As an entrepreneur, there is one thing that is certain – you will always be learning something new.
Sometimes, even when you don’t want to.
In this episode, I’m going to let you in on some of the most important lessons that I’ve learned since becoming an entrepreneur.
When I quit my nine-to-five as a dental hygienist, I was so excited and eager to go all-in on my business to the point where I worked way too many hours.
You know the saying…
“Entrepreneurship is leaving 40 hours a week working for someone else to work a hundred hours for yourself”
In the beginning, I would just say “yes” to every single opportunity that came my way.
It seems counter-intuitive when you’re a start-up, to turn away opportunities, doesn’t it?
I believed that saying “yes” to everything would be bringing me more and more opportunities, which might be true, but worthless if they’re not in alignment with my focus.
(Focus was also a HUGE lesson I’ve learned, but for another day)
It really comes down to opportunity cost.
If you want to get official, here is how Merriam-Webster defines it:
the added cost of using resources (as for production or speculative investment) that is the difference between the actual value resulting from such use and that of an alternative (such as another use of the same resources or an investment of equal risk but greater return)
For me, this was meant using my most precious resource – time – to chase clients that weren’t good fits.
I learned the hard way after saying yes to everything for six months and found myself in the same spot, chasing my tail, spinning my wheels, busy as heck, but not any closer to where I wanted to be. I thought that helping every single client that came my way would be the most effective way to accomplish my goals.
I didn’t consider how difficult it would be to fulfill on every single opportunity that came my way. I was still in that “impostor-preneur” as I like to call it phase, where I was surprised that people wanted to hire me and I was afraid that if I couldn’t take on a new client right this second, I would lose them forever and I didn’t even think to consider what a wrong client would look like.
At one point, I had to re-evaluate what my mission was and what I wanted my movement to be. I had asked myself: “Did I want to help every client get omnipresent online or did I want to spend time amplifying brands and messages that I truly identified with and respected?”
This is where I had my biggest learning…
I realized that my movement is to help other visionary entrepreneurs lead their movements.
Once I labeled how I wanted to build my movement around, I started to find that clarity and I really do believe now that when you create that space, it will be filled.
With this newfound space in my business, started to attract the right clients, clients that had messages and businesses that I adored, that I could emotionally invest myself into because I saw how it would change people’s lives and it was something that I could be proud of.
To know more about my journey to healing and clarity, stay tuned.
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Transcript:
00:00 Quitting my nine-to-five was such a big step for me, but I didn’t go from being a dental hygienist to becoming a CEO and building a movement overnight. There have been plenty of hiccups, stressful times, and teachable moments
00:12 along the way. There have even been times where I was really close to throwing in the towel. You’ve probably been told that content is key to growing your business, right? There are so many experts who spend a ton of time cranking out incredible content consistently and yet they’re broke. See, there’s a huge difference in growing your following and growing your income. How do you create content in a way that actually gets you paid over and over again, like turning every video into an army of salesmen that deliver your perfectly crafted message around the world, around the clock, perpetually forever. I’m Marley Baird, and you’re listening to The VIP Code. Everybody. This is Marley Baird, and welcome to The VIP Code
00:58 Podcast. Today’s episode is a big one, Building Your Movement. I’m going to let you in on some of the most important lessons that I’ve learned since becoming an entrepreneur and how I learned what my movement was. At the end of the episode, I’m going to be telling you about my latest challenge my team has launched and how it can help you drive massive impact through video, so be sure to stick around to the end to find out how you can get involved. But for now, let’s talk about building your movement. When I quit my nine-to-five as a dental hygienist, I was so excited and eager to go all-in on my business to the point where I worked way too many hours. You know the saying “Entrepreneurship is leaving 40 hours a week working for someone else to work a hundred hours for yourself” – Something to that effect.
01:40 I would just say yes to every opportunity. It seems counter-intuitive when you’re a start-up, to turn away opportunities, right? I believed that saying “yes” to everything would be bringing me more and more opportunities, which might be true, but worthless if they’re not in alignment with my focus. You have to think about the opportunity cost, which I learned the hard way after saying yes to everything for six months and found myself in the same spot chasing my tail, spinning my wheels busy as heck, but not any closer to where I wanted to be. I thought that helping every single client that came my way would be the most effective way to accomplish my goals. I didn’t consider how difficult it would be to fulfill every single opportunity that came my way. I was still in that impostor-preneur as I like to call it phase where I was surprised that people wanted to hire me and I was afraid that if I couldn’t take on a new client right this second, I would lose them forever and I didn’t even think to consider what a wrong client would look like.
