Ep 159: How I Built a Million Dollar Business

Lately, I’ve been getting the same question over and over: How did you become so successful, so fast?

And when people ask that, they usually mean the numbers. Yes, I left a career in the innovation field, started my own coaching and leadership practice, and made $360K in my first year. Four years later, it’s a million-dollar business. But the real success wasn’t financial.

The real success was this:
 Creating a vision for a whole new version of my career and myself…
 Diving in headfirst off a high dive…
 Committing fully, going deep, moving fast, and never looking back.

I had never owned a business before. I had always been a leader inside organizations. So from the outside, it looked like an anomaly. But from the inside, it was the result of very specific inner and outer work.

In this episode, I walk you through exactly what made the difference.

What You’ll Learn in This Episode

Why belief is everything.
Just like my son picking up a guitar and declaring, “I’m a guitarist,” the people who move quickly are the ones who allow themselves to be who they are becoming before they have proof.

How to clean up the mind.
Our thoughts create our emotions, our actions, our results—and then we collect evidence to prove whatever we already believe. To build a new future, we have to deliberately change the belief system, not just the behavior.

Why your energy is your most precious resource.
Your time, focus, and life force are not free. When you stop leaking energy in every direction and start investing it intentionally, everything accelerates.

How to work with the subconscious.
The brain filters out opportunities that don’t match what it believes is possible. Through visualization, emotional processing, and unconscious reprogramming, you train your nervous system to recognize the future you’re creating as “safe” and “real.”

Why you must be willing to feel anything.
Fear, doubt, cringe, imposter syndrome—none of these are problems when you know how to feel them without letting them stop you.

How to use the same process innovators use.
Vision. Iteration. Obstacle strategy. Milestones. Aligned daily action. A simple, regenerative system that turns ideas into reality.

Why community changes everything.
Being in rooms with high-level, high-vibration women leaders raises your nervous system, your standards, your belief in what’s possible. You rise to the level of the room.

This is the exact recipe I’ve used to:

• Go from burned out and broke to building a million-dollar business
• Create time freedom and deep family connection
• Transform my body, my relationships, and my leadership
• Live a life that includes snowy mountain days with my kids and beach strategy sessions with women CEOs

It’s also the exact work I teach inside the Moxie Mastermind.

Because the world needs women leaders right now.
There is no more waiting.
And I am all-in on helping women rise.

So I’ve made my journey from burned out to blissed out, the thing I’m doing to help other women, teaching the three steps I took to get here. 

How to connect with Marie:

• On the Web | The Local Bloom
• Instagram: @the.bloom.coach
• All Things Marie on LinkTree

JOIN THE BLOOM ROOM!
We'll take all these ideas and apply them to our lives. Follow me on Instagram at @the.bloom.coach to learn more and snag a spot in my group coaching program!

