So if you're still making decisions like an employee, but you're technically the CEO of your coaching business, you're probably overworked, overwhelmed, underpaid, and completely exhausted.

So today we are going to go through the five stages of identity.

From running a business, starting from an employee, being a coach, being a leader, being an owner, and being the investor in the business, and what each stage will help you to do, but also not growing into the next stage, how that would hold you back in your business.

So what we are literally going to speak about.

I love this topic.

Is that secret thing that most business coaches are not talking about, but the thing that will have you feel like I'm freaking doing everything, but nothing thing is happening.

That's what we're going to go through today.

So I think you'll get a lot of insights today.

Absolutely.

Can I pause you?

I haven't said before we say anything.

Because today it's Luca's birthday, but we're recording this today and tomorrow it's going to be published.

So when this is published.

It was yesterday.

It was Lucas birthday, but congratulations.

And this is why.

You see, I got my jewelry on.

I feel so dressed up.

Yeah, you look super nice.

And thank you.

And thank you for acknowledging me on my birthday.

Always.

You do that in such a great way, and I appreciate you for that.

So I completely lost what I was and what I was about to say.

But we were talking about the different identities and the thing to realize, first of all is, number one, society conditions us to be a good employee, not necessarily any of the other ones.

Like, coach is a very specific choice that we all make who kind of follow this podcast and think this is interesting.

But so employee, that's kind of the norm and standard.

A coach is a decision that is made by someone who wants to dedicate themselves to helping people.

But when it comes to the three, last one, leader, I.

I don't think that society breeds great leaders at all.

And when it comes to being an owner, there isn't anything that helps you to become a great owner unless you really commit to building that identity out.

And when it comes to investor, that's for 99% of the population, a complete.

Like, I have no idea what that means.

Sure.

We have a relationship to.

I understand an investor.

That's someone who does investment banking or who buys ETFs or invests in stocks or makes money of their money.

Sure.

But there is so much more to the investor than the actions that we take.

So we're going to cover all of it but let's start in an area where we can discover a little bit more about what.

Why is it important to differentiate and distinguish the different identities?

Yeah.

I can give you an example because when I started my coaching business I believe, actually I do believe I was ahead in the identity due to the fact that I already, when I started my coaching business, been in other kinds of businesses for 18 years.

So it was not new thing to be a business owner.

I've had employees, I've made a lot of money.

I've had different kind of businesses before.

I'm used to running a team, been a leader.

However, I still felt like when I was shifting into this new niche of being a coach, like this new business model, I, I kind of went back.

It was kind of getting into this new thing because I was stuck in, well, I need to do it a little bit different.

But what I realized rather quickly there was one thing that was the positive of not being an employee because I am been an employee since like forever.

When you were 19, you scrubbed toilets.

At the toilets when I was 19.

And have a part time job as an adult as well for a few years in between a couple of businesses.

But I just want to say because I think that's important, I think it's important to realize that many people, especially the people starting out, they have a tendency to dream big.

Yeah.

And have a very long sighted vision of like I'm going to achieve these big results in a short period of time.

Yeah.

And that is possible.

You can achieve really big results really fast.

But it's important to understand that you came in from 18 years of business experience.

I started my first business 16 years ago and I've been both successful and unsuccessful.

I've been both hiding and taking the center stage and all of that we had before we started this.

And it's important to realize that especially when we're looking into the identity.

I don't have a problem with confidence.

But when confidence becomes ego and when confidence becomes kind of like I'm not open or I'm not humble, I'm not coachable, then instead of that confidence helping you, it becomes a problem.

Absolutely.

Because what we need to do is realize that these are five very different characteristics and they are equally important to build a long term successful coaching business.

And I would, I would even dare to say you need the employee mindset as well to some degree because you need to be that kind of factory worker in some parts of your business at different times.

And if anything broke, you need to know how your Machine works so that you can step in, fix it if.

And then give it away.

Yeah, 100%.

