Ep #366: Lessons from 10 Years in Business: Your Business is an Asset

Welcome to the Make Money as a Life Coach® podcast where sales expert and Master Coach Stacey Boehman teaches you how to make your first $2k, $20k, and $200k using her proven formula.

Hey coaches, this is lesson 5. Today, we’re going to be covering lesson 5 of my lessons from being in business for 10 years. And this one is going to save some businesses. Like for real. I think there will be before this episode and after this episode. So make sure you dig in.

So we’re going to talk today about your business being an asset, thinking of your business like an asset, and treating your business like an asset. And I’m going to explain what that means. So I used to say that your business is your baby. And if you are a parent, you will really get what I mean by that. Even if you’re a fur baby parent, okay? All the parents.

In the beginning, especially, one of the things that made me so successful so quickly is the idea that it was my job to take care of the business, not the business’s job to take care of me. That I had to feed it constantly with coaching and skillset development, and effort and time to go out and market it. I had to care for it 24/7. I would lose sleep over it, I would be exhausted with it, I would nurse it constantly as it grew into a big old business or an asset. I could never need anything from it or have high expectations of it, right? We don’t have high expectations of babies or toddlers. I couldn’t expect behavior, certain behavior, because it wasn’t mature enough yet to give me the results, the behavior that I demanded.

But if I kept nursing it and showing it how I wanted it to be, one day it would be this beautiful, handsome, well-behaved thing that I wanted to show off to the world, to everyone. One of the hardest lessons I think is that your business is not responsible for your living and lifestyle and bills when you get into business because you want it to pay for your lifestyles and bills.

That’s the absolute hardest thing. What do you mean? That’s the only reason I started this thing. I really know how that feels. And even worse, I think what makes it more painful is that we don’t realize that’s the deal that we’re making when we start. We don’t realize that we’re having a baby, and we’re about to metaphorically or physically be very sleep-deprived and financially strapped for the next few years while we grow a tiny baby business.

So then, when you’re confronted with this level of hard, the level of hard of having a newborn and a toddler, I see very, like, there are very stark similarities between the two. Right, the level of hard of having a newborn and a toddler.

Like this, and then having a business. Like, often this is when people tell themselves when they are in the hard, when they’re in the, you know, metaphorical or physical sleepless nights, when they’re in the failure, when they’re in the I don’t know how to do any of this. I don’t know how to keep this alive. I don’t know how to make money. It’s not making money. What do I do? When they’re in this, and they didn’t realize this is what they signed up for, then we tell ourselves, like, I’m not cut out for it, I can’t handle it, it’s too much, it’s not working, I quit. 

With real babies, you can’t quit. You’re forced through the hard. And you do get to the other side because you can’t quit. This is something I remind myself of often. Now, actually, you can quit. So this is also really important. You choose not to quit being a parent because you are unconditionally committed. Right? You don’t like get 4 months in and be like, this is so hard, all right. Bye baby. Some people maybe, but the majority of people, if you are listening, maybe you have not done that. Because you are unconditionally committed. You have to be unconditionally committed to your business as well. 

And I’m not saying that it comes before your kids. I’m saying I always tell my clients who have kids, I’m like, you have two kids. Okay, great. Now you have three. You have four kids, great, now you have five. When you have multiples, then I think it becomes less and less a thing, right? The 1 to 2 is stark, but it’s a big, it’s a big difference. 0 to 1 and 1 to 2 feels like a big difference. But I could see if we had a third one that would be like, all right, we know what we’re doing here. So you’re just, you’re not replacing your actual children, you’re just adding a child. It’s a baby child or a business child. It’s a baby child. It’s a business child.

But you really do have to be unconditionally committed to it so that you show up and feed it enough, and you put in enough tender care and nurturing that it can grow up and thrive. So what the feeding it and the nurturing it looks like is you growing your mindset as an entrepreneur, as a coach, and as a leader. You growing your emotional range for courage, uncertainty, tolerance, resilience, disappointment, all humiliation, shame, all of the hard things. 

Growing your capacity to handle hard things. Growing your capacity to create time where it currently feels like it doesn’t exist to make way for these growth activities and the learning and caring for the business. That’s the biggest thing, right? You’re going to probably be working full-time and parenting full-time. And you’re going to be like, how do I make time for this business?

