Hey, it's David, welcome back to A Changed Mind, a sanctuary for your human spirit, a place where I will remind you each and every episode of the certainty of the goodness of the future. I'm your friend, your host, your guide, and I'm really excited about this episode because I'm gonna be sharing with you the really simple framework that allowed my wife and I to go from zero to $30 million in revenue over the course of the last seven and a half to eight years doing something we really, really love. And what I'm gonna be sharing with you is not what's commonly taught in the marketplace. If you're an entrepreneur, you're probably aware that the market is selling us a lot of magic pill strategies, right? Just the perfect strategy will help us grow our business. And that's not actually what we discovered in terms of how it works. It was a very different experience for us. And as we look backwards, we can now see that there are true philosophical principles at work here that allowed us to generate a lot of income, generate a lot of impact, and actually do what we love doing. And this is going to be super relevant for you no matter what stage of growth that you're at right now. You could be doing tens of millions of dollars in revenue, but not having the emotional experience that you'd like of your business, experiencing more churn with your employees, feeling like there's more that falls on your shoulders, or if you wanna do it right, you have to do it yourself. So that's a challenge at the scale stage of business. Or maybe you're just getting started. Maybe you're at the early stages and you're like, gosh, I don't even really know how to communicate what I do powerfully to other people. And I don't even really know if I'm the one meant to do this work. And will anybody really want to enroll in my programs? Or you could be everywhere in between. And we've certainly been through that experience. And I'm gonna share with you the two really core things that we needed in order to be successful. And the good news is, is that once you have these two things dialed in, then you can be successful at whatever it is that you're doing. It just requires consistent action and patience. And over a period of time, you will produce results. The other thing is that if you don't have these two things in place, it can be a very confusing experience. And that's how it started with Carol and I. I knew that I wanted to share personal growth with two entrepreneurs. That's how we started this business. And I wasn't quite sure how to do that, whether we wanted to do it through seminars or through digital courses or books or podcasts and social media. And so Carol and I started taking a lot of training courses. We invested a lot in ourselves, hundreds of thousands of dollars in the first few years of our business, in courses, in intensives, in events, in workshops with coaches. And I remember the first course that we took, that teacher, who's a very well-known teacher in the personal development and business development space, said, hey, it's really simple. All you need to do is learn how to run Facebook ads. You need to create a four-part video series that teaches a little bit of your framework, whatever it is that you teach. And at the end of that four-part video series, you make an offer for a digital course. And so that's exactly what we did. I went and learned how to run Facebook ads. My wife learned how to manage CRMs and email software platforms. We had to figure out how to do all the camera work and the video from home. And we actually implemented it. I built a list of 6,000 people on an email list that I had invested around $15,000 to build. And we put all of those people through this four-part video series. And I learned how to write, copy, created these email campaigns to support the video series. And nobody actually bought the digital course. It was totally heartbreak. And this was back in 2015. And so we didn't give up. We saw another opportunity. I can't remember what it was. It might've been an ad that came through my Facebook newsfeed where there was another expert who said, hey, if you're running these email marketing campaigns and Facebook ads, and you're trying to sell a digital course but it's not working, the problem is that you don't have a smart enough system. See, your email system has to know whether someone's viewed a video or not, or whether they made it all the way through till the end. And depending on where they were in their engagement with your content, you would send them different messages. And so they called it dynamic marketing automation. And so there was an opportunity for Carol and I to go spend two days with this teacher and a room full of other people who were also trying to grow their businesses and make a greater impact in the world. We spent $15,000. We went home, we implemented this dynamic marketing automation sequence, and we sold a couple of digital course, but not much improved. And so what we ended up doing, at least it felt like, we were going round and round and round on what I call the entrepreneur's carousel, looking for this perfect strategy that would allow us to actually grow our businesses. So that number one, we could provide for ourselves, because Carol and I were investing a lot of money in our growth and in our business, but not getting a lot in return. But also, and I think even more importantly, to be able to feel like we were doing what we were meant to do in the world. And Carol and I had a conversation at a sushi restaurant one night, where we were both just so upset and so depressed because we had been working so hard. Like, a thing that I'm very proud of in terms of how Carol and I operate is that we actually implement, you know? Oftentimes, you learn things, and then you procrastinate or you self-sabotage, and you don't actually take the action that you know you need to be taking in order to grow your business. Well, we actually did, and it still didn't produce the result. And so we were feeling hopeless, and at one point, Carol said, "'Gosh, how could it be so hard "'to just wanna go out and help other people "'and to be able to make a little bit of money for ourselves "'so that that can be our life, "'so that we can have some sort of financial stability, "'maybe even someday have financial freedom?' And so what we learned through that experience was that fundamentally, the marketplace is confusing because a lot of the marketing messaging is trying to convince entrepreneurs that you're really one strategy away. I mean, there are even some slogans of people who say, like, you're one funnel away. All you need to do is create an online marketing funnel, and then you, too, right, could have the life that the teacher has, whoever you're learning from. And what we found is that that's not actually true at all. So I'm gonna walk you through what we've understood in terms of the strategy side or the marketing and sales side of business, but I'm also gonna interweave that with a second component that is absolutely essential. In fact, it is the root cause of whether or not you choose the right strategies, whether or not you choose the right people to learn from. It is the root cause of whether or not you attract, for example, promotional partners. It's the root cause of whether or not you actually implement the things that you learn and whether you implement them well and produce the result. And without this root cause, none of the sales and marketing strategies could actually work. And this was the big aha for us as we were growing our business. And it's this two-piece framework, the sales and marketing strategies and the root cause are what have allowed us to really scale and grow at an accelerated rate, you know, $30 million over the last seven and a half years from what was once just an idea. And what I'm gonna be sharing with you is gonna be relevant to you no matter what type of business owner you are, or again, if you're just wanting to start a business, and it's gonna be appropriate no matter what stage of growth that you're at. And I'd say 70% of it will be for any business owner, but 100% of it will be for those of you who are coaches, consultants, or some type of service provider. You help people with their relationships, with their wealth, with their mindset, with their emotional healing, with their business. You know, maybe you're doing some form of lead generation or you're a marketing agency or you're a leadership consultant or a branding coach. 