4. Things I Wish I Knew Before Starting a Business

Running a business will force you to grow in ways you never expected.

In this episode, I’m sharing the lessons that took me years to learn...  burnout, people-pleasing, financial stress, losing clients, rebuilding confidence, and figuring out how to actually run a business in a way that feels sustainable.

I’m talking honestly about what the last eight years of entrepreneurship have looked like behind the scenes, like the mistakes I made early on, the mindset shifts I NEEDED, and the things I wish someone would’ve told me before I started.

We’re talking boundaries, mindset, sales, systems, networking, delegation, perfectionism, and why so much of entrepreneurship is really about unlearning the stories you’ve been carrying around for years.

If you’re in a season where business feels heavy, confusing, or like you’re constantly questioning yourself, this episode will probably feel very familiar.

In this episode, I talk about:

• The mistakes and mindset shifts that changed how I run my business
• Losing clients, burnout, boundaries, and rebuilding confidence
• Why sales, systems, delegation, and community matter more than people think
• The biggest thing I wish I knew before becoming an entrepreneur

Connect with me on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/itsallmost/
Visit my website: https://www.itsallmost.com
Join The Conversion Club: https://itsallmost.com/the-conversion-club

*I'm so sorry about the audio on this episode! My neighbors were determined to ruin my recording! Working hard to make sure it doesn't happen again. Thanks for continuing to listen to this podcast*

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hello, my beautiful yeah. Welcome to episode four of After Podcast. How are we here? How are we here? I am so excited. Today we're gonna talk a little bit more about business. And specifically, what I wish I had learned or knew before I started my business. So learn from my mistakes, learn from my experiences, listen to this episode if you want to make sure you don't make these same mistakes. Okay. If you want to make sure that you are starting your business with all the lessons that I have to share with you. Just to give you all a little context, I did share a little bit about this in episode one, but yeah, I've been doing the damn thing for eight years now, which is wild to say for over eight years. Almost a decade. Someone said almost a decade the other day, and I was like, shut the fuck up. Like I can't even believe you would say that. But it's true. We have been in business for over eight years now. There was a lot of word of mouth to start, and it still is pretty word of mouth, but we're gonna get into that a little bit. I do want to break down some of my years for you so that you're understanding kind of how we got here to 2026 and where we started. So in 2018, I launched my business back in March of 2018, and it was really born out of wanting to quit my job and wanting to get away from people that I didn't really like to work with and more towards people that are more values aligned. So yeah, in 2018, it was my first year of business. You know, we were learning a lot of things. I was letting scope creep happen, which for those of you who don't know, scope creep is essentially when a client you have agreed upon scope and you're saying, okay, I'm gonna do X, Y, and Z. And they're like, could you also add A, B, and C? And they just kind of keep adding little things, little things, even though they're paying you for only X, Y, and Z. They're actually not paying you for A, B, and Z. So that's kind of what scope creep means. And girl, I was letting that in, and it was not good. I was letting a lot of things slide, I wasn't setting boundaries really well, I was allowing late payments, and I lost an anchor client at the end of 2018, which I do think I mentioned in the first episode led to my personal finance journey. So it did lead to good things, but losing that anchor client like really freaked me out. And by anchor client, I mean when you have that like big whale client, the one that's bringing in the most money. So I always say have more than one anchor. You want to have at least two anchors so that if you lose one, you don't have a huge chunk of your income missing. Have I learned this lesson entirely? Not necessarily, but we are working on it. But when we got into 2019, you know, that's kind of when my personal finance journey started. I started finding a balance of my services. I was still getting my bearings when it came to owning a business and running a business, but I remember there were like one or two brands that I was finding things out about the executives and the owners, and it just like wasn't aligned. And so I actually ended up firing both of those clients because I was like, I don't want to repeat what I was doing before, which is working with people that didn't really align with how I wanted to exist in the world and how I wanted to do business and how I wanted to be making money, right? So that was 2019. I actually honestly, 2019 was the year that I was feeling the momentum. I was like, oh my gosh, I'm ready, I'm ready to go, I'm ready to like build. And I was doing a lot of events, quarterly events, trying to build community and trying to yeah, get my name out there and network more. And then, as we all know, 2020 happened and the pandemic really messed things up for me. I mean, it messed things up for everyone. But it was a real lesson in like scarcity and dealing with this global panic, just because I'm sure a lot of you experienced, I just had so many clients who are like, oh my God, what's gonna happen? How am I gonna make any money? So the first thing to go, and usually, which is so frustrating, is the first thing to go when it comes to like budgets at companies and things like that is marketing, which is so wild to me because I'm like, you're gonna complain about not making sales and not making any money and not selling any product, and then the