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Business Blasphemy
Sarah Khan, Business Advisor and Leadership Consultant, is calling B.S. on the hustle-focused status quo of business and entrepreneurship, and getting real about what it takes to grow a business or career and NOT become a statistic. In each episode, Sarah helps navigate the rampant B.S. that permeates business strategy, marketing, operations, and mindset that has business owners hustling and pivoting themselves into burnout. She cuts through the noise and gives you guidance on how to view the status quo with a more discerning eye. If you're ready for success without the B.S., buckle up for hard truths, fun rants, terrible puns and (more than) the occasional curse word.
Business Blasphemy
EP108: They Didn't Like Jesus Either: Identity, Authority, and Success with Natalie Bullen
In this no-holds-barred conversation, Sarah sits down with Natalie Bullen of Unapologetic Wealth to dismantle the myths about success, entrepreneurship, and identity.
Together, they expose why most entrepreneurs are stuck chasing strategies instead of building real wealth, why belief — not tactics — determines success, and why trying to be liked is the fastest way to stay invisible.
Natalie shares her rise from reluctant entrepreneur to authority and wealth strategist, the brutal truths about entrepreneurship nobody wants to admit, and how to finally stop living for validation. This is not just an episode — it’s a full masterclass in radical self-leadership and decisive action.
Guest Bio:
Natalie Bullen is a Wealth Identity and Authority Coach for high-earning entrepreneurs and affluent professionals. As the founder of Unapologetic Wealth, she helps ambitious women move beyond revenue milestones into true wealth, influence, and power. Her work challenges outdated financial narratives and equips first-generation wealth builders to think, decide, and live like the wealthy women they are becoming.
Connect with Natalie:
- www.unapologeticwealth.com
- www.unapologeticwealth.com/cashmere-club
- https://www.facebook.com/Ladylyricist06
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Follow me on LinkedIn for more no-nonsense advice on leading with power and purpose.
And if you’re ready to dive even deeper, grab a copy of my book Bite-Sized Blasphemy and ignite your inner fire to do life and business your way.
The Business Blasphemy Podcast is sponsored by Corporate Rehab® Strategic Consulting.
Welcome to the Business Blasphemy Podcast, where we question the sacred truths of the online business space and the reverence with which they're held. I'm your host, sarah Khan speaker, strategic consultant and BS busting badass. Join me each week as we challenge the norms, trends and overall bullshit status quo of entrepreneurship to uncover what it really takes to build the business that you want to build in a way that honors you, your life and your vision for what's possible, and maybe piss off a few gurus along the way. So if you're ready to commit business blasphemy, let's do it. Hello, hello, blasphemers, you are in for a fucking treat, my friends. We have today Natalie Bullen, the one and only Nat Bullen. She's here. We're going to talk some shit, because you know that's what we do, but I'm going to let her introduce herself and then we're going to dive right into it, because I already know she has a ton to say. So, nat, welcome to the podcast.
Speaker 2:Hello, I am so excited. This is going to be fun. It's going to be fun. Yes, I am a accidental entrepreneur. I own Unapologetic Wealth. I'm a recovering sales coach and now I actually admit what I really do for people, which is helping them step into their authority not just being an expert, but being an authority so that they can achieve the wealth that they want. Truthfully, you want to be rich. If you're listening to this, you want more money, you want more time off, you want stocks or investments or bonds or to travel the world. You want something you don't presently have and you think it's because you don't have the right strategy, you don't have enough team, you don't charge enough money, but if you truly believe that success was inevitable for you, you would do different things, and those different things are what would generate the success that you say that you want. So it's really an identity shift that I provide for people, more than coaching or consulting or funnels, and that has taken me a long time to admit. So thank you for asking.
Speaker 1:I appreciate that because you know what I see so much in what you've just said in terms of my own journey. Right, because I started in operations, I started with strategy strategic operations right, because I started in operations, I started with strategy. Yeah, strategic operations right, like let's help people build the back end. And there are so many people that I worked with where I ended up having to like kind of be for lack of a better word their conciliary Like this look, we need to talk, we need to have a conversation. Every single day was a conversation about you're not doing the right things. Like I can't operationalize your business for success until you're doing the things that you need to be doing. And it's interesting how many people avoid doing the right things. The marketing in this space is so, so good.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's easier to market to disempowered newbies who believe that they're one funnel away, like if we look at the people who are successful and popular in the area. That's what they do. They take people who don't know anything and they tell them that they know everything and then, by staying tethered to this everlasting communication source, that one day they will be the thing. But it's not true, and you can tell it's not true, because if you ask someone a question, like if you knew you couldn't fail, what would you do? It is always something different than what they're doing right now. Yes, yeah, so like there's a super easy litmus test for am I performing at my highest level? It's literally one question, and if your answer is different than what you're doing now, then you've got an identity shift to make. But that is not as compelling to sell as oh, you just need one tactic, one tweak, one funnel, one new email, one new system, and then you're going to be a multimillionaire. That feels much less scary than you are going to have to change the fiber of your being.
Speaker 1:You hit the nail on the head right Everyone wants the two emails. All you need is two nine-word emails and you can make a million dollars in your next sale or you know, just posting fucking income statements and whatever right, Like it's so easy to get distracted in this space. Okay, I want to. I want to pause for a second. I want to backtrack a little bit. Reluctant entrepreneur, I relate to that. Tell me how you ended up coming to entrepreneurship, why reluctant?
Speaker 2:COVID, had there not been a pandemic, I would absolutely not be an entrepreneur. I guess being a know-it-all and talking too much was probably part of the problem. Yeah, those qualities didn't help me. You know, when COVID hit, I was working two jobs. So Black people are 12% of the population, but we carry 70 percent of student loan debt, not 17, 70, 70. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so I was working a part time job to pay my twelve hundred dollar student loan payment, even though I had a full time job at the bank and NBA and securities licenses. So when COVID hit, they laid me off my part-time job because they laid off all the part-timers, and I was like, well, that sucks, because that's how I pay my student loan payment. You know, even though I've never had a job that actually required a degree and we tell ourselves that college is not a scam, felt kind of scammy over here because I pay more than my mortgage and car note combined in student loan payment.