Transcript

Warm Welcome And Listener Story

SPEAKER_00 0:08

Welcome to the Bloom Your Mind Podcast, where we take all of your ideas for what you want and we turn them into real things. I'm your host, certified coach Marie McDonald. Let's get into it. Hi everybody. Welcome to episode number 159 of the Bloom Your Mind podcast. I just got a message from someone on Facebook. I am never on Facebook, and so I logged in there and saw a few messages from people that I had missed, and it was so wonderful to get in connection with them. I get so much like spam there that I just never check it. And so I got these two messages or these three messages, and one of them was from a dear old uh friend of mine from a long time ago, and she said, you know, I listened to your podcast with my daughters, and it starts these great discussions between the three of us, and they ask such great questions. And one of my daughters asks to listen to it every week. Oh my gosh, that just brought tears to my eyes. My daughters listen to my podcast, and it just um, you know, to help lift up and connect generations of women to give us empowering topics to discuss, to lift women up in any way and in any form is a great honor, such an honor of mine. And so I'm just so delighted to hear that and love any kind of feedback like that that helps me understand how all this content serves you. Well, I just got back from Costa Rica. I was in Mammoth, I had one day turnaround, and then I went to Costa Rica for a week with a group of women CEOs, and I was coaching these CEOs, and I was adventuring with them, and I was getting inspired by them. And it was just an incredible journey. I swam under waterfalls, I gave some surf lessons and did some surfing myself. Um, it was just brilliant and wonderful. And this is something that I constantly prioritize for myself. It's the first thing that I put on the budget for my own business is being in groups of women that elevate me and lift me up, and then uh groups of women that I can coach and support. And groups of women CEOs are my favorite ones to be with these days because we're all leading businesses that are trying to make the world a better place in one way or another. And it's really, really amazing. And it's so in line with the Moxie mastermind and these retreats that I lead that it's really fun to do some coaching there and then do a lot of coaching in the Moxie. Um, and I'm back, got back at 11 p.m. last night, straight into a day of coaching, and it feels so good to be back in the zone. So, welcome to all of you. I've been getting the question for the last year over and over, and uh, quite a few people have asked me lately. And I thought I will finally just record this podcast episode on how I was able to build a million-dollar business so quickly. How was I able to build such a successful practice in such a short period of time? So, when people ask me about the success, I think we are talking about a few different things. So let's define it. Success meaning that I left my career in the innovation field where I worked to lead a company and scale a company for 15 years, and I started my own practice, coaching, going into organizations and consulting with the C-suite, leading retreats, teaching, and I made 360,000 in my first year. So, yes, it was a financial success for sure. I cut my hours in half and I doubled my income in my first year. But also more than that was that it was the success of creating a vision for a new version of myself, my career, myself as a professional, myself as a balanced individual that spends as much time as I want with my family. And I first created that vision and then I dove in headfirst off a high dive, and I went super deep, super fast into that vision and built it, never looking back. So I think in some ways, people are asking me, like, how did you do that? How did you dive in with no question about whether or not you were gonna pull it off? Because I'd never had my own business before. I had always worked as a leader inside organizations. So it was an anomaly to people how I succeeded so quickly while they were experiencing many things that stop them. And I coach so many of my clients on these things that stop them when they're trying to make an idea real for something like this, for a career change, for a business that they're starting, to elevate themselves financially, create financial freedom for themselves, or to make the vision for their dream career real. The things that stop people, many of my students are imposter syndrome. So many of the people that come and get coaching from me that are coaches have a really hard time claiming their title after they get all their training and they start their work. How can I say that I'm a coach right away? Or they finish acupuncture school or art school or they're writers or musicians, and they have a really hard time claiming the title before they have a whole bunch of success under their belt. Even though they have the training, they have the passion, they're in the practice, they have a really hard time saying this is what I do now. How can I say I'm an entrepreneur? How can how can I say I'm a businesswoman? How can I say I'm a CEO when I just started? You know, it reminds me when I think about this about the other day. So my husband is like a, you know, has been a touring musician. He he was for over a decade and is semi-famous. And my kids are really used to seeing him play shows, play guitar. Um, he's an incredible guitarist and have seen him on big stages. And we've always wondered, you know, are our kids going to want to play guitar? My s my daughter plays violin, plays piano, she plays flute. And my son is about to start playing violin. He plays flute. But the other day he picked up the guitar and he finally asked my husband, Hey, will you show me some chords? My husband showed him a couple power chords and he played guitar all night. He made up a song on the guitar and sang it. And when we went to bed that night, he was overjoyed. He was lying in the crook of my arm and he looked up at me with his big, beautiful eyes, and he said, Mama, I finally am a guitarist. I play guitar now. I've wanted to for so long, and now I'm a guitarist. And I just had this love, this glow, glow up in hearing him, right? Like we love that. We want that. We want