But as I said, I mean, even though I started this new thing and it's not really natural for me to go to an employee role identity because I've not been there for so many years.

But what I believe, what happened, at least to me, is that when I get fearful, when I get into scarcity and get overwhelmed, I go to the lowest identity that I'm 100% fully owning within myself.

And I don't believe that's just a me thing.

I believe that's a global thing.

That's what we do.

So what I saw is I got stuck at least in the first year.

I mean, I did go out and invest in someone who could help with things I did not know how to do.

But what I also got stuck in was working 16 hours, days and had to do everything myself.

I had to learn this.

I had to do this.

I remember when I was pricing my first program, I was selling, I was pricing it like an employee.

What does that mean?

I was pricing it like counting how many hours would I spend with them?

How much money can I make?

What would be a reasonable hourly payment?

How many people could be there?

That is an employee mindset that would think about that, selling hours.

Because that's what we do as employees.

Like we get a hourly salary.

Yeah.

I didn't even know that you did that.

I did that with the first time I was pricing because I didn't have any other way to price it.

It makes sense.

I remember the prices, so it makes sense.

But I just didn't know that you did that.

No, but I actually did that.

And it took me a long time to understand that.

This is crazy, but it's the identity.

So when we speak about this, I think it's really important to understand that this happens subconsciously.

We.

We don't think about it.

This is what happens when we are not making conscious decisions and working consciously.

About what identity am I running my business in?

Also not focusing and tuning in on what does my business need from me right now, but more autopilot.

Because what it takes to build a business is to become and step into the character that your business needs.

And I think many coaches, when they start up, they are staying unconsciously as an employ or the technician.

I need to do everything.

I spoke to a coach the other day, she hated it, but she was spending so much time building websites and doing stuff and like, I don't know how to do it.

I'm not good at it.

So what happens is that they build a job rather than a business.

They just build a new job.

And I think a lot of coaches would recognize that.

They feel like they are working harder in their business than they ever did in a job and they're feeling overwhelmed because there's a lot of new stuff.

I understand why a lot of people are quitting because if that's what it's like to being a business, business owner need to be a really big upside of huge why for me to really want to do that.

Right?

Yeah.

So in order to just break that down because I think it's important.

The intention when building a business is to get more freedom and to have a better lifestyle.

But what they really do is that they're creating something where they're self employed rather than employed.

Yeah.

And with self employment you're going to get freedom.

Sure.

But the freedom is only that you get to choose which 80 to 100 hours a week you want to work.

So instead of working 40 hours for someone else, you're now working 80 to 100.

But you're probably not going to earn more than if you just had a regular job.

And we need to realize that that that is what we are doing.

If we don't invest into our growth and figuring out how to navigate it differently.

Self employment is the worst because it's so much work, less money and you're constantly going to be stressed out, overwhelmed and you're going to be frustrated.

The misconception of growing or scaling a coaching business is about like what funnel you use, how you know how to scale your legion and your sales.

Well, that is true.

But it's also understanding not matter one bit if you stay stuck in the wrong identity.

Because what will happen is that you'll break all of that.

You won't be able to make the right decisions and you won't be able to do the right things at the right time doing that.

So I mean we should absolutely go through the different stages.

But we also want to understand the typical things that we see from working from the wrong identity level is that we are underpricing, we're over delivering, we are bottlenecking our own growth.

We see that a lot.

Right.

Suddenly that you can't take in more clients because you want to be somewhere and take care of everyone and do the right things.

It might be that you are killing it on Instagram.

You're really good at doing content, but if you're afraid of delegating, I mean you just stay stuck like you need to be the one doing everything, which means that your business will be plateauing and not growing.

And I believe a lot of the people who are following this episode right now, I want you to actually, right now check into what plateau are you at right now and how, for how long time have you been stuck at this plateau?

Like, what is your average monthly revenue?

How long time have you been stuck here?