Well, how would you make time for another baby? Maybe you would, I don’t know, take a sabbatical. Maybe you would, yeah, you’d figure it out. You’d be up in the mornings, you’d be up late at night. You’d get less sleep. You’d not have time for social stuff as much. You wouldn’t be watching as much TV, you wouldn’t be doing as much things for yourself. Like that is the truth in the beginning. It’s not always like that.

But I think we’re afraid to have this conversation because so much selling has been done, not just in the coaching industry, in network marketing industries, about like how easy it is to just start a business and make money on the side, and it really is an illusion.

It is not, there’s no such thing as passive income in the beginning. Anyone who is telling you that is it’s a little bit of a lie. Like no matter what, it takes time to educate yourself, to figure out how to create some sort of passive income stream. It doesn’t just happen. Right, so everything that you create in the beginning is a baby, and it’s going to require this level of care.

And so the only option is to grow your capacity to manage what you’re already managing so that you have more energy to manage and handle more. That’s it. And I tell my clients that is at the beginning, but that is also going to millions. I get multiple 6-figure earners or a 7-figure earner that wants a multiple 6-figure earners that want to go to 7 or a 7-figure earner that wants to go to 8. And they’re exhausted by their current business, and they don’t have extra time.

Or people will ask me, you’re launching now, and you have all this time because you’re not coaching. What do I do if I’m coaching 20 hours and I want to start selling group and I want to have time for launches and marketing? You have to grow your capacity. This is not a time issue. It’s a capacity issue.

And when you’re at your max, that will always be when it’s the hardest, but you have to figure out how to handle hard. Not find a way to bypass the hard. You will never be good at entrepreneurship if what you’re searching for are ways to bypass hard. You will become excellent at entrepreneurship if you’re always finding ways to grow your capacity to handle hard, to create more energy, and to find time where it doesn’t feel like there is, and to manage your time better and to produce more in the time that you have. That will make you a phenomenal, very rich entrepreneur. 

Feeding it also looks like growing your confidence to put yourself out there and to be visible. It looks like expanding your money beliefs to create money from your personal service. It’s a very personal thing to sell a coaching service or a program or like your content. And to believe that people will pay you and to believe that you can make way more money than generationally you’ve, anyone in your family’s ever made. It was so wild. Oh my God.

We had a 200k Mastermind call recently. We do bonus revenue coaching calls. So we have our weekly call, and then we do revenue reporting or revenue tracking. And I have, I’ve done a podcast about why we do this, but we do that every month, and we cheer people on in the Facebook group, but people also have my tracking system that they’re able to upload their revenue in and really see their growth.

And the those that participate in that, I give them an extra call every month to come on, and all we do is coach on their thoughts about their revenue and their money and the feelings around it. And so the first call of this new class, we had, I mean, it was like the greatest call that’s ever been. We cried through the whole thing, mostly.

And there was a really big transformation about that, like that it’s okay for women to cry in business spaces. But the thing that was like one of the things that was radiating through the room is that it got brought up that we are all, every single woman in the room, was the first to make the kind of money that they’re making in the generations of their family. They were the first ones to break generational money barriers. Can you, like, I can’t even explain it to you.

The profoundness of being on a call where every single person or most of them are saying, I am breaking generational income barriers. I am making more money than any person in my family that’s come before me. Like that’s wild.

Me too. And if you’re in 200k or if you’re not there yet, like that’s, it might be my new mission is to help women become the highest earners that have ever been in the generations of their family. Like, break that barrier. Yes.

And we have to work on our money beliefs to be able to do that. We have to work on interpersonal relational issues within our family to do that. We have to break out of the family dynamic a little bit to do that. There’s a lot there. I could go on about that forever, but I’ll move on.

We also have to grow, or we, you have to grow your skillset to market, sell, and deliver. Just that alone is has been my entire business offer suite for 8 years in business. I’m going to teach you how to market, sell, and deliver, and create a really profitable business. I’m going to teach you how to make money as a life coach. Like that in itself has been enough to be almost 10 years of content coaching and business delivery.

Learning how, and I call, I really teach a lot, like in my revenue challenge, learning how to create money from nothing in my 200k Mastermind. That is the skillset. Going from zero to 2k. We also start, we start that process in the 2k for 2k. Learning how to go from literally I’ve never made a dollar as an entrepreneur to my first $2,000 and then my first $4,000 and $6,000 and $10,000 and then $20,000 and then $200k. That is a skill set. That learning that is feeding the baby.