to be able to have that confidence right away. That knowing that when we decide to do something, we can jump in. We don't have to prove ourselves to anybody else in order to claim and be who we want to be. We don't have to have a whole bunch of other people legitimize us. We can legitimize ourselves. It would just so beautiful to hear that confidence in his voice and see that certainty. And he's been playing guitar ever since because now he's a guitarist, right? And by claiming it, it allows him to pick up the guitar every day and to build skill in it every single day, to put himself out there and develop the skill because we can't be perfect right away. We have to iterate and try and do it again and again and build skill through doing. So we look for that brilliant belief in ourselves that we had as kids. We chase it as adults. And that's one other thing that holds people back. Another thing that holds people back is getting so stuck in the how. How will I pull this off? I have a vision for what I want. I know so clearly what I want, but how will I pull it off? Which, of course, we can't ever know until we do it. Another thing that holds us back is doubt, just self-doubt, which so often is a green flag. Self-doubt is there to show us what questions to answer. So if there's some self-doubt about whether we're gonna have time for something, then we do the math problem. If the math maths and it's gonna take 10 hours a week to pull something off, and we uh we can create 10 hours in our week, then we're good to go. And the self-doubt just becomes a green flag. Another thing that holds people back is too much focus on the past, on what we have and have not been able to do so far, which is completely irrelevant when we look at the future. When we let the past define us, we repeat the cycles of our past over and over. We have created in the past what we were capable of creating based on how we were thinking and feeling and the actions we were taking and the skills that we had then. The future will require a different way of thinking and feeling and doing in order to create different results in our life. So we have to be more dedicated to this future vision. We have to think about the future a lot more than we think about the past when we want to do something new. And there are all kinds of other stuff that hold us back. My business has taken off so successfully, it's now a million-dollar business. I built it in four years and more than anything else, it's exactly what I want to be doing. So people ask me all the time, how did you do this so fast? How did you build it so fast? How have you been so successful? So I want to tell you the three things that it requires. These are the three things I teach in the Moxie. These are the three things I focus on with all my clients. These are the three things that I do anytime I'm trying to make an idea real. I'm gonna share them with you right now. The first one is work with a coach to get clean in your mind, to clean up your thinking and get aligned with where you want to go. When I started out, I hired a coach right away. I wrote a vision, I sent it to the coach, I read it to her, and I faced the cringe because I read it to her. This vision, I want to coach groups, I want to have a mastermind, I want to have a podcast. It's been going for years, I want to lead retreats, I want to go into organizations and work with uh CEOs. And I wrote this beautiful vision of working half as much and making twice as much. And I remember the coach's response. She said, That is such a big bold dream. I interpreted that. What I heard was your bananas, girl. Look at how cute that is. That's such a cute big vision. Yeah, right. Which is absolutely not what she meant. But of course, I heard what I already believed. So when I had that reaction, I thought that she was sort of like, oh my god, that's cute. Look at you. That big vision, that's a little bit bananas, that's a little bit wild. Look who you well, look what you think you could do. That was a flag to me that I had to clean up my thinking. So that was my work. I worked with her to clean up all my thinking and get in full belief that I could do it, and then it happened like within months. I built all of that in the first year and then grew it over time. The other things we want to work on in coaching is to understand my energy is not free. It is the most precious thing in my life. Do you understand that? Your energy is not free. You only spend it on what you want. We have to learn to first value ourselves, our time, our focus on all of the things that we spend our time and our focus and our energy on as the most priceless and valuable thing. Our energy is our most valuable asset. So no more spending energy and putting it out in every direction. Only putting energy in on the thing that matters most to us. So we'll talk more about that in a little bit in part two. We clean up our thinking. We have to clean up the beliefs that we hear ourselves saying and the ones that are under the surface that are holding us back from the vision we're trying to create. Because our actions, the actions that we take and the things that we don't do will always be aligned with what we believe to be true. Our thoughts lead to our emotions, our behavior, and the results that we have in our life. And then we go around collecting evidence of those things that we already believe. So our job is to work with a coach or work with the tools that I share on this podcast to change what we believe so that it lines up with a future that we're creating. Then we gotta imagine what we've never seen before. We have to have a future focus, even though there's no example of it out there in the world to focus on yet. We can't have an example of our idea exactly as we want it to be in the world before it exists. So we have to be really clear on that vision and believe in the after before we have evidence of it. And it will become real. I have done it over and over and over again. But we have to have a crystal clear vision and then we train our subconscious. Our brain literally filters out possibilities, opportunities, conversations that don't match our belief system. It does that through unconscious bias. So we have to work with our unconscious through coaching with an expert, through self-hypnosis or vivid