I’m sure that I lost a good two years of business growth just due to making poor money decisions. 

At the time I didn’t see it that way. I saw my low bank account,  a deep fear of incurring more debt, and I didn’t trust my ability to earn real money.  So I made money decisions from that place.

It was a logical decision to be frugal and careful, however but was also a huge mistake. 

I needed to invest wisely into my business and to step into a place of empowerment. Those poor money decisions also kept me financially poor and  kept my business disabled. 

Now I can see it all so clearly, but at the time I was in the mud so all could see was more mud. 

When I woke up I began to search for  the right mentors to help me and it was  as though a ray of light shone into the darkness. I realized that while I was stuck in the mud, the rest of the world was moving and I was being left behind in my scarcity mind-set. 

The last few years I’ve been making up for lost time. I am now mindful of where I spend money, but not operating from a “I can’t afford it”  mentality. 

I knew that in order to shift and grow my  income I need to find joint venture partners and this meant, get off of my bum and go to events where I would meet the right people. 

A few weeks ago I went to Midas camp with Andrea Lee. My friend Kathleen and I drove all the way to Vancouver BC, stayed in the fancy hotel and had a blast. Andrea is an amazing teacher, business woman and a heartfelt person.

I learned so many new empowering things for my business that I hardly know where to begin sharing.

I met tons of amazing people who are part of my tribe. I’m sure some of them will end up being joint venture partners in the future. I came home feeling energized and focused.

All in all I spent over $4,00 if I count the new year long program I signed up for. Will this have a return on investment and be worth it?  As andrea says, “All business is an experiment,” so I don’t have that answer yet. What I do know is that I am more focused now, have huge support, and have even more good stuff to share with you, my clients. 

If you are looking for a way to get this same energy and focus ( and you are a female  come to my Wild Women Entrepreneur Retreat - an exclusive event for  a small group of smart, but wild, women!  Look at the website and then get back to me. 

How is your old story holding you back in your business?

So much of who you are, the decisions you make and how you present yourself has to do with your story. 

I recently had one of those aha moments and uncovered another layer of my story and how its been running the show.

When I was in second grade I had an unfortunate experience with math at school. I was in one of these combined classes on grades two and three. One day my teacher was showing the third graders long division and the rest of us were supposed to be “not watching.”  

Being good, I didn’t watch but but some of my classmates didn’t listen and instead they learned long division and I was left to feel stupid.

I asked to be shown but she just told me to wait until next year. Evidently there were no points given for being good. A could have gleaned many messages from this incident but the one I adapted was that I wasn’t good at math and also not very smart overal. 

That stayed with me and as a result I stayed away from financial stuff, struggled and thought I wasn’t smart enough to make money. 

I’m not sure where I got the idea that it took higher than normal brains to be able to make money but I didn’t think I was smart enough. 

Not feeling smart came from that childhood message. Math was not my best subject in school after that and somehow I thought you couldn’t be smart unless you were good at math. It’s really amazing the twisted beliefs that get adapted at a young age and then the decisions that are made from those places. 

I only share this story as an example.  When I realized what my story had been all those years, I decided to re-write the story. In the new story it talks about a very smart little girl who was in a very low quality elementary school with poor teachers. She was bored and creative but had no outlet for her creativity there, so she learned to daydream and doodle away the hours. As a result she got low grades in math.  

However she grew up and got two masters degrees and got an A in statistics. She took a year of glaze calculation as part of ceramics and got in A in that, and this was before the use of calculators. ( ok- I am that old:) 

As a result of my new story, I realized I was certainly smart enough to run a business and understand the financial part. I also realized that one of my skills is to help other entrepreneurs to understand and change their own story to support their success.

Can you see how there might be a story from your early childhood that is affecting you today?  

What is your own story around being a successful entrepreneur?
What part of your story do you need to let go of?
What’s your new story?

I would love to help you unravel this. Contact me for a free discovery/strategy call

I am loving the gorgeous tulips that are right outside my front door!

They are a reminder of the magic of new growth and the simple beauty that comes with it.

For years I knew how important it was to outsource, hire an assistant, and not try to do everything myself.

I’ve been preaching this to my clients for years because in theory I knew that “doing everything yourself keeps your business at a small size that you can manage.” 

It’s a funny irony. I wanted my business to be larger, have more income streams and I also wanted to have a team. The theory was correct. 

The trick was how to turn that theory into practice. Some years back I began by hiring various personal assistants to help me with projects. There were problems immediately:

• I really wasn’t earning quite enough money yet to pay for it.
• I didn’t know how to find the right person or the skills I really needed.
• I didn’t know how to manage that person.

So I ended up with people who were not exactly the right fit, I felt like they were doing stuff I could have done myself and I also couldn’t guarantee them a certain dollar amount each week. 

It was hard and I felt like I was missing an important piece of the puzzle (a common thread for me:)  

In fact, it was all good! What I realize now is that for most solopreneurs, there is an overlap time. You need help sometimes, but not all the time and you have to experiment and figure it out. 

You need to also develop  your own business plan first so you are focusing on the projects that will help you to grow your business. This is the key! Once I got that key it all changed. The telesummit I just did was the completion of this shift. I absolutely could not have done it without expert help.

I didn’t hire people because they were cheap. I hired them because they knew more than I did and could do the parts I couldn’t do, didn’t want to do, and didn’t have time to do. I paid top dollar for my telesummit Virtual Assistant, but Claire was actually a project manager for me. She kept me on track and I trusted her!

As a result of that experience, I was able to see exactly what I needed help with next in my business.

