As long as I can remember I have wanted to hit two major accomplishments by the time I turned 30. Owning my own home and owning my own business. I am beyond excited to announce that I have been able now to do both. As I sit in my wonderful home office I can’t help but look back on everything it has taken to get here and how grateful I am for the people that have helped me achieve this. It is crazy to think that even just one year ago I had begun to feel like success wasn’t for me. That despite the hard work and countless hours I put into building a name for myself and being able to take care of my family financially, I always seemed to hit a stumbling block (or in many of my experiences a 100-foot tall rock wall). I started to let those feelings creep in and I fell further and further into believing my life is just meant to be hard. Today I can honestly look back and point out the 3 factors that turned this thing around. I want to share the 3 things every entrepreneur MUST do to build a successful business.
- Stop beating yourself up. I like many of you am my biggest critic. I can nitpick everything I do until I just stop doing it all together. I had adopted a mindset that in order to be successful everything I do had to be “hard work.” I was so far down this rabbit hole hustling for every client, working night and day to “perfect” every piece of content I was putting out, and literally working myself into exhaustion. It took a couple of outside influencers to point out that I was focusing so hard on how hard everything had to be that I wouldn’t have accepted or appreciated anything else. I had to sit down and take a good hard look at why I allowed myself to feel this way and how I would go about changing it for the future. I was blessed to be able to work with Matt and Joyce every week and tap into their years of knowledge on a topic I literally knew nothing about. I learned just how much you can change just by changing your focus and where you are putting your energy. Instead of focusing on how hard things were I changed my mindset to think about how great things were for me in the big picture. I truly am blessed with an amazing husband and marriage, two beautiful kids who are brilliant beyond belief, and so many other things that I could go on all day about. I stopped focusing on all the things I was doing wrong and started APPRECIATING all the things I was doing right. After all staring your own business or putting real effort into pursuing a passion is something to be celebrated on its own.
- Invest the right tools. This one can be hard, especially when starting your own business. I held on to every penny like it was the last one I was going to get. Which is tough to do especially when you aren’t even making enough to pay yourself! I found the cheapest way to do EVERYTHING. The only problem with that is it usually turned out to be the hardest way. For example, I found a free plugin that would allow people to sign up for my mailing list but that is all it did. Then I would have to manually email out each freebie as I got the email notification then take that information and manually input it into a separate software where I am sending the newsletters out from! Talk about exhausting. If you sign up for a freebie to be delivered to your email you want it NOW. So I became hooked to my phone and computer. Every time I got an email notifying me someone had signed up I had to drop everything I was doing and rush to send out the freebie. Now I have a system in place that will send the freebie and upload the email automatically. I can’t even put a price on the value of this because I had literally started to be resentful every time someone opted in! Now I just get an email at the end of every day with the number of new subscribers and I can smile about it. Invest in tools that will save you time. When building a business, especially as a solopreneur you have only two assets your time and money, and while it may be hard to accept when you sit down to pay bills, your time is always more valuable.
- Invest in YOU. For years and years, I have known many business and life coaches. I always thought to myself that seems silly because if I can afford and business or life coach I would be wealthy enough to feel like I don’t need one. Boy, was I wrong. There came a point in my business last year that I had beat myself up enough, done things the hard/inefficient way long enough, and had worn myself down to a point where I honestly felt like giving up. Being there at the bottom of a hole you had dug 100% yourself is a scary and lonely feeling, but also one of the best opportunities to learn. It was at this point that I truly feel someone was brought into my life and in the most pathetic “what have I got to lose” moment of my life I made one of the best decisions. I decided to invest in ME. Not in my business, not in a product or service, but in myself. In making WHITNEY better. I decided to spend more than I had planned to pay myself for the month on a program that didn’t promise to make me more money or increase the sales in my business but to make ME better. I felt so selfish and indulgent I didn’t even know what I was thinking as I walked to my car. Looking back now I feel that perhaps it wasn’t a moment of weakness but a spark of strength. I was brave enough to invest in making myself better and deep down I knew that ultimately it was the only way to improve my business. The 6-week course that I took from Janette VanLeer changed every aspect of my life, seriously!! I felt like a better mom, a better wife, and she lit a fire under my business that all I could do was hold on tight and ride the wave. If you have ever met Janette you know that she is humble beyond belief and will probably turn bright red as she reads this but I am so eternally grateful to her and her ongoing commitment to helping other people with her incredible gifts and talents. I am also grateful that she is offering a FREE mini session with her. So happy day to you. If you are interested just click the link here and book an appointment.
Every business and every businessperson is different, but you have to each of us have to embrace those differences and use them to build a unique business that no one else could. I cannot express enough how grateful I am for the experiences that I have had: the good, the bad, and even the ugly because I have learned so much from each of them. We need to stop beating ourselves up for struggles and celebrate these struggles as learning experiences. We need to value our time more than our money and invest in the tools that are available to make our lives easier. We need to place immense value on ourselves, invest in being the best YOU that you can be and it will pay for itself tenfold.
