349 - How to Build a Movement Business Plan That Keeps You Growing for Years

You're listening to 4-23% the Woman of Color Business and Entrepreneurship Podcasts. 23% of business owners are women of color and we are here to grow that number. I'm your host, Diel Sheran. I used to be a social worker and now I'm a multi-million dollar entrepreneur. One of this shall be talked about all things sales, money, business, and freedom so that women of color can create wealth, built power, and change the face of entrepreneurship. Let's dive in! Hello, hello, my lovely listeners and welcome back to the podcast. Okay, I have a quick one that I came up with this concept and this framework when a friend asked me, "Diel, how did you rebrand? How did you get yourself back one track?" After a million dollars, your income kind of plateaued and you kind of got disenchanted with entrepreneurship and you wanted to refresh things but you didn't know what you were trying to figure out like the direction of your business and you didn't necessarily know what it was and then now we see this beautiful rebrand, this thriving new offer, my membership. You've renamed your live event. You are coming up with a new version of your mastermind. You are one new marketing channels. You have a new marketing philosophy. Your clients are getting better results. You've been coming up with new frameworks and new courses and new teachings for your clients. You're still creating content. You're still coming up with new ideas. How do you get reengaged? How do you realign yourself with a new direction after you've been fumbling around for a little bit? I told her I said, "I just have a movement business plan. I like to create a movement. I believe your business is a movement where you are impacting hundreds, thousands, millions of people. Just like a civil rights movement or a political movement. I believe our businesses are also movements." I was just like, "You just need a business plan for your movement." She was like, "Okay, do you have a process for that?" And I was like, "Going back to processes and frameworks and ideas have just been pouring out of me." I was like, "No, but I can make one and I can walk you through the process that I use to re-engage myself in my business. Take all the lessons that I learned and create a new business model that works for me." And so that's what we're going to talk about in this podcast episode. I have 10 powerful questions that I think you'll need to sit with in Journal One. It will not be a quick little exercise, but you can sit and journal in this. Also, you can take this transcript and put it into ChatGBT. You can literally put this, you know, whatever you're listening to it, you can pull the transcript and you can put this into ChatGBT, you can put this into CLAID, which is another AI tool, and you can have conversations about it about the questions that I am going to ask you and the ways that you can be processing this information so that you can put together your own movement business plan. So to this point, I want to start off with a few things. Number one, I think it is so important to have a plan. I think the number one reason why business owners do not double their income, they don't double their sales is because they really just don't have a plan. And a plan cannot be, I just want to go from 100K to 200K. That's not a plan. That's just a number. It's a random outcome with no actual steps or decisions like literally made for that. It's just a random outcome. And if you don't actually have a plan, you're not going to get there no matter how hard you manifest, no matter how much you want to. And I think that's a really important distinction. If you do not have a plan, it does not matter how much you want something. You could want something so bad, but if you do not have a plan for it, it doesn't matter. You could want to double your Instagram. So bad, but you don't have a plan on how many posts you're going to post on trial rules, how many carousels you're going to try a week. The types of posts you want to create, the beliefs and the mindset that you need to have that's different than the one you have right now. If you don't have any of that, you're not going to double your Instagram following. You're not going to do anything. If you really want to go from 101 to group and you don't have a plan, you will not get there no matter how hard or how high your desire is. And I think that's really important to realize. I've been coaching a lot of clients on, you know, they're saying, man, I've been stuck at the same income level for four or five years. I've been doing the same thing for four or five years. And I really wanted to hit 200 K. I really wanted to hit 500 K. I really wanted to hit 300 K. And I just can't seem to bust through it. And I said, well, what was your plan to do that? What would you do differently from 100 K to 200 K or from 250 to 500? Walk me through your plan and they can't tell me they're like, well, I was just going to double my launches. I'm like, okay, well, how are you going to double your launches? I don't know. I was like, are you going to double your leads? Are you going to launch in this way? Are you going to show up like this? Are you going to get on a new marketing platform? Is your messaging going to update? Do you have a new direction that you're going to take this program that you're trying to sell? Crickets, no answers. And so I think it's just so important fundamentally to have a plan. And my definition of a plan is decisions you make ahead of time. That's all a plan is, is decisions you make ahead of time. What are my offers? How do I want to market them? What are the angles in which I'm going to market them? What is my price? How do I want to run my company? What are the ways I'm going to grow my audience? What are the ways I'm going to increase my conversions and overcome more objections? Do I have answers for all of those things? Again, desire alone is not enough. Once alone is not enough, you need an actual plan to step you there. Now, planning doesn't have to be like super masculine or involve spreadsheets and all these like pages of documents. I'm not saying that. Again, my definition of planning is just decisions