The mistake I made in business...
…that cost me a lot of stress
Business is an incredible personal development journey. I’m so passionate about helping people have the full picture of business, not limiting themselves to classic business knowledge but broadening their awareness to develop the sustainable mindsets, strategies and skills they need to grow.
The biggest mistake I made in business was thinking I had the complete picture of business and getting frustrated when I wasn’t seeing growth.
Great sales and marketing alone do not create a business owner who feels secure and peaceful inside their business. There is so much more to it.
In this episode, I share the story of where I was at when I started my own business 14 years ago. I talk about how I missed the bigger picture and the journey I went on to understand where my energy was best spent.
Classic business knowledge is important but it will never give you the full picture.
To discover impactful growth on a personal and professional level, you need to expand your thinking beyond the basic principles.
If you’re in your own business, you’re going to love this episode.
See below for a full transcript.
Don’t forget to go to the bottom of this page and let me know in the comments any questions or what you think or just share the love on social. Thanks
Podcast transcript.
I want to give you a little warning upfront. The next few episodes are totally business related. Now if you're not in business, you may still find this really interesting. If you're thinking about transitioning to having your own business, you will definitely find this interesting and if you're in your own business, you are going to love this.
So let's get started. I want to start by telling you the story of where I was at when I started my own business. So I was 22, pretty young, pretty ripe, pretty green. And let me tell you a shell of the person I am today in the sense that I lacked a lot of confidence, I lacked a lot of knowledge, and I was extremely shy. And what a lot of people don't know about me is that it was 2008 when I started my business, so it was 14 years. ago this year 2022 at the time of this recording, I was really sick.
I had been diagnosed with chronic fatigue syndrome by a doctor. I was told that I was never going to be able to get better, because at the time they didn't really understand what Chronic Fatigue was. They just knew that it came out of nowhere and they had no solutions to like help it get it better. And the prognosis was pretty much that I was never going to be able to work again. I was never going to be able to make a full time income. I was never going to be able to exercise or train or compete in martial arts again, three of my favorite things. And it pretty much felt like a death sentence to the 22 year old version of myself. And being who I was. That was the year I also started my business.
So the way that I came into coaching, people often asked me this question, it wasn't because I went out and sought it out as a career path. I didn't even know that it existed but what I did know was that I didn't want to be an interior architect and I didn't want to do karate full time and I didn't know what I actually wanted to do. But I had these lifestyle qualities that I wanted to own and embody and live by.
I knew I wanted to really make a big contribution. I knew that I wanted to have location freedom. I knew I wanted to have time freedom. I knew that I wanted to work with great people. I knew I wanted to freely be able to express myself. And I knew that I wanted to be able to make money that was outside of making money from purely just my time. Trading time for money. Now being 22 I had no idea how that was actually possible. But when I got sick and actually around the same time I was training to break world title in my martial arts career. And I discovered Neuro Linguistic Programming or NLP.
That was my entry to the world of coaching. That was my entry to the world of being able to mess with the subconscious mind and have a completely different experience inside of 15 minutes and I became obsessed with this tool. I became obsessed with learning as much as I could. Just like I became obsessed with learning about business, once I discovered that I could have my own business, and I wanted to make sure that I always had an edge and I became obsessed with learning how to coach. I used the tools on myself. I was able to transform my mind, transformed my body, transformed my ability to fight. I was able to come back, win a world title and start my own business.
And that's kind of how I got into the world of coaching over a number of years. People just started to ask for my help. They asked what I was doing, I was sharing it. And I became incredibly passionate about teaching other people these tools, which is why I now run a school, Be Your Own Coach on NLP.
But that was just one part of it. You know, so many of us when we start businesses, we're really good at what it is that we do. Where we've had an experience, we've learned something, we've developed a passion, we've developed a skill and we are exceptional at the trade of that skill. Perhaps that skill is coaching, perhaps that skill is massage therapy, perhaps it is interior design, no matter what it is, there is a difference between the trade of the thing that we do and then the business of the trade of the thing that we do. So for quite some time my business was purely built out of referral, out of invitation and out of me just meeting people around the world and them wanting to work with me and me doing great work with them. And that's kind of how the business begun.
Now I had a compromised body, I had a compromised immune system so I did have to take it very, very easily. But a few years in, I realized that I didn't know very much about business and I think this happens with so many business owners we don't actually get the education around business that we need before we begin. We get really excited we think that we know all of the moving parts because we're good at what it is that we do. But there is so much more to it.
So when I became ready to grow my business a little more, you see chronic fatigue, that diagnosis technically doesn't actually go away. So though I feel really good on a daily basis. I know that I need to take care of my body. It's like a finely tuned machine that speaks to me very loudly. That's how I've reframed it. Anyway, I wanted to grow my business a little more and I wanted to learn a little bit more about what I was doing. And so I signed up to do an incredible program around marketing and online business, which I absolutely loved. And I tell people about it all the time and I go back to doing all the time.
