Art of Earning, Big Thinking
I’m not the kind of person who wakes up early to exercise.
I’m not the kind of person who is outdoorsy.
I’m not the kind of person who makes a lot of money.
You have a story (probably many) about who you are and what you’re about.
Those 4 were some of mine.
Have a minute? I’d like to share more–but it’s personal.
***
In January 2016, I hired a personal trainer because I thought I needed someone to hold me accountable for exercising on a regular basis.
I didn’t like the way I felt, the way I looked, or the amount of energy I had. It seemed like a reasonable solution to the problem.
Guess what? I went to the first 2-3 sessions of the package I purchased and didn’t show up for the rest.
In January 2017, I decided I was going to set my alarm for 6am and start the day with a workout.
I’ve massively succeeded. I feel more comfortable in my body, I love the way I look, and I have pretty boundless energy.
The difference? When I hired a trainer, I told myself, “I’m not the kind of person who exercises on her own.”
When I got serious about changing my routine, I told myself, “I am the kind of person who wakes up early to take care of herself.”
And, now I am.
***
I moved to the coast of Oregon 5 years ago.
Every day, I felt like a “city person” in our small fishing town.
I loved spending time outside in the temperate rain forest, at the beach, or in the state parks. But I looked at Sean’s friends–who would hike up a mountain and then ride their bikes 20 miles on the beach in one weekend–with jealousy.
They were “outdoorsy” people.
When I moved back to PA 2 years ago, I grieved the loss of the wild outdoors. I wanted mountains, beaches, and rivers. But I realized that PA Dutch countryside, deciduous forest, and rail trails were cool too.
We bought a Subaru. We got a bike rack. I bought hiking shoes.
And we used them.
One day Sean said, “I think we’re becoming the kind of people who go hiking & biking every weekend.”
I said, “We already are.”
***
When I started my business, I set my earning goal at about $30,000.
That’s how much I had been making in my previous job.
After all, the person I am–the interests I have, the skills I have, the way of thinking I have–isn’t the kind of person who makes a lot of money.
Luckily, I met a lot of women (and men) who were exactly the kind of person I knew myself to be (smart, ambitious, values-driven, philosophically-minded…) who were making a lot of money running fabulous businesses.
I changed my mind: I am the kind of person who makes a lot of money.
Not only that, I’m the kind of person who leads a company that makes a lot of money.
And now I do… and now I do.
***
What I’ve discovered is that, quite often, when I say, “I’m not that kind of person…”
What I mean is that “I wish I was that kind of person. Too bad I’m not.”
What’s more, I’ve discovered that I can be any kind of person I really want to be simply by changing my story and taking action to make it real.
Now, left to my own devices I might have been perfect (dis)content to limit myself to my preconceived notions of who I am and what I’m capable of.
But I make a point to surround myself with savvy, fiercely intelligent, healthy, and happy friends. They’re business owners who are constantly improving themselves, their companies, and their craft.
They’re the members of CoCommercial–an online community of small business owners serious about making waves in the New Economy.
Yesterday, during CoCommercial‘s The New Economy & Your Money virtual conference, I asked our members to consider their money stories.
They shared the “kind of person” they believed themselves to be.
And many, many of them realized that the kind of person they believed themselves to be was only a shadow of who they truly wanted to be.
They realized that by shifting their money stories, their entrepreneurial stories, or their personal stories, they could change the action they took and the reality they lived in.
Think about the reality you’re creating with the stories you’re telling yourself about the person you are.
If you don’t like the “kind of person” you believe yourself to be, take action to change it. When you do differently, you become something new.
When you become something new, it might be the person you’ve been all along.
***
Interested in surrounding yourself with the kind of business owners who can help YOU make this kind of leap?
Big Thinking
When I’m feeling cheeky, I will admit to having retired two husbands with my business.
My first marriage ended (it’s better for everyone involved). And my second, well, okay…
Technically, we’re not married. But we own a house together, pay the bills together, and he survived about 25,000 miles of travel with me in one 12-month period. So, give me a pass on the shorthand.
Now, a few months after I retired my first husband and hit the biggest revenue goal I could imagine at the time, I started looking for a new goal.
I felt rudderless without a challenge to work toward.
I asked everyone: How do you dream bigger when you’ve just achieved more than you’ve ever dreamed of?
How do you dream bigger when you’ve just achieved more than you’ve ever dreamed of?
Now, I realize that sounds like a really quality problem to have–and it is.
But there’s more to it than meets the eye.
Here’s why:
You can’t create what you can’t see.
When you’re a student or working in a corporate career, your goals are based on what’s in front of you, what you’re exposed to.
You eye the scholarship. You fantasize about the acceptance letter. You want the promotion. You look for a raise.
You can see yourself attaining any of those things because they’re right in front of you. You see people achieving them and know they’re possible. They might be a dream, but they’re dreams you can see yourself living.
With business, it’s often very different.
I didn’t know I could dream of running a million-dollar company. I didn’t know I could dream of hiring a team of fabulous employees. I didn’t know I could dream of speaking on stage in front of hundreds or thousands.
