5 things I have learnt from building a million dollar business
This week was an exciting milestone for me and my business. We turned five! 🙈🎂
I recently read that less than 1% of businesses around the world generate more than $1,000,000 per year in sales. This was a little yay-moment for me because not only has my business survived five years, but it’s thriving and we’re generating more than $1,000,000 every year 💸
The whole point of running an online business is to make things look pretty, glittery and attractive, which means my business probably looks like fun 100% of the time from the outside…
Given you guys only see the highlight reels of my job, I really want to take this moment to have a heart-to-heart with you all 💖
What better way to celebrate turning five, than to share the five biggest lessons I’ve learned from building a million dollar business 👏 It’s not always easy and fun, but that’s actually what inspired us to start our podcast – Babes Talking Business. We wanted to empower women by sharing what actually goes on behind the scenes of running a business!
I really hope these lessons will inspire you to take the plunge and start your business – or take your side hustle or biz to the next level 💪
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Get clear on your vision and your WHY ✨
What inspires you to start a business? A side hustle? A passion project?
I know it sounds really cliché but it’s honestly true. You need to understand your WHY…
It’s super important to know what you want from your business and what’s going to drive you, because the first 12-months getting your baby off the ground are always the hardest. But when you’re clear on WHY you’re doing it, you can decide whether your discomfort, pain and challenge is outweighed by the potential that you see in your future.
I like to think of it as either being motivated by the carrot or the stick. Sometimes people are inspired by the carrot - the shiny things or pretty vision at the front. They’re inspired to create a lifestyle, generate an income, make an impact or have a contribution 🙌 Other people are motivated by the stick - the pain that is always just behind them, reminding them of their reality if nothing changes. I was initially motivated by the stick. It was being unhappy in my career and my lifestyle that led me to make BIG changes in my life and start my biz ✔️
I see so many people start businesses and feel so inspired by the idea of business or a creative project at the start, but the reason they fail or give up is because in the back of their brain they’re doubting themselves and if the work it takes to actually be successful at it is really worth it 😅 They’re asking themselves if it’s really worth working on Saturday? Is it really worth working on my side hustle at the end of a really long day? Is it really worth me putting myself out of my comfort zone? Is it worth the rejection? 🤷♀️
What these questions tell me is that they still haven’t decided what they want - or more importantly - WHY you want it…
Because once you become really clear on your why, it’s so much easier to just dive in and do it. It’s really as simple as that! 💥
I’m not here to sugar-coat things – my first year was TOUGH! 🥵 While it was super tricky in those first few months, I really think knowing my why is how I’ve been successful. I don’t need anyone to motivate or inspire me. I don’t need to be reminded why I’m doing what I’m doing. I know wholeheartedly why I do what I do, and that makes all the work worth it 💖
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2. Anyone can be successful at business, but it’s not for everyone 🤗
When I say this, I mean it in the nicest way possible! I started my business with an absolute passion to help anyone and everyone that had a vision. What I’ve realised over the past five years is that it doesn’t matter if you’ve got no degree or 10 degrees, no kids or four kids, if you’re a man or a female.
But it does take a certain type of breed to be successful in business 🙌
I’m not sure if it’s innate or if they’re characteristics you can work on, but you need to have self-discipline.
A lot of people come into entrepreneurship with an employee mentality.
They think they’re going to start at 9am and finish at 5pm, and because they worked 8-hours they should have made at least the average wage for the day.
These people believe they need to trade time for money.
That employee mentality just isn’t going to serve you in entrepreneurship 🙅♀️
You can’t think that you’ll work as long as someone tells you what to do or that you’ll work as long as someone congratulates me at every checkpoint 😳
If you need a pat on the back, entrepreneurship isn’t for you. You need to do things when nobody is watching. It’s about discipline, delayed gratification, resilience ⚡️ If I gave up every time I was rejected, whenever anyone said anything negative about me or my business, or whenever I hit a roadblock, I would have given up a long time ago! 😂
What I’ve learnt from being in business is that for you to be successful in business, you need to be resilient, but you also need to be a problem solver. You can’t throw yourself a pity party every time life gets challenging, because you’ll never be successful. And spoiler alert ‼️ Problems never go away. You solve a problem just to get a bigger (higher quality) problem.
The truth is that failure and success aren’t two different paths 🤷♀️ We can’t have one without the other. In fact, if you’re failing, I would say you’re already succeeding 🤩 If you’re being challenged and you’re having problems in your business, it’s not that you’re failing. These are just normal and natural parts of running a business, so it actually means you’re on the right track! 💪 Success is on the other side of that failure - not on another road altogether!
These aren’t the things you can get from a coach or a mentor. They’re the things you need to dig a little deeper and find within yourself to be successful…
And maybe business isn’t for you. That’s ok - business isn’t for everyone. Employees and jobs are just as important, needed and valued to change the world, help people, deliver services and products, put food on the table and raise families. Get clear on what you want, what is important to you - and what is the right vehicle to get you (and your families) needs and wants met. That may change in different chapters of life too.
But from what I have seen and experienced… entrepreneurship is in your blood. You can try to suppress it, but it keeps taunting you. You are always craving or day-dreaming of more and will never be satisfied reporting to a boss or settling for a capped pay check.
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3. Dive into your money story 💰
Plenty of us don’t realise that we inherent our money habits. We’re taught to manage and think about money in a certain way growing up. The traditional schooling system teaches us that we need to trade time for money – That’s what I thought when I left school and got a scholarship to go to university! 😳
But when we think about money in that way, it’s really tricky to embark on business when you stop trading time for money. It makes it hard to scale because it brings a guilt that you’re not working as hard as you were at the start, yet the money continues to grow. I’ve been there 🙋♀️ (I even wrote a blog about it if you would love to hear my own personal breakthrough!)