If you've been stuck on the plateau you're at right now for the more than four months, I would say there's probably something with your identity you need to look into.

I think you're 100% accurate with that.

I think another consequence here is, first of all, absolutely, you won't see the business results you, you probably started the business to get, but even worse, the emotional results that you feel like a failure.

You feel like, I'm not good enough, I can't do this, I'm just a failure, I never succeed, and all of these things.

But what it's really about is that you are not at the right identity level.

Yeah.

What piques my interest is that I want to angle this slightly differently as well, to just cover more parts of it.

Because there is one thing, like with the employee mindset, we can recognize it because society is used to it.

Yeah.

Here's the thing.

If you're trying to run your business as a coach with the intention of being a coach, or what does a coach do?

Coaches help people, then what's going to happen is that you are going to run around and help people and you're probably going to do it for free.

And it's not going to happen in an efficient way so that people can see the benefit of working with you for a longer time, which means investing in your business, which means they could be a part of why you're plateauing in your business.

So the downside of, of bringing the coach to the marketing table is that the coach isn't necessarily going to produce great marketing.

If you bring the coach identity to a sales call, that coach isn't going to do a great job closing that client, helping them long term.

The coach is going to get the fast kickoff of like, I'm going to solve their problem in one session and I'm going to come out of the sales call, feel significant and feel powerful.

And the problem with that is that it's going to ruin your business.

You're going to spend time making no money and people will recognize you and they will be grateful, but it will never be anything more.

It's not going to Be long term.

Like, changes either.

We started with the employee.

The next level at the staircases now is the coach.

Let's just run through the five and then go dig into, like, what is the.

The pros and cons, how it's helping us.

So we have the employee, we have the coach, we have the leader, we have the owner, we have the investor.

So these are the five levels of identities that you will need to grow through if you want to have the ultimate freedom in your life.

So what's the biggest consequence of the employee mindset?

I would say that, first of all, it's that someone else is going to take care of me and provide me with what I need.

Our team had a sales call, I would like to say with a person a few weeks ago, and this is no shame on this person.

I just want to acknowledge how important it is because she said on the sales call when our team asked, but, like, I'm sensing that you're not fully committed to really build a business.

Is this what you really want?

And answer she gave was, yeah, I've applied for a job and if I don't get it, then I am committed to build my business.

And then we know by then you're not going to succeed in a business.

Or at least have it really, really tough until you shift that mindset super hard.

She's doomed to fail forever and ever.

No, no, but you need to shift that.

Yeah.

Because she's going to struggle until she shifts.

Because that's not.

That mindset will not build a business because it's harder than that.

And let me just say, I'm not blaming that person.

I'm blaming the identity of that person.

Because that identity will not work in the business.

Totally.

Because we see that with people that we meet all the time.

People who like, I'm going to try it and if it gives instant results, then I will invest some more into it.

And that's also this job.

Otherwise, I'll just get another job.

Yeah, you can approach life that way.

You can't.

If you want to build a healthy relationship, like, I'll try it out.

I'll give you a hug and we'll see if we're going to have adult time tonight.

Like, it's like, it's super weird.

We need to build that relationship the same way goes with the business.

You have to fully immerse.

Then it comes to risk management.

Well, does that mean I need to quit my job and go all in in my coaching business?

No, that's not what it means.

You can if you have to.

And I really understand that I'm speaking to a low level of coaches starting out right now, but I think it's important to just distinguish it when you're starting out.

It's important that you realize that when you are working with your coaching business, because you're not going to work 24 7, you don't need to work 24 7.

But when you work, need to do that with your whole heart invested and you can't dabble with, let's see what happens.

I'm going to try it out.

There is no try.

You know, try to sit down, try to stand up.

You either do it or you don't.

There isn't anything in between.

So please don't treat your business as I'll try it.

No one tries to be a parent when their baby is born.

I'm going to try.

And if it doesn't work, I'm going to give it to the fire department.

That's a really good distinction.