100% of what I'm gonna be sharing with you is gonna be relevant and it's gonna help you, most importantly, eliminate about 90% of the things that you're potentially focused on right now in your business and hone in on only those things that you need to be focused on in order to get to the next level of growth. Does that sound good? So I will share with you that back in 2014, 2015, 2016, we tried a lot of different things, not only the Facebook ads and the webinars and the video series and the marketing automation and email list building campaigns, but we tried social media, we tried YouTube videos. In fact, if you look on my YouTube channel, if that's where you're watching this right now or if you're on one of the podcast platforms, you jump over to my YouTube channel later, you'll see videos from seven years ago. That was part of us trying to implement a strategy where a guru in the marketplace said, hey, all you need to do is build a YouTube follow, right? And then you'll be rich and you'll be able to make an impact. That's not to say that you can't build a YouTube following, but it takes a while, right? It's not an immediately impactful strategy, it's a longer term strategy, so it's not particularly good for you if you need to generate revenue in your business anytime soon. We also started a podcast back in 2015. You can no longer find those episodes because this podcast has now replaced it. I started writing a book back in 2015 because someone said, hey, you know, your book is your calling card. You know, if you have a book, you can build a multimillion dollar business off of a book. None of those things were true for us. And that's just for us. It might be different for some people, but I think a lot of the people that get highlighted as success stories with these individual strategies for growing their business are unicorns. And oftentimes you don't really know the backstory. So there is a philosophy that is highly intelligent, highly appropriate that I'm gonna share with you that's gonna help you understand this journey of entrepreneurship and getting out of whatever stuck point you're in right now, whether it's just trying to get your business off the ground, or whether you've created this massive business, but now you feel like your business is actually suffocating. Or maybe it's not even suffocating you, but you're just experiencing a lot more stress, anxiety, and overwhelm, and you'd rather be owning your business than in the weeds of your business. Everything I'm gonna be sharing with you is gonna help you really understand where you're at and what you need to focus on in order to move forward. So when we got started, we were at revenue zero. So we had no revenue in our business, and we implemented a lot of different strategies. None of them worked, even though we implemented them. And I think we implemented them well. And at one point, what I realized was that the key to getting to our first six figures in revenue, or we actually break down this entire stage of growth, which we call start, the start stage of growth, from zero to $250,000 in revenue, the key to that actually had nothing to do with strategy. So bear with me, I'm gonna explain this to you. At the earlier stages of growth in our business, we lacked clarity. We were not clear on who we serve, and we wanted to serve a lot of different people. And so even though we had taken programs and invested in coaching that said, hey, you have to really narrow down into a niche, into an avatar, into a very specific ideal client, we were hesitant to do that. We thought, well, gosh, we'll be leaving so much opportunity on the table, and so many people will go without our help. And so what we found was really, really important was to get a specific ideal client. Now, if you've already got a more advanced business, you're doing tens of millions of dollars a year, you already know this. But at the earlier stages, you don't know this. You have to really dial in a specific person or a specific type of business that you're serving. That's number one. Number two, you have to have really differentiated and unique messaging that is authentic to who you are, that's authentic to the way that you actually provide the solution to the marketplace, and that doesn't sound like everybody else. The good news is, is that messaging and that market positioning does exist. It is inside of you, because you're absolutely unique in the way that you deliver your product or your solution, in who you are. You think about it, there's like, what, seven billion people on the planet right now. Each of us are unique. We all have our own individual fingerprint. Well, you have your own individual way of serving the market, and it's essential to get clarity around how to communicate that powerfully to the marketplace, right? Who you serve, and then to be able to communicate to them in a differentiated, unique, and authentic way how you serve them. The third thing is to have, at least initially, a one-off, and that offer has to be built and designed in a way that you can effectively deliver it, that produces really extraordinary outcomes for your clients so that they become raving fans, and that is actually delivered in a way that that specific avatar or client who you are communicating to and enrolling into your programs, that they wanna be able to receive it. So an offer, offer structure, understanding offer theory is really, really important, right? And the fourth one is having persuasion and enrollment skills. You don't have to be a sales expert, and by the way, sales doesn't have to be sleazy, but you have to have some skills in order to actually help the person that you're talking to when you've finally engaged with the ideal client or the right person, and you've communicated how you're able to support them in a differentiated and powerful way, and you know what your solution is, what your offer looks like so you can speak to them about it, you have to be able to help them through their objections. See, we all have resistance to change, change in our relationships, change in our business, change in our wealth, change in our health, so your mind has actually become acclimated to the current status of your life, and so your clients are gonna have objections that are gonna be somewhat unconscious because in many ways, their unconscious mind wants