first thing you're gonna get rid of is marketing. Like, that's how you make money, that's how you sell your products, but that's a whole other episode, probably. I digress. Yeah, so 2020 was actually the year I hustled the most, and I really hope I never have to hustle like that ever again. I worked so many hours, I worked so hard, I launched a really big event virtually, obviously, called the Women's Wealth and Wellness Summit. And I found like all these sponsors. It was just out of my comfort zone work that I was doing to try to kind of make up for the scarcity and the panic that I was feeling in 2020. But we made it, we made it through, even though it was like year almost three of the business, and then we made it to 2021. And 2021 was actually another year of like really figuring out my service array, really figuring out what I wanted to offer and what I wanted to be doing with my time. I had retainer clients, but I had a lot of one-off projects that I was working on. And I remember one of my clients, I needed to like set some strict boundaries with them. That was very, very scary for me to do. We will talk a little bit more about boundaries in just a second. Basically, they kept scope creeping, scope creeping. It was just so frustrating to work with them. They were a really annoying client and they wanted to renew our contract. And I was just like, if we want to renew our contract, like I need X, Y, and Z to happen. And she was like, Well, I don't know if that's you know how I like to work. And I said, Well, I think it's best for us to part ways. So that ended up happening, but it was a really great lesson to learn, and I was doing a lot in 2021 as well. But 2022 was actually my best year financially. I made a lot more than I've ever made in my entire career trying to get back to that, trying to get back to that level. It was a very abundant year. Like I had a lot of abundance in my energy, I had a lot of confidence in myself. But something happened towards the end of 2022. I set a pricing boundary with one of my clients because out of 2020, I was really desperate for work. I was desperate for any client to come in at that point. And so I lowballed myself in terms of my service. And I thought, okay, maybe I can like work my way up back to my original starting rate. I think I gave them like a thousand dollar discount a month, which is way too much. I want to say like six-ish months in, I increased about 500 a month and they took it well. So I was like, okay, great. And I thought maybe six months later I could do it again and I could, you know, just kind of get back to my original rate, which didn't go well. They ended up taking the role internal and they got rid of me. And that was a very, very scary moment. It was another moment of like, I lost another anchor client. I tried setting a boundary and it didn't go well, but it did lead to actually quite a bit of wonderful things, which I don't want to discount, but it actually led into my three very sort of coasting, easy, chill years. In 2023, I had three clients that I had throughout 2021 and 2022 acquired. And I just maintained them from the previous year, and I just continued, I actually am still working with two out of three of them. So yeah, we were able to take those three clients and kind of just coast through 2023 and 2024. But in 2024, I know I'm throwing a bunch of like years out at you again, similar to another episode where I was just like, and then in this year, and then in that year. But anyway, 2024 is the year that I was planning my move to Portugal. So I kind of needed it to be a coast year because I was trying to sell a house and I was trying to get a visa and I was trying to do a lot of different things in terms of my personal life that I couldn't really do a lot with my business other than just like maintain how it was and keep things going smoothly with my clients. I did also in 2024 start working with my business coaches. I got a lot more organized on my offerings and having their support was so helpful in terms of building into 2025 last year. It was also a coast year for the most part, but it was the year I was like actively moving. I didn't really have a permanent home for a good six months. I was just like living out of my suitcase. And I did ideate at the beginning of the year my new business with my business coaches on my amazing, amazing retreat in Mexico. It was really transformative. And yeah, I ideated my second business almost with two L's. And I also ideated the Conversion Club, which is my monthly email marketing membership for people who are ready to turn email into their most sustainable and profitable sales channel. So almost the business launched in June, and then the conversion club launched in September. And oh my goodness, that was a huge, huge learning lesson. Launching the Conversion Club and really just maintaining it, it taught me so much about connecting with founders. It taught me so much about how to teach topics. So basically, in the conversion club, it's month to month. So you can subscribe at any time, you can cancel at any time, but you come in and we teach one email marketing subject a month. So think your welcome series or how to build your list or how to read your analytics or holiday promo like Black Friday Cyber Monday emails, just one sort of very foundational, essential topic a month. I teach it and you have two weeks to go and implement. And in two weeks, I also host a QA and implementation session that's two hours long. And you basically have me for two hours to either go over things together, review anything that you're working on, or if you're like, I haven't had time in the last two weeks, I just want to sit down and dedicate and have time to do the work that I said I was gonna do. And I'm there to literally help you press the buttons or to look over anything or to share my strategy insights or to brainstorm with you. And I really want to, through this membership, serve founders who are looking for this kind of support, who are looking to not try