From Self-Sabotage to Seven Figures: A Business Mindset Deep Dive with Steph Gorton

Ok biz bester, this one’s for you. Today I'm joined by my best friend, Steph Gorton,  as we get into the the nitty-gritty of growing your biz without losing your mind (or your weekend plans).

What’s in it:

😈 How sabotage plays up at every stage of business
📊How to automate your work for max efficiency.
👥  Best practices for hiring your dream team.
💸 The smart ways to invest in business growth.
🧘‍♀️ How to streamline your workflow without overworking.

If you’re ready to scale your business without the hustle, these strategies are your roadmap! Don’t forget that growing your business doesn’t have to mean running yourself into the ground. Focus on the smart, sustainable steps, and you'll see that success doesn’t always have to come with burnout. Keep it chill, keep it smart, and keep pushing forward!

👉 Join LUL waitlist!
👉 Catch the Episode!

As always, please don't forget to hit Subscribe! xxx

Transcript

Unknown: 0:00

One of the best decisions I made for myself. I quit my job that I was doing for six years. I'm still pinching myself that this is my life. When I joined low like, Oh my God, everything just turned around. Absolutely phenomenal and insane. Working with free really helped me think outside of the box and reframe how I wanted my career to look I set some goals which I thought were gonna be pretty long time. Goals, I thought they were gonna be one year goals, five year goals, 10 year goals. I changed what I thought was the impossible. I now have so much more self confidence, which I never had before. The impact is not just on the person that joins leveler. Pretty much all of them happened either within the three months, or within six months of being level up, your life canon high is going to be the best decision you make this year. Trust me, you'll have FOMO if you don't do it. Level up, your life is opening again soon, and the wait list is now open. Go to the link in the show notes to put your name on the list. Now back to the episode. So Steph, welcome back to the podcast. For number 500 I am down. Are we here for 600 too? Yeah, yeah. Very happy to have you here. Thank you, mostly because we get to go have wines. And this might be a quick episode for me out of here real fast. But actually, I want to have this conversation because I haven't caught up with you since you went to America, and I know that it was quite profound for you and was quite transformative. You had a lot of internal shifts, and selfishly, I've just got lots of questions that I think listeners would really love to know as well before we sort of get into that, because you were in a room with some high achieving entrepreneurs. I want to know, for people that are listening that have thought, maybe I want a business. Do you actually believe anyone can have a really, really successful seven or eight figure business? Can anyone do it? Yes, I actually do believe it. And the more entrepreneurs at the level that level that I meet, the more that I know for sure. Yeah. The thing is, you you really have to want it. You really have to want to do it. That's it. That's literally it. And there is it's not for everybody, like everybody in that room loves the game of business. They don't just love what they do. They love the game of business. And I think that that's a big distinction between it's not just loving what you do, because you the bigger your business grows, the less of what you love you will actually do, which is crazy. And so as your business grows, you get sucked into all these different wearing, all these different hats. And the one thing that I think, yes, I think anyone can do it absolutely. I don't think you need people skills. I think because any skill can be learned, it will take time. But I met people in the room that definitely, at some level, on Spectrum, definitely, you know, not the friendliest people, some people that I thought were just absolute wankers. I met all of them the nicest people we've made, oftentimes, the biggest ones, the ones that made the most money. We're talking like, yeah, we mentioned a mill a week, but there was a guys in there. They're making $52 million a year. Like, so yeah, it's just absolutely crazy. Like, just so insane that they just, yeah, it was, it was crazy so and upwards of that. Like, 5258 60, $100 million a year. Like, one business, one of their businesses, they have five businesses, one of their businesses. They have five businesses, one of their businesses, making 52 million a year. What sort of businesses were they? One, he had a coaching program, but he also had a SaaS product that was like a software service, so something like school or whatever, for IT companies. He had another couple of businesses as well that were all in kind of similar veins. He basically had the one niche that he services, and had multiple businesses that service to that niche. Fire out, okay, so anyone can do it, anyone can do it, if anyone can do it, what do they need to be aware of? Because if people are listening, even myself, if we're listening, and it's like, well, everyone can do it, so I'm going to do I'm going to do it. But what are the realities or the sacrifices, the hard truths that people need to be conscious of before they decide that this is the path for them? Such a great question. I think you'll agree with this, and I actually would love to hear your take on this. You're way more in this world, but just zooming back out about the things that drove me in the beginning are very different to the things that drive me now. So the things that drove me at the beginning were significance. And I think a lot of people starting businesses start because of significance. So they'll start for two reasons, significance and money. And very they say freedom. Most people want significance. They want to be recognized and and I see it all the time. They're like, I want to be the person that