made ahead of time. Are you making the right decisions ahead of time so you know where your business is moving? Okay, so now I want to talk about the movement business plan, which is what we're going to talk about today. Specifically, what's it for? Because there's all different types of planning you can do. Just within this episode, the first five minutes of this episode, we talked about content planning. We talked about launch planning. We talked about doubling your income planning. All those different plans, each of those are separate plans, right? You need to be thinking and planning about your business. Now, the movement business model, I would say, is the like bird's eye view. It's not a from July to August plan or okay, here's how I'm going to double my launches in the next six months. It's more bird's eye view of where am I going potentially over the next three to five years? Where am I headed in the long run? And I think it's so important. It is so important to have a bird's eye view and a bird's eye plan because several things can happen when we're so close to the ground, we get really nitpicky. We're like, okay, my Instagram following hasn't grown, but I'm like, okay, but where are you headed in the next three to five years? We're like, okay, I need to like double my conversions for my sales calls right now. I'm like, okay, but where does this fit into the grander picture? And then this is how you end up repeating your income for five years, six years, because you weren't looking at the bird's eye view. You were just focused on the next two months, the next three months, the next six months. And so I think it's important to look at the now, but then also scale up. The movement business plan is also for you if you're thinking about like some significant changes where you're thinking about closing down offers or you're thinking about going in a completely different niche or if you want to hit a pretty significant business model income milestone. So like for me, I know my business will look very different from one million to 10 million. So then I walked myself through these questions. I knew that I was potentially thinking about closing one of my offers. So I walked myself through these questions. So this is again for that bird's eye view for those really, really big changes that you want to be very intentional about. And you don't just want to say, okay, I'm going to close down my offer. Okay, I'm just going to shut things down. Okay, I'm just I just want to do X, Y and Z and then you end up regretting it later, because it wasn't thought out and not considering multiple different aspects of your business and multiple different plans. So I would say if you're thinking about a big niche or messaging change, if you're thinking about closing or creating a new offer. And then if you're thinking about like trying to grow your income massively in the next three to five years, not in not necessarily in 12 months, but within the next three to five years. So these are the questions for me that really helped me walk through my rebrand where I went from DL Shua into four to 23%. I did a big rebrand in 2025. This also helped me make decisions about my offers. I retooled my mastermind. I sunsetted another program and I created a new offer. I literally created an entirely new business model. That's why it's called like the movement business model where again, I'm not making little changes, like should I do Instagram or TikTok, even though that's a part of it, but that's just one piece. There's 10 pieces I'm going to walk us through today. And so if you want to make really big changes, and I would say this is also why I was still able to create a half a million dollar membership in 12 months, which is crazy because I walk through this exercise. And I think again, this exercise is really important. If you want to make changes and how you can make them in a smart way, we don't want to make anything flip it. We don't want anything to be is it rash, brash? I think it's brush or like not well thought out, right? Impulsive. We don't want to make any impulsive decisions. We need an entire like movement business plan. I'll also say this movement business plan, like I said, is supposed to be implemented in three to five years. So do not make these decisions based off of, you know, the next six to 12 months, think about, okay, can I keep with this? Do I want to stay with this within the next three to five years? That's actually how you want to filter through these questions. Okay, without further ado, let's dive in. All right, number one, define the movement word or phrase. So like I said before, I believe that all your businesses are movements. And why I like to define it as a movement, like a political movement or a movement with a very special cause is movements have hundreds of people. And that's what we're doing in entrepreneurship. We're not just selling a product. We are creating a movement where we're impacting hundreds and thousands and millions of people. And I want you to start viewing your business that way. Like, oh, this isn't just product service offering. You're literally creating a movement. And so a movement is a single word or short phrase that captures the emotional destination of your client's transformation. It's not a tactic. It's a feeling. So for me, the destination or the result of my client is that women of color have more sales and money. When women of color have more sales and money, then what? And that is you'll have emancipation. So my movement is emancipation. My movement is not my niche. It's not sales, right? My movement is emancipation. And so I'll also say this and I meant to say this in the beginning. This exercise is really made to for people who've made over a hundred K. Minimum, you've made over a hundred K. You can kind of like pussy foot around and you can kind of, you know, experiment your way to a hundred K. And you may not have the answers to all these questions or the themes may not be blatantly clear until you've made a hundred K. So still if you're under a hundred K, that's okay. But I think even the first question we have, define the movement word or phrase. And it's based off of what does your client feel after they've