The CEO Shift: My Journey from Business Bottleneck to Lionhearted CEO
The CEO Shift: My Journey from Business Bottleneck to Lionhearted CEO
What's this episode of the lionhearted ceo podcast about?
Discover How to Break Free from Being Your Own Growth Ceiling and Scale Your Service Business with Sustainable Strategies
Do you find yourself:
Constantly juggling client work, barely finding time to breathe?
Saying 'yes' to projects even when you're already swamped?
Struggling to hand over tasks because 'no one does it quite like you'?
Dreaming of scaling but can't see how when your calendar's already full?
If you're nodding along, you might be the bottleneck in your own business - and you're not alone, lovely!
In this open and honest episode of Lionhearted CEO, I'm pulling back the curtain on my six-month podcast break and sharing how I transformed from being the bottleneck in my business to embodying true CEO energy.
Here's what you'll discover:
âĸ Why a successful service business doesn't always equal a scalable one (and how to change that)
âĸ The real challenges of creating scalable offers when you're already at capacity
âĸ My four-step plan for breaking free from being the limit to my own business growth
âĸ How slowing down counterintuitively became the key to scaling up
âĸ The game-changing mindset shifts that helped me step into my Lionhearted CEO role
Plus, I'm sharing my biggest takeaways from this transformative period, including why it's okay (and sometimes necessary) to completely restructure your business model.
Whether you're feeling trapped by your own success or ready to scale without sacrifice, this episode is your blueprint for sustainable growth.
Hi! Iâm your host Sophie Griffiths, a Meta ads expert and business growth strategist.
The LionHearted CEO podcast is designed for impatiently ambitious women who are ready to scale and often juggling motherhood alongside their thriving online businesses in coaching, course creation, or service-based business.
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Read the transcript:
NOTE: This podcast was transcribed by an AI tool. Please forgive any typos or errors.
[00:00:00] And a big welcome to a lion hearted CEO, the podcast for unapologetically impatiently ambitious women who know they want to stop being the bottleneck in their business and become the lion hearted CEO they know they are meant to be. I'm Sophie Griffiths, a tea enthusiast marketing, and met ad specialist.
[00:00:22] and firm believer that chocolate should never be kept in the fridge. Join me every Tuesday and Thursday for bold, imperfect, fun approach to marketing and scaling your business without burning out every few months. We'll dive into practical strategies and have inspirational conversations that will support you to create a thriving, sustainable business that brings you joy as well as financial freedom.
[00:00:45] Okay, let's jump in. Hello! Right, oh my goodness, well this is a bit of a long awaited comeback. So in this episode I am going to be talking about what the hell happened in the six months that I have been gone from the podcasting world. [00:01:00] I got to the point where I essentially burnt myself out. And so I had to stop the season quite abruptly. And I had totally intended to come back in January. So I'm talking about November, 2023, and then January, 2024. So I thought
[00:01:14] I'm just got a little bit too much on my plate. I'm a little bit burnt out. I just can't give what I need to give to the podcast at the moment. I'll just have a little break. Just. Few weeks, you know, a rest over Christmas. Yeah, sure. Good one, Sophie. And then in January, you know, I'll pull myself together and I get back to it.
[00:01:30] I've been intending to bring the podcast back for months. My poor, long suffering VA has been planning, re planning this podcast multiple times because I just never seem to quite be able to create the space for it.
[00:01:44] And what I'm going to do in this episode is talk you through exactly what happened and how I. Well, I have completely changed my business again for a long, long time. Listeners. You know that I love a pivot. I love a business change. I [00:02:00] am not afraid of changing my business. I am here for the long term for the business, but that does not mean for me that my business has to stay the same all the time.
[00:02:08] However, in the last year on the last 18 months, I probably changed my business more than that. I would have wanted to in hindsight. And so going forward, I am looking for a bit more stability, a little bit more structure, but it's been a huge, huge learning curve and I wanted to share with you exactly how I have created a structure in my business that now is giving me the time and the space to record this podcast.
[00:02:36] It's also the structure that has created multiple revenue streams in my business. has allowed me to start speaking on stages and having that space to do that. It's also allowed me to grow my business quite significantly over the last six months without burning out. And this is something that I struggle with a lot.