go to. I want people to pay me. Well, I want, you know, everyone wants PR from a really early stage in business. Everyone wants to be in Forbes and get awards and all this stuff, right? It's so true. Yeah, they want the significance. Sense, yeah, they want to prove to people, and probably really, they want to prove to themselves that they're worthy of it at some level. And so that's the first thing. Is, like, if you're doing this for significance, it actually is going to take you, like, five years to be significant, yeah? And so you should just know that if you are the kind of person that's like, I and you might not be aware of it, but you may hear it in me saying it, that was what drove me, for sure. And I realized when I got the Forbes article that it meant nothing and it didn't matter at all, and that the accolades went else didn't mean anything, and they still had a heap of self hate that was driving most of me forward at the time. And so there's the significance trap, then there's the money trap. So then you work as hard as you can to hit the financial goals, and then you get to the all the money you ever wanted. Then you realize that money wasn't it either. So significance, isn't it. And also money is not it, because there's so much that I won't do for money like ever. And so significance, isn't it, money, isn't it? So then what the fuck is it? And so it comes down to eventually fulfillment. I You have to love what you do every day. And I have a couple of examples of this where clients, you know, do creative arts or crafts or whatever, and they're like, I don't listen to a business. And I, I can tell you right now, the thing that you love as a hobby probably isn't good to do as a full time job, you know. And so there are some things that you're gonna hate doing forever and ever and ever, even though you think you'll love them straight away, like you and me, we loved one to one, deeply coaching people. Like the first three years of our business, we were like, yes, and we still can enjoy it, but way like, not the not the driving force. Now, driving force is mass impact, bigger classrooms for you. Like classrooms, right? So I think that just knowing that whatever you're starting with is probably going to change and adapt so much over the time that, like over time you, I think you eventually lose focus of why you started in the first place, because I think it's just so wildly different. That sounds hard. Yeah, it is hard. Like, did you have a moment where you woke up and was like, Holy crap, what's this all even for all the time to this day? And I think the one thing that keeps me on track is, okay, well, what's the alternative? We were coming to this beautiful studio today, and I was driving in the streets with on the way here, and I happened to be going through peak lunchtime traffic. Everyone was out. They're all on their phones. A lot of them look really unhappy, you know, walking around on someone else's time, taking their half an hour allotted time that they're allowed to take. And I just thought to myself, Oh, that's not it for me. That's not it. That's a lot of it for a lot of people. And that's okay for me, it's not it. And so, yeah, what's the option? What are my options? So would you say then that the most important thing, and the people that you were in the room with in America, these people that are, you know, doing the business game, do most of them seem fulfilled to you? So fulfilled? Yeah, it's so interesting. It's not just the money. I think the money helps. It's not just the money, but they're so fulfilled. And I think the fulfillment comes from the achievement. And I do think that you have to do something you love. I don't know anyone who does something. I don't think you would, you would know. I've never met an entrepreneur that suffered through something that they hated. Eventually, it will grind you down as a person, and you will not make the sacrifice. You'll stop making the sacrifice for that. So it genuinely has to be something you love. It. You cannot do it just for the money. It sucks, like you won't survive it. So it has to be something you love. It has to be something that excites you. And I think that you have to find the fulfillment, not in the big goals. I think that the big goals are the thing that drive you initially. So the first $10,000 a month, the first time you speak on stage, the first book you write, right? I think it's like, oh, you're writing a book. You might think, I can't wait for the dates on shelves and having the book launch and blah, blah, blah. And I think you'll look back and you'll realize it was the moments alone in Bali writing the book that made the most difference, when you nailed that chapter and you got that line right. And if you read your own story back, and you're like, This is epic. Like, I think that as entrepreneurs, the wins in business and the fulfillment has to come from the smaller milestones. Like Tim and I celebrate the most when we turn a new ad on and it gets leads, and we're like, yes, yeah, we'll high five in the kitchen. Another sale will drop in, and we don't give a fuck, yeah, couldn't care less. Like, great, someone's joined. I'm super excited to work with you, but the money itself isn't we're way more excited by like, something new that we've tested and tried, that's working, or a client having a win because of something that we taught them, way more fulfilling than having the big wins. Think that's so huge and it's so easy to look at, I can see how people could be forgiven for looking even at your Instagram and going, Oh, it's so easy for them. They just go from strength to strength, and it's so easy. And I can say as your best friend, like, fucking hell, if there is something I love and admire about you, it is how willing you are to do hard stuff, like you make some skills. Scary decisions, ego, death after ego, death after ego, death after it's almost I don't know how you are still living