achieved the result? It's very easy to answer that question when you work with at least 20, 30 clients at a hundred K business, right? Minimum. And so I would say like you either need to make a hundred K or to this point, you need to have worked with at least 20 paying clients regardless of the price so that you can actually answer these questions. Okay, going back to defining the movement word slash phrase, you want to choose what that word is and is typically a feeling that your clients feel after they achieve your program promise of one of your offers or both of your offers if you have multiple offers. Some examples of movement words is one of my clients her name is Torres Stens. She's a dating coach and her movement is permission and I love that. Where it's permission to ask what you want when you're dating. Permission to say your values and say what you're interested in very clearly. Permission to get dressed up and be approached by men permission to go against unconventional dating rules permission. I love that. I love that. Gina Knox, she is a wealth coach on money and wealth coach. Her movement word is unbothered being like, okay, when you are able to pay down your debt and you're able to invest in the stock market, you feel unbothered. Money no longer bothers you. And so that is her movement word. She literally has a tote bag with the word unbothered on it. And so you just want to be thinking about, okay, when my client achieved the result, what do they feel? And then this word will be a guiding word for everything else. And so whenever I'm making a decision in my business, I say, okay, well, what will help them feel emancipated? What will help them create the sense of emancipation in their lives? So you want to just go back to that question over and over again. When you're thinking about your marketing, you're thinking about your offers, you're thinking about a webinar title, you're thinking about a certain email. The movement can be laced in and woven into every single thing that you do. I go viral on TikTok talking about how financial safety is created through entrepreneurship and how that creates emancipation. And so I literally have been going viral from talking about financial emancipation and financial liberation for women of color. That's literally all I talk about and how I go viral. So my movement has also been bringing me in social media leads. So it's a very, very powerful thing and it's the first thing you need to just unpack. And inside of my mastermind, this is something we spend a lot of time on. And we have an entire training just on how to think about your movement and the different little nuances of your movement words. So if you're interested in learning more about a movement, make sure to join our mastermind and we cover that more there. Okay, number two, map your skills to the identity that they create. So I want you to think about and I want you to do this exercise. I want you to list every skill and offer that you teach and then ask then what each until you land on a role not a result. So I'm thinking about my friend Jasmine of High Flyer Powerhouse. She does a lot of design work. She also has been known for rebranding. And so we use her as an example. She does rebranding plus design. Plus she's also started talking about social media skills. And it doesn't end at okay, they just have a pretty brand. It ends at they're going to be the celebrity of their niche. They're going to be a dream creator. They're going to be their own it girl. You then want to think about okay, but I think about my movement and I think about all the skills that I teach then what happened. So for me, if I think about I teach I teach so many things. I teach sales calls, lead generation, content, messaging, mindset, webinars, launches, money management, money mindset, money healing. Right? But I think about all those things, it's not that my clients just have more sales and money. Is that my clients are able to feel financially supported by themselves without relying on systems of white supremacy. My clients are able to take care of themselves and be able to make money within 30 days. Like that's a personal metric for me where I say I want my clients to be able to generate money out of thin air in a 30 day period. So if their family needs something, if they need something, if they have to go to the doctor, they have an emergency surgery or if they need to buy a new car or if a family member needs something, they know how to create money in a 30 day period. That's something I've been focusing on teaching. But to this point, if I had just listed out all my skills and said okay, if they do all this, they make more sales, then I wouldn't have more direction. Right? I wouldn't have a brand that stands out. So again, not to get all complicated, I just want you to list out all of the skills that you teach your clients and say okay, if someone were to learn all of this, who would they become, what identity would they have? Okay. Number three, the third thing. Now I want you to make a direction and have like a goal for your company, not just a description. So when I go back and think about my movement word, which is a mains of patience, we attached a metric to it and that metric was from our list that we created above where we wrote down all of our skills. And so we said okay, if we wrote down all of our skills that we teach our clients, and then we wrote down what identity they were able to create, then what will we be able to say as a company? So then that's the direction that the company is going to head in. So our company goal is to help women of color make a billion dollars in client sales. We're at like 45 million right now, but collectively to make a billion dollars in client sales. That is very important to me. That helps me make very clear decisions to be like okay, I need to create a podcast episode. Okay, I need to create a course for my membership. Okay, I'm thinking about doing this. I'm thinking about doing that. Should I take this away from my business? Should I add this? And it's like okay, what will help my clients make a billion dollars in client sales? So that's like a company mission and a company goal that we have. So the third step is