to keep them exactly where they are. Sometimes they're financial objections, time objections, objections of whether or not this will actually work for them, and so you have to have some, what I would call persuasion or enrollment or sales skills, not to be sleazy and sell people into your programs, but in order to help people overcome the inner objections they have to the solution that you have for them. Now, these are four pieces, right? Ideal client, messaging, offer, and enrollment skills. I call them the core four, and having clarity around these core four is essential because it activates the one thing that you need in order to start enrolling clients almost no matter where you are, whether you're at an event, whether you're at a business networking opportunity, whether you're standing at the line at Starbucks. These, having clarity on your core four gives you this thing called confidence. You're now confident. You're confident in who you serve. You're confident that you are the one to serve them and how to powerfully communicate it. You're confident in the direction that you're taking them in terms of the solution or the offer, and you're confident that if somebody engages you with a level of interest, you have enough skills to be able to have a conversation with them and enroll them into your solution, and when you're confident, you activate something inside of you that's magnetic. You start showing up more powerfully in your day-to-day activities. You start having ideas that can put you in front of your prospects. You start to tune in to different ideas. You have new thoughts. You have new perceptions. You start to become motivated to enroll clients into your business, and think about it for a moment. Just practically speaking, if you don't know who you serve and you don't know how to powerfully communicate what you do and you have doubts around your offer or your offer structure, whether it can even help people or how you would deliver it, and you have fears around having an enrollment conversation, do you think you're gonna have thoughts and ideas and be motivated and inspired to take action that are gonna put you in a potential interaction with a prospect? Of course you won't, right? There's a tremendous amount of fear as a result of the lack of clarity that's occurring, and so this is one of the mechanisms around self-sabotage and why early-stage business owners have such a hard time really getting going with their business is because they lack clarity around these foundational pieces, and so there's this absence of this catalyst called confidence. Now, this is very different than what the marketplace is trying to propose, right? Write a book and get some clients, launch a podcast, get some clients, build a funnel, get some clients. What I'm saying is be confident and you'll get clients. How do you activate confidence? Through clarity, clarity around what? The foundations of your business. So if you'll see, we're not in strategies at all yet. We're just talking about you being solid within yourself and within the initial framework of your business to be able to show up powerfully when you interact with potential prospect, and so this may sound a little bit woo-woo, but it's really not. It's at the core of behavioral psychology. When you have confidence, you start to have thoughts and ideas. Oh, maybe I should go to this place. Maybe I should attend this event. Maybe I should join this group. Conscious ideas, but you also have unconscious ideas. You just have an idea to actually go to a particular restaurant on a Tuesday night and you end up striking up a conversation with someone who either ends up becoming a client or knows someone who ends up becoming a client. When you have confidence, you enroll your conscious and your unconscious mind in connecting you to the people who need what it is that you have. My first $250,000 that I generated wasn't based on a single strategy, despite the fact that I had tried so many strategies unsuccessfully. Carol and I had invested at one point in time in a really high-level Tony Robbins program. I've shared this story in other episodes.I've shared this story in other episodes, in particular in the episode that Carol and I did together, which was episode four, where we basically transferred our bank account to the Robbins Research Institute. We were at a Tony Robbins event. Carol and I had just decided that we were not gonna invest in any more programs, and then Tony Robbins makes an offer for this program where he doesn't even name the price point. And he talks about being able to surround yourself with other people who are operating at an elevated level, having people who will help pull you forward so you're not always feeling like you're pulling other people forward. And Carol and I had this conversation after this sushi restaurant intervention where we felt like giving up, and Carol said, God, how could it be so hard to help people? A few days later, Carol said, we really need to surround ourselves with other people. I'm tired of just being the one pulling all of my friends forward. So here Tony Robbins is on stage saying, hey, if that's what you want, I've got a program for you. And it ends up being a over $100,000 program for Carol and I to participate in. So we enroll in this program, and we have a really wonderful year. We learned some things about business with Tony Robbins. We learned a lot around personal growth. Did the things that we learned directly translate into the strategies that we implemented in our business? No, not really, but it was a great experience. And the most important part was that we met a lot of really other amazing people who were investing in themselves, which is why being a part of a community of people who are investing in themselves is so important. And what ended up happening as we were a part of this community was that from time to time, we'd have dinners when we were at events together. And I'll never forget the first time we were at a dinner with a bunch of other people in this program, and one of the other people in this program had their friend there. His name was Ruben. And so Ruben said, hey, David, what do you do? And I had started getting clarity around my core four. And so I had a level of confidence. And I was like, oh, I work with entrepreneurs. I help them with business strategies. I help them with their mindset and help them achieve the next level of success, both in their business, their bank account, and their life. And he said, well, what makes you different than Tony? And so I began to articulate it around what I believe. What I believe is that real transformation isn't motivation or inspiration. It's a fundamental rewiring of your brain. What I believe is that the game isn't about hustling or grinding or figuring out the perfect plan. It's about having a vision and then identifying the resistance you have to that vision through a resistance inventory or a resistance audit, and then having the tools to remove the resistance. And when you remove the resistance, you start to elevate the performance of your business and the performance of you and your life. You start to discover the strategies or the strategies that you were working on before you start to work. Anyway, I went on this whole riff with him around my messaging. And he said, oh, that's really interesting. And he started asking more questions and he started asking questions