with all these ego deaths lately, but like I see that you're also willing to do the hard things, and there's been so many different iterations of that. So if we look back at your journey, and I only met you, like, two years into your journey. I think was like the beginning of PMP, but there was a few years before that, where you were, you were Audi, when you first decided to change your whole life. Yeah, what sort of iterations have you gone through, where you've felt like sabotage, this can't happen, and where you've had to do the hard things at every phase of business. So I'll be really honest, the only thing that happens at every phase is the story. So at every single phase, it's a story that stops you from getting to the next level. And then you when you identify what the actual story is and you can change it, that's when it actually starts to move. That's when you'll move through the next to the next phase. Then often the story is entangled in an identity shift, which is really big and hard, because whenever you shift an identity, you have to let things go, things have to fall behind, and you will change. And that's uncomfortable. So from Audi to near, my first business, which was a events business, the story was, I'm too dumb. I saw was I'm too dumb to do this. I never had any formal education. I barely passed High School. I didn't go to university, I dropped out. I had no formal education. So How the hell could I do anything like ever? How could I do anything ever like this is never gonna work for me. And so the first story was, I'm too dumb to do this, and that really played out heavily, like building my first website took me six months. I cried every day trying to build it because I felt so stupid that I couldn't get it, and why couldn't make Why couldn't I get it? And why is it so hard? And, like, really hated the first, honestly, six months business, which is awful, launched my first event, and no one bought tickets. Had to cancel it. And luckily, I had to my corner just being like, do it. Do it. This is it. This is welcome to Business. And so the iteration that took me from that to just keep going with that, and you're eventually again, celebrating the small wins. My friends bought tickets to an event, and then one other person, I call them a stranger. One stranger bought a ticket, and I was like, Oh, yeah. Something in my marketing worked, my spamming of Facebook groups. Something in my spamming of Facebook groups worked because someone signed up they thought that I was legitimate enough to pay me $50 for a ticket. Oh, my God, this is happening. And then, you know, it was like, Okay, now we're making big money. And the next shift was, am I actually going to quit my job and do this huge identity shift from being a worker to being self employed? Mass fear, especially for me with, you know, my parents went bankrupt when I was quite young. I was, Oh, my God, we're gonna run out of money. And, yeah, yeah, what am I gonna tell my parents? They're gonna be so disappointed, all those things, so big identity shift there. Then once I got into entrepreneurship, I was like, I'm gonna be the entrepreneur. Like, watch out, Lisa messenger, because I'm covered for you. Actually, on one of our, I don't know if you remember this one of our team meetings in PMP, I think you suggested that we read Lisa messenger, yeah. And I was like, Who is she? I don't even know who she was, but you were, you were in that last, I think already, yeah, getting her on your podcast and all this stuff. Like she was definitely, oh, I remember that season, yeah, that's it, girlfriend, yeah? Like, I was looking at other female big entrepreneurs, and I was like, I'm gonna gun you down. You watch me. You just watch we're gonna be best friends, yeah, which is so funny. And I ended up not actually liking her that much later on in life, in terms of, like, I there was a bit of a values alignment later on as I kind of got to further on to entrepreneurship. But yeah, I went through this phase of like, okay, well, I'm here now, so I'm all in on this. So I was, I got a $5,000 credit card I paid for my first business coach, you know, she was all right, but I learned some things, which was cool. And I really went to Tony Robbins, and I started having some internal shifts. Okay, I have to think that I am this person before I become this person. So how does this person behave? And then I started behaving kind of like that daily, right? So that was kind of the next shift, and that took that business pretty far, to be honest. There was a lot of failures in that first business. There will be a lot of failures in anyone's first business. There's lots of mess. Didn't know profit and loss, didn't understand money. Almost had to fire hate people, because I made really bad firing like, hiring decisions. I couldn't afford to actually pay them anymore. Lots of shitty things that I had to figure out along the way. And then, uh, COVID hit, and I sold that business. And then the identity of, okay, I actually had fully taken on that. I was Steph from House of poppy. That was my name, Steph from House of poppy. And so when I sold that business, I remember calling my business coach at the time, and now very good friend, Ellie, yeah, and I was crying, and I said, if I'm not Steph from House of hobby, who am I? I've been Steph at Audi. Now is Steph from House of hobby? Who the fuck am I? If I'm just Steph? And what an interesting like reflection, because wild that I needed an identity to cling to, and I. Think, honestly, we had a conversation earlier. I think I've only just come out of that in the last couple of weeks of needing an identity to clean too. That wasn't just, this is actually just who I am, yeah. And so then I became Steph, the business coach. And then I wanted to, you know, take over the world with business coaching and be the best business coach and and so I kind of clung to this new identity of being this professional