Feeding it is also growing your audience, growing the value that you give, adding to your value bank. It’s nurturing the people you meet as a coach, and then the audience that you start gathering on maybe the socials, or on an email list, or through a podcast. All of these things are how you grow the baby, how you feed the baby.

And just like those sleep-deprived nights, if you have had a newborn in your life, where it feels like it will never end, and you have entered the tunnel or the land of hopelessness. It will. But this is where the analogy starts to differ. It ends with growing your value and skillset in selling and your mind as an entrepreneur, not automatically.

So with kids, if you keep feeding them, and I guess it doesn’t really end automatically with them either. Like, you have to maybe sleep train them, you have to do things to get your children to the different stages, right? They have growth stages, but there are things parents do to foster that along. And if most humans can do that. If you do it, then they get to the point where they do maybe sleep through the night. We are not there yet, but I eventually think we will get there. They go to school.

Like I was telling my husband, our lives are going to be so dramatically different in 3 years because both of our kids will be potty trained, both of them will be out in school full-time, and we will have our days back. And then if they’re in school full-time, likely they’re going to sleep probably really well at night. And then maybe they’re going to be in sports, which is also going to help them sleep. So I was like, or extracurricular activities, whatever it is.

I’m like, our lives could be dramatically different in just a few years. And it feels a little bit more like that’s inevitable, versus your business doesn’t get out of the baby phase unless you grow your value and skillset in selling, and then you grow your mind as an entrepreneur. And that can take as long as it takes.

I have had people come to me and not grow these two things and be in business for 10 years, not making any money. And then they spend a couple years with me, and they’re making 2 million dollars a year. That example is rare, but it’s a profound example of this specific thing where it’s not automatic, it requires value and skillset in selling, and your mind is growing your mind as an entrepreneur.

So I have two big ideas around this that I want to kind of unpack. One big idea that I will drop here, and I’m not here to tell you that you’ve done anything wrong or what you should do. But the advice I will offer from love, the story I will tell you about my success, that’s what this series is about, is because in the beginning up until $100k, and now I would even say in like the current economy, I would say even maybe $200k, I treated my business like a baby and did not make it responsible for taking care of me. I worked full-time. My job paid my bills and allowed me to feed the baby.

I invested in what I felt I needed when I needed it. And that’s where my personal money went. And then when I started making money in my business, that’s where my business money went. I invested a lot of it up until my first $100k. And I have been aggressively investing ever since. And I have lots of podcasts about that.

I talk about it often because I want you all to know, like as much as the things I teach skill-wise and the lessons that I teach you here on the episode that have to do with mindset, as much of that has to contribute to my success, my willingness to invest in my business has to. I just because I’m a business coach who you could potentially invest with, I can’t hold back that message for seeming salesy. Like, I just have to tell you I’ve invested a lot in my business.

And so when I left my full-time job, I was making $8,000 a month. Like when I gave my notice. And I was living substantially below that income so that I could still invest and pay my taxes. And so that’s why I’m saying that amount might be higher now because it’s been 10 years. So it doesn’t make you a failure if you are still working your full-time job while you are growing your business. It makes you smart.

And it doesn’t make you more successful to leave your business; it might make you insufficient. It might make you scared. It might make you unbalanced, imbalanced. Created a new word there. Right, there’s not like this equals that. Leaving your job equals success, and staying at your job equals failure. That’s not the way it works. For me, I wanted to be able to invest. I wanted to feel sufficient on every call and not push a client because I needed money to pay bills.

I didn’t want that level of desperation. So every day I walked into Walmart, for those of you that think you have a hard time. I walked into Walmart and all of its glory, all the Walmarts across the country, all of them. And I would walk through the doors and say, I choose to be here so that I can pay my bills and take care of myself powerfully, invest in my business, and grow my asset, grow my business baby. Some version of that every day.

Because I used to have like there was a moment where I had a really intense coaching call with my coach and I was thinking about quitting, but it was in a creative space where I couldn’t pay for my coaching and I couldn’t pay my, I wouldn’t be able to pay my bills. And it was a really big like, I don’t know, you got to step up to the plate here. Like that’s not being a mature business owner. And it was hard, but she was right. And I was like, okay, like I’m not going to just like not pay my bills and not pay my coach when I owe my coach money. Like I’m not going to do that. I’m going to figure it out, even though it’s going to be really hard.