to make a direction or a company goal. Number four, do the want match exercise. This again, it has multiple exercises and multiple layers. And I want to be clear, this process like all these 10 questions, it took me like a year to like make the decisions or when all of them. You may not be able to do it quickly and it may be something that you revisit over and over again. And when I've shown this to people, they typically like take two out of the 10 exercises and they run with it and that provides a lot of clarity. So you can use this like you use this as you want. Use this as you want. Okay, going back to the list. So list everything you want for the business itself. So list down, I want to be a viral creator like I want a big Instagram audience. I want to be able to work this amount of time. I like doing live calls versus reviews or I actually don't want any calls. I actually do all a sink a synchronous. I don't want any coaching calls and I'll talk about like trade-offs and sacrifices in a second. But you just want to think about what is everything I want. I want to make sure my business is baby proof. I want to make sure that I'm really talking about these things. I don't want to talk about these things anymore. I want to talk about these things instead. I want to make sure that I have speaking engagements. I love speaking engagements in my business. Whatever it is, I want you to write down all of your wants. And I don't want you to think about logistics or how far you are aware from those things. Or like, oh my god, I don't even have 80% of the things on this list. That's good. That's a good thing. That means we know where we're headed versus you just repeating your results because you're not aware. And so I want you to get really clear on write down, on the left hand side, all the things that you want. And then on the right hand side, I want you to write down all the things your clients want. What do your clients want from you? They love it when your own live calls. They love it when you audit their budget or you audit their resume. They love it when you talk about these topics. These are some of their favorite topics that they're always so excited to hear from you. They love it when you show up this way. They love boxer coaching from you. They love x, y, and z. They love your Instagram content and watching you on Instagram stories. Whatever it is, write down the behaviors and the desires from your client. Now, you might say, but what if something won that list is something I no longer want to do? That's okay. I just want you to write it down. So again, you have a T chart. You have a sheet of paper and you have all of your wants on the left hand side. And then you have all of your client wants on the right hand side. And Brooke Castillo did this exercise when she was reimagining her business. And she said it was changing. her office and she was trying to figure out, okay, what do I want and what do my clients want? And I just think that was such a smart way of deciding and such a smart way of choosing because you can do too much of one of the other. You can go 100% on what you want, but then there's no demand for it, so then it doesn't sell. But then you can over index and give too much of what your clients want and then you're bitter and you have resentment. So then once you have this T chart filled out, I just want you to start circling. I want you to circle the things that are really important to you when it comes to the things that you want and then I want you to circle the things that you can deliver. Again, some things you may not want to deliver on, but then you'll just write down or circle, hear the things I could deliver on from my clients. And then you should see like a merge. You should see like an offer come together. You should see some sort of offer group program 101 coaching model that's beneficial to you and also beneficial to your clients. So here's an example for me. And my want match list, I said that I want to be able to talk about sales and money. I also, that's one of my favorite things that I like talking about. I also said, I want reoccurring income. I want reoccurring income so bad. And it was because in January of 2024, I woke up and I said, why is my strike account at zero? I've been in full time entrepreneurship for four years. I've been in entrepreneurship collectively for six years. Why should my account start at zero at the beginning of the month or the beginning of the year? Reoccurring income just as my baseline. And so I remember saying that to myself and I hung on to that desire. And I said, I think I want to reoccurring model business. Even though I've done high ticket, I've done like one time payments for years and years and years. I listened to that whisper that said, I think I'm ready for reoccurring income and I want to do the work to have reoccurring income. And I believe that I can have a thriving membership. And so I said, okay, I wanted to be reoccurring income based. I also said, and needs to be baby proof. I eventually want to start growing a family. And again, I'm thinking three to five years. I'm not just thinking about a mat leave. I'm thinking three to five years when I have a toddler and I want to go to mommy and me classes and I want to do this that in the third. I said, okay, I want to make sure that I have flexibility within my schedule, which is also where a membership worked out great. I also told myself that I want it more flexibility with live events. I love doing a one year conference, but I also wanted to do some pop ups. I traveled a lot and I said, I want some more flexibility with live events. I don't just want to do one and all the pressures on that one. I just want some more flexibility. So that was one of my want match list for myself and then for my client, they love when I talk about sales. Obviously, so I'm like, okay, boom, boom, boom, want match right there. They love when I coach live. And I say, okay, if I coach live, then I can't be bogged down in client review. So I will need to hire that out. If they want me to coach more live and show up live more. So I said, okay, I can show up live more. I could coach more. I also said, okay, they love me live. Where can I also add in