Why following everyone's advice will only set you back with Leanna DeBellevue

Hey Mark. Hey Katie. Hey you want to do a podcast? Yeah. Sweet okay. Welcome to the "Unforget Yourself" show where we use the power of blue and the proof of science to help you identify your blind spots and get over your own bullshit so that you can do the fucking thing you actually want to do. Absolutely. I'm Mark. And I'm Katie. And we're the founders of "Unforget Yourself" and the creators of the "Unforget Yourself" system. Look, being a business owner is tough with vulnerability and with humour we'll be sharing with you the real stories behind the success of those brave and crazy enough to start their own business and to show you that you're not alone. Not from the accidental entrepreneur to the laser focus CEO. We have honest conversations about how they get to where they are today. We talk about the challenges that they faced and what they're currently dealing with in real time on the roller coaster. Long the way we want to show you that it's you. You are the most important asset in your business. Yeah you are. So let's cut the bullshit and start the show. Enjoy. Okay, hello everyone and welcome to the show. Now just a quick interruption to your normally scheduled episode. If you wish more people knew you, trusted you and actually reached out wanting to work with you, this is for you. Most experts try to post more, shout louder or chase attention. But the truth is clients don't come from content. Clients come from real connections and that's why we built the profitable podcast system. We'll help you create your own simple relationship-driven podcast that brings the right people into your world, build trust fast and turns amazing conversations into clients, content and opportunities and all without you becoming a marketer or an influencer. So you don't need a big audience. You just need to write people hearing your voice, eating your energy and thinking, okay, I get you, I trust you. I need to work with you. So if you want a proven way, then actually grows your business, not just your to-do list. Head over to profitablepodcast.com and we'll show you how this will work for you. And now onto your scheduled podcast episode. So today we have this, Leanna Debellvue, the founder of Debellvue consulting, a business consulting practice that helps founders and CEOs uncover blind spots, remove bottlenecks and step back into true leadership without sacrificing growth or culture. Through systems, refinements, hands on accountability and her accountability collective. Leanna worked closely with business owners to simplify operations, strengthen the customer experience and release themselves from the day-to-day roles that keeps them stuck. Now, Leanna's journey from selling a highly successful, near-autocilot marketing agency to starting again from scratch demonstrates what it really looks like to move through the muck and the mud of growth while redefining success on your own terms. And while challenging, controlled, driven habits and the belief that more effort equals better results, she's helping founders reclaim time, freedom and a business that supports both ambition and life. Leanna, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for having me and very excited to be here. Thank you so much for joining us. This is me a fun conversation. So I want you to kick it off. So can you expand a touch more on where you are today with your business and who is it that you love to work with? Yes. So I am the founder of Debellvue consulting as you mentioned. And this is a product of following my passion. What I love more than anything is to help small business owners reach their dream of being a free entrepreneur, free business owner, which means freedom of time, freedom of concerns about money or staff, all of the processes and these types of things. So I founded Debellvue Global Marketing 15 years ago, grew it, scaled it, sold it, and then realized what I wanted to do more than anything was to help people get out of their own way, the same way that people had helped me get out of my own way along the 15 year journey that I just had. So that's what I do now. Okay, so let's break that down because with your clients, when they reach out to you, getting in their own way, that can be so, so confusing, so worrying. You maybe you don't know what's going on. It might be something deep, it might be hidden. You might know about it, but you're trying to avoid it. So what are those mistakes that you find your clients making time and time again before they start working with you? Yeah. A lot of times, people are afraid to grow. When you are just starting out, you have to be the marketer. You have to be the salesperson. You have to be the CPA and all of the different things, right? Because your budget really doesn't allow you to outsource things. And with that comes a false sense of security, right? You're like, I've got it all. I've got it all handled. I can do it all on my own. And you want to grow, but suddenly you're afraid either, I don't know if I can afford somebody or if I bring a professional in, and we see this a lot in the financial realm of bringing someone in, someone might see that behind the scenes is pretty messy, right? And there's fear there. I talk about this because I did it myself, right? With my business, sometimes an Amazon purchase would contain printer ink and a dog toy for my dog, right? So I mix things up quite a bit. And I was afraid to let the professionals in to take a look. Or I was afraid to hire that first person because wonder if I can't make payroll than what happens, right? So talking people through those fears of what is holding you back? And I think a majority of the time people know what it is, but that doesn't take the fear away. Just because you name the fear doesn't remove the fear. Yeah, knowledge is power, which is great, but also we need to implement this. We need to work on this. And this doesn't have to be like deep dark lots of therapy sessions and go all the way back. Sometimes understanding what it is, then from that place, fantastic. We can work alongside it. We can understand it. We