to do everything all at once because that's not the point of email marketing. And we can't do all the things that we need to do for our email marketing in one month. And so I really wanted it to be approachable, to feel accessible pricing-wise as well. Our membership is under $100 a month, and it's actually the most affordable way that you can access my expertise, my brain, my strategy recommendations, my insights, my feedback, et cetera, et cetera. So that was a really big deal to have launched in 2025. That was also the year I hired a PR team for the first time, and that led into 2026, where this year I in January hired my very first operations assistant. I launched this podcast, and I also went on another business retreat with my coaches, the same coaches that I love and adore so, so much. And they helped me kind of get some clarity with my offerings and with how I wanted to format and structure my retainer services. So just a little bit of an overview of sort of the trajectory of how things have been since 2018 when we first launched Almost Consulting. What did I wish I had known before I started my business? The first thing is finding aligned clients, right? I talked a little bit about this earlier, where I really, really wanted to find people that not only aligned with my values, but like respected me as a marketer, respected me in my work. Some of the big things that I think when we're looking for aligned clients, yes, we're looking for like what's the persona? Who are they? What industries might they be working in? How big is their company? What revenue might they be generating? What products are they selling? Et cetera, et cetera. All those things, yes, do matter. But I think many of the things that I didn't really take into consideration when I was looking for quote unquote aligned clients were things like people who would respect my time, right? People who, clients specifically, who wouldn't treat me like an employee, who wouldn't expect me to be on all these calls. I am not an employee. I am a contractor. So like respecting my hours, respecting my communication style, respecting how I showed up as a contractor, and then also respecting and valuing my skills, right? So like not micromanaging me, not telling me how to do things or questioning my recommendations or listening quote unquote to my recommendations and then doing something completely different, right? So we want clients who are respectful, who also pay on time, right? That's a big one, who don't try to get away with shit, essentially, who don't try to say, oh, it's net 30, but like we're gonna pay at net 45 or net 60 or you know, whatever it is. People who don't scope creep, like I said earlier, people who have the same values as me, not just in life, but like in business as well. How do we wanna be operating? How do we wanna be communicating? How do we wanna be executing on our initiatives and our strategy and our campaigns together, right? So all of those things when it comes to finding your aligned clients, important, very, very important. I also really, really want to emphasize the difference between chasing and aligning. So whenever in my career, and I want to say it's been like four, maybe five times, whenever I have chased a client, whenever I have like pushed and pushed and forced almost gone after a client because I liked how I saw their business on social media. I liked what I saw on a public-facing front. And this has happened, I want to say, like at least four times. Every time I chase a client, I always end up with a terrible manager. I always end up with like so much disorganization within the company. Nobody really knows what they're doing, nobody has defined roles. Everyone kind of does a little bit of everything. And I will say moving towards aligning and attracting versus pushing and chasing, uh, world of difference. Truly a world of difference. So let's not chase, let's not chase, let's not push, let's not force, let's align, let's attract. That's kind of what I'm talking about in terms of tapping into your feminine energy in business, right? Versus the masculine energy. Because I think, especially as women who are business owners, there's a lot of this necessity to be in that masculine energy, to be closing deals, to be getting on sales calls, to be doing all these things that are traditionally more masculine energy. But I really am trying to, I'm still working on this, tap into more of that feminine energy and just like, this is who I am. Come if you will. And if not, that's okay, right? But what I will say is as someone who has really relied on word of mouth for the majority, if not all, of her business career, I will say, really, please build your lead generation funnel. Don't be afraid of like building the funnel in a way that makes sense and doing the outreach and connecting with your network and just asking people for help. We'll get into that in just a second as well. But that's been a big one that I'm still really undoing is the fact that I've relied on word of mouth for so long and I haven't really done a good job early on of building like a really solid lead generation funnel. So something I wish I did that I hope you don't have to learn either. That you just get right right off the bat. Beyond retainer clients, though, we're getting more members inside the conversion club, which I'm so so excited about. And I'm gonna speak this into existence in terms of my ideal conversion club member. But my ideal member really is someone who is gonna attend the workshops, right? Or if they can't attend, they're gonna watch the replay within the next week or so before the QA and implementation session. And then they come to the QA and implementation session and ask questions, right? They ask me questions, they want me to review things with them, they maybe want me to strategize with them, brainstorm a little bit, or if they can't make either of the live workshop or QA calls, utilizing Circle, the membership platform that we're on, and asking me questions inside our various