Category: Productivity

    Episode 246: Simple Ways To Plan And Win Every Week – with April Beach

    SweetLife Enterpreneur Podcast April Beach

    This episode is for those in Phase 1 – 2 – 3 – 4 – 5 of the Lifestyle Entrepreneur Roadmap™ Not sure what Phase your business is in?

     

    Episode Bonuses:

    Organize your assets and ideas into a Signature Offer

    Who This Episode is Great For:

    This is a great show if you’re an entrepreneur in any phase of business who sets out to accomplish a lot, and leave every week feeling like a failure.

    Summary:

    You have a lot to do in a short period of time. Add the fact that much of the work you need to complete as an entrepreneur requires training to complete, feeling accomplished evades you. I get it! I’m a pro at planning more than I’m capable and in this show I am giving you the framework I needed to create for myself, so that you can win your week’s too. This is a short episode with simple but big takeaways that can work for all entrepreneurs, even those who struggle to stay focused. I also share my favorite tools for staying focused and how to push through when my mind wanders. 

    At the end of this episode you will:

    1. Hack my simple plan to do more in a week than ever before
    2. Know how to pre-plan for failure so it never happens
    3. Free up one whole day

    Resources Mentioned:

     

    Sand Timers on Etsy Brain.fm Flora – Green Focus App

    SweetLife Podcast™ Love:

    Are you subscribed? If not, there’s a chance you could be missing out on some bonuses and extra show tools.  Click here to be sure you’re in the loop.  Do you love the show? If so, I’d love it if you left me a review on iTunes. This helps others find the show and get business help. I also call out reviews live on the show to share your business with the world. Simply click here and select “Ratings and Reviews” and “Write a Review”. Thank you so much ❤︎

    Need faster business growth?

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    Full Show Transcript:

    You’re listening to the SweetLife entrepreneur podcast, simplified strategies to grow your service business and launch a life you love faster with business mental and entrepreneur activator, April Beach Hey there. And welcome to this week’s episode. This is number 246 and I’m April beach. It’s so good to talk to you again. Forgive my cracky voice. I just got back from funnel hacking live in Florida and just had a million amazing conversations and my voices hurting just a little bit here.

    So I hope it’s not too scratchy as we go through today’s episode, because this is really important. I’m so excited to talk to you about simple ways to plan. And when your week, this is going to be a shorter episode with a lot of information and is jam packed for you. And this is important because of a couple of reasons. First of all,

    I know you have so many ideas and so many things going on and you want to win every single week, right? You want to go into that week. You want to feel like you just nailed it, right? When is the last time you actually had a week that it was a Friday night or even a Sunday night? And you’re like, man,

    I did awesome that week. It usually actually doesn’t happen as often as we’d like or worst case. If it does happen, you’re always one of those overachievers like me, where we never actually stopped to realize we won the week. We’re just looking to the next week. And so I’m talking to those of you who really truly want to win every single week.

    And you want to feel good about that and you want to stay focused. So all of the show notes and everything we’re talking about can be found at episode 246 on our website. And our website is Sweetlife po.com. And if you’re new here, it’s so good to meet you. I’m April beach, I’m a business coach and strategist, an online business architect and an offer engineer.

    And I work with experts and coaches and consultants. And I have done this for over 25 years. I help you turn your ideas and your thoughts and your assets into high profit, deep impact business reality. And everything we talk about on this show are tidbits of amazing strategies that our clients get when they work with us. And this show is known for giving business coaching that other two coaches charge thousands for.

    So I’m so glad to connect with you. Again, everything can be found by visiting Sweetlife co.com. So let’s lay the groundwork of exactly what you can expect at the end of the show. You can expect that I’m actually going to break down our hyper focused weekly worksheet with you here on the show. I’m going to take you through the steps and really break down how that worksheet is laid out.

    This is a worksheet that we save for our clients. Only. We actually go through this process, our clients getting them ready and nailing every single week. And you’re talking clients that make multiple, multiple six figures up to seven figures all the way down to starting entrepreneurs that haven’t even launched. Our first product. These strategies are really important for everybody, regardless of where you are in your business.

    And we’re going to go through that process and I’m going to share it with you on today’s show. You’re also going to know how to plan for failure and how to overcome that. And it’s a really simple way as soon as I explain it to you, you’re going to be like, oh yeah, totally. I got it. I’m going to break that down for you.

    And then at the end of this show, a very special bonus. I’m even giving you all of the tools that I use. Now. These are physical tools. You guys like tools that you can get off Amazon to help you stay focused. And so that you can keep moving forward and sharing with you. Some of my very favorite apps as well,

    so that you can totally win every single week. So again, all the show notes are found@twohundredandfortysixonsweetlifecode.com. And if you’re ready, let’s go ahead and dive into this week show. Okay. You guys were talking about simple ways to plan and win every single week. Now, let me give you a little bit of a backstory. I am highly confident that I have undiagnosed ADHD and I probably have my whole life.

    I actually love the way my brain works and I love the way that God made me, but I will say it is a bit challenging to stay focused. If you follow me on Instagram, sometimes you’ll see me. We’re all right, posts that sometimes I will literally just find myself that my brain is so full or the work I’m doing is so hard.

    I will just wander around in my home. I have a home office and just start looking out different windows. And so winning the week is really, really hard for me. And so I’ve had to come up with a strategy that could kind of bring me back to earth when I start to float away in my mind during the day. And I own for those of you guys that don’t know me,

    I actually own five companies. Two of them are my own and three of them are my husband’s. And so we constantly have a million things going on. The only way we can do this and be very profitable and successful in what we do is to win every single week. And so I’m sharing with you that this is a huge struggle for me. And to be really honest,

    let’s keep it really real. I don’t win every single week, but this is a proven strategy that I’ve used in that we coach our clients on to come pretty damn close. And so I want to download you on this this week. I totally get the fact that you have so much work that you need to do and complete as an entrepreneur. And here is what is even harder about being an entrepreneur is that most of you are in that first five years of business.

    So in order to complete much of the work you have to do, you’re probably also learning how to do that. So you’re not just having to nail the task at hand. You’re having to figure out how to nail the task at hand and why to nail the task at hand. So when we’re talking about accomplishing one thing, there usually are 20 steps to learn how to accomplish that one thing,

    which by the way, this is a perfect reason why you should be in our business coaching programs, because we just give you all the steps and the SOP and the template. So you don’t have to go through that. But most people do go through those processes to do all the learning upfront before the executing. And I understand that it might be a slower process for you.

    This is why people tend to start out with in the beginning of the week, all these things that you might want to do, and then you get to the end of the week and you don’t feel as accomplished as frankly, you should, because the reality is is you probably did a ton of stuff. So I’m going to show you and break down our framework that I really needed to create for myself.

    And now that we use with our clients so that you can win your week too. So let’s first start with my hyper-focused weekly worksheet. Okay? So this is literally one piece of paper that our clients get every single week. And then they get to meet with Kyle Taylor in our other business dream team, expert coaches that are super killer, awesome people at keeping them focused.

    And I’m going to unpack this for you here, but literally as you’re listening to this show, I just want you to imagine one piece of paper. And on this piece of paper, there are just three very simple columns. That’s it? It’s not fancy because if we make this paper fancy, then all of a sudden this paper is going to become a task to complete instead of a tool to help you complete the tasks at hand.

    So the very first thing that we do in our hyper focus to week weekly worksheet in our meetups is choosing the number one most important task. Now it’s not rocket science, but the reality is, is what task you choose will affect the whole rest of your week. And so let me give you some tips on how to choose that task. And we like to talk about taking a task that by choosing that task,

    it makes everything else easier or obsolete. And that really comes from the strategies, taught in a book called the one thing, which we love and recommend for our clients to read. And so it’s really figuring out what is that one thing that I need to do to make EV that makes everything else easier or obsolete. But now let’s go ahead and take it a step a little bit deeper for you.

    Okay. Usually now hear me out, raise your hand. I don’t care where you are. If this is you, usually clients have some really immediate fires to put out and then they have some longer-term business blueprints that they’re building out. So we kind of have these two different categories, like the fire and the blueprint, or for most of our clients,

    it’s like money. They need to bring in immediately right now, like their kid’s college payment is due or they have to pay their team or, you know, whatever else they just want to make more money. You know, like in this quarter they haven’t had their quarterly budget yet that they wanted to hit. So there’s immediate tasks and there are farther out tasks.

    I don’t care which one you choose in your week, as long as it aligns with the cycle of work that you’re currently doing in your business. Okay. But you need to pick one and only one. All right. So number one, if you’re listening to this right now, just say to yourself out loud, what is the number one most important thing that I need to do or nail or complete or build or whatever the verbiage is this week in my business.

    And write that down. Number two, you are going to take a second and you’re going to list out the first three to five action steps to complete that task. So the first three to five things you have to do in order to start the process of completing your number one task, and it could be making a decision on software. It could be signing in and checking my email and cleaning out my email inbox.

    It doesn’t matter how small it is. As a matter of fact, the smaller, the better when we’re really getting down to the nitty-gritty of how to complete a task. But I want you to list out the top three to five action steps that complete that task. And there could certainly be more than that, but just list out the first three to five.

    And then here’s really where it gets important. Step number three is determining what can get in your way or stop you from completing this task. So ask yourself what is one thing that can totally derail me? What is some reason why I might not be able to complete it? Maybe it’s you don’t know how to use the software that you have to make a decision on.

    Maybe it’s that you don’t have somebody to help you learn how to run a Facebook ad. Maybe it’s that you’re afraid and you are your problem. You are your block because you’re having to put yourself out there in a way you never have before, but I want you to really figure out what is that brick wall that is going to come up this week and stand in the way of you being successful at nailing this number one task.

    And after you’ve identified your brick wall, I want you to list out a plan that you are going to enact when that happens to overcome it. So you need to determine what can get in your way, and you need to make a plan before it even happens to crush that, and that is step number three. And step number four is blocking out the times or one day on your calendar to focus on this one task.

    You can take all of the steps in the world, but if you don’t then plug it into your calendar and designate a time that you are going to plug this in, in actually get it done. There’s a really good chance you’ll procrastinate it. And it won’t get done because in most cases, we still even underestimate the amount of time. It takes us to complete something.

    One of my very favorite special business mentors, Carrie Wilkerson says, don’t wait until Friday or Thursday, even to start working on your number one task of the week, do it on Monday, Tuesday or Wednesday, because inevitably something’s going to happen. Some kid is going to get sick, or the dog has to go to the vet or you have to catch a flight somewhere you weren’t expecting,

    or a client needs you for extra help, whatever it may be that is going to happen until we want you to start it earlier in the week and the first three days of the week so that you can win your week. And so let me recap those steps for you really quickly. This is how we complete the hyper-focus weekly worksheet with our clients. Number one is choosing your most important task.

    Number two is listing the first three to five action steps to complete that task. Number three is determine what can get in the way and make a plan to get over that. And number four is to block out the time in your calendar in which you will work to complete this task. Very, very simple. And after you’ve done this for your most important task,

    then you have permission to go on and follow these same four steps for task number two, and for task number three in each week, but make sure you do the work for each one, starting with number one and make sure that you complete number one before you start moving on to tasks. Number two and three. All right. So now I promised you,

    I would share with you some of the tools that we use behind the scenes and some of the things I’ve learned to use over the years just to keep me focused. So these are literally physical tools and some of them are apps and you’re probably going to laugh at me, but they helped me. And so I thought maybe if they helped me that they might help you as well.

    The first one is actually a technique and it’s called a Pomodoro technique and Pomodoros were created by Francisco Cirillo. And I’m sure I’m butchering his name because he’s Italian and I don’t speak very great Italian in the Pomodoro technique as a time management method. And it was developed by Francisco in the 18, excuse me, in the 1980s. So it isn’t that old in the word.

    Pomodoro actually comes from the word tomato named after like a tomato kitchen timer. I know sounds really silly, but this is how it goes. These are the in order to complete a Pomodoro, basically it’s a way to stay focused. And I will tell you, I have taught this to my teenage boys when they have so much homework and they have trouble staying focused.

    If you do Pomodoros, and if you teach your kids Pomodoros, their homework will become so much easier. It’s a very, very simple thing. So the original way to complete a Pomodoro is in six different steps. So, number one, you decide on what you want to do, the task that you want to complete. We’ve already done that with your hyper-focused weekly worksheet,

    right? So you have your task at hand. Number two, you set a timer and it could be a tomato timer in the kitchen or an egg timer I use. And this is one of the tools I was going to share with you. I use a sand timer. I have this old sand hour glass with this beautiful blue colored sand in it.

    And you can buy sand timers anywhere. You can buy them from local artists in your area. I love supporting local, like glassblowers and local artists in your town, or you can buy them off Amazon, you know, and you can buy them in different time increments. So Pomodoros usually start out in 25 minute increments. If you’re teaching this to your kids,

    or if you’re doing this for your first time, yourself started out at a smaller increment of time, like 25 minutes. When I first started doing Pomodoros, I only could do them for 25 minutes. Now my Pomodoros run 45 minutes, but typically set it for around 25 minutes to start. And during that 25 minutes of time, you’re going to work on that task.

    Okay. And you are a hundred, a hundred percent focused on that task. Don’t pick up your phone, you know, try not to even get up to go potty. I mean like that is your time you’re in there a hundred percent. And then when that timer goes off, when that timer ends, even when your work is not done, you have to get up and take a short break.

    Typical breaks on the normal Pomodoro routine are five to 10 minutes. So you’re technically taking a five to 10 minute break every 25 minutes. Okay. So you can run these. If you’re only taking a five minute break, then you can run two Tom Pomodoro cycles in a one hour period of time. If you have less than three Pomodoros, you know,

    in an hour, if you’re getting things done faster than you can group together, work to complete within a Pomodoro and try to run this cycle of Pomodoros at least three times in a row. So try to do Pomodoro cycle maybe in the morning before lunchtime, or maybe another one in the afternoon, after three cycles of Pomodoros, you need to get up and you need to take a bowl 20 to 30 minute break.

    So that’s how we run Pomodoros. It’s literally a time chunking and time blocking way to stay focused. But the only way it works is if you make yourself get up, when that timer goes off, regardless of whether or not your work is completed, otherwise subconsciously in your mind, if you just blow through that timer, you’re never going to be able to train your mind to stay focused because subconsciously your mind is thinking,

    yeah, she’s not really sticking with the timer and I’m going to be stuck here working on this a lot longer. So that’s why we use Pomodoros. And like I said, it’s a great technique for your teenagers as well. All right. And then the other tool I want to share with you is that Sam timer, or just a regular kitchen timer,

    believe me, it is so helpful to you. You can also set a timer on your phone, you know, but it’s just not quite as fun to me. I like looking at my sand timer and actually kind of makes me work faster. When I see this and stripping in there. Number three is the flora green focus app. First of all,

    there are tons of focus apps. There’s tons of apps you can download on your phone in order to stay focused and complete the task at hand. One of my problems is that I automatically pick up my phone and literally like my teenage boys. Okay. I’ll just automatically find myself just picking it up out of habit. It has become a habit that I’ll pick up my phone.

    So I either have to leave my phone in another room of the house, or I literally it’ll love these little apps where you can grow trees on your phone. So the flora green focus timer, I’ll put a link in the show notes. It’s a free app on apple and iOS device. And there’s other ones similar for Android. And it literally grows a garden.

    And the more that you don’t touch your phone, the more your garden grows. And there are also opportunities with this app to actually plant physical trees and to do a lot of give back, which I really love companies that do that. So grab something like that. If you need that, if you’re like me and you constantly are picking up your phone,

    don’t use your phone as your Pomodoro focus, timer, use something else like that and use a regular clock or set a timer on your kitchen stove. Or like we talked about use the sand timer or, or an electric timer of some kind. And then the last tool I wanted to share with you is a tool called brain FM. I have shared this tool before on the podcast.

    I absolutely love brain FM brain FM is an app that you can play on your phone, or you can play on your desktop computer. And it literally plays, focus, music, relaxing music, sleep music, and the rhythms and the beats within the music are scientifically proven to give the outcome based on what you chose. So when you’re doing creative flow work,

    you can literally play music that makes your brain creatively flow more based on tapping into brain FM. You can say, oh, this is a creative flow work time. Or this is a focused work time, or this is a steady time. And they have different types of sounds and rhythms and nature sounds and drums. And it’s absolutely fantastic. Everything from piano to guitar.

    It’s my favorite app in the whole entire world. You guys, I will tell you, and I use it all the time. I always have brain FM on. And so those are my tools I wanted to share with you just keeping it real here, sharing with you that I do as well, struggle with staying focused. And I think honestly, every one of us does.

    And so I wanted to share with you the hyper weekly worksheet, even though you can’t see it, it’s a part of the process that we roll up our sleeves with our clients every single week, and then share with you the process in order to complete that identify your most important task of the week and how to make sure that you have a plan to always overcome that.

    Then nothing’s ever going to catch you by surprise. And then I want to share with you those really practical tools that we use that our team uses. And some of them are silly and funny, but you know what? They totally work. And if something works, we’re going to dive into it and we’re going to share it with you because every single one of us needs to be able to have the leg up that you deserve in your business.

    It was really, really funny. I’ll I’ll end with this. I had the privilege of being able to spend about six hours last Saturday with Tony Robbins. And he was speaking live at funnel hacking live, and he was only supposed to speak for a shorter period of time, but he ended up staying with those of us in this room. And it was a really small space,

    especially for a Tony Robbins event. He ended up staying with us for almost double the time he was supposed to be there and really went off course of things. He usually teaches to the masses. It was a very special opportunity. And one of the things he said, I found very, very striking. He said, entrepreneurship is the most dangerous sport around because of the fact that if you don’t make it out,

    you die. And it was really like, wow, you are right. This is like do or die. Can you try it again? Can you get another life like a video game of your first, second, third, fourth business. Doesn’t make it. Yes, but it’s true. You either sink or swim and you can kind of doggy paddle through this in anything like a silly sand timer or an app on your phone that grows trees.

    It has little hot pink and Flores and green birdies. If that’s going to help you, you go with it because you deserve all the support in the world because you are doing something that almost nobody does. You’re building your dreams and you’re helping other people do the same and keeping you focused and keeping you moving forward is how we get that done. So thank you so much for tuning into the show.

    I love connecting with you again, apologies for my scratchy voice. Hopefully it will be back before we record the next episode you guys be awesome. And seriously, thank you for sharing the show with friends and connecting with us for so many years. Again, all the show notes can be found by visiting Sweetlife co.com. And this is episode number 246. All right.

    Talk to you soon. Bye-bye.

    Episode 239: Systems To Scale Your Online Coaching Business, Part 2 with April Beach and Rachel Cook

    Rachel Cook SweetLife Entrepreneur Podcast April Beach

    This episode is for those in Phase 1 – 2 – 3 – 4 – 5 of the Lifestyle Entrepreneur Roadmap™ Not sure what Phase your business is in?

     

    Episode Bonuses:

    Discover your business growth phase by taking the SweetLife Entrepreneur Self Assessment

    Who This Episode is Great For:

    This is for those of you who’ve nailed your first offers and you want to scale.

    Summary:

    Predictable systems are what makes the work flow. Systems to scale, systems to grow your team, systems to manage your marketing, client facing systems, and more… 
     
    This 2-part show with systems scaling queen Racheal Cook makes understanding how, why and when to create systems within your business, simple. There was so much business IQ delivered that we broke this show up into 2 parts, so be sure to tune in to both for the full effect in your profit. In detail we discuss, scaling versus growth, the 3 systems every business needs and why you don’t need to try to do everything to create a profitable online service or consulting practice.

    At the end of this episode you will:

    1. Learn the difference between growth and scaling
    2. Understand why the best sales start with subtraction
    3. Gain confidence that you really don’t have to be everywhere online to be profitable

    Resources Mentioned:

     
     
     
     

    SweetLife Podcast™ Love:

    Are you subscribed? If not, there’s a chance you could be missing out on some bonuses and extra show tools.  Click here to be sure you’re in the loop.  Do you love the show? If so, I’d love it if you left me a review on iTunes. This helps others find the show and get business help. I also call out reviews live on the show to share your business with the world. Simply click here and select “Ratings and Reviews” and “Write a Review”. Thank you so much ❤︎

    Need faster business growth?

    Schedule a complimentary business triage call here.

    Full Show Transcript:

    You’re listening to the Sweetlife entrepreneur podcast, simplified strategies to grow your service business and launch a life you love faster with business, mental and entrepreneur activator, April Beach. You guys welcome back to two of the systems that scale show here on the Sweetlife entrepreneurial business podcast, we have a very special guest Rachel Cook. And if you missed episode number 238, please just pause it here.

    You can come back to this right after you listened to episode number 238, because I want to make sure you don’t miss any foundational parts of what we’re talking about today. I want to make sure you leave with a whole entire clear business picture on the systems that you need to scale your business. Today’s guest is our returning expert. Racheal Cook. She’s an award-winning business strategist who believes entrepreneurship doesn’t have to be so complicated.

    And over the last decade, she’s helped thousands of women entrepreneurs designed predictably profitable businesses without the hustle and burnout. And Rachel’s work has been featured in places like fast company, us chamber of commerce and other resources online. And she is an Amazon, Amazon bestselling author of the fire and up and focused challenge in your business sweet spot. And when you tune into last week’s episode,

    you’ll hear that I have been a huge fan of Rachel Cokes for a very long time. So this is a very special treat for me personally, to be able to bring her on today’s show so that you can learn her amazing simplified strategies to scale your business. In today’s show, we’re going to talk about the importance of following systems and creating systems for your business,

    including marketing systems, sales systems, and customer-facing user experience systems for coaches, consultants and service-based online businesses. So if you are at the point where you are trying to scale, you’re struggling to scale and you know that the systems part of it is the missing piece. Then this is the episode that you need to be paying attention to of course, partnering with last week’s episode,

    number 238 and all of the show notes and everything we’re talking about today can be found by visiting sweet life co.com and simply click on the podcast as well as all the places where you can connect with Rachel tap into Rachel’s amazing challenges. The ones that initially connected me to her over eight years ago in so many other places where you can learn from Rachel directly.

    All right, so let’s go ahead and dive into today’s show. Now let’s jump to the next area of systems that companies need to have in place to scale. Yeah, we had talked, I the earlier about, you know, each time you add a new offer to your business, you have to make sure you have a marketing system, a sales system,

    and a customer experience or a delivery system for each offer. So you almost need to do an audit of your business and figure out what are the things that you’re doing in each of those that are working and what aren’t working. Because often I find that we’re doing things because we feel like we should do them or that’s because how everyone else does it or how the industry says to do it.