woman that got gets in Forbes and needing validation, really, to from other people to say that I was worthy of charging people the rates that I was charging grew that business. Lots of identity shifts through there, and a big money ones came through that that business really took me, and that was when I first met you, that really business, really business really, we went from 10k months to 100k months and 12 months, and that was the year that I met you, and the money identity shift really changed me. I felt like I couldn't talk to people anymore because I felt like they would judge me, or I thought money was changing me. Interestingly enough, I was just changing and I was bagging the money out being the problem. But the problem was that I was doing it in a way that wasn't making me happy, and I didn't think there was another way. So I was just clinging to it. And so there was a lot of dissolving of you know, how I my belief system is about working hard to make money. There's a lot of dissolving of that in that period. And that was when I watched you go on your bike and travel around, and I thought, how is she making almost as much money as me working literally, like two hours a day, just fucking around with Paul and I bike all day. Excuse me, yeah. What is this? Yeah, that was when I started to believe a new story of, okay, maybe it doesn't have to be this hard. And that brought me into a kind of a new identity shift. And up until this time, I'd been really playing the good girl. Had really played the pink, pretty good girl card to make people like me so they would want to buy from me. And at that point that was no longer serving me. And that was when the black arrow came in, and the pendulum always swings very hard. So I'm being very soft girl to very hard girl. Yeah, no, I think I've just come somewhere in the middle, just, you know, I can be soft. I can also be pretty firms. And so now, yeah, I thought I went to my hard beach era where everything was like, I'm gonna say it how it is, you know, my content became quite preachy, almost, because I wanted to prove to people that I had something to say, you know. And I think I really, really just come out of that in the last six months, I would say, just, actually, this is just, there's somewhere in the middle, and I can be actually, probably all of those things all at once, yeah, and there's just been so many identity shifts along the way, and there's so many more within that, and that's in a really short period of time. Like, it's been a lot of identity shifts in a five years, yeah, three to five I've probably, like, three to five years, yeah, yeah, which is crazy. And at every level, like you've coached hundreds of business owners now, you've seen other people in the space, whether they're doing six figures a month or six figures a second, some of them, like you've seen all you've seen all of it. What would you say if we break it down into, like, startup, you know, people that are just starting, and then people that are scaling, and then people that are mass scaling, yep. What have you seen as the patterns of sabotage or fears, things that can really stop people in their tracks? Like you've mentioned identity, you've mentioned things like that. What do you notice as, like, the patterns at every level that people just need to clock? This is normal. This actually is what comes up, and that doesn't mean something's wrong, but just clock it totally so the first phase. I don't know exactly when it ends, but typically probably up to, I would say, 20k months. I think that probably up to 20k months, which is around, what is that like? 300 $400,000 a year. Yeah, I think that most of that is self sabotage from not thinking that you're good enough or actually good enough for what you do. And the second self sabotage that's playing out, it's actually heaviest in this space. And the other ones playing out is what we will think, 100% I would agree with that, yeah. And those two are very heavy sabotages on their own. So not good enough is already big and very hard to navigate. Yeah. And what will they think is huge and, and I think having both of those, which I think will, yeah, honestly, I would say that once you get past 20k months, you resolve that money stuff. So you you you know that you can do it. You've done it consistently for a little while, three or 400,000 you've got proof. You've got runs on the board, you've got some momentum. I think it starts to feel a little bit more safe that you proving to yourself and to others that you can do it, and you kind of know that you're kind of good enough at some level. Otherwise people wouldn't have been paying you at some level. So it does kind of disintegrate at that point. But those first those first few years, really are just so hard. I feel like mindset is the number one. Like I always say to anyone starting a business, mindset in the startup phase is the most important. It doesn't ever become not important. Yeah, but it's all that putting yourself out there. What are my colleagues going to think? What are my family going companies on LinkedIn? No. Sales grows. I'm not a money person like all of it is so heavy when you're starting totally and the sabotage I see in the beginning phase is I'll go small. Yes, I'll just shrink myself a little bit. Yeah, and that's actually the opposite of what your business needs. Totally like, I had a conversation with someone the other day, and she was like, Cool, I'm just gonna do this. She works with people who have a lot of money. She goes, I'm gonna do this thing for $44 and I was like, why your audience have a lot of money? Very, very wealthy, asset rich people. She was there in a lot of debt. And I was like, no, no, they're asset rich. There's a very big difference between people who are in debt and people who, like, there's good debt and bad debt. These people are in very, very good debt. And I was like,$44 they're gonna think that I think