I have been doing telesminars for years and it was time for me to do my first webinar with slides. I kept putting off going on the Instant teleseminar site to figure out how to set that up, how to embed it on my website etc.  That stuff  gives me a headache, so I was sabotaging my process by doing everything else first. This past week, I finally gave the job to Tara, my new VA and empowered her to do it. In one hour she figured it all out for me.

Now I can spend today creating the webinar content which is my favorite part. 

I feel like I am now a grown-up in my business and moved into being a really good manager. I can’t show enough appreciation for Tara. She is not just my VA. She is a valuable member of my team.

• Know what you are good at, at what parts you need to outsource. This won’t be the same for everyone. 
• Find someone who has the exact skills that you need. I am more of an artist, teacher.  I needed someone more left brain!
• Communicate and show appreciation. This goes a long way to building a strong relationship. 

“5 Steps to Awaken Your Entrepreneur- It Begins with Your Mindset”
Thursday April 18,  4PM Pacific
http://www.awakeningbusiness.com/the-awake-entrepreneur-shift/

What is your own experience with hiring a VA? What help do you need?

There are clear and easy steps to marketing your service to the world.

And if you follow those steps impeccably you will be successful and make money!

It is logic in the purest sense.

Likewise, if you don’t follow the steps, you will make less money and be less successful.

Of course, there are many ways to judge success depending on what stage your business is at, and it’s important to acknowledge all the successes at each part of the process.  

This can be very hard if you are always looking at what you haven’t yet done!

At the beginning, it might just be having your first client or deciding on a domain name. Later you also might judge your success on how many income streams you have activated and how much money is coming in. 

Regardless of what stage you are at, the very first step is always to Shift Your Mindset. This is not something you do once, and you are done! It keeps coming up, over and over.

You want to expand  and shift into your entrepreneurial mindset.
Michael Gerber, author the the  ”EMyth Revisited” explains this very well!

“The entrepreneur is our visionary, the creator in each of us. An entrepreneur is a person who takes an idea, product or service and does whatever is necessary to introduce it to the marketplace where it can produce revenue.”

Most people who begin their service business, struggle to become a real entrepreneur. He says, “They fail to see the business as a product as an entrepreneur would. Instead, they see the business as a job.”  

If you are a therapist, coach, designer, or other practitioner you might relate to this and have found yourself stuck in that place of working hard and getting nowhere!

So, the first place to begin is in changing your mindset. This has not been a black and white shift for me!

Every new stage I get to in my business, the issues come up again. One of the big ones for me has been my money mindset. 

Here is one example that snuck in when I wasn’t looking.
In an effort to be financially responsible, I made decisions to use Free Conference Call for my teleclasses. I have over 60 hours I have recorded in the last few years. However the quality is so poor that I can’t really make them into a paid product or event make them into a Podcast for i tunes.  

It saved me money but disabled my business!

It was actually my scarcity mindset that made the decision, but I didn’t realize it. I got fooled!  Now I have shifted to Instant Teleseminar which is high quality and also  will allow me to have webinars with slides. It’s not free but so worth it! Plus I am an affiliate so I can earn money just by referring people.  Again- an entrepreneurial decision.

Here is my link. Please use it if you want to do teleclasses. I highly recommend not making the same mistake I did!  

http://kayalikes.com/instantteleseminar

You can immediately become an affiliate as well and very soon you will be making money rather than spending it. Another mindset shift! 

Here are a few questions to answer that will help you to have more insight around step #1

How is your mindset disabling your business?
What changes to you need to make that would make you be more of an entrepreneur?
What is one small thing you can do today to make a huge shift?

Come back later to hear about Steps 2-5!

The wonderful life of a work-from-home entrepreneur.

In your fantasy it was all about doing what you love, sleeping late, making a difference!

Of  course you have people running after you to throw money at you because they just love your programs, your healing work or your art. 

That was my fantasy and if I hadn’t had any self-doubt or made all the mistakes, I’m sure this would have happened for me long ago!

However, it was really hard work to get to where my business is now!

The last two weeks in my tele-summit, every one of the presenters shared a similar story.

Flora worked as a waitress, Patti had two small children to support and no income, Connie spent her retirement and made almost no money the first year, Jenn didn’t think was smart enough to receive money, and so on. 

However every one of these people have highly successful businesses now. They worked hard, learned and shifted their mindset. Jenn talked about getting past your stoppable self. Vicky talked about doing it, not trying to do it!

Vicky shared:
You’re doing better than 50% of the people if you just show up. 
You’re in the top 20% if you put out any effort at all!
You’re in the top 1% if you do everything you can!

Where do you want to be?  I want to be in that top 1%!  I just overcame huge fears, self-doubts, money issues and tons of other crud, in the process of hosting this amazing event. If I can do it, so can you!

What is your big thing that you could do if you didn’t have your issues? Are you willing to do it anyway ?  I did and I didn’t die and neither will you. 

Are you willing to do all you can? 
What is stopping you?  

Some responses I have heard  include:
Having no money, not wanting to create debts, fear of failure, not being good or perfect enough. 

I’ve had all those things too and I just decided that my desire to be wildly successful was more important than any of those tiring old issues:)

Here are two ways I can offer you to help you right now!
I’m offering. It’s up to you to accept! 

Download the Mp3s of all ten amazing sessions. Listening again will give you so much help! Each speaker shared so much wisdom!

•  Create and own your expertise.
•  Connect and communicate to the world through your strong message.
•  Monetize and leverage your gifts.

Remember- the first step is showing up!