Speaker 2:So I said, well, I kind of went from working 60 hours a week, 40 hours at the bank, 20 hours part time, to working like one week on at the bank, one week off. We had like a team A and a team B so in case team A caught COVID, the whole branch wouldn't have to shut down. So I was working 60, 70 hours a week, 20 hours a week. I was like this is uncomfortable, I need to fill my time with something. And it just so happened that Clubhouse was around and I had been doing free financial literacy seminars in the community. I've been on TV for them.
Speaker 2:And when the school shut down and the churches shut down and the jobs shut down, who wants a financial literacy presenter? So I said, well, I'll just go online and I'll just disseminate the information. And people were like can you coach me? You could change my life, can you coach me? I'm like I don't really want to. They're like but no, but you have to. I'm begging you. I'm on bended knee with tears in my eyes, I beg, I beg and I'm like I guess so yeah, and I've always just taken it too far. I've always just taken it too far, like it started off with just I'm going to have one offer on the side, it's not a problem. And then suddenly I was quitting my job and then I was like, well, I'm only going to have like private clients. And then suddenly we were launching like a group.
Speaker 2:And then I was like well, we're only going to be online and then suddenly always I'm like a less like a non-insane kanye, like there's always another thing, it's like just one more step, like one day. It like I fully believe that one day I'll wake up a billionaire with the same feeling like, yeah, we just took it too far. We bought an nhl team, we bought like antarctica.
Speaker 1:It's like every day is the morning after right.
Speaker 2:Yeah, like every day, I wake up and I'm like whoa, that escalated fast. Well, I'm really not clear how I have a community that already has like 20 people in it. Like that's very confusing, so okay.
Speaker 2:From a person who doesn't want a community right, from a person who doesn't run free Facebook groups to a person who was supposed to be leaving facebook, like I don't, I don't understand how any of it happens. It's. It's almost like an out-of-body, like you levitate above your real self and you see yourself doing shit and you're like, hey self, what you got going on down there and self is like, oh, don't worry, it's totally aligned with your plans and beliefs, it's fine, yeah. And then it like creates a thing and I'm like that's not aligned with our beliefs and it's like well, it's built now and we've already sold it, so maybe you should align it to your beliefs. Like maybe you should. It's. I just I don't know. I don't know which one is the, the little devil on the shoulder and which one's the little angel on the shoulder, because they both both seem to like I don't know hopscotch they're both holding like ends of a jump rope and, like myself, is like jumping through the rope.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's like I can skip rope. I can't double dutch. I don't know what you guys are doing right Now. You said something really interesting about a line so things are happening and they're not aligned with your beliefs, but you can align them with your beliefs, and that I mean that right there, the number of people who burn stuff down, I mean, and this is I mean, this is something that we all talk about. Right, if it doesn't align with your beliefs, don't do it. But that's such an interesting perspective shift.
Speaker 1:If something doesn't align with your beliefs, how do you make it align with your beliefs? Like, so, the Facebook group. So here's the backstory y'all. I woke up one morning and I had an invitation from Natalie Bullen to join her Facebook community and I was like Natalie doesn't usually. I mean, in fact, the week prior, natalie had emailed or sent me a message to tell me that the group that I had opened for my summit was spamming people on a daily basis with invites. And that's a Facebook glitch, because everybody knows that's not something I do not pitch, slap in the DMs or at all.
Speaker 2:Which is why I reached out to you, because most people who have been doing that I had been unfriending and blocking, but because it was you, I said this doesn't seem right, this doesn't seem like her and maybe there actually is something going on.
Speaker 1:And there was, and that's why.
Speaker 2:I was like, hey, do you know about this? And you're like uh, never, no.
Speaker 1:So I ended up closing that group and then going back and opening another one and making sure that the settings aligned with. You know, do not, please, do not, spam people invitations. So anyway, it was an inconvenience but it aligns with what I do. That's what I did. So I wake up one morning to my surprise there's an invitation for a Facebook group from Natalie Bullen. I did not even think twice. I'm like, yeah, of course I'll join it. And I learned later on that was never your intention. Like you did not want to have this group. Like you woke up one morning and basically there were like thousands of people in this group.
Speaker 2:Oh, it was a horrible because I I was in a group program run by a tyrant who we don't talk about because she's litigious, and I got kicked out.
Speaker 2:And in that particular program they lump people by revenue level and these particular women who were in that group were people I was mentoring for free. They were at the lowest revenue level of the people in this particular program. So these were not prospects. Most of them did not even make the kind of revenue or run the kind of business where they would qualify or even need my services. But I knew that they weren't going to get support from that group where the tyrant was running it. So, at the goodness of my heart, I became an admin in this particular group of people and unfortunately, because Facebook deprioritizes groups, over time you stop getting reach. So even though I would go live and ask them how they were doing and try to check in, nobody would respond back. And over time you just kind of forget about it because if they don't respond, I don't show up, they don't see the posts posts I mean. So there was proprietary information from the main group in that channel. There were about 150 women I was mentoring, there were two other admins and this is the group that facebook decides to send thousands of invites to in the middle of the night. Now I have a facebook group called nat'ss it's all the people who've ever paid me before. Why the fuck couldn't it have blew up that group? That would have been the perfect group to fill full of people, because that group was already a promotional group where I would go to say, hey, your favorite coach is back and I have an offer. If you want to get back in the saddle again with UW, here's how you can pay me offer. If you want to get back in the saddle again with UW, here's how you can pay me. I'm not to brag, but imagine having the kind of clout where you can literally put all of your buyers in a group and say, hey, group of buyers, here's that thing I'm selling now. And they'd be like, oh, I can't wait to buy it. Why would you not fill up that group? Why would that not be the group? It's just a lot. And so, yeah, I woke up to it. But I wouldn't even say that making the offer fit your beliefs, because you can't shift your belief system like that. You'll tear your nervous system up.
Speaker 2:Trying to do that, I think a bigger thing for me is where am I going? So there's a version of you that makes sense for what you have now. If you're middle class, if you pay yourself 50K a year from your business, there's a version of you that allows that to happen. That version is OK with your level of debt. That version is OK with the number of hours. That version accepts that you might need to buy generic paper towels or that you might need to do your own hair dye.