it's too cheap. I wouldn't buy it because I think it's it looks too cheap. Yeah. And so that you're not taking yourself seriously, well, I take you seriously. And I think that there's something that happens you're out of that face where they shrink, they undercharge, they hide, they they blend in. So all their stuff looks the same. They go for browns and neutrals and beiges and, you know. And I get it, we've all been there. I did all the very, very I used to black it with just black and white, just subdued, really, just subdued pinks. Yeah, you know, don't want to, yep, very much. I mean, I still use camera graphics, yeah, not well designed ones, yeah, totally, you know. And I think you're right. What your business needs in that first bit is like you need a gung ho. You need to get louder. You're the most scared when you're the most scared in the startup phase. I feel like that's when your business needs you to be freaking courageous, totally. And it's icky and it's cringy, so icky, and cringy, it's so hard, if you could get past that phase, guys, I promise business gets easier. Yeah, 100% and I actually remember you saying to me, I don't know, must have been during PMP, you said, the hardest is getting to your 10 and 20k month, for sure. And I agree with you. I'm like, 100% that's the hardest you're learning, the most new skills you're getting past, all the mindset things you're sabotaging in a real like, like you said, it's self sabotage. Yes, then there's a new phase, yes, after 20k months, when you're starting to move into, you know, 2040, 50, 100k months, yeah, what have you noticed? There are the main patterns of sabotage and fear that presents itself. What was your experience? Too? 20 to 60k months. So at around that$700,000 a year, $800,000 a year, you'll see another stop, stop gap that will happen there. And what will happen is to go from 20 to 60, you will have to work really hard. And you know, that's a lie. You don't have to work really hard, but you will work really hard because you don't know another way. So to get from 10, from zero to 10 or 20, you can pretty much hustle. You'll hustle that day yourself. That's no problem. But then at 20, you probably are gaining some momentum, and things will start to happen quite quickly, and you won't have the time to end or conscious consciousness, conscious awareness to know what's coming, to hire people or be ready for the growth that's about to happen, because you're still believing that. I can't believe this happened, like you're not ready for what's coming next, yeah. And so what will happen is that you will just keep saying yes, because this is what I wanted, is when I wanted clients. I wanted more money. I want to get 50k months. I want these things. And so you will take on a ton of clients, and you will burn out. This is where this burnout is very, very ripe in this phase, and it will be scary to hire people. You won't have systems and processes in place to do it. You'll try hiring someone, and it will not go well for you. That's this is just part of it, guys. And then you will create a story that no can do it the way that I can do it. So then I'll just so we go the next story is either two things. One, I'll keep small. That's it. I don't even want this that badly. Anyway, I'm not going to sacrifice time with my family for this like this. The story runs exactly. I see it all the time. The story runs. It's not worth it. I'm not going to do this. It is that you again, you're at a new level of skill, and then the level of skill is that you have to find a way to create systems and processes and hire team members for your business to be able to be able to take it to the next level, and to be able to give yourself the space and time that you need to grow the business. And so this is what this is, that's the story that will come up is it's all too hard, and I'm just going to play down here because it feels safe and comfortable. And most people at this point are achieving a level of financial freedom they didn't expect to achieve. So like, I should just be grateful here, even though their mission is actually much bigger. And then what will happen once you get past 60k months? Getting 200 is really easy, so if you can hit 6065, 70, you're there like you, it'll happen within six months. It'll move really quickly for you, because to get to 65 ish, 70k months, you've typically built out enough of the team, the systems, the processes you've got it dialed in enough to get enough of those marketing systems happening that you can pretty much guarantee that what you've done before is going to keep working. 100k months is where the next thing is. So most people get stuck at 100k months, or somewhere between 100 to 130 they'll loop there. Yeah. And the reason they'll loop there is because the things that got you there will not get you to the next level. So from 50k months to 100k months, you'll you'll zoom in, because all of the marketing, all the systems, all the things that are designed to attract that level of person will get you to the 100k month point. At the 100k month point, you basically, it's actually about doing a lot less so to get 100k Months, you may have added extra revenue streams or extra things in to get there, because you just wanted to hit the number usually. And then what will happen is that you, at this point, to go to 200k months, you actually need to peel back completely. And you have to choose very if you hadn't already done it. You really have to choose one niche. You really have to choose one offer you like. There is no two ways about it. There's just no two ways about it. Wow. There are so many identity shifts within that even like all of a sudden you go from the I saw this for you, actually, you were the sales person, the coach, the everything. And then all of a sudden you had to relinquish control to team and Tim and Tim. You've had to do this on so many different levels, which is so scary, yeah, and I