So every day I choose this. I choose to come here so that I can create money to pay for my bills, to take care of myself, and to pay, to invest in my business so that it can grow more.

And every day that I empowered myself in that way, I felt more and more grateful for Walmart and for being there. And I had less and less of a level of desperation that maybe other people experience when they’re trying to build their businesses. And so I was really, truly in a good place every time I got on a consult.

Now, I wasn’t in a great place. I wasn’t making tons of money. I was definitely like every week, where are my coaching payments coming from? And I got to scrap it together. I got to work a couple extra hours. I got to bring on another shift. I’ve got to vie for better stores and like really try to, you know, go across the country wherever the best store is. Like I would literally drive 8 to 10 hours just to get to a best store so I could make more money. I was committed.

So, another idea I want to drop here that I’ve already kind of mentioned, but I want to say it a little more plainly, is we get the equation wrong. We’re used to believing that time equals money. So we think if we quit our jobs, we will finally have the time to be successful. But in entrepreneurship, time doesn’t equal money. Skill equals money, value equals money. There’s no set time for how long it will take you to develop that skill.

An entitlement to that happening in a certain time frame will have you taking actions that lead to a lot of unnecessary pain, frustration, low self-confidence, and it will have you putting your business into financial distress by believing if you quit your job, you will finally have the energy to be successful. No, that’s not that may not happen. It’s not that it won’t happen, it may not happen.

I think what makes you successful is finding the energy when you think there is none. The learning curve is very steep for entrepreneurship. If it wasn’t, everyone would be doing it, and everyone would be rich. Now, just because everyone isn’t doing it doesn’t mean everyone can’t do it. Everyone can, just not everyone will. I want you to do it.

And I believe this is the power of having constant coaching and having community of other people doing the hard thing with you, normalizing that hard, normalizing that journey, seeing lots of examples of what feeding the baby and nurturing the business look like. But you’ve got to think of it that way. Everything is an investment for creating a healthy baby that turns into a healthy child that turns into a well-adjusted adult. That is what we’re doing with our businesses in the beginning.

Okay, so that brings me to your business being an asset. That baby you’re nurturing has the potential to be a much bigger asset than your stock portfolio. I want to say it again. People won’t like it, but I’m going to say it. Your business has the potential to be a much bigger asset than your stock portfolio.

I recently heard this explained, and I wish I had saved the post because it wasn’t someone I follo,w so I don’t remember who it was, or I would give credit. But I was on Instagram and I was scrolling and it was a woman and she was talking about before millions, you don’t need to be thinking about passive income.

And then she said, because passive income, or like, and she didn’t say your stock portfolio, but that’s the way I’m kind of thinking about it, but any type of passive income. And actually, I think she was alluding to that based on the analogy she gave, but because it when you don’t make a lot of money, the funds you have to create passive income or a stock portfolio, like they just can’t make you rich. Right, if you’re investing 10 to 20% of $60k or $100k, that isn’t going to make you rich. If you play the long game, yes, in 25 years, you might end up with 1.5 million dollars or whatever it is. And that is amazing. I don’t know that you could even retire off that type of money anymore. But it’s not going to make you rich now or anytime soon.

But learning how to earn, this is what she said, learning how to earn a million dollars, 2 million dollars a year, absolutely can. So then she said learn that first, put all your energy there. And then, between earning millions and then investing in passive income streams, your net worth will skyrocket.

But even the best investors that I know, like, can’t sign real estate deals and grow their portfolios unless they’re at a higher income tier than me, they’re not doing that faster than I’m making millions. So even someone investing for 10 or 20 years before me that has maybe even a multi-million dollar net worth now, when I make in 2 to 3 years, the entire worth of their portfolio, I’m going to be richer faster. So do you see what I mean? Like, there is actually a level.

Now, I’m giving like a big example is like if you get to millions, but that’s her point, right? In the video, is like, don’t make the like we try to get to passive income so quickly that we make all of our decisions based on getting to that passive income so our money is creating money. But if you have a little amount of money creating a little amount of money, it’s not the same as if you focus your energy instead on earning your first million, your first 2 million. And then suddenly, that money that you are putting into passive streams is a lot bigger. You have a lot bigger pool to start with.