about my tools. And up until this point in time, I had only coached one person. A friend of mine had a kid, a 19-year-old kid with social anxiety. And he said, hey, would you coach my son? So for $125 an hour, I was coaching his 19-year-old son. So I'm at this event, right? I've only got one client. And I had already decided that I was gonna start charging $5,000 a month for my coaching, a huge leap from $125 an hour. I would meet with someone once a week. I knew what my offer structure looked like. I'd charge $5,000 a month to work with someone on a six-month minimum. So I have this conversation with Ruben, explaining to him what it is that I do in a differentiated way, and who I serve in a very specific way. And it turned out he was exactly that type of person. And he heard my message as something different. I knew what offer I was going to enroll him into, which was just my one-on-one coaching. And I knew how to have a basic enrollment conversation. So we spoke for about an hour that night. The next morning, I'm waiting in line to get into the Tony Robbins event, and Ruben comes running down the hall. He says, Dave, Dave, hey, you got a minute? He said, hey, I couldn't stop thinking about our conversation last night and how much I need what it is that you do. And he said, how much would it be to actually work with you? And now I was prepared to have the conversation. There was no hesitation, right? I still had some personal insecurities. Oh my God, can I charge $5,000 a month for someone to just do a coaching call once a week with me? But I said to him, well, Ruben, I said, I usually work with people over the course of a year, but if you'd like to get started, you can make a six-month commitment for us to coach together, and it's $5,000 a month. He said, great, send me the contract. Can I have my first session on Friday? And he walked away and I was like, oh my God, I just generated $30,000 from one person. And so having the clarity around my core four gave me the confidence. I was investing in myself and putting myself in situations and environments where I could meet my ideal client, right? High-performing entrepreneurs that needed work on their mindset, but also needed some support on their business growth and their business strategies. And I enrolled my first client. And during that one year in that community, I enrolled six more clients. I generated $180,000, actually more than that. I believe it was close to $250,000 because I kept increasing my prices. Some people would actually commit to one year. At one point, I made it mandatory to commit to work for a year with me. I also started doing this thing, which was like a VIP day. It was eight hours at my house where I would do an intensive with someone for $25,000. And it changed my life. No strategy other than knowing how to powerfully communicate what I did and having the confidence around who I served, what my offer was, and basic enrollment skills. So I became a walking weapon of enrollment. And that's what's required at the first stage of growth. Zero to $250,000, we call that the start stage of growth. There are three stages of growth. I'm about to get into the next two with you. But that is the start stage of growth. There is no magic pill strategy. In fact, the reason why none of the strategies actually work is because you don't yet have your core four dialed in and you haven't road tested it. See, part of the beauty of the start stage is going out and having conversations with people. It's not building funnels. It's not hiding behind your computer. It's not building a social media audience. It's going out and interacting with people in life. We've had so many different people in our coaching programs create massive success at the start stage just by getting clarity on their core four and then being in environments where their ideal client is. So for example, we have health and wellness practitioners who work with people who are health and wellness conscious. They enroll people directly from their yoga studio. They're having a conversation with someone after yoga class. Someone says, hey, what do you do? They're able to powerfully communicate what they do. That person says, wow, I think I need what you have. They know where they're taking them in terms of their offer or solution, and they know to have a basic enrollment conversation. We have people who actually go into corporations who do corporate leadership, and they'll deliver, and I'm gonna get into the strategy in a second, but they'll deliver a brief presentation as part of ongoing corporate learning or corporate training, and they'll enroll people within corporations into their leadership development programs. I've enrolled clients into my coaching programs, as I mentioned before, just being in the line at Starbucks, striking up a conversation with someone who turned out to be an entrepreneur. We end up having a follow-up conversation. They enroll in one of our programs. So there is no strategy for the early stages, which is why so many early-stage entrepreneurs struggle, because the marketplace is selling us strategies. The strategy for the start stage is called confidence. Confidence is achieved through clarity. Clarity of what? Clarity of your core four. Now, I'm gonna talk to you about the other two stages of growth and what we found to be effective in terms of sales and marketing strategies at those stages, but this is where I also wanna share with you the root cause. Remember I said there are two things necessary to create success in your business? One is understanding what to be focused on at each stage of growth, and we've identified three stages of growth, and the reason why most entrepreneurs are not successful at moving through these stages is because they believe that all strategies are relevant for all stages, and it's not true. 90% of what you're being sold in the marketplace is not relevant for your stage of growth. Understanding what strategies are appropriate or work the best for your stage of growth is critical to get through that stage, and again, at the start stage, it's not even really a strategy at all. It's confidence, right? But the other important thing, the root cause of being successful at each stage of growth, and right now we're talking about the start stage, is your mindset. Now, the problem with mindset and saying, hey, your mindset is essential is most people go, yeah, yeah, yeah, I got it, mindset, and mindset's not a yeah, yeah, yeah, I got it kind of thing, and mindset is not something that is predominantly focused on in any of the coaching programs out in there in the market, right? People are like, oh, let's define what your why is, or your BHAG, your big, hairy, audacious goal, or you do morning incantations or affirmations, not that those can't be useful tools at a particular stage of your personal development journey, or you just hustle and grind and you motivate your way through, right? All of those are sort of like what mindset is in the entrepreneurial world. That's not what mindset is at all. In fact, a lot of times, the current mindset messaging makes the rest of us feel like shit over our personal growth. It's like, I don't wanna wake up at 5 a.m. I don't wanna hustle and grind. I don't wanna outwork my competition. That doesn't sound fun for me at all. There's a whole flavor of personal growth right now that's being propagated by former Navy SEALs or military