Speaker 2:There's a version of you that aligns with your socioeconomic status, with the business that you have, with the spouse that you have, with the friends that you have. But if you're like me and you see your future as vastly different than your present, the version of you right now can't go with you into that new place. The version of Natalie that is a billionaire that owns part of an NBA team or part of an NFL team, that has 200 doors of real estate and millions of dollars of stock that person and this person you're talking to cannot coexist. This version of Natalie has to die. That's the part that people don't get. They cling on to who they are now and they build offers for where they are now and they hire for who they are now and they invest for who they are now. Well, all that does is get you more of what you are now.
Speaker 1:What you already have yeah.
Speaker 2:That's it. You're just optimizing what you have and most of us are working on our growth systems, not our wealth systems. For instance, let's say I decide that I want to be a multimillionaire and that I want to invest in some hedge fund. Well, maybe step one is becoming an accredited investor. Like, maybe I should do some research. How do you invest in a hedge fund? And then you look and you go, oh, you got to be really rich. How rich do you have to be Accredited investor? How do you become an accredited investor?
Speaker 2:200,000 personal income, 300,000 household income, blah, blah, blah. I'm an accredited investor because I hold securities licenses. So I kind of got to leapfrog the income requirement. But even if I didn't, if I was reading it as a lay person 200K. So then you're like, how do I pay myself 200K? Huh, I guess my business needs to do 600, 700, 800k.
Speaker 2:Maybe you need to ask your bookkeeper, maybe you ask your accountant. Maybe you realize I have no financial management and I need to start hiring someone to help me with my money. So then you go online and go, hey, who's a good bookkeeper? What's the difference between a bookkeeper and a CFO? And then you hire this person and you say how much do I need to make revenue to pay myself 200,000 so I can be an accredited investor and start getting in bed with some of these deals? And they might say well, you only pay yourself 50K a year and your business makes like 300. You probably could pay yourself 75. And then maybe, if your business did 700,000, you could pay yourself 200. So then it becomes how do we make 700,000? So then you need to assess what are the price points, how many leads. You see how this is logical.
Speaker 2:But it starts from the belief that I'm already that rich ass person. Yeah, I believe that all I'm destined for is this my brain is not going to take me down the line of thought that I just walked you through. That's the issue that most people have. They say I want to learn how to invest and they say that shit. Every year I make a post. It's on autopilot every year.
Speaker 2:What do you wish you knew about money? The number one answer is always invest in the stock market and Pete. The same people say that every year. Why don't those people ever hire a financial planner? This is a real question. Like you can get a financial plan for between one and $3,000. These are people who are going on trips, buying cars, buying shoes, buying clothes, getting tax refunds. Maybe You're telling me they've never had $3,000 to be able to get a financial plan, or even a few hundred to meet with a financial planner one time, or even go down to the bank and talk to a financial advisor or ask chat. There's nothing they could do Every year? The only answer is I want to learn how to invest.
Speaker 1:Go on Google. I don't understand how we have such a wealth of information at our fingertips and yet so many people do not take advantage of that. I mean, if nothing else, they don't have the belief they don't have the belief.
Speaker 2:The belief is the issue, it's not the information. This is why I also warn entrepreneurs against trying to position information as the Holy grail. You're going to buy my program and you're going to get informed. Information does nothing. People have to believe that that information will work for them. In order for you to be confident enough to open a brokerage account and execute a trade, you have to have a belief that what you do works for the greater good, that, even if you don't really know how the stock market works, that it's better for you to get involved and try than for you to do nothing. Yeah, you got to have a strong try than for you to do nothing. Yeah, you got to have a strong belief system, and most of us do not. We've never been taught how to be more resilient.
Speaker 2:A lot of people only feel good about themselves when good things happen to them. They only feel good about themselves when they're flush with cash. Most people have their net worth and their self-worth fused together like Siamese twins, yeah, so when something bad happens, they feel like bad people. They conflate that thing. So you're not going to try new stuff if your identity is attached to winning, if you feel like a failure. When something doesn't go well, then why would you ever try anything new? I don't think everything I touch will work, but I think that enough will work for me to keep going Absolutely.
Speaker 1:I want to talk about the identity piece a little bit, because you mentioned something before we started recording. We were talking about how Natalie paid me the absolute mother of all compliments and said that I'm one of her favorite people on the internet, which you know. I take that to heart because the fact of the matter is and you all know this if you've been following me for a while a lot of people do not like me. A lot of people do not like how I show up. I constantly have mindset coaches that I did not give any sort of permission to connect with me about telling me that my mindset is suffering, that I'm a negative person, that you're never going to have clients because you're constantly tearing people down. I've had so many shade posts written about posts that I've written like it's absolutely bananas.
Speaker 1:So, when somebody says this to me, it means a lot. And then we joked about the fact that people hate us.
Speaker 2:And I I'm not joking, no no, no, we're not.
Speaker 1:Let the guests be clear.
Speaker 2:Natalie is not joking.
Speaker 1:But I want to talk about that because I think that this is really important, because it speaks to identity. It speaks to, like you also mentioned, about you know, having built this clout that you can just drop into a group of people that you've collected and say, here's the thing, and people will buy it. There are so many people chasing virality and calling themselves fucking thought leaders and all of this, all of this nonsense. First of all, what did you do to build this, this clout, this credibility? I mean, I think I know the answer, but I'd like people to hear it from you. And why is it actually kind of a good thing for people not to like you?
Speaker 2:because that's scary for people.
Speaker 2:I don't know why.
Speaker 2:I don't know why. I don't know why my mother told me that I would not be liked because I was smarter than people. My mom told me that my teachers wouldn't like me because I would be smarter than them. That's what my mom sent me to kindergarten with Five. She put me in public school and deferred not behave, not take your nap. My mom taught me that people won't like you because they are jealous of you. Adults will be jealous of your intellect. Imagine sitting in a five-year-old school with something like that. So like I just got to give Annie Fleming all the credit. I just got to give my mom a credit for like, putting that out there for me. And, sure enough, my first grade teacher was very intimidated by me. It was a whole thing. So she gave me that advice right in time. My mom is super churchy, my mom's very religious. My mom loves God. Don't say nothing about big God over there with Annie. Annie, don't play that right. But she told me that they crucified Jesus, as if to say if Jesus ain't good enough for people, certainly you won't be. So that's how I grew up. I grew up knowing if they ain't like Jesus, they not going to like me. They live. Jesus came to save your soul and you hung him on a cross by his, by his hands with some nails.