And you can compound those investments a lot faster. So creating an asset that can give you the funds to invest bigger amounts of money would ultimately make you richer faster. Like that’s just circumstantial. Even if it’s not the average person doing it, even if it’s not the norm, that is the circumstantial truth that creating a business asset that makes millions of dollars or a lot more money than you’re making now will give you bigger amounts to invest passively and ultimately make you richer faster. That is just circumstantial. That’s neutral. That is true. I don’t know that you could not prove, I don’t know that you could disprove me on that.

And here’s the thing, when you get the audience size and the sales skills to sell in what I call the one-to-many model, what will happen is suddenly you’re creating assets, additional assets under the business asset, processes, concepts, tools, resources, courses, and those will be worth money for as long as you’re able to sell them.

The richest people in the world have companies and stock portfolios, right? They have both. They’re generating millions of dollars, most of them generating millions of dollars a year, and they also have their money invested. They have a brain that can generate money as long as their brain functions.

I love thinking about that for myself. I have created an asset in my brain, not even my business, because if I wanted to end this business and start a new business, I could. Right, I could make money with my brain. I love this thought for me, and it will generate money as long as my brain functions. I could be making money when I’m 80 if I live that long and my brain is still, I’m still aware, and my brain is still functioning, I’ll still be able to make money.

So the richest people in the world, they have things that they have created once that can pay them forever. I created The Consultation Code in 2018. It’s a book that you get when you join 2k for 2k. Either a hard copy or a downloadable copy. And I break down my consultation process and different talking points in a consult, and then I give like 50 different examples of coaches asking for coaching on their consults and me telling them why it went wrong and how to fix it.

And people tell me if they read that book in a weekend, they’ve gotten literally the investment back for the program and a crash course on selling life coaching. Like I still to this day, people tell me they would pay $2,000 just for that book. It took me 64 hours of human real labor to create that book. And 8 years later, almost 8 years later, it is still an asset that makes money and serves my clients. Created it once, and it’s still working while I’m sleeping to deliver value for me.

And now my 2k for 2k program requires about an hour a week for me, depending on if I’m, you know, if we’re in like a, sometimes I do 2k for 2k Live. It’s not as often, but like I’ll do it once or twice a year, maybe, and that’s a little more work, but mostly it requires an hour a week for me, and it generates millions of dollars a year. It’s made, I think I’ve made like all time closer around 12 million dollars from the program.

So do you see what I mean when I say at $60,000 a year, when that’s what I was making when I was selling mops in Walmart. If I was a good little girl and I invested 10% of that revenue, is that $6k? Terrible at math. Let’s say it’s $6k a year for the last 20 years. That would not come close, come close to being $12 million. That’s what I’m saying. You see it?

So when it gets hard, don’t forget this isn’t another job you are creating. The right mindset is that you’re creating an asset that will grow exponentially for you or that has the potential to.

So here’s why this matters. I’ve noticed this a lot over the last few years. I coach 7,000 coaches a week, and that’s not counting any my free stuff I do or like my Entrepreneur Series and things like that. I’m doing a behind-the-scenes that has almost 1,000 people in it right now. So that doesn’t count that, like just in my like 2k, 200k, 2 Million Dollar Group

And one of the things I’ve seen is there’s a group of coaches, it’s not everyone, but there’s a group of coaches who really blew up during the COVID times. They just kind of struck gold where they were on the upstream of growth, and then also everyone in the world was at home on the internet. Then the economy started crashing a little bit. Lots of people have different opinions about that, but it’s pretty provable that it went down. And people went back to work and got off the internet and reprioritized living actual life and got out and started taking vacations again and spending time outdoors and all the things.

And buyer behavior started shifting and changing because of how congested social media is. Lots of things contributed. And there are people who started struggling in business. Many of them might, when I talk to them, it’s all those things happened and coincided with something really hard happening in their life or really hard happening in their business. And either way, they ended up being at a place in their business where maybe they’re at a really low profit, at break-even, or even in the negative. And I’ve seen it in a bigger number than previous years.

So here’s what I want to say, no matter when you listen to this episode. When that business asset breaks even or goes in the negative, you have to start nursing it like a baby. You cannot give up. You’ve got to give it CPR. You’ve got to deep dive to recover it.

I want you to think about like you wouldn’t cash out your entire stock portfolio because it’s been down for 3 years. And if you did, you’d be doing so against most likely all financial advisors’ advice. Right, everyone tells you when you start investing money, if it goes down, do not pull out. It’s down for 3 years. You don’t pull out. It’s supposed to be a long game.