people, and it's all about working harder, hustling, and grinding. And I understand where that message comes from, especially if you've been indoctrinated into harsh environments as part of what your life experience has been. But what we've found is there's a more elegant way. There's a more intelligent way. There's a more effective way to actually align your actions and your emotions and your thoughts with the outcomes that you wanna create in your business, and that's by doubling and tripling down on this thing called personal growth. I would call it human evolution or personal evolution because what it's really about is it's about identifying the limiting beliefs that you have that are represented by patterns of thinking and emotions in your nervous system and in your brain and having the tools to actually rewire your brain and to increase your emotional resiliency and your self-awareness and your emotional capacity. So that is actually the root cause of your ability to be successful at every stage of growth. If you look at the start stage, for example, if you believe that your message is not worth hearing, then you're gonna have a pretty hard time coming up and getting clarity with really good differentiated messaging. You know, if you believe that what you offer isn't worth it or you believe that it may not help people, you're gonna have a hard time coming up with a killer offer. So there are so many limiting beliefs that impact how we are executing in our business, even how we're doing the core four. So in our coaching programs, for example, there's a tremendous amount of emphasis on mindset at every stage of growth, but at the start stage of growth from zero to $250,000, it's really about identifying all of these feelings of self-doubt, low self-esteem, not mattering, not being worth it, comparing ourselves to other people and identifying that resistance and transforming it, right? Using the tools that I've talked about over so many episodes on this podcast. But you have to transform the resistance if you wanna be successful at implementing the strategies at any stage of growth. So this start stage strategy of the core four, right, in building confidence, in order for you to actually be able to do that successfully, you have to remove the resistance that you have to yourself, to enrolling clients, to money, to time, and to the process of entrepreneurship. You know, what you believe determines what you think on a moment by moment basis. And what you think determines how you feel and what you feel determines what action you take and then the actions determine the results. And so if you have a belief that you're not worthy or that you don't matter or that the message you have or the skills that you have, right, aren't that good or that nobody will value them, then you're gonna have thoughts around things not working out for you. This person's not gonna wanna enroll in my program or work with me anyway. Then even before you have a conversation with someone, while you're still sitting at home, before you even have ideas around different environments that you could go out into to connect into life and potentially enroll people, you're gonna be feeling rejection. And if you're feeling rejection already before you've even done anything, you're not gonna go do those things. Instead, you'll take some other action, which is procrastination, self-sabotage, or you'll try to brute force yourself into executing on some strategy and then it's not gonna work. And the mistake we make is thinking the strategy didn't work because the strategy is bad. No, the strategy didn't work because the emotions that you brought to the strategy were low-level emotions as a result of low-quality thoughts and limiting beliefs. So it's very important. If you wanna be successful in entrepreneurship, that you not only put an equal weight on the sales and marketing strategies and your mindset, but that you actually get that your ability to execute effectively on the sales and marketing strategies is determined by what you think. You really are creating your own reality. And so any experiences that you're having in your business right now that feel like roadblocks or that feel like friction or that feel like resistance, or if things aren't working out for you and you're becoming frustrated, that's actually a call to look inside of you and to see what it is that you believe about this experience you're having in your business and to work through transforming those beliefs. So you cannot be successful, even if you take everything that I'm talking about in this podcast episode, you're like, okay, I got it. Start stage, core four, clarity, confidence, invest myself into environments where my ideal prospect or my client is, and then be available for having powerful enrollment conversations. You're not gonna be successful at that if you're dealing with a bunch of childhood traumas, limiting beliefs, and limiting stories. That's gonna affect the way that you implement on the strategic side, and that just makes sense. But again, because I think we treat mindset as like a yeah, yeah, I'll read a personal development book and I'll be fine, or I'll listen to some motivational podcasts or videos, and that's what I call doing mindset work, right? Or I've done some mindset work, so now I'm done doing mindset work. Because we treat mindset that way, we end up getting stuck in our businesses. And at each stage of growth, not only do the strategies change or the business approach, but also there's a higher level mindset requirement. So let's look at the next stage of growth, right? What we would call the growth stage. Let's call it $250,000 to a million dollars a year in your business. Well, just practically speaking, some adjustments need to be made. You know, when I got to about $250,000 a year in my business I think it was coaching six to 10 people, that started to take up quite a bit of time, right? I mean, that was an hour to 90 minutes every single week, plus I needed to be out there engaging with life, having powerful enrollment conversations to continue to enroll clients in my business, plus Carol and I were starting to build the infrastructure around creating an email list and kind of building the future of our business, some marketing automation sequences. I created a digital course, like there was other work to do. My week started getting filled up pretty quickly. And so there's a need at the growth stage, the way you kind of transition from quarter of a million dollar cap to a million dollars a year in your business is to transition from one to one to one to many. Now this is actually one part of the two part sales and marketing strategy for the growth stage. Notice I didn't say podcast, notice I didn't say funnels, notice I didn't say webinars, right? The strategy is to transition from one to one to one to many. So what does that mean? Well, you're generating money now, you're generating anywhere from over $100,000 to quarter of a million dollars a year in business. And so you can start to invest into some key hires. And so some of those key hires might look like, for example, a salesperson, so you're no longer doing the enrollment conversation. If you're delivering services, it might be some fulfillment support. So for example, for me, it was actually bringing on one coach, so I didn't have to do all the coaching. And I, as I mentioned before, created a digital course for people that I would meet that maybe didn't wanna immediately invest in one-on-one coaching with me or coaching with my coach, they could consume the digital course. So this was a way that I could actually do one to many in terms of the fulfillment of my product, right? You could coach with my coach, you could take the digital course, and I started running a group coaching program. That was the real game changer for me that allowed me to scale to a million dollars a year in revenue. Because if I met people who wanted access to me, but didn't wanna pay a premium price, they could do my group coaching program. My group coaching program was 12 weeks for $3,500, right? Not much less than what I was charging at the time for my one-on-one, six months at $5,000 a month, right? 