Speaker 2:I don't think anyone is universally liked. I don't like Beyonce I'm sure I'm one of the only people in the world that can say that but everybody don't like everything. That's just. It's not going to work that way. Being universally liked is impossible, just like perfection is impossible. And so I have a lot of ego. I actually don't like to attempt things that aren't possible. I don't mind attempting things that are difficult, but I don't want to attempt anything that is impossible, and it is impossible to please everybody. That is not real. So that's not something that I'm going to invest any of my time in. I'm not going to invest even one minute of my day trying to be liked by everyone. I think that a lot of times we focus on what we don't want. You know, my stepfather was an EMT. He's still with us, he just is retired. Want. You know, my stepfather was an EMT. He's still with us, he just is retired.
Speaker 2:And when I started driving, he asked me what do you think is the most dangerous place at the scene of an accident? I said being in the accident, being one of the two or three cars that was involved in the accident, and he said, no, the most dangerous place to be is passing the accident. I said, well, that doesn't make any sense. They're in the ditch, they might be dead. I'm driving by it. How could I be in more danger than them? He said because people rubberneck when the accident's off in the ditch. You take your eyes off the road and look in the ditch and guess what happens when you focus on the ditch, you end up in the ditch right with them. Guess what happens when you focus on the ditch you end up in the ditch right with them, and the person who rubbernecks is more likely to die at the scene than the people in the original wreck.
Speaker 2:So a lot of us spend a lot of time focusing on what we don't want. We don't want people to dislike us, we don't want this post to not get likes, we don't want people to not pay us. So we're so focused on the negative outcome that we're trying to avoid we don't recognize. You're putting focus. Avoiding something takes focus. It takes focus to avoid an outcome. You have to be actively thinking about that outcome over there to not fall into it, correct it, correct. So what we don't recognize is when you wake up in the morning and go no-transcript. Wake up and say I want to be wealthy, focus on the wealth, don't focus on not being broke. So when you focus on not being disliked, you lose power, because now the people you could have impacted, who could have liked, you, could have loved you don't even know you exist because you spend all your time trying to water down your message to not be disliked.
Speaker 2:I spend so much time on the good shit I don't have time for anything else. I have a paid community now. I have private clients. I have a live event in the fall which I don't know why everyone is not going to be at. Frankly, I have a merchandise store now, which is new for me. I'm writing a book. We're launching the public podcast. We're launching a paid newsletter. I'm really excited about that book. We're launching the public podcast. We're launching a paid newsletter. I'm really excited about that one. We're pulling content down off Facebook and kind of moving and diversifying. In short, I have so much success to focus on.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I don't have time for low level thoughts like what if someone doesn't like me? Like that just can't meet. Imagine having a meeting with yourself and the purpose of the meeting is people not liking you. That's essentially what you're doing when you focus on things like that. I just met with my project manager today. We talked about my website. We talked about the live event. We talked about onboarding for my new program. We talked about the circle community. We talked about my email. We talked about the circle community, we talked about my email. We talked about some of our outstanding projects and we ran late. That's why I was late here today. We had so much to talk about and, frankly, I probably, after this call, need to get back on the phone with her and finish the meeting, because we probably got another hour worth of stuff important stuff that moves the needle for UW to talk about. I just can't imagine spending even one minute of that meeting going.
Speaker 1:How do we get people to like us?
Speaker 2:what if it doesn't work? What if people don't buy it? What if it's not the right price? What if? None of that is important. The only thing that's important is my mission getting fulfilled, putting more money in the hands of good people who run ethical businesses. That's why God put me here to eradicate poverty and middle classness for women, especially women of color, especially black women. So how could somebody's external validation be more important than my mission? How could somebody's external validation be more important than my mission? How could somebody's opinion about me matter to any degree? I just feel like people not involved with their mission enough. I just feel like people not in love enough with their craft. I think people just not selfish enough, because I'm just too damn selfish, thinking about what I came here to do, to be worried about what you think about what I'm doing.
Speaker 1:When did your mission become clear to you? Like, when did that? When did that belief kind of form in you that this is why I was put on this earth?
Speaker 2:Cause I can hear the conviction you know, I was probably seven or eight Whenever I read the census. So I was probably seven or eight and read the census that came out and that census said that black people were the poorest race in the United States. Every census since then has said the same thing. They might as well call it the consensus, because we are consistently at the bottom. And I asked my mom, why are black people poor? And she said who told you that? And I said well, it's in this census. It says that we make less money than everybody else. And I don't understand that, mommy, because you work and daddy works and we don't seem poor.
Speaker 2:And I decided that before I die, somehow the statistics about black people were going to be different than when I was born. I haven't fully figured all of it out yet, but I'm going to do 100 people's worth of work in this space. Most people die and they've done zero people's worth of work towards their mission. They say they care about these missions, but a lot of times when you meet people and say, well, what are you actually doing to give back to this cause that you say, that you love so dearly, they're not really taking a lot of action. They love thoughts and prayers and stuff. Yeah, I want to do a hundred people's worth of work in the missions that I have. Like. This is the groundwork getting myself really financially realized and being a multimillionaire. That's, that's pillar one. And pillar two is giving back micro grants, mentorship, launching the nonprofit. And then three is the philanthropy. You know, my father spent many years homeless. He's a Vietnam vet. He had some substance abuse issues and the US government threw him away and I don't like that. So I really want to have, you know, buses that go around and do like mobile clothes washing, mobile haircuts. I want to have an initiative to help people get their driver's licenses back, get their identification back, so they can get jobs. If they want to get jobs, have tiny home communities. That's big vision because I have the capacity.
Speaker 2:If you are gifted, if you are smarter than average, prove it. Smart people like to prove that they're smart. They like to write books and they like to talk real talk and they like to use, you know, TI level words. They want to sound like a thesaurus. Prove it in your action. If you really are smarter than other people, then you should bear more fruit. So I feel like the fruit at the end of my life will tell just how smart I actually was. Was I smart or was I just ego driven? And there is a difference.