think that's where I would personally. I've seen it for myself too. I can do it myself. I don't need anyone else. I've got this. So I just, I resonate with so much of it. When you're in that seven figure. Mark, your business is at the seven figure. Mark, you know, people are in the eight figure. Mark, all of that, what would be surprising for people to know. For those who are listening that are like, Oh, fuck that. That sounds like more team, more pressure, more stress, more responsibility. Like, what are some things that have surprised you in that realm? Two things. One thing that took me a really long time to make acceptance and peace with, and I feel like I've only just made peace with it in the last six months, has been that it's a sales and marketing machine. There's no two ways and people will leave. That's gonna happen. And you could have the best product in the world, and people will leave, like, people are gonna leave so or like, not, you know, make a new choice, or whatever. So you're always gonna lose people out the back end. So you constantly, it's a machine, it. There is no two ways about it. Yeah, there's and the minute that, the sooner you just accept that that is the way that it is. I tried so hard you, I mean, you worked with me? Well, I worked really hard on this. I was like, How can I make this the best thing ever for the clients? They never, ever, ever, ever, ever leave. You're wasting your time. Yes, make it the best product for sure, yes. But people aren't just leaving because of your product. Or sometimes they are like, definitely, sometimes they are, but fix it to the best that you can. Make it the best thing that you are proud of, that you know for sure works. It gets your clients results, and if people leave, that's just part of the game. And so I think I tried so long listening to Heba Hall mosey podcast being like, if you just retain every client you ever got, guys, it's unreasonable. It's unreasonable. It's not gonna happen. Yeah, there's no business that that happens. So hanging out with people who are doing million dollars a week, I learned there is no business that that happens. Like, it's a sales and marketing machine. You need to, you guys need, like, you need to figure out how to sell or find someone who can, and you need to figure out what your marketing channels are. And it's just then the second thing, the most, actually, three surprising things. It's just a numbers game. So, like, it's actually so mathematical and so logical. It's wild. It's just so much the case of, like, okay, so this, and we spoke about this the other day, there's this many people coming to my website. I know that if there's that many people come into my website, I'll make this many sales. So that means I just need to dial up my ad spend or or, you know, nailing my organic content to be able to drive that much traffic to my page. Figure out what drives traffic to my page, do more of that content so that I drive this much traffic to my page, so I can guarantee the sale. And it is, it is spot on every time. It's crazy how mathematical it is. And so that's removed a lot of the emotion of the process for me, which has been really cool, because you just do the thing, to do the thing, and then you just do the thing. It's so simple. Yeah, actually, I think the reason I rejected it for so long was because it felt too simple, yeah. And it's, it's actually so relieving. Yeah, it is, wow. And the third thing is that everybody at the top has so much time that was, and I know that that was the one you were kind of digging for in the conversation here, which was, yeah, I was really surprised. I thought Tim and I went to this event, and I thought, and this is the second time we've met these people. So the first time we met them was three months ago, and and I we were on the way over there, and we're like, we're gonna be so chilled to everybody there. Could you imagine a million dollars a week, how fucking stressed they must be they must be so crazy. And I've literally, we got there, and the first people we spoke to, this is so embarrassing. The first people we spoke to, we they were so relaxed. They were sitting on, like, back on chairs. Yeah, it's like, oh, have you guys been like, Oh, we've actually been offline for the last two and a half weeks, yeah, because we just got our surfboards, then we just went out to the middle of the middle of the ocean in Fiji for the last like two weeks, and we've just been surfing. I literally haven't looked at my phone. Today's the first time I picked my phone up. And they're businesses. I'm talking million dollar a week businesses. I mean, just running proper, CEO proper. They're like, they bring their wives, they all have their kids, they bring their nannies, like it, and it's just, and the wives come to all the events, and they're like, we're new babies. Like, I'm talking like, new, new new, new babies. Like, they're three month olds. And it really showed me that once you get through so we're in a phase, and there will be another, there's the next phase, and in this phase is a set of skills that we need to learn. And that set of skills is hiring and managing eight players. And, like, really, really, really strong leaders, really strong people. We don't know how to do that yet. We don't know how to build good, really great company culture. We don't know, like, where we're getting there, but we're definitely not nailing it yet. And the minute that we nail that, that's when that next level will unlock for us. And so now it's just a game of like, every day, Tim and I, Tim's reading how to be a sales manager. Books. We're watching videos in the afternoon, every afternoon, about how to be better managers, how to build company culture, how to build a company that people want to work for, remunerate people, what the KPI should look like for some roles, like we're just deep in the skill of learning it, because that's the unlock for sure. And when