    But if we pop the hood and take a look under there, we realize, oh, maybe this actually doesn’t work that great for me. So thinking about marketing, I’m always thinking through the framework I mentioned before the marketing pieces attract, engage, nurture, so attract getting it in front of brand new people. Who’ve never heard about, you don’t know who you are,

    what you do, what your brand is about. Engage is getting those people to kind of raise their hand and go, oh, I’m interested in learning a little bit more. I want to connect with you and learn more about what you talk about, what you have to offer. And then nurture is actually building the relationship and helping them to build that know like,

    and trust so that they are like, oh yeah, April is the person I want to learn from. Or April’s the person who’s going to solve this problem for me. And then I’m ready to have a conversation about what the thing is that I’m buying from you. If you don’t have a clear idea of what your strategy for each one of those is going to be,

    it tends to be throw spaghetti at the wall marketing, right? And that is the biggest waste of time. And this is where I see so many people burning themselves out. They create these ideas of all the things they think they need to do all the places they think they need to be, but nothing works together and pulls people in a singular direction.

    So for example, in my business, my number one attract strategy is doing interviews on podcasts. See, And you guys are all gonna follow her after this and eat up everything she puts Out. So interviews on podcast is my number one strategy. How did I realize it was my number one strategy? I actually went back, looked at my last 10 or 25 or a hundred clients.

    I pay attention to where they came from. And if 80% are coming from podcast interviews, then I’m going to do more podcast interviews. And I intentionally designed systems around it. And when I was able to, I hired someone whose whole role in my business is to pitch me for podcast interviews, because we know that it drives results. So we’re putting a system in place we’re tracking it.

    We’re adjusting when we realized this one thing is working really well. Once I do a podcast interview, what happens? Well, I’ve already mentioned the fired up and focused challenge, which one is one of my best performing engaged pieces of content I’ve ever created. So it’s free value where people can come get into my ecosystem and learn more about me and how I operate once they do that.

    We’re nurturing them with our podcast, promote yourself, CEO. And every week they’re getting more content along the same types of topics as the fired up and focused challenge and what we’re talking about now. So it’s all very congruent. It’s keeping people on a similar learning path. So everything is mostly audio because we know if they like podcasts and they like podcast interviews,

    and we want to make it really congruent for people to access all the content that I’m sharing. It’s all designed to travel with them. And that system is just rinse and repeat for us rinse and repeat, rinse and repeat you. Won’t see me add much complexity to that. I might do experiments here and there. We’re going to drag you on clubhouse.

    Well, And that’ll be a fun experiment. Like I am. I’m always open for experiments. When I have the bandwidth to play around with them. I find that there are certain things I could take away from my business and it would not impact the bottom line. I could go silent on Instagram and it would not change the revenue I bring into my business.

    But if I go silent on my podcast, it will absolutely change the revenue I bring into my business. Right. So you have to know what actually works for you and be able to track so that you can make those smarter decisions. And it follows that 1, 1, 1 rule, like you just need one thing in each thing and make sure it makes sense for your people.

    So that’s kind of a marketing system is what is your attract strategy? Where are you sending them? How are you engaging with them? And then what’s your nurture strategy? How can you make sure that all of those things are very symbiotic. They’re all working together in this really easy to manage ecosystem. Now, as the CEO, it doesn’t mean you have to be doing all of those things a hundred percent by yourself.

    Your goal should be to have other people who are helping you deliver those things, because the most important thing for any business is consistent marketing. If you turn off the marketing, it’s like driving your gas tank down to empty, and then hoping you’re going to go somewhere. You’re just not. So if you’re starting to feel like you’re on a content hamster wheel and you’re exhausted and you feel like I don’t have time for this stuff,

    then you had to hire some help and have team to help you with that. So I have team that helps me with every part of that. Literally the biggest part of my role in all of it is to sit right here in this chair with this big microphone and talk, everybody else handles all the other moving parts of that. All I have to do is sit down and talk,

    which makes it sustainable. So if you can answer those three things, you will have a marketing strategy that becomes scalable. And if you’re willing to keep it simple and instead focus on the quality of what you’re putting out there, instead of the quantity of places you are on, you will see amazing results. Hmm. I love that. And I think that’s important for our listeners to hear as well,

    you know, especially with so much push to, to be everywhere and do all the things. And I really, it’s just so important in, in fundamentally proven and Just think about everybody points back to, we talked about Gary V and how he’s like be everywhere. Do all the things. If you follow him long enough, you’ll realize he has a team of about 15 to 20 people who all they do is follow him around all day,

    record everything coming out of his mouth and then repurpose that into tons of content. So he is not doing that on his own. He has a massive team that is producing at that volume. And his play is as an influencer. He has to be everywhere because that is his approach is widespread messaging. That’s not everybody’s approach. So if your approach is you have a very specific topic,

    a very specific niche, a very specific person you’re trying to talk to go deep. You don’t have to be shallow and playing on the surface level, trying to reach as many people as possible. You can go deep with a smaller group. Well, And I love that you said that too. And I think that this will resonate quite a bit with our audience as well.

    Is it? You said something. I think I wrote it down here, somewhere in my, in my notes, but you said that you’d rather be, you know, incredibly significant for a smaller group of people than superficial and barely making an impact to thousands and millions. And I think that that is really an important differentiator because it is a different business model.

    And I think that maybe even starting there, if you guys are listening to this and you’re like, oh, you know, which, which approach do I really take? Listen to what Rachel said and think about what aligns with what you want to do, your significance, your impact, and frankly, your, your business model in your, your life.

    I mean, listen to the show, you guys know me, we’re always talking about building, you know, really the life we build the business, you build life. Like, what do you, what do you really want? And so building a profitable business with a small audience is done all the time again and again and again and again. And so I think that that is maybe the first step as our listeners are thinking through what you said for you guys to think about,

    you know, how does this really fit into, you know, really what I want my big picture to be, who do I really want to be in this space? And how does that align with how I see myself in my significance? And so I really appreciate that. You said that. So we talked about scaling with teams. We talked about scaling with marketing.

    I really, your simple marketing three-step system is amazing. And then the third area that you were going to share with us today is scaling through your customer experience. Yeah, yeah. That I love this too, because I feel like no one talks about customer experience. Everybody is so focused on the brand new people coming in the front door that they forget about all their clients are losing out the back door.

    And the reality is most strong, successful, sustainable businesses. It’s not about the one-time sale. It’s about the repeating sale. It’s about the lifetime customer value. And these are things that I feel like no one talks about these days. But if you look at any traditional business model, which is the world I come from, they’re always looking at who is their customer and how are they getting those people to continue,

    right. Customers. So retaining them as customers getting repeat business from them, getting rave reviews from them, getting referrals from them and just having those people continuously engage with them. And if we change it, our perspective there, instead of putting all of our effort on the front end and into putting it behind the scenes and how we take care of our clients,

    it gets a customer for life versus a customer that’s one time. And I think this is a huge differentiator for a lot of people. If you think about the research shows that it’s seven times easier to keep an existing customer than to go out there and buy a new one. Well, we know right now that there’s more noise than ever before. Ad costs are going up.

    It’s harder to break through than ever before. Our industries are becoming more saturated. They’re becoming more sophisticated. Taking care of your people is one of the simplest things that will help you to stand out. And it does not mean that it needs to be complicated or it needs to be expensive. It just needs to be thoughtful. So a huge piece of this is actually thinking through the delivery of what you’re doing.

    And this is like the bare minimum, the delivery of your promise and your product program or service needs to be thoughtfully done and not just thrown together at the last minute. And I’ve seen this happen so many times, especially in this online world where people are so focused on how big the launch is that they forget that on the back end of those launches is upwards of a 10 to 20% default or refund rate.

    And the reason that is so high across the industry is because the customer experience is terrible because there’s no follow up with those clients because they buy something. And then it’s like, thanks for your purchase. And they never hear from that person again, there’s no personal attention given. So this is one thing where we want to scale deliverability in a way that brings back the human touch to business.

    And I think we’ve gone so far in the direction of automation that it’s been to our own detriment. Like the idea of everything should be evergreen. Everything should be automated. It’s left a whole lot of people right now who are saying things like, I don’t want to buy another course, right? I didn’t open this course. I didn’t complete this course.

    I didn’t get as much value as I thought I’d get out of this. But if we do a few things differently, they would have a different opinion and a few simple, simple things. You can do one, you can continue doing the automated things like you should have some sort of email delivery reminding people to go in and use the thing. They just bought coaching them through it,

    answering questions, highlighting cool things going on in the community that is like the bare minimum that is highly scalable. But then do the things that don’t scale because the things that don’t scale or the things that are memorable Heights, this is one huge thing. We forget that some of the most amazing businesses in the world will still pick out a few people to send amazing experiences to they’re still upgrade people’s experiences.

    And that’s how we end up with these customers for life. So one of the things that we do, I mean, these are just little things. One is we actually track our clients progress through our programs. And if we see in our coaching platform that we use that they’re getting stuck, or they’re not moving forward in their plan that we’re tracking with them.

    If they’re not responding, if they’re hiding, we proactively reach out and we’re like, Hey, what’s going on? Right? And half the time they’re surprised. They’re like, hold on. How’d you know, and it’s like, well, we can tell that you haven’t logged into anything. We haven’t seen you on any calls. And so we’re concerned,

    are you okay? How can we help? And to some people, that’s all they need. They just need that little nudge. And sometimes it opens up a whole like, oh, I’m stuck or I’m having a hard time and we can get them back on track and deliver the promise of our offer. But if we let them default into overwhelm or I don’t know what to do,

    then they’ll fall off. And there’s another customer who feels less than happy about the experience they had with us, as opposed to a customer. Who’s like, oh my gosh, they actually reached out and checked in on me. Right. It’s just bringing that human approach. Right. And, you know, and even small things like you were saying, writing like a handwritten card and dropping it in the mail.

    And we were talking about this. And one of our programs is where identifying where that places, where people can, whether it’s the hardest work in the program or the part that’s not fun and doing that phone call then. And, and I think that, so it’s really interesting. Again, there’s a certain need to have a, a higher level perspective on the evolution of online business to have this conversation about,

    you know, being in this space for a good deal of time. So I actually speak about this often on the show, but just for our listeners that haven’t heard that yet. There’s an evolution of like courses like the, we’re talking about where we used to do these like huge courses and set it and forget it. And evergreen, huge launches and people ate him up and he was amazing.

    And then like 2015 came along, 17 came along and now we’re to the point where only 6% of people are completing online courses. And I love what you said, it’s doing the things that don’t scale. It’s doing the things that actually matter. Like, okay, if I’m a teacher and I’m actually trying to teach people and not just sell them into my big launch,

    what do they really need from me? And I love that you share that you guys do that because you, that those are the things that separate the oil from the water. When we’re talking about businesses that really, really delivering a transformation to their clients and their students. Yeah. And this is important if you’re delivering a transformation, you just have to know that the industry has shifted away from the automation,

    the evergreen, I know that’s what everybody’s selling right now because they made their money on it five years ago. But right now, what is getting those clients stick around. And like, we had a 90% renewal rate of our program this past year, 90% of the people who took it last year, renewed again this year. Okay. And you guys,

    Rachel has a year-long CEO program. We’re going to make sure you know about, so this isn’t like joining us for, these are people that have worked with her for a year. 90% of them are like, I want to stay with you. They want to continue. And they’re either continuing in the same program or they’re upleveling to work with my team in a higher level one-on-one way.

    And when you start looking at it from that different lens, it’s like, does it make sense for us to send a handwritten note? Yeah. Does it make sense for us to say, Hey, do you want to come to Richmond for just a small peer mastermind day? Here’s some people who live in the area, let’s just send them a quick invite.

    Heck yet, does, does it make sense that we ship out books and print planners and all these things that five years ago, people thought I was crazy when I was mailing out little bundles to my clients. And I’m like, but you don’t understand. These are the tools that I think will help them and they get it. And they’re like, it feels like Christmas because no one gets that stuff.

    So it’s not about sending a gift. That’s just like a fun thing. It’s about how can you make this experience thoughtful? How can you show people that you’re really committed to the result that you’ve promised them? Does it mean that if you see somebody struggling, you offer to jump on a quick 15 minute call. Yeah. I mean, this past year we have gone through new babies.

    We have gone through miscarriages. We have gone through divorces. We’ve gone through weddings. We have gone through movies across the country. We’ve gone through spouses, losing jobs. We went through the global pandemic. We went through a crazy election cycle. We went through all sorts of things. And at the end of the day, it’s the commitment to saying,

    you know what? As a team, it doesn’t take us a ton of extra time each week to sit down and go, Hey, who could use a little extra love and check in with our team of mentors, check in with who’s running our communities and say, who could use a little extra something from us? Do they need a little email? I’ll send video emails out to people.

    Do they need a little extra love? Do they need a reminder? Hey, we’re here for you. Those are the things that stand out compared to just feeling like another number on a list that paid, you know, a couple of thousand dollars for a program. And that program designer, celebrity, entrepreneur doesn’t know who you are, right? It’s a whole different experience.

    Does that mean every business needs to be as high touch in their approach as I am at this point, no, you don’t have to be at all. You can definitely scale up lower price point things and have a more hands-off delivery of it. But I think this is where you have to know your purpose and the work that you’re doing in the world and how you want to do it.

    There’s no right or wrong. I’m just giving a different perspective of, I would rather work in a really meaningful way. Go really deep with people have clients who work with me for a few years at a time. And then they come around and tell me the things they’ve been able to do. You know, like my husband quit his job and is working with me full time.

    I was able to take two months off this summer and the business kept making money. I was able to hire people in my team to deliver my course. And all I have to do is show up a couple times a month. Like those types of things are really exciting to me because it does give them back the freedom and the life that they really want.

    And I love how you design businesses. And that’s why I’ve followed you for so many years. All of these really, I don’t want to say common sense because they, they aren’t common unless you’ve gone through the process of seeing what else is out there. But fundamentally we’re teachers, we’re, we’re coaches, you know, we’re we’re teachers. And especially if we just compare it to like how our kids,

    third grade teachers are to them, you know, they’re doing these things are trying to figure out all the ways like to make them laugh and make them happy and make them, you know, do all these things. And granted it’s totally different situation, but as teachers and as people that people pay us money and they trust us to help them. Yeah.

    I love the way you engineer your programs. And I love the way that you explained that customer experience. So we talked about a lot, totally to break this episode up into two episodes. This might be a, two-parter Going to be a two-parter. You guys are recording it Now, not a plan, but this will be a two-parter if you know,

    I think that what is so important, what I want people to take away. In addition to all the things you should see, all the Rachel Cook quotes. I have that written down on this paper. You guys, you’re a scale is about adding and it’s not, no scale is not about adding it’s about subtracting. I can’t even read my own writing.

    What comes easiest to you is most often your greatest asset. I mean that you are gold. You’re like just gold or gold. I have like five quotes in my chicken, scratch written here on my paper. You know what I want you guys, listeners, you know, every, every show we want to give you proven processes, trainings, tactics,

    and strategies that you guys can take to the bank, but it doesn’t mean you should take every one of them, right? We have shows and all these different topics, but why I’m so excited to have Rachel here is because of the fact that if you are designing a, like, Rachel does, like I do, you know, family, how frequently we work,

    how often we work, the capacity in which we work simple is always better. And it doesn’t mean that it’s the right way for everybody, but it is very, very profitable. And it’s very tempting to make things really complex. It’s really tempting to make things complex. So I really want you guys just to like, take a deep breath as you’re listening to these now,

    two shows and put them on repeat, make sure you’re following Rachel. And the first and the first episode, I, you know, we, we sent you to go do the fire up and focus challenge. So hopefully you did that. If you’re listening to part two of this, go back and listen to part one, take a deep breath and just,

    and just be like, this is doable. This is smart business. This is taking what you were saying, traditional business and applying it to the online landscape, which not very many people do. Looking at those metrics, referrals in, you know, lifetime customer value, things that are very important to look at that again are oftentimes missed and not discussed in the shiny world of the online coaching space.

    Go back and listen to this episode of repeat, just absorb. And then we really want you guys to reflect in what aspects of what Rachel talked about today, that you could be implementing into your business because it’s not about adding it’s about taking away in the simplification in order to scale in getting away from the grind, the more, and really coming back to the key factors that are going to increase profit and decrease time and capacity is such an important,

    there’s so many lessons in gold that, that you share today. Rachel. And so I appreciate you being here so much. We’ve talked about a lot. Thank you so much. Thank you for coming. You know, tell everybody, you know, in the end of this episode, day time that we’re spending together, what do you think that you know about yourself as a leader,

    through this process of what you’ve done? What do you, what do you feel like that you really love of how you grown as a CEO in this space over, you know, over how long have you been in business over a decade? For sure. Right. I mean, Yeah. I think I started my business in April of 2008. So it’s been awhile.

    It’s been awhile. I would say, you know, the biggest thing I’ve come to love about myself as a leader is that I’m continuously willing to be uncomfortable. I think as a leader, you have to be willing to get uncomfortable and to be able to sit in discomfort, which does not make leadership sound too appealing. But what happens when you’re willing to sit in the discomfort,

    when you’re willing to sit in the discomfort of coming up against your own inner critic, coming up against your own imposter syndrome, coming up against your own resistance, being willing to look at the different sides of yourself that maybe you really don’t want to look at. That’s where the leadership growth has been for me has been when I’m willing to sit in that discomfort and lean into it and push myself through it.

    Because often for me, the leadership parts that have been the hardest have been the one about the parts about surrender and letting go of control and getting out of the way and trusting that I am hiring amazing, amazing, smart, brilliant women who also have a gift. And who also have things that they’re here to leave the world with. And I’m providing them an amazing opportunity to make an impact within the scope of this container called my business.

    And if I’m just willing to continue leading into my own discomfort and stop trying to control the heck out of everything and let other people do great work, too, we’re going to do amazing things together and it’s going to be incredible, but I can only do that if I’m willing to push myself out of my own comfort zone. And right now that comfort zone is learning how to rest.

    It’s tracking my sleep. It’s taking intentional time off and not feeling like the urge to jump in and start a new, a new thing because what I really need right now is rest. And I really need time off. And sometimes as an entrepreneur and as a leader, it’s hard to really fiercely protect that thinking time, that recovery time, but it’s so true.

    The more higher up you get in your career and your journey as a leader, the more you need to protect that so that you can come back to your team and really give them everything you’ve got. Everybody’s just kind of gone nodding their head listening. Yep, yep. Exactly. Free to aware. Can besides we said it in what will now be the first part of this episode?

    I really highly encourage all of our listeners to follow you. I, like I said, I’ve done it for years. I have my team follow your stuff. You’re very, very smart. And the way you teach is very understandable. And so I appreciate you consistently showing that you have consistently shown up. And that says a lot, that says a lot.

    So, so we appreciate that. Where can people find you The best place to find me is going to be on my podcast, promote yourself to CEO. We have an episode going out every week, all about how to scale a sustainable business without the hustle and burnout. So I’d love to see you over there. And of course, we talked about the fired up and focused challenge.

    You can get the full 10 days@firedupandfocused.com it’s available on demand and absolutely gratis. So go dive in. Yeah. Awesome. Thank you so much for all your time and, and making this a two-parter cause there was so many things. I just, anytime you, anytime you’re talking, I’m like writing it down. If I know our listeners so much appreciated getting to know you,

    if they don’t know you already as well. And so all of the show notes will be available for you guys@sweetlifeco.com, click on the podcast. We’ll have everything there, all the resources that Rachel said and how you guys can continue to follow her as well. Thank you. Thank you very, very much. I really appreciate finally getting to meet you face to face after all that you have poured into our company from your knowledge and wisdom over the years.

    Well, thank you so very much for having me. It was such a pleasure. Okay. Thank you so much for sticking with us. That was amazing. Rachel is one of my favorite people and now you know why, again, don’t hesitate to follow Rachel, reach out to her and connect with her. And of course, Rachel and I are also connecting on clubhouse live in all the places that you can find her and tap into the solution she provides can be found by visiting Sweetlife co.com,

    simply click on the podcast. And thank you so much for listening to this show. It’s because of you guys that we’ve been named the top 50 moms in podcasting, and this show is going on our fifth year. Really, really appreciate you guys and appreciate you sharing the show with your friends. Have an awesome day and I’ll talk to you next week.

    Episode 238: Systems To Scale Your Online Coaching Business, Part 1 with April Beach and Racheal Cook

    Rachel Cook SweetLife Entrepreneur Podcast April Beach

    This episode is for those in Phase 1 – 2 – 3 – 4 – 5 of the Lifestyle Entrepreneur Roadmap™ Not sure what Phase your business is in?

     

    Episode Bonuses:

    Discover your business growth phase by taking the SweetLife Entrepreneur Self Assessment

    Who This Episode is Great For:

    This is for those of you who’ve nailed your first offers and you want to scale.

    Summary:

    Predictable systems are what makes the work flow. Systems to scale, systems to grow your team, systems to manage your marketing, client facing systems, and more… 
     
    This 2-part show with systems scaling queen Racheal Cook makes understanding how, why and when to create systems within your business, simple. There was so much business IQ delivered that we broke this show up into 2 parts, so be sure to tune in to both for the full effect in your profit. In detail we discuss, scaling versus growth, the 3 systems every business needs and why you don’t need to try to do everything to create a profitable online service or consulting practice.

    At the end of this episode you will:

    1. Learn the difference between growth and scaling
    2. Understand why the best sales start with subtraction
    3. Gain confidence that you really don’t have to be everywhere online to be profitable

    Resources Mentioned:

     
     
     
     

    SweetLife Podcast™ Love:

    Are you subscribed? If not, there’s a chance you could be missing out on some bonuses and extra show tools.  Click here to be sure you’re in the loop.  Do you love the show? If so, I’d love it if you left me a review on iTunes. This helps others find the show and get business help. I also call out reviews live on the show to share your business with the world. Simply click here and select “Ratings and Reviews” and “Write a Review”. Thank you so much ❤︎

    Need faster business growth?

    Schedule a complimentary business triage call here.

    Full Show Transcript:

    You’re listening to the Sweetlife entrepreneur podcast, simplified strategies to grow your service business and launch a life you love faster with business mental and entrepreneur activator a probate Back to the show and welcome to a very special two-part episode here on the Sweetlife entrepreneur and business podcast, episodes, number 2 38 and 2 39 coming straight at you. As a matter of fact, these episodes are so good.