Speaker 1:There's a huge difference. I think a lot of people, I mean you, say, get clear. And I don't think a lot of people have a mission. I don't think I think they have a lot of. It'd be nice if, but they don't have a clear cut mission of like no, this is the change, this is the change I want to see. No, you absolutely do.
Speaker 2:I don't care what, in the short term, the things that we complain about. This person didn't make good on their payment plan. This live event didn't sell as many tickets as we wanted. In the grand scheme of things, none of that really matters. What matters is continuing to do the thing and putting yourself out there. You can accelerate any goal if you're willing to do the uncomfortable change. And experts in particular particular, they have these fancy frameworks and systems and venn diagrams have trademarked all of it. You know what I'm talking about.
Speaker 2:How often do you install your system on your own self? I do that on myself all the time, yeah, yeah, so that I know where my upper limit is and I know where my, my belief is. I know where my growth edge is. All the time it's like um, the new jumanji movie, um, yeah, and like they only got the next step. So they didn't see the whole map, they only saw the, the obstacle they were up against at that time a lot of people trying to wait to get a whole map and see what's all coming. You, you just got to take one step, yeah.
Speaker 1:Just that's all you can take? You can't, you cannot plan for 20 steps down the road, but that's what people try to do.
Speaker 2:That's why people who've never made a sale hire eight figure coaches. Tell you how many people have gotten in my DMs trying to run masterclasses and webinars and run ads when they've never served even one private client? Why are you working with this coach who has these very advanced systems that require a huge audience, a huge marketing budget, 10 team members, and you know you have none of that.
Speaker 1:people want to skip all the steps and there's because they don't want to do the uncomfortable work of having to, like you said, shift their belief in their identity.
Speaker 2:Nobody does, nobody does. No one wants to do uncomfortable work, but the ones who are making a difference are the ones who are doing it.
Speaker 1:They suck it up and they do it Right Agreed. I think that's the big difference that people don't understand. They hear people like you talking. They hear people like you talking and they're like well, you know what, I can just copy what they do, or I can jump on the bandwagon or jump on the coattails of this person or that person, but they're not sitting down and understanding like you have to have a purpose. Your purpose cannot be dictated by somebody else and you have to be so laser focused on that purpose that everything else is irrelevant. But there are not enough people who are that convicted in anything, let alone business, or purpose or mission. They're just not convicted enough. They want the bare minimum because it keeps them comfortable, but then they also want the privilege of complaining about the fact that that's all they have.
Speaker 2:I don't get that. I mean you're right. I just I don don't know. I don't think you can shortcut the work. No, that's my belief system. So because that's my belief system, I don't really try to shortcut the work. I also need my beliefs to be rooted. In fact, I've never met a successful person who has sidestepped doing all the work. So I actually don't believe it's possible and my lived experience continues to reinforce that it's not possible.
Speaker 1:So well, that's why I don't like language around short cutting and collapsing timelines and things like that, because I think it gives a false impression of what is possible. Right, I just, I mean.
Speaker 2:I think there's a level where that makes sense, like right now having served over a thousand clients, having had 12 launches coming in on, we're closing in on 1.5 million cumulative revenue. Cumulative, that was not one year. I'm not a seven-figure business owner. Let's not lie on the internet People like to lie has to be an all-in-one year for you to be able to say that. Has to be one year, one fiscal year or one calendar year, you pick. But now if people say I could give you a shortcut, it's not completely a lie because I have enough data for a statistician type person to be able to say well, actually, natalie, you don't need five steps to sell this. You've already sold it eight times and you've proven that really, this step and this step were the ones that kind of moved the needle. So maybe you don't need five steps to sell this. You've already sold it eight times and you've proven that really, this step and this step were the ones that kind of moved the needle. So maybe you don't need that master class.
Speaker 1:That's not a shortcut though. That's clarity. That's like a clear and direct path. That's not shortcut. Shortcut is like you don't have to do these things because you don't like them you have to.
Speaker 2:You have to at least once, twice, three or four times if, because you have to have data, and that's what's so interesting. Let me put it this way if you're not gonna have data, then just go full woo and admit that. You just do shit from your gut and you just figure it out as you go along. But you can't do both. It's the lie about both that bothers me the most. It's the well. I kind of trust my gut when I don't have data. Now you see why I refuse to be a business coach anymore.
Speaker 2:My private coaching is moving to wealth, identity and authority. Only. Only you have to have already made money. You have to already be selling something. Your marketing and systems are dialed in. You don't need me to help you with ops or calendars or anything. You need to become the type of person who makes the uncomfortable change to grow your business period. That's what my private coaching is going to be, because sales coaching attracts people who have no sales and business coaching attracts people with no business. Now, that's not an absolute. There are business coaches who serve real people, but they don't flock to me.
Speaker 2:Let me tell you, I get the want-a-preneurs who are, who are just like, hey, I've never sold anything at all. Can you help me? Or like asking questions that are really strange, like I'll have people say what should the title of my workshop be, and they'll give me four titles that are unrelated to each other. So it's not like a semantics, it's like the topic, and I'm like I don't know what's the outcome of the programming, because the title needs to correlate to the programming. Well, I don't know, I haven't set up the programming yet. Uh, okay, well, what is the upsell? Like, what is when they come to the master class, you're gonna sell them something. What is that? Well, I don't know. I'm kind of working through that too. Then why are we starting at the title? Like it's the complete wrong thing to try to pick, you don't? I'm writing a book. It has kind of a working gist, but the title of this book is not going to be revealed until the book is written.
Speaker 2:Yeah, when the book is written as a whole and it is edited for clarity and we read it front to end, then certain names will be this could work and certain names will be absolutely not because of the content. Why would you start with the name? It's just like people with those stupid acronyms they call frameworks. They'll be like a money person, so they want the framework to be the wealth framework w-e-a-l-t-h. So they try to put some like complicated shit together, the like working everything all together, lima, tango, hero method, like they try to make the acronym work and you could tell they started with the acronym and tried to shoehorn the thing. But it's the method. The method is more important than the acronym and you could tell.
