Ep #370: Lessons from 10 Years in Business: Listening to the Whisper

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.

Hi coaches. Welcome to episode 370. Today, I am announcing a big change in my business, a directional, it feels like a seismic shift, a directional shift in where, how things have been going, where things have been going, and I want to give you all of my perspective and my thoughts.

Because one of the things I’ve noticed over the years is that I had my amazing production manager, videographer, all the things, Matt Care, once said to me that when people don’t know the full story, our brains are designed to fill in gaps. And because of the way our brains work, often those gaps get filled negatively.

And I have seen that happen in the last 10 years of my business, and I’ve watched people think that they know how I’m thinking and decide that they know what my intentions are or how I make my decisions or why I’m doing this or why I didn’t do that or all the things. And I have found in the last like few years what I started doing, if you’ve been following me for a long time, this might not be like the best intro episode to me if you’ve just found me, but if you’ve been following me a long time, you have seen me do this.

When I did my 200k Mastermind unbundle, I really walked people through that decision. When I launched the Entrepreneur Series, I really walked people through that decision. And so today I want to do my best to capture all of my thinking and help you, help walk you through this next decision and this change that is happening starting today.

And I titled this episode Listening to the Whisper. And I actually think that I might end up making this like one of my 10 lessons. And I have so many of them that I keep like shifting and being like, oh no, this one’s the most important. So maybe I’ll just keep them going, and maybe it will be more than 10.

But I’ve really been deeply contemplating like what are my lessons in business over the last 10 years that I have learned to help impart that wisdom to all of you. And they, these lessons have spanned all of my offers and things that you can find in 2k and 200k and 2 Million Dollar Group. Things that you can find in the Entrepreneur Series, like they’ve all spanned across everything I’ve ever done, everything I’ve ever sold, because I’m teaching them in my containers, but I also just live them. But I wanted them to have a space on the podcast. So I titled this episode Listening to the Whisper and I do think that this is a really important business lesson.

And I’m going to talk more about it later, but what I’m just thinking right now out loud as I say this is that if you don’t listen to the whisper, and if you don’t know what that means, like I always think of this as like there’s like a loud voice inside of us, a roaring fire of a voice, often demanding for us to do things. And then there’s like a little bitty, like, little fire, like when you turn a gas fireplace on, and we have a gas fireplace, and there’s like the pilot light, just like a little guy.

And it can create a big fire as well if you’re willing to listen to it, and that big fire is really like how you live your life. It’s the intention to which you do everything. And so it’s a challenge, I think a lot of people go through this with entrepreneurship, they have this whisper, this desire to build a business, and they are terrified to listen to it. And it’s not very loud, so it’s easy to distract yourself from it, and it’s easy to have other things be louder. It’s easier to prioritize above it. It’s easier to live above it because it’s just a really small voice. And it takes a lot of courage to listen to that whisper.

So, I’m going to talk about that today, but I have titled the episode this, and I do think it’s worth contemplating. How much do you listen to your whispers? How much attention do you give them? The whisper of belief in yourself, the whisper that you can do this, the whisper that it’s possible for you to make 100k, 200k, a million. The whisper to do that launch, the whisper to whatever it is. It’s like the whisper to do that thing.

Listening to it is such a big part of making sure you don’t end up somewhere that you don’t want to be. And I spend a lot of time thinking about that because one of the things, especially as I’ve had kids, one of the things that I’ve constantly talk about with my husband is I want to make sure I never end up on my deathbed wishing I had been a different mom or prioritized things differently, having a business and having kids. And you know, I just don’t want to waste this one precious life that we have.

And so I’m always wanting to be very intentional to make sure that my life doesn’t feel like it happened to me, but that I happened to it. And so I think the more you can listen to your own whispers, the more you will feel like you are happening to your business and to your life and not the other way around.

So that’s why I’ve titled this episode what I’ve titled it. And I will tell you, I’m going to try to be as concise as I can, but recently I did a Cyber Monday special where you could join a behind-the-scenes group that I titled Making of the Offer. I was creating a new offer and launching it in January, and people could come into this group, and I was going to take them behind the scenes of the work involved to do that. And we have 800 people-ish enrolled in that group, a little over 800 people.

And everyone has been going crazy over hearing me and having access to me in a less polished way. And so when I thought about this episode and this big change in direction that I wanted to share with you, I thought, you know, I kind of want to do it the episode in that way. Like I’m in this energy of a more authentic version of myself, a more open version of myself. And so and a less polished version of myself, right? That comes with you take a little bit of that away the more polished you get.

So, this episode’s a little bit more like behind the scenes. Like it’s going to have maybe that energy, but it also means that my thoughts may not be as collected as they normally are. But I want to take you back to three years ago, where I had a very seismic shift in my life and in my business, where I had my son and my first child. And I’ve talked about this a lot on the podcast.

That season of my life was just life-altering in so many ways. Becoming a mom, I always wanted to be a mom, but I didn’t realize the type of mom I was going to become. I laugh all the time because I used to tell one of my good friends that I’m not going to be the mom that’s like, I’m not going to every practice and every, we’re not doing travel sports and we’re not doing all, I’m not, you know, my life isn’t going to be revolving around kids sports and not, you know, the nanny can take them.

And now I’m like front row, like screaming and cheering at my son’s three-year preschool Christmas play. I just didn’t realize. Like, I’m being a mom feels like it looks so good on me, and I was always meant to do it, and I am much more involved than I could have anticipated and thought.