Now the thing with this was that what I didn't realize was that marketing and sales are two separate things but they're just also two individual parts of the whole picture of business. So what happened was I made the mistake of thinking that, that was business, understanding marketing and understanding sales was business. So I had the practice of my business and what I was doing in the practice of my business and then I had marketing and sales out. I happen to be really great at sales because I used to have a full time sales job. I learned about the marketing and you had to bring people into my business and you had to sell them and I knew how to serve and I thought that was fantastic. That's what I need to know about my business.
And I have since learned that so many of us do not understand the full working wheel of business, of which sales, marketing and service are just three spokes on the huge wheel.
Of course a wheel does not turn on three spokes. So I went out and spent years studying, researching and learning about the full picture of business and what I learned transformed my life, actually transformed my business. It transformed me, It transformed the way that I show up in the world, because it gave me a sense of grander perspective over where I was going, what I was doing and why what I was doing mattered. When I did it, depending on the season of my business, season of my life, my life stage, my goals, my desires and what was going on. Classic business knowledge.
For example, sales and marketing are things that I believe we all need to learn, but my mistake was learning those things and thinking I had the complete picture of business and then getting frustrated when I wasn't seeing, say my social media following grow or my email list grow as fast as I wanted it to. I found it really easy to get caught up in this idea that there are certain metrics that apply to business. And if you don't have say, a big email list or a big following, those metrics will simply not grow. So I was getting caught up for a long time in thinking that sales or marketing were it, and I was missing the big picture.
And what I learned was like I said sales and marketing are just two of these beautiful spokes on the wheel in business. When you understand the full wheel of business, which is at least five other spokes on the wheel. There's actually more when you understand the full picture. Sometimes focusing on sales and marketing is not where your energy is best spent in order to increase your bottom line profits. Now I have a lot to say on the word profits, which is going to come up in a future podcast about the difference between profits and revenue. And why it is so important to understand the distinction between the two and not get caught up in vanity metrics and vanity marketing.
But for now, what I really want to focus on is the fact that sales and marketing alone, great work alone, having a referral based business alone does not make a business owner who feels secure and safe and peaceful inside of the business. When we understand the financial piece of business, when we understand the customer base that we have and how to best serve them, as well as sales, as well as marketing, as well as distribution, as well as caretaking what is happening, as well as all the other spokes in the wheel, we have so much more freedom to be able to look at exactly where we are at in our season of life and season of business and to look at what is going to be the next best move and the next best place to focus in order to either grow our business or stabilize exactly where we're at so that we can ensure future growth or to look at improving our bottom line improving our systems improving our teams and things like that, so that we can continue to grow sustainably.
So these are things that I did not know when I first started my business because I didn't have a business education, I had to learn them along the way.
And one of the mistakes that I made was getting caught up thinking that learning sales and learning marketing I was all good.
But then when I went through difficult times like with my body being compromised, with burnout, with different challenges from separating with someone, and my financial situation changing, and even now I see this with clients of mine where we've had a global pandemic we've had you know, lots of things going on in people's personal lives. babies being born second babies being born moving house, changing countries, you know, whatever it might be. These can impact the amount of energy that we have, the amount of time that we have, the amount of bandwidth that we have for growing our businesses too.
So a number of years ago back in 2000 I think it was 2018 or 2017. I actually created, after 10 years of studying this ,a course called The Business of You and that course has been for sale ever since then. And now I have a lot of students who have gone through that course they've said it was transformational and life changing. And they turned to me for business strategy and business advice. Now I'm not an official business coach, but what I am is somebody who has studied business, I'm interested in the sustainability of a human being behind the business. And I'm very passionate about people having the full picture of business not just an idea that we know about business when we know about sales. We know about business when we know about marketing because we know what to do when we wake up in the morning. I am extremely passionate about people knowing what to do when the proverbial hits the fan. And when they're at their peak and they're ready to go to the next level. I want people to have sustainable mindsets, sustainable strategies that take them from zero to 10 and 10 to 20 and beyond and as well as the skills that they need to implement each of the spokes of the wheel.
Business is such a personal development journey. It's a lifelong journey. It's something that never really ends.
And so talking about business has become one of my passions in particular because I know firsthand what it is like to try and operate a business in a world that tells you just keep showing up on social media. Just keep marketing, just keep on keeping on when you have a compromised body. When you have a compromised health system, when you have compromised time, compromised energy, and compromised bandwidth. And I also know firsthand that learning a few simple sales strategies or marketing strategies, which is what I learned can get us really sucked into thinking that that's all that is available for our businesses. When the proverbial does hit the fan, so we hit it harder. It doesn't necessarily work all the time. We're wondering what's going on. We think things about ourselves and our ability to create business for ourselves that are absolutely not true. It's just that we're relying on one particular strategy when we should be looking at the big grand picture of business. And we're hoping that that one particular strategy that we have learned in marketing or sales is going to get us out of it. So it's kind of like we, you know, on a hamster wheel or just digging, digging, digging, digging, digging, hopefully that will dig far enough to get out the other side of the problem.