more live elements? And so I have a private podcast where I submit and recordings for my private podcast where it feels like I'm live, but I'm async and they just want to hear my voice. And I think that's important when you're doing this exercise where don't get so literal, but you want to say, what is the essence of this desire that my client wants? So if you're like, my clients love when I send them hour long loom videos, but I can't do that. It's like, okay, I'm hearing that your clients love depth. I'm hearing that your clients love specifics. And I'm hearing that your clients love personalized feedback. There's a thousand different ways to offer depth being specific and personalized feedback without it looking like an hour long loom. But you can still accomplish that result that your client wants. So from there, I also said my clients love live events. They love community. They want more community. They want to talk to each other more. We constantly, constantly hear that feedback. And so I said, okay, they love community too. And said, all right, well, I think we have an offer. I think we have a really unique offer here that fits all of our desires. So making that T chart is really, really powerful. I would say it's one of the most powerful things outside of creating your movement word. It's one of the most powerful things is really creating that T chart. So that's number four. Number five, then use the movement word as a decision maker. So when you're thinking about your curriculum, when you're thinking about your price, when you're thinking about, okay, should my group program be six months and two calls a month or should it be 12 months and one call a week? What does the actual mechanics look like? Then you'll use your movement as a decision maker. So an example is when we were retooling our membership. So after we already had it for a year, I went through a big retooling process and I have a podcast episode that I dropped in March or April about that, like how we retooled our membership. And it's been better than ever. I just, I love it. I love it in there. So definitely listen to that podcast episode. But something that I did was I kind of gutted the whole membership and I rebuilt it. And I said, how can we really, really infuse emancipation in this membership? Where can I feel emancipated running it? Where can my clients feel emancipated? What does emancipation look like in this offer? So something that we did was we had a pre-recorded course drop every single month. And it was really challenging for me to come up with and my clients didn't really engage with it a ton. It was just like another feature even though it was like phenomenal teachings and phenomenal concepts in there. It was really, really good. So something that helped me feel emancipated and also I knew that my clients would engage with it more as I said, what if I did it live? Because it was taking me too long to like think about it, pre-record it, upload it versus it would have been faster if I just had delivered it live. And my clients would have gotten the teaching and the information better live as well. And so I was like, I think that's a win for emancipation for everybody, right? And so thinking about making your decision making all throughout that entire process. And so another example for me thinking about the example of emancipation, our movement was pricing. I said, okay, I can continue to raise my prices. My colleagues and other business coaches in the industry, they all have $30,000 masterminds. Like, I'm definitely underpriced. But something that I anchored back into and I said, well, if I think about the movement word of emancipation, I really do think like a form of accessibility and having a $197 membership, which is still a high ticket membership. Most memberships are under $100. The fact that we're 200, if not 300, depending on when you enroll, that's huge, right? That's massive. And so I said to myself, like, that is a form of emancipation for me, my pricing and how I'm thinking about my pricing is a form of emancipation. Now, I got coaching on all these decisions. And sometimes my coach and my colleagues and my peers who were like, peer coaching me, they would poke holes and they would say, is that really emancipation? Right? Is that the highest form of emancipation? So still, like, gut check your answers with the coach, right? Gut check your answers with the coach. So I decided to base my pricing off of what I felt like embodied emancipation at that level. And it's just helped us with so many decisions, like, okay, with emancipation and helping women of color achieve this billion dollar goal, I said, we should do more student teaching. So we're going to have some more student teaching in our programs. I also said, I'm going to share the stage with clients. I want clients to come and share how they're making sales to empower everyone else. That is a form of emancipation. I really, really thought about my movement and my word and how that can be laced in all big decisions and small decisions. I also think too, this is how you really create a unique business where literally people say about my programs and my offers are like, there's nothing else like it. And that's what I want. I don't want a cookie cutter of my coach. I don't want a cookie cutter of what's just out in the industry. I want something that's unique to me and you need to the problem that I'm serving within my business. So use the movement word as decision making. So that's number five, going to number six, decide how you will receive money. Get specific on the actual mechanics courses, reoccurring memberships, passive income, high ticket, right? So get very clear on the actual mechanics on how do you want to receive money? I like that question. Instead of like, what are your offers? I'm like, how do I want to receive money? I want reoccurring pavements. That could have been $97, $497 a month. That could be a three month membership or a 12 month membership. That could have looked like a lot of different ways. But I thought about how do I want to receive money? And I said, oh, that's actually very clear. That simplifies it a lot. I said, I want $197 payments and then $997 payments coming in. Like