[00:02:59] I am really, [00:03:00] really prone to burnout partly because I have ADHD and I have all the ideas and I just love going hell for leather on things. I'm not very good at. Estimating time. So I always underestimate how long it's going to take to do something and overestimate the amount of things I can do in any given time.
[00:03:21] So it's a bit of a recipe for disaster, which is why at Christmas I realized that something really had to change if I was genuinely going to continue to scale my business. So as a bit of background, last year, so in 2023, my business grew from a sort of 30 to 40K a year business to a six figure, you know, VAT threshold business within about five or six months.
[00:03:47] And it was incredible. It was something that I had been aiming for, for a really, really long time. I've worked for myself for seven years and I, I've always been on that journey to try and get to a point where I was like replacing my [00:04:00] corporate salary, where I loved what I did and was serving a lot of people and was doing work that felt rewarding and also financially was viable because for a lot of years, like the work was not really financially viable.
[00:04:13] I was really, really lucky that had an incredibly supportive husband and family. So it felt incredible to finally start hitting numbers every month that felt like, yes, this is what I've been working for all the time, but it was a little bit like, be careful what you wish for, because, because once you wish for it, then it's like, oh, okay, this has brought a whole new level of problems that I need to sort out.
[00:04:43] And I didn't have, if I'm honest, the structures. um, and systems in place to maintain those numbers. So that's basically, long story short, that's where we got to at Christmas, that, I realized, I need to stop winging it here [00:05:00] and just kind of get to a point where I need to know that each month I have income coming in.
[00:05:08] I've realized for my nervous system, for my mindset, for my mental health and for my family's kind of financial stability as well. I'm not someone who thrives in big months followed by smaller months, a significantly smaller months. So there's always going to be fluctuations, but I'm not someone who enjoys.
[00:05:28] Those big months and then lower months because although yes, it averages out, I would much rather have consistently like mid range months. So this time last year, okay, I rebranded. I stripped back loads of services. I took out power hours. I stopped my group program and I fully focused on getting fully booked with my one to one.
[00:05:50] Um, it was a high ticket one to one. It was a three month program. I loved doing it. And I was like my one goal just to simplify everything in my life and, and get to these five figure months. I [00:06:00] really, really wanted to get to, I'm just going to focus on selling one service to one type of client and we're just going to do it.
[00:06:06] And that's going to get me to those five figure months. And it did. And it was incredible. I also then decided that I was going to co launch with. My lovely business partner, Colette Macbeth, my high ticket group program as well called Ignite. So that launched in October time, 2023. So that was great.
[00:06:25] So I had this one to one underlay and then I had this group program on top. I loved all of it, but I was at capacity really, really quickly, especially with the one to one. And what I really found was I Needed to be bringing probably at least three to four clients in a month to then to hit my income goals every single month as people cycled out of the three months I needed new people to cycle back in, obviously, um, and what happened was I got to Christmas and I realized that I wanted to create [00:07:00] a.
[00:07:00] DIY the audience builder course. I did it. However, when I try to create the time and capacity to create this course, to work on my business, to have some level of offer an income that didn't involve my one to one time with me, I had to dial down the number of one to one clients I was working with, which makes sense to create more capacity, right?
[00:07:22] But the problem with that is. Literally, as I dialed down my one to one clients, my income dialed down. And then not only did I want to, um, do that to create space to do the audience builder course, but I also wanted to take time off over Christmas and what I could see quite quickly was, okay, so if I want to take time off over Christmas, maybe over the summer, I want to take time off as well.
[00:07:46] Not only will that impact that month, if I don't. On board new clients, but then over a cycle of three months, it's going to mean consistently lower income unless I then bring in like double the amount of clients the next month. And suddenly I realized that this, [00:08:00] this way of just having one signature program was not going to work for me and how I wanted to work and how I wanted to run my business.
[00:08:09] So over this period, I tried to hire a team. Which was successful in that it taught me a huge amount, but it was incredibly challenging. I started with one VA and then she changed the days and the way she was working, which didn't work for me. Then I started with another OBM and that didn't work out because she Change the way she was working as well.