visualization and train our brain to recognize the possibilities, opportunities, and actions that we can take to get us where we want to go. And we can do that through self-hypnosis and visualization. Okay, we have to clean up our emotions, understand how to be willing to feel anything and understand how to do that. Work with a coach to process our emotions so that we can get more and more comfortable feeling whatever we need to feel as we throw ourselves out into the world. We have to get really clear on what we actually want. We do that by separating out all those beliefs in our head and really separate out what we've been taught to believe from what we want to believe. And that's how we get really clear on what we want. So if you aren't with a coach and you don't want to work with a coach, you can do that. All these steps, you can do this number one step, which is cleaning up your interior world, your mindset, using vivid imagination and hypnosis, cleaning up your emotions, focusing on the future. You can use all the free tools in this podcast to do that. Every one of the things I described in this alignment process are episodes in this podcast. So use them. You can do it. Decide that you're gonna learn these tools and practice them every day, and then do it. And if you are ready for a coach, reach out or find somebody out there. Okay, that's the first thing is work with someone to clear up your energy, your mindset, your emotions, all of it that we just talked about. Number two, use the process that innovators use to turn what you want into reality. Make your idea into a real thing. So after working with the Stanford Dschool and thousands of educators, kids, school systems, the organization that I used to work with had created tons of change makers out there in the world that knew how to turn an idea into a real thing. After doing that for 15 years, I combined that simple, easy process with all of my knowledge and training in what the conscious and unconscious mind does as we try to make ideas real. So I turned that into a very simple system where you envision the thing you're trying to create, you iterate forward until it's real, you do some obstacle work, milestone in action planning, and it's all just a simple, easy, one-stop shop map. You lay out the work and then you do it until it's done. And you focus on doing it in a way that gives you energy so that your energy is not going out in 50 different directions, but you're focusing all of it on your priority. One main priority with maybe one or two additional personal things that are important to you physical habits, relationship goals. And then you just get yourself into action every single day. Work your plan. Know how to use your time so it feels like there's always plenty of time. So that's step two. Use a process. Step one is get a coach to help you clean up your mind. Number two is work your process. That process of having a plan, working it, and iterating, taking aligned action every single day. And the third step, as a woman who's making my ideas real, is to be in the company of women. The third step is to stay in groups of high vibration women leaders. Put yourself in high-level groups that feel like you don't really belong there yet, and you will rise to the level of the group. I cannot tell you enough what a game changer this is. I have done it time and time and time again. At first, it can feel intimidating, like you're in a pool of peers who are beyond you, and then you slowly just feel yourself rising to meet them. They keep you in an energy that pulls you to your highest best self, your cleanest, clearest, most amazing self. And so you don't always have to just create that energy yourself. You don't have to depend on only you to stay at your best. You have a community of peers that keep you accountable, keep you aligned with your vision. And what that does is it makes you 95% more likely to actually achieve your goals. When you have a group that is your accountability system where you're showing up as your authentic self to that group. Those are the three things. Work with a coach, work the process that innovators use, making an idea and a real thing, and be in the company of high vibration women or peers. The three steps. It's what I teach in the Moxie Mastermind. It's the recipe I've used to go from burned out and broke to building a million-dollar business with so much more time for my family and myself. It's how I've transformed my body, my finances, my relationships. It's why I spent the last two weeks playing in the snow with my family. And then one day later flying to work with women CEOs on a beach in Costa Rica. You can create anything by doing these three things. So if you have any questions about which podcast to listen to, if you want to do this work on your own, reach out. If you want suggestions about what type of coach, I know a lot of coaches could be the right one for you. I highly recommend that you work with someone to help you clean up your mind. None of us can see the inside of our own mind. I always have a coach. And if you would like to come into the Bloom Room or the Moxie Mastermind, both of those spaces are open right now. So come and join us there. But no matter what you do, belief in the vision for what you are. Creating in the world is the number one most important thing to keep you focused every single day. Whether you're failing or succeeding, whether people get your idea, whether they don't, whether you feel grumpy and out of sorts, or whether you're having like a high vibration day, these are the things that you can do to make that idea real, to keep your belief in your idea strong. Use the tools to manage your mind and your emotions. Have an accountability system. Have a plan for your goals. Turn them into smart goals, make them real. With these three things, you can make any idea real. I've seen it, I've done it. You got this. And that's what I've got for you this week. I will see you next week. If you like what you're hearing on the podcast, you gotta come and join us in the Bloom Room. This is a year-round membership where we take all of these concepts and we apply them to real life in a community where we have each other's backs and we bring out the best in each other. We're all there to make our ideas real. One idea at a time.