Speaker 2:That's why I don't listen to nikki minaj anymore. You can hear her set up her punch line three lines early because she will say something that doesn't make any sense. You can tell she's trying to work into tyrant because she's saying crazy stuff like hydrant, vibrant. Look at my hair is pink, is vibrant, I squirt like a hydrant. You're a tyrant. And it's like girl. We saw that coming like four lines ago because you've been saying really weird shit at the end of every line for like two stanzas. We get it.
Speaker 2:You could tell when people were trying to back into something. You actually don't have to do that. Your, your, your framework doesn't have to be an acronym. Yeah, it doesn't have to be cute, buttoned up, polished thing and I think people get so stuck on that that they lose sight of the fact that this is supposed to be helpful and logical for the right person. Yeah, not necessarily flashy or fancy. You know, money coach, oh, here's my money method. Oh dear, here we go. What does the o stand for? Opulence, occlusive operations. Because that they wanted the word money.
Speaker 1:Because they felt like the marketing is always the focus. The marketing has always been the focus. There are too many business owners who are actually just marketing.
Speaker 2:They're trying to be marketers yeah, it's trash I'm a terrible marketer man.
Speaker 2:I don't care what anybody says, I tell the truth too much. I just want to tell the truth. Okay, and sales is more fun than marketing, anyway, in my opinion. I like to actually conversation going. I like to actually collect the monies. You know what I mean. So for me, um, marketing I won't say it's a necessary evil because that makes it sound unpleasant. I actually really like marketing my own stuff. But to me, a great marketing kind of eliminates sales and great product kind of eliminates marketing.
Speaker 2:And if you don't believe me, ask yourself how ChatGPT marketed itself to you. What ad did you see? What did ChatGPT do to get you? Nothing? Other people sold you on using chat gpt. They went on facebook and they raved about how great it was and you downloaded it and you signed up for it and you paid for it. That's what happened. They did zero to market to you or sell to you, because they didn't have to, because the product was great.
Speaker 2:So if you make the product great, half of your job is already. Cashmere club is a great product. I'm not going to beg people to get in it or stay in it, because it already has a great value proposition. As a matter of fact, I think people are going to tell other people about it. I think that my job is going to be done once I get this cohort. I mean, obviously it'll exist and we'll have to treat our people well. But if you have to, I tell people.
Speaker 2:If marketing is a nightmare, like not, you don't know how to market. You know how to market and you've spent the money and it's still hard. The product probably needs help. And see people get so involved in this is my baby, this is my project, this is my this and that, and they're so ego driven they build stuff that has no demand. That's the thing I'll never understand as long as I live. Like we don't have time today, but I'll never understand the Natalie. No one wants this, no one asked for this, but I built it anyway. That is so confusing. If you don't have 10 or 15 people who are willing to buy something, why did you make it? But then they blame.
Speaker 1:It's a sales problem. It's a marketing problem. It's a positioning problem. It's a mess. It's none of that. Your product is shit.
Speaker 2:Nobody wants it like it has to solve a problem that people want solved, like I had a client send me these beautiful flowers for my four-year business anniversary and maybe there is a product that is called a pedal keeper and it could be a little skirt that goes around this potted plant that catches the pedals and and sweeps them into the trash can for me. But I don't get flowers enough to buy something whose sole purpose is to sweep pedals off of this desk. I would rather just throw the whole arrangement away eventually because they are flowers. Maybe I will take one rose and I will press it so I can keep it in a book, but the rest I will happily throw away. So maybe it solves a problem, but is it a big enough problem? Is it a common enough problem? Is it an irritating enough problem for a person to pay to fix it? And the answer to that is usually no.
Speaker 2:It's also how people end up in models that they hate. It's why I don't have a traditional membership. I had somebody DM me. You know one of the people who hates me. I told you people hate me. I thought you would never, ever have a community. You're a hypocrite.
Speaker 2:You talk about low ticket memberships and here you go, launching a low ticket membership and I'm like well, first of all, a low ticket membership is $7 a month or $27 a month or maybe even $97 a month. I'm making all my people committed to a year up front, so I don't know how that could be conflated with a low ticket membership. Two, I'm selling it to affluent persons. I don't know very many memberships that are purposely doing that, that are turning people down because of an income level. Most of the memberships that I get targeted will take anybody with a pulse and a paypal. Yeah right, um. And three, if you don't fight churn, you don't have a membership, because churn is the big issue is that people can come and go meet people on national average stay in memberships three months. So even if you make them commit to a quarter, that's the only quarter you're going to get. So it's important for you to recognize that people will harp on what they want to harp on.
Speaker 2:Now, this person is probably a really good person and they probably have a husband and maybe even a child, and they probably run a business that I hope has a mission, vision and value and it might even have some OK marketing. But instead of spending time meeting with their team, investing in the stock market, getting on the treadmill, eating a nutritious meal, getting extra sleep, having sex with their partner, organizing their asana, putting up a new job ad, hiring a business coach, going to therapy. They decided to spend 10 minutes messaging me about something I said I didn't want to do six months ago in a post. I forgot that I wrote yeah, it's not that people can't be successful is that they don't do the work that it takes to be successful. They are so focused on what other people have and what other people do. I told you earlier I'm a non-crazy Kanye. I am laser focused on me. I don't have a lot of time to focus on other people in general. It's just not my vibe. I like me, I love me. I think me is great.
Speaker 2:So as long as those things are true, then that's where I'm going to put my focus, and so I pray for people who are like that, because they never will be successful. They don't have time because if they're messaging me stupid crap like that, they're messaging other people's stupid crap like that. These are the people who want to go back and forth with you on your posts and they want to be argumentative. Go find some business. I actually have a lot of clients. People think I'm around on social media all the time. I haven't been on Facebook day. I probably won't be a meeting with one of my mentees. I'm going to be promoting a speaking engagement. I need to do some recordings for a course and I need to prepare for my calls tomorrow. You know my husband's going to be back in a few hours. I like to greet him at the door. I like to make sure he has lunch. So I really, really really will not have time to argue with people about the super bowl to. I just won't have time and so, like when I, when people do stuff like that, I just I'm like poor little ting ting. They can't be making any money. They have so much time available to them to do things that have no meaning and won't shift their life in any way. If you've ever met me, you know that you're not going to convince me to do anything. That wasn't my idea. So it's a complete waste of time and it also makes you wonder. You know it's part of why I'm moving.