it was very clear. I was like, that is how I want to receive money. So one for my membership and one for my mastermind. That is what I want coming in my bank account every single month all day. I literally envisioned it. I said, I can imagine payments coming in at that level every single day all day long. So think about how do you want to receive money? I like all painful. I want more painful. I can see $5,000 painful coming in. I want more done for you income where I get a really big five figure build every single month. I want VIP day income where I'm working with clients and they're charging me 10K or they're charging me 5K for these builds. Thinking about how do you actually want to receive money? What does the business model look like for receiving money? Again, it's a slightly different question than like, what's my offer? Because then we can get hung up in the offer mechanics. And I would say in a three to five year period, your offer may change, but how you receive money likely won't change. So for me, when I think about my everything full time program, it was once $5,000 lifetime access. There's 12 months access for $2,500. And then we did lifetime access for $2,500. We kept playing with the price and playing with the offer. offer, but how it received money was pretty consistent. It was a four figure offer and a four figure payment coming in. So think about deciding how you want to receive money. That's very, very important. Number seven, design your schedule and your sacrifices. This is really, really important. Decide how you want to work. Do you want live launches versus evergreen group calls versus one on one? Do you want to be on a stage doing speaking engagements or do you want to spend time doing content creation? Right? Do you want to do events and sponsorships or do you want to do sub-sec articles and LinkedIn? Think about how do you literally want to spend your time? What do you want your day to look like? What do you want your week to look like? What do you want your month to look like? So for me, I'm very, very clear on this. So for my day, I was like, I want space to create short form video content every single day. I want space in my calendar to do that. I also want space to think about new concepts and frameworks. I want to be a business that creates new tools for my clients. I also said I want the space to do a weekly webinar or a monthly challenge for my ad funnel. I want space in my calendar to bring in new sales every single month through that specific vehicle. I also said I want a coach one to two days a week. And I not only want to coach, I also want to teach live classes to my membership and my mastermind. I want to be able to teach and use those frameworks. I want just one team meeting a week. I don't want a whole bunch of meetings with my calendar. I want one team meeting a week. Do you see how specific I am? And also, I'm not just saying, okay, I only want five calls a week. It's like, okay, what type of calls and what are those calls going to do? But as you can see in my example, it's a very balanced, intentional calendar. I'm doing a live evergreen funnel with a weekly webinar or a monthly three day challenge, depending on what I'm doing. I also have teaching and coaching calls. That means I'm running active, live active groups. I'm not selling passive courses. I am creating space for a short form content. So I'm not relying off of sub-sec articles or LinkedIn. I am focused on video content specifically. So you want to be thinking and designing your schedule as such. Now, I want you to hear all the sacrifices in that too. Like I said, I'm not a LinkedIn. I'm not doing a ton of speaking engagements. I don't like speaking. It takes too much time away from my family and away from my clients. I'd rather speak at my own events or speak to my clients. I don't want to be on other people's stages right now in the season of my business. So there's very intentional sacrifices that I'm making. I also know I'm quote unquote, leaving passive income on the table by running active programs that require my time and attention. But that's how I want to deliver right now. I don't want to have just like passive courses or a passive course suite. So if you say to yourself, okay, I want to have groups. I don't want to do any more 101. Okay. Also think about what is the sacrifice of that? Do you have the skill set for that? And it's okay if you don't. Again, this is a long term plan. But I just want you to factor in. Okay. If I want to go all into group, then instead of time being spent on 101, my time then needs to be spent on lead generation and having enough demand to fill up my launches. That also needs to be on my calendar. That needs to be how I spend my time and do I want to do that. I remember I was talking with a client. She was like, I want passive courses. I went passive income. I said, okay, you'll create the passive course once. You're right there. But I said the rest of your time will be spent looking at ad funnels and looking at ad metrics. Do you want to do that? It's going to be spent looking at customer service. Someone can't log in. Someone can't get a PDF. Someone doesn't like the fact that you're on teachable versus kajabi and they want to refund over that. That's going to be like the number one thing people are going to be doing is your customer service. I said, are you okay with that? I said also it's going to be very limited testimonials. They don't have a relationship with you. They don't have like this ongoing commitment or connection with you. It's just recorded content. You may not get a ton of testimonials. Are you okay with that? How will you scale this program? If that's not a part of the actual mechanism is they can't talk to you so they don't build a relationship with you so they don't necessarily have a testimonial. She was like, oh, I said, that's how you're going to be spending your time. So yeah, it's thinking about what does your day, your week, and your month look like. What does that look like? Go back to your word of your movement. Go back to that movement to be like, okay, within my schedule and within the things I'm spending time on, how do I want my movement to be expressed? Okay, number eight, get