Ep #136: Tracking Growth

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, today I wanted to do a short little podcast for you. I know that mine tend to be on the longer side. And in case you’re having one of those days where you just need to grab a piece of inspiration or hear me in your ears for long enough to remember the resilient badass mother effort you are, and your mission to change lives. I want to have something for you that you can quickly listen to. So, we’re going to mix it up today, short and sweet. Listen to this message as often as you need.

So, I’ve been talking a lot about this with my students in 200K about tracking your growth. So, some of them are in the river of misery. They are having a thought that they aren’t growing. They are having the thought that it isn’t working. And the thought that they aren’t on track for their goals. And it’s important that you know sometimes it is actually just a thought but it will always feel real. It will feel real to you in your emotional body that you haven’t grown.

I recently felt this about my own business. Shortly before my wedding I started stressing out in my head as one does right before their wedding, that I wasn’t even close to hitting my goal this year. And was actually coaching myself on making peace with not hitting it and I did. I spent a lot of time coaching myself on how I wasn’t going to hit my goal. And then I actually looked at my numbers and I was at $8 million in the last 12 months. And my goal is 10 million in 12 months. I’m almost fucking there you all, I’m almost there, you may be too.

You just have to look at your numbers. I know, this is like rocket science. You have to look at your numbers. So, I asked my students to do this as well and so many of them were astonished when they looked at their 12 month number to see that they had actually made 100K, 200K, so many of them had their minds blown. They had made 100 or 200K and not even realized it.

Some of them were at 198K and had no idea that they were $2,000 away from 200K. This happens because they and we, all of us, we’re (a) thinking only in terms of the current calendar year we’re in and not in a rolling 12 months period, the last 12 months, and what we have done. And (b) we were too busy thinking that we weren’t even close to our goals to look.

Literally what happens in your brain when you’re too busy, when you’re spending lots of time thinking about how far away you are from your goal, you don’t have the time or energy to actually look at how close you are to see that you are close. Your brain just sees evidence everywhere for it not working and you not growing when that’s what you’re believing.

Think about how that feels to think that you’re behind, that it’s not working, that you aren’t growing, that you know, this is a big one, that you know, you believe deep down you are going to fail already and it’s only halfway through the year. It feels awful, it drains all of your energy. I was thinking about that for me. I spent so much energy being down that I was – I had decided I was going to fail ahead of time, first of all. But it was all a misconception to begin with. It was all me just not being focused on the right thing and the same with my students.

One of the simplest ways to combat the drama is to just look at your numbers. Some of you are further along than you’re giving yourself credit for. I had took $8 million in 12 months. If I could figure out how to do 8, I’m pretty damn close to 10. And it turns out that we were at the $5 million mark at the halfway point of my goal, at the halfway point of the year, halfway through the year, six months in. But my brain though that that number was way lower too. When my CFO told me I was like, “Wait, what? That can’t be.”

So, my friends, my message today is to track your growth, it’s so obvious yet I wasn’t doing it. And then when I pointed it to my students, my students were blown away too. So, I think there’s probably a lot of us not tracking our growth. And not just for this year, where you’re at this year but for the last 12 months. If you set a goal to say double what was last year’s goal, you might think you’re behind, and you’re not on track, and you’re stuck, and you’re stagnating.

But just check and see. Has your last 12 months improved from what you ended with last year? Because last year we ended with 6.4 but our 12 months currently is 8. It shows, it proves growth. You can also compare last July, so July of 2020 with July of 2021, this July. I like to do this on what feels like our low months because our low months now are often much higher than our low months of the previous year.

And I have mentioned that on a podcast before, looking back and seeing that the year before was, I think it was 48,000 and then the current year was 100 and something, something insane. I don’t even remember but something insane. Maybe it was even way bigger though at 400,000 but there was just massive growth. And I remember doing it at the beginning of the year and you just forget these little tricks when you’re in any kind of insecurity, insufficiency, lack. Your brain just forgets the things you know.

So, at every level, even at the multimillion dollar level you have to do this. So, you want to see where you have improved. You have to actively look for it. And I want to offer for those of you that if you measurably haven’t grown at all, meaning factually, measurably, you’re still in the exact same place as last year, I want to offer that you get to choose what to think about that too. Remember that whatever you decide to believe is how you will stack your evidence and filter all of your information.

So, you can actually go back and listen to episode 54, how to set and achieve goals. And I talk about creating a track record of success. I would listen to that episode if you need help with tracking non-monetary success. But you can track that as well. I’m going to end with this example. I have a few students in my $2 million group, remember I said this happens at literally every level who are in this freak out headspace of I’m in the same place that I was in last year. And I’m not where I thought I’d be.

But what’s actually true for them is they are making around the same amount of money but with a whole new offer. So, they went from making $300,000 coaching 20+ hours a week to $300,000 coaching one call a week. That is not the same thing. That is scaling.

When you make a certain amount of money with a lot of energy and effort and then you go make the same amount of money with less effort. That’s why we keep every year, we relatively keep our goal the same or just a little bit more than the previous year because our goal is to do what we did the previous year but better. And then once we do that better then we’re going to add a bigger goal.