    I didn’t actually set out to take the value today’s guests offers and break it up into two shows, but it was so great. There was so much information and I want to make sure you have an opportunity to absorb and implement it, that we did break it into two shows for you. So welcome. If you are a new listener here, I’m April beach,

    founder of the Sweetlife company host here of the Sweetlife entrepreneurial podcast and everything we do is to help entrepreneurs design, launch and scale their business online since 2006. And we are so glad that you are here in tuning into today’s show. Today’s guest is somebody, let me be really honest that I have totally fan girl over four years. And if you know me,

    I don’t fan girl often like ever actually it takes a lot to impress me, but I totally fell hard for this one woman because of her scaling systems. When I first found her back in 2013, and I have followed learned from it admired her ever since this is Rachel Cook MBA. If you do not know her, I am super excited to be the one to be able to introduce you to her.

    She is literally a systems genius and all the way back in 2013, 14, her lead magnet guys lead magnet, it was called fired up and focused was so good that I put my entire team through her lead magnet. So let me give you a formal introduction into who Rachel is. She’s an award-winning business strategists who believes entrepreneurship doesn’t have to be so complicated over the last decade.

    She’s helped thousands of women, entrepreneurs, design, predictably, profitable businesses without the hustle in burnout. She’s the author of Amazon bestselling books fired up and focused and your business sweet spot and hosts a weekly podcast promote yourself to CEO. She’s a sought after speaker on entrepreneurship, marketing productivity, productivity. Look, I can’t even flow through that word because Rachel is so amazing.

    She’s just going to make everything so much more productive on this show. And her work has been featured by the us chamber of commerce Ford’s coaches, council, fast company, and more, and we are going to dive right into today’s because I want to give you an opportunity to truly focus in on what we’re talking about, implemented in your business and walk away on the other side,

    changed and transformed by what you applied from, what you learned today. At the end of this episode, you’re going to learn the difference between growth and scaling. You’re going to understand why the best sales starts with subtraction little puzzle there. You’re totally going to understand what I’m talking about at the end of the show. And you’re going to gain confidence that you really don’t have to be everywhere,

    online to be profitable. So all of the show notes can be found by visiting Sweetlife co.com. And let’s go ahead and dive in to episode number 238. All right, you guys, I am super excited to be joined by this very, very special guest. And you need to know a little bit about why this woman is so special to me. First of all,

    maybe eight years later, she never knew how special she was to me and how powerful she was to our business Intel. Like right now, this is the one person I can say that I have probably fan girl over for almost a decade in this space. And so here’s a story why, okay? She said here, I’m telling embarrassing her behind the scenes,

    but here’s the story why you guys know I’ve been in all my business for a very long time, since 2006, but inherently, I am not somebody that thrives by creating systems. And so 2013 was coming around and although we had our online offers, we didn’t have the systems in place that we really needed to scale. And I came across this amazing woman who’s here today and literally her lead magnet back in 2013 was so amazing.

    I put my entire team through it and it completely got our business organized and in place. So that’s the intro. This is literally very surreal for me to be here with this woman that I have found, because what she teaches has literally changed our business. And I know it will change your suit. Welcome to this. And we live podcast, Rachel Cook.

    I’m so glad that you, Oh my gosh, April. I think I need that little intro to just come with me for every interview and every talk that I give from now on. Thank you for having me. This is going to be a fun conversation. You are amazing. Okay. So tell everybody let’s like take it back. Was it 2013?

    Is that how long ago was, yeah, It was end of 2013, beginning of 2014 when I created the fired up and focused challenge. And it’s still around today. Yeah. Everybody, what that was and the situation, the circumstances in which you created it, because that’s what makes it even more bad-ass than it already is. Oh gosh. So the circumstances for me creating the fired up and focused challenge is I was at that point,

    it was actually going into new year’s 2014. And I had already planned this very fancy online marketing launch for my, at the time signature course, I had hired a videographer. We had done the three-part video series. I had a makeup artist, I got my hair done, all the things. And about a week before I was set to release that very professional,

    fancy looking launch, I was just getting this feeling like this. Isn’t what I want to talk about. I don’t think this is as relevant to my community right now. So I sent out an email. It was like that quiet week between Christmas and new year’s. And I was like, Hey, I’m just curious as I’m creating content for the new year,

    what is your biggest challenge when it comes to getting things done in your business? And I sent that little quick email out. I said, just hit reply. I did not realize that within a day I would have hundreds of replies. And I went through all of the responses and just saw that there were these themes coming up. And what I realized was,

    you know what? Entrepreneurs have no shortage of great ideas. We have no shortage of creativity. What we tend to have a shortage of though is follow through is the sticktuitiveness to actually implement those big ideas and to get to the other side so that we can see these goals become reality. And that’s when I decided I was going to create the fired up and focus challenge,

    because I realized where a lot of people were getting stuck wasn’t that they didn’t understand the opportunities in front of them or ideas for how they wanted to grow their business. They were simply running out of time and didn’t know how to manage your time and didn’t know how to structure their schedule. They didn’t know how to structure their team. They didn’t know how to structure much in their business.

    And unfortunately, when you hand a bunch of creative people, no structure, not much gets accomplished of really good at starting things, not so good at finishing them. So we created the fired up and focused challenge. I remember my son who was born earlier that year was a baby, which means I was up probably to one or two every morning. I was only a couple of days ahead of recording the challenge and releasing it at the time.

    It was 28 days. It’s now 10, but it became such a huge pivotal piece of work that I’ve created because it was a moment for me where I realized things that I had learned and had intuitively or, you know, implemented in my life and my business that I took for granted for how I was approaching my work and how I was approaching my business.

    Other people didn’t know those. And I think it comes back to what comes easiest to you is often your best asset, because it comes easy to you because you have mastered it. You have a level of mastery over it. And that is something a lot of times other people want and need is someone who has that level of mastery to show them how,

    or to help them do things at that level. So, yeah, so we created this challenge. It skyrocketed my business. It totally took me on a different path because up until that point, I hadn’t really been talking as much about systems and productivity and the operations and internal structure of businesses. I had been talking a lot more about just marketing and sales and I realized that marketing and sales is what draws often a lot of people in,

    because let’s face it. It’s very sexy to talk about marketing and sales, but when you have the operations in place, that’s when you actually have a scalable, sustainable business. Right. And that’s a perfect flow into what we’re going to talk about today. And really that challenge. I went through all 28 days, all of my team went through the 28 days,

    like I said, and we ate up every single bit of it. And it was amazing. And that’s exactly what we needed at that point of time as a company. Yes, we had, you know, we had the marketing down, we have the offers down, but there’s this middle place. And I can’t wait to talk about it today where,

    you know, everybody says, they want to scale. Scale is sexy, right. You know, scale is what we do. But, you know, without these things in place, it’s going to be a bottleneck for your business. And oftentimes companies fail. And like the word that you use behind the scenes that we were recording was like, they implode on themselves.

    So now this is something I’m so glad that you’re here on the show, because I don’t think that you’re saying that yeah, the marketing brings people in the marketing and the sales is what everybody wants to talk about, but what really people struggle with or the systems, the actual systems to scale. So first of all, did you ever watch that thing?

    I don’t even remember. I just was so into the fired up and focused challenge, what did you do with your, did you still want your signature program? Yeah, it was actually our best lunch ever. It was my first six-figure launch after that very first time running the challenge. But you know, it’s interesting is fast-forward I turned that challenge into a book,

    into a podcast and two signature talks it’s turned into multiple other things. The challenge continues to be one of my biggest assets and I give it away pretty freely just because I know it’s so valuable to people. Yeah. Let’s tell everybody where they can find that before we move on because listen, you guys seriously. It is absolutely amazing. Amazing. It really is.

    It’s very clear, very precise, very like pinpointed to what people need to do. So how can they Find that fired up and focused.com? You can go there and get access to the full 10 day version of the challenge and it’s available on demand. So you can go get that at any time. You guys totally go get that, especially for those of you,

    for our listeners. If you’re in phase one or two of our business growth system, if you’re a listener to, you know, our different phases. So it’s really planning really the launch or you’re in that launch phase, moving on to scale, you guys need this. So I think that’s a great asset and resource. Okay. So we have a problem.

    We globally here, you know, we have a problem. The problem is systems systems to scale systems to grow the teams systems, to manage the marketing, all of the systems that really make a well-oiled machine, whether you know, our listeners have just themselves on their team or they have a team of eight or they have a team of 80 systems are still necessary.

    So what do you feel like right now? And we’re going to dive into your most important systems to scale here. What are you seeing? It’s 20, 21. There’s a lot more online businesses now than there were, you know, back in 2013, what are you seeing now are like the biggest bottlenecks that your students are experiencing when it comes to growing their business?

    Yeah. Well, one thing when it comes to systems at scale is remembering that scale does not equal growth. They’re not words that you can just transpose and think they mean the same thing in business growth can happen where it takes just as much effort to achieve each level of growth. So you can bring in more revenue in your business by just working harder,

    putting in more hours, bringing in more and more team scale comes from economy of scale, where you’re actually having less resources produce higher results. So that’s where you’re getting to the point where the growth is more exponential with less resources, less time, less energy, less money, less team going into achieving that higher level of revenue. And I think that’s a really important discernment because oftentimes I find people think that scaling their business just means working harder,

    just means throwing more at it. And those two things couldn’t be further from the truth. It’s not about working harder. In fact, if you start talking to CEOs of businesses that are making multiple 6, 7, 8 figures, you will find that they get to the point where they prioritize their thinking time, just as much as they prioritize time that they’re in their office,

    because they know how important that time away is in order for them to show up and lead and be creative and be strategic. So it’s not about more time and energy and efforting. That’s not what scale is about. It’s also not about just throwing more at it. Scale is not about adding it’s about subtracting scale is about taking away all the excess. And this is something that I think when we’re in earlier stages of business,

    we have to try out a lot of things to find out what works. Because with each thing that we’re offering, we have to have a marketing system, a sales system, and a customer delivery and experience system in place. So for each offer, you have, it doesn’t matter if it’s working one-on-one or having an online course or having a product, you have to market it,

    sell it and then deliver it. So when you add more and more and more offers, which is often what happens for a lot of people, they they’re like, oh, I have an idea for another program. I’ll have another thing for this next thing. And what happens is each time they’re adding a new thing, they’re not adding one thing, they’re adding three.

    So they’re adding layers of complexity. And when you add layers of complexity to your business, it makes it harder for it to run efficiently. It makes it harder for you to reach economies of scale in any area. And it also makes it harder for your team because your team never knows what’s the priority. What are we focused on? Where should my time and energy be?

    What is the goal right now? Because there’s too many things going on behind the scenes in the business, cause it’s too complex. So if you want to scale, if you want economies of scale, the key really is to do less, to hone in and look at your metrics, look at your numbers, figure out what’s actually working and double down on what works and strip away anything that is extraneous to that we don’t need to just keep adding more and more and more.

    So I often see this happening in, like, let’s say in marketing, there’s always something new happening in the world of marketing, right? And so what you’ll start to see is people who, and this is one that’s easy to see what’s happening just because it’s very obvious when people are trying out lots of things, right? We see them suddenly. They’re not only on Facebook and Instagram and LinkedIn,

    but now they’re on Tik TOK and they’re on clubhouse and they’re doing all of these other channels. And if you try to do too many things and spread yourself too thin, it is very, very difficult to do any of them. Well. But what if you find one that you started as just an experiment like April, you found clubhouse is working really well for your business.

    Well, if clubhouse is working great, but you’re getting nothing really off of Instagram and Facebook. Yeah. Then the scalable approach would be okay. The channel that works best for us is live audio. So I’m going to strip away anything that is not aligned with live audio. And I’m going to take that time and energy and resources and apply it towards the marketing channel that is working for us instead of saying,

    oh, clubhouse is working, let’s go do Tik TOK and this and that. You know, I really, I love that you said that because one of the things that is really being spoken about so much as Omni presence of needing to be everywhere and all the channels, and it’s this old, you know, Gary V approach to crushing it. And it’s really,

    really tempting. And it does make entrepreneurs and small business owners feel like they need to be everywhere and they need to be doing everything. And so I just think that this is, so this is so fundamental to building profitable companies. And I love that. I love that you’re sharing this. I also love that you showed the difference between growth and scaling.

    We talked about that a couple of weeks ago on the podcast and actually did a clubhouse room on this. Nobody I asked when I started the room, like, do you understand the difference between growth and scaling? Not one person could define that. And so it was really interesting. So when we’re in clubhouse together talking about this episode, we should talk about that because it’s,

    it’s really, really important in that. Have you heard of the rule Of ones? The rule of ones? Yeah. So I, I didn’t come up with this. I, I heard this Program, one client, one marketing tool, one sales strategy. Yeah. That’s pretty much the approach I take is I have one core, one core strategy for each area of my business.

    And I use a framework that I teach a lot, which aligns your marketing and sales with the customer journey, where we have one attract strategy, one engaged strategy, one nurture strategy, one invite strategy, and one delight strategy. And once we, once we figure out what our primary one in each of those are, I just doubled down on those and try to avoid anything that is taking too much effort away from each of those.

    Yeah. The rule of one, I haven’t heard it that way in a long time. Yeah. All that. It’s super old and that’s why it’s like old is good, but you know, and yeah. I was wondering that. Yeah. And so, and I think, I mean, we’re not old, but when, I guess when we think about online business,

    we’ve been an online business for like we’re old on my business. People we’ve been online business for a long time. And so yeah, as you were saying that, I was like, oh yeah, this is like that rule of lens. This is really great. And it’s so smart. So when we’re talking about scaling and we’re really talking about these systems and thank you so much for sharing your method,

    if you guys should pause this episode, rewind it 20 seconds. And listen to Rachel’s method. I have her like five or six steps of whatever that was. I was genius. Let’s talk about these scaling team, scaling, marketing, you know, scaling client experience. Let’s jam on each one of those a little bit. Can you dive in and help our listeners understand when we’re talking about scaling with teams?

    What does that mean? And where can they start in this process of doing this and what are the problems I’ve shared this before on the show? My greatest weakness is delegation. I have been a terrible person to work for for years, and I have amazing people that work for me. Not because I don’t honor a value them, but because I don’t stop and think about what I’m doing to best communicate and to empower them.

    And about seven years ago, I had an amazing woman working for me who loved me enough to say, Hey, listen, I don’t want to quit. Cause I love you. But you know, you’re not good at this. You’re a terrible boss. And I knew it. I knew it, but I didn’t know. I guess it was more than seven years ago.

    Cause it was before I found the fired up. It was like 2010, 2011. And so I say this to say that I think are a lot of leaders like me who struggle in this area. At least I’m conscious about it now. And I work really, really hard at that, but it does not something that comes naturally To me. It is not something that comes naturally.

    And I think, again, as entrepreneurs, we have a lot of those double edged sword parts to our personality and our kind of mindset. It’s like, we’re really great at what we do because of this. But it’s also the thing that holds us back. So being raised by entrepreneurs as I was, I had a built-in mentor in my dad and he told me the most important lessons in leadership that I could’ve ever learned.

    And he said, your job as a business owner is to fire yourself from every job in the company. It’s to fire yourself as quickly as you can. And some people are like, well, what do you mean if I fire myself, then what am I doing? You’re being the CEO and the business owner. You’re not being the marketing director and the project manager and the assistant and the bookkeeper.

    You’re not doing all those things, but this is really hard for entrepreneurs to embrace because especially for those of us who are building our businesses from the ground up, our businesses are built on our experience and expertise and our intellectual property, our passion, the thing we care about the most, it can be so hard for us to pull ourselves out of our business.

    And when we are really bad at it, what tends to happen is we get in everyone’s way, every person who we try to hire on the team, we end up getting in their way. And that’s where they’re emailing you finally and being like, can you just get the hell out of the inbox? Because I am trying to do my job here.

    And can you just let me do my job, right? So you have to learn how to fire yourself. And this is one of the most important lessons when it comes to scaling your business is every time you bring someone new into your business, it is changing your job description as the CEO, because you’re no longer the CEO and whatever their role is that you just brought in.

    You’re eliminating again, you’re taking things off, you’re taking things off your plate. So one of the exercises I always have people do that are working with me inside of the CEO. Collective is whenever they’re bringing new people into their business, I make them rewrite their job description as CEO. Now this is an exercise that most people have never done because we go out there and rewrite job descriptions for everybody that we’re bringing on the team.

    But we never sit down and say, what is my role as the CEO of this company? What are the most important things for me to be focused on? And each person is going to be a little bit different because we all have our own different strengths as the CEO of our business, right? We all have something a little bit different to bring to the table,

    but you have to get really clear on what your role as CEO is. And when you hire people in, you have to reevaluate, okay, what is most important? So for me and the CEO of my business, my top three tasks that drive results, that I only allow myself to focus on content. So my business is built around my intellectual property.

    So I’m either creating content free or paid my clients really diving in and understanding who they are, what their needs are, what their challenges are, having a deep understanding and connection to my clients. And then connection, connection drives my business. I am not here to be an influencer and make a small impact in lots of people’s lives. I’m here to be someone who makes a big impact in fewer people’s lives.

    So I know that that connection is what drives my business. And so each time I bring somebody on my team, I’m like, okay, those tests are off my plate. What do I need to stay focused on? Is it related to these three things? If it’s not related to these three things, then it should not be where I’m spending my time and my energy.

    And that has prevented me from doing things like getting into the inbox or making graphics in Canva or editing podcasts or, you know, any of those things that we start to do when we are like itchy to get our hands back in the day-to-day of our business, you’ve got to get used to pulling yourself out of it. And a huge part of that when it comes to bringing on your team is just knowing that you have to be constantly firing yourself.

    And re-evaluating your role. And even as you reevaluate your role, you will have to be constantly asking yourself, what is my zone of genius versus my zone of excellence? Because for a lot of us, we’ve had to get really good at lots of things, but it doesn’t mean it’s what we’re best at. Like I can put together a really great slide deck.

    Is it what I am best at? No. Is that the highest and best use of my time? Absolutely not. If I am bored and I don’t know what else to do with myself, will I sit down and start getting into Canva? Absolutely. That’s my favorite way to procrastinate doing the real work that I’m supposed to be doing is to be getting into Canva And say,

    Canva black hole mine. It is, It totally is. But if I talk to my team, they’re like, well, why did you do that? Why didn’t you record something new? Why didn’t you go take some time off so that you can have that thinking space. We know that you need, why didn’t you write the first chapter of the book that you’ve been putting off for six months,

    because the canvas is easy and right there, and I’m pretty good at it. That’s why. So we have to be aware of that and really get into, as you’re growing your business, you’re pushing up against your growth edge as a CEO in your own leadership. And it is uncomfortable and it’s not always easy to sit down and do the higher level things that we know will move our business forward.

    Like sitting down and writing my book is more likely to move my business forward, then making another slide deck in Canva. But I’m more comfortable making the slide deck in canvas than I am sitting down and figuring out what do I want to say right now? Right? And when you do say it, I want to be on that team. So make sure whatever,

    whatever you put out there, I’m waiting. And I think that’s important to know too. So let’s talk about it from my perspective, everything you said is so, and you guys now know why leverage heal so much, right? And like, yes, that is exactly what is happening in my mind right now. I’m thinking the exact same thing. I do the exact same thing,

    but then they put me on perspective as somebody who’s learned from you, I need your content. And I think that, that is like sometimes I think that helps me as a CEO to think like, I’m the only one that can do this. Right. And I know that there’s somebody out there that literally needs to hear what I’m going to say, whether your books about whatever,

    raising kids or systems or whatever you write about, I don’t care because I’m going to read it because I, I appreciate everything that you say and I resonate with it. And so I think that that has been a driver for me to push through that. And I feel that there is, it’s almost like walking up a river, like upstream, like your thigh deep,

    and you’re walking up upstream and you really want to just go to the side and sit on a rock and work on canvas because it’s fun. But instead you need to get back out in the middle of that river and walk upstream in think like my husband always says, she’s like the hardest work that we do as entrepreneurs is, is that thinking it is for sure.

    Absolutely. And so I, I appreciate everything that you just said. And because I, I literally, that is me you’re is resonating and with our listeners too. I know. So this team aspect of it, where we’re talking about scaling with teams, let me ask you, how is it, how many people do you have on your team if you’re willing to share that?

    I think we’ve got about 15 right now. Okay. Yeah. I mean, we have seven, eight now and I mean, I honestly, it’s like a shared, like, that’s hard for me to help each one of them, Brad, just because of who I am as a leader. How do you pick people for your team? Like how do you know they’re the right people?

    I know we could do a whole, I think I just did an episode with this on it and somebody else, but I love asking these questions because I think it’s very important when we talk about scaling. I know that the selection of team members is a bottleneck for leaders. How do you navigate That? It is because you have to be able to not just outsource and delegate,

    you have to be able to give ownership and that’s a whole different level. And this is one of things. It does prevent a lot of people from scaling because they will hire someone to delegate the marketing or to delegate the launch process or to delegate all the onboarding their new clients. But they always end up in a bottleneck because if all you’re doing is delegating,

    it means those people are going to be coming back to you to ask questions and for decisions to be made. And if you are the only person in your organization that has clarity about where the business is going, that understands the values that you have and your purpose, and that understands your kind of internal framework for making decisions. Then you will always be the bottleneck because you will always have people coming back to you to ask a thousand things.

    They will always need things from you. So building a self managing team is like a whole nother level. Another show about that. I mean, it is, it’s a whole nother thing, but for me, when it comes time to hiring people, I mean, I have people on my team. Who’ve been with me for over 10 years now and they’ve grown with me.

    And the biggest reason why I think I’ve had so many people, I mean, I hear all the time people saying, I can’t find a great assistant. I can’t find a great project manager. I can’t find this. I can’t find that. And they’re like churning through people. And I’m like, do you have clarity on what your purpose is and your business and who you’re really trying to help and how you really want to show up and what your business stands for.

    Because if you don’t have clarity on any of those things, it doesn’t matter who you try to bring in. Because at the end of the day, you can train anybody to do just about anything from a tactical practical perspective, but you can’t train people to care about your business or about your clients or about why at any of it matters. So when it comes to hiring great people for your team,

    it takes time and you just have to know, it’s just like dating the first person you’d go out on a date with might not be the love of your life. You might have to kiss a few frogs and eventually you find the right person. And maybe sometimes you end up with somebody who’s great for a while, but then you kind of grow apart and you need to go find somebody else.

    Like it’s a relationship. So like any other relationship you have to spend time having clarity about who you are showing up as and who the ideal person is. Who’s going to be that good compliment for you in the role that you’re looking for and take your time and finding that person, just know that it’s, it might not be the first person you talk to,

    or the first person you hire. You might have to try a few different times, but if it’s a fit and you’re willing to invest in the person and in the relationship, then the delegation part of it becomes easy because they understand who you are, what you stand for and how you would make a decision about something. So they can take ownership over that.