can, here's a good principle, if friend it's so to understand this fear, allow it in and be like, what's going on? What's really happening? There's something beautiful there. So can you expand on that? Because I think that's an interesting concept. Yeah. So I think when you invite someone in, as business owners, I think we put an expectation on ourselves to know everything, right? This is my business, my baby. I know what's best for it. I know how it operates. And when I work with people a lot of times, they have all these amazing processes. It's just in their head or they have a system and only they know the system. So when you get into it and get them to kind of let you in, if you will, you realize that there's so many great things that are happening behind the scenes. And when you start to talk about the great things that they're doing and the way that they've made things work so far, it builds that trust to where they open up a little bit more and now they're not afraid to show you what they think they're doing horribly, which nine times out of 10, it's not a big deal, right? They feel like it's a big deal, but in reality, it's something that we all do, right? I think we're all doing the best we can of what we have. And that's that's so true. So we're all trying really hard to have that understanding of, yeah, it might be messy back here. It may be struggling with XYZ, but so's everyone else. And maybe, maybe you can talk about permission, because that permission to grow, that permission to be vulnerable, maybe that's really hard in this day and age of everyone should have all together or have it fixed by now, right? Yeah. And I think it's podcasts like these that have real conversations that your messy might look different than my messy, but I promise you everybody's got mess, right? And when you show up, when I show up for a client, and I'm willing to be vulnerable, and I'm willing to show you my mess, right? Here's what I'm noticing from your business, and here's my journey in that same way. It does, it gives people permission to say, I'm really struggling with this, or I am afraid of this, or I don't know what I don't know, and I'm hitting a ceiling, right? But I always tell my clients, I'm not miles ahead of you. I'm a few steps ahead of you on a journey. So I still remember the pitfalls that are three steps back. I know how to navigate you to the left or to the right to get you to where you want to be. But the second that they feel like they truly have a partner in this, there's no judgment, there's no, you know, kind of, I don't know, punishment for not doing things perfectly. Once they realize that it really is a partnership, and I'm here to help guide them, then I'll a lot of that scared mindset fades away, right? - I love these head partnership. It's a great word. It's a great way of doing this because you're right, it's you and your client on the same side of the table, which is, okay, team, what have we got? What's going on? We're, it's us against the desire or against the challenge. And so I love that partnership angle. I think it's so helpful. So what do you love to see? Once your client starts to open up, once they start to really share, what happens? - What happens? - Once we start having true communications, and I tell them, just show me everything from the very beginning. Let me know what I'm working with, no matter how bad you think it is, because then I can create a roadmap that's honest, right? If you leave out what you think is what you want to hide the most, that could be the biggest component that's going to get us where we need, that we need to address, right? So once I get a true picture of where we are, what I love seeing is the business owner gaining confidence in that we can overcome this struggle, or we can figure out how to get them to meet their goal. And when they start seeing that maybe the self talk that they've given themselves, that they don't know what they're doing, and they've done everything wrong. When you see that moment where they switch and they go, "You know what, maybe I did create something "that is really cool." Or, "I am providing a service that's benefiting others." Then they gain excitement. - Or that moment of realizing, "Oh, I am doing well, you see the stats, you understand it." So maybe it's that just recognition of being able to look at what you have done, look at what the good, we spend so much time looking at negative. But those times of celebration of maybe realization, I think that's so important. - Yeah, yeah. And they're comparing their everyday life with everyone's highlight reel on social media. And that's not fair, right? You see, here's my huge win, and here's my success, and here's my client, and here's my next vacation, and here's all of the things, but you don't see that I got up at 4 a.m., and I'm going to bed at 11 p.m., and I'm up at 2 a.m. worried about whatever, right? And so they're not painting a reel picture. So I kind of look at myself somewhat of an artist. I paint the reel picture for them, and then I get to say, "Look at how beautiful this is." Right, look at what you've done. And once they kind of honor that, then going into that next step doesn't feel as scary, because they've already done really hard things, and they've done them really well. So let's talk a bit more of the tangibility here, because we're talking an awful lot about the human, the person which I love this. I mean, you're on the unforgettable show. Unfigate yourself. Remember you in the equation, but also the tangibles, the things that you get to do, so the things that they see, from it might be a person, might be a business perspective. What are those things that measurably change and move due to this permission, due to this confidence, due to this shift in ourselves? Yeah, I think it looks different for every client. Some clients, success to them is freedom of time. I want my time back so that I can spend it with my husband or my kids or my grandkids or my girlfriends or whatever that is. For other people, it's not panicking. Every two weeks when it's payroll time, that you're not going to make it. That's a conversation I have with people at