So, if we do 10 million this year, when we look at the year coming up likely we’ll say, “Okay, let’s do 10 million again or something close to that and just do it better, more effectively and then we’ll be ready to grow more.” That is part of scaling, it doesn’t mean you haven’t grown. That time that you freed up while maintaining your income, that is massive growth. It’s what’s going to help you scale even more.

Now, you may not be there. You might even be doing less than what you did last year. But I bet if you look for it there are things you are further ahead this year on than you were 12 months ago, writing copy better, getting more engagement, working with higher quality clients, clients that you consider your best clients. Maybe you started a podcast. You got certified. You signed clients or you hadn’t signed clients before. Track your growth, monetary and non-monetary. This month compared to this month last year.

The last 12 months, this July to last July compared to last year’s revenue. Find the growth. Track the growth. That will fuel more growth. When you’re looking at all the areas where you’re not growing, you’re not measuring up, how you’re going to fail, how you’re not going to achieve your goal. Especially we do this even when we’re really close, could be like my goal is 10 million, I’m going to end at 8.5 and I lose my mind about it. And you guys do this too. Your goal could be 500K and you’re going to do 350K and it’s pure devastation.

That devastation, that pure devastation is only going to create more work for you, more suffering for you and less money for you. And if you don’t believe me, sit down and model that out. See who you are and how you are when you’re believing that you failed. Already you’ve decided you’re going to fail by the end of the year what your goal was. When you’ve decided you’re not growing, when you’ve decided you’re not making money, when you’ve decided to believe that and then you’ve gone out and found all the evidence to prove it.

It’s a lot more fun for all of us to grow our business when we believe we’re growing. It’s more fun to grow when you believe you’re growing. It’s not very much fun to grow when you don’t believe you’re growing. It’s so simple. You have to actively look for it every single day. How are you different today than you were yesterday? Where have you gotten better? Create a list. If you have to do it every single day, do it every single day. Here are all the ways I’ve grown from now in this moment from last year.

Where was I at last year? What was I doing last year? What was I having drama about last year? What was I not good at last year. What was my biggest fear last year? What is it this year? Maybe even my fears have grown. I was talking about this with my husband, this is the last thing I’ll add.

I was talking about this with my husband and I was telling him that it’s like at every level of millions of dollars that we make I have different levels of fears and anxieties. And one of them has cropped up where I have all of a sudden started thinking that I don’t have as much money as I do. But all that’s actually really happened is for the past couple of years it was like my money and my business’s money were relatively the same. And our business hadn’t really grown a life of its own yet. And now we’re at the point at $10 million where our business, it’s literally a life of its own.

It needs a pretty sizeable reserve to make sure we can always pay our employees, to make sure we can always cover our marketing, for our events are much bigger, they cost a lot more. Our business is operating at a higher spend to maintain it and we need a bigger revenue. And the only way I can describe it is it’s taken a life of its own. And then now we’ve started, because we have so much money and we can’t invest it back in the business, we have started investing our money.

And it’s really when we started investing our money and created a portfolio, and we started thinking about creating accounts for our children and doing bigger things with our money in our personal lives that I realized these are very separate things. There is the business money and there is my money. And the profit is going to get at least split to some degree between two. It could be more on one side, more on the other. But there’s going to be profit that goes back into the business and profit that goes back into our personal accounts.

And it’s always been that way but I can’t describe it yet. And I can do a podcast once I’m fully on the other side. But it definitely feels different at this $10 million level. It definitely, it’s like a new awareness for myself on my money, and on what I want to do with my money. And I have new goals for my money. And much more, what I would say mature responsible goals for my money that are focused more on my family and our future and less on myself.

And so, all of that, I wrote this whole process, what I thought, where I am now and where I want to be, the result that I want to create, which is a $10 million net worth. And I put all the steps that would be the process for that. Here’s what it would take to get there. And it was a long list. But what occurred to me when I made the list is that none of these things on this list were even in my mind a year ago.

None of these things two years ago would have been remotely in my awareness for things I’d be doing. And they’re complicated things like creating trusts and making a will. And doing all these things that just weren’t even on my plate when I was still working and focusing all of my time and energy on scaling my business and growing it into a company. There was the time when I was focused on creating a company and now I have one and managing the money for my company and thinking about the money in my company.

And then me as a family instead of me as a single person are very different, so maybe that’s the best way to say it. But those problems are so different than last year’s problems. And that doesn’t mean something has gone wrong. We’re always going to be dealing with what we’re working on and the process to achieving what we want to do next. But just writing the process out for what it’s going to take to achieve your goal and looking at what you were spending your time with a year ago will be a massive shift for you in how much you’ve actually grown.

So, make sure you track your success, track your progress, track what you’re spending your time on and the problems you’re solving now and how different they were a year ago, even six months ago, or take it back two years. You will be able to find that you are in fact growing, I promise.

Okay, I love you all so much. I’ll talk to you next week.

Hey, if you are 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, and then $200,000 using my proven formula. It’s risk-free. You either make your 2K or I give you your 2K back. Just head over to www.staceyboehman.com/2kfor2k. We’ll see you inside.