02:47 You need help, you’ve got a budget to pay me like I’m your girl. The truth is there’s only one Marley. And when I was trying to help everybody, I wasn’t able to give anyone the level of value that I to provide. And more than that, I connected with a few clients who didn’t even share the same morals or values or goals that I did. Actually, I had a client come to me once that was, he labeled himself as a dating coach for men and I thought, Oh, that’s nice, wonderful. Like I love it. Turned out he was a how to get women in bed in 30 minutes or less kind of coach as a married woman who values monogamy and healthy relationships that just, it’s not in alignment with my values. And that client was my big wake up call to having criteria for who I can and cannot work with.
03:38 There’s a coach or a service provider for that person and that’s great, but it’s just not me. So at this point, I had to reevaluate what my mission was and what I wanted my movement to be. If you don’t have clarity, what kind of people do you think that you’ll attract to your business or to your movement? So I had asked myself, did I want to help every client get omnipresent online or did I want to spend time amplifying brands and messages that I truly identified with and respected. So then I realized that my movement is to help other visionary entrepreneurs lead their movements. And I couldn’t do that successfully until I truly believed in their business or understood their origin story and was inspired by their messaging like Cristy code red who is changing and saving lives. I’ll never forget the first time I met her and worked with her.
04:29 We really connected right away cause we have a very similar work ethic and drive and we just, we hit it off so quickly. She helps people lose weight without exercise, diet pills or shakes by taking on what she has created, the code red lifestyle, focusing on real food, water and sleep. Everyone and anyone can do this. It’s incredible. If you haven’t heard of her, please go check her out. And she’s in an industry that’s so saturated by coaches everywhere trying to help people lose weight or get fit. I’ve just never met anyone like Christie or have seen a movement in audience like Christy code reds, and one of the first times I met her, she didn’t have Facebook live with this woman who I think had lost near £100 and she’s helped a lot of people who have lost a hundred pounds or more with the code red lifestyle and this woman in the interview, I was like crying hearing this, she was saying, Christie, I got to tell my husband, I release you.
05:26 You no longer have to take care of me like that. She didn’t have to be a burden on her family because of her weight. She could walk again, she could remove some of the medications that she was taking, she could play with her grandchildren. She didn’t have to worry about health complications taking her life early. I heard that interview and I was bawling and that’s just one of so, so many. She also helped me to lose 20 pounds in three months. So not only does their lifestyle helping people lose up to 10% of body weight each month work. She has the movement behind her to reach the masses because for a woman who has a solution that is changing and saving lives, what a tragedy it would be to not share that with the world and reach the people who need her. Christie is just one of many clients that when I hear their story in their movement, I need to go all-in on it knowing that this is honestly a case of life and death.
06:21 Your movement isn’t just pretty Instagram posts and a bunch of likes on a caption. It is changing people’s lives. It’s improving their health, their wealth, their relationships. It’s giving them time, education, resources, freedom. Even if it just starts with one person, that one person gets to change their family and their community and make their greatest contribution to the world, and you get to be the one who leads them to do that. So when I hear people that are like, I don’t know my story or well, someone else’s already out there speaking a similar message or imposter syndrome, I’m not ready yet. Or who am I to stop being selfish? You are doing a disservice to hundreds, thousands, millions of people by sitting on your hands and you know what’s worth cause if you don’t speak your message and lead your movement, someone else will and it just might be your competitor who doesn’t have the same abilities or heart or level of integrity as you.
07:23 And then what happens to the people who needed you? Nothing changed. Maybe they went backward. Maybe they even got scammed. It’s your moral obligation and it’s also mine to help you to realize that I’m sure that you have dealt with your fair share of mistakes or failures or downright disasters. Maybe you’re like, I was in, took on way too much, way too quickly. Your movement may be building, but maybe it’s not building to the way that you want it to. When I realized that I had taken on clients who didn’t align with my values, I panicked. I didn’t know what to do. Was it right for me to cut ties or should I stick it out? Would I be more in integrity by continuing with the client, following through with what I committed to or would I be more in integrity by being honest, kindly refunding or declining the opportunity and allowing both of us the space to find what’s more in alignment for our respective movements about, I’m about six months into my business, I was in a space where I was making Oh, $20,000 a month.