Before I was connected to people who were dreaming those kinds of dreams and–more importantly–working those kinds of plans, I didn’t have a clue about my potential as an entrepreneur.
Every step of growth my business has taken has been a direct result of my connection to someone or something that allowed me to finally visualize a bigger goal or challenge.
When I retired my first husband, I didn’t know how to think beyond, “I want to make $100,000 per year and retire my husband.”
I had no close relationships with people who had achieved that.
When it came to ambitious colleagues and friends who took their businesses as seriously as I did, my well was damp at best.
As a result, my business suffered from my lack of vision and creativity. It kept growing but not at the pace it could have.
I worked harder instead of smarter.
I pushed for incremental successes instead of exponential steps forward and new ways of creating value.
Now, you might be thinking, “Tara, I haven’t hit the goal I’m working on right now. How can you expect me to look beyond that?”
Here’s why I expect you to–and why I believe you must:
The action you take is dictated–consciously or unconsciously–by your vision and goals.
Try this thought experiment.
What would you have to do differently to reach your goal for 2017 in the next 6 weeks, without working more in your business?
Your first reaction might be panic. But your second might be a pretty creative way to reorganize your business and your time to achieve more, at a faster pace, than you originally let yourself plan for.
That’s why you need to be connected to people who push you, challenge you, and take their businesses as seriously as you take yours.
Those connections help you take dramatic steps forward in your business–starting with the way you spend your time and the action you take right now.
They help you get creative about how you’ll achieve your goals and see new possibilities all around you.
The decisions I make and actions I take today are based on the vision that I can now see myself living, and that vision was inspired by the possibility I’ve glimpsed in the lives of people I know.
It’s such a relief to make big decisions with ease and take action that supports those decisions.
And, it’s all thanks to the ambitious and open business owners I’m connected to on a daily basis. They’ve helped me dream bigger dreams and take different action.
On Monday, I’m going to share with you how a completely different kind of connection–with people who have businesses wholly different than my own–helped to dramatically transform my vision for my business.
Plus, you’ll get a sneak peek of what we’ve created for you to solve this problem.
Art of Growth, Show Notes
The more you learn about copywriting (or sales and marketing in general) the more you realize that half of your job is using other people’s ideas.
Now, don’t get me wrong: I am not advocating for copying other people’s work.
Is that clear?
Okay… what I mean is that…
Business is always a process of identifying what works and creating from that knowledge.
Copywriters do this by paying attention to what really grabs their attention, turning that into a formula, and then creating completely original content on top of that formula.
Now, copywriting is a particular passion of mine. I love learning about how it works and I love the way it trains me to think differently.
And when I think copywriting, I think Joanna Wiebe from Copy Hackers.
I had the chance to talk to Joanna about her approach to marketing a brand new project that Copy Hackers has been working on, Airstory.
When I asked her how she was approaching the marketing for Airstory–which Joanna describes as what would happen if Google Docs & Evernote had a baby and let Trello raise it–she said she was really inspired by a marketing campaign that Blue Bottle Coffee had come up with.
They decided they wanted to use the idea too.
Blue Bottle had created a beautiful video “course” on Skillshare that explained the process of brewing exceptional coffee from start to finish. As Joanna told me, the result of watching it was that you couldn’t think about coffee the same way again.
In order for her to use the idea…
Joanna needed to reverse engineer it.
Her goal is to get people to rethink the way they’ve always done a frequent task: content marketing specifically and writing generally.
After all, that’s what Blue Bottle did. It’s not really about the videos, it’s not really about putting it on Skillshare. The really important part is to understand the mechanism that made that campaign go viral: rethinking the way you do a daily task.
Further, Joanna told me, the real idea is teaching people to be a better consumer of your product so that they’ll only want to choose your product in the future. It’ll be the only one that now meets their standards.
Once she knew that, she could approach marketing Airstory with the “how and what” of the Blue Bottle campaign but with her core goal being to create better writers instead of better coffee brewers.
The videos and distribution channel for the marketing campaign became what I call the “building blocks” of her marketing. But her own product, brand, and customer perspective become what the building blocks are made out of.
You can do the same thing with any successful marketing or sales assets.
What’s more: you should.
I teach our Quiet Power Strategy clients to start looking at every sales page that catches their eye or every email that moves them to click as an opportunity to create a template.
That template is inevitably made up of building blocks that you can use if you only sub in what’s particular to your product, brand, and customer perspective.
Take this blog post, for instance!
- The first building block (at the beginning) is a shocking or counterintuitive statement that seems to go against cultural norms.
- The second building block (the bulk of the email) is an explanation of this idea referencing a conversation, in this case, one I had with a successful business owner.
- The third building block (what you’re reading right now) is a call to action around how to apply this to work for you.
- The fourth building block (it’s coming, read on!) is a final call to action to check out the whole conversation.
So what are you waiting for?
Listen to Joanna explain this whole process–plus how she interviews prospects to come up with product ideas and how she’s built out two teams to support both the training side of the business and the software side of the business.