I think every business owner needs to do some type of reflection or investigation into their personal money story. It can be really hard to think like an entrepreneur if we don’t truly understand these things within ourselves. It’s about working harder not smarter, scaling the business and building residual income and an asset 📈
Once you’re properly educated on money and you understand the importance of having multiple income streams, you can look where you currently are and use the statistics to predict where you’re going to be in 10, 25 and 50 years from now ⏩ How much superannuation are you going to have? How much more tax are you paying for not having a home based business?
Here is a blog where I shared the 7 books that personaly helped me shift my mindset around money and changed my life, literally.
Diving into your finances and financial literacy will teach you that you can’t afford not to have multiple streams of income. In the 21st Century, you can’t afford not to have a side-hustle or investments in different areas 💵 You need to look at your money to realise how simple these things are too. If these things don’t make sense to you, then you haven’t dived into your money story yet 📚
Plenty of people were probably surprised by these sorts of things over the past year from COVID-19, but that’s because no-one has ever forced them to look at their money. The most successful people I see in business are the ones that have educated themselves about finances and they use it to keep their eyes focused on their vision 🙏
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4. Relationships are EVERYTHING 💖
I mean it. EVERYTHING! 🙌 Getting any business off the ground is about networking. Unless you’ve got money to invest in paid advertising or you’ve already built a platform of influence. But usually the way you grow influence is through building relationships and adding value consistently over a long period of time 🙏 Once you start building a team, it’s then all about how you can look after those people and nurture your relationship with them 🥰 Whether you’re a small or large business, this is everything!
The best way to improve your relationships is to work on your communication. It’s about people-skills and knowing how to listen more and talk less 👂 Look into sales, leadership or influence books (I have a whole chapter on emotional intelligence in my book if you feel called to delve into that). Learn how to read people, ask great questions and solve people’s problems 🤝 We’ve never lived in a world where we’ve been so connected, yet people have felt so disconnected.
People just don’t want to hear about your shit 🙈 When I’m hanging out with family and friends, I’m asking them about them. When I’m meeting potential clients, I want the focus to be on them and what they want to achieve. Taking the time to ask these questions doesn’t just bring success, it brings deep and meaningful relationships.
Don’t go into things wondering what you can take. Always ask yourself what you can give or how you can leave a positive impact 🤔 Whether it’s your energy, your focus, a referral for a book you read or your program or your products, it’s so important to get good at your communication and relationship skills.
If I’m being totally honest, this is still one of the biggest challenges I face today 🙋♀️ It’s easy to build a tribe of people like you, but when you start building a team and a successful business, you have to up your game 💪 There are so many people out there that come from different backgrounds and have different perspectives, values, love languages, communication styles and personalities, and I welcome that! But it’s a huge responsibility to make those people feel valued, seen and heard.
You can mean so well, but it’s important to realise that we all look at the world differently and we have different personality styles. The key is being able to understand others, and be flexible in your approach and learning it is not about how you communicate or see the world - it’s about how they do. You are here to serve them ✔️
Image Credit: Lauren Kerr babes in business motivational and mindset speaker
5. Shiny object syndrome!
The people I see having success in any profession are the ones that don’t chase shiny objects. We hear so many stories of the businesses that fail, but I honestly think no one has told these people that they’re not failing – this is just business! 😉
These people are told life is greener over here, you’re in the wrong company, you’ve just got the wrong product. If you’re distracted by comments like this, you just can’t be successful. We all see those people that jump from company to company or industry to industry – they never make it anywhere! 😬
You need to have grit, focus and determination to be successful 👊 A big part of this is surrounding yourself with people that are actually successful in business and will tell you how it really is. Business is hard! Talk to any successful business owner and you’ll realise they’re in the trenches with you! 🙏
There are going to be seasons in your business where you are hustling in the trenches and you’ve got to get to work. It’s early morning and late nights. But if you’re surrounding yourself with the people who are actually doing the do (or have done it in the past to create the success they enjoy now), they’ll tell you it’s not forever. It’s just for a season.
It’s like anything in life! We have seasons in the economy, in the weather, even in our menstrual cycles as women! Business is the same, particularly as a start-up. I’m telling you this because if you’re in the trenches, it’s all worth it!
Surround yourself with like minded people who ask you the right questions, challenge your standards, remind you of your worth and your why when you forget…
✨Because quitters never win, and winners never quit ✨
The last 5 years have shown me that I am my biggest asset. I know I can rely on me to show up, do the work and look after other people. Why do that for someone else and not for me? If you know you have drive like that within you, show up and work on your own dreams rather than being used to build someone else’s because people with this level of tenacity, hunger, desire and willingness to learn are hard to find. So if an employee has got you… trust me it’s your loss.
My journey certainly hasn’t been all rosy and up-hill. There has definitely been seasons of my journey like that, but they have been periods of plateau or dips too. That’s not because of luck 🙅♀️ It’s because of delayed gratification, vision and being surrounding by like-minded people. I dive into my money story, show up when I need to and remind myself that we all get to choose our hard 🤗
Owning a business is hard. But is working 9 to 5 for someone else easier?
These are the five biggest lessons I’ve learnt, and I’m still only a baby but I can say that the girls I work with are what inspire me. I’m beyond grateful that I get to wake up every day and do what I do with these epic women by my side. They were the women I was craving for all those years ago - women who were ready to be the change. Thank you for joining me on the journey so far – here’s to plenty more years to come!!🍾🤩