    Thank you so much for sharing your, your perspective on that. I know our listeners are already thinking about that. The processes we’re talking about delegating the team. So I think that that was really, really helpful to share that All right. You guys, that was an amazing show. I know we cut it off there in the middle. And as I said,

    we didn’t start out this interview to actually break the show up into two episodes. But Rachel was so generous with her expertise and she delivered so many tangible things you can take right now and apply to your business. I really wanted to make sure that you had an opportunity to actually do that. So make sure you tune in with us next week on episode number 239 to catch the second half of systems to scale your business.

    And again, all of the show notes, all of the resources and all of the ways that you can connect with Rachel directly can be found by visiting Sweetlife co.com and simply click on the package. All right, guys, talk to you next week. Bye bye. For now.

    Episode 230: Simplified Systems To Scale – with April Beach and Brittany Keeling

    Brittany Keeling SweetLife Entrepreneur Podcast April Beach

    This episode is for those in Phase 1 – 2 – 3 – 4 – 5 of the Lifestyle Entrepreneur Roadmap™ Not sure what Phase your business is in?

     

    Episode Bonuses:

    Join us live on Clubhouse to get your questions answered. 
    June 2, 2021 12:00 ET

    Who This Episode is Great For:

    This is a great show for entrepreneurs and companies who are ready to scale and grow, but lacking systems to make it happen. 

    Summary:

    It’s time to scale your business, and you know that systems and SOPs need to be in place. But, if you’re like me, the thought of sitting down and documenting your tasks sounds as fun as having teeth pulled. Thankfully Brittany Keeling, our guest expert, is sharing practical ways and clear, simple systems you can follow to start scaling now. 
     
    In this show we’ll also cover the difference between a platform, a system and automation. These common terms are misunderstood but important to understand. Stick with us and join us live on Clubhouse to meet with Brittany personally and get your questions answered after listening to this show. 

    At the end of this episode you will:

    1. Brittany’s 5 Steps To Scale
    2. How to create SOPs without crying 
    3. The importance of choosing the right platform to make your business easier to manage

    Resources Mentioned:

     
    ClickUp (Brittany’s Affiliate Link)
     

    SweetLife Podcast™ Love:

    Are you subscribed? If not, there’s a chance you could be missing out on some bonuses and extra show tools.  Click here to be sure you’re in the loop.  Do you love the show? If so, I’d love it if you left me a review on iTunes. This helps others find the show and get business help. I also call out reviews live on the show to share your business with the world. Simply click here and select “Ratings and Reviews” and “Write a Review”. Thank you so much ❤︎

    Need faster business growth?

    Schedule a complimentary business triage call here.

    Full Show Transcript:

    You’re listening to the Sweetlife entrepreneur podcast, simplified strategies to grow your service business and launch a life you love faster with business mental and entrepreneur activator, a probate. We are so excited to dive in depth. So number 230 here on the Sweetlife entrepreneur podcast, and today’s guest is simplifying your systems and helping you put standard operating procedures in place so that you can scale your business.

    And this is why this is incredibly important. We have so many companies that come to us and they want to launch courses and masterminds and memberships, and they want their suite of offers created. But oftentimes when we do a really good job launching scalable online programs, there are some systems that are missing in the backend. And when these systems in the backend are missing,

    then what happens is a bottleneck. And you actually can’t even absorb all of the money and the clients and the hard work that you’ve gone into in order to actually launch and reap the benefits of the hard work. And so today on episode number 230, we’re diving in with Brittany Keeling, she’s the CEO of be elevated a business operations and launch expert. And she’s going to take you through the processes of how to really simplify your systems.

    Now you’re going to laugh. I am being really transparent about how I hate creating SOP on this. So if you’re like me, you’re going to be able to relate real well to what Brittany’s saying. And we’re going to give you some amazing strategies to get through that today on this episode. So this is a great show for those of you guys who are in phases two through four of my Sweetlife business roadmap,

    that’s the startup to scale up system that we’ve created. And in order to figure out what phase of business you’re in simply go to sweet life co.com board slash quiz, and you can take a very short self-assessment. So this episode, this business training that we’re talking about is specifically for those of you guys in phases, two, three or four of that business system.

    What you can expect at the end of this is to first of all, know the most common standard rating standard operating procedures that should be in place for your business. You’re also going to get tips on software that can simplify your processes. And you’re going to know how to use the way that you work as a leader, as an entrepreneur, in order to put it into systems in a way that is actually going to happen for your business.

    So I’m so excited to dive into all this. And of course, Brittany will be with us live on clubhouse, the Wednesday that this show drops. So if you are not a member or following the Sweetlife entrepreneurs club on clubhouse, please make sure you search us on clubhouse life. One word, just like this podcast. And you’re going to get access to that room where Brittany is going to be able to take your questions.

    She’s amazing. And I’m guessing you’re going to want to have somebody like Brittany workshop with you, and that’s what the clubhouse is for. So let’s go ahead and dive into today’s show. All of the show knows everything we’re talking about can be found by visiting our website@sweetlifeco.com forward slash two three zero. Oh, wait. I lied about that. All of the show notes can be found by visiting sweet life coat.com

    and then you got to click on podcast, but then it is episode two, three, zero. All right, you guys, I can’t wait to dive in with you. Let’s do it. All right. You guys welcome to episode number 230 here at this sweet life entrepreneur business podcast. I am joined by Brittany Keeling and yes, you’re probably getting entired me saying this.

    I met Brittany on clubhouse, like all of our guests, like lately, all my new clubhouse friends and she is amazing. I was in a clubhouse room with Brittany and she said three words that I was like, oh my gosh, I need this woman to come and talk to us and really simplify and clarify these three terms. And you’re going to find out what they are here and just a little bit on the show,

    but, you know, Brittany is a scaling with systems expert. And so that’s what we’re all about here on the show, giving you tools and strategies to move forward and scale your business. And so here we are, Brittany, thank you so much for joining us. Tell everybody a little bit about yourself and how you became such a systems ninja. Yeah,

    I’m so excited to be here. So I have a really sort of unconventional background. A lot of people get into this space from, you know, they were in the corporate world and they decided to go off on their own. And I actually started my first business straight out of high school. So I was a serial entrepreneur for a few years, with a few various different businesses.

    They were actually all online businesses as well. So been in the space a while and towards the end of 2018, I was feeling really burnt out with what I was doing. I wanted to change it. I just didn’t know what to do. And so I started asking people who knew me like, Hey, what do you think of when you think about me?

    What am I good at? What are my strengths? Literally, everybody came back and was like, oh, you’re type a you’re detail oriented. You’re great at like being productive and helping people reach their goals. And I was like, okay, I can do something with this. So heading into 2019, I started trying to like make that shift. But right at that same time,

    my dad who was a business owner actually passed away unexpectedly. And so I took over his company the day after he died. So yeah, I put my business hold and took over his company. I was 21 and it was a mess. He did not have. I mean, obviously I was grieving, but also he didn’t have anything documented. He did not have,

    you know, a second in command. It was basically two months of me being on the phone all day, every day with clients saying, sorry, he’s not here anymore, but we’re still business as usual. It was very weird. But another thing that we ran into a lot was like the questions being asked and us not having answers. And that didn’t feel good for anyone.

    Of course, we didn’t want to say, sorry, we don’t know the answer to that. But at the same time, my dad kept so much in his head, in his head and all over his desk. I mean, papers everywhere. So it was just really hard to try to run once he was gone. And thankfully we did end up selling that business four months later.

    And at that time I had planned a move across the country for like a month later. And I was like, oh, I have now no income and no clients and no business, I should do something. So I relaunched my business and I went like full force headfirst into the deep end as an online business manager. And so at that time, this was like August of 2019.

    And I just dove in, I invested in a mentor and I was like, you know, I’m just going to help other entrepreneurs create something that actually can outlive them. For me. It grew really quickly. I’ll give you the cliff notes version here, but essentially I created a bit of a monster that was doing for me the opposite of what I was trying to do for others.

    And so I ended up restructuring a bit around this, actually around the same time, last year. So around like August, September of 2020, and now we work with clients in either one day or one week and we have a few signature offers, but we really essentially help them either get their systems in check, do like an overhaul, get them things simplified,

    make it make sense for the long haul for them. Or we help them have a large-scale launch of a digital product or service in a short timeframe. We do like a seven day package for lunches or a one day for one week package for systems, depending on how robust it is. And clearly to have that done. We have to have a lot of really clear systems internally as well.

    Yes you do. Oh my gosh. So first of all, congratulations on all your success. It’s so hard when you know you’re doing something well and all of a sudden it’s running your life. I love how you have modeled. We talk a lot about life, first business modeling here on this show, and I love how you’ve modeled your offer to actually deliver that time in life that you want.

    Secondly, I’m so sorry about your dad. I lost my dad a couple of years ago and that is it just really hard still sometimes today I’ll like forget, and I’ll go to pick up a phone and call him and it’s just this weird thing or I’ll think, oh, I can’t wait to tell dad or whatever. And so I totally get that.

    And I’m so sorry about that. Your dad also was a total entrepreneur like that entrepreneur brain, like the notes everywhere, papers everywhere. I’m literally not going to turn the camera. You guys, before this, behind the scenes, you were typing something out to think like that’s way out. I need to write in order to think and process in. But because of that,

    then I have a million pieces of paper. And so your dad sounded like amazing man and very typical classic entrepreneur. And then the last thing, you know, I love how you have always been an entrepreneur out of high school. Like we have very similar stories. I absolutely love that. And so I’m just so glad that you were here on the show.

    Now what you’re talking about from a business sense, first of all, it’s no surprise that you are so successful because what you need are what people need are the tactical things that you actually deliver. It’s the not sexy part that everybody desperately wants and needs. They’re the systems and that like the SOP and the client pipelines and the launch plans and the content plans and all those things.

    So I’m so excited to talk about what we’re going to dive in today. And I know our listeners will be like, okay, bro, gen up so we can hear her talk. So, so like, so this is very exciting. And so I’m really, really excited about what you’re going to download for us today. So one of the things that we find as a company is a lot of companies come to us and they’re like,

    oh, we’re so excited to scale with courses and offers. And all these things help us design them, but it’s like, let’s stop because they don’t have their systems and processes in place. Yet. I was actually in a clubhouse room last week when I was saying that to somebody and the woman ended up DME me on Instagram saying, so you said I shouldn’t do this yet until I have systems in place.

    What are the exact systems? People don’t know, like you were saying before we started recording what they don’t know. So can we first for our listeners who might not be familiar with that, we first talk about what systems should you actually have in place before you start really scaling your business. Yeah, 100%. And I love that we’re talking about this because every business I’ve ever worked with that has overlooked these steps in the beginning has had to spend more time and more money and more energy backtracking to redo the things that were not done properly.

    So my hope is that if you’re listening to this, you will not get in that position. It is never too late to start creating systems. And just like April said, it is not at face value, super sexy to talk about, but it is super sexy when you get weeks of your life back. So, yeah. So I have sort of a top five systems that I like to focus in on whenever talking about like getting started with systems,

    mind you, there are a million systems in the world and I totally understand that, like can be really overwhelming. So I always just suggest starting with these five. And if I feel like too much, start with one, like just do one at a time because it’s going to be better than nothing. Okay. So let me make sure you guys heard this before.

    She says this. When you walk away from this show commit to start with one, if this is an area you need to grow. So sometimes when we hear all five, it is overwhelming, but Brittany is going to download you on what they are. So I’m really excited about this. Okay. What are they? Yeah. So quick overview of the five systems I like to hone in on are a task management and project management system.

    So this is where you can keep all of your ideas. So instead of having 12,000 places to look for things, it’s all in one place, an SOP standard operating procedure creation system. So you may or may not have heard of SOP before. And if you have heard of them, it may be in a corporate setting or it may just be like,

    sure, I’ve heard of it, but I don’t know what to do with it. How do I create them? Having SOP are important, but you need actually know how to create them. So having a system for creating new SOP is on an ongoing basis is going to be huge. The third system is a content planning and repurposing system. Let’s be real,

    pretty much all of us are marketing through social media. So we probably need to have a system there so that we’re not having to spend hours every single day typing up a last-minute caption just to get it off the door. Right then the fourth is a client management system. This one is huge, huge, huge, I’m such a huge fan of white glove experience and really kind of going above and beyond with the client experience because we want everyone in our sphere to feel really valued and a huge way you can do that is with your client management system.

    And then the fifth and final is email marketing. And if you’re like, well, maybe I don’t have a list. This is fifth for a reason. It is very important of course, but you don’t have to start with this one if it’s not the easiest one for you to dive into, but we can keep it super simple. Maybe you have an automated welcome sequence or some sort of automated email marketing in place.

    But even if you just have some sort of system for showing up regularly in your email marketing, like a task for yourself to write a new email once a month and send that out, it’s so much better than nothing, and you’re still going, nurturing your audience chat. Okay. So let me state those again for our listeners. And then we’re going to move on.

    We’re going to dive into a couple of those today. So the five systems you recommend people have in place to start our task management, SLPs and a process for actually creating SOP and an SOP. If you’re listening in stands for standard operating procedures for any of you guys that didn’t know that number three is a system for content planning. Number four is the system for client management and number five,

    it’s a system for email marketing. Is that right? That’s right. Okay. Let’s kind of pivot in. Let’s just focus in actually on those first two things tax management and SOP is here on this podcast. So when we’re talking about task management, there are so many things that businesses are doing on a regular basis. And oftentimes companies that are looking to scale,

    you have just very few people doing all the things, talk to us about how you recommend and how you really kind of lasso all of these things that are happening in order to get them into one place. Yeah. So I think the biggest thing is like, you know, there are first of all, so many ideas in our brain at any given time.

    And even if we just think about the ideas alone, not even the to-dos, it’s like you could have a million dollar idea, but if you write it on a sticky note and forget it exists, there goes your million dollars. Right? So I’m a huge advocate for getting things in one place. So initially, I mean, I would start with hunting down all the things you have all over the place.

    If you’ve got just tasks and ideas and to do’s everywhere, get them all streamlined in one place from there, you can probably then start diving into breaking things into categories. And again, this can be really overwhelming. And like a lot of times people are like, well, I just have one big list. What do you mean I need categories, but we can structure things very strategically when we are intentional about it.

    So if you zoom out of the day-to-day of your business and actually look at everything from a bird’s eye view and look at all of the tasks on your list, look at everything that’s popping up. Do you want assessment of what do I, and if I have team members, my team do on a daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, yearly, so on and so forth basis.

    And what maybe aren’t we doing that needs to be done more regularly and even seeing like what tasks have popped up that are not recurring tasks, but you’re noticing them coming up more and more often that can really help guide you and figuring out what the departments of your business really are. So being able to identify it, doesn’t have to be like 18 departments.

    You don’t have to have a whole marketing team to have a department for that. When I say departments, I’m really, especially for small business owners, mostly honing in on the fact that like, there really are still segments of our business, where if we were to scale to a much larger level, we’d likely be outsourcing those two different team members. Yeah.

    And that’s usually where most of our listeners are. They’re like really ready to the point they want to scale. They have all these things that are happening. And many of them have even really started building their teams. But yet they’re not exactly sure. Also with that being said, many of our listeners are to this point where they also have a, just a ton of,

    VA’s doing a couple little things for them at once. So as they’re listening to this, I’m guessing you’re the expert here in this process. You also really recommend that even all these little pieces, even if it’s somebody who’s only working a couple hours a month doing a task for you that you develop SOP for that as well. Correct. 100% a gauge that I like to use is like,

    okay, if you were to take on 10 clients tomorrow, would you be ready? Yeah. My business mentor talking more says that all the time. He’s like, you know, it doesn’t matter if we get you all these clients in here, he’s like, you know, it can be like, it’s like a fire hose. If you do not have these systems in place,

    like don’t go out and grow. Right. Oh, that’s so good. That is such a great analogy. Oh my gosh. So you’re just going to lose them. All right. And that’s why when companies come to us and they’re like, we want to develop our signature offer. We want our signature courses or masterminds. We’re like, okay, are you going to be able to handle it?

    Because if you can’t then literally everything. That’s like an overflow out of the top and you know, let’s make sure your stuff is in place. And so I love this conversation we’re having. So in the process and behind the scenes, you were sharing how you guys go about doing this. You have a software that you love, and I’m just going to say out loud,

    you know, Kelly Buckner, our director of operations for our company is going to geek out when she hears this episode. Because I think that what you’re talking about is like right along the lines of something that she would love to look into more. So talk to us about how you go about this process for people. And, and also, I mean, they are in a million different places.

    All these things are in a million different places. Let’s talk about simplifying software for a minute. Yeah, absolutely. So a lot of entrepreneurs are, and you know, we’re in 18 different softwares when in reality there’s probably one or two that could replace the bulk of them. And I think, you know, at the end of the day, maybe you’re going to pay more for one software,

    but then you’re going to be able to let go of three others. And it’s so worth it. Now, if you’re using six softwares and it’s like, you know, you don’t have any problems and it’s working well for you and future casting. You’re not going to have any problems. Great. If it’s not working or if it is working, you don’t need to necessarily change it.

    But if you’re starting to grow and you’re ready to scale, and you’re like, you know what, being in all this software is just really not working for me. Then. I mean, something that my business does all the time is like helping businesses get streamlined into less software or at least suffer. That makes more sense for them. And so one of the things that we do is we utilize click up and this is where we use like our task management and our project management.

    But also we use this as like the one-stop for the whole business. And we do this with our own business, as well as for our client’s businesses. Because if you’re listening, I can almost guarantee if you don’t have some sort of system in place, you’ve probably got your Google docs, a hundred different docs or folders in your drive. You’ve got your handwritten notes,

    sticky notes, your whiteboard, your mirror, that you’re writing on your, your, everything, just everything notes on your phone. You’ve got your, your 18 journals on your desk. Like it’s just all over the place. And so being able to create an atmosphere where it doesn’t feel like, oh God, another place I have to look every day and instead positioning it in your mind.

    And also in the way you structure it as the only place you need to go and look at things every day, it really is a game changer because instead of waking up, you know, three hours into your slumber, remembering that you forgot to do three tasks that are like really important, and now you’re going to be panicking about it. You can have one place to put them all as soon as they pop into your head and then literally forget about it.

    Like you can just forget about it and come back to it later. Yeah. I love that. And that’s so important for entrepreneurs like me too. Not officially, but pretty officially have ADHD. And so this process of going through and understand like the tasks, changing task management, having things in one place is, is really, really, really important.

    And another thing you said just triggered something that I like to tell businesses all the time. And this is what Brittany is talking about. This is why this is important. I like to say, you know, how would you carry your business today? If you were already a millionaire, you’d already have these systems in place, and you’re never going to be there until you have these systems in place.

    This is the bottleneck. And this is so important. And you know, we’re not saying you have to use one software or another, like you can do it whatever way works for you. But the reality is, is simplified systems scale. They do simplified system scale. And so this is so incredibly important. Okay? So in this process you’re going through and people have all their ideas and they’re bringing their,

    all their ideas together, taken all their sticky notes and their pieces of paper. And they’re getting it. Like you guys use click up for this. How do you recognize, are there like certain departments of a business that are standard or typical for, you know, service-based businesses and online entrepreneurs where you tend to group together type of department. So you sort of,

    our listeners can kind of at least clarify their mind and start heading in one direction of how to organize their stuff. Yeah. Such good question. So some like standard departments that we like to utilize are like your headquarters, right? So for us, at least in here, we house various things like our capacity so that anyone on the team can come in and see what we’re working on.

    Like what big package, but also what’s coming. We have like the next several months booked out and we can all see it and be prepared. And then also if I’m on a sales call, I know what’s available and what’s not I’m meeting notes, go in there, employee onboarding various things like that. Team resources go in there. So like SOP is our brand kit,

    affiliate links, testimonials our team agreement. So we have like, all the team has come together and agree. Like this is our way of working so we can all reference that. And then another department is operations. So you’re going to have your recurring operations more than likely that may be broken down into various things like social media. So Instagram, Facebook,

    LinkedIn, so on and so forth. Maybe your email marketing can go and hear your metrics management. So if you’re needing to check on your numbers weekly, the list, of course. Yeah. Right. I mean, I’m thinking in my mind, I’m like podcast processes, like for us, you know, podcast processes, you know, PR speaking,

    client management. So as you guys are listening to Brittany talk, just think about like the grouping of repetitive tasks that you’re doing in your business and start to figure out what falls under each one. And then take an opportunity to understand that for each one of these, you need to develop these standard operating procedures, which brings me to the next question. So we hear this all the time and I’ll be really honest with you.

    Especially somebody that’s like always in all directions. I own four companies. I have three kids. I’m always on an airplane somewhere when somebody tells me and it’s okay if you have to tell me this, but let’s just keep it real here. When somebody tells me that I have to sit down and document every single thing that I’m doing in some capacity or some way for like a week straight,

    first of all, I’ve never, ever, ever done that. I can’t think of anything worse than doing that. And so what I ended up doing, and this is why, if you’ve also listened to the show before, I’m like not the best person to work for. I mean, I have an amazing team, thank God. But you know,

    it, it’s kind of hard. So it literally, I’m not kidding. You it’s taken me 25 years to get through. And so when I go down and I document like an SOP, it is usually like in a scrub, like we’re working on a project like that day. That is my work I’m going to do. But going through my everyday,

    you know, week just kind of documenting my time and managing my time and stuff. You couldn’t actually, I’m being so honest. You’re going to like school me here. Probably like you couldn’t pay me to do that for my own company. Like I am Wade. I’m like all off in a role. Is there any other way to do it? Yeah,

    totally. Okay. Good. Cause that way sucks. Right? At the end of the day, it’s like we’re busy and the thought of creating a whole system and process and documenting the SOP, Internet’s going to take me three hours longer than if I would just do it all myself and then never outsource it. Right. Right. But of course in the long run,

    we know that’s not true, but it doesn’t make it any to do in the moment. So I do have a philosophy that I like to follow a system. I like to follow with creating these because most business owners are very similar to you. Like I can’t say that I have a lot of fun sitting down and creating all of SOP for my business.

    And so if you don’t like it, then that’s yeah. Then they really are tough work. Okay. Right. And any, you don’t have to do it alone. And it’s actually to be so much easier than we think. So here’s what I like to do. And here’s what I tell people to do. Start identifying what needs to be documented.

    Right? So obviously your recurring tasks, easiest thing to start with, you know, it’s going to happen on a recurring basis. So start there. And once you’ve identified, this needs an SOP, take a loom screen recording. The next time you do the task, you can literally do the task, the exact same way you would without documenting anything,

    but screen record it and talk through what you’re doing as you’re going. And then if you have a strategic and like, well put together template for the written SOP, you can then give the loom or whatever kind of screen recording. You utilize to another team member. You can give it to somebody else and they can build out the SOP, the written version.