Speaker 2:I won't say I'm leaving social media, but I'm moving away from it. It's the pair of social relationships. People actually think that they know me. They think that their opinion matters. They slide my DMs. I know you said this and I know you said that and I know you said who are you? That's always my first thing. Who are you? Right, content isn't coaching Just because you read my post. That is not equivalent to you know me or I like you or I want to hear from you. Me making a post online is you know and so like. That's part of my inner work I've done on myself.
Speaker 2:Where am I still overgiving and where am I still trying to showcase my value and worth and where am I still performing like a scrappy entrepreneur that's brand new and has to crank out content to get clients? And how can I move into showcasing my methodology and my systems to be able to call in the best client Because I can make money. Making money has never been my problem. Most entrepreneurs, their problem is making money. That's the whole problem. Their business does not make the money that they want it to make and that's the struggle and it's always been the struggle.
Speaker 2:If that's not your struggle, you start to find that you have a lot of time to do something else, cause eventually you're, like you get a little bored, you know so, like for me, it's always making sure that I have a challenge but that I'm not burning myself out. So my brain is always teetering on that edge. It just can't. I just I don't even remember what people post. When people DM me and go, hey, did you like my post? Or I saw that you liked my post I don't even know what posts they're talking about.
Speaker 2:Like I'm so laser focused on me I barely even read other people's stuff. Like I know that sounds so conceited, but I'm trying to hone my craft, I'm trying to get better at this content thing so I can write less content. You know people ask Natalie, why do you post seven times a day? I was lazy and I was shit at writing content. I'm just going to be honest and I knew if I wrote seven posts a day, at least one of them will be great without me even having to try. So now trying to distill down to one or two posts is making me have to be better at writing.
Speaker 2:I can't just fill my timeline with fluff and what I used to do. I used to be like let me just think about this post. Now it's like does this showcase my method? Does this speak to my absolute best buyer? Does this funnel people to something other than my DMs, because my DMs are crazy? Or is this an auntie, nat, hey, this is what you need to do to get your shit together type post? Or is this a rah-rah, sis, boom, bah, get up and make some sales posts, because those aren't really the kind of posts that are going to push my thought leadership to the next. That just fills up my page with crap to where my team can't even find the post that I'm looking for to put in my book.
Speaker 2:The content mountain made my ego feel good, but it wasn't making the impact I need, and it worked for the version of Natalie that existed when she wrote it. It just doesn't work for the version that I am today the best thing you can do as an entrepreneur, if you take one thing from all of my rambling today accept that you will be a new version all the time. Treat yourself like software. Accept that you are software and that you will be a new version all the time. Treat yourself like software. Except that you are software and that you will be going through iteration and that every new version overrides the old one. Yeah, it has to. You can't keep them all. A lot of us want to keep all the old versions. If you're elder, millennial, you've probably got a box with every Apple product you've ever bought. Every iPhone you buy, you keep the box. I know y'all got the boxes. Don't lie, say you don't have them. Override, override, right, like it has to erase and replace the old version.
Speaker 1:Listen, I'm a Gen X, I don't keep no boxes and I immediately get rid of every device, I know, but the millennials are like damn it, she taught me. I do have 20 Apple boxes in my house and they're all empty and I haven't had the device for like six years. Yeah, I know, Exactly right.
Speaker 2:I have the box for the TV that I bought when I was in college. Because I still have that TV. It's like 15 years old. It has the receipt taped to it. I bought it Black Friday in person. Remember when we used to do in-person.
Speaker 1:Black Friday shopping, lining up at three in the morning.
Speaker 2:Yep, yes, I was at Walmart at four in the morning. Thanking God I didn't get trampled. That was me. I was at the back of the pack, though, because I was fat and I already knew, if it came down to any kind of physical altercation, that I was just gonna lose. I have like ridiculous pointy acrylic nails like I could like scratch you, but that's about the athletiest I'm gonna get like I'm not really. Yeah, I'm not. I'm not like I'm strong, but I'm not athletic, and there's definitely a difference. Like athletic requires agility or coordination or hand-eye something. Yeah, I've got none of that. I can kick you really hard. That that I can do so like you have to know your strengths, but that that's the thing. And like, when I meet people and they're like Natalie, I didn't have a mom like you did. What can I do? And I'm like then, be my mom. They're like what do you mean? Be my mom?
Speaker 2:My mom was in constant, unwavering source of positive energy. Be that for yourself. Don't speak anything negative to yourself ever. My mom doesn't. If I call my mom right now and I pick, if I call my mom on this podcast, my mom hey sweetie, hey honey, how is your day? I'm doing well, mom, how are you and she's going to start talking about God and she's going to talk about her day. And if I go, mom, I'm down. You shouldn't be down. You're a child of the most high God. What's wrong? Like my mom has never insulted me, she has never called me out of my name, she's never called me stupid or dumb or ignorant, even when, even when I sinned, even when she was frustrated, even when she was mad, even when she found out I was drinking or out partying or having sex. Like never, ever, have I gotten a cross word from my mother. So I get it. Maybe your mom's not like that, then maybe you need to be your mom. Like, get in programs like positive intelligence that help you rewire your belief system, that negative track in your brain. Like anytime, like journal, anytime you start thinking man, I'm a piece of shit, man, I'm not worth anything. Man, I, I can't do this Journal that I feel like a piece. Like, write it down and then, like, talk to your therapist about, like, who put those things in your mind, because you didn't do it. That's someone else's voice, it's your parents, or the bullies, or your ex-husband. You decide, you decide. Okay, I didn't have an Annie Fleming as a mom, but I can still have that voice in my head because I choose to. You know what I'm saying. Like, I just I'm not saying I don't have privilege, but sometimes you can manufacture privilege. Sometimes you can make your own situation better.