clear on what you're leaving behind. I think this question is a little different than like sacrifices because sacrifices are just like trade offs, right? So like you don't do X to get right versus when I think about things you're leaving behind. That's a lot more risky and you will likely feel that more emotionally like the things that you're leaving behind. So for me, I decided this year to close one of my programs. That was a really big emotional decision and I decided to leave that behind. I was like, okay, I don't think I'll be able to do this. Another thing that I decided to leave behind was I was in like this peer ran mastermind that had a lot of affiliate opportunities and list growth opportunities. But I was always want to summit. I was always on a call and I believe in doing collaborations and lead generation that way. But that wasn't my personal highest form of it. And so I had to let a lot of my colleagues down and I said, hey, this year I'm just not participating in any bundles. It doesn't necessarily align with any of my goals. So I had to say no to a lot of colleagues. I've also had to say no to income streams. Like I don't have time to do one-on-one coaching in my calendar. I don't have time to do consistent VIP days on my calendar. I also think about what do you have to leave behind emotionally? So when I decided that I was going for 10 million and I was like, I think this emancipation movement can bring me to 10 million, I said, DL, you're going to have to let go of a lot emotionally. Right now, you're very comfortable with your current income size and your current audience size. In order to go from one million to 10 million, we have to 10x that. So you're going to leave behind your comfortor ability, right? And like the fact that you can kind of cocoon, you will need to be more visible in social media. You will need to be more exposed and open for feedback and criticism. You are leaving behind the comfort of a million dollar business. Or you can say this with, you're leaving the comfort of a specific niche and you're going to go in a different niche. You're leaving behind the comfort of, you know your clients maybe won't resign into the new business offer or the new program that you're creating and you're going to be leaving them behind. And so again, sacrifices have like a equal trade off. But I also want you to think about the things that don't have a trade off, but you know that they just don't fit. They don't serve the movement anymore. Maybe it was an old movement. Maybe it was the passive version of you. Or you're going to just have to literally create space to do the things that you know will help you create the movement that you want. So yeah, we think about change like we're just going to get everything that we want. But we don't think about no, you're going to have to say no and leave a lot of things on the table. And are you clear with that? Because one of the things that I see is people will start to make changes, start to work on a plan. And then they're like, wait a minute, I can't do both. And I'm like, no, you have to choose, right? You have to make a decision to leave something behind to go to the next level. And so I think it's really like important for you to be aware so that your nervous system isn't surprised when that decision comes where you're like, okay, this was the moment. Diel warned me that I won't be able to do it all. She warned me that I'll have to say no. She warned me that I may not be able to pursue a certain income stream that I want in order to pursue and create the movement of my dreams. Okay, after you decide what you're leaving behind step number nine, let the values support the movement not replace it. So when I think about my movement is a meant's a patient, I just have three values. A lot of people have like five values or six values. And it's like integrity and responsibility and all these things. I think values are fun. They are not like, I think about my values maybe like, you know, once every six months, it's not something that I revisit over and over and over again. Like that's not that's not the goal of it. But when it comes to values, I like to just choose three. And I say, okay, what are the things that will help me support this movement? So my values are brilliance, freedom and sisterhood. So brilliance means that we are a teaching heavy company. There are some coaching programs that just coach. There's not a lot of teaching, right? Like I think about a few masterminds that I'm in right now. There's literally like six videos in the portal. That's it. The rest is you got to just come and get coached. And so you have like people that are coach heavy, right? Where they just coach a lot. You have people that focus on, no, we want to live it then every quarter, right? Like they more say, like, hey, we don't do much on zoom, but you have to go on a plane every single quarter. There's programs like that. But for us, I say, no, I want us to be brilliant. I want us to be known for our frameworks. When they think about me and they think about for the 23%, I want them to think about the sales call clinic. I want them to think about the visa statement. I want them to think about the three B method. I want them to think about those signature frameworks that we have. And so brilliance. I then also think about freedom, like why are we doing all of this? It's for freedom. And so it's little things like I don't know in the in the in the future. I'm like, I love that I'm a virtual team that we have the freedom and flexibility. My contractors take off whenever they want that we have a virtual team. I also love that we instill that within our clients, we whenever we coach them and support them, we always want them to choose Freedom Financial Freedom Time for you. freedom is a big part of our coaching and teaching philosophy and how we make decisions in the company but then also how we lead our clients. And then also sisterhood were really big into community that really helped me influence my decision with I want a membership with a growing community where our clients talked to one another. I also said, okay, I want to have a community manager in my membership. And right now Carrie, our community manager