[00:08:30] And I had a bit of a thought. I was like, right, I need someone who isn't trying to run their own business as well. I'm going to employ someone because then I have control over the hours they work, how they work. However, that was incredibly time consuming to try and recruit someone into the business. And in the end spent a lot of time recruiting and then didn't find someone that I felt was a really good fit.
[00:08:53] And that was really, really disappointing. So there was a lot, it was a bit of a melting pot last [00:09:00] Christmas of a lot of things coming to a head. I would say Christmas and Q1 as well, like a lot of things came to a head that were just really, really challenging. So this is like the turning point. I mean, I'd say like it's the turning point, but it was like four months of, of turning point.
[00:09:17] Pretend, I mean, I'm still making changes now, so let's just call it a six month slow Titanic speed shift change, but always. With a clear direction because I created a plan and I stuck to the plan and it's been painful at times, but it has had a really great impact. So what I'm going to talk to you today is about what that plan was, what exactly I did and how I maneuvered myself out of this sort of corner that I backed myself into.
[00:09:46] So first of all, I was, I would say I was quite resilient and despite having Incredibly challenging experiences finding a team. And honestly, building a team around me has probably been one of the [00:10:00] hardest things I found over the last few years. And I do not underestimate the fact that it's probably because I am really challenging to work with.
[00:10:07] I, I think fast, I speak fast, I act fast, I learn fast. I like to do stuff myself. I hate to delegate. And I also, I'm not hugely structured. So I find it quite challenging to. To be in systems and processes that support my team, however, have found an amazing team and understanding the way that I work best, the way they can support me best and finding people who also who actually enjoy working in that way and supporting me in that way has been such a game changer.
[00:10:39] So the first thing was to work on my support. So, um. I picked myself back up after trying to start with two people over Q4 last year and found my incredible VA Laura at the beginning of this year, um, and started on boarding her in January and every month has gone from strength to strength. And what is amazing is that she's [00:11:00] so proactive about looking for stuff that I.
[00:11:03] Could do with help with that. She can see is not working really well, but she's like, Okay, this is taking up a lot of your time and I could be doing it like let's have a call. You can hand over to me and let's build a process from there. So that's incredible. I also have an incredible Facebook ads VA who now does a lot of the admin side of my ads work, which again has been a total game changer because I was spending hours fiddling around with uploading graphics and resizing graphics and copying and pasting.
[00:11:30] so much for having me. different sets of copy into different ads. And you know, whilst I love doing the strategic work, I love writing the copy. I love doing the graphics. I don't need to be the one in there actually setting it all up. And Claire is incredible at that. And then also I had a huge change in the way that I'm kind of doing my social media.
[00:11:50] like I wanted to employ someone. Then I ended up pausing with the support I had and now I've got new support. And like working on that process and how. We're going to work [00:12:00] together because I here's the thing. I'm not the best social media management client. Again, I'm well aware of this because I don't want to just hand it over.
[00:12:07] I really enjoy social media. I really enjoy writing captions. I like being on stories. I don't really want to hand over to someone else. And just be like, yeah, post I'm, you know, I'm just going to disconnect from Instagram. I don't want to know anything about it. Like I, I like doing it. I just don't have time for it.
[00:12:24] And I'm not consistent when I'm left to my own devices. So having a social media manager that doesn't feel threatened by me editing every caption that they write and actually, you know, getting to a place where we are mapping out the content together, they're creating the graphics and the reels, cause that is the part that I have no interest in.
[00:12:44] Um, And then like kind of drafting a caption for me so that I can then edit and tweak, sometimes rewrite other times go. Yeah, this is brilliant. Just go for it. Like having someone who is not threatened by me being that involved has been a massive [00:13:00] game changer. Well, so optimizing my team. Was like, was step number one.
[00:13:05] Absolutely no doubt about it. Introducing systems as well. So we heavily rely on ClickUp now. And I also use Slack as well with for my clients as well of my team. And one thing that someone once said to me was, which I just wanted to share because it's really stuck with me. It's your business and you get to decide what systems you work on.