    They can include the video version in there. They can plug it into whatever. You know, if you’re using a task management software, get it in the right places, create templates within that. If you want, it can get really nice and crazy robust, but it doesn’t have to. And even better when you do it that way, you now have a video,

    an audio with your video and a written. And so no matter what kind of way somebody learns on your team, you’re meeting them where they’re at. Okay. Thank you. So I do that. I do LUME recordings and then you’re like Dropbox fanatics, and then I’ll put it in Dropbox. But I really thought that I was like duck taping the process together.

    And then, you know, we can get them transcribed through our Searchie and everything that we do. So thank you for saying that because I literally is like, this is just the way I work and it’s just the way it’s going to be. And this is the way I work and I just, I’m never going to change me. So I hope this works out for y’all,

    which, which it has. I mean, I have an amazing team, but in the back of my mind, I’m always like, you suck at doing this because you’re not doing it the way it’s supposed to be, but I know I would never, ever like literally over my dead body, am I going to sit down and write down my steps that I am doing?

    So, yay. I feel a little redeemed here on this show and then Kelly in the process, like she does this as well. And so like listening to the podcast, you guys all know like what we really like struggle with behind the scenes. We try to share it all with you. This is one of those things that I haven’t really liked so much.

    Okay. So in that process, you know, documenting it in whatever way that works. I also do audio recordings on my phone. So I do audio as well too. And that has seemed to work, you know, to upload them for certain files as well for my team and our team Dropbox folder, I should say, hopefully that’s acceptable, but it does work.

    Okay. So after somebody has, you know, really documented these processes, let’s go back and let’s kind of circle back and let’s talk about the importance of simplified software. Share with us more about click up, why you guys use that, why this is your chosen spot to do this in really why, of all the things out there, as, you know,

    there’s a million there’s Monday and Salesforce and all these other things, like why is this your go-to? And so our listeners is, is there processing can think, oh, well maybe I should check that out. Yeah. Great question. So let’s tie it in with SOP is right. If you create a hundred SLPs and they’re sitting in a Google drive that nobody knows exists,

    what’s the point, right? Versus if we can pull them in to a software, like click up, or if you’re using something else, you know, whatever you’re using, bring it into one place so that someone can super easily search the name of what they’re looking for, or go to the SOP folder or list and look through it, what they need to find.

    And you can even from there, so like in click up, you can create like a template of tasks essentially. So you could also turn your SLPs into templates if it’s like things that need to be tasked out. So if you’re onboarding a new team member, for example, that can be a template. Every time you onboard a new team member, you duplicate the template,

    you assign things out and boom, like you’re good to go. Okay. So this is making my mind totally gone in a different direction, which I won’t on this show, but I also teach entrepreneurs how to license and scale their content programs and systems. And every single one of them has a different place where they build those systems. And so what I’m hearing you say is it click up,

    could possibly be a place for those of you guys that this is really advanced scaling. But those of you guys who are listening to this show who are licensing your courses, your content, you’re creating a certification program. All of these mixed level scaling could use a software like this to really streamline the distribution of your processes and templates a hundred percent. And you can even like,

    you can like sell templates. You can share templates. I mean, you can do so much with it. And the reason that I really love click up above all the other platforms, I’ve, haven’t been in all of them, but I’ve been in many of them. And what I tend to find is kind of twofold. One click up is 10 steps ahead.

    Of many of the other platforms, other platforms are coming out with a lot of the things click up has, but they’ve had it for months. So why not choose the software that is going to be 10 steps ahead. And two, it has a very, very, very customizable interface. The aesthetic of it. You can look at it in so many ways and customize fields and can do it everything in your own brand colors.

    I mean, there’s so many ways to go about it. So I, I love it. I it’s just the, in my opinion, I clearly am a nerd about this platform, but I’m a huge fan. I’ve been in so many different ones and it just has proved to be the best and has the most robust options for what we need. Okay.

    This is, I really love this episode. Thank you so much for everything you’re pouring into us. Okay. Before we wrap this up, I do have to say, I love the aesthetic side women entrepreneurs. We really like this side. Like, I really love the fact that I can change the picture on the back of my Trello board. I mean the stupid stuff like that makes me really happy.

    So I love the fact that it does offer that option as well. And I appreciate you sharing this resource so much here. You guys, as you’re listening, we’ll make sure that we are going to share Brittany’s affiliate link to click up with you so you guys can go and play with it and try it out. There are three different words I would love for you to,

    this is the circle back from the beginning, define for us as we close up this show. And I think that the clarity and the definition of each one of these, whether whoever’s listening is new or established is going to be very, very helpful. Can you please define the difference between a platform, a system and automation for any of our listeners that aren’t crystal clear on these saints?

    Absolutely. And it’s really common to not be crystal clear on this because some of these buzz words right there, total buzzwords are used interchangeably when they shouldn’t be. And so it’s confusing for most people. And so what I have found is that if you’re not clear on what each of those are, it can be really difficult to know what you need or ask for help or find the right resources.

    So I’m really passionate about helping find clarity throughout these. So let’s start from, you know, a platform. So a platform is like a click up, right? Click up is a platform. Or of course there are other platforms like, you know, later first scheduling on Instagram or depths auto active campaign. There’s so many, right, but having a platform does not mean you have a system.

    It’s really how you utilize the platform that you can create systems within a platform being signed up on click up does not mean you have a system being signed up on any software does not necessarily mean you have a system. You can create systems within the platforms. Like we create systems all throughout clicker and they can go hand in hand, but they are different things.

    So a system is something that can actually be documented, right? A system is something we can put into an SOP that we can duplicate and do over and over again. And then an automation of course, is something that is going to be automatic. But again, it’s different. Not all of your systems are going to be automated. Some of your systems are not going to be automated and that it can still be a system.

    It doesn’t have to be automated to be a system and you can house. So an example here too, all three of these things can go hand in hand is within click up. There are automations. So you can have the platform I’m just using click up as an example here, you have to pay me to say this, but wish they were. So you could use click up as your platform.

    You could house your content creation system in here, and you can have automations in here as well to move things accordingly. So they can all go hand in hand. They are very different things though. And so I think being able to define those is really, really helpful. And being able to talk about things. Yeah, I love it. I wrote down that quote,

    having a platform does not mean you have a system. And I think that is so powerful and that’s really a great way to wrap up today’s show. Of course my like business coaching minus went crazy. Now I actually want you to reach out, to click up and have them sponsor a room on clubhouse in pay you to talk about it. Like, let’s get this right.

    So click up, we’re going to tag you in this and you need to be, listen, you need to hit Brittany up, sponsor her clubhouse rooms because it’s, it’s good for everybody. So, all right, well, I just really appreciate your expertise so much. And we are going to be live in clubhouse on June. What did we say?

    I think it was June the night at 12 o’clock Eastern time in the club that goes with this podcast. So this podcast club is called the sweet life entrepreneurs club. Search it up on clubhouse, hit me up, hit Brittany up, like send us a DM. If you want to know where the club is because Brittany sent me coming in live and we’re gonna be taking your questions from today’s show.

    And this episode is going to drop on Monday. You have two days to listen to this and come in and let Brittany roll up her sleeves with you and help you guys get your SLPs and systems in place, you know, answering platform questions, whatever it is, we are here to serve and support you. Not just listen to this show, but to implement the show and put it into action.

    So now you have a couple of, you have a resource as well, and I’m going to make sure all the things that we’re talking about here in the show notes for you guys. So what is a free resource you have for our listeners? Yes. I have a pretty doozy guide. It’s called five systems to take your business from scattered to scaling.

    And it goes a little more in depth into all five of the systems we touched on at the beginning of this episode. And then also I actually include in the guide my own SOP templates. So there you go. Yeah. I’m so glad. Oh my gosh. An SOP template. Okay. So all of the show notes are going to be found@sweetlifeco.com like on the podcast.

    And this is episode number 230, and everything’s going to be in there for you as well. But we want to see you guys in clubhouse, even you, Android users are getting invites now. So we want to see you guys in clubhouse. And if you need an invite, hit me up on Instagram. We have actually a lot of club invites they’re releasing to us.

    So we’re excited. You can RSVP for this event and we’ll get you an invite to that, Brittany, thank you so much for your time. I’d love to everything we’ve talked about and clearly appreciate you confirm me. I’m not totally crazy about the way I’m supposed to be doing things and just really appreciate all your expertise, how clearly you explained things and those you guys who are listening,

    please follow Brittany, pay her and follow and just thanking her for her expertise in Korean and tossed bang. It’s great. Thank you. I appreciate you. Thank you. Have a lot of fun.

    Episode 218: Entrepreneur Sleep: How To Thrive As A Peak Performer – with April Beach and Mollie McGlocklin

    Mollie McGlocklin SweetLife Entrepreneur Podcast April Beach

    This episode is for those in Phase 1 – 2 – 3 – 4 – 5 of the Lifestyle Entrepreneur Roadmap™ Not sure what Phase your business is in?

     

    Episode Bonuses:

    Join the SweetLife Entrepreneurs Club on Clubhouse to join an upcoming room with Mollie and April

    Who This Episode is Great For:

    If you’re a sleepless entrepreneur, this show is for you.

    Summary:

    Sleep is affecting our businesses. Whether good, or bad, your sleep is connected to your company’s performance in some capacity. And, beyond that… our health and livelihood as humans.  But we all know that, right? 
     
    If you’re like me – You have no desire to listen to a podcast that discusses everything you already know!  But this episode is different. Sleep expert, Mollie McGlocklin dives into tracking your sleep with tech, understanding Heart Rate Variability HRV, and simple small-steps you can do each day to work with your Circadian Rhythm. 

    At the end of this episode you will:

    1. Know how your Circadian Rhythm affects peak performance
    2. Know how to read the date from your wearable sleep technology
    3. And have basic things you can do tomorrow morning towards more productive and healthy sleep

    Resources Mentioned:

    SweetLife Podcast™ Love:

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    Full Show Transcript:

     

    You’re listening to the Sweetlife entrepreneur podcast, simplified strategies to grow your service business and launch a life you love faster with business mental and entrepreneur activator, a probate. Hi everybody. And welcome to episode number 218. And I’m April beach, your host founder of the suite Life company. And I am so glad to be talking to you again, usually on this show,

     

    we’re talking about scale strategies, online, offer creation, how to create your courses or your mastermind and funnels and marketing. But we are all about building a business to give you the life that you want. And so that requires a holistic view on strategies for both business and life. And so I love doing shows like the ones that we were doing today.

     

    And let me be completely clear with you about why this show really hits home for me. About two weeks ago, I landed in Philadelphia from Denver for a weekend to visit my oldest son who plays lacrosse for the university of Delaware. And I was on my laptop. The whole entire time got out of the airport, got in the rental car, turned on clubhouse,

     

    and I was really tired. You guys, I had just gotten to this point where I had been going, going, going, by the way, I thrive on going, going, going, but I turn on clubhouse and I was browsing through the rooms of what I should listen to. And there was a room that popped up regarding sleep and it really hit home for me because I knew that this is something that I do not do well in this area.

     

    Now a little bit more behind the scenes. I don’t like sleeping. I love being awake. I do really well from 10:00 PM to 1:00 AM. You know, the world falls away, everything’s silent. And that’s when I really thrive as a creator, frankly. And so I would much rather be awake living life than be sleeping. And that’s the way I’ve been my whole entire life,

     

    but it’s really taken a toll on me and let’s even go a little bit deeper in transparency behind the scenes. What I used to think when people talked about, Oh, you know, I hit quote unquote, that wall. These are the things that I thought, Oh, you’re going to love me. Or you are totally going to hate me and never listened to this podcast.

     

    Again, here’s the honest truth. When I heard anybody say or tell their stories about how they got like super tired and hit a wall. These were the things that went through my head, keeping it real. I thought I am stronger than those people. I thought that will never happen to me. And I thought I am born to thrive in like this balls to the wall type of a life.

     

    It’s always how I have been. I love living like this. These people just aren’t built like me. Okay. Talk about really, really judgmental. And that’s when things like hit us on the face because it is in the face because that’s exactly what happened to me in over the last couple of months, I have gotten completely exhausted. The second part of this and why this episode is so important to me personally right now is that I lost my father to dementia.

     

    And I realized that the way my brain is functioning is not the same way. It was 10 to 12 years ago. And for whatever obvious reasons that is, you know, age, maybe being one of them, I’m not taking care of my brain. And it is one of my greatest assets. And so when I heard our guests today speak on this clubhouse room about sleep.

     

    I knew that I personally needed for her to come in here and deliver some insane wisdom to me as a CEO, as a business owner. And I believe that there are some of you guys out there that need to hear this message and what she’s talking about as well. Now here’s the deal. If you’re like me, you haven’t seriously, no desire to listen to a podcast that discusses everything you already know that you aren’t doing right?

     

    But this episode is different. Our guest today is going to dive into tracking your sleep and understanding technology behind sleep trackers. And she’s talking about simple steps, okay? Simple things that you can do. You know, we’re not going to come in here in this show saying you got to get sleep, but that’s not at all with this show is about,

     

    which is why I personally appreciate this episode so much. So let me introduce you to who our guest expert is today. Molly McLaughlin is a creator of sleep as a skill, a company that optimizes people’s sleep through a unique blend of technology, accountability, and behavioral change. She created this company from her own experience when she literally has had not slept well her entire life,

     

    she had massive, poor sleep habits. And all of a sudden she found herself in for months. She dealt with insomnia in her background is in behavioral change. And so she went down this rabbit hole to figure out like, what is going on with these disturbances in my sleep. And she really went in a way that did not include sleep AIDS. And because of her experience,

     

    now this company was born and she is an absolute expert at helping you know, how to really get the sleep that you need and understand sleep. And that’s what we’re talking about on today’s show. So at the end of this episode, you will know how your circadian rhythm affects your peak performance. You will know how to read the data from your wearable technology,

     

    which was super cool because I wear sleep technology, but frankly, I really didn’t understand how to read the data. And so that is very cool. We’re talking about this on today’s show as well. And you’re going to walk away with some basic things you can do. First thing tomorrow morning to move towards more productive sleep in more healthy sleep. So here are the background notes,

     

    everything we’re talking about, including a link to join the Sweetlife entrepreneurs club in clubhouse, where Molly and I are going to be going live. And she’s going to be chatting with you about your Entrepreneur sleep and peak performance questions can be found by visiting the show notes for this episode. There’s a lot of things in here and even more tools that Molly’s given you.

     

    So if you want to know more about, we’re talking about Connect with Molly further, be part of this conversation and frankly learn right alongside me, visit Sweetlife co.com click on the podcast. And this is episode number 218. So let’s go ahead and dive in with Molly.<inaudible> All right. Hi, you guys. Welcome to another episode of the Sweetlife entrepreneur in business podcast.

     

    I am so excited to be joined by my guest today. I’m actually found her on clubhouse. Many of you know, who’ve been listening that I am bingeing clubhouse and can’t get enough of it. And this is exactly why, because I get to dive into spaces that I never would have been able to before in find people like Molly. How do you say your last name off?

     

    Yes. Perfect McLaughlin. Absolutely. Yes, I know. Is it phonetic? Is it not? Yes. And find people like Molly McLaughlin. I am so excited to welcome you here on this show. Can you introduce everybody to your area of expertise in super power? And just give us a little bit of background before we dive into what we’re talking about today.

     

    Absolutely. Thank you so much for having me here. This has already been a pleasure. I can’t wait to get into more with you. I am the creator of a company called sleep is a skill that helps people optimize their sleep through a blend of technology, accountability, and behavioral change, and a little bit background on me and why I’m so obsessed with the topic of sleep and why it’s totally changed.

     

    My life is that for so many years, I did everything not to do for your sleep. You know, every article you read what to do. I was doing the opposite in a lot of ways, but it really didn’t think it was much of a problem. I didn’t think much of it at all. Living in Manhattan as an entrepreneur, burning the candle at both ends stressed to the max.

     

    And I just thought of my sleep as a lot of labels. I thought of it as I’m a night owl, I’m a short sleeper. I’m not the greatest sleeper. Oh, it must be in my jeans. That’s just how it is for me. And, and you know, a number of different things, but didn’t think of it as something that I would have much of a say of how to transform.

     

    And I didn’t correlate when I was starting to get more and more sick at different things, you know, just getting run down anxious. I had guessed straight as I had shingles. I had a number of things that were just indicators, right. That you are stressed and things are not working. So, so yeah, and then it was not until I went through my own period of insomnia while traveling internationally.

     

    So in different countries, you know, not speaking the same language and I cannot sleep. And it was really a lot of the entrepreneurship part of it that, you know, our businesses weren’t ready to be taken on the road yet. My fiance and I, and how it manifested was suddenly I can’t sleep. And the amount of anxiety that was happening during that period,

     

    I went to the doctors in Croatia, got, you know, with Google translate and leave with their version of Ambien. And in that moment, kind of like, what is the game plan here am. I’m supposed to just take something like this for the rest of my life, that doesn’t align with my identity of who I think of myself and yet I’m desperate to sleep.

     

    So what do I do? So what ended up happening was really just getting up under this area, going really down the rabbit hole of what it would take from a, what I learned to chronobiology and circadian rhythm perspective to transform my sleep. And then from that place, it really just snowballed into like podcasts, newsletters, courses, all of the things.

     

    Okay. So you said so many things and we’re just going to kind of come together and pack it. But right now, I mean, your super power is helping high performers and entrepreneurs and small business owners have a healthy life and sleep. Yeah. That we all identify just like you said, I mean, I am you back in the past, right?

     

    I definitely, I do not sleep as much. It goes in flows. I have an inconsistent sleep. You know, I have kids which brings a whole nother dynamic into that and I travel about five months a year. So with that being said, I think I have like a recipe for disaster relief disaster. And so I’m so excited to learn from you today.

     

    And I know our listeners too, are going to be like, Oh yeah, that’s probably me. I’m like, so let’s start by just really unpacking this. So you said circadian rhythm. What is that for anybody that is not really aware of that term and what part of our bodies function in that capacity? How does that work? Yes. Perfect.

     

    And I also want to say for what you’re sharing too, despite that being one of the lowest points at the time of my life was what it felt like, you know, just nothing is working. This is the worst thing is horrible. And yet I do now look back on it as being one of the best things that could have happened to me.

     

    So if you are at any given spot in your journey around sleep, I think there really is so much to learn from it. It really, no pun intended woke me up and had me transform my life in ways that I don’t think I would have, unless it was at such a rock bottom place. So having said that, Well, just along the lines to thank you for saying that.

     

    Cause I do feel like, I mean, I’m really transparent here with our listeners on the podcast. I mean, I do feel like, like I had hit a wall, I just turned 45 this week and I’ve always been able to push and push and push on a high performer, had tons of energy, always been able to do it. And it was just finally a couple of months ago as a first time in my whole entire life where I was so tired and I couldn’t push through,

     

    I’ve still always been able to do that. I like, literally couldn’t think I literally couldn’t speak, like the words were coming out of my mouth incorrectly, but it was the first time ever where I feel like I hit that wall and I couldn’t keep pushing it forward. And so I knew at that point in time, and this was prior to Christmas that like,

     

    I’m not healthy. I’m like, it doesn’t matter. I go to the gym every single day. All those things don’t matter. Like I knew that I was literally aging my brain and frankly, as with my father had dementia and these are all things that I’m starting to think about. And I’m saying, listen, I have really hit this wall and I need to sleep.

     

    This is no longer something that, and I don’t want any of our listeners too. And this is the whole point of the show. Like, don’t get to the point that Molly did. Don’t you get to the point where I am, where I’m like stalking this woman on clubhouse. You guys help me. I have hit a wall. So we don’t want you to have to be to the point where I frankly am literally at this recording and where Molly was,

     

    because how much more are you capable of being before you ever, ever get here and so on and so forth. So thank you for saying that. And that’s why I stopped you. Yeah, absolutely. It’s really important because I won, you know, I was reading nonstop, all these different things around how to improve my sleep and speaking with all these different experts and one thought leader in this area had made the point that when your sleep is not working,

     

    there’s something that your body is really trying to tell you. And I’m not trying to say that in a loose, like esoteric way or anything, but I think that’s really important because how I was running my, this didn’t come out of a vacuum. This was from, you know, years of kind of a mismanagement of my time, my days my,

     

    you know, keep pushing it to the next level. And, and so it occurred from a snowballing of that. And so what it really took was that to actually, for me to listen. So I don’t know the plus side while I at the time didn’t want to go through it. It actually was a blessing. And so I hope that there can be that message and that there is,

     

    there are so many success stories on the other side of people being able to shift this area. So one, I acknowledge you for the sharing and the, the vulnerability there, because it’s so important. And to, you know, so then the, how, so what you said about the circadian rhythm, why this is important in this conversation is one just to kind of bring it back to the basics.

     

    So no matter where you’re at and where your sleep journey is that we can always start to come back to one that this is a skill that, okay, so this is learnable. So let’s just let’s learn. So from the strategic rhythm perspective, one that exists on a spectrum was something that I didn’t understand. So the circadian rhythm is this 24 hour rhythm as human beings that we function within.

     

    But that rhythm, the queuing system for that rhythm can either be on the spectrum of, from a strong side or weak side. And you might be falling somewhere in between that spectrum. Then I would make the argument that many of us are on the weaker side of that just as a modern society, how we’re, how we’re functioning and as diurnal creatures.

     

    Yeah. This is all kind of coming from this concept around chronobiology the science of really time and how that impacts our biology as diurnal creatures. We are meant to be active during the day and at rest at night. And of course, in my example, I was doing the opposite, like, you know, upside down living. So we’re looking to,

     

    how can we bring things back and align with those cue givers that will help our rhythms be strong? So we, you know, those people, those friends of ours that might go out, everyone goes out and out super late, but they still wake up at the exact same time, you know, early morning. And you’re like, how are they doing that?

     

    That’s crazy. That’s actually what we’re looking to train for is that kind of specificity around just the automaticity of waking up routinely going to sleep routinely around the same times, but there’s tons of things we can do to get to there. Okay. Fascinating. And I know those people I’m married to one of those people that it doesn’t matter what time he goes to sleep.

     

    It is like, this is what time he gets up every single day. Yeah. Okay. So talk to us about, you know, really why is this important for fully understanding for those higher achievers busy entrepreneurs? How does this fit into our, you know, whole life business strategy? Because to me, as a business strategist, the way I need to form it within my own brain is say,

     

    this is part of my strategic business in life design. This is just as important is marketing and selling and other things. So it’s a very holistic approach to business and life. And so how for entrepreneurs and small business owners are really just high achievers who are listening to this, why is this so important? How does this really affect their everyday? And honestly their profit and their performance.