If you treat it like something, you can't give away that commitment.

I got it here and I'm freaking going to do it.

It that will have you winning above, like 95% of the people who are starting a business.

I totally agree that your business isn't your baby, but I like the metaphor because just as an infant needs your attention and you can't give it enough, or a puppy or whatever, your business is the same.

It doesn't matter what you give your business, your business will always want more.

And when you're getting good at solving the problems that occurs in your business, what happens is that you're going to get more problems.

And some of the problems aren't going to be the most important problems to solve.

So you need to look past them and focus on the problems that make sense to solve.

But it's not about solving all the problem problems.

It's not about taking care of everything that could be taken care of, but it's really about taking care of the stuff that moves it forward in the direction that you have decided.

So with the employee mindset, you do not get all of that.

Let's move on.

And I know there will be people right now listening saying, okay, good, I'm not going to have the employee.

And you said there was a coach and then there was a leader and then there was the owner and then there was investor.

You know what?

I'm just going to go for the freaking investor because I'm going to make a lot of money.

And I really just want you to understand that if you're not owning the employee, if you're not owning the coach, if you're not owning the leader, if you're not owning the owner before going into the identity of an investor, you're not owning it.

You won't be able to manage it, you won't be able to run it, you will not be able to make decisions as that identity.

Your business will crash faster than you can even open a website.

And you need all five at different times.

It's not like, okay, I'm done with the employee mindset now.

I'm never going to touch it again.

Okay, try relate to your co workers that you hire and see how well that's going to happen or people that.

You know outside of your business.

It's not like I'm done with employee mindset now.

I'm always going to be in the coach mindset and then when I'm done with the coach mindset, I'm always going to be in the leader and so on.

That's not going to happen.

You need all of them.

You need all of them in order to advance and you need them at different times in your business.

So if we step into the second one, which is the coach identity.

Now, the coach identity is obviously really important, running a coaching business.

Unless you're buying a coaching business and there are already coaches in it.

But that's a completely different ball game.

If you're building your coaching business, you need to dedicate time to build out your own coach identity.

I don't believe that you help your clients the best if you only lean on your capability of asking the right questions.

Because that's a coaching technique, being able to ask the right questions to have the client find the answer.

But the thing is, to me, coaching is helping people.

And helping people isn't necessarily done by just asking questions.

Sometimes it's going to be to give a metaphor or to come with a suggestion or to really lead them forward so that they could see a solution, so that they could try and they could either fail or succeed.

And if they fail, they try again.

And if they succeed, they double down on the that when it comes to the coach identity, it's really understanding when is it time for me to help people and how do I want to help people?

Yeah, and it doesn't matter if you're a coach or mentor or consultant or whatever.

The coach identity is the delivery part, like the giving away, which means that, well, when is the coach identity really good to have?

Because you jump in and out of the different identities all the time.

If you only own like the coach identity, you stay stuck in the coach identity.

That's why you're plateauing in your business.

You're plateauing because as a coach, you are all about helping people.

When my clients are help, I'm successful.

Really good to watch your clients, however, not so good to watch you.

It's really a lot of kind of a pleasing mentality.

You're taking care of everyone else, but you're not taking care of yourself.

You're not taking care of your business.

So as that identity doing marketing, you probably just give away everything.

During sales, you're coaching on the calls.

You don't want to really charge for your offer, so you're probably on the price.

You're probably selling hours.

But you also stuck in the mentality of they need me, they need to talk to me.

You remember our client Moshkin?

We've been working with Moshkin.

She's amazing for many years.

She was stuck in the coaching identity for a long time because she had such a firm belief that they need me, they buy me my hours.

And that means that having that mindset, you'll be stuck in, you can only take clients one on one because you believe you are so important in that.

So, so you can only take clients one on one.

That means there'll be a cap on how many clients you can handle.

You'll also feel overworked at some point because you'll be working all of the time.