12 weeks at $3,500. And then what I did was I increased my pricing to work with me directly. So if you wanted to work with me now, it was 10K a month, right? So I lost a few private clients, but I was making a lot more with the private clients I was working with. And then I was able to really maximize my time by launching a one-to-many program, right? Which for me was group coaching. Some people do like a two-day intensive or a workshop where you can get a bunch of people in a room and serve them all at the same time. And so you're working with more people at a lower price point, but net-net, you're generating a lot more income, right? I think in my first year, I had 12 people over the course of the year on my group coaching program. And so that was $3,500 a month for 90 days. That was 10K. So it was another $120,000 in revenue, but really effective for my time, one group coaching call a week. And then many of those people, when they finished the 90 days, would either continue into a 12-month group coaching program or they would move into my private coaching with me, right, at 10K a month. So one-to-many.One-to-many in terms of the fulfillment and how you deliver your product is essential if you want to go from 250,000 to a million. One-to-many is also the key on the marketing side. So remember, at the start stage, you're just out there having conversations with folks, enjoying your life, investing in yourself, investing in your growth, putting yourself in environments where your ideal prospect is. But if you really want to scale your marketing, you can't be having one-on-one conversations all the time. You have to go to one-to-many conversation. And the best one-to-many tool that we found is presentation. So a presentation, that presentation could be a webinar that a bunch of people could attend at the same time. That presentation could be a 45-minute live stream in a Facebook group that a bunch of people can participate at the same time. That presentation could be like I did a couple of weeks ago. I was invited to Austin, Texas to do a talk from stage to 150, seven, eight, and nine-figure entrepreneurs sharing with them exactly what I'm sharing with you here, right, through a presentation. And the presentation starts to weave in all of the things that you really got good at at the start stage. You speak to a very specific audience, in my case, high-performing entrepreneurs. You share a little bit about your story. You share some social proof, now that you've worked with some people, of people who've been able to produce results. You share what makes you different and a little bit about what you believe and the way that you deliver your products and programs. Maybe you teach three things over the course of a presentation. And at the end of the presentation, you direct people to some sort of call to action. That might be having an enrollment conversation with you. It might be purchasing your product online. It might be having an enrollment conversation with someone from your team. But this was a game changer for me. The first time I did a presentation, I was invited to speak to a business networking group. It was called Vistage up in Atlanta. And I had a buddy of mine who had gotten exposed to my work, really liked it, wanted to support me. And he said, hey, I've got approval from my Vistage chair for you to come up and speak to our group. There were 15 entrepreneurs. I went up, I did a 45-minute presentation. And at the end of that presentation, I directed people that if they really wanted to go deeper and get my help and actually achieving everything that I had talked about was possible during the presentation in terms of their business growth and growth in their mindset to come and have a conversation with me after the talk. Well, five people ended up coming up and saying, hey, I'd love to explore with you. Three of them actually enrolled into my coaching program. And at that point in time, again, it was $5,000 a month for six months. I enrolled $90,000 in business from one 45-minute talk. And so I went and did that over the course of the year half a dozen times. And that ended up adding up to almost half a million dollars in revenue for me with coaching clients. Again, some people would move into my one-on-one coaching. Some people would move into my group coaching program. Some people would buy my digital course. And then once I had a coach, some people would coach with my coach for a discounted rate. But I started delivering these one-to-many marketing messages. And then I took that presentation and I built it into a webinar. And I had other people I met along the way who were like, hey, I really like your work. And I've got a community that would really need what it is that you have. Do you do an online presentation? Well, certainly I do. I deliver a webinar. And at the end of that webinar, again, some sort of call to action, buy my $500 digital course, schedule a strategy session with myself or with one of my salespeople. And this is how we grew from 250,000 to a million dollars in revenue. Now, what also had to happen was not only going one-to-many in terms of the fulfillment of my program and in terms of my marketing, right? And presentations, by the way, let me take a step back before I move on to this next piece, which is the mindset growth that's required for the growth stage. If you really look at all of the marketing messages that you're getting bombarded with, they're presentation. It could be a 60-second presentation in a Facebook ad. It might be a 12-minute, what's called VSL or video sales letter presentation that you watch on some landing page where then you're asked to take some sort of action. It could be a 45-minute webinar. It could be a 45-minute talk from stage. If you really think about it, even a networking conversation that you have with someone, once you start to get really good, is a presentation. You're sort of presenting what you believe and presenting your story and presenting the opportunity to someone to get them to sort of change their mind and to enroll them into your belief system so that they'll want to do business with you. I've run online challenges, five-day online challenges, one hour a day, five hours over the course of the week. It's a presentation. That's what it is. You come to my annual event, The Powerful Living Experience Live. Yes, there's a lot of value there, of course, but it's a three-day presentation. Even within the three days of the presentation of my event, there's a one-hour presentation where I make an offer to enroll into my high-level coaching program. Even if you go back and you listen to some of the