But I had my baby. My whole world, my whole life changed, and I had postpartum anxiety really bad. So that contributed to a lot of it. I will say if you ever have a baby or you ever have like any type of like PTSD or anything that is kind of altering your brain, like don’t make decisions during that time. But a lot of my thoughts went to maybe I would step away from my business, and I felt a lot of pain every time I was away from my son.

And I’m sure that all of you have felt this where, you know, again, I don’t want to get to the end of my life and feel like I missed my children’s childhood, right? Like that I missed being there because I was working and making money. And I have a deep desire to be very involved in their life and I feel a lot of pain when I’m not. And it’s a very real thing.

I’ve been on so many calls, live calls where I can hear my kids screaming for me in the background, and it’s a very painful thing as a woman, I think, for a lot of us to experience that. So I spent a lot of time exploring what it would look like to step away. Like, we went all the way in to even the financials of that. Like what would that look like? And I let myself entertain it in a very serious way.

And at the same time, I was also having a really hard time in my business. And I’ve been very open, and I’ve talked about that on the podcast as well. I had a I was having a very hard time for many reasons. I could probably sum it up here in, I was just talking about this on a coaching call.

Number one, I had a very high-revenue business that was very high-end coaching. So a lot of money sold to a very small group of people, right? Like I had a $25 million 200k Mastermind program that was really 100 to 200 people at a time. And when you build a huge revenue, like a big revenue business like that, and it’s built on not a ton of people, a few people.

Yes, you can go really deep with those people, which is why I loved that, and you can really mentor them and take them through, you know, I helped people go from literally making nothing to $2,000 a month to $2 million a year. But what happens is your business is very vulnerable because if a few people who have some leverage within your community decide, for various reasons, to go out and say really terrible things about you, it can really impact your business in a really big way.

And we live in a time of cancel culture, we live in a time of, you know, online attention, even if it’s negative, can be very powerful for people. So even if they’re like attacking somebody else and they’re getting attention for it, that feels like power for them. So we’re just like living in a time like that.

And so my business was what I would say out of balance in, like my foundational offer was built on a true one-to-many model, but the bulk of my revenue wasn’t. And so that was a vulnerability in my business. So that was a hardship in business.

I also had stepped so far out of managing the business and the operations that it had really gotten away from my core values and I had really delegated so much responsibility for my business at that high revenue that I didn’t think it was possible to ever re-right that ship and to turn things around and do it differently. And I really felt like I’d lost the core control, and yeah, I just didn’t know how to get it back.

Everyone talks about how often I talk about Howard Schultz’s Onward book. They’re like, Stacey, stop talking about Onward. But that book really helped me re-steer the ship. It really helped me bring it back. It happened, and one of the most powerful thoughts I had was it happened to Starbucks, so if it can happen to Starbucks, it can happen to me. And if Starbucks can turn their ship around, I can turn mine around. And it was so powerful.

So that was also happening and so I have a baby, have this unbalanced revenue happening in my business. I have operations, customer service, like, in general, my business running in a way that didn’t quite match my philosophy. And then I had a bunch of people start hating on me on the internet. And I remember I actually had several people that deeply loved me tell me at the time that they just were concerned that I wasn’t living by the things I was teaching them anymore.

And the truth is, I actually was, and until you get to a business that is creating more than $10 million of revenue every year and run by anywhere from 15 to 20 employees, like you just don’t know what that’s like. So I really want to encourage you all not to think that you know what’s happening or think you know how easy it would be, or think…

Like so many seven-figure earners were like online talking about, well, you know, my business doesn’t like this, I would never do this. But you don’t know until you have it. You don’t know how hard it is. Like it is so difficult. So this is a little bit of a rant, but it is so difficult to pass down your values and how you think and the way you would say things and how you would approach things to 20 different people. It’s very hard. Like, I remember, we had one employee, like, I don’t want to go too far into it, but we had one employee where we like follow protocols and systems, and we have processes for everything, and she was like, I’m just not doing that. I’m not following that process. I don’t want to do that.

And it’s like, it is a challenge. And especially if you’ve never done it before and you don’t have the perfect road map. It’s not about like I’m out of integrity. It’s about I’m learning how to teach all of my people to engage with every decision that has to be made in the company that I can’t always be a part of to think like me. It’s a next-level challenge, and not everybody knocks it out of the park the first time. But when you get to $10 million of revenue, the expectation of perfection is wild.

So I also had that going on where people were interpreting ways that my business was running as like, oh, she doesn’t care, she’s obsessed with money. She’s not living in her values, she’s not living in her integrity, instead of I’m running a $12 million business with 20 employees and trying to figure out how to quality control that and also coach my people and do all the things without a road map to do that. And I’m a new mom, and I’m battling postpartum anxiety that is so gnarly, I barely sleep. And so that was a very hard time in my business

Like, I can’t even describe to you the level of difficulty and pain that I experienced during that time, especially because people misunderstanding me is what I’ve had to work so much on that, but it is one of my biggest triggers and biggest fears, is like, oh, I’m going to be misunderstood.

And then things being well planned and highly executed is such a big value of mine that when it isn’t that way, like every time my team would make a mistake that was public-facing and then people would attach it to some terrible meaning about me, I felt so much shame, so much disappointment, so much humiliation. I would lash out at my team. Like, it was just not a good place. It was like living in fight or flight in my business for a while.

And so I contemplated leaving just for so many reasons, like all of them compounding at the same time. And I really let myself entertain that. And I’ve been thinking about it as if you have your marriage is just like so far from what you thought it was going to be, and you wanted it to be that you both sit down and entertain the idea of divorce. And in that entertaining leaving and seeing what that would truly be like, maybe there’s even a separation, sometimes you find that you do absolutely want to leave, and sometimes you find out that you absolutely don’t want to leave at all. And in fact that your choice, like realizing you have a choice mixed with desire, reignites your passion.