[00:13:28] Because as a bit of a people pleaser, someone who struggles with boundaries and people pleasing in general, if I started working with someone, uh, this is clients and team, by the way, I'd say, Oh, what system do you work in? I'm, I'm happy to, you know, work in your system. So at one point I'm like, WhatsAppping one team member, Voxering another team member, you know, clients on Voxer, also clients on Slack, also clients on ClickUp, and Trello, and Asana, and we've just got stuff [00:14:00] all over the place, totally unmanageable, stuff falling through the cracks, and me just feeling like I'm getting bombarded from every single different angle.
[00:14:07] So, Being able to sort of step into that, that, I think that for me, that's the start of that, like CEO mindset of, okay, this is my business and in my business, we have our task management system is on ClickUp, comms are on Slack, and, you know, we have Google Drive, In the main, I do have some clients where I still go into their systems, but that's generally where I'm, I'm consulting or managing their ads and I'm kind of much more embedded into their businesses.
[00:14:34] But generally speaking, all my clients are now embedded into my systems and it makes the world of difference sorting out systems like that and lots of automations as well within the business, which leads me on to my next step of my plan. I knew that if I wanted to do offers that weren't just with me, so it wasn't beyond this like one to one three month program that I needed to grow my audience.
[00:14:59] [00:15:00] So getting clients with a one to one offer. Yes, I absolutely needed leads. I need to be growing my email list. And I was like last year I grew my email list. I spent money on ads. You know, , I went to lots of events. I did kind of speaking bits like, but. It wasn't that fast. So I still it was quite a sort of slow leisurely pace, and that's absolutely fine.
[00:15:20] And a lot of people who work in this way to work one to one offer like done for you or like high levels of one to one work. You don't need to grow your audience to a huge level and you don't need to do it really, really fast. Like you can take it nice and slowly. However, once you get to the point where you want to be doing anything that's on a larger scale.
[00:15:44] So I wanted to create a, DIY self paced, Facebook ads course, and I knew that if I wanted to get people in that I was going to have to start building an audience, a bigger audience and faster. So I really committed to my ads. Um, obviously [00:16:00] I know how to use them. So that is an incredible benefit. Like, don't get me wrong.
[00:16:03] But I created a new lead magnet. I created a new welcome sequence. Really thought about my email flows and I increased my ad spend as well. So last year I spent in the entire year in 2023, I spent about, I think it's just over 3, 000. It works out about 8 a day. My ad spend this year will be a lot higher.
[00:16:23] And that's really, really intentional. On average, I spend between 20 and 25 pounds a day at the moment. So it absolutely will be higher this year. And that's because I wanted to speed up my audience growth and I wanted to start selling. And that makes a real difference with. That mindset of like, I'm just growing my audience versus I'm selling to my audience.
[00:16:43] So I started creating this new lead magnet, and then I created the space to launch this audience builder course, which is my DIY course, and it teaches people how to grow their email list using lead ads, exactly like I do, and also teaches them how to grow their social media [00:17:00] and amplify their social media to then connect, and to then bring new people into their world.
[00:17:06] So by reaching new people with their content, their social media content, but also to connect with their current audience as well and show their current audience the content that they're creating. Because one of the biggest issues with social media is we put content out there and maybe only like, I don't know, five to 10 percent of our audience actually see it.
[00:17:22] So I really started before I created the course and before I started teaching this to clients, I really experimented on my own accounts and then with some of my. Management client accounts as well. What's the best way to do this? What's the best format? What's the best content that works for this? What's the best campaigns to use?
[00:17:42] Like what's the ideal budget levels? So there's a lot of testing and just got really curious again. I think it's really easy to get stuck in a rut. And with anything in life, isn't it about how I could use ads in a really like effective way for not a huge amount of budget. So a lot of my clients, I'm using these kinds of ads [00:18:00] for like between two and three pounds a day.
[00:18:02] So it's like super, super low cost, but just allows that amplification of your content every single day. And it really takes that pressure off that content. What's the word I'm looking for? I want to say rollercoaster, but it's not really that relentlessness of the content where you're like, Oh my God, I need to put out at least three pieces of content every week.