support zones. And I always love to either share a little bit of feedback in the comments or make a Loom video or something like that that will help people optimize the newsletters that they want me to review or the automations that they want me to take a look at or the subject lines or whatever it is. So in terms of speaking things into existence and manifesting, that's the kind of conversion club member I am manifesting. So if that sounds like you and you want to learn about email marketing, hit me up, let me know. We'll throw the link in the show notes. But yeah, so that's in terms of aligned clients, what I wish I had known before I'd started my business. Now, boundaries, boundaries is super, super important. So what do they always say? They always say set boundaries early and enforce them often, right? So retroactively trying to set boundaries really doesn't work, right? Because you've already shown people that they can treat you this way, that you don't want to be treated. So for example, me letting scope creep happen, right? For me to two months later, three months later, after we started working together, say, like, oh, when you asked me to do ABC, like that was actually out of our scope. So if you're gonna ask me in the future to do things that are outside of our scope, you know, I'm gonna start charging. But the thing is, is you've already allowed ABC to be asked of you without paying for it. So they're like, well, you already did it and you didn't ask me to pay for it, so why now? Right? People don't like retroactive boundaries because it causes confusion, frankly. And that's not what we want to do. And sometimes we don't really know what boundaries we want to set until we've experienced them, which is totally understandable. But wherever possible, if not with this current client, with any future clients, you know, if a situation comes across that crosses one of your boundaries, you can just say early on, hey, if this comes up, this is what's gonna happen, right? And enforcing it often and not just letting things glide and not just letting things continue to happen that you don't want to happen. I will definitely be going over boundaries in a future episode, like in more depth and in ways of how to set them and how to enforce them and how to continuously communicate them. So don't worry, we will do an episode on that. But I just wanted to touch on like really please do not try to retroactively set boundaries. It does not work. For example, like the client that I was talking about earlier, I allowed them to onboard me at a lower rate, right? A much, much lower rate. And to them, that said, okay, this is what you value your services at, right? And because that actually wasn't what I valued my services at, it was because I was desperate. It was because I wanted a client, it was because I needed any amount of income. That trying to increase my rate back to my regular rate was, I mean, I could have done it in a much, much better way. But it was actually really hard for them to like retroactively learn that I didn't really like that rate. You know what I mean? Whether I said it or not, my actions, what I was asking of them implied that. Versus now still working on saying it with my full chest on a sales call. But I am very much firm in my pricing now, where I'm like, if we want to do it for this, this is what it is. And I'm not offering things a la carte anymore. I will do another episode about that. But I used to be like, oh, like a la carte, like we can add that on. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No worries. Oh, we can do that. Yeah, yeah, yeah, no worries. And now I'm just like, take it or leave it. If you want it, you want it. If you don't, find someone else. Like, I'm not the one for you. So yeah, really working on those boundaries. And again, I'm over eight years in. I'm still working on that. So be patient with yourself. Another one that I really, really wish that I had learned or knew before I started my business is mindset. Mindset is such a big one, truly. I think probably the biggest one for me when it comes to building your confidence, when it comes to Really unlearning some of the limiting beliefs we have around money. Those two are definitely huge things I've worked on in the last year with various coaches, with Karina Baldwin of True Adventure Collective, with Gillian Minter of Quantum Wealth Academy. And I will do, don't worry, a separate episode on all the coaches that I've had and all the amazing people that I've worked with that have helped me get to where I am today. But in terms of what I wish I had learned before I started my business, really wish I had learned how to tell a different money story, right? And unlearn, undo the things that I had picked up in childhood and picked up throughout my life in terms of worth, in terms of value, in terms of embodiment, in terms of giving and receiving and abundance versus scarcity mindset and all those things. A mindset is definitely a big, big topic. And it's something that I'm gonna go over in many, many episodes of this podcast in very granular detail, in very specific niches. I really want to be talking about mindset and how that kind of work, which I am nowhere near done doing, but that kind of work is so impactful when it comes to running your business and just living your life, right? A really recent example of this is one of my big clients, I won't name who. I want to say a few years ago, this same client, they basically started panicking and they started firing a third of their staff and they started reducing their budget. And it really freaked me out because I thought it meant that I was gonna get axed, which I didn't at the time, but it was like such a moment and just a few years ago. So just a reminder that again, I'm still working on all this, but even in the span of like a year, two years, I have made leaps and bounds in terms of my confidence and my mindset and my abundance versus scarcity. So with this same client, I panicked, I was freaking out. I had to like