So in this exploration, one of the things I decided is if I’m thinking about throwing in the towel and closing all of it down, what if I just scrapped the way it’s been and decided if I could start it from scratch today, what would I do?

And it was a really massive undertaking, but I restructured the entire business. I decided I wanted it to be all virtual. I didn’t want to make my family travel for like 25, 26 days out of the year. I didn’t want to take four different trips a year that weren’t vacations for my family because I love to travel so much personally. I didn’t want to have 200k being the thing that held up all of my revenue. I actually wanted it to become more accessible, and it could be if I took away the expense of the live event and the expense of one-on-one coaching being included.

And there were a lot of things that I just rethought my longer-term vision for how, if I could just restart it, this is what it would be. 200k would be more accessible. I’d be able to coach them for a much longer period of time to get them to 200k. I took away my guarantees. Like, there were so many things that I changed, of like this is what I want my business to be.

I let go of all of the management staff in my company, all of them, and I redid all of the operations for my company. I took back quality control, I took back messaging control, I took back my own social media, like all of this from a place of this is my choice. Like, I want to run the business the way I would run it now as a mom and as knowing what I know now. And if I can find happiness here doing what I love, then maybe there’s something here to keep going.

The other thought that I had is like, there were so many elements that felt out of my power that it felt like the option to restructure was within my power. And it didn’t feel like scaling back as much as it wasn’t like, oh, I’m going to scale back because I can’t handle it. It was I’m going to scale back to get control and rebuild from there. And it felt really important to do that for the health of the company and also for my happiness.

And so what I realized during this time, and I got a ton of coaching. Like, there was a year I invested $233,000 into my brain, into two really pivotal coaches and investments. So I worked my brain harder than I’ve probably ever worked it in my entire life. And coached myself and explored my beliefs and changed my beliefs and grew my capacity. And during this time, one of the things I realized is I love being a mom, and it does hurt sometimes to be away. It does.

Today I’m recording this podcast and I am so excited to be here with you and to do this podcast and I want to do this. And I realized today my baby like within the last few days, she’s started to really realize if I’m not there or not. She started to be like, oh, in the room, that’s mom. Whereas, like before, she was like a little bit like a potato, like a sack of potatoes, and I don’t really know what’s going on and it doesn’t matter who’s holding me. Like I felt that from her. I’m like, she doesn’t care if she’s holding me. My mom like will like be obsessed, obsessively holding her, and I’m like, it’s fine. She literally doesn’t care if I’m holding her.

And there’s been a shift just at she’s about to turn five months where she cares. And I’m seeing that now, and I’m like, oh my god, I remember when that happened with Jackson, and it was so hard. Oh, this is so hard. So I love being a mom, and it is hard to be away.

But this was so important that I realized along this journey is I also love me and my business and creating and teaching and the feeling I get from coaching. I love who I am when I do this. I love the mother I am running a business and being a trailblazer. Like, I love both of those things and I do believe that I can hold both of them.

And in fact, I think a good balance, like if I’m very focused on balance, both of them make me the person that I want to be, the mom I want to be, it helps me live the life I want to live. And so I’ve been really focused on balance being what allows me to thrive in both and actualize who I’m meant to be in this world and truly have it all. It won’t always feel like I have it all. It will feel sometimes like the hurt of your baby wanting you, and you’re not there. Like that will be there, but the same way that I will feel the restlessness if I’m only with my kids and I’m not doing this thing I’m supposed to be doing in the world.

And so that’s one of the things I realized. And the other thing I realized during this time is that I love striving, entrepreneurship, going after big goals. I love it for so many reasons. And as an aside, I just want you to think about for you, if you, like, if you’ve really considered the idea that you might love striving, and if you could love striving, why would you love it? If you could love entrepreneurship, why would you love it, even if you’re in the hard stuff now? If you do love or could love going after big goals, like why would you?

For me, I think it’s harder to operate without momentum, and it’s a lot less fun. I think it’s harder to maintain than to just go for it and build. And I have been, oh my god, I’ve wrestled with this so much in my brain. I can’t even tell you all. In all of my day-to-day, I have deeply, to the depths of my soul, explored the desire to just like, you know, make several million dollars a year, and like maybe just do 2k for 2k, or just do 2k and 200k. Like, I have considered closing offers out. I have put everything on the table. I have thought about, like, truly like having a very soft life business for the next several years while my kids are young.

Like, I have really explored that. And I just keep coming back to, I actually think if you have big goals and desires, it’s harder to maintain than to actually just go for it because of the idea of momentum, right? So if you don’t have momentum because you’re not actively building, like anytime you’re not actively building, you do not have momentum. Momentum comes from active building.

So if you don’t have that, even the maintaining becomes very difficult. Like it might seem like it’s going to be easy to just like make a few mill a year or for you a few hundred thousand, you know, wherever you’re at if you’re listening to this, it might seem like it would just be easy, like, oh, I’ll just make a little bit and coast because I need to focus other places in order and you know, I need the soft life in my business in order to focus on other areas of my personal life. Like, it seems like the easier path, except when you lose momentum, everything becomes harder. So I would rather build and keep building momentum because the momentum, once you’re in it, if you just maintain it a little bit, it keeps going indefinitely, and then that actually gets easier.