08:26 I had lots of clients, lots of referrals and opportunities kept flowing in and lots of stress. I look back on this time and I’m like, Oh my God, I’ve, I was miserable. My health and wellbeing were at an all-time low. I had zero boundaries. I said yes to every opportunity, every request from a client and my perfectionism and like people-pleasing tendencies were just running me into the ground. My parents at the time actually were like, they so concerned about my wellbeing that they had even offered to financially support me if I would just quit. Well, I didn’t quit, but after some soul searching, I fired about 90% of my clientele and I kept only the ones who I really loved and felt emotionally invested in their business. My revenue dropped drastically and although I thought that my anxiety would to, my anxiety actually skyrocketed, I realized that I was living in a space of reactivity.
09:27 I had gotten myself into this place where I was constantly on guard for requests from our client. I was so used to hustling and multitasking and putting out fires that when I removed all of those elements from my life, I had to hit the reset button and rewire my thoughts and behavior and in that was learning to find stillness. My previous belief was that I had to hustle and I had to. If I, if I wanted to grow, if I wanted to make more money, I had to hustle. I had to put in all the hours that it had to be stressful. So silence to me and stopping and slowing down was terrifying. It felt counterproductive. It felt wrong. I constantly felt like I was forgetting something or more than that, like to be alone with my thoughts. I’d have to go deep and understand why I took on those patterns, but ask yourself where are you when your best ideas come to you in the shower?
10:24 Driving when you’re about to fall asleep in the still is as uncomfortable as that was at first. That’s where I was able to find those answers and the ideas that were the seeds and the stepping stones to my movement. I can’t tell you what your movement is or should be, but what I can tell you is that it comes from the quiet thoughts that arrive in your still moments. It comes from reflecting on your stories, where you came from, the roadblocks and the obstacles you overcame, the people you met, both the heroes and the villains of your journey. All of that packaged and positioned as a key to someone in a similar situation. Looking for the opportunity switch that your solution is going to provide them. When I was in that spot where I had to make a decision of getting out of misery and taking on the risk of, well, what’s gonna happen in the meantime as I let go of these clients?
11:19 Honestly, it didn’t take long for me to recover my clientele and income. And I know that sounds like a risk. Like how could I let go of all of this and just hope that it’s going to come back to me somehow. But after I let go of, as I said, 90% of those clients, I actually left town for about a full month. I always romanticized about going away to heal. But the truth is like when you go away, if you think like, oh, I’m just gonna go to like this exotic location so that I can go on this healing journey. The truth is you take your heart with you. So it just hurts from maybe a warmer or a pretty location and you’re not in the comfort of your own bed. But I took the time to heal after several nights of waking up in a cold sweat and grabbing for my phone only to realize that there were no fires to put out cause I had extinguished the last one already.
12:09 I started to find that clarity and I really do believe now that when you do create that space it will be filled. So this time as I was healing and finding clarity, I started to attract the right clients, clients that had messages and businesses that I adored that I could emotionally invest myself into because I saw how it would change people’s lives and it was something that I could be proud of, proud of being a part of, proud of putting my name on it. It surprised me the time, but I suppose it shouldn’t have. There really was something to being the kind of person or client that you want to attract in your life. The personal development and the introspection was the biggest key and understanding who I want to serve and how can I serve them. Then, from there, it was to paint that picture for my audience who I am as a visionary leader, someone that they can know, like and trust my vehicle, my mission, what I advocate for, what I defend against.
13:05 I advocate for impact-driven profit focus businesses. I defend against mediocre and mundane messages that fall flat, launch to crickets that don’t change lives. I think that every entrepreneur, or not even entrepreneur, just every person, every human being in general, has a moral obligation to live up to their greatest potential and the profound messages that we have. The ability to create in our own personal development in our own still moments can infiltrate into the mainstream and influence thousands or millions of lives to be able to reach that potential. If you want to increase the impact and profit for your movement, check out the challenge I just launched. It’s called the Infinite Video Impact – driving profit with massive impact through video challenge. It’s packed with over $3,000 worth of strategies to help you position content in a way that indoctrinates and generates leads for your business over and over on autopilot. And I’m offering some special bonuses just for my podcast listeners, so head to InfiniteImpactChallenge.com to learn more and sign up.
14:10 Thanks so much for listening to The VIP Code podcast. Do you want to connect with me and other impact-driven, profit-focused entrepreneurs who are on a mission to make an impact while creating more freedom in their life? Join us in the private Facebook group, Entrepreneur On Purpose. Now, just head over to Facebook and type in Entrepreneur On Purpose. When you join, you’ll get access to how to grow your list from YouTube, which will teach you how to generate leads organically and on autopilot from your channel. This is the only place you can get access to this, so be sure to go join the Entrepreneur On Purpose group. Now, I look forward to you joining us next time on The VIP Code.