the very beginning, because I can bring you what I deem to be successful. But if that's not what you deem to be successful, then you're not going to feel like we're making that traction. So we start, we reverse engineer it. What does success look like to you? If it's freedom of time, how can we create small little milestones that make you feel like you're gaining traction? Every step of the way. I love that, because it's super important to know where we're going. I mean, it's everything's A to Z. One, two, no. That's what we're supposed to do here. But we get so caught up, I feel, and maybe you've seen us with your agency and your new business that, rather than if we don't know exactly where we're going, we can just be driving through doing stuff and hoping. I love hope. I love faith. I love belief. I also like proven strategies and direction. Right. So have you caught yourself where you realize, oh, I've lost my way or maybe your clients are like, they're doing so much, they're working so hard, but because they haven't got an end point, they didn't know where they're going. Does that make sense? Yeah, no, absolutely. I think I struggle with that myself a lot of times. We were chatting a couple of minutes before we started that building a business today is very different than it was 15 years ago. Right. I also have expectations of performance that are rooted in 15 years of experience. So something I thought I wanted, I would start down that path and be like, you know what? I don't think this is exactly what I want. This isn't the true destination. So I think it requires consistent check-in with myself and then with our clients. This is what you said you wanted. We're on that path. Does that path still feel right for you? Right. Some people go, I want to scale and I want to go from five employees to 20 employees. Okay, well then we get around employee 10 and some reason it's not feeling right. Okay, maybe they thought 20 was what they wanted because maybe that's what the guru said or their competitors are doing. And they get to 10 and they go, you know what I think I'm good. So I think it's a consistent check-in with is that goal still in alignment with where you want to be? I think alignment, great word because you're right. It's not, you don't want other people's expectations, as you said earlier, but also their goals. Here's what success looks like. Here's what you need to build. You might be okay as a soda printer. 10 people, 100 people. It's, you don't want that. I mean, this concept, you don't want that. You want that gives you. You don't want the business. You want the free back gives you. You don't want the website. You want something that tells your prospect exactly what you do. It's always on the other side of this. Maybe we focus too much on the thing rather than what the thing can bring us. Yes, 100%. It's never about the website. You're not going to get a higher conversion rate because it's a lighter blue instead of a darker blue. There's little components that altogether collectively make up a product, but we're creating a story. We're telling, we're creating the brand. Why is it important for us to understand why you care? Why is it important for someone to interact with us in a certain way? And a lot of times people think it's about the thing. And I'm 15 years into it. I'm going to tell you it's never once been about the thing. OK, then let's talk about your why. So why this business? Why is this important for you right now? Yeah, I definitely feel like it is a gift that was given to me along the way. I've had amazing mentors, coaches, friends, fellow entrepreneurs that came alongside me and helped me grow. They believed in me when I didn't believe in myself. They called me out when I needed to be called out. And I know what a blessing that was for me. And I know that not everyone has that same circle. And I feel like this is my ability to pay it forward. Someone did it for me. I would like to do it for someone else. It took a lot of people to help me realize my dream. I would love to be that for someone else. I want to help them get to that next level. So that's my why. What was that moment like when you realized, yes, this is what I want to do. This is my mission. What was that moment like? Was it one shining moment? Was it a slow build? What was that like for you? Yeah, so I sold-- when I sold the agency, I had a very different idea of what I wanted to do. I was going to do step-and-defractional CMO work and it was just going to look very different. And I couldn't get myself motivated. Motivation's never been a problem for me. I'm always one. Let's just do it. And I couldn't get myself to do it over and over again. I just kept finding, you know what? I'm going to do this today. I'm going to do something. And I wasn't moving the needle forward. And I couldn't figure out why. And I was talking to my friends. And I was like, I don't know what's wrong. I can't make myself do it. And then I went home and had a conversation with my husband. I said, I think something's wrong. I think I just want to do something else. And he said, well, you know, we have some time. Why don't you just dream? My friend said, think about what you want to do. Don't rush yourself. And I woke up one morning and I just knew I want to give that to other people. And the second-- like I said, you have kind of check in with the destination. right? And once I checked in and realized all I really want to do is talk to small business owners and help them. And that moment on I hit the ground running. Super excited. Let's go. Everything fell in place. It was a misalignment before. Beautiful. I love that once you find that alignment. Everything feels a little bit easier. I mean, it's not going to be completely easy all the way through. But there's some flow to it. There's some direction. Everything starts to take on a life of its own. So what's been the difference for you? Because then you found your why. You found your purpose. But as you said earlier, growing a business now, rather than the business you grew way back when. Yeah, it's a different time. So what's maybe been the biggest surprise for you? The surprise