So, for me, I want to go for it. I want to build because of the momentum and because it’s more fun. I think there’s energy and vitality and a liveliness in building and in the challenges that come with it, and then overcoming them is what makes us better humans. Like I like myself more in my resilience. That’s what I mean by better human. It’s not more worthy human, but I do like myself more. My opinion of me is higher when I am at my highest level of resilience, when I’m not, when I’m in my like highest level of empowerment. When I am going after what I want, like not just thinking about it, but going for it, in the stretching, in the growing my capacity and my energy to have it, I love that version of me more. Like that is my preference for me.

And I also know that the hard of believing new things in my brain is actually healthy and good for my brain. We spend so much time talking, like so many coaches come to me and they’re like, I’m trying to believe this new belief, and the anxiety I feel is making me sweat. It’s getting me up in the middle of the night. It’s giving me symptoms where I’m physically ill.

And I’m like, what if none of that’s a problem? Some of it might be, right? Like, if you have like, maybe an undiagnosed thing happening in your brain, some of it could be, so I don’t want to be reckless, but I just think we don’t think we think that’s a problem sometimes when it’s not. Sometimes this like it’s if you’re working out, you’re sweating. If you’re working out, you might actually like if you’re like, let’s say you’re running and you fall and you stumble and you actually bleed, or you break something, or you pull a muscle. It doesn’t mean that you should never work out again, right? Like working out in general is actually good for your body.

And so I’ve been thinking very deeply about this. I know this is going to seem like, I know this is going to seem like what? I don’t even know how to describe how I feel like you’re going to receive this next piece, but if you’re in the behind the scenes, I feel like you’re going to totally get it because I’ve been talking through these things live with you all.

So you’re seeing me kind of explore my beliefs and explore my intentions and my mission and my vision. And so there’s been so much circulating in my brain, but one of the things I swear to God, to all of you, one of the things that helped me decide this new directional shift in my business for now has been one of this next thought, which is this, because sometimes I tell myself too that I want a break from believing new things. I want a break from striving. I want a break from going after big goals. I want to break from entrepreneurship.

Like I joke with a couple of my colleagues, like I’m just going to go flip burgers for McDonald’s. Or sometimes when my husband is and I are out to eat, I’ll like yearn to be a server again. I’ll be like, oh, the days when I would all I would have to think about is what’s your order? What would you like side, like would you like fries or a salad with that? Like those were the days where I didn’t have such heavy things on my plate.

But, this is a big but, personally for me, and for all of the women in my family, because I was just talking to my mom about this the other day and then I’m going to go really deep for a second and then I’m going to come right out of it. But my mom and I were actually talking about this the other day, and my granny was here. She’s 80, and she was also talking about this.

Dementia runs in our family. My great-grandmother died, I don’t know if she actually died of dementia, but she had it, and I watched her lose her memory of all of us in our family. And it was devastating. If you’ve been through that, like it’s devastating to see someone slowly forget every single person. Like the story of The Notebook, right? To like have, her and my great-grandfather were married for 64 years before she died, and sometimes she would come alive when he would stroke her face, and she would remember him. And other times not so much.

And there have been so many studies that show the importance of igniting and using your brain to protect it and to keep it in good health. And so my mom, she does a lot of like word searches and a lot of like just like things, crafting and things that just keep her brain active, and my granny does too.

And so I know that there is a very real possibility that runs in our family of not having power over my brain one day. And I want to use it for as long as I have it, and I want to use it to solve really hard, big problems because I believe that is what will keep my brain healthy. It’s very similar to like, if you have like maybe a body, some disease that the body breaks down if it’s not used, that runs in your family, and you’re like, I have to be really healthy, like I’m going to go to yoga every day, I’m going to work out every day. Like I believe that too. I do that with my body as well, but it just feels extra important to keep my brain sharp. And solving big problems is what creates it to be sharp.

So that might seem deep, and it might feel a little extra for being a reason to do something in business, but it is something that I think about as I age. It’s something that I think about. I was just telling Neil the other day, like, I want to be, I hope my children have children young, because I had my son when I was 40.

So by the time he waits until my age to have kids, I’ll be 76. And I was telling him like, I want to be like the granny that’s like I take care of my kids. Like, or my grandkids. Like, I want to be their caregiver when my children are working. Like, I want to be the one taking care of them. Like if that means moving to where they live, if that means if they live in two different cities, like me having two different homes and going back and forth. Like I want to be so involved with my grandkids’ lives, like so involved because I’m not going to be there for as much of their lives as, you know, my mom is able to be for my kids. And I think about that stuff. You can’t when you’re aging, you know, I just turned 40, like you just can’t not think about it, especially when you have young children.

And so as extra as that seems, that is like another layer of what’s helped me come to this directional shift, this change and kind of like the decision of whether I’m going to step away from my business that was started kind of three years ago or not. And then there’s a couple other things. So let me not go down too much of a rabbit hole. Let me tell you the other thing.

So there’s two more things, two more things that I have been contemplating. One of them is that I am the first of my lineage to create generational wealth and to do that by bringing big dreams of entrepreneurship to life. And I’ve been thinking about this a lot. It’s like, are you the first person in your family to be an entrepreneur? You might not be. You might have parents who are entrepreneurs and grandparents who are entrepreneurs.

And you might be. I actually wasn’t the first one in my family. I was thinking about this the other day and I can’t believe I’ve never thought about it before. My dad was an entrepreneur for a small amount of time. He built a, he built a business that, it was a lawn care business, and so he would like mow people’s lawns, and he built it big enough that like demand was high enough that he hired my cousin to do it full-time. And then he was working full-time. He had three young kids at home and then the demand grew even more and he couldn’t figure out how to solve for, he couldn’t like he kept trying to hire people, and they would flake, and then people would be mad because someone didn’t show up. And he couldn’t figure out how to solve that problem, and he ended up just closing the business.