is killing it. Like I feel like this role was designed for her. She's doing such a good job. And we tell her that every team meeting, we're like, Carrie, you're a natural at this. She's killing it as a community manager. She's doing a really, really good job. And so I also talked about how we want more student teaching and we want to put more clients on our stage, on our podcast. We are filming success videos of our clients and we're going to start to build out libraries where our clients are saying, here's how I'm creating the results so that they can teach the entire sisterhood. Also, it's sisterhood. There's a level of vulnerability there. So I'm more vulnerable in my communities. I have a deal's diary in my membership where I break down my wins, my losses, my personal things. There are some things that only deal diary consumers and readers know in the membership that know where else in my content they know about. And so it's just creating that intimacy. When I think about sisterhood, I also think about vulnerability and intimacy versus just like a general community. And I think this is even interesting. Like community versus team versus sisterhood versus classroom. All of those can, you know, the same, the same word of groups of people come up. But sisterhood feels different than team. Team feels different than community. Community feels different than classroom versus students. You see what I'm saying? And so the words do matter. And again, play with AI. Brain dump with AI to be like, this is what I want. This is what I care about. This is how I want things to be expressed. This is how I want things to look like here, the things I want to create help me create just three words, three emotional words or three descriptive words to articulate this vision. And then the last question is I want you to visualize how this movement shows up. So how does this movement show up? So me specifically, I said, okay, I want a video based marketing team and like marketing direction. If I can market anywhere, I want to market on video. I think it's really important for people to see that I'm a black woman. I think it's really important for me to be teaching and educating and shifting beliefs and sharing my story on video. I could delete Instagram and go all in on LinkedIn. I could delete Instagram and go all in on my email list. But I'm like, no, I want a video based like marketing system where I am leaning heavily on video. So I said, okay, let's re ignite my YouTube channel. Okay, let's re ignite my Instagram and my TikTok. I've been heavily investing time, money, masterminds, coaches helping me with my content mindset because I I'm deciding to show up on video. I think that's a good expression of my movement and of my values. To this point, I also said, okay, I don't think I just want to have a passive course funnel where people join the membership. I said, I think I want to do three day challenges or weekly webinars where people are seeing me one video teach. And so again, thinking about how do you want to visualize how the movement shows up? And like I'm demonstrating, there's a thousand different ways you can think about it. But what is the best way within your values and what's in your movement work that will help you show up with your marketing? A way that my friend articulated it, which I loved, she says, like, I want to be a TikTok first business. So TikTok is the bowling ball. It's where I go viral, where I get the most amount of leads is where I funnel people to my email list. And then I do have email and then I do have a podcast. And I do have these other things. But TikTok is like the first bowling ball. So I'm a TikTok first business. Or for me, I would just say I'm a video first business. I do YouTube. I do Instagram. I do TikTok. I do webinars. But I'm video first. You might be, hey, I'm YouTube first or I'm LinkedIn first or we really value private DMs. Like I want to be a DM first business where one LinkedIn and Instagram people are talking and converting with us in the DMs. So think about like I'm a blank first business to help you kind of make a marketing philosophy that helps your movement be expressed. Okay. It's so funny at the beginning of this, I said, this will be quick. 45 minutes later, 45 minutes later. So let's break this down. Here are the questions. And again, you can put them in AI. You could put this whole transcript of this podcast episode in AI and chat, GBT and Claude and work through these questions. And like I said, it's best for businesses who've made over 100 K where you have some data to fall back on, not just like your thoughts and feelings, but actual data. And it's for you to think about a three to five year vision when you are making a big messaging or a niche change when you're making a big offer change. Or if you're trying to have a big income dip, these questions are really powerful. So number one, define the movement word or phrase number two, map your skills to the identity that they create. Number three, make a direction that has a goal for the company. Number five, use the movement as a decision making filter. Number six, decide how you want to receive money. Number seven, decide how you want your schedule and your sacrifices to look like. Number eight, get clear on what you're leaving behind. Number nine, let value support the movement. And then number 10, visualize how the movement shows up in your marketing. All right, y'all. Happy journaling or AIing. However, we want to process these questions. Give yourself patience and grace as you're working through these. Again, these took me a whole year to do. And so definitely take a couple of different rounds of sitting and playing with them. And I hope it provides some clarity. All right, thank you so much. Thank you so much for tuning in to for the 23% the woman of color business and entrepreneurship podcast. If you want support, strategy and community to grow your sales and money as a woman of color entrepreneur, join our membership. You can sign up at for the 23% dot com slash membership. And make sure to follow us on Instagram at for the 23% and visit our website at for the 23% dot com. Thank you so much for being a part of our community. I'll see you next time.