[00:18:22] Otherwise I'm just not, you know, getting those opportunities to get in front of my audience. So I really wanted to, so this is kind of the third phase, I guess, of my full step plan was to, um, amplify everything that I was doing. So really push myself to get more visible. So I used ads to do that. I also really started to push myself into doing in person speaking events, going strategically to more in person events, but the ones that were really going to have my ideal clients in the audience, you know, that I was going to be connecting with my ideal clients.
[00:18:56] I've got a bit of a thing on like return on energy invested at [00:19:00] the moment rather than just in return on money invested. And last year I attended a lot of events and they were great, but some of them did not give me the return on the energy that I invested to go to them. So this year there was a big focus on that.
[00:19:13] I also am speaking at a big event in October, which I'm very excited slash terrified about. So it was really leaning into like, how can I amplify my voice? Amplify my message really, really worked on my messaging. I had a coach where we focused a huge amount on my messaging. And of course, bringing back the podcast, that has been a huge goal of mine.
[00:19:36] I'm not going to lie. I was hoping to do it a bit earlier than this, but my four phase plan has taken slightly longer because. Well, that's just, that's just life, isn't it? And it is obviously my tendency to underestimate how long things are going to take. And also with children as well, um, that was a bit of a challenge.
[00:19:54] And then the final step in my four step plan Was to really [00:20:00] look at my offers and how I could stack my income and create monthly recurring revenue that that was beyond like one to two months and not feel like as honestly, like at the beginning of the year, I do remember feeling like, yeah, okay, I'm hitting like 10 K every month, but every month.
[00:20:18] I hit, I get towards the end of the month and I hit like whatever I hit. And then on the first of the month, I'm like, right, okay, I've got whatever, probably like a couple of grand in recurring revenue. And now I have to climb a mountain to create the rest of the revenue that I need. And it was like an uphill struggle every month.
[00:20:37] And I was like, Oh, that is not good for me. Like, that is not the kind of mentality I want to be in every month. Like, right. What leavers do I need to pull? What action do I need to take? What offers do I need to launch? Like, what do I need to do to, to like hit this financial goal every single month? So it was really looking at what my offer suite was going to look like, and then how I could create that over time.
[00:20:58] So what it looked like [00:21:00] was step one, audience build a course, because I knew that there was a lot of people in my audience that wanted to learn how to do ads and didn't need a funnel. Like if you don't have online courses, memberships, low cost offers. Um, digital resources like you don't need a huge funnel.
[00:21:17] You just need to bring people into your world, like exactly like I was doing last year. So that was like my basic course, which has been such a success. And it's, I'm going to talk about that in another episode, actually, because I think it's, uh, there's been a few things I've done that worked incredibly well.
[00:21:31] And I want to share that. There's also a few things I've done that have not worked incredibly well, which I will also share. So that was kind of step one. I created a few small offers that say I have like little. Cool. little offers, if you like, that are like 11, 27, there's things like a plug and play welcome sequence, which allows you to connect with your audience.
[00:21:52] Once you've got, you know, ads and bringing them into your world, there's like how to use chat GPT to write really great ad copy. What's the other? Oh, how to create a lead [00:22:00] magnet that appeals to your cold audience, so to use in ads. So smaller offers that all lead into my audience builder course. And the next level from there is then raw.
[00:22:10] So I bought back one to one. I didn't bring it back until the beginning of April. Like that's how, how long I had to take away from one to one to allow me to put all of these steps in place. It's now I've revamped it. Um, and it's working incredibly well, and it's in a it's in a much more of a format that is more repeatable, and it allows me to have quite high touch, but also
[00:22:34] it's more scalable rather than me doing endless one to one calls all the time and sitting on zoom. For every hour of my working week. So it's, yeah, it's going really, I've had some incredible clients through it with incredible results. So I'm really, really happy about the changes I made there.
[00:22:50] I will go into more depth in another episode. I feel like I keep saying that will go into more depth because I think it's really important to get into like what this offer creation actually looks like that allows you to [00:23:00] scale. Because my natural tendency is to just include a lot of one to one time with me, because I know if I can get someone on a Zoom call, then, um, I can help them.
[00:23:09] But the reality of that is that I cannot do that for every client at every price point for every offer. So it's like, how do I, like, share my knowledge without it having to be me sharing it live? So that's been a big, it's been a big exploration for me. Then we've got Ignite, which is my group program, which is a combination of, using an ads funnel, but alongside Colette, whose work is all around like the messaging.