That means you have less time to market sales and just having freedom in your life because you need to be everywhere.

So as a coach, there's a lot of good places and when you are delivering, you should absolutely jump into your coach identity.

When you open your zoom and you have a client in front of you or you have a group of people in front of you, you are the coach a hundred percent.

Then on side of that, that is just not helping you.

It's holding you back in your business.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

And, and the most important part here is that what is it that makes your business grow?

Well, a part of it is your delivery and the, the kind of results that you create.

But it's also about how you talk about those results and how you leverage that in your marketing.

And that comes to how you're as a marketer and then it comes to how well you are at like selling to the people who are interested.

And the coach identity, it's not that good to.

To get that kind of momentum in your marketing and sales because the coach focuses on the wrong thing.

It's about acknowledging the problem long enough so that they could realize that hey, this takes more than a quick fix.

But the people who have a problem are also unaware of the solution to a degree where they are maybe, maybe somewhat aware of how to solve it, but doesn't know how to navigate it because of limiting beliefs or worldviews.

Whatever it is, there is something more, more foundational missing in the navigation of how to move past having the problem that I have.

And a coach can't solve that with a snap of a fingers.

What it's like being a human being is that it's a dynamic experience, which means that new problems are going to surface all the time for the rest of your life.

Which means that even as the best kind of magical coach kind of person helps your clients and gets breakthroughs all the time, then what you need to understand is that no matter how many problems you solve, there will always be a new reason for the clients to get your help further.

So you need to be good at marketing and sales so that you can keep them for longer so that the impact as a coach becomes way bigger.

So even if you can help your client in a sales call, you're only going to help them on a microscopic level compared to if they bought your program.

That's what we need to realize.

Then we can grow in and realize that, okay, there is a different conversation that I need to lead and then we're starting to, to talk about the leader perspective of things.

So now we jumping to the leadership identity.

Yeah.

And how do I then lead my business towards the designated outcome that I have decided?

So that's number one.

What is it that you're leading it towards?

What is your goal?

You need to set an intention of what is it that you're going to produce long term, short term.

And we can dive into structures and details and self discipline and all of that.

Let's not do that right now.

Let's just do on a higher level what is a leader in the coaching business.

Business we need to acknowledge after the coach we can let go of.

Your clients do not need you as a human being.

Your clients need results.

So as a leader, how can I manage to build something that give my clients results even though I might not be holding the hand all of the time?

Now you start thinking a little bit different.

You shift your focus away from you into how can I lead the business?

How can I lead my clients through a process, process that will give them the results.

How will I lead my business?

How will I do Marketing, how will I lead the team?

How will I lead outsourcing stuff that I should not be doing?

So for you to be a leader, of course, leading yourself is one thing, but leading a team, leading your business, leading the progress of your business, just different.

There's something to lead and that means there's something for you to outsource.

You.

If you think everything in your business should be done by you, you're going to be stuck.

So as a leader, you also jump into, so what should I lead, who should I lead?

What processes should I lead?

You are the leader, but you're not the technician.

You're not doing everything.

No.

And I love that.

And adding to that also is like, you need a destination.

A destination for your clients, a destination for your marketing, a destination for your sales.

And you need to be able to see, am I leading my business towards that?

What it really comes to, what is it that you lead as a coach?

You lead the progress of capability in the client.

Because if you're just a coach and you're just helping your clients all the time, what's most likely going to happen is that you build codependency, that the client's going to start to need you in order to move forward.

Because it's not building the capability of moving forward on its own.

We need an actual intention of, I want to make you get this, know this and feel this.

And as business coaches, it would be terrible if everything that we did was to tell them what to do.

And then, bye bye, you're done in the program, you made your money and they're like, yeah, but what to do?

What am I going to do now?

And we're like, you do you like you're done in the program, bye bye, you had great results.

No, that's not what we want to do.

So for us, it's always been really important to build a capability of being able to continue.