other podcast episodes or you just think about this podcast episode, it's a presentation. So if you can really master presentation, you've mastered all marketing channel. In fact, I'd go so far as to say all marketing is a presentation. And so that's why it's so essential if you want to make this leap that so few entrepreneurs are able to make from a couple hundred thousand dollars a year in revenue to a million plus. The number one tool that you can add your arsenal is a presentation. But again, notice I'm not talking about strategies. If you were one of my coaching clients, we'd sit down and take a look at what type of business you're in and we'd take a look at the skills that you have and we'd take a look at what your desire is and then we'd identify what strategy might be most effective. But at the core of that strategy would be a presentation. So presentations plug into everything else that you might want to do. Funnels, networking, speak to sales, keynote talks, writing a book is a presentation. Podcast, YouTube channel, growing your social media, all of it is a presentation. And that's why it's an essential tool for that second stage of growth. So again, going one to many in both your marketing and fulfillment and mastering presentation. And you have the ability to master it because you've already done the groundwork at the start stage. You've had conversations with people. There were a lot of people who didn't enroll with, but I learned something from the conversation. Oh, that didn't resonate with them or oh, they weren't really my ideal client or they would say something to me and I'd go, oh, I never really thought about them needing my mindset and business coaching for that particular thing. Wow, I love the way they articulated it. Or you'll start to see patterns. My God, so many people are bringing up the same thing. Great, that's what eventually makes its way into your high converting killer presentation, right? That you leverage to go from 250 to a million dollars from a marketing stamp. What's also required is mindset growth at the growth stage, because you're starting to hire a team. And so that's gonna bring up natural doubts, doubts about trusting people. Initially, your team is not probably gonna do things as well as you do things. And so you're gonna have to learn how to let go of control, to embody this thing that so few of us understand called surrender. You're gonna start investing the money that you are making back into your business, both into people into marketing expenses that can bring up some fear of financial insecurity. You might start to feel like there's just too many things going on and start to experience overwhelm or stress or anxiety or that there's not enough time. Well, guess what? All of those things that you're gonna experience that are gonna emerge at the growth stage, they've always been inside of you. All of those doubts, all of those fears, right? All of the doubts about yourself, fears around other people, fears around money, fears around even getting to the next level of success. Like, are you worthy of it? Or perhaps you saw your parents being able to live their lives at a particular level of financial abundance. Maybe it was $250,000 a year or something like that, but now you're starting to hit your upper limit. And so you start to experience like, I can't break through this income ceiling. Well, all of that is a mindset. And so you have to marry this mindset growth with these growth stage business strategies that I'm sharing with you. Otherwise, the strategies are not gonna work. You will self-sabotage. For whatever reason, the strategies won't work or you'll start to feel like you're burning out or you're not gonna take consistent inspired action or you're gonna produce the results but not really love the experience that you're having of your business. And the way that you transition through all that is to actually do a deeper level of mindset. Audit and inventory the resistance that comes up at the growth stage and have the tools to be able to transform that resistance. New limiting beliefs are gonna come up, new childhood traumas are gonna emerge. So you've gotta be able to work through those or they're gonna hold back your growth even if you've got the perfect sales and marketing plan for the growth stage. And again, as I mentioned before, it's not just that the mindset is important, it's the root cause of your success at every stage of growth. When you create success, that's an effect of a solid mindset or a changed mind. And it's a little bit misleading because we go, no, no, no, like having that amazing presentation and selling from stage and enrolling $250,000 in business from that one presentation, that's what has allowed me to be successful. It was the presentation, it was the stage. Yeah, but your ability to be able to develop that presentation in a way that will allow it to perform and even more sort of the coincidences and synchronicities of getting the right stage and being able to have that marketing opportunity and the right people attending, whether it's a webinar or a live event or something like that, all of that is a byproduct of how you're vibrating, your resonance, right, your frequency and your mindset. So both practically speaking how you execute and then sort of all the synchronicities and coincidences of the growth stage are dependent upon a changed mind. And then we've got the scale stage. Scale is from a million dollars beyond. And so at the scale stage, you are now really starting to build an organizational chart or a team. So there's a whole art to hiring. But just from a sales and marketing standpoint, you have to have automation. There has to be some level of predictability. This is where you do need to advertise. It's very, very difficult to get to a million dollars plus just you consistently delivering presentations in real time or any of the other marketing strategies that you may implement that prove to be successful. So you have to be able to really digitize yourself. And so that's where some of the strategies that Carol and I had tried to implement earlier on can prove to be beneficial, right? Being able to take all of the mastery that you've developed up to a million dollars a year in your business from your messaging, your story, your offer structure, your enrollment skills, your success stories, your testimonials, and to put that into some sort of automated or what's called evergreen advertising campaign, right? Because Facebook ads, as long as you put your credit card in Facebook, can run 24 seven. YouTube ads, same thing. Affiliate partners can drive you traffic all day long. And so you have to have a system that sort of exists always for the most part on the internet that can receive new eyeballs and new prospects and move them through an automated version of everything that you've been road testing at the earlier stages. And so that might be someone opting in, building your email list to watch a free 12 minute video where you're delivering a 12 minute version of your presentation and then giving them an opportunity to schedule a strategy session or purchase your product. And those things now happen with your team, right? So you have your coaches or your consultants fulfilling on most of your product for you. You have a sales team fielding most of your sales conversations. And then you're now transitioning into a new level of leadership