you get the A players, guys, you won't need to drag them. They just do. Yeah. They just do Yeah. And I think that's, that's why everyone's so chill at the top. They're so chill. That's insane. Like, we're not chill in comparison, yeah. And I think I'm pretty Yeah. I have afternoons free every day, you know, I see my hot tub. Like, these guys are even more chill. And I think they would have gone through a real maybe they all went through would you say, like they're chill now, yeah, but let's not look at them now and say it's always going to be easy. I'm sure. Yeah. Did they? Have you noticed they also went through a season of so much sacrifice, like, the reality of getting to that point is they're just sacrifices that people just need to accept right now, if they're going to go forward on this path, there's a couple of things you will have to accept. One is that you will either sacrifice time or money. Yeah, and so, and I'm just going to play that out in a really, real way so that people can understand and comprehend what that means. But you will either sacrifice time, by the way, of you will have to give it your all, all the time, like I have mostly sacrificed time. We're very cash rich because of cash wealthy, I would say because we have sacrificed so much time. So you've seen me work very, very, very, very hard, very extended periods of time and but that's not the only way that you can do it. If you are willing to reinvest back into your business. A lot of people do it a lot faster, or not a lot faster, but in a different way, a lot more chill, because they just don't take big wages or have big profits left in the business. They reinvest all their profit back in and so because of that, they hire great people, or they learn those skills quite quickly. It is trial and error. You will hire people repeatedly, and then you will figure it out. That's just how it works. On me. Obviously, you're perfect. Oh no, hiring you. Yeah, you were perfect. That was the funniest thing. We won't talk about it, but I just remember when we did our quote interview, yes, it was like, 10 minutes on the phone, and you were just like, yeah, come work for me. And I was like, was that the interview? Was that it? So I'm excited to see your leadership and like, training skills evolve, and we have a four stage interview process now. Yeah, when I started with you, it was very much like we vibed. I loved what you it was so not that's I'm even reflecting now on how much you've had to change and develop your skills, because I've been in your interview process four years ago, it was not an interview process. It was, I mean, so so magical and so aligned, and I'm so happy it happened, but I'm so happy to see it's cool to watch your skills evolve. You also saw me get burnt, yeah, 100% from that interview process, not with you, obviously, yeah, but you've seen, you've saw that play out in real time. It's a testament to you that you haven't let that close down your willingness to trust again, because business is and this is the what would So, okay, you said that the people right up here, they've taken the emotion out completely. They've just built a machine, yep. What then do you say to the people who are these, quote, heart based business owners, heart led, Soul led business owners who are there for massive impact, human connection, all of that deep stuff. Do these people up there just go past there, or are they still very heart centered in all of that, and they leave with their heart up the top too? Finally, with your heart. That's such a good point. Do they look at numbers? And the main metric is bottom dollar. It's not dollar. All of them, they measure all metrics. Yeah, people at the top are measuring 200 metrics a week, like, minimum, like, without doubt. So there's the money metrics. Great, but yeah, these people would never, most of these people would never put something out that wasn't helping people, yeah. And so then they have, most people will do some level NPS scoring, yeah, so making sure that their clients are actually happy with the services, and they are heartbroken when their clients are not. So if that answers your question, so I'll give you an example. There's someone at this point, I'm not gonna names, and they had an incredible kind of like, seven figure level network for it, coaching program, so a level that's under that, and they have a level that's for like seven figure entrepreneurs, and it's been the creme de la creme of their business for years, for very, very long time. And recently they made the decision to let a, I don't know what happened. They must have done a big marketing spree on it, and they let a bunch of people in, I think, like 30 or 40 people in. And. And and they let a lot of the wrong people in. And three months down the track, we're now three months down the track, and it's a ghost town. No one talks, no one's commenting. And it's not the owners, the owner of the company. It's not actually his responsibility to manage that. It's he's another guy that was in the room. It's his responsibility to manage it. Both were heartbroken. Both were heartbroken. They were like, This is so substandard. This is we had this amazing thing, and we ruined it. We have to fix it. But they also see it as we just have to fix it, and this is just a moment in time, and we just need to fix it. And they're not like, butt hurt about it crying on the shower floor. I mean, maybe, but they're, they're just like, Okay, we have a problem that didn't work. There's a B lesson. We need to make an apology. We probably need to give them three months free for a refund, or we need to put on a really fucking good Christmas party and make it epic and fix it, or kick some people out. But there's some stuff we need to do. We need to do that, and I think that what happens with the group of people that you're talking about that aren't at that level, they're heart centered. They make it means. They make meaning from it. The emotions are running the show, just way too hard, yeah, because it's, it's yes, like, so yes, these people have hearts, of course, yeah, I'm gonna say not all of them, yeah, of course. 