So our kind of foundational program that I love is designed to help coaches reach either 5 or 10k per month in their coaching business.

Now, to make €5,000 or even €10,000 once is how much is that worth?

Well, it's worth maybe €3,000.

But being able to make €10,000 as many times as you want for the rest of your life, I mean, that's a different story.

So we want to build capability.

So the progress is how capable is my client to be able to continue this work on their own?

That is what we want to lead the coaching part, the delivery part towards.

But then there are different parts to lead, you need to lead yourself in managing your own identity as an employee and as a coach.

You need to navigate, navigate your clients towards their results.

You need to navigate your marketing, your sales.

And all of a sudden we talk about a lot of different hats.

You know, sometimes you need to be the marketer and sometimes you need to be the salesperson and sometimes you need to be the admin or the customer support or.

There are a lot of different things that the moment you can realize that you can structure the leadership to make that easier, then you also have a structure of execution.

Which means this is the stage where we start doing SOPs, standard operation procedures.

Like everything we do, we put it into systems, we break it down, we break it down to how do we do this?

Like if I'm not doing it, I'm giving it away to someone else.

How should they be doing it?

This is where we start having the library of SOPs, like how do we do stuff in our business?

A good question to ask yourself is, if I were to give this process away to someone else, what does this person need to know in order to execute at my level?

And it like it's a work in progress, keep that, keep at that.

And so if we put on revenue levels here, for those stuck in the employee mindset, I would say yeah, you can probably stretch it up to doing consistent 5k month, but you'll be working freaking hard for you stocking in a coach mindset, you can, you can stretch and working really hard up to 10k month, but that's your max.

Like that's going to be your cap.

In that if you're, if you're really good and if you happen to build a culture of your clients recommending you to other people.

I've met people who are navigating their coaching business and making make between 10 and €15,000amonth at a stretch.

But then I've met more than 6,000 coaches.

So what I really want to say about it is that you don't own the navigation.

You are dependent on people doing it for you, which means that you're a good coach and that's great, but it's not sustainable, like you said.

So the next phase of being a leader, that will probably take you up to 20k a month because that's the stage where you start giving outsourcing some things, you start doing different things, but it's still not, not just you doing it, you're managing your business, you're managing your team or like the first persons helping you out outsourcing stuff, which means that you manage more, you can break it to 20k month, but then we're going to have another plateau at that, like that level.

Which means now we need to go into the next phase.

When we hit the 20k month, we, we need to start applying the owner identity because the owner identity is a big difference.

Now as the leader, you are having the SOPs, you are starting to outsource stuff, you're starting to have a team team.

But now you grow into the owner.

The owner is looking at the business as something that how can we make really scalable?

How can we make systems?

How can we have automation systems?

Now I know people still want stuck in, but I just want to start with systems.

Yeah, but if you haven't owned the other parts too early, if you're starting to try to do systems too early, literally.

I spoke to someone the other day.

She's not making money money, but she's been for five months building systems, not making any money.

That is ridiculously because that's like wasting.

Your time, like building a factory, not knowing what to produce.

Yeah.

So that's really what it is.

And I want to emphasize that by also saying the same thing again, but in a different way.

When we scale and when we are growing from 20k and want to do more than 20k per month, what we want to do is simplify what works and double down on the resources and then triple down on the resources.

But it comes with simplicity first.

So we need to kill all the complexity and we kill the complexity with creating structure for the stuff that are moving the needle, basically.

And what we want to do with that is building system with what we have simplified what we know works, we.

Take what we know works and we build better systems for that to make it work even smoother and in a larger scale.

And then it's innovation.

Then it's always about how can I simplify this even more?

How can I outsource this even more?

But you need to have something.

It's kind of like trying to, to decorate the home without a home.

You know, you need to buy the house first and then you can decorate it and plan it and what's going to come up on this wall and what kind of furniture are we going to have over here?

So if you're building websites or if you're running ads or if you're doing stuff in the beginning, just trying stuff out, unfortunately it's not going to take you to the level that you want.