has been that the entire landscape has changed in 15 years. The introduction of AI. It has been something that I have really had to take some time and figure out how do I leverage this between saving me time? Right? Because it can spit out something in seconds and keeping the authentic brand and my voice. When do I use AI to help move the needle forward? And when does it need to be me with my notebook and my pen figuring it out? That's been a lot harder than I thought it was going to be because everyone made it seem like all you do is plug it into AI and it knows you so well. It spits out something that's remarkable. And maybe that's the case for some people. But I haven't quite seen that myself. I think with everything like AI is a tool. There's different tools that you had 15 years ago that were maybe revolutionary that moved the needle to save time made things easier. It's just another tool that we can we can misuse, try and use too much. But it's super interesting. So have you enjoyed going back into growing with business after the success you had and now you get to do it again? Are you enjoying this? I would put the muck, the mud, the going through this time. In some ways, yes, because I love being able to create, it's like a fresh canvas. I get to create a brand new masterpiece. The other part of me is like, what were you thinking? You had freedom of time, you had great income, you had amazing employees, you had the system that was really working for you. But I thrive in the challenge. I want to figure it out. I want to, as crazy as it sounds, I want to fail because I want to know what works, what doesn't work. I'm really excited to do it on my own. Over the years, I had an amazing team that did so much for me. All I really had to do was show up. I didn't really need to create things from scratch. Now I feel like this is a fresh opportunity to put in my ideas not from beginning, but with 15 years worth of experience under my belt. You said about you want to fail. I think it's a beautiful way of looking at it because every single failure is a lesson to learn. It's an investment made. It's a problem solved. You found another way not to do it. What has maybe been the heart I never asked it for? What's been your best failure in doing this recently? I think the best failure was thinking that going down this path was going to be what was right. Now I had, I said that it took me a while to get in and I found ways to procrastinate, but I still had a website. I still had all of the things I had a business page. I had a Google, like I was doing all of the things. So for me to realize, nope, we need to scrap the website and it's a whole new website and we need to take out all of our content that was there before because it's not no longer in a line with where we are. That was a big potential failure, especially since everybody had asked me, what are you doing? I told everybody what I'm doing. Now I'm like, oh, I'm just kidding. I'm not doing any of those things. Once I told people what it was that I was redirecting myself to, everybody was like, absolutely, of course, that makes so much sense. And I was kind of a little afraid of the judgment of, oh, she doesn't know what she's doing. Does she really, do we trust her with our business and those types of things? Full, everyone was on board. It was beautiful. Yeah. Nice. I think it sounds like some outside validation really helps there. And I we shouldn't need it, but sometimes it's so helpful. But once we make that decision, I was like, okay, that's the wrong way. Let's go this way. What was the, apart from obviously the outside validation, what would these signposts, maybe the nods and links from the universe? What are those things that made you realize, yes, this I am on the right path? I think the internal screaming of yes, the excitement that just naturally welled up in me, made it so obvious that nothing else would have been the answer. Now, this isn't mean that I'm going to be on this path for the next 20 years. But today, in this moment, I'm a thousand percent sure, I'm exactly where I need to be. Beautiful. And to wrap this up in a big, big, beautiful bow, if there was one, maybe more recently, one bit of advice or a principle or something that helps you at a time when you needed it most. What was that for you? What's that out for you? The one thing that I learned very early on and it's a lesson that I think is invaluable to me, whether I'm established or new, is find a circle of entrepreneurs who are in the muck with you. Don't take advice from the people who want to keep you safe. Take advice from the people who are risking it all just like you are and navigate with them. That's that beautiful. Well, Leana, thank you so so much for sharing not only the amazing work that you do, but also your personal journey as an entrepreneur. You've gone through semi-stages, so it's fantastic to hear. So thank you so much for sharing. And thank you for having me. It's been a great conversation. Oh, you're welcome. And for those people that want to know more about you and the amazing work you do, how can they reach out? How can they find you? Absolutely. So our website is DebellViewConsulting.com and all of our social media handles are Debell View Consulting. Fantastic. Well, there you are. If you're curious or think the sounds fantastic, go and check it out. Then reach out, start the conversation, find an amazing new circle. And again, Leana, thank you so so much. This has been a lot of fun. Thank you. You're welcome. Hey, Katie. Yeah, Marc. Wanna do an outro? I sure do. Sweet. Hey, thank you so so much for listening and making it to the end. Yay, you. So what happens next? We ask them the things that podcast are supposed to ask at the end of an episode. Can you please rate, review, download? Subscribe. Yeah. But why is it important? Because that's how our podcast gets noticed. Some people find us. It is. And we want all their earballs. All the earballs, all over place. We do. Nice. Yeah. So please do all those things. We'll be ever so grateful. And then more people here, you're a beautiful voice. Oh, you're awesome. Oh, yeah. See you next time. Bye.