And then he bought land and tried to create a paintball business. He wanted to like have like a paintball, I don’t, it’s not a track, what is it? A paintball, it’s not a maze. What do you call them? I don’t know. But anyways, he wanted to have like a, you know, like where you could come play paintball games, and he built all the stuff for it and then just never did it.

And he used to tell me all of his business schemes, like all these business ideas, and then he would never do them. And then when I started having my own business ideas, he would just throw money at them. Like, I could just tell he wanted me to be so successful.

When I wanted to be an actor, he paid for like really expensive private lessons. When I was 17 and told him I was joining Amway, he bought my startup kit, and he paid for me to get a booth at the fair and have all these like products out for people to try. And there was a lot of like supporting me in that dream as well. Like if I can’t do it, I want you to be able to do it. So him and I were always coming up with business ideas and talking through business things.

And the fact that I was able to do it and create generational wealth, meaning like I was just telling the story in the behind-the-scenes, my dad would hunt for turkey and for deer to feed my great grandparents. That’s how poor they were. So to come through and create money that will continue to make money and serve not just my children, but their children, as long as it’s stewarded well, serve their children and their children, like generational wealth, it feels like an opportunity that I can’t underappreciate. It’s a big moment. It’s a big change. It’s something like I am the like I’m creating wealth that will live far beyond me for the people that I love that I may not ever get to meet. And that feels like a big deal to me.

And the other thing that I’ve been thinking about is that I’m going to throw some stats at you. I recently read a Forbes article that women are now outpacing men entering entrepreneurship. And that 49% of all the businesses started, I think in 2024 or 2025 were all women-owned businesses. And then a couple years ago, when I made my first $10 million at my coaching school’s like mastermind, they put some stats up on the board that 0.0049% of Americans make $10 million a year.

And I’ve been thinking about this a lot because I have been through a lot of challenge, challenging times since I had my son. And you know, out of the last four years, three of them I’ve been pregnant, postpartum, or like having, you know, coming out of the postpartum phase, right? Like, it’s just that’s the place I’ve been in for three of the last four years. And I haven’t seen a lot of women at my level talking about what it’s like to have, be pregnant, to be birthing babies, to be postpartum, to be raising young babies while also running a $10 million company.

So I’ve been thinking about that, 0.0049% of Americans make $10 million a year. Well, what’s the percent of women making $10 million a year? I tried to use like ChatGPT or AI or whatever to figure that out and even that, and they couldn’t even find the answer for that. So it’s got to be far less than 0.0049%. Then what’s the percent of women making $10 million a year and having babies at the same time and going through postpartum and running a $45 million company? As close to zero as it gets.

And at this time, I, this I feel like, and it could just be in my like, in my reticular activating system, like in my brain’s awareness, because I’ve been kind of contemplating, am I stepping away or what am I doing? I’m restructuring. And I’m seeing a lot more and more women who I look up to or who I follow or who I coach with or you know, there’s been so many, stepping away from their businesses either altogether or fractionally, fractionally, is that the right word? Pairing down, and for many reasons that are not my reasons, right?

Some of them have been like, I just, one person I follow just let go of a big revenue stream for her business, and she said, listen, I built my business to do this. Like I built this for this. And I love that for her. I love that for all of the women that are like, yeah, like I got to this place where I don’t have to work, and I don’t, I want to live my life. Like I think that’s, I’m like, yeah, as a coach, like that might have been why we got into it.

And in fact, I will say I used this against myself for a little bit when I was feeling very sorry for myself about being a new mom and having to be away from my kids and, you know, comparing myself to stay-at-home moms, not in a healthy way. I used to be thinking like, I should be doing that too. I have littles, that’s the right thing to do. And like, well, if they get to do it, why shouldn’t I get to do it? I had a lot of very unhelpful thoughts for a while about working and being a mom of littles.

But when I think about these stats and when I think about being the first in my lineage to create generational wealth and bring dreams of entrepreneurship alive, when I think of the percent of women making $10 million a year and having babies and running a company and doing it all, like when I think about that, I feel so compelled to go in the complete opposite direction.

And I am very surprised by this. And you might be too. I am very surprised by my desire, instead of my desire to step away, my desire to double down. And I haven’t decided this lightly. There have, I mean, it’s been three years. So there’s been so much deliberate coaching and exploration and investigation and it really, like I was thinking about the phases I’ve gone through in the last three years. It took me going from I’m not growing right now, I’m being with my kids, to I’m growing slow and steady, to maybe I want to grow big. And what are all my reasons?

And I feel like if you’ve been listening to the podcast for a while, you might even be able to see those thoughts in my communications when it comes to like what’s happening with my business. I think you could see each of those stages. And now I’m firmly in, I want to grow, and I really want that growth to be on my terms and my way. And I do feel like that I have earned deeply after $45 million in sales and 10 years in business, like I for myself, like not from an entitled place, but for myself, I have earned deeply doing it my way from this moment on, even if it breaks my own rules of, you know, because I would go follow my own rules to grow again in a heartbeat.

Like if I was starting from zero, I would do everything I taught in 2k for 2k. If I was trying to get to 200k, I would do everything I taught in 200k. If I was trying to get to 2 Million Dollar Group or to $2 million, I would do everything I teach in 2 Million Dollar Group.

I would not deviate from that at all. That is my 100% truth. And now that I’m not in any of those places, I’m like, okay, what’s this next thing? Maybe one day I’m going to have a program that’s like after 10 million where you like have so much money that you don’t have to work and also you want to work and now you have to figure out like what is my motivation and my desire and how do I want to run a business with that level of like with those circumstances, which is different than I want to run a business with the circumstances of I need to create generational wealth, right?