     

    I mean, that’s what we’re really getting down to get to if that’s the driver great, that’s the driver, are you not making as much money as you could be because frankly you aren’t sleeping. Right. I’m sure that there’s some data and some correlation there. Absolutely. Well, so there’s so many places we can go with that, but I can just even say anecdotally that my fiance owns companies that help train poker players at the table that are high stakes,

     

    lots of stress, and how to make those decisions, that their decisions in their thinking from a cognitive athlete perspective will impact, you know, possibly thousands and millions of dollars as a result. Right? So one of the first places that they begin is the sleep optimization perspective. And I work with tons of poker players in the management of that. And so I share that just because that’s a very tangible experience of at the table,

     

    you can either walk away with lots of money or not. And so it’s kind of entrepreneurial in nature, but you apply that in the high stakes of your days of your, you know, business interactions with people and just that cognitive ability to show up consistently and reliably, like, you know, so in the example of myself for years, I, there wouldn’t be accountable illness around how I would be when I’d wake up in the morning.

     

    It wouldn’t be like, Oh, okay. So for that next, really important client call or what have you, I will be bringing my a game. It wasn’t like that. It was like, I hope I get a good night’s sleep and you know that I can have that functionality. Right. Like, That’s me, I’m raising my hand. If you guys are watching the video,

     

    it’s like, this is me. Yeah, for sure. Yes, exactly. Cause that, you know, and there’s tons of studies that will point to this. So whether it just error rates, if you’re sleep deprived and the amount of errors that you might make, if you’re taking scent, you know, test, or this is important for pilots,

     

    you know, these would become life or death elements, but certainly from a productivity perspective, like you’re gonna have all your faculties available to you in those really times. So just to scale it back, I think of it as a couple of things. One, I think of it as super, super important for that productivity perspective. And also because I had so much of that mental health component in there with anxiety and stress and moodiness and crankiness and freak out,

     

    then, then with that just, it provides for me just a really important space to be at a equilibrium with how I’m approaching the world around me and stress levels and anxiety levels. And we can get into some of the wearable indicators for that. So it’s not so esoteric. It really has some kind of quantified data behind it. Right. Okay. So yeah,

     

    let’s go ahead and do that actually. Can you, I definitely want to talk about the wearables at the time of this recording. Probably if you’re listening to this six months or eight months from now, the wearable part will probably not be accurate enough today because the technology is evolving. And that’s what we’re kind of talking about behind the scenes, but let’s go ahead.

     

    Can you start just by sharing a couple of steps for those of our listeners who listened, they’re like, okay, this is, I am April right now. I mean, just tell me like, what should I be doing to get on top of this, the process of bringing this into order. Yes. Great. Okay. So step number one.

     

    What I actually say is despite the fact that a lot of what I’ll be talking about from the circadian rhythm kind of lifestyle perspective is that a lot of it’s kind of how to harken back to almost Hunter gatherer days and like, you know, aligning with sunrise and sunset. I’m not saying everyone needs to rise with the sun. I’m not making that at all,

     

    but I’m saying that there’s a lot of things we can do to bring about that workability with those rhythms of nature, because that’s going to really result in higher sleep efficiency and quality of our sleep. And at the very same time, despite the fact that I’m saying that I’m also gonna promote the marriage of technologies. And so much of this technology is at the source of our kind of being off-kilter with the,

     

    that relationship, ironically, then bringing in tech, I’ve found to really make a difference to game-ify this. So again, you know, down the road, you’re listening. What I would say is the first place to begin is a logging system of where your sleep is at right now is really, really eyeopening to people because often people say, I know I’m not sleeping well,

     

    but then we try to get up under will. How much, how many hours are we sleeping? What times are we sleeping? How many wake ups, what’s your sleep onset look like? All of these sorts of things. And a lot of it is like, well, I don’t know some gray areas, a lot of question marks because it is it’s,

     

    it’s such a hard area to track. So getting a proper or getting a sleep tracker of whatever at the time of listening to this is known to be one of the most effective on the market at the moment. Right. And follow them On Instagram or club ads. Cause I’m sure she’ll be up to date with this. So yes it is. She will.

     

    I’m sure be talking about what is the most up-to-date thing when you are listening to this episode? Yes. I’m often fondly known as gadget girl by the end of the clubhouse. So we were talking about that was my name and not from a perspective that these are infallible, there’s still things you don’t want to just blindly listen to whatever stats are coming back.

     

    You want to be aware of what they’re good at, what they’re not so good at, but either way, what they tend to be pretty solid at is are you asleep or are you awake? What time does that look like? But then also some health metrics that indicate the, your recovery that you attained throughout the course of the night. So all of those things will give us,

     

    you know, kind of a window or insight into your sleep. So I say, start with that first place because, and years back, what it was, one of the first recommendation was keep a sleep diary, you know, write it out manually. And now you could do that, but also, you know, to begin to start tracking, it will be automated for you and often provide a way more insight that you might be surprised by some blind spots.

     

    And along those lines, I have a question for you about one of those metrics with one of my slit trackers that I, that I had used in the past. And you mentioned it when, before we started recording this, which was heart rate variability, can you explain? I mean, I saw it on my sleep tracker. I, when I’m like Googling it online,

     

    it was actually really hard for me to understand why that was so important. Can yes, it was a one Oh one on that. I’m so glad you said that. So this metric, this one metric you could devote into multiple podcasts, there’s actually entire podcasts that just talk about how to kind of understand this one metric and influence it. You’re not alone in the confusion of it better.

     

    I’m like, why don’t I get it? So it, but it’s the reason why it’s I foresee one, it’s already ballooned in popularity around understanding this. And I foresee it being even more and more influential in our health. So the one, what is it? It’s heart rate variability HRV is basically the time interval in between your heartbeat and indicator of your recovery.

     

    So if you can think of heart rate as kind of your load, that’s put on to you, you know, moment to moment, then HRV is reflective of how quickly can you recover from moment to moment? So it’s recovery of both mental elements of recovery, but also physical elements of recovery. And that physical can be about like the foods you’re eating the workouts,

     

    you’re doing the air quality in your space, preexisting conditions that you might have going on. But then the mental component is really eye-opening to just how you’re relating to the world around you as entrepreneurs to, Oh my goodness. Like that can be really eyeopening. You get a lot of stuff on your plate and suddenly that that number will show that impact. And that can be a really cool way for those of us that might want to do that.

     

    Push through, push through mindset. And I’m so one of those to start to respect the importance for recovery time and almost relating to our body, like an athlete would to build in that really next level of recovery so that you can take on all the things you gotta take off. Okay. Yeah. And I can see that I do understand a certain aspect and the correlation of that because when I used to train for fitness competitions and we used to do the heart rate training,

     

    and when you know, between the things I was doing, like how fast would my heart recover between sets? And so is that kind of the same thing that we’re talking about here that’s happening in sleep that we’re measuring? Yes, exactly. So that’s why a lot of people are excited about particularly longitudinal nocturnal HRV. So there’s, you can measure, of course your HRV 24 seven and the nighttime HRV can be really eye-opening because that’s giving us an indication while there’s not presumably as much noise that’s happening because there’s a lot of noise on your measurement of your HRV during the day.

     

    Cause you’re, you’re eating, you’re, you’re talking, you’re working out all these things. Whereas when you’re sleeping, presumably that’s largely recovery time and that is what HRV is all about. But so if you wake up and traditionally, this is very simplified because there’s way more nuances to this metric, but often the higher it is from your baseline, the more recovered you are and the more you see it kind of dipped down,

     

    then that can often indicate that you are being more taxed, you’re stressed or you’re getting sick. So it’s actually really popular right now. That’s why it’s trending to with COVID that a lot of people are looking to this as indicators and days in advance of when you might even feel that you’re getting rundown, that that number is shifting. Then that can be a signal to really prioritize that recovery.

     

    So those are just some of the ways that you can relate to it. But in the practical application, what I see with my clients is so all the clients are wearing wearables. They’ll see, Oh my God, my HRV is really dipping like significantly. So then they’ll prioritize recovery from whatever that looks like. So if they’re big time athletes, then they will adjust their training to really lower that.

     

    And to take that off time, if they’re just entrepreneurs and they might kind of scale back some of their calls or what have you to really make a difference with that number and then get recovered in a way that can make a difference. The following day, That’s amazing. This is so much great information. Okay. So number one, log, make sure that we’re paying attention to what we’re doing.

     

    Get a wearable let’s, you know, we’re not going to do with the archaic way of tracking when we go to sleep. I mean, there is just absolutely so much data out there that I’m hearing you say that it’s important for us to track know and be able to understand so that we can adjust things. So what else would you recommend for those people who are listening after they go through these first steps?

     

    Like what type of common adjustments are typically? I know every single person is different, but are typically beneficial that you have seen with high performers and entrepreneurs. Yeah. So one asterisk that I would put for the wearables is just ensuring that you’re, we’re not getting like a no CBO effect by saying, Oh my God, I have so many friends that literally would come because I’m only getting 20 minutes of deep sleep,

     

    30 minutes of REM or whatever. And so one just know that as of, at least this time, the recording, most of the hand and wrist wearables, they are said so much great information. I love what is available there. And the sleep stage classification in particular. So knowing is this deep is this Ram is this light, it’s not the best.

     

    So to not get yourself all riled up around that part, instead focus on those basics that we talked about, what time did you go to sleep? What time did you wake up? And then some of those recovery metrics, so to stay in that zone. So that’s just my aspect around that. But then what I would say for, for all humans and particularly entrepreneurs is this concept of circadian rhythm.

     

    Entrainment is really, really valuable to have a framework by which you set up your days so that you can strengthen that circadian rhythm. So you can be like your husband, right. And just kind of the goal is to be like your husband and to basically wake up around the same time off to go to bed at the same time, all of that comes from that.

     

    So this is actually a term you can find in any kind of chronobiology textbook of understanding that you are in training your circadian rhythm, but that is from a number of what they call time givers that are external to you, that you are playing a role in from a behavioral perspective of getting so a couple of those that’ll just rattle off real quick. The top down most important one is light,

     

    particularly sunlight. And the timing of that. So if you get nothing out of what I’m saying, then I would definitely say that first thing in the morning, how to train yourself to get even just a few minutes. I mean, ideal would be more, but a few minutes of sunlight outside. And unfortunately behind a window, doesn’t really count. It counts,

     

    but takes much, much longer estimates with Jamie’s ICER out of Stanford, puts it at anywhere from 50 to a hundred times a longer to reset your master clock each morning, if you’re getting sunlight behind a window versus outside. So you want to just get yourself outside, but also expose particularly your eyes to that morning, sunlight, you know, you want it to be wherever you might be on the globe.

     

    We’re aiming for that to be in the morning hours usually before like 10:00 AM of getting that morning light. And the reason for that is that behind your eyes is the super charismatic nucleus, which is your master clock that influences all your peripheral clocks as to what time it is. And why that’s important is then a whole cascade of kind of hormones and functionality happened based on what time the body perceives it to be.

     

    And so we want it to be as consistent, those triggering systems as possible. So that’s that light in the morning and then dosing it throughout the day. But then you want as bright days as possible and as dim nights as possible. And when I say dim, it’s like post sunset, you want to be getting, I mean, really the, the actual recommendation is like candles,

     

    but I know that’s not always so practical. So even like, I got like red lights over here. So, you know, you can, that can be another thing that you can bring in if you’re not willing to do the candles. But so we’re looking for very, very dim lighting that allow us to have our cake and eat it too. So versus like how things used to be sun would set.

     

    We kind of go to sleep not long after for thousands of years now, we want to be able to still like, you know, do things, but we don’t want to impact our melatonin production. So that kind of red light candles or worst case scenario, incandescent lights that have more red in them, those can make a difference. So that getting that light right,

     

    and then the next step would be temperature. So being mindful of really having this arc of your body temperature throughout the course of the day. So high temperature throughout the day movement activity, eating, you know, having engaging in lots of dynamic, cognitively demanding tasks, all those things during the day. But then in the evening, shifting over to fasting,

     

    you know, relaxation, resting, connecting kind of calming everything down. So for entrepreneurs, what we do is create really like say layout of your day, where you have a set wake up time, he was set bedtime. And then from that place that had a Creek kind of two parts of your day, like a day mode and a night mode.

     

    And then even just these little things like understanding like, Oh my God, when I have my food will influence the timing of when I fall asleep. And when I wake up and, or the amounts of wake-ups that I have throughout the night, things of this nature can be super, super empowering for people I learned so much. I never knew that about the sun in the morning.

     

    Thank you so much. I’m like, literally I’m here taking notes. It’s just incredibly fascinating. And so the sun and the light, obviously all makes sense now that you explained that, but that would never be anything that would be, you know, just obviously common knowledge to those of us who aren’t experts like you. And so thank you so much for sharing that.

     

    Okay. You have given us a ton of information. I have one last question that I’m curious about how you’re going to answer. Obviously I don’t know it, and that’s why I’m asking it. Is there a minimum amounts of sleep that general and I’m sure everybody’s different, but generally speaking that you believe people need to function in a healthy capacity. Oh yeah.

     

    That’s the million dollar question. Everyone wants to know that one for sure. And you know, so some of the, the known recommendations are having us as it, a healthy adult, as it changes throughout the years, basically what age you are. But as a healthy adult than getting anywhere from seven to nine is the recommended amount that we’ll have thrown out.

     

    There are other people that will speak to that you can, for some people might make sense to be in the, you know, six is range and what have you, based on their, the quality of that sleep. So I will say that it’s kind of split on that, that topic, but certainly what you can do is through the tracking element of things,

     

    start to get up under that. The more we have some of these kind of top down, most important things addressed, then what often begins to emerge because, you know, sometimes you got to get past all of this sleep deprivation and built up time of variability, of sleeping all kinds of hours, and then not enough and ups and downs. So once we start having those structures often,

     

    what emerges is more of your kind of set point for your sleep at the age that you’re at and at the health level and energy expenditure that you’re at each day. So you can have a clear understanding of that once everything else just kind of falls into order as well, is what I’m hearing you say. Okay, I lied. I have one, one more question.

     

    Can you catch up on sleep? Mm, yeah. Good question. I know. Cause then it’s like that sleep debt topic was very popular for a number of years. So that is another one that is a bit of a point of contention, but there’s different schools of thought so well, if we go back to the conversation around dementia that you mentioned,

     

    that’s a really big topic that’s come out of. This looks like a really strong correlation between sleep deprivation and neurodegenerative disorders. So whether it’s Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s dementia, different things of that nature really linked because of the lack of proper cleaning. So glymphatic drainage was the coin, the term that was coined around this. So glymphatic drainage meaning versus lymphatic it’s glymphatic and glymphatic is the cleansing process of the brain each night during sleep,

     

    during deep sleep in particular. And what it’s doing is it’s basically rinsing out with a janitorial process of your brain, of the buildup of waste products in the brain each night. And that’s what amyloid beta plaques are. Basically what’s left over. It’s a kind of calcification in the brain if we’re not having that proper amount. So the concern, so the reason I mentioned that is that we don’t see a lot of great ways to counteract that.

     

    So say if you’ve been doing that for years and years, and there’s this buildup of this kind of a dirty brain, if you will, that buildup, and it’s very similar to brains that we see for late stage Alzheimer’s dementia or what have you. It looks a hand in hand and we don’t have a really strong way to then reverse that. So what I would say,

     

    even from that perspective alone, is that we don’t want to rely on this kind of messy relationship to sleep where I’ll make up for it on the weekends, or what have you, because also if we just get back to the basics of what we know for great sleep, that the more we have that variability and the up and downs, one of the term for it is actually social jet lag.

     

    And so social jet lag being this concept that, you know, Oh, around five days of the week, I’m really great with my sleep. I do pretty consistent, but then on the weekends, you know, I want to let loose and then you stay up late and it’s like three hours difference and, or more or whatever. And so with that,

     

    then it’s, you’re having the experience that’s similar to, from a biological perspective, similar to jet lag. When you try to get yourself back on your normal schedule on Sunday night or Monday or whatever, but you didn’t go anywhere, but you’re still having that negative impact on your body. So the long and the short of it is it doesn’t seem to be a reliable method to build that sleep debt and kind of knock it out by having these long stretches of sleep.

     

    Because then that also impacts cause quality sleep is a measurement of how your sleep was the night before the night before that. And they, before that. So it kind of all plays a role in there. So if you didn’t sleep so well, one night, often people will benefit from what’s known as kind of rebound sleep because you now, the body is really craving to get itself back on track and it will,

     

    you know, kind of greedily get the sleep staging that it needs, but you can’t rely on that as a sustainable element because then that throws off your circadian rhythm. And now you’re getting tired at the same time. And it’s so frustrating. Right? All of that makes sense. Oh, thank you so much. I learned so much today. Thank you so much for being a guest on the show and we’re going to make sure everybody knows how to find you in the show notes,

     

    but can you tell everybody who’s listening to this? Like, Oh my gosh, I need more of Molly. I need her help. I need her in my life. You know, what does that look like? How can people work with you more? Yeah. Well, number one, just thank you so much for having me. Thank you so much for your also just transparency and vulnerability about how you’re relating to your sleep.

     

    And, you know, just gives us all hope in these different periods when we are struggling to hear, okay, I’m not alone. Cause you know, that’s really what I was dealing with with my sleep. So, and it’s takes courage to share that cause you could be like, Oh yeah, I’ve got my whole life together. And dah, dah,

     

    dah. So, you know, I really, really admire that. So great work with that. And then yes, if you are struggling with your sleep, this is a real mission-based thing for me. so1@sleepasaskill.com, there’s lots of things that are available for free. We have a weekly newsletter, so I call it Molly’s Monday obsessions, cause I’m pretty obsessive about this topic.

     

    And so all of these, you know, things that I’m obsessing about in the world of sleep and also kind of asleep experiments, lots of graphs and fun charts and whatever. And so that’s every Monday when you sign up for that, you also get a free downloadable PDF. That’s optimized bedroom, how to optimize your sleep environment comes right along. And then we also have a sleep assessment that you can take.

     

    So whatever you’re dealing with with your sleep, then that will get you some kind of tailored advice around those areas. We have weekly podcasts with different sleep experts and you know, sleep tech and what have you. So all of that is available for free. And we put out a lot on social media and we’re really amping that up as well. And then if you are really struggling,

     

    you need more than that. Then we do have courses and one-on-ones and different ways of working together as well. Wow. All right. Thank you so much, Molly. I’m definitely going there and I appreciate your time and your expertise and pouring into me and our whole entrepreneur community. And I am sure that this is going to be an important topic. It has been,

     

    but really, as you said, moving forward. So we just really appreciate your expertise and, and being here with us today and it was such a pleasure to get to meet you same here. Thank you so much. You are welcome. Thank you.<inaudible> What a great show. Thank you so much for learning alongside me and hanging out. Most likely you knew a lot about this information.

     

    Probably a lot more than I did, but it’s just such a pleasure to, to learn. And I took a million notes if you’d like to join Molly and me in a clubhouse room where we are talking all about sleep, wearable technology and all these things so that you can function at your peak performance as an entrepreneur, whatever that looks like for you go to sweet life,

     

    community dot and There you can join by link our clubhouse club. You still need to join separately on clubhouse if you’re not a member, but you’re going to get an email with reminders and, and an invitation to this room with a direct link to this room. So again, you can go to sweet life, community.com to join our Sweetlife entrepreneurs club on clubhouse to talk to Molly live about this.

     

    And of course, all of the show notes can be found by visiting Sweetlife co.com click on the podcast. And this is episode number 218. Have a great day. And I’ll talk to you guys soon.

    Episode 169: How To Launch Your Services Online: Small Business Help Part 2 – with April Beach

    SweetLife Entrepreneur Podcast April Beach

    This episode is for those in Phase 1 – 2 – 3 – 4 – 5 of the Lifestyle Entrepreneur Roadmap™ Not sure what Phase your business is in?

     

    Episode Bonuses:

    Need faster business growth? Schedule a complimentary business triage call here.

    Who This Episode is Great For:

    This episode is for small businesses that want to launch live group coaching and need help getting started. Software makes up the nuts and bolts of your online business, but it tends to overwhelm some to the point of stopping. Trust me when I say that if I can use (and now teach on) software, anyone can! The important part is making sure the software you choose works for you! This show is for business owners who are considering building a group coaching program and want to make smart choices.

    Summary:

    How to build a powerful group coaching program.  In this show, I break down how to plan your group purpose, how to choose the best software, and how to bill, onboard and pick the best platforms for success. Every business is different and this episode helps you find the right answers for your business. We also discuss the power (and joy) of hosting live group calls and what types of entrepreneurs will thrive with this business offering. 
     
    Today’s episode will help you plan your group’s purpose, schedule, taking payment, onboarding customers and deciding the best platform for your group goals. 

    Highlights:

    1. Determine what type of group you’re building
    2. Choose the online platform to build your group in
    3. Set up how people pay you.
    4. Understand why AI plays a key role in customer satisfaction. 

    Resources Mentioned:

    SweetLife Podcast™ Love:

    Are you subscribed? If not, there’s a chance you could be missing out on some bonuses and extra show tools.  Click here to be sure you’re in the loop.  Do you love the show? If so, I’d love it if you left me a review on iTunes. This helps others find the show and get business help. I also call out reviews live on the show to share your business with the world. Simply click here and select “Ratings and Reviews” and “Write a Review”. Thank you so much ❤︎

    Need faster business growth?

    Schedule a complimentary business triage call here.