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Big Thinking
Wanna make a bet?
I bet you’ve held off on a project because you didn’t know how to make it happen.
You had a great idea, something that would really make a splash, really get your brand out there.
You could see the finished product (idea, book, offer, etc…) in all its glory.
And then…
You realized you had no idea how to make it happen.
- How would you shoot the videos?
- How would you get the new website up?
- How would you edit the files?
- How would you market the opportunity?
I’ll admit it: I feel pretty safe making this bet because I’ve been there, done that.
If I look back on the last 8 years, are there probably at least 15 times I could have changed the course of my business if I’d only been willing to step back and let someone else figure out the details.
This week on Profit. Power. Pursuit., I talked to Jenny Dopazo about a project like this, her web series The Fabricant Way.
She actually told me, “The one thing that was certain was that I wasn’t going to put myself in a position where I needed to learn how to do this. Me becoming a film person was not part of the vision.“
Learning Is Your Job But It’s Not Your Only Job
As a small business owner, you’re constantly putting yourself in the position of having to learn how to do new things.
It’s not necessarily a bad thing–learning is part of entrepreneurship (and it’s one of the reasons I love it so much!).
But it can become the default setting: new idea equals something new to learn.
And when you’re overwhelmed, overloaded, and overscheduled, it means that the things that could really change the course of your business–like Jenny’s video series–often get left behind.
Jenny said that once she realized that becoming a “film person” wasn’t part of her vision for the project, she was able to get clear on what seat at the table she really wanted to be in.
Then, she could identify all the other “seats” she needed and find the right people to fill those roles.
Now, I understand that that in & of itself might sound intimidating. Maybe you’re not in a position to make that kind of investment or maybe you’re not connected to the right people.
But once you know how you want to position yourself in a project, you can start to get creative about making it happen: maybe you can trade services, maybe you can ask for introductions, maybe you can set up a revenue share, etc…
Don’t table a project just because YOU don’t know how to make it happen.
Get clear on your vision and your role in that vision–and then get creative about the rest.
Listen to this week’s episode & subscribe:
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Interviews, Show Notes
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The Nitty Gritty:
- How Jenny realized her business was running on “autopilot” (not in a good way) and decided to do something that would surround her with the people who inspire her
- Why you need to get clear on what seat you want to sit in–and then determine what other chairs you need to fill in around you to make that happen
- How Jenny used her focus on community to build the vision for the series–and how that’s helped her tie the video series back to her agency and bring in clients
Where do many small businesses drop the ball? They make something good, but never achieve greatness because they fail to be intentional about every aspect of a project.
But Jennifer Dopazo, owner and creative mastermind behind design and digital strategy firm Candelita, and my guest on this week’s episode of Profit. Power. Pursuit., isn’t like most business owners.
Every day her inbox filled up with projects that she completed on autopilot with no real excitement. She dabbled in all the tactics that the books and gurus said she should to build her business—blogs, social media, and more—but these efforts didn’t feel authentic or aligned with her company’s mission or vision. Although she got clients from these with efforts, they were clients that weren’t a good fit. Something was missing.
That’s when I realized that it was not only about the type of work, or industry or market or you name it, but it also had to do with the person behind the project and how I could connect with them.
— Jennifer Dopazo
At this point, her client list included mostly big brands and corporations. Although corporations and independent business owners share many of the same struggles, Jennifer was intrigued by small business owners and their freedom to chart their own course without board approval and multiple meetings to get stakeholder buy-in.
I’m more compelled to work with people who want to build a business because they want a better life for their family.
— Jennifer Dopazo
She decided to step out of her creative comfort zone to find the connection she craved and to create something that would support the independent business owner. The idea for a video series started to form. She researched, developed a strategy, and reached out to other professionals who could make her vision come true. The result: The video web series The Fabricant Way.
Not only does The Fabricant Way support the independent business owner and highlights them in their natural settings, this project allowed Jennifer to reconnect with her community and satisfied a creative itch that wasn’t being met.
With the End Goal in Mind: “It’s not about me. It’s about them.”
Jennifer was very intentional about the role she wanted to play in the video series.
The one thing that was certain was that I wasn’t going to put myself in a position where I needed to learn how to do this. Me becoming a film person was not part of the vision.
I decided to look around to find someone whose superpower was video.
— Jennifer Dopazo
She considered the needs of all stakeholders in the series. It started with her, but quickly she considered the needs of the entrepreneurs she interviewed, what the viewer would prefer, and how to offer different ways to use and consume the content she created. Her vision was focused.
Her focus reminded me of something Brian P. Moran said in his book, the 12 Week Year—vision is how you decide that what you want is a given and is in no way “fluffy.” There was no fluff about Jennifer’s end goal either: She had a very clear vision of what she wanted the web series to be. To achieve her vision, she got the “right people in the right seats to make it the best” it could be.
Take a listen to the full podcast where Jennifer and I explore her journey, how her thought process evolved, the similarities between independent business owners and the much larger corporate clients she’s worked for, how this new creative outlet supports her design business, and her continued commitment to her community.
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