talk to my coaches, I had to get talked down from ledges. I was just like, ah, and I had just this desperate energy, right? When it came to sales, when it came to trying to rebuild my revenue again. Not rebuild because I didn't lose them, but like I freaked out that I thought I was gonna lose them. And so I was always kind of like looking over my shoulder, one eye open when I was sleeping. I was just like, when is the other shoe going to drop? And actually, last year in 2025, they ghosted me for like five months because they got acquired by another company, yada yada, yada. And that was also pretty scary. But I kind of had tried to start with my mindset work by then. So actually, it was pretty helpful to mitigate some of that panic and some of that desperation that I was gonna feel if I if I had lost them. And then this last month, I got a call and they told me that they were gonna have to pause our contract, that they literally just restarted not six months ago. And it freaked me out because again, didn't learn my lesson from the whole anchor client situation. They were my one anchor again. So I say all this to you because I have not learned clearly from the at least two times that I was supposed to learn this lesson already in terms of anchor clients. But what I will say mindset-wise is that I didn't panic as much as I did the year before, or even the year before that, or even you know, four years ago, because I knew innately that it was making room for better things. I've told so many people this story. But literally the week before I got that call when my client was like, hey, we should pause our contract, I had been telling everyone that I didn't have enough time to be doing all the things that I wanted to do. And really, it was me telling the universe, like, I need more time, but I wasn't specific with how I wanted more time. And the universe was like, Okay, heard chef. And they basically got rid of the client that was taking up the most of my time, but also paying me the most money. So you gotta be careful how you word things to the universe, frankly. But I mean, sure, there was a little grief and there was a little panic in there too, but like it was so toned down compared to a few years ago, compared to even a year ago. I'd been doing this work with my amazing wealth mindset coach, Gillian Minter. And I really just knew deep down that the universe was giving me the time that I was looking for to launch this podcast, to relaunch my membership, to be working on all these podcast interviews that I'm on, to be doing all these things and all these goals and all these new services and blah blah blah. Like everything that I was trying to do with my time that I kept saying I didn't have enough time to do, the universe was like, okay, here you go, here you go. And I know that it was more than anything clearing the way for me to call in better things, to call in more, to call in clients that aligned better and to call in clients that paid more and you know, all those things. And having that innate understanding and that trust in myself, in my destiny, in what I knew was mine, really, really helped. So I do want to go over in a separate episode what that kind of mindset work did for me because it really truly transformed my life. That's definitely another big one. In terms of what else I wish I had learned before I started my business, logistics. Let's talk about the admin shit, right? Because I didn't know what I was doing, I didn't know where I was going. So logistically, I had a lot of things to figure out, right? Not knowing how to run a business. But what I will say is figure it out sooner rather than later. You don't want to have to redo work or undo systems that could have been organized better earlier on. So, for example, using platforms like CRMs or Google Sheets or whatever it is that's most helpful for you, utilize those and start setting your systems up, start putting your SOPs together, your processes, how you do things, all of that, start that earlier rather than later. So, for example, with my operations assistant, I had to put sort of like a press page together to sort of list all of the podcasts that I've been on interview-wise as a guest. And, you know, at first I was just like, okay, I'm gonna have my assistant put this together. And there were just certain things that like I didn't really like it like this. And normally in the past, I probably would have just let it slide and like addressed it later. But I was like, no, I need to communicate that this is what I want. I want to try this out. And if I don't like it, let's do it this way. Yada yada. Like those kinds of things where if your instinct is telling you, like, oh, I should adjust this now, do it sooner rather than later. Okay, because later means that you're gonna have to maybe duplicate work. You're maybe gonna have to undo things, redo things. Like it's just time that's wasted. So if you're like knowing that you don't want something to be organized a certain way, or you would prefer it get figured out at some point, figure it out sooner. Figure it out sooner rather than later. And thank me for that later on. And also, like, really be sure to keep files of everything, like logs, emails, receipts, everything. Keep track of that shit and organize that shit early, early on, because your future self will thank you for doing that. And that kind of brings me into finances as well. Like, open a business bank account and keep it separate from your personal account. Try to keep all your business expenses, all of your payments, all of your invoices, that kind of thing in the business bank account, and then also be tracking all of those things, right? Where what's happening in the business bank account, how do I make sure I'm not using my personal card or my personal bank account to do any of these things because it's just gonna make bookkeeping a lot harder. It's gonna make your organization a lot harder. What I also really like to do is I go into Google Calendar and I put reminders of like when