Starting Over

Welcome to Business And, the podcast for people making it all happen. Running a successful business completely takes over your life, but I'm a believer that there is still room for some ands like health, wealth, beauty, and maybe even some fashion. On this podcast, I'll share with you what's working for scaling my nine-figure business while keeping you up to date on the latest trends, news, and fun finds. This is a place for business and let's dive in. My businesses generate hundreds of millions of dollars a year, but if I lost everything today and had to completely start over, it is the exact plan I would use to make $100,000 minimum this year, using the skills and tools that you already have. So here's the full strategy I'd use if I had to start over from zero. First up is to get ruthlessly clear on the skills that you already have. What can you sell today that somebody would pay you for? When you think about the target of making $100,000 this year, I am not telling you that you need to go to school to get some degree in order to learn something for you to make money. You can use the skills that you already have to make $100,000. What is so beautiful about the world we live in is you can type into ChatGPT. These are my previous job descriptions. This is my resume. And based off of this information, what hard skills do I have that I can use to sell a product? It is wild because ChatGPT will tell you what skills you have. I find that a lot of people really do struggle with identifying skills that they have. They feel a lack of confidence in the skills that they have, and they aren't really sure of what they're good at. So let AI help you. You might think that you aren't good at things, but you most certainly are. And whatever skills you do have would allow you to make $100,000 this year minimum. So here's some hard skills that would be included on your resume. This could be anything from consulting to social media, to design, to graphics, to sales, copywriting. But what about the intangibles? The things that you do really well in your life, such as being the life of the party. That is a skill. So is being super organized or having some sort of productivity system. Whatever it is that you already do that makes you successful with the people that you spend time around, not just at work, but also personally, you can sell those skills because there are businesses and people who are willing to buy from people who are good at a specific thing. You just have to nail down what that specific thing is. Failing to identify the skills that make you money is what leads to people believing that they need degrees or certifications. And that's what delays their success. Start getting cashflow by selling the skills that you already have. Next is number two. In order to make money fast, you need to pick an offer, not a business. This is how you can easily make $100,000 this year. You see, most people get hung up in starting a business, but what they really need to start is selling an offer and getting clear on what they can sell and who is interested in buying that thing from them. You are simply looking for people who are interested parties, who have a problem that you can solve. And from there you do the math. So think about this. Let's say you created an offer that is $1,500 a month, like operations consulting or AI workflow setup. You could be ready to pitch this offer to people tonight. And what I happen to know after working with thousands of business owners is that there are thousands of business owners who would buy those offers from you within minutes. People who are competent with AI, with operations, with productivity, with organization and their ability to sell those things to people who are interested in them, are able to make a disproportionate amount of money very quickly. This is not a business, this is an offer. It is a very specific offer to a business. Now, why I'm hitting on offer is that I don't want you to get confused with starting a business versus creating an offer. A business, you start thinking about websites and logos and incorporating or creating your LLC. And should it be a C-Corp? Stop the madness. When you pick an offer, you are shortcutting the process of actually making money. Creating a business doesn't make you money. Selling an offer does. Remember that getting to the goal that you want is somebody saying yes and then paying you ASAP. Here's some ideas of offers that don't require businesses. You could start hiring assistants as a service. There is no shortage of business owners who are looking for assistance. And the deliverables could be three to five screen candidates per month where somebody pays you two grand a month in order to do this for them. And then you would just move on to the next role. Next up, you could be a professional weekly team meeting builder. After working with thousands of business owners, I promise you they will pay you to prep and document their weekly meetings. And you could do this with multiple business owners. And you could do this with systems of scale utilizing AI. The deliverables would be agenda templates, live meeting support, scorecard tracking, etc. Next up, offer and pricing review quarterly with sales page touch ups. Businesses would pay to have you do this. Look through a fresh lens at their existing core offers and give them guidance and advice on what is and isn't working so that their pages convert better. These are just a couple of examples of offers. And there is no shortage of the amount of these types of offers that you could create for business owners that scale that would allow you to make $100,000 this year. Next is number three, which is to actually leverage AI to build better and faster. If you want to get rich in 2025, AI is not optional. Workers who use AI every day are two times more productive and earn up to 30% more. If you're currently working alone, you are already losing. I use AI for just about everything. Any hiccup that you have in scaling your offer, you can have AI tell you what potential bumps am I going to run into because I didn't see this one coming. It happened and I don't want this to happen in the future. It is magical what it can create for you and how it can come up with phenomenal ideas to actually help your business scale. Only if you know how to use it. And I will tell you just last weekend, I spent four hours going through and creating a bunch of assistance for myself for different things that I need help with each and every week. And yes, did it take time? Of course it did. But it only took four hours. And the target of investing four hours in something is that it ideally gives me 40 hours back by the end of the month. But most business owners are not going to put the four hours in because they don't know how to use it. They're not technologically savvy. So how can you leverage that as part of your offer where you become great with utilizing AI as part of your offer so that you can scale fast? This will differentiate you from all the service providers who are still operating in a world pre-2023. I like to think about AI as the only force multiplier that lets you compete at scale, but without a team. That brings us to number four, sell ugly and sell fast. Focusing on perfection over speed will ruin any chance you have of being successful. You do not need things to look pretty in order for them to be successful. In fact, the way you create success is oftentimes not having the pretty thing. It's by you overcoming objections, overcoming people's perceived obstacles in order for them to move forward with your product and your service and then ensuring that they actually have remarkable results when using them. That is how you create success, not with a perfect website and the best logo and all of these colors that really speak to you and creating something that you're proud of and having it be your legacy. You're not creating your legacy with your first