And so you’ve seen me make some of those changes to my existing businesses. The wanting to be on, you know, the terms on my way. Again, I don’t offer guarantees anymore. I’m just more selective in general with the people I work with. And this year coming up, I’m going to be even more selective of who I let in my Mastermind spaces.

That feels like a really big deal to me, is I’m going to have a lot more qualifiers and a lot more education on what it means to be in a Mastermind space with me, not in like a high-control way, but like, hey, here are my terms and I want to make sure you agree to them. Like, I want to make sure we’re all on the same page of what feels important to me as far as how we engage together in this space. And I’m just going to be more clear. Like, I’m just going to lead on that. I’m going to be more clear and I’m going to, you’ll see. I don’t want to go too much into it, but you are going to see me be more selective and how I do that. Like, if you watch me, you’ll see it.

And I’m also, moving forward, going to worry less about other people’s feelings in regards to the decisions I make in order to make sure that I am happy in my spaces and that I desire to be there. Like, my boundaries are going to be at an all-time high, and I’m working very hard to be okay with people not being okay with some of my boundaries.

And like, some of, and let me give you an example of that, because sometimes I think you guys can make stuff up that’s not helpful. Like sometimes people will say, I want the transcripts, and they’ll have lots of reasons, including that they learn better by reading the transcripts, but I don’t give out my transcripts. That’s my intellectual property that I might want to turn into a book one day. I don’t know, but I just don’t want people owning that. Like having that for a lifetime access, like here’s a transcript of what every word that was said and all of Stacey’s intellectual property. That’s a no for me.

People seem unhappy when we, when they want them, and we say no. And I’m just going to honor that. The clients who work with me have got to be okay with that. I don’t want to give you the transcripts of my intellectual property. From love, I don’t want to do that. So I’ve got to work with people that are okay with that.

So, like that’s like an example of that, where normally I would have lots of thoughts about displeasing people in that way or like telling someone no and then them being mad at me, like I would be mortified. So I’m working with owning this is my boundary to make me happy, or like not letting people sell in my spaces and giving them warnings like, hey, if you do this again, we’re going to kick you out. Like, you can’t be selling in my spaces. I don’t like that.

So those things, again, even though things you would think are super easy, they’re challenging for me. So I’ve been my boundaries, I’m working on them being high because the more happy and desire I have to be in a space, the more I create and the better I feel. So that is like me getting to do this in my way.

But the other thing that’s happening, and I’ve told I’ve been pretty like upfront about this, but I wanted to really like paint the picture of why this is happening. I am adding a new permanent offer. As part of my doubling down, as part of my going in the opposite direction, as part of my choice and my desire, as part of what makes me eternally happy and doing it my way, I am launching a new offer today. It is going to be the next big body of work that I do. Possibly the next decade of my work.

What I know now is that it has felt scary. It’s now it feels a lot less scary because I’ve moved forward so much on it. But there has been this whisper for at least the last two years. Like a really small one amidst my brain telling me to step back, there’s also been a whisper to step forward and in a direction I haven’t done before.

In fact, in a direction that I’ve sort of stayed away from. And again, I think we’re just not listening to our whispers enough. And I’ve been telling my clients to listen to those whispers and to investigate them, to explore them, and maybe possibly honor them. And I’ve been telling them they can do so without permanence.

So, although I am saying it’s a new permanent offer, I am also allowing that at any time I can change that. It’s the only way I’ve found that I can let myself go all in without abandon is that I’ve got to be willing to say, this is what I would do if I were all in, and I’m going to do that with all of my heart until I’m not. And maybe that will never come. I know I’m in fully for a year. I’m probably in for at least two to three years because I am already planning 2027 in my head. I’m like just feel like a content teaching machine right now, and so I have at least all the way through mid 2027 planned out, and I just know once I get in that more is coming.

And so if I love it as much as I imagine I’m going to and as much as I have loved it, I can see this being the wisdom that I dissect 10 years from now talking about this offer. Like, I’ll go back and be like, oh my god, remember episode 370, 10 years ag,o when I launched this offer? L,ike here’s what we’ve done in the next 10 years.

So, I’m getting started. Actually, I already got started. I wanted to test my joy and my purpose with this new offer in a very strategic way. So, I launched the Entrepreneur Series. And what this was, if you’ve not heard me talk about the Entrepreneur Series, but even if you have, I’m going to tell you kind of a different angle about it.

When I launched it was because I’d brought on someone from outside the coaching world that was in the tech world. And after watching me teach on stage at 200k live multiple times, he said, you know, I know you’re teaching sales, but really I feel like you’re teaching entrepreneurship to coaches. Like, it feels much bigger than even selling. He’s like, the selling is like amazing, but what you’re really doing is teaching sales and entrepreneurship to coaches. And I started saying that to people. Like when they say, what do you do? I teach sales and entrepreneurship to coaches. And I started really thinking about what would it be like if I claimed that? How would I do that?

And when I started thinking about, well, what is it that’s like the sales pieces, obviously are my 2k process, 200k process, 2 Million Dollar Group process, but then what’s this thing that he’s picking up on of the entrepreneurship side that I’m teaching? And if I could say what is it that entrepreneurs coaches need to learn as entrepreneurs, it’s mindset. It’s the mindset game, it’s the emotional game, and it’s a decision game.