And the truth is, depending on where you're at, marketing might be the thing that you need to focus on, but it might not be marketing, it might be creating more sales with the people that you currently have in your audience or in your life. It might not even be sales. It might be that you've got a number of customers and you don't need to do any external sales, but it's about creating more for the people that you're already working with. And that is going to create an incredible, incredible, incredible lift to your bottom line in your business. It might not even be that it might be that you can make internal structural changes, so that even if you did nothing on the front end of your business differently, you would have more that you take home from a profit sense. So it's not just about one thing or another. There's no one thing that's better than the other. If you were to know that there are internal shifts that you can make where you can actually save money or make more money without having to change any of your structural strategy when it comes to marketing and sales.
You could do that and it would probably not take you very much effort not take you very much time but have a bigger impact on your bottom line without you having to invest any more time or energy into into marketing.
And wouldn't that be wonderful to know if you didn't have any more bandwidth or money for advertising or whatever. But if you knew that creating more through a marketing sense, was going to be the way for you to go next because you have certain reasons and there's a certain season and phase of life in business where we might do this. We might do it consistently but it's not the only thing we do there are a million different ways you can do marketing for your business, not just one particular way.
So the reason why I'm sharing this is because every single day as a business owner and as somebody who coaches a lot of business owners, I see people experiencing so much stress and anxiety over this idea that something is changing and they've got a hit what they know even harder, when they're not actually certain of the whole picture of business. And it brought me so much peace, so much inner calm, so much perspective and so much confidence in times of uncertainty, in times of change, in times of transition, in times of great stress and in times of up leveling, wanting to take my business to the next level, to be able to critically and clearly look at my business and the business of others and to see it for exactly where it's at. Think about the life stage, the energy the person has, the bandwidth that they have, the season that they are in and to go okay based on this plus where it is that you want to go and your unique ideas, your unique vision, your unique dreams, your unique goals, because let's remember, not everybody wants the same thing in business.
So telling you that you have to get better at sales, when you've got a particular type of business that doesn't require that, is going to distract you and waste a lot of time, money and energy. So being able to look at the business clearly.
See all of the different pillars of where you can actually go and where you can focus your energy. And then thinking about your unique values and goals and dreams and where you're going, and your season of life, and your energy in your body and then going okay, well this is the one that I need to go down and then what actions do I take?
Well, here are a whole bunch of actions that I can take that has transformed my business over the last 14 years. It's transformed so many other people's businesses. And I feel like there is no more important time for us to be up leveling and learning these skills, especially if we're business owners who never actually learned them.
So I want you to think about the difference between profit and revenue. I'm going to talk about that in my next episode. And I want you to think about what it is that your unique business goals are like: What do you want to actually do? How much money do you want to actually make? And what do you want your lifestyle to look like?
Do you want to have a lot of high touch time with the people that you're working with? Or do you want to have a lot of low touch time, potentially work with even more people, depending on even that will depend on where you go next and what it is that you might create and all of these things make a difference and layer upon one another so that you can have sustainable income, sustainable energy, sustainable business and all of it actually energizes you and supports you to take care of yourself. And of course, that's what it's all about for me.
I had to learn at such an early stage that so much of the business advice that is kind of out there and available, did not apply, in a sense to me and my specific dreams and goals. Because I couldn't actually risk my body that much. I couldn't actually risk not getting enough sleep. I couldn't risk undercharging and overworking because I didn't have the energy to do it.
So in a way Chronic Fatigue was such a blessing. But I speak to so many people on a daily basis who I wish that they had the level of resolve that I had to get in order to take care of my body when I was sick. Because I think sometimes without it, we can think we need to wait for permission to charge more, we can think that we need to wait for permission to take our businesses to the next level or to go pro in some way. And that is absolutely just not the case.
In fact, I urge you and encourage you to spend time thinking about what it is that you really want. And taking one step on the way to getting there and really thinking about this for yourself so you don't get distracted. Okay, so that's your homework rather than thinking about what are the next five social media posts I'm going to post so I can talk about my business. I really want you to think about big picture. Where is it that you want to go? How do you want to spend your time? How much time do you actually have and how much money do you want to make? And I will talk to you more about this in the next episode.
Hope you're having a beautiful day. And what I want to say before we finish is that in a couple of weeks, I'm actually opening up the Bloom Business Incubator. So this is why I'm talking about business a little bit more on the podcast at the moment. It's because the Bloom business incubator is open. And in this experience, which is 90 days three months, I am going to be educating and coaching a small group of service based businesses who are at a revenue mark of between you're just starting out and up to half a million dollars a year revenue turnover, not profit, revenue and turnover. So you can be just starting or up to half a million dollars and I'm going to be helping you with understanding the full educational piece about business that we don't get taught. So you can look at it critically from a larger perspective and help you to see and make choices that support you your goals, your dreams, the phase of life that you're in, no matter what phase of life you're in for every 90 days for the next 25 years.
So if this sounds like something that you're interested in, you would love to receive a bit of business education plus transformation in the form of coaching with me, check out the link below this episode. Reach out and DM me ask me any questions that you want and I'll see you in the next episode where I'm going to be talking about the difference between revenue and profit and why is very important to understand the difference.
Stay Curious, Stay open. The life you crave is so much closer than you think.
LOVE
Hayley xx
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To discover impactful growth on a personal and professional level, you need to expand your thinking beyond the basic principles.
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