tax filing needs to happen. Is it quarterly, is it annually, is it local, is it state, is it federal? Like thinking about all of these filings that you have to do and then really keeping track with yearly reviews, yearly check-ins, yearly tracking, whatever it is that you need to do to make sure that you're understanding year on year how things are performing business-wise. Another big one is to get a CPA, just get someone to do your taxes for you because especially as you continue to grow and scale, you're gonna find yourself in situations where you're just like turbo tax is just not cutting it, right? Like I need a CPA who's understanding these nuances, who's gonna be able to get me the highest refund to help with my expenses, to make sure that my retirement contributions are being deducted in the right way, et cetera, et cetera. So a CPA is gonna be really, really important. Same with a bookkeeper. That's actually one that I need to be working on now is I need to get my own bookkeeper because I've been kind of manually like half-assing and doing it kind of incorrectly for the last seven years. What I did do is the very first year in business, I had a bookkeeper. Basically, what I did was I took everything that they set up for me and I literally just like copy paste duplicated to the next year and the year after that, but I don't think I did it like exactly correctly. So get a bookkeeper. Don't be like me. Get a CPA, get a bookkeeper, hire these people. They're going to save you time and they're going to keep you out of jail. Okay. Because ultimately, at the end of the day, I think you got to spend money to make money. I know a lot of people say this, but like I truly believe that if you just get it done right the first time, it's better because it's not gonna be cheaply done and you're not gonna have to redo it later. Like you're setting the foundation correctly. You don't want to have to like, you know, half-ass the foundation and then the foundation starts to shift, and then it costs so much more time and money to go in and redo and fix the foundation, and all this stuff that you built on top of it is now not on a stable sort of base, right? So we want to get our base right from the start. Another thing, sort of in that vein, is like delegating. So, like your CPA, your bookkeeper, for me, my PR team, my operations assistant, delegating will always be better than figuring it out yourself. Okay. It's gonna take you less time. It's going to allow you to just get everything done right the first time. Like I said earlier, I mean, I will preface this by saying always hire for what the person can do starting from day one. Don't hire for like the potential you see in them. This is something that I probably will have to learn eventually at some point. I mean, hopefully not. But like what you know they can do from day one is important because if you're hiring someone for the potential of what you see in them, but you don't think they can do like right on day one when you start working together, it's gonna be another waste of time, right? So, like, don't waste your precious time. Your time is valuable, your time is money. If time is money and we're going around spending our time trying to learn things that we don't know how to do and not doing them well versus just hiring someone who knows what they're doing and who knows the nuances and who knows the loopholes and who knows all these rules and regulations that you have to look up and maybe get wrong and da da da. Do not waste your time like that. Spend the money. Okay. For me, my PR team, I hired them because I was trying to pitch podcasts myself. It took so much time, it took so much effort. I hated it. It was the worst. Like I really truly did not like it. And so I was like, look, I need someone to be doing this for me because I just can't be doing it myself. And within the first few months of hiring them, like they booked so many podcasts that I never would have done on my own because I just didn't have the excitement or the time or the zone of genius, right, to be doing any of that. Also, in terms of like a bad example, an example of where this actually went wrong. I can't even remember how many years ago it was, but I back in the day hired a client lead gen outreach service. So they were going and messaging cold messaging people on LinkedIn and you know, trying to help me schedule sales calls with these leads on Sales Navigator on LinkedIn. But they weren't good. Like I had a very specific niche and I don't think they were very familiar with that niche. And so it didn't actually really help to have hired them. I spent a lot of money, I didn't see a lot in return. So also knowing when to walk away, knowing when, okay, maybe this wasn't the right person. Maybe I need to find someone that's a little bit better that is gonna align with my needs and help deliver things the way that I need them to be delivered. So, like, know when to hire and know when the hire was maybe the wrong choice, and you need to walk away. Those are two very, very important lessons that I wish I had learned before I started my business. Another big one is sales. I am great at marketing. I know marketing is like my zone of genius, that I know for sure. But sales, not so much. And for those of you that think sales and marketing are the same, you're wrong. They are not the same. Sales is just a little out of my wheelhouse, not a little, a lot out of my wheelhouse. And a big thing that I wish I had started a lot earlier on, which is something that I'm kind of trying to learn a little bit more about now, but I wish I had started sort of like year one, year two, is to learn how to execute a very, very smooth, a very, very effective, and a high converting sales call. So there are so many sales call teachers, people who teach sales, people who teach how to have confidence on a sales call. And I wish I had tried to learn from them earlier on because I was and sometimes still am very much a leave it in their court kind of person. Like I leave too much