Like having a steely mindset that can rise above and think higher than any challenge, even if it’s a challenge no one else has ever faced. Having resilience and the ability to expand capacity and energy when you think there’s none. It’s learning how to make decisions as an entrepreneur that still honors why you became a coach in every single decision. It’s creating balance in the agenda of an entrepreneur whose job is to bring in revenue, and then also balancing that with the agenda of a coach who wants to serve and transform.

So revenue, serve, and transform. And balancing those out, and also balancing out living life and having and maybe having family and other priorities, health priorities, while also running a profitable, growing business, and how to deal with the imbalance of all that can come from that.

Now here’s what’s really crazy. When I first created 2k for 2k, my coach and I discussed if I was going to add a lot of mindset work into the process of 2k. And it is there. Like when it comes to selling, it’s there everywhere you look. It’s woven into the process. I’ve always said, when it comes to selling, I teach what to do, why to do it, how it impacts the client, and how you need to think and feel to do it really well.

But we kind of stayed away from deep dives into mindset and emotional work because at the time, coaches were kind of getting lost in this like endless self-improvement. And we wanted to bypass that and just go straight to listen, you are improved, go make an offer, do the thing, you’re ready. And it worked like crazy. Thousands and thousands of coaches got off the ground and started making money.

And that is still true and in this moment, in the industry, at this moment in time, at this time in the world, every coach that I’m having conversations with, when they’re being honest, they are telling me the biggest things holding them back are mindset, capacity, energy, resilience, aliveness, courage, work ethic, identity. It’s like development of them as people, as entrepreneurs, as coaches, as leaders.

So it feels like it’s time, like full circle to develop coaches to be the highest level entrepreneurs they can be, to be able to withstand entrepreneurship and do it well, to be able to handle the risk and tolerate that, to tolerate the journey of entrepreneurship, to honor that a coach who is also an entrepreneur needs very specific training on how to balance those two, to honor those two at the same time.

That being an entrepreneur coach is not the same as being a contract coach and being hired by a company to coach for them. And it’s also not the same as being a standard mainstream entrepreneur. We’re not going to respond well to if you want to be successful in business, you got to miss the ballet lessons and you’ve got to sacrifice and you have to work 100 hours a week and you’ve got to bleed and you’ve got to, you know, leave everything on the like we’re not going to respond to that because we got into entrepreneurship to have control.

Like, this Forbes article was saying that the reason women are outpacing men in business right now is because they want to be their own boss. They want to make the rules. They want to be able to manage their home life with and also bring money in.

And so for all those reasons, especially if you are a woman coach entrepreneur, the rules, the way you have to learn entrepreneurship, it has to be different. It has to factor in the reasons you got into business and who you are and the cognitive load that you carry, potentially as, not always, but potentially as a mom or a wife or the matriarch of the family or the doer and organizer of the family, and maybe the leader, the breadwinner, and the visionary of the family. It has to honor all of those things.

I think it’s why a lot of business programs don’t resonate with coaches. Like it’s what I, this new offer is going to be what I did with selling, is I made it resonate for coaches. I’m like, hey, here’s what you’ve probably heard in selling, and this is why it doesn’t resonate for you. It doesn’t come from service. This is why get energy sends you so far away from signing clients. So we’ve got to make entrepreneurship resonate for coaches, of we have to make being a CEO, being the boss, being a leader resonate for coaches, and what that entails.

Like, there’s such a huge cognitive load that comes from being the one who has to make all the decisions, all of them. The one who has to decide when you don’t know what the right answer is. The one who goes first. And I want to help develop that next generation of coaches in this industry to be great at that, to handle the load of going first and going often and going with the purpose of leading your people to do the same, to be powerful instead of powerless.

And to bring it full circle again, because honestly, I can’t even keep track of in the last week or two how many full circle moments this offer has created. But when my coach, when I first started my business, I heard my coach say, I’m not scared of losing it all. I would just rebuild it with all the knowledge that I own in my brain. And if I was being honest, I used to think, oh my god, I hope I never have to do that. And then I had to.

And now having rebuilt it, having taken my business from literally struggling in customer service, struggling in operations, struggling in team management, struggling with profitability, struggling with reputation to killing it in customer service, clean, clear, lean operations, efficiently managed, lean teams, 60% profitability, a million dollars of revenue growth, all in the same year, and a strong reputation with clear leadership, like no one can ever take that away from me.

And I want this for you. I want you to never let anyone take it from you, including yourself. I feel really passionate about this. One of the other things I read, I believe in this Forbes article, is that 47% of women who quit their businesses do so for personal reasons. They cite personal reasons as the reason.

And one of the things that it said is that women actually, the reason we’re outpacing men in starting entrepreneurship is that we actually have more tolerance for risk. Like we’re willing to take financial risk, we’re willing to take risk, but we also take the financial losses and the criticisms the hardest because we’re taught that being nice and caring for others above ourselves is the mark of being a good woman.

So we do that. We pay employees more than average to be good. We keep them long after it’s stopped working to be caring. We refund even when it’s against our policies and financially harms us, so that just to not be seen as uncaring and to be seen as abundant.

I cannot tell you the amount of conversations in 2k and 200k that I have seen with that, it’s that in and of itself, I’m going to take out credit card debt that financially harms me just so I don’t look uncaring and because I’ve been taught that’s the abundant thing to do. I’m going to financially harm the business and go against good, savvy business sense and put myself in harm and possibly put myself out of business. And I’ve done it too. I remember when people were attacking me, I refunded $1.5 million of my own personal net worth, took that from my family, because I didn’t want to be seen as uncaring, and I wanted to be seen as abundant.