Speaker 2:Jay-z is a billionaire married to arguably one of the most attractive women. I might not like Beyonce's music, but she's hot. Let's be for real. She looks great and she's always looked great. She's been hot 20 years. So Jay-Z was born into projects. I can't say I've really even like been to the projects. Definitely not like big city projects. No, I've never been to the level of projects that he grew up in new york, absolutely not like the projects in alabama are not, because we don't have the gang violence.
Speaker 2:So like no, I've never in my formative years. He was poor. He had to sell drugs. You could argue that I live a very privileged lifestyle compared to sean carter. How was he a billionaire? Because at some point he decided that his identity as a kid in the project selling drugs to help his parent wasn't really the person he was. He realized this is the thing I'm doing. This is not the person I am. So then he decided because I am a mogul, I'm going to start behaving like a mogul instead of behaving like a kid who lives in the projects. And it wasn't overnight, but like it happened.
Speaker 2:So we all have some amount of privilege. Maybe we don't realize it. Some of us have pretty privilege. Some of us have parents who went to college. Some of us have never been poor.
Speaker 2:If you're only, if you've only ever been middle class, you actually have privilege. If you've only ever been middle class, you actually have privilege. Yeah, if you've never missed a meal, you actually have privilege. So, like, use it, use your privilege. Like, yeah, use whatever you've got to get what you want. I'm. I have higher than average intellect. I am privileged.
Speaker 2:Why would I downplay. Why would I be like well, it's not fair for me to be smart because everyone can't be smart, so let me not use my smarts. How would that sound Like? Why wouldn't you use the gift you need to go use your talent or you will lose your talent. So I've never liked the idea that Natalie doesn't have to work for it. Natalie was just born with these perfect genes and these perfect parents and that's why she can do stuff that I can't do. It's like that's, that's a, that's a cop-out man. Yeah, that's a cop-out. I wasn't. I wasn't great. I was a villain. Early y'all are getting like after therapy, natalie, like y'all are getting a Natalie worth knowing. I was a mean child okay, I was. I was a snarky oh my God. And in college I was intolerable. I am a person worth knowing. Now, I was not always. So I think it's easy for us to tell ourselves someone else is better equipped to do the thing, but God wouldn't have put the idea in your head if you weren't qualified to execute it.
Speaker 1:It's letting yourself off the hook, and I really, I love what you're saying, because what came to mind as I was listening to you was be the person you deserve to be Right. Be the person you deserve to be.
Speaker 2:I deserve to be rich and fulfilled and satisfied and happy. And so if I'm not that person right now, then like I need to do everything I can to get there. I think sometimes we're waiting on external things. I think the only way I'm going to have the life I want to have and that's if I fight tooth and nail is to decide the kind of life I'm going to have and take actions every single day towards that life. That's the only way. But waiting on people to like me, waiting on me to lose weight, waiting on me to have more money, a better website, a copywriter, a project manager, a better scope and own franchise, like if I'm waiting and waiting, that's going to be years from now. And what are you doing while you wait? You got to stay ready so you don't have to get ready. Y'all not ready.
Speaker 2:I've had people who could have gotten grants but they couldn't pass the financial check because they didn't have their books up to date. I've had people that I would have been able to get on stage to get a $1,500 speaking fee, but they didn't have a keynote speech or a media page or a. They didn't have it. They couldn't produce a speaker reel or any kind of proof. These were people who were telling me, natalie, I'm actively looking to be a speaker. I found a gig that was looking for speakers in their lane and I knew the coordinator and handed their name over and they could not come up with the documents to prove they were actually a speaker. You got to stay ready, so you don't have to get ready.
Speaker 2:So all of that time that people spend hating me, hating you, complaining about our content, complaining about why I didn't approve their posts in my Facebook group that I never even saw because I was serving my clients, all that time you spent you could have been getting the things you need to actually move your business forward. That time is the time that you could have written the content that you say you don't have time to write, or the sales page that still isn't up, or the speaker reel. They're like well, I've never spoken professionally. Make your own stage. Why you think? I have my own event every year? Because I know I can make more on my own stage than anybody will pay me to be on theirs.
Speaker 2:So, like if I die with nothing, I threw it all away. I threw all of my privilege and influence. I threw it all away. Why? Because I was worried about someone's opinion Because I was worried about failure, because I was trying to be perfect. Oh, those sound like terrible reasons to live beneath your purpose. That's heart-wrenching. I could never imagine. I could never imagine telling somebody my fear of your unsolicited opinion as an unsuccessful person that I've never met on the internet kept me from doing what God put me here to do.
Speaker 1:Y'all, that's the mic drop. You didn't know you needed.
Speaker 2:That would just be such a crazy thing, and I almost want to tell people that the next time somebody messages me some BS I think that's exactly what I'm going to say.
Speaker 1:I think you should Imagine if everything that you have said today was necessary for people to hear, and I want to thank you for coming in and just being your true, honest self, because I do get a lot of people who pitch the podcast, who come on the podcast and I can see you know they're trying to say the things that they know that they can use as soundbites later and that's totally fine. Like you, come here, however, you need to come here, but, honestly you, this was less a podcast appearance than it was a sermon at church, so y'all just been taking church, that's what we do.
Speaker 2:That's what people needed to hear Today.
Speaker 1:That is what people needed to hear, so thank you for just thank you I appreciate you so very much.
Speaker 2:This was I got to get my thoughts out. I Just thank you.
Speaker 1:I appreciate you so very much. This was I got to get my thoughts out. I appreciate you. Okay, last thing Tell people where they can find you. Where would you like people to?
Speaker 2:find you, they can go to my website, unapologeticwealthcom, or they can find me on Facebook. I'm the only Natalie Bullen. You'll see. Sarah will put it down in the show notes for you, absolutely.
Speaker 1:So okay, for this week we are adjusting that final tagline. Some of you can have success without the BS, but you all need to come back to church next week.
Speaker 2:So I will talk to you. Then Stop, if you can, bye.
Speaker 1:That's it for this week. Thanks for listening to the Business Blasphemy Podcast. We'll be back next week with a new episode, but in the meantime, help a sister out by subscribing and, if you're feeling extra sassy rating this podcast, and don't forget to share the podcast with others. Head over to businessblasphemypodcastcom to connect with us and learn more. Thanks for listening and remember you can have success without the BS.