[00:23:33] So it's, how do we combine really potent messaging with an ads funnel that then allows you to kind of reach new people and sell offers as well. So it's really about that offer creation and funnel. And then I had my consultancy work as well. So that's my one to one clients that I basically embed worm my way into their, their business and become like a little bit like a, I'm a consultant of marketing in their business and then run the ads [00:24:00] for them as well.
[00:24:01] So that's where I was. I then was like, right, formats that I love. I decided to introduce in person days as well. So introduce an audience, build a course. in a day. So it's like a one off training day. And. I'm literally going to be there with you for the whole day, setting up your ads and just getting it done rather than buying another course and like hoping you find the time to do it on your own.
[00:24:24] So that's really exciting. And then finally. The last couple of months I've been working on something, a mastermind. So this is like the final, I guess, piece of my puzzle because all of the other things that I do, so the audience builder course and raw is for people who have not run ads before. So generally it's like.
[00:24:44] The audience builder course is like the first time you're running ads. Raw is about the first time you're setting up your first ads funnel. So generally, either you've done ads, but you haven't set up a funnel, or you've never done ads before, and we set the whole thing up from scratch. But I realized there was a real [00:25:00] gap, um, in people who had either run ads previously, had a funnel, but, um, Hadn't been running ads to it.
[00:25:07] So it's people who have funnels essentially have had the big launches have had the five figure months have like have the different levels of offers a bit like this. Like I'm explaining, um, but just want to grow it. And it's maybe it's not quite clicking into place. Maybe there's an offer missing.
[00:25:23] Maybe they can't quite see how this process actually works for their business and they want to really like map it out. So I'm actually doing an in person day for that, where we're going to create this blueprint. What I've talked to you about today is about Reaching new people all the time, optimizing your systems and social media, amplifying that with ads and then strategic things that you love doing, like speaking and podcasts, and then generating revenue from that funnel.
[00:25:50] So it's my raw framework, R O A R. And that's what we're going to be doing on the mastermind day, creating that blueprint, that raw blueprint for your business so that you can go [00:26:00] away and implement it. Oh. Hint, hint, if you want support, I will then be running a mastermind, which is exactly built on these four core pillars to support scaling businesses to implement that.
[00:26:13] So that is my, that's my new thing that I'm doing and that starts in September. So I will put the links to all of the different offers. and in person days in the show notes. And make sure that if you've got any questions, just come over to Instagram and DM me. And I am at sophiegriffithco on Instagram.
[00:26:31] And again, obviously I'll put the link in the show notes as well for you. So that's how I decided I was going to start generating revenue. So I've gone from a single one to one offer three month offer to having this like sort of progressive offer stack, which works really nicely for clients to progress through, but it also works really nicely for me because it allows me to have lots of different things on the go, but without feeling overwhelmed and burnt out because I actually [00:27:00] just, uh, this is quite monumental for me.
[00:27:02] I've got boundaries in place. I know what I'm delivering, who I'm delivering it for, what the goal is and it's. It's really helping me, but also it's like massively helping my client as well. My clients as well know what the goal is of working together and then what they need to be achieving.
[00:27:17] And then when they achieve that, it's absolutely incredible. So, Oh my goodness. There has been, that's a bit of a whistle stop tour of the last six months. So I thought to end the episode, I would just share my biggest takeaways of the last six months. So the first one is there are a lot of ways to grow a business.
[00:27:35] I've tried most of them myself, and especially like I've worked alongside with clients as well, but we've done for you, done with you, DIY, launch evergreen group programs, memberships, courses, low cost offers. Like there's so many ways to grow a business and to scale a business and to generate multiple levels of income in your business.
[00:27:55] Now, some people. will absolutely love having one thing, [00:28:00] one group program, and all roads lead to that group program. And that's all you offer. And it's super clear who it's for, what you offer and how you offer it. Other people like me will need more variety. I realized that I like selling different things to different people at different times of the with different focuses and different energy.