That’s what we do because of the messaging that we’re given. We say yes when we mean no. We fear being talked about. We fear leaving our spouses behind. We take care of everything and everyone but the business. And when we can’t fucking keep up anymore, when we are in despair, we let go of the business.

But it doesn’t have to be this way. Like, this offer feels like my rally cry for women, for coaches, for entrepreneurs. Like, there is a different way. I have created it. I now live it. But it does require evolution. It requires thinking in a revolutionary way as a woman, as an entrepreneur, as a leader, as a coach, it requires something different, something that works because what is happening now for a lot of people isn’t working. And I’m going to teach it.

I started teaching it in the Entrepreneur Series. And I will tell you, each course that I launched of this of the Entrepreneur Series, I, every time it ended, I was left feeling sad that we could not take this work further. And at the same time lit up because there was so much more I wanted to share, and I saw the work changing my clients. Like, we got so overwhelmed with testimonials that I couldn’t even keep pace with sharing them all.

So I know that this work is needed, even if it’s not like the most apparent thing on your mind, even if you think that what’s on your mind is like what’s the next offer and what’s the stats, and how do I get people more converting? It’s like the honest answer for so many people along with that, along with the strategy of entrepreneurship is the mindset work, is the emotional work, is the decision-making work of the entrepreneur coach.

And this is my new membership. Oh my god, I almost started crying. I’m so excited. I’m launching a membership for the first time ever, which also feels like a big deal. It’s the only thing I haven’t sold, really. And I’m so excited to do it. You can come with me by signing up annually and just be all in for the entire, the whole year is planned out, every single month and into the next year. Or you can come with me month to month. That’s the this is the first time ever that you’re going to be able to do that. So you can join if you’re like, oh, I’m really curious about what this is, you can join for one month and decide if you want to continue or not. And each month, I’m going to teach you how to be a stronger entrepreneur coach.

And I will say although I am totally fine to have men in my space and I have men in all of my spaces, I will take you all day long, but this is, there are going to be moments where this is very focused on being a woman entrepreneur coach because we just have that added extra layer of societal expectations that really makes us make bad decisions in business that harm us and sometimes have us closing the doors at 47% because we can’t manage the life and all of the things.

Like, I feel so compelled by that. When I read that, I just burst into tears because I know I’ve been there. I’ve been through the dark of the night with my business. I have been through the deepest depths of despair with my business. I get it. I know the challenges of running, having a family, being the mama, and also dealing with the deep business problems. Like I or even just growth and not being able to figure out how to get there. Like, I know all of it. So I wept from knowing for these women that closed their doors. And you may not even fear that now, but I want to make sure it never even comes up in your brain.

So each month, we’re going to focus on you being stronger so that you don’t need the path to be easy, so that you don’t need life to be easy, so that you can meet any challenge with a bigger version of you than you ever thought possible. Like I could not imagine the me that I am now, even two years ago, even a year ago.

We’re going to study the identity that you need to develop as a coach, as an entrepreneur, as a leader, as an investor, as a breadwinner, as a woman. I’m going to help you build capacity and capability every single day, one day at a time, because it’s created in the little moments, not the big things. It’s the everyday tiny moments. I’m going to teach you how to ignite a liveliness in you with your business and your life, no matter how hard times are, and then expand it during good times.

And one of the things that people have been asking about like crazy, I’m going to teach you how to operate from desire instead of willpower. I’m going to teach you how I create new belief alongside protecting revenue and all the other entrepreneur responsibilities. That’s something else people have been asking about like crazy in my behind-the-scenes, is like how do you have time to create all these new beliefs for yourself, but you’re also running this business. I’m going to teach you that.

I’m also going to help redefine standing out online as an entrepreneur and a coach because this current social landscape has like scrambled a bunch of people’s brains. And I’m going to help you build the muscle of visibility and how to withstand haters and cancel culture, how to think about that, how to be so rock solid in your core. I’ve coached so many people through that recently.

Like all of these things are labeled personal issues, right? When I’m talking to my people, why I took a step back because of this personal reason. I took a step back because of this health reason. I took a step back because of a family member’s health issue. I’ve taken a step back. Like I’ve had so many people and then I’ve also helped so many people step forward that wanted to. Not from should. I don’t want to be another should, but if you want to take a step forward, I want to make sure that step is concrete.

I’m going to help you challenge your work ethic in the best way, not just like hyper productivity and burnout, like the best way to challenge your work ethic to where you never have to worry about burnout again. We’re going to really create true balance one day at a time. This is everything that you need to be in business for the rest of your life if you want it, and everything that you need to enjoy the hell out of your life and your business while you’re in it.

And if you’ve ever just thought, I want what she has, just know each month we’re going to break down the thinking and the emotional expansion that I had to do to create it. Like this is the entrepreneurship on steroids, but in the best way.

So, come join me in the Entrepreneur Coach Membership. We start this January right now with the three identities: the coach, the entrepreneur, the leader. If you heard my podcast where I taught that for an hour in a free course, I’m going to teach that for an entire month inside the membership. We’re going to dive deep, we’re going to take lots of examples in coaches businesses, like real coach examples, and I’m going to teach far deeper than I taught on that episode

But the identities that we have to embody, we have to start with that, and then we’re going to layer on all the skills, all the emotional capacities, all of the beliefs needed to be the highest level, to execute at the highest level as a coach and entrepreneur and a leader.

So, I am not taking a step back. I am not pairing down. I, like a rubber band pulled back just so I can slingshot forward. Come join me at staceyboehman.com forward…. I’m going to cry… forward slash ec dash membership. So let me say it again, and we’ll link it in the show notes, staceyboehman.com/ec-membership. I hope to see you inside.

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.