But for whatever reason, we don’t see our business asset that way. But for me, the way I think about it is the infinite game, the big picture is this asset has infinite potential for upside and return. That’s what entrepreneurship is: taking on risk to create an asset with infinite potential return. No guaranteed return, that’s not what I’m saying. So you got to let go of entitlement, but infinite potential return.

So it’s worth it to dig out of any hole you find yourself in. It’s worth it no matter, for example, much my message to my 2 Million Dollar Group. No matter how hard it is for you to figure out how to scale to a million or to 10 million, it’s worth it.

And this is where I really want to say to you, it’s worth it to keep investing in that asset even when the business is down. A friend recently asked me how I got my profit up to 60% from at one point a low of 7%. And my answer, beyond cutting big expenses because I did do that, which also made me change the way the business operated and who operated it. So that was a big part of it. And we got very lean. I had to hire better people, I had to create simpler operations, we had to have better systems and processes. Like all of that functionally did have to change.

But the other thing that I did, because she had already done that. So the other thing I did is I really did double down on my mindset and my coaching. So in one year, in the same year that I cut $6 million of business expenses from my payroll and tech and operations, I also invested $230,000 in my brain and support and growth. I know that sounds like a lot. You have to remember I’m at playing at a really big level. But that would be maybe the equivalent of your business hasn’t posted profit in two years, and you’re investing $23,000 into it. Right? It’s like, at some point, we’re just adding zeros. It’s the same problem. 

And what I was telling her is it’s paying off like wildfire for my internal operations, like me as a leader, and how our business runs. But also my business value, like what I’m offering to the world, and therefore all of my client results. Everyone has shifted massively who’s working with me right now. Everyone’s feeling that energy of holy crap, like my coach just is like really in a deep state of growth, and everything she’s saying is resonating with me deeply. Like that’s the experience I’m having in my, that carries on to even my clients

So it’s worth it if you’re willing to do the hard thing. And I talked about this in the episode about uncertainty tolerance. I had to hold a lot of uncertainty for a really long time, but I kept what kept me going is that this is an asset. I’m not going to let this go, and when this could do wonders for my family for the next 10 or 20 years. Like, where will we be in 5 years even with this business asset? It’s going to be drastically different than where we are now.

And then in 10 years when Jackson’s like just turning, like a like just becoming a teenager, his life is going to be so drastically different than what it is now. I’m going to be such a drastically different mom because I’m always growing my mindset. It’s going to be wild to think about how much growth we’re going to have in the next 5, 10, 20 years. But I see a lot of coaches quit and give up their asset because they can’t handle the feeling of it’s not working, or low profit, or breaking eve,n or even a negative year.

But you could pull yourself out of that hole and have 5, 10, 20 more years of profit with this asset if you thought of your business this way. But you have to figure out getting out of the hole, and that’s much harder to do alone.

So digging out of the hole is not the expense to cut. Like the support, the help, the knowledge, the all of it, the processes, the systems, the protocol, like all of it, anything that you could invest in that you think is the best bet for digging out of the hole is not the expense to cut. And I see a lot of coaches think it’s the first thing to cut. Like, oh, my business can operate without me being coached, and it can’t operate without the operations. Like the things I’m paying for operations. But that’s actually not true. It’s the opposite.

You could run a coaching business, even a million-dollar coaching business, from just your phone. I have a friend who had literally made a million dollars without even having, I think a VA. Everything she did on her own. But she had a business that made sense for that. Right, you could literally just run it from your phone.

You could do Zoom from your phone. You could not even do Zoom. You could just do live streams in a Facebook group. Like, there are ways to be very inexpensive in your operations. And your clients, the best ones will not care if the quality of the coaching is very high. I don’t care at all. You can deliver it to me on a Zoom call, perfectly cut and curated with captions, or you can do it, deliver it on a Live. I’m listening to them the same. Doesn’t matter to me if you’re paying $7,000 a year for Zoom or you’re paying nothing for Facebook.

And I know that if my coach has a healthy business, that’s better for me as the client. So you could run a very lean business. It’s the opposite. You don’t want to cut, you want to figure out how can I run my business with the least amount of expenses operationally, not I could run my business if I had to without having support.