    Full Show Transcript:

    you’re listening to the sweet life entrepreneur podcast Simplified strategies to grow your service business and launch a life you love faster with business, mental and entrepreneur activator A probe age How you guys, um, welcome back to the show. You are listening to the sweet life entrepreneur in business podcast, and I’m a pro beach online business development expert in strategist, and I am here to help you continue to grow your current business online. Or for those of you who are interested in launching new online service is or a new online business.
    All of the show notes and the resource is that we have for you can be found by visiting Suite life podcast dot com Now on today’s show, we’re actually continuing a two part training that we started last week about how tow launch your online service is. This is something that is an amazing way to grow your business. It’s an important way to scale your business, meaning you could duplicate yourself and reach more people. Bye and launching online coaching, consulting and digital service is digital products, and we’re diving into the actual nuts and bolts of some things that you need to have in place to watch group coaching service’s and some different considerations based on the type of delivery that you may want to have.
    A CE faras sharing service is to groping people online. So this is perfect for you if you find yourself in a place where your company is ready to scale so you’ve reached capacity, meaning you can no longer see people face to face or one on one. And right now, if you’re listening to this riel time were stuck in this sad and funky Corona virus economy, so we can’t see people face to phase right now, anyway. And so it’s a great opportunity for you to continue to reach groups of people.
    Reach your audience, Reacher established customers gain more customers by launching Group Coaching Service’s. This is also perfect for you. Have you been thinking about hosting on online mastermind group? Or if you’ve been thinking about hosting instruction or some sort of training two groups of people at once, this is an ideal chauffeur you to listen to. All of the show notes will be found at Sweet Life, podcast dot com, forward slash 1 69 and for advanced business development coaching programs, courses and masterminds cruise over to sweet life co dot com,
    and there are a variety of opportunities for you to help you take your business to the next level Online over there for you. Okay, All right, let’s go ahead and dive into today’s business training. All right, As we’re talking about group coaching, it’s important to differentiate that the type of group coaching we’re discussing is different than if you were coaching a team. This is actually for those of you who are experts, mentors, leaders, skill teachers, coaches and consultants. And you want to host a group where each individual in the group has their own story,
    their own track. So it’s different than if you were coaching a team all for one purpose. To learn to do one exact thing. Group coaching is where you still have similar goals, and you have to outline the expectations for any grip you launch. But each person is creating their own reality out of the instruction that you are giving. So I just wanted to differentiate that here in the beginning, and there are generally two different types of groups that you can think about creating and you know, the sky’s the limit on this.
    But for the sake of this podcast in this training, this is the easiest way to just really move us along here and get your group coaching started faster. So the 1st 1 is instructional group in an instructional group is really where you are teaching strategies so people can take them, make them their own, apply them to their own life or their own business, and then move forward or the other type of group. Coaching can be community based, where you’re actually facilitating, Ah, place for people to work together,
    work amongst each other, really connect with each other over the similarity that they have in the topics that you are leading them with. And most group programs actually contain an aspect of both of that, whether it’s instruction the majority of the time. And then there’s a community component for an afterburn effect, or whether it is established within that particular group coaching program from the very beginning. Another thing I wanted to talk to you about is that if you are launching a course that a group of people are going to go through,
    that isn’t what we’re talking about on today’s show, but we’re really talking about live events where you’re coaching a group of people at a time. So I just wanted to clarify that before we dove into this particular episode now a couple reasons why this is amazing. First of all, one of my favorite things to Dio is to connect with people live in a group there, so much fire that goes around and passion, and people start talking and inspiring each other. It is one of the best ways to coach people,
    so I just wanted to share. Everybody’s experience is different, but it’s one of my favorite things to do is to see that happen based on the leadership that I give to a group of women entrepreneurs in. So if you are a type of business leader that your personality loves, that community loves mentoring and inspiring others. A live group program could be a really excellent business model for you know, we always want you to pick a business model where you’re happy and you thrive at what you’re doing, cause that’s gonna make you even better at what you already are in your area of expertise.
    So the first thing is to establish. What is the purpose of this group? Is this strictly for instruction? Is this a community based group?
    Am I delivering content on a certain schedule within this community? What are people going to expect out to be part of this group?
    And how should I set this group up for success again? It could be a combination of all these things.
    Or you can just host groups based on one of those aspects again, community instruction or content delivery. And so,
    after you’ve made that choice, step Number two is diving in and picking the platform. So where is this group gonna live?
    Where do you want to live there? So many options? The 1st 1 Let’s just get it out of the way.
    First is a Facebook group. You know, I hate Facebook groups, but I also have Facebook groups because they’re easy and people are there all the time.
    It’s hard to retrain an entire audience on something there, naturally doing everyday anyway. But Facebook groups have their pros and cons,
    and so that might or it might not be a good place for you to host your group, but I just wanted to mention that first,
    because it’s one of the first ones that people think of another option, which is doing a great job.
    It can be competing with Facebook, and we talked about this on the last few episodes. I’ve spoken about this platform a couple of times,
    but it’s called Mighty Networks. Mighty Networks is a super rad app. I will tell you I love being part of mighty networks.
    I’ve had my tea networks groups. It’s so nice because it gives me, like, a push notification on the sleep screen of my phone when somebody has posted to me and I can I can set up my notifications for that rather than having to go into Facebook and scroll through all my notifications that came from my sister and my cousin and my clients.
    It’s a terrible thing to do, especially for people like me that have at least 10 different squirrel moments every single day.
    It’s really hard for me to stave, bogus. And so that’s why baseball is another reason why Facebook is a terrible option for me.
    But Mighty host does a really good job of creating topics so people can communicate, and in post under them and taking people outside of really that cluster.
    You know what that happens inside Facebook? The downfall of that is there is no live streaming into my tea house.
    And that’s one of the reasons why I’m still in place because I love and you might love this, too.
    And this is thinking about how you want to connect with your group. I love being able to pick up my phone,
    click the Gold Life button and just be able to talk in there and say, Hey, how’s everybody doing today?
    That’s something that’s important for me. It’s something that my community expects and wants for me. And unfortunately,
    at the recording of this, it’s just not an option that’s available in mighty House. But I just wanted to share those two things because they’re the 1st 2 platforms that entrepreneurs usually hook on to.
    Mighty host does integrate with zoom so you can in bed video through zoom. But it still requires you to log on to a totally different platform rather than just clicking a go live button.
    And when you’re a busy woman man, every step counts, doesn’t it? All right, couple other platforms I wanted to throw out there for you.
    You’re gonna have to test which one you like. The 1st 1 we already mentioned is Zoom. I’m sure you know,
    zoom by now. There are two different types. Asim Platforms. As we mentioned on last week’s podcast,
    There’s Zoom Meeting and they’re Zoom webinar and they both have totally different functions. So it’s based on how you want those platforms to function,
    and you can use either one for group coaching. The other two are Google hangouts. I will admit I just attended my very first Google hangout last Friday,
    and I thought it would be a lot harder to get into Google hangouts. It wasn’t something that I ever felt like I wanted to even try.
    And there was a meeting that I wanted to connect with a group of really cool women here in Colorado from women who start up and they had a Google hangout and it was pretty cool.
    There were some downfalls to it that I didn’t like the fact that I couldn’t see everybody like you can in a zoom platform,
    but it was easy. It was easy for me to get on there and it was clearly integrated with my Google business email,
    so that was very simple, too. So Google hangouts could be something that’s may be a first step if you want to host community in Host group Coaching service is online and then the other one is crowd cast.
    I Love crowd cast. I’ve used crowd cast numerous times. It has a great integration feature where you can see people’s live chat,
    especially when you’re on crowd cast online. Unfortunately, crowd cast has had quite a few technical problems every time I’ve tried to use it.
    But you know what, ladies? That could just be me, because I swear there’s like some magnetic field around me that if some software or tech is going to break,
    it will break at some point in time on my watch. So it definitely could just be me. I love the way the platform works.
    I love the way it’s set up in that has a green room function. And so those are just some suggestions for you.
    I know a lot of the last podcast episodes. We have talked about software, and if you’re building an online business,
    it is software software are the boards and the foundation and the nuts and bolts of your house instead of just having a storefront.
    And so that’s why this software that you choose will make or break your business. And it’s not that it’s the software itself.
    It’s how you use this software, how you needed to function, why you’ve chosen that software and frankly,
    whether or not you know how to use it in a TV for you. At the end of the day,
    we want things that are easy, because then you will perform better and everything else that you d’oh So again I will make sure all of these resources are available for you in the show notes and links to try these things in the show notes for this episode.
    So if you haven’t ever gone a rich our podcast website yet, it’s really cool. It’s like a whole business resource center.
    We rebuilt it about a year and 1/2 ago for you guys in. You go in there under the show notes for this and has all these links to everything we talked about in the show in a whole bunch of other free business training that most business coaches charge thousands of dollars for.
    It’s a huge database of free stuff in there for you guys. So just cruise over to sweet life podcast dot com,
    and you can. You can grab all that and check it out. So we talked about number one.
    She’s in the purpose of your group number two. Choosing your platform. Granted, this is not an exhaustive list of platforms.
    I’m sure there are other platforms out there. These are just the ones that we tend to talk about the most with businesses that are growing and scaling online.
    The third thing is is to create a schedule just like the parameters that we set up in last week’s show about how to set expectations to establish your one on one coaching.
    Virtually the same goes with your group, so it’s important that you have a set schedule that people like you and like me about if you’re listening to the show about you’re a planner like I am,
    I geek out on my calendar that’s one across my wall, and I won’t commit to anything unless I know that I can fit it in my calendar in.
    So if those are the type of people you’re serving, then you want to make sure that you’re prepared and you have a schedule set out now where people register for your group.
    Coaching is really what I want to kind of drill into today. So some of the platforms we talked about have that built in where you can schedule your medians in advance in Zoom,
    and you can even have multiple mediums. Another place you can do this is if you choose to host your online group coaching in Facebook in a private Facebook group.
    You can also create events within Facebook and actually scheduled the events there within Facebook itself. So I just wanted to share that with you two options.
    Make sure you have a place where people can sign up. You have a software that gives them notifications and reminders to show up.
    Because Justcause people sign up doesn’t mean people show up into the end of the day. We want people to obviously show up,
    and so that is an important aspect of whatever software you choose. Make sure that you do have the ability to have people schedule online and get reminders so they will show up for you okay.
    And before we dive into step number four a little behind the scenes here, my husband and my three boys just got back from a long word skateboard ride,
    getting some fresh air, and everybody just came barreling through the door with their shoes and the dogs and the skateboards and everything.
    Welcome to my life. I love my life. Actually, I felt so blessed. But there’s a lot of noise in the background for all these podcasts were recording right now when everybody is home together.
    So thanks so much for bearing with me through that. So step number four is How will you, Bill,
    you got to make money, right? That’s why you do what you do. Yes. You probably love what you d’oh,
    but let’s make you some money so you can keep doing it and help more people. You need to decide how you’re gonna build for your group coaching program.
    Do you want to build once and they get unlimited access to all of your events? Do you want to set them up on a subscription where they’re automatically charged every two weeks or every week or every month?
    And of course, how you lay out your program. The content of what you’re delivering is gonna dictate obviously,
    how long this is gonna go. The point I’m making is it. We have to make sure that your software is set up to support you in this.
    We want to make it easy for people to give you money. Amen. Amen. OK, so this means that whether or not you choose Facebook or you choose zoom or you choose another platform.
    You know, you have to make sure that you’ve determined how you are going to build people, how frequently and how you’re gonna take money in depending on that platform,
    they either have that built in or they don’t. Now, this is a great advantage of mighty networks,
    mighty networks. You can actually receive payment through mighty networks, and everything is all in one there. Another reason why I do love that platform again.
    Nothing’s perfect. So you can’t go live in there. But maybe there are other things you could do to improvise that sort of connection with in your group.
    So I just want you to pay attention to how you’re gonna take money, how frequently you’re gonna build in the most common payment processors are stripe Pei Pao in some people even use square or square up,
    and each of those enables you to create a type of service. Now I’m can’t verify for sure if square up frankly allows you to create subscriptions.
    It’s not a platform I’m an expert in, but I do know that they allow you to charge and build for service is,
    and we have a lot of clients that you square up for. You know, even local service is like esta Titian’s.
    You square up to take payment and my eyelash girl use the square of today payment. And so if you have a one time payment,
    that might just be the easiest thing to do to get people to onboard to your group coaching program. If you’re looking for more of a subscription billing plan,
    then stripe and paper. How are your options? And they have those sort of different payment options integrated within them in those two platforms,
    integrate with most community online platforms as well. So number four the most important thing is make sure you know how you are going to charge people and make sure it’s easy for them to pay you in the last thing I just wanted to touch on.
    Gosh, I think it’s actually been a while since I recorded a whole entire episode on email marketing. Maybe it’s time.
    Message me. Send me a d M on instagram If you want more trains on email marketing email marketing is not your regular business email,
    so it’s not my email address. Email marketing is actually a c R E M. It’s client relations management system and the type of email marketing that I want you to think about.
    Having four group coaching is automated email marketing. This means that when somebody signs up for your group coaching program,
    they get automatic e mails. It’s like using a I. This is how we’re starting to integrate heart official intelligence into our online businesses.
    So the software knows somebody signed up and the software sends them an automatic email that’s written by you super personal,
    thanking them for joining whatever program that you’re doing, letting them notable what to look forward to and it’s automatically sent to them.
    In a perfect world, we want this software to send them a couple of different emails reminding them of the upcoming meeting,
    helping them get onto your platform. Whether that is how to get onto crowd cast or how to join our Facebook group or how to post a topic and mighty host.
    Whatever it is, we want your email marketing to create a relationship with them. Anto walk them on,
    boarding into your program in little teeny baby steps so that they feel super taking care of from this second they pay.
    We want to make sure that the second somebody pays you, they don’t have what most people have is like this momentary panic of buyer remorse where you’re like Oh my gosh,
    I should I should I should have done that, you know, we want them to immediately get any mail and in a perfect world,
    really be redirected to a page. It says, Awesome. And so glad that you’re here. I can’t wait to work with you or I can’t wait to have you join our program.
    This is what you can expect. This is where to go for questions. We’re here for you. We understand what you’re looking for.
    And we have paved the way for you to have an amazing experience in my group coaching platform or program or whenever it ISS.
    That’s why we need an email marketing manager. Now the reality is, is a lot of these platforms don’t have email marketing built in.
    So if you’re choosing these platforms based on the platform itself, it’s not necessarily in all in one. So you might have to go in source an email marketing manager and make sure it connects.
    Or it’s what we call integrates with your community platform of choice. And so listen, it’s like baking a cake.
    There’s 1000 different things that you can put into your set up to make it customized for you if you have questions about this.
    First of all, everybody has questions about this. This isn’t business strategy, you guys, that this is the nuts and bolts of business.
    I am happy to answer your questions about platforms any time I do answer questions about this and how to help you pick your best platform.
    Answer questions about this all the time. Cruise over to our podcast community, our Facebook community. It’s totally free,
    and you can go in there and just plug away any questions that you have, and I’m in there frequently supporting you guys,
    So just go to a sweet life community dot com, and it’ll redirect you to our Facebook community and you can ask any questions.
    So here on the podcast, let me just give you some samples of platforms based on the ones have talked about that have the most capabilities.
    So so far, based on needing to have a platform where you could deliver content, having a schedule that you composed,
    having a way to bill and having notifications go out, then mighty hosts is the way to go. That’s the Gold Star again,
    their downfalls like I still can’t use it because I really appreciate being able to go live with my community.
    I’m willing to piecemeal other parts of software together so that I could still go live with my community, but that might not be a big thing for you,
    so I just wanted to make the easy button up here that mighty hosts and granted, you have to pay for more bells and whistles,
    but is usually the way that businesses go when they’re creating community platforms and community coaching. So far, the other one that I’ve mentioned on other shows,
    which I haven’t had a chance to test yet. But when I first checked it out a year ago and loved it,
    I ran away because I looked to the price tag. It was like $5000 I’m not gonna pay $5000 to play with something.
    But they have a sense rebuild the platform and I can’t wait to get in there. And it’s called Disciple Media.
    In So Disciple Media, I think, has everything it did the last time I checked. Everything that that we want you are gonna play will pay more for it.
    So I will also go ahead and make sure that there’s a link to the new platform built by Disciple Media.
    So you can go in there and try that as well. So let’s go ahead. Let me just do a quick recap.
    You might be able to hear my dogs barking because, seriously, every single person walks by my house and I have a little Chihuahua that never stops parking.
    And especially now that everybody is going for a walk 20 times a day in my neighborhood, that damn dog just never stops working.
    So we’re just gonna push on, aren’t we ladies. Okay, so the recap for today’s show is how to watch your online group Coaching service’s again.
    This is perfect for you guys of your established businesses, and you want to reach more people you want to sell more.
    Service is you want. Establish your expertise or if you’re a new business and you just want to head out the gates with launching group coaching.
    I know that there are quite a few new businesses that have come through our doors in the last six months that are actually launching certification programs,
    so it doesn’t even have to be an actual business. It could be more of an educational certification based program.
    Yeah, group coaching is away, right? So first of all, we talked about platforms and making sure you’re choosing the purpose of your group,
    whether it’s instructional or community or, you know, just strictly sharing content or a combination of any of those choosing your platforms.
    We talked about Facebook groups, mighty networks, crowd cast Google hangouts and zoom. Those are the top ones that people seem to be going through.
    Currently, the recording of this we could probably record this same show in six months and I might give you a different list.
    Number two or diving in the next part is creating a schedule and making sure it’s easy for people to register.
    Easy for them to know what’s coming up again. The clearer in the more, the more simple you lay out your program,
    the more money you are going to make, the more people you are going to enroll the next episode making sure it’s easy to pay you,
    making sure that the experience of going online registering and pays you d picks the experience that you want to give your customers.
    And so you want the whole entire process to aligned with your branding your experience the way you want your customers to feel when they start working with you.
    So if you are a high end brand and you are delivering high end group coaching, you’re not going to take money through Venmo,
    right? Right. So we talked about stripe and papal integration and making sure that it’s smooth sailing there to set up subscriptions,
    accounts or one time payments. We also talked about square up and how that could be an auction for some people as well.
    And then we talked about email marketing to the extent that I would love for you, just a walk away with either new knowledge if you didn’t have this,
    or just reinforce knowledge to what you already know about how important it is to utilize a I in creating automated e mails that are going out to people who have already paid you to reassure them that they’re in the right place.
    So we don’t want any buyer’s remorse who want to create raving fans that are sharing how great it is to work with you over and over again with all of their friends.
    So that is today’s show. This is episode number 169 of The Sweet Life Entrepreneur podcast. Thank you guys so much for being here.
    If you have not yet. I would love it if you’d leave us a review on iTunes. That really helps other podcast listeners find our show.
    And it’s something that we really appreciate very much from you guys. So you could just cruise overto apple and leave us a review.
    And a lot of times we actually read these reviews live online, and we feature a business which is exactly what I’m going to do right now,
    all right? And this is so sweet. I just went over to pole are featured review this week,
    and all you moms will get this. My son Sam, I saw left me. Review. It’s up Sand Beach and says,
    My mom’s podcast. Love you, Mama. Five stars. So not my future business is weak, but that melts my heart.
    I do want a big C tour to five four for your review. Thank you so much for taking the time to come on here,
    You say. That’s so good. It’s like talking to a business Vesti really relate to our style of business advice and how protective she is over her audience.
    Just pinged a few episodes and I’m hooked. Keep it going. Thank you so much for leaving that review.
    That really means a lot, but I don’t know your businesses and I want to shout out and help you get eyes on your business is well,
    so if this is your business d m me directly on Instagram, you confined me at sweet life. Underscore entrepreneur.
    That’s my instagram account, where I share a lot of business and a lot of mom with three teenage boys.
    Life in de Emmy there and let me know your business so we can go ahead and make sure that we give you a shout right back out.
    See tour to 54 All right, you guys, thank you so much for hanging out with me on today’s show.
    Next week we have Sarah tomes are Facebook and Instagram ads expert back in the house, and she’s diving through the seven steps to set up your Facebook business page or fix your broken Facebook business page to make sure you are optimizing your results in the time you put in there.
    Next week’s show, All right.
    That’s all folks!

    Episode 157: How It’s Made: Behind-the-Scenes of the SweetLife Entrepreneur Podcast™ As It Turns Three Years Old – with Britany Felix and April Beach

    SweetLife Entrepreneur Podcast April Beach

     

    Subscribe: iTunes | Google Podcasts | Spotify | Android Devices | iHeart Radio | TuneIn | Stitcher | Facebook Messenger
    Episode Highlights:
    1. What it really means for my business to bring you this show each and every week so you can evaluate if a podcast is right for your business.
    2. The good, bad, and the ugly behind every aspect of the podcast and step in the process of making it.
    3. The free gifts I have for you as a thank you for making these past three years so special for me.
    Why This Episode Is Awesome:

    I love getting to pour into you every week and provide you with the trainings and guidance that helps you build your business and find lifestyle freedom.

    This podcast has allowed me to connect with you in a way nothing else has.

    That’s why I could think of no better way to celebrate our third birthday than by giving you a behind-the-scenes look at what it takes to bring you a new episode each week.

    And, I could think of no one better to help me with this than Britany Felix.

    Britany has been a part of this journey as my editor and producer since the very first episode. This podcast literally wouldn’t have launched without her and I’m so happy I get to celebrate this birthday with her and you, my amazing listeners!

    How to Take Action:
      1. Share this episode on social media, take a screenshot, and then email it to podcast@sweetlife.co by January 19th, 2020 to get free access to my Ideal Client Avatar Masterclass.
      2. When you do step one, you’ll also be entered to win a 2-hour deep-dive business strategy training session valued at $700!
      3. Join me in my business mentorship and mastermind, SweetLife Launch.