where you're no longer operating in your business, but you're the visionary operating on your business and you have a team to support you. But a lot of entrepreneurs at the scale stage, million dollars, $10 million, $100 million plus, they don't, we don't appreciate that mindset is such an important component of being successful at that stage of growth. I would say even more so than the strategies. The strategies are there. And we have the financial resources to be able to hire the consultants or to implement those strategies. But what's actually key is that our mindset is aligned. So for example, oftentimes I work with entrepreneurs and it's such a subtle game of mindset now who feel stuck in their business. I'll tell you a quick story. I was actually, as I mentioned before, keynoting in Austin several weeks ago. And then after I did my talk, I had lunch and an entrepreneur said, wow, I really loved your talk. And I don't really think I have a mindset issue though. My problem is that my team doesn't think before they take action. And I said, oh, tell me more about that. And he said, yeah, we've been at a bottleneck at around $30 million a year. And it's frustrating because my team spends a lot of time on different activities that aren't really in alignment with producing the results that we wanna produce. And no matter how much I coach them or no matter how much I give them structure in order to keep them on track, they just get distracted. And he said, but that's a tactical issue. That's not a mindset issue. And I said, well, it actually is a mindset issue. And I heard your limiting belief already. And he said, I didn't have a limiting belief. What was it? And I said, well, you believe that your team doesn't think before they take action. And so I helped him understand that that is a limiting belief. Somewhere along the way, he probably developed this idea that if you wanna do it right, you have to do it yourself. That it's difficult to depend on other people, that other people won't do as good a job as he does. And so as a result of that, it's clouding his judgment because his team does think before they take action. Of course they do. Like if they didn't think, they would just be like inert lumps of flesh laying on the ground. Of course they think. Now they may not think according to the priorities that he would like them to be thinking. But he's now operating from a limiting belief that they don't think. And so he's experiencing that emotionally. And then he's taking action based on that emotion. So he's actually trying to create solutions based on a false premise that his team doesn't think. So every solution he comes up with ends up not working because it's based on a faulty foundation. And he said, well, wow, I really see that. So what's the solution? And I said, well, we'd have to coach through it. We'd have to see like what's next. Once you get clear that, oh my gosh, that was a limiting belief. My team does think. Then we would take a look at, well, what's your next reaction to the experience that you're having with your team? And we'd work our way through all the resistance until we got to something that was actually true or real. And then from that place, we'd start designing the strategy. And this is why so many entrepreneurs at a very high level are either frustrated with a revolving door of their teams or they believe that in order to be successful, they have to make a sacrifice or they've been listening to too many of those Navy SEAL motivational entrepreneurship videos. And so they've sacrificed their relationships. They've sacrificed their health and they're burning out even though they're having business success. I know a lot of entrepreneurs at a very high level that are making a ton of money and wanna shut their businesses down because they can't take it anymore. And so the solution there is not a different strategy. There's actually plenty of strategies there that are already available. Again, it's a changed mind. And so if you look at these threads that sort of run through from $0 in revenue, up to tens of millions, if not hundreds of millions of dollars of revenue, it's not so much about finding the perfect strategy. It's about understanding the philosophy of business and having the right mindset. Within that container, you'll discover the strategies. Maybe for you, there is a podcast in your future. Maybe for you, it is YouTube videos. Maybe for you, it's influencer marketing. Maybe for you, it's building a franchise model around your intellectual property. It's unique and different for each and every one of us. And we can go learn from people who have fantastic frameworks for each of those strategies, but we want to adopt those strategies within the proper container for business success. The proper container for business success is to understand that there are three stages of growth, start, grow, scale, that philosophically there are components that are essential at each stage. At start, it's about clarity and confidence. At growth, it's about one to many. And at scale, it's about automation and predictability. And then to make sure that the wrapper around that, really the root cause, is our continued emphasis and focus on using our business as an opportunity to identify the resistance, the frustration, the doubts, and the fears inside of us, and doing the transformational work, the deep transformational work, so that we can keep growing, so that our business can keep growing. You know, one of the things that I told a friend of mine the other day was like, he's very successful in his business, he's probably doing over $10 million a year, 10 to $20 million a year in his business, and he was sharing with me some challenges that he was having, and I said, look, you don't have a challenge in your business. When you have a challenge with your business, you have a challenge with yourself. If you resolve the challenge with yourself, you'll have the thoughts, the ideas, the right people will show up, you'll re-approach the challenge in your business differently, and you'll solve the challenge, right? But if you just try to solve the external challenge without dealing with the inner game of business first, that's how we end up going round and round and round and frustrating and expending all of our energy and either giving up on our business or just, you know, kind of wishing that we didn't have this beautiful business that we were so inspired to start in the first place. So that's your Entrepreneurship 101 for today. I hope you enjoyed it. If you did, do me a favor. If you're watching on YouTube, give me a comment below, subscribe to the channel. If you're listening on one of the podcast platforms, Apple or Spotify, definitely subscribe so that you get updates and leave me a rating or a review. That's how we get this work out to the world. And if you're watching on YouTube right now, I've got two more videos for you. You can check out this one, which is about business burnout. You're absolutely gonna love it. If you love this episode or this one around resolving your family money blocks, and if you're listening on the podcast, just scroll through and find the next episode that resonates with you and give it a listen. It's been such a pleasure being here with you today. I hope some of the things that Carol and I have learned over the last seven and a half years can benefit you, and I will see you on the next episode.