It also has to do with being a product of your product. The moment you stop investing in coaching as a coach, and not because you think you have to have it, but because if you’re trying to grow, you believe coaching supports growth. If you don’t believe that, but you’re selling that coaching supports growth, you step out of being a product of your product, it becomes very hard to sell. 

Now, beyond the hardships, the last thing I kind of want to touch on is that if you thought of your business as a financial asset, one with unlimited potential for growth, you might treat its growth differently, too. You might treat showing up to it differently.

So I recently told my, I’m doing a, I’m releasing a new offer in January, and I created a group that I am giving them behind the scenes to me making this offer. So videos, audio drops, posts showing them how I’m working the launch, how I’m self-coaching myself, the way I’m making decisions, the way I’m handling life circumstances that come up, all the things. I’m like super raw and real. 

And one of the things that I told my students in one of the videos is that you have to choose your future self and the discomfort that comes along with that, often over the comfort of your current self. That means choosing your asset even when it’s very difficult and very hard. It means showing up for it even when there’s a lot of good reasons not to.

So one of the examples I gave them is that I have not had or created a lot of time for going through all my post, like pre-postpartum clothes, like pre-pregnancy clothes. And I’m in this weird in between where my postpartum clothes don’t fit either. And so I don’t have a lot of clothes to choose from that I can wear that fit me and are comfortable for work or day-to-day. But it’s like a big thing to go through. I have to pull out all of my bins, and I have to retry on clothes and then take up to my closet what actually fits and take what out of my closet doesn’t fit.

So I was just going to go buy new clothes, but then I haven’t had time to do that either. And I had a situation in the mall where I was going to have time, but then their line was so long, and I had to go relieve Neil with the baby, and so I had to put all the clothes back, and I like started crying when I left them all. I was feeling so sorry for myself.

And then the next day I’d really processed through the emotions, and I had this thought, like I could actually just wear the same thing over and over and not pity myself about it. I could do that because I have 3 hours of time that I could go shopping, or I have 3 hours of time that I could dedicate to this launch and to my business. So really, like I said, do I want to make $600,000 or $6 million, or do I want to buy $600 worth of clothes?

Like, sometimes you have to be more uncomfortable than you want to be. Find comfort in the discomfort in order to choose your future self. It doesn’t mean ignoring yourself because I do actually have physical clothes I can put on my body. Right? So it doesn’t mean ignoring yourself.

It just means measuring carefully when to find capacity when you don’t think you have it, and doing it so often that when you truly can’t show up, you have no drama about it, no regrets. You know it’s the right thing without a shadow of a doubt.

I also think if you’re thinking of your business as an asset with unlimited potential for growth, you start investing differently. You don’t treat investments like a student trying to get an A plus or like a consumer aiming to for satisfaction and total consumption. You extract value no matter what, and then you go use i,t and you don’t pressure yourself to use every drop. You get what you need when you need it. You pay for access to what you need when you need it. You figure out how to get what you need when you need it. You hear how I keep saying this? What you need when you need it. What you need when you need it

Because you see what you need as a key component of building an asset. Right, the asset doesn’t get built by itself. It gets built by giving it what it needs when you need it. That’s going back to it, nurturing it like a baby. You can do that at every level. My business is a baby, a million-dollar baby trying to go to be a 10-million-dollar grown-up. And then eventually it’ll be a 10 million dollar baby, maybe wanting to go to 20 or 30 million. But you’re always going to be nurturing it at different levels.

Everything you do today is for your future asset tomorrow. So that’s the lesson today. Are you nurturing the baby and investing in the asset, showing up as if you are creating an asset to pay you for years to come? Are you seeing quitting your business the same as cashing in an asset that would otherwise would have paid you and your family for the next 10 to 20 years? You have to protect the asset. Figure it out. Don’t give up.

All right, that is my fifth lesson from 10 years in business. If you have not signed up and gotten access to the free course, How to Sell Life Coaching, I just want to give you a reminder that it is available right now. Go to staceyboehman.com/howtosell and you will get more conversations like this of how to make money and start selling coaching in your business and get that business asset off the ground. All right, I will see you next week, my friends. Love you.

Hey, if you’re ready to make money as a life coach, I want to invite you to join my 2k for 2k program; where you’re going to make your first $2,000 the hardest part using my simple five-step formula for getting consults and closing new clients. Just head over to StaceyBoehman.com/2Kfor2K. We’ll see you inside.