in a potential client's court. I will say things like, but no worries if not, or I will leave a proposal in their inbox and they won't follow up with me, or I won't get a yes on the call. I won't be taking charge of the sales call. I won't be listening to their language and mirroring their language and being able to address their objections and say my pricing out loud with my full chest on the call, utilizing silence, right, during a sales call as sort of a tactic to get people to contemplate and to consider and to come back with what they're looking for and what they're hoping to get out of my service. So yeah, I definitely wish I had started with sales earlier and started honing those skills. And it's definitely something that I'm still working on. And maybe I'll bring on like a sales expert to come and do an interview on this podcast. Would that be interesting? Is that what we want, yappers? Let me know. And then really, one of the most important lessons that I wish I had learned that I would like to impart on all of you in this episode is just a start. As a recovering perfectionist, I know this is a lot easier said than done, but stop waiting for perfection, right? Perfection is, I know I'm quoting someone. I don't know who I'm quoting on this, but one of my favorite quotes is that perfection is the death of ideas and enthusiasm and momentum, right? Because we're waiting for it to be perfect, but it never will be perfect. And then all we're doing is procrastinating, right? Out of fear, out of scarcity, out of lack of confidence, whatever it is. So one of the best pieces of advice I ever got from my coaches is just to start with version one, right? You can start with version one and you can continue to refine it. That's kind of how I felt about this podcast. I was like, oh, do I want to re-record episodes one, two, and three? It's not perfect. It da-da-da. But like, no, it's version one. I know for a fact that these first few episodes are not gonna be nearly as good as episodes a hundred, two hundred, three hundred because I'm gonna be getting those reps in, right? I'm gonna be a lot better at doing this. I did this with the conversion club too, with the membership. I kept like delaying the launch, and I kept being like, oh, maybe I should launch in October or in December, or maybe I should just do it in the new year and da-da-da-da-da. And my coaches were just like, no, just launch it now because there are so many things that you're gonna learn actually doing it. There's so many things you're gonna learn getting feedback from other people, from your clients, from your students, whatever it may be. And you're not gonna get any of that just letting it live in your head or live in your drafts or live in your computer or live in your phone. Just start. Okay. It's never gonna be the final version when you first start. You do need to stumble, you do need to learn, and you need to get feedback to know what to include, what to take out, what to adjust. So, really, please just start, right? Done is better than perfect. We're never gonna get to perfection. And so we really need to unlearn that expectation of perfection and just get out there and just do the damn thing, right? Yappers, okay? Say it with me one more time. Do the damn thing. And also really not being afraid to pivot and not being too proud to pivot, right? Knowing when to walk away from something or try something new. So, for example, I was talking about my services earlier. I have been for the last few months just really uninspired by my service offerings and just like not excited about selling them. And I had known them for so long. These were the offerings that I've had, more or less, for the last eight years. And so I was just like, oh, it's familiar. I know it, you know, I know how to sell it-ish, and I know how to deliver it. But the thing is, is it just wasn't giving me the energy for sales and for marketing any of these services that I needed to have. And so I really needed to make a decision of like, do I change the format of my business, the structure of my services and my offerings, or do I try to like keep doing the same thing and hope something changes? You know what I mean? For those of you that know me, you probably heard me talk about the lily pad theory. This was something I actually learned from a really wonderful astrologer out of Seattle, Stephanie Gayling. Shout out to you. She told me about the lily pad theory long, long time ago, which is essentially like when you're on your current lily pad, you can only see a certain perspective, right? But as soon as you jump to the next lily pad, you're like, oh, oh shit, I can see all of this side that I couldn't see before on the original lily pad, and so on and so forth. So it's like you kind of have to take a step forward to see, oh, what are the other possibilities? What was I not realizing standing back there and waiting and hoping something was going to be different, right? So just like jump to the next lily pad. Jump to the next one and see what kind of world opens up for you. Jump to the one after that and see and maybe you're like, oh, wrong lily pad, but you can always jump back, right? You don't have to commit to this path that might not be aligned for you, but you won't know until you try. That's my other big thing is just try something just to see if it's what you want or not. And if it's not, just come back, right? And try a different path. But you're not gonna be able to see these new perspectives. You're not gonna be able to see these new opportunities until you go to another lily pad and you try to see what is a different perspective or a different point of view or a different set of opportunities and circumstances. So you're not gonna know until you try. And that's a really, really big lesson when it comes to starting a business. I think, and I know I've said this for every single one. I'm like, another big one, another big lesson. But for me, another really, really important lesson is that community is everything. We are nothing