90% of them have hearts. Honestly, really good people. Really want to help. People have very big vision, much bigger vision than actually their business now, most of them are onto more world saving levels of vision. Yeah, but I would say they care very deeply about their teams and they care very deeply about their clients. But that doesn't mean that they only make decisions based on those metrics, either, because at the end of the day, to pay their team and to actually run an event, and to keep an event role, to keep these things running for clients, there has to be money, because if there is no money, there is no business. And if there's no business, for those clients, go out into the world and get suffocated by somebody else's shitty product or shitty thing in the world, or like, I mean, how many awful NLP courses are there in the world that are just mass manipulation tools for taking people's money, right? And so there's this, there's we have this almost obligation to, if you are a heart centered person, to run it like a fucking business. Because if you don't run it like a business, it will not survive. And then they just, you're just gonna leave people out in the in the wild, free to go and get burned by some other people. It sucks. I love that. I love that it gets to be both and it is both. Yes, so moving forward. We're wrapping this up because I want to one. Moving forward, 2025, what's next for you, and what sort of sabotaging patterns do you need to be aware of it the level you're at now, 2025 we honestly, it's, it's crazy. We've just, I'm so I actually feel so proud of us, like I feel super proud we have really, genuinely built something that's gonna the vehicle that's gonna take us there without sacrificing the things that I've been scared of sacrificing, which are two things, one, client experience. I want to be the coach in the program. That is a non negotiable. So because I want to continue being the coach in the program, I don't want to just bring other coaches like that's not how this looks so but we're fortunate enough, not fortunate. We did it, that we built a business that that gets us where we're going financially, to allow us to do the next thing, because we really want to retreat space business in in the future, I don't think that's going to happen next year, probably the year after next, we're hoping to get pregnant, so I don't think it's a good time you and I, you and I, yes, we've got that. Yes, we are trying to get pregnant, yes, with our respective husbands, together, altogether. Husbands, separately, at least different rooms. And so the the goal is big retreats, love really, like the next iteration, I would say, of Tony Robbins that just a little bit less wild and exhausting and transforming and stuff just a bit more like normal and and so that's kind of the goal, but that's kind of a three to five year goal for us, the vehicle to drive us to the point where that becomes a reality for us, both financially and being able to get the sponsors and the backers and the because it's a big thing, it's a really expensive and big thing to Do this current business will take us there without sacrificing too much of the things that matter, time, freedom, lifestyle, freedom and and client experience, things that matter most to me. So yeah, so the next year is just really darling down and making sure that we hit our goals over the next two years, so that in three years, we can do the thing we really want to do. And what are the patterns that you need? You know you need to be aware of next year that stop you two patterns, money stuff for me and I have a really, I've really hectic funny stories. They all creep up when we're about to make big moves, we're going to go into a period of what we would call a reinvestment period. Yeah. So there you will have these at different phases in business. We're about to go into one, which means that pretty much everything we earn. And we poured back into the business. Yeah, won't be, we'll have, we may even dip into our kitty, yeah, and we have both become okay with the fact that we may even cut our salaries, yeah, to make sure that we can do it. Yeah. So there are reinvestment periods in business, and we're about to go into one. And so we're hoping that it just pays off and we won't have to do those things. But it may not, and we're willing to do that. So money stuff, yep. And not getting too caught up in other people's stories. I have to, I'm doing a very big call on social media at the moment, unfollowing a lot of people. Yeah, I am following you, not you or anyone listening properly, probably. But yeah, unfollowing, muting, yeah. Really, being very, cautious of what stories I buy into, because I can get very easily, I'm very easily influenced, yeah, but that's be, like part of being open minded. You're just an open minded person. You, yeah? You don't close things down. And I think that's like the shadow side of being open minded. You can be influenced because you're open to it, yeah, which is beautiful, which is why you can always twist my arm for a night out. Yeah? So on that note, we're gonna go, thank you so much. I love you. I love you too. Thank you for tuning in to the mind school podcast. It is a massive intention of mine to continue to grow this show, because the more the show grows, the better the guests get. And I know that is going to be so powerful for you listening. So if I could ask this massive favor, it would mean the world if you could please leave a review, hit the Follow button, or leave a rating on Spotify, so that we can continue to grow this show and bring you the juiciest, most thought provoking and expansive conversations through incredible guests. Thank you so much for tuning in. I'll see you next week. You.