[00:28:23] And different ways of working with me and sharing my knowledge and expertise. I really enjoy that variety. And yes, it does create sometimes more complexity, like more systems. And I definitely need more support from the team and systems to be able to do that. But I think what I wanted to share was like your preferences on how you want to run your business, the type of offers you create and what works for you is so key in creating your offers.
[00:28:51] Like, Whenever I've created an offer because I thought I should or because lots of other people were doing, I've realized that actually, uh, like long term [00:29:00] commitment programs aren't the best for me. I need an end date, really, if it's like a group program. Because I just really, really struggle with, uh, long, long term evergreen programs.
[00:29:10] So, that's something I've learned about myself and it means that I won't ever Launch a membership because an open ended membership is just not something that would be healthy for me, and I would enjoy doing so it's really understanding about yourself and just keep testing and learning and like, do you know what, if I, if I do launch membership in the future, obviously direct me back to this episode.
[00:29:31] But it's fine. I can test it. And if I don't like it, I'll just stop like pivoting, changing and but really identifying like if something it doesn't feel good, doesn't feel great. Do you need to change it? Because I'm just such a massive fan of not feeling like you're having to be stuck offering one thing just because that's what you've committed to doing.
[00:29:51] Like you can do it for six months, see how you get on and then change it. Um, so that's, that's one of my biggest takeaways is don't ever feel like you're backed [00:30:00] into a corner. Okay. You can always make a plan to get out of a corner. Your preferences matter. How you like to work matters and creating joy in your business matters.
[00:30:10] And then the final thing is you don't have to keep selling to the clients that you're currently selling to. Okay, you can change your audience. You can change who you sell to. You don't always have to sell to people who are just starting out.
[00:30:24] You can change who you sell to, and it will take time to build up that audience. And when you do make a pivot, it will also Always take longer to build up that audience again, then you think it's going to and that's in my own experience and also with clients as well. But it is. So worth it. And just like, there are so many ways you can like build up momentum and change it faster.
[00:30:47] But, it's a journey that once you're on it, um, just stick with it. Often this comes from when you want to work with like the next level clients. It's so worth it to just keep going. If you're in that at the moment.
[00:30:59] And then I think the [00:31:00] final thing I wanted to leave you with is you are not your business. If things fail, if things have to change, if you realize you need to start again, if you fit, if you burn out, if you take on too much, if your boundaries are wobbly.
[00:31:15] It is not a reflection on you. And it's taken me a really, really long time to dissociate from the fact that I am not my business. I am the CEO of a business. And if tomorrow that business stopped, that it is not a reflection on me. I still don't know that I 100 percent believe that statement just to share with you, but I am working really, really hard.
[00:31:36] Really hard on becoming a CEO of a business that I love and I'm so invested in and so absolutely brings me joy, but it's separate to Sophie as a person. Uh, so that is where that's where I'm at with my business. And I just wanted to share that because I think it's something that a lot of people struggle with.
[00:31:58] So it's great to be back. I [00:32:00] absolutely love doing this podcast. I am going to be here twice a week. I know what a commitment my VA did look at me with slightly panicked eyes. And I said, I decided I was going to do two episodes a week. It's going to be fine. And again, guys, if it doesn't work out, I'll be going back to one episode a week, but for the foreseeable, it's going to be two episodes.
[00:32:18] It's going to be a slightly longer, more strategic episode on a Tuesday. And then there's going to be a short new format on a Thursday. And aiming for about 10 minute episode, which is giving you like super actionable insights and challenges essentially to be like, this is what's working, go away and do it now.
[00:32:36] That's the goal of that. So I'm very, very excited to be back and I look forward to seeing you soon.
[00:32:42] Thank you so much for listening today. Before you go, if this episode struck a chord with you, I'd be over the moon if you could take a moment to rate, subscribe, and leave a review. Your words not only brighten up my day, but they are also the magic that helps others discover this lion hearted community.
[00:32:58] Again, thank you so [00:33:00] much, and I will see you next week.
[00:33:01] thank you so much for listening today. Before you go, if this episode struck a chord with you, I'd be over the moon if you could take a moment to rate, subscribe, and leave a review. Your words not only brighten up my day, but they are also the magic that helps others discover this lion hearted community.
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