3 Tips While You Are on This Entrepreneurial Journey

Recently I was inspired by a post I saw from someone online. This woman actually posted that about five years ago she was a single mom. She was on food stamps and welfare. She was depressed, she was an alcoholic, and she had tons of debt. And it just made me think of how far we can come from places that we're at in our life, and how many things can change in a matter of years.

Just to show you where she's at now, she has a multimillion-dollar business and she's crushing it.

So many people out there are really stuck "in it". They are seeing a lot of success around them and forget that other people have probably gone through a lot to get to where they are currently. A lot of people have the thought, "Oh my gosh, I'm not working quick
enough. And I'm not getting to where I want to be."

I just want to remind you that every single person comes from somewhere. And every single person has worked to overcome some kind of obstacle to get to where they're at.

It makes me think about my own journey, five years ago when I still had tons of student loan debt and I still quit my job (with a steady paycheck), because I was exhausted and burnt out. I was done working 60-plus hours a week. I wasn't happy anymore and something had to change.

I needed to start my own thing so that I could have my own time freedom. I was doing a lot of things just to bootstrap and really make things work. I had to bob and weave, especially in that first year of business. It was not easy in any way, shape, or form. I took out credit cards and money out of my 401k to make ends meet.

I can't tell you how many times that I was just a little puddle, a mess on the floor, just crying and thinking, "What the hell have I done with my life?"

I've gone from this (consistent paycheck) to this (ahhhh). I just felt really insecure, unconfident and it was mentally frustrating.

Add debt on top of that, add sadness and frustration and student loans and all kinds of stuff. And it was really hard to stay mentally strong each day, building my business.

I just want to share with you because it took a few things to really help me get out of that chapter in my life:

1) The first thing was extreme FOCUS on your WHY.

-I had to remember Why did I start this in the first place? Why, because I don't want to wake up at 5:00 AM every morning and get ready and drive to a job that I don't want to do anymore.

-Why do I want to do this? I want to have time freedom. I don't want to miss out on any other holidays with my family. I want to be able to take a week off and go jump in a car and go traveling if that's what I want to do.

So the fact that I knew my why, and I was focused on why I was doing what I was doing, it gave me that fuel to keep me going in my business. And it kept me pushing.

Those days where things got hard and I got another bill in the mail, instead of letting it crush me, I honestly started laughing. It was like, "Ha-ha, what else have you got for me?" Keep this in mind as an entrepreneur, you will have a lot of challenges thrown your way and if you were really trudging through and want to make this business work, you are most definitely going to have seasons of this.

In fact, I call it the entrepreneurial badges of honor. You have to go through all this crappy crap to get to the other side, to get to where you want to be. It's not easy and it's not for everyone. But the number one thing is that extreme focus and not forgetting your why.

I know many entrepreneurs, find it difficult to choose one area of focus and we want to be what Marie Forleo calls, multi-passionate entrepreneurs. Well, I thought I wanted to be a multi-passionate entrepreneur... and guess what... I spun my tires for years.

I had really focused that first year on building my first business, which was a remotely run house cleaning business. I really focused on that business and I grew it to six figures. I grew it to where I wanted it to be.

The wheels fell off the bus with that is when I tried to focus on a bunch of other things. I tried to do real estate. I had my house cleaning business. I wanted to be a coach. I wanted to get involved in marketing.

I had a lot of balls up in the air and it's hard enough to build one business, let alone, four or five. So I don't recommend that. I think people like to wear that, "I'm a multi-passionate entrepreneur" badge, but please... Pick one thing, stay focused, build it and then build off of that. Okay?

2) The second thing I want to tell you that really helped me move the needle with my businesses and everything was time blocking and organizing my day. This is actually something that Scott, my husband, helped me out with. Because when we become our own bosses, we tend to have squirrel brain all the time, and we tend to realize that, "Wow, we can do whatever we want!"

And we become incredibly unproductive and after we open about 20 tabs on our computer, we realize it's now 3:00 PM and we have not got any closer to our goals.

So my second tip is, to time block out your day. Create a routine, schedule, something to follow. I use google calendar to block out things in my day (such as when I will work on creating content, schedule calls, focus on lead generation and more).

One day I always block and protect on my calendar is Monday. It is my CEO day. That's the day that I work on my business and I meet with my team. It's a sacred day for me because it gives me that protected time to really work on my business.

3) The third tip I have for you is, set goals and work backward. Break them down into little pieces. Often when we set huge goals for ourselves, we start to get overwhelmed, and think "Oh my gosh, we're never going to hit it."

Here's an example of how I broke down goals: I knew I wanted to hit a certain figure in my first business, my cleaning business. So I broke it down into how many houses that we needed to have booked each day, how many clients we needed to have, how many cleaners I needed to have to meet that, I just worked backward entirely. I knew exactly what I needed to hit those goals... So that I knew that I could pay for bills, my mortgage, my student loan payments, and all that good stuff.

In conclusion, I just wanted to share with you that these things take time.

You don't just snap your fingers and things happen in your business overnight. It is a journey and it has just been one of the craziest, most developmental, most challenging journeys that I've ever been on.

...And I would never have it any other way.

The lessons that I have learned and the things that I've overcome during this time, have just changed my life. And I can proudly say, last year was a huge year and I know for 2021 was kind of like a mess for a lot of people.

I did go through cancer, but I overcame it and I also became debt-free. I paid off my student loans. I paid off my car. I paid off every credit card bill I had and I became debt-free.

It took time, didn't happen overnight, but it's extremely possible. So stay focused, stay vigilant, you've got this. And if you ever need someone to talk to, I'm here.

To connect go to www.thetimetogrow.com