And if you're building system and buy CRM systems and fancy fancy learning portals for your delivery.

Whatever it is that you do, clients comes first.

You need to build a business so that there is something to simplify.

Yeah, yeah.

Percent so as the owner it, it can be a long stage and now it starts like moving into to the investor.

It could be a very long stage because the systems you need, the structures you need to build into your business will evolve as you grow.

But the big shift, I love what you said here.

The big shift is as an owner you understand it's not about doing more, it's about doing more simple and scalable.

Right?

Well the principle is simple scales.

Yeah.

And if you take out simple, there is no scale.

Actually exactly the opposite of what the mentality of an employee on a coach.

Because like I meet people who barely making 5k month.

They're on all platforms, they have a podcast.

They like literally spreading themselves, thinking they need to do everything.

Yeah.

And they're everywhere all of the time doing crazy stuff, jumping on different trains, trying different stuff out and they're working, working their asses off without any actual tangible results.

So then we get to the investor.

So I would say the line between being an investor and, and being the owner is a more of a smooth line.

It, it will come at different levels and they will start of smoothing out.

In the beginning it's absolutely ownership, but then it turns into the investor.

What is an investor?

An investor looks at the business not like a baby bought in general engine.

It's an engine.

Right.

So it needs to work.

So the investor will also create long term revenue of value by adding assets, taking the money in and investing them somewhere else.

In order for us to do that, as an investor, you probably in a stage where you are only doing the specific core things inside your business, but you're not doing the daily stuff at all.

That's not what you're doing.

You're outsourcing yourself more and more as an investor.

You are more tracking KPIs.

KPIs we build up as an owner, but as the investor you're more tracking the KPIs.

Making sure the business have what it needs to to get the next thing.

It's also about taking the money out like the profit and invest them and buy more assets.

It's about building or growing the investment.

So really see your business as an investment, see how can I.

And I grow it even more.

It's.

I think it's a huge step.

It is.

But, but you can borrow the some of the characteristics while building your coaching business.

I would like to Say that when I started out, and this is like a brief recommendation, you can't hold me responsible for it because it depends on different countries.

But when I started out, I calculated what do I need to cover in VAT in taxes if I make a profit, how much taxes do I need to pay.

I decided to put 38% of everything that I own aside for future payments of taxes and stuff.

Then I knew that if everything I make is profit, profit, I know that I will be able to cover all the expenses to the government.

This does not include taxes on my salary and this does not include the payments I pay for being my own employer.

Those are different taxes.

But 38% was for the, for the government.

Then 31% was for a saving account.

So I put everything into a savings account.

And then the last 31% was for operation and operations, covered my salary, salary systems, the, the small stuff.

Google.

You have a Google Drive.

When I started out, Google Drive Zoom.

And you know, it was a couple of hundred euros a month.

It was cheap but, but then it was my salary as well.

On 31.

In the beginning I had to borrow from my own savings slightly.

But I was very conditioned that the 38, I'm never gonna touch that 31 of savings.

I'm only gonna touch if I really have to so that I can do months to month, month.

But, but the thing that happened and that what, what, what that created was that when I closed down the year and I calculated how much do I need to pay the government, I realized that 38% was more than I needed to save because it wasn't all pure profit.

I had a like a 60% profit margin at that time.

So, so I, I made my first million euros.

That was all just hard work.

It wasn't focusing on simplicity, it was hard working.

But it was combined with all the different identities that we've talked about today.

So you can build a business with just hard work and dedication.

But if you want to go north of that, which, which has always been the thing we want, not for the sake of making more money, but for the sake of bigger impact and deeper.

Impact and more freedom.

Yeah.

And then building our lifestyle on top of that.

When I did this, what I realized was that when I closed down the year and paid the government, I got, got money from the 38% to put into my savings.

And that money has been crucial in order for me to reach my long term goals.