without the village that we've built. We are nothing without the community, our network, the people that are going to bring in insights that we might not have had without them. They're going to connect you with people that you wouldn't have found otherwise or you might not have made a connection with otherwise. They're going to provide moral support, provide insights, provide help, provide just amplification, right? Thinking about how we're going to network. And again, I know people hear the word networking and they're like, oh my God, I don't even know what that means. Like networking sounds so scary. But the thing is, is it doesn't have to be scary. You can actually do it the way that makes the most sense for you. Someone that I learned a lot about networking from actually is less from she's so lucky, formally balanced black girl. She talks about going to networking events as an introvert, which I am, and really just setting the goal of like just meeting one person, going and having a conversation with someone and making a connection and following up with them afterwards. Like that's not that scary, right? When you go to networking and you're like, oh, I have to talk to everybody and I have to do this and I have to do that. Just go with like one goal. Maybe speak to three different people, maybe get one person's contact, whatever makes the most sense for you to make it a little less daunting. But like that's something that I think I'm missing a lot these days that the pandemic kind of took from me, that I was actually doing a pretty good job of in 2019 pre-pandemic, is just making sure that I was getting out there, I was getting in front of people, that I was making these connections. Someone I really love who's doing amazing networking events is Alicia Kumar of the Founders Table, one of my favorite networking organizations, groups, companies, businesses. And I really highly recommend if you are ever in a city, they have cities all over the United States, but check out the Founders Table. It is one of the best networking experiences I've ever had. But really, when it comes to community, nurturing them, right? Asking for help, setting your pride aside and saying, hey, I need help from you, please. I need client referrals. I need you to share something for me. I need you to introduce me to someone. Like just letting go of that pride, which I had a lot of for a long time, of like, oh, I don't want to ask people because what if they think like I'm not, you know, successful in business and I can't get clients on my own. And it's like, let that shit go. Nobody cares as much as you do about whether or not your business is successful and yada yada. So just let that go and ask for help. I know, again, a lot easier said than done as a recovering eldest daughter who is afraid of asking for help, but not just asking, but also reciprocating, right? It's about giving, it's about receiving. I feel like I've been pretty good about giving and I'm not as good about receiving because I'm just like, oh, help, outside help. I don't know how to accept it. But going out and really just like building that relationship with people and a back and forth. I need a little bit of a connection from you. Maybe you can help me amplify this membership that I'm promoting, whatever it may be, or things like referral fees and commission and affiliate links or whatever. But just continuing to foster that relationship with your community is gonna be so important as you continue to build your business and just start your business. But the thing is, is with everything that I've just said, I need to emphasize that you need to do what works for you. Okay. Not everything I'm saying here is gonna work for you, and not everything that works for others will work for you. So, like people on TikTok and on Instagram who are like, I'm an expert in how to do this and that. And like, if you follow my five-step program, you'll for sure get XYZ result. And the thing is, is maybe, maybe you will, but also remember that like those people are not experts in you and your brain and how you like to work and what is gonna be the most effective for you. So with this episode, and honestly anything that I do with this podcast, take what resonates with you and leave what doesn't. Because I don't know how you function, I don't know how you prefer to work, I don't know you the way that you know you. So if anything comes up in this episode or any future episodes that you're like, not for me, that's not how I would prefer to work, or that doesn't resonate with me, that's okay. Okay. Just take that and just understand yourself a little bit better. Understand how your brain works, understand what you would prefer to do, and move forward with that, with those insights. That's all I have for you for now. I hope it was helpful. I hope you got a lot out of all the things that I either wish I had learned or am still learning when it comes to running a business. And I am excited for the next episode. We're gonna talk a little bit more about my move here to Portugal. So if you enjoyed this episode, be sure to like, comment, and subscribe. I'm so happy you're here, yappers. I appreciate all of you. Thank you so, so much for making it all the way to the end of episode four of our podcast. And I will see you all very, very soon. All right, love you, yappers. Chao ciao. If this episode gave you something to think about, please take it and do something with it. If you want more of this or you want to see what my life actually looks like, follow me on Instagram at it's almost with two L's. We'll be sure to link it in the show notes. You can also follow me at almost consulting or serious by. And if you're serious about getting your emails to convert, you can check out the Conversion Club, a monthly membership for founders ready to turn emails into their most profitable and sustainable skills. With expert guidance, content tools, and how to actually use it. Check it out at the link in the show notes. I'll see you in the next episode, Jeffers.