freaking offer. Get this out of your head. What you are trying to do is learn how to sell something. You're trying to find the right market for you to sell to. And the only way that you know if somebody is truly interested in buying from you is if you start selling it and you sell it fast. And early on, they're not buying the brand. They are buying you. They're buying your product. They're buying your story. They're buying the way that you communicate it. So it does not have to be perfect because perfect does not scale. The Startup Genome Report in 2023 reported that 85% of startups that iterate early succeed, while 70% that over plan fail. Most people think that they need to look ready instead of actually being ready. So remember that as you're doing your pitch, it doesn't need to look perfect. It doesn't even need to look good. It just needs to clearly solve a very painful problem. And the pitch needs to be sent today, not someday. Number five is one of the most important strategies. You need to obsess over your first customers. According to the Nielsen Global Trust of Advertising Report, 84% of people trust referrals more than they do ads. So especially obsessing over your early clients creates a compounding effect that drives credibility. When you first launch your offer, you are not trying to boil the ocean. This is not the time where you have your 10-year vision and your five-year roadmap and all the milestones built out. We're scrapping that. We're going to how do you make $100,000 this year to have the foundation to be able to have a million dollars and then $100 million in the future. But in order to ever get to $100 million, you actually have to hit your first $100,000. And so this obsession over your clients early is the only thing that matters early on. Nothing else matters. You have to obsess over their feedback, over their perspective, over the way that they use the product and their thoughts on the branding and the positioning and what specific pain points your product actually solves. Because when you're creating an offer, it's easy for you to just create in a vacuum and you think that you are your customer. This is a huge mistake I see business owners make. They think that they're the customer so they build it around them. But if you build it around you, you're not actually building it for somebody who's interested in buying it because you aren't your own customer. Somebody else is. So listening to those people once you finally get their attention and have their trust is the only way that you get your business to a place where people are referring new business instead of you constantly having to pay for new business, going back to that Nielsen report. So remember that your early clients are your sales funnel. They will give you the case studies that you need and all of the testimonials and all the referrals if you pay attention to them. One of my favorite quotes around this is love the one you're with. Love the client that you have now, not the future clients that you want to have or the people that might buy. The people that are in your ecosystem and have purchased already are the people who need your most attention, especially when you're first starting out. That brings us to number six. If you spend your first 100K, you are never gonna make your second. Cash is your weapon. It is not a reward. I learned this the hard way. When I first dropped out of school and started making money, I thought I was rich because I had $3,500 in my bank account and I went and spent 2,000 of it on a Louis Vuitton duffel bag, which was ridiculous. I really thought at the time though that I was rich. I was like, oh my gosh, I'm making so much money. Why do more people not buy Louis Vuitton bags because it's so easy to buy them? Having $1,500 in my bank account did not make sense to me that I was actually broke and poor. I thought I was like rich and just rolling in dough. But when the first moment came, when there was an opportunity for me to invest money in a business, it was $15,000 for me to partake in this opportunity. And instead of having that $15,000, I didn't. I blew it on a Louis Vuitton duffel bag that made me look cool, but really made me look like an idiot because I wasn't able to take part in an opportunity that would create wealth for me versus having some stupid bag sitting on top of my Costco purchased carry on. So when you first start making money and this whole offer thing actually works, you're going to think it's magic and it's easy. And all of a sudden you're rich. You are not rich. When you have made your first $100,000, the next target is to make $200,000. It is not just to spend all of that money because you think it's the reward for your hard work. You've demonstrated to yourself that you can sell and that you have an offer that people are interested in. But there is a lot of work to do from that $100,000 to be able to truly scale it so that you have a business that will consistently produce income for you, whether or not you choose to show up. Most people just make the mistake of inflating their lifestyle too early. So try to keep the $100,000 that you have liquid, meaning you don't spend it, you don't put it away someplace, you just have it available to you so that you and the business that you're building have options and you have leverage and you can make room to place powerful bets instead of staying stuck in survival mode. Last up is number seven, which is your lack of speed kills momentum. The more momentum you can create, the faster your business will grow. And what kills momentum is pausing, is stalling, is getting distracted, is getting complacent. So keep going. It is remarkable. It is overperforming if you are able to generate a business that is doing $100,000 in revenue in its first year. So as you grow the business, focus on the small wins and the fast battles to keep the speed and momentum going. Just whatever you do, don't stop. John Maxwell has a law called the law of big mo and it stands for the law of big momentum. You see, as you stack small wins, the small wins become bigger wins and the bigger wins make you feel good and confident. So you keep going after bigger and bigger things and taking more risks, but having more wins. That momentum is vital to your early success. You paying attention to the small wins and saying things like I'm on a winning streak and reminding yourself that you are winning. You are making progress. There is momentum, is what allows the momentum to continue to be built versus I'm stopping. I'm starting. I'm stopping. I'm starting. I'm pausing. I'm thinking when you have this type of behavior, you never quite get into momentum. And the challenge if you never find momentum is that people have a hard time trusting you because you're somebody who's running a business, not running a business. You've started selling things, but now you're paused on selling things and you can never actually get consistency. You're not able to see what isn't isn't working because you yourself are starting and stopping. So don't stop. Keep going and remind yourself continually. I am broke. I do not have enough money in order for me to achieve the life that I want in order for me to pay for the things that I want in order for me to have financial freedom. So even though I've made it this far, I have barely just started. And there's so much more for me to go out and create. If you follow these seven steps, starting over will not feel as terrifying. If you enjoyed this podcast, you are going to definitely not want to miss out on my new newsletter. It just dropped. I just started creating this content and I am obsessed every single week in your inbox. I'm going to send you business and which is exactly what it sounds like. How do you fit business and all the other things in your life so that you are up to speed on fashion, beauty, wellness, all things that really matter. 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