Because it was money that I could invest into help the right help at the right place.

It was money that I could invest into systems.

And it has been so important just to realize that my business is created to survive on 31% of its income.

The rest goes to future other stuff and the government.

Yeah.

And I think just for transparency here, like a part of what's been possible doing this thing as the investors in our business is understanding that we don't want to spend all of the money money in the beginning.

And the investor mindset is not about going out and buying flashy things from the beginning.

It's about saving up for assets that will provide you long term.

So what we've been doing is that we definitely been saving money but we bought this ranch we live on today.

We bought that.

Even being able to keep another house that is now a rental property would only be possible because we built the business we have.

And some of the income streams we're doing are passive.

Some of them are close to passive passive.

But it's just building up different assets that are giving us revenue.

Yeah.

And that is about being financially literate.

We, we need to be able to read finances.

And that comes with just having an interest in sustainability of how can I create something that is healthy, that takes care of me long term?

So that is like high level.

That is something that you want to develop right now.

You don't need to develop it but if you are from anywhere between 0 to 30 to 50k months, maybe closer to 35k months maybe I would say make sure that you save as much money as you can because it's going to create your life.

Don't buy a Porsche because you can.

Don't do anything that doesn't have your future financial interest in, in, in the scope of doing stuff.

Not saying that we did not blew a lot of money because we could.

We did of course but, but it.

Was also about like testing it out.

But we never, we never did it.

Never take any of the investment money.

But we never did it on the cost of our savings.

So we, we designed it the way so that we could save and still drive a Range Rover.

We did it so that we still could buy this ranch and still have savings.

We fly business class and it's wildly expensive but we don't do it on the cost of our savings.

We're still doing all of those things because we are on a different level today than we were when we couldn't drive a ranch Rover or when we couldn't fly business class or when we couldn't, couldn't buy this ranch.

So yeah, there are a lot of different things that we do.

I mean we're putting, we're putting a lot of money into like renovating this house like with several hundred thousand euros already into this development to build our lifestyle.

But we don't do it on, on behalf or on, or sacrificing our future, future savings.

And that is a very important kind of distinction to make.

And yeah, it's something to manage and it's something to, to navigate moving forward.

Forward.

Quick tips to evolve your identity like that evolution.

And first of all, ask yourself that the kind of decisions I'm making, what identity am I making these decisions from?

Like have a journal.

Ask yourself every day, like when I'm making these decisions, what identity is actually in charge here?

And when you have a problem, what mindset or what identity do you, you go to in to try to solve that problem.

Then the second thing is your language because your identity is shown through your language.

How, how you think is also how you speak.

Like look into how are you saying so instead of I'll do this, like you can ask yourself how, who can do this change the way you speak.

Then we have the rituals that will support.

Because at the stage where you're a leader, make sure you start building up the leadership scoreboard.

As an open owner, make sure you book time to be CEO because it's important that you have thinking time.

As an owner.

You cannot just be working in your business.

You really need to step out and working on your business.

So block out time in your calendar for being a CEO.

So then I also believe it's about choosing make a decision.

So if you can recognize, okay, I'm at this level right now, I need to be this level.

Like who would I be?

Make a decision on.

Now I'm going to be the leader.

I'm now I'm going to be the owner and define what does that mean?

Find someone who is clearly an owner and look at them, like study them, how do they speak, how do they act, how do they think, how do they do stuff?

And start copying that and then audit, audit it every week.

If I said I was going to do this, is that what I've been doing?

How can I improve this identity next week?

Week?

I think it's great.

If you're interested in hearing more about something very specific, make sure to reach out and let us know what you would like to hear about.

On the topic of running a coaching business in 2025 and we'll make an episode on that if it's so if.

You like this episode, make sure you subscribe and give us a big fat like or give us a comment.

Start following us on Instagram and let us know what you would like to see more of.

And we'll see you next week and.

Subscribe for future episodes.

See you in the next.

Sam.