    [Tweet “I love getting to pour into you every week and provide you with the trainings and guidance that helps you build your business and find lifestyle freedom.“]

    Links Mentioned:

    The SweetLife Entrepreneur Podcast | Episode #00: Lifestyle Entrepreneur Manifesto

    The SweetLife Entrepreneur Podcast | Episode #87: Being Brave, Bold and Authentic to Connect with Your Tribe and Grow Your Online Business – with Amy Porterfield

    The SweetLife Entrepreneur Podcast | Episode #107: Are Online Courses Really Working? What Entrepreneurs Need To Know

    The SweetLife Entrepreneur Podcast | Episode #122: How To Choose An Online Business Model That’s Right For You

    The SweetLife Entrepreneur Podcast | Episode #146: How to Become A Speaker and Use Stages To Grow Your Business – with Pete Vargas

    The SweetLife Entrepreneur Podcast | Episode #151: How To Plan Your 2020 Lifestyle Business Calendar, To Live Your Best Year Yet – with April Beach

    April Beach on Instagram

    SweetLife Entrepreneurs Community on Facebook

    SweetLife Entrepreneurs Behind the Scenes on YouTube

    Airtable

    GarageBand

    Skype

    SquadCast

    Audacity

    Libsyn 

    you. You’re listening to the sweet life entrepreneur podcast simplified strategies to grow your service business and launch a life you love faster with business, mental and entrepreneur activator a probe Age. Wow. Wow. Wow. Okay, welcome to this show. It is episode number 157. Do you know what that means? I honestly didn’t even sink into me and tell the end of November when I was planning our podcast episodes. It is our third podcast birthday. We have been podcasting. You and I have been together.
    We’ve been delivering episodes to you every single week for three complete years. Like we don’t turn three until that year’s completed. Wow, I just can’t even believe that we’re here. To be really honest, this podcast has been such a blessing because it’s given me an opportunity to connect with you on a much deeper level than we can do through any social media. Even through writing a book, I’ve written two books. Nothing I’ve done in the past. His enabled us to break down the barriers between technology like podcasting does.
    And I am so grateful for you. Literally. I have some big gifts I’m giving you guys big gifts this week for our podcast birthday. It’s gonna be a celebration that want our week long. And I’m so stoked about that before we dive into this, it’s gonna be a little bit of a different episode today. A cool one. I hope you love it. That plan, because it’s a little bit longer than our normal episodes. So just a heads up about that. But it’s gonna give you some awesome insight,
    especially if you’re wondering what podcasting is like, what it’s like behind the scenes, how I plan these episodes, how it affects my life and my kids and my money and my travel in my sanity and my sleep and my systems and everything. We’re talking about everything behind the scenes here, but before we get started, I just want it. Bless you. Bless you. Bless you. This podcast would not keep going without you without you subscribing without you sharing this show with your friends without you sending me direct messages on Instagram saying,
    Hey, April what you said resonated with me. Those things hit home to me and want to get those comments from you buys when I when I see you sharing it or when I get an email that says, Hey, April, thank you so much for giving this training the way that you did and not charging for it. When I get those messages from you guys, it really keeps me going. That feedback is is so important, because this show really is a love offering and a labor of love for you.
    You know, before we started this show, I really felt strongly that any woman that wants to launch a business and grow a business deserved really trustworthy in free, proven, actionable business trainings. And that’s why I created the show in the first place is to make sure that there is good, safe, solid, trusted business coaching for any woman that chooses to watch and grow her business and design her life through entrepreneurship. And if you don’t know me yet, or maybe not that well, maybe your new listener.
    Thank you so much for tuning, and I’ve been coaching women tow, watch and grow their business for 23 years, and I’m an online business pioneer. I launch my first online courses back in 2008. Well, we were like duct taping stuff together and my core purpose is to teach women how to design their life through entrepreneurship. So this show really is an extension of my why. And it’s just all about you. So thank you so much for tune into it. And so I want to pour into you guys today immediately here on the show right away and bless you and give you gifts for our birthday.
    So let’s start out with that. And then we’re gonna dive into today’s episode, and then we’re going to give more gifts away at the end of today’s episode. So the very first thing is, I want to give you guys. If you are listening right now, during the time that we’re recording this show, so during our birthday week only, which means you’re a subscriber, you’re getting this podcast real time. So it’s January 13th 2020 through January 1920 20. So within this week, if you were in between January 13th and January 1920 20 you get Theresa.
    I talk about on today’s show. The first thing is anybody listening? I’m giving you completely free access to my ideal client Avatar. Master class. This is an amazing class and It comes with a huge workbook where you’re gonna be able to hone in and find your ideal clients. And what’s even cooler about this is when you’re done with this class, you’re gonna walk away with the copy written for your website Marketing copy Already planned out. It is a killer class and I’m giving you totally free access to it as our birthday present.
    How does that sound? So here are the rules. Every single person listening this week who follows these rules is going to get free access to this master class. The rules are number one share. This podcast episode even shared on linked in you can share it on Instagram. You can share it on Facebook. So I want you to share this podcast episode wherever you want to share. You can share in your instagram stories. And when you share it right, a little message or something about why you like this show.
    So people understand why the heck you’re sharing it. And you can also tag us If you’re on instagram at Sweet Life entrepreneur or at April Beach, you could find me that way as well. We’d appreciate you sharing it purposefully not just sharing whatever works for you and then take a screenshot of where you shared it. An email, your screen shot. Two podcast at sweet life co dot com. Okay, so again, sure. The episode Take a screenshot email the screen shot The podcast at sweet life coat dot com has to be This week has to be between January 13th January 19th and we’re gonna send you completely free access to my icy A My ideal client avatar Master class,
    which is like the gold standard Master class. If you are in a place where you are having trouble finding your clients or communicating with them or you don’t know what you’re niches, this is all for you. And then on top of that, one person is going to win a two hour deep dive business strategy training with me, and that is a $700 value. Okay, so share the episode, and then one person who does that and gets access yes to the master class is also going to get a two hour,
    totally free deep dive business strategy and planning session with me. So I hope that gets you totally excited, and I want you to listen to the whole inter show but positive show right now, and you can share it and send your screen shot and make sure that you get access and that you are intertwined The strategy session. Okay, so this show, like I said, it’s a little bit different. There is no one better that I could think about celebrating our third birthday with us, then Britney Felix.
    Britney Felix is our podcast producer, and I found Britney and you’ll hear a little bit about this story. I found Britney because, frankly, I had thought that I could produce his podcast myself. I was like a card. Could this be got into a very quickly and realize that? Yeah. No, that’s just not gonna happen. And so I immediately found Britney, and I will tell you this show would not have launched without Britney. Britney Felix is a podcast editor and consultant who founded podcasting for coaches,
    where she specializes in helping female coaches and consultants either launch a podcast for their business or improve their existing podcast so that they can develop relationships with their ideal clients, build brand awareness, generate new leads and making valuable networking connections she’s awesome. And so she is going to interview me on this week’s show, and we’re gonna share a lot of behind the scenes. You guys, we talk about what it really means to produce a podcast week in and week out. For those of you guys that are thinking about hot casting,
    I know a lot of people start podcasting and then drop out, which is not great for your brand. And so this show is gonna help you determine Maybe if podcasting can be part of your future can help you connect with your audience more. But then we’re also sharing the good the bad. Am the super duper ugly? You guys were gonna know how I cut corners behind the scenes when I choose guests and why I choose guests and why I choose certain guests over other guests. We’re totally getting into it,
    and we’re sharing the complete production. So I’m sure you exactly step by step how we produce this show, what I do in what order what we upload to wear and how the show is completely produced from the audio Thio, the research behind each one of the show’s toe actually marketing the show as well. So sit back. Grab a glass of wine. Celebrate with me. Thank you so much for being here. I appreciate you guys so much. This is sweet life Entrepreneur Podcast Episode number 157 and all the show notes can be found by visiting suite life podcast dot com forward slash 157 All right,
    you guys, this is a really special episode. And that is because we have reached our third podcast birthday. The Sweet Life Entrepreneur. A podcast is turning three this week. Maybe it was last week, someplace in the middle of this weekend, next week, and and that we’re just so grateful to you. This is a celebration episode, and I have Britney Felix on the show, and we’re gonna do something a little bit different today. First of all, as I introduced before, Britney is a reason why this podcast launched you guys.
    It definitely could not have gotten off the ground or continued to be produced. Especially which is the high quality and attention to detail that Britney and her team bring Thio Not only my podcast, to be honest, but like so many women’s podcasts, she’s just an icon in this space. And I’m so grateful to have her as part of our smart, hard 10 team bringing this show. And so we’re inducing a little bit different. We’re actually like flipping the interview. And Britney is gonna interview me on today’s show regarding how we go through and produce the sweet life entrepreneur podcast and also talk a little bit about behind the scenes of what it takes to bring this podcast to you guys for 157 episodes three years in a row.
    So thanks so much for being on the show. Britney and everything. You D’oh! Give everybody an intro. Dios. They don’t know you yet. Yeah, Thank you so much, April. I always love being on the show because you just shower me with compliments. And of course, that feels amazing. But I am thrilled to still be working with you three years later. This is kind of surreal to me. You are actually my very first launch client. So you’re the first person who’s client are who show I helped officially,
    like, launch into the world. So I consider the show a little bit of my baby as well and I really look forward to the information that you provide as a listener. Even so, even if I weren’t getting paid for it, I would still wanna listen to the show. Because I love the rial take and the raw information that you provide to people you don’t hold back. You’re no holds barred, and I just I love that there’s not enough of that in the world right now. Thank you so much.
    Thank you. All right, so this is gonna be a cool thing. Britney knows how hard it is for me. Toe. Create content and bring this episode to you guys. Sometimes it’s beautiful. Sometimes it’s really, really difficult. Usually that all spins around what’s happening in my life with my kids. Is most of you guys know been faithful listeners for three years, and so we’re gonna flip this a little bit and give Britney and opportunity thio kind of walk me through the steps as I share them with you on how we bring this podcast of life.
    So the first area we’re gonna dive into is actually the podcast planning process. And as we get into more of the production, then Britney is really gonna be able to share even more behind the scenes of what it takes to bring this show to you. So, Britney, you know, you see this planning process that I put together, You know what would be the questions that other podcasters or people considering podcasting might ask about the planning process. So one thing I would say is I see the end result of the planning.
    Basically, I see it when it comes on our spreadsheet. For those that aren’t aware of April’s process, we use a system called Air Table. It’s an online spreadsheet. Platform is completely free, and it just helps us kind of keep everything organized. So I see the topics that are going to be coming up. But I have no idea what goes into deciding what you’re gonna talk about and when. So what’s that process like for you? How do you determine what topics are gonna be discussed in what episode and how does that intermingle with what’s happening in your overall business in life?
    Great. Okay, so I have a four step planning process for this show. The first thing I do is I usually look at what’s happening with my business.
    So what programs do I have that air coming open? What sales do we have? You know, that might be happening in the Desert times throughout the year.
    What events, whether it’s a retreat or one of the mastermind events that we have happening. And then what’s also happening with my affiliate partners?
    Because I do have some other businesses away affiliate with that we support. So the very first thing I dio is I look at my whole entire 12 month calendar now as a reference point for you guys.
    If you haven’t laid out your 2020 calendar yet, gold back and listen to episode number 1 51 and actually give you the steps toe,
    lay out your whole 12 month calendar. And so I do that. And I’m pretty faithful about doing that because the purpose of what we’re doing here is to make sure that in a perfect world,
    it’s not always perfect. But in a perfect world, what I’m talking about on the show aligns with what’s happening in my business.
    Maybe, um, I’m opening a new program or it’s a new training course or it’s a new event,
    and so I want to make sure I’m talking about on the show what’s happening with what we’re offering and the extra help we’re giving entrepreneurs.
    And then the second thing that I do, which I don’t know if this is like what everybody else does.
    This is just my life, because everything I do is I actually look at what’s happening in my own life with my kids.
    You know, where am I gonna be? What is the season of that life? So, for example,
    my oldest son is graduating from high school this May. So the podcast episodes that I’ve artist sketch to talk about or what happens to you and your business when you know you’re not totally empty nest.
    But when your kids are starting to move on to what they want to do and you have a more of an opportunity to design a different version of your life,
    then you have for the last 18 years. And so that’s kind of how I am lined the episodes with what’s happening in my life.
    Also seasons, right? So is it summertime? You know, our people trying to plan a vacation in other happenings that are going on is far as trends in the year,
    for example, and this is just hypothetical. I don’t have this plant, but it would be like how to do a big you know,
    Mother’s Day sale. If that Mother’s Day is in May, then that would be a show that that I would plan to do and released in April.
    So I really kind of take a look at what’s happening in my life and what’s happening with what we’re offering and what’s happening within the sales of the year as well.
    And then I look at the needs of you, buys the listeners, and this is really what it comes down to.
    I can lay it all out here on the counter, and I think it’s a great idea. But what really is like the final check is what you buys need.
    And so we look at things very carefully. You’ve been listening to this show for a while. You know,
    we specialize in service based business development, whether it’s online or offline. Still, So what’s happening in the industry?
    What’s happening with online business? What’s happening with courses? Many of you might have heard the episode that I did last year and I’ll look up the episode and put it in the reference for you of the show notes.
    But it was like our online courses really working, and that was a really important episode to have because so many people have launched online courses.
    But at that time when we recorded it, the data was not great about how many people were actually buying and finishing them until that was an important show to host.
    So it’s kind of an example of what I look at what’s happening in the industry and in what you guys need,
    what problems need to be solved, what bottlenecks you guys were facing, what fears or different issues could be coming up.
    And I listened very carefully, toe obviously my clients to the women in my mastermind programs, to the women,
    my Facebook community and I pay really close attention to those of you who connect with me and share your problems and your issues.
    And I develop shows to solve those issues. And the final question I really ask is, what is the injuries?
    Olt of a show And I do that actually, even before I start recording the show. So you know What’s the Andrews?
    Well, what’s the final need? What’s the final goal or knowledge? Or a problem that’s solved at the end of recording a specific show?
    And then the last step I do as faras the planning process is I determine whether or not that particular episode is gonna be a solo at this old or whether or not it should be a guest that I should bring on the show.
    And I think, Britney, you think we’re probably about 50 50 solo and guest episodes. I don’t know what it works out to at the end of the year,
    because I know you kind of go through phases, which might be something else to talk about where you have mostly solo episodes for a month or two,
    and then maybe you have mostly interviews for a month or two, and I think that’s a deliberate choice as well.
    Yeah, yeah, I can definitely speak to that, and we’ll talk more about, like the recording schedule and the actual production process.
    But I d’oh, so I host a lot more solo episodes, usually before I’m about to open a registration for one of my master minds or registration to work with me in some capacity.
    I do that because it helps my audience connect with me more. And it helps me to really clearly communicate and help my audience and my clients to identify is is something they actually need help with before the opportunity arises as to whether or not they want to invest in themselves to get the solution to that.
    And so I feels, hear me doing a lot more solo episodes before my sweet life launch programs or before one of my master minded programs opens.
    But I look for a lot of guest episodes during the times where I know that I am almost totally out of office,
    and I think that’s what breaks easily, too. So it’s kind of brings us to our recording in production phase.
    So I am mainly out of office from June through August. This particular year. You guys, I don’t know how I’m gonna do it yet.
    Connect with me on Facebook or Instagram and and send me some encouraging mama entrepreneur vibes because and when I’m looking at my calendar,
    I’m pretty much traveling from May all the way through the end of August in although that you know, that’s a laptop life.
    That’s what we all want. It’s really difficult to maintain the podcast during those times, and so I have to be a super awesome planner to make sure that I have guests lined up and we’ve already pre recorded.
    So this kind of how this works for me, I usually have a week blocked off on my calendar.
    That is all podcast production week, whatever that week is. I do a very good job of not scheduling when I want private client meetings not filling out my calendar with anything else in that week,
    and it changes. It’s not always like the first or the third week of the month. It does change,
    but its planned well in advance in that week is just too match, recording with guests and producing podcast episodes,
    researching my own episodes and outlining my own podcast radiance that I host. So I do that one week a month,
    but I don’t record in June, July and August, so that means that I have to start batch ng really early,
    and this is for any of you have applied to be a guest on my show. Just know that so I’m already recording.
    You know, those summer show’s starting in the month of February were batch ing those. So I do have guests more often during the summertime when I’m not really there,
    and it just helps me to be able to serve our listeners more because I am that put in time,
    usually only working like a 15 hour work week and traveling around with my kids. I love that you do patching,
    and that is what I recommend any of my clients. D’oh! Because it really does help you get into this frame of mind where you can just knock all of these things out.
    And how great is it to know that you have your content for Well, you know, like three months plan now?
    And it’s not something you have to worry about when you travel, because I can personally attest to this.
    I actually, whenever I travel, I find it so difficult that I put my podcast on hiatus every time,
    every time, meaning whatever I travel for, like a month or two at a time, because I do that.
    So I think that it’s great that you planned this out ahead of time and it’s absolutely critical that is planned out ahead of time.
    There’s no way that you can start doing this even a month before you want to take off and travel like this or enter an extremely busy season where,
    you know, you’re just not gonna be able to put the time and effort into it, right? And I love Okay,
    So you guys that don’t know Britney yet you should definitely connect with her. She travels everywhere, and I think that’s why Britney and I work together so well together because she’ll send me a message or email usually is earlier she can and saying,
    OK, hey, I’m gonna be in Scotland for a month or whatever, you know. And so we worked together where she’s,
    you know, she might come to me and say, OK, April, I know your batch recording just wanted to let you know I’m gonna be out for this period of time,
    too. So let’s try to get in all your batch recording ahead of time so that so it works for both of our travel schedules,
    and I think that’s one of the reasons why she and I worked so well together. Very grateful for that because our lives are travel,
    lives are very, very similar. And, you know, I think that one of the things I do have to say that’s important about pre recording and connecting with the right audience is even though I’m traveling in June,
    July and August, I’m still working with clients. I’m still running my master minds and still coaching entrepreneurs.
    I’m still hosting my programs, and so all of my energy during that time is actually poured into direct work with the clients it that are in our community.
    And so it’s incredibly important to me to make sure that I have guests on the show that can keep pouring in at the level that I want for our listeners who aren’t yet in our community.
    And so I really try to seek out those gas that are experts in their space in order to deliver deliver shows that are timely for that time of year.
    So when I say I travel in most of you know this, it doesn’t mean I’m not working at all.
    It just means I don’t have extra time to be thinking about making sure we’re putting out great content on this podcast because that would be very,
    very difficult. I’ve never recorded a podcast away from home. I know many people do where they can,
    like recorded podcast in the hotel. It just doesn’t work for my creative mind. Like I need to be in my space,
    my creative space not staring at some, you know, hotel wallpaper in order to be inspired to create a show for you guys.
    And so I record everything here. I do not record on the go. I think that’s important to mention.
    Yeah, it is. Because you definitely can do this on the go. I mean, I know people who travel full time,
    as I’m sure you d’oh! And they still record content. So it is possible. But I agree.
    I do prefer to record a home. I have bought travel microphones. Ah, few different ones. And I take them with me planning to record,
    you know, maybe like a solo episode. And it never happens because it’s just I’m not in the frame of mind like you are.
    Yeah, and I think that that’s just knowing who you are. So if you’re thinking about starting a podcast and you’re wondering how you could do it or you can do it from.
    I think knowing how you best create content is a really important question to ask yourself before you decide that.
    Hey, I can record, you know, from the car. Or, you know, I could record anywhere.
    And so I think that’s just important thing. To know yourself well and to kind of get into that healthy ecosystem that inspires you to create really awesome stuff.
    And and this just happens to me, my home office space, you know, which obviously comes with its drawbacks because,
    for example, like when the kids were on vacation, a lot of shows, they’re like the dogs were barking and somebody is like,
    coming at last, have, like, 10 boys stop in through the garage and drop their skateboards everywhere.
    And and that’s just the way it is. And that’s actually in nature of this show, and so it doesn’t bother me,
    but that might not be a great thing for somebody else, depending on where you guys choose to record,
    right. So before we moved to the next phase in the process, I am curious when you do these batch recordings and you do emus faras a few months in advance.
    Are you ever concerned? Because I know this is something I hear pretty often about this information not being relevant anymore or about the links not even being good.
    A lot of people don’t think about that. You know a program no longer being available. Does that ever occur when you’re kind of planning out this process to think about that?
    Yes, 100%. And so the guests that I curate for the show. So if we backtrack a little bit,
    the first thing I want to clarify is that after I’ve determined the right episodes that you guys need to solve the problems that you’re currently facing in your business or the trends within the online business space,
    I then go to our guest application list, and I then look for guests that can solve those problems for you.
    So that’s my process of doing it. I’m very particular about who we curate and how we bring guests to you guys to pour into you.
    And if there is not a guest on my application list that I will go find one. We’ve had quite a few guests and show where I’ve hunted down and said,
    Hey, listen, my people need what you have to teach and I will go after them and I will personally find them until with that being said,
    when I talk about batch ing ahead of time. So with guests, I always make sure that anything they’re sharing it has to have longevity.
    If they’re launching a program or something that is timely in the show has to be produced and released on a certain amount of time in order to support them.
    That’s something that’s planned well in advance. So that’s something that’ll do with our affiliate partners. And we’ve done that in the past with,
    like, Pete Vargas was on the show because we supported his stage to scale method. But we had those plants planned well in advance,
    so I usually don’t bring guests on the show for the purpose of selling their programs. It’s usually for the purpose of pouring into our listeners to give them a skill set that they would normally pay thousands of dollars to learn.
    And then I love to honor our guests, however, though, that if we can figure out how to then give our our listeners the extra bump with having an opportunity to join their program.
    Then that’s planned really well in advance. And then for my own, you know, lengths and making sure everything is in a way that is always timely and always up to date for you guys.
    All of our things that we deliver to you are planned out for the whole entire year and very well in advance.
    And so I already know exactly what we’re delivering and when we’re delivering it and in what capacity and the links for those things.
    And I actually create them at the time that we produce the show. Okay? And I do actually want to go back really quickly to the planning session.
    We walked through your four step process there, but what does it look like when you actually sit down to record?
    Do you scripted out? Do you have a bullet list? You just kind of let it flow. What does that process look like for you?
    I love that question. Okay, so I outlined all of the business trainings, and then I research and make sure that I have all the most up to date data and then I’m delivering the best training that I can.
    And so it’s. It’s a lot of old school writing at first, and after three years of podcasting,
    you guys were totally gonna laugh at me. I have a five inch, three ring binder that is hand written notes for every single episode.
    It is so old school. It’s being born in 1976 and it comes naturally to me. And so I have notes,
    and I have pages and pages based on the training that I’m giving now 2020 I finally and Britney, I just sent this to you.
    With our most recent episodes, I’m finally and transferring the whole entire outline in outlining every single episode in Dropbox paper.
    So we use is for a software We use Dropbox in order to share files and produces podcast amongst our teams.
    And so I am riding out in outlining episode of Dropbox Paper, which does a couple of things. First of all,
    it’s not gonna go if my house ever burns down. Secondly, there’s a flight or something terrible. Secondly,
    yeah, I’m hoping that really helps Britney’s team to produce our show notes, and it helps my team to create the E mails in the articles and the Social media posts to produce the show because it’s directly coming from me instead of having people have to listen to the episode,
    go through the transcription and write a summary to the best they can. And so I just really started doing that.
    And I’m hoping it’s gonna be able. Thio Give our listeners even more thorough content throughout the week for every single podcast we’re producing,
    more in depth content, more steps and actions. So whether they’re listening to the show on audio or rather than reading the block post,
    which will be coming up with the block post for every single show as well, however, they like to absorb content,
    so that is my process of doing it. But it’s not just the process of recording the show. It’s for a much greater distribution process of the content to get an entire listeners hands that make sense.
    Yeah, no, definitely. And I appreciate you breaking down that process because I know for me, I’ve always been curious because I listened to the raw audio.
    I listen to it before, gets edited, and you were so well spoken, and if I didn’t know any better.
    I would think it was scripted and that you were like the greatest actress in the world because you just run through this content and they’re I mean,
    they’re almost no stumbles. Obviously, we all have our verbal ticks and things that we d’oh. But I mean,
    you just breeze through this content and I am always so impressed. Well, thank you so much. Yeah,
    I just I just want to talk our listeners through it. I think it’s important to talk to them just as if they were standing face to face with me in a live event I was hosting here in Boulder,
    Colorado, and I was teaching them the same training. So I do outline it, but nothing scripted.
    I don’t read anything. I have heard that before. I know there are some podcasters that even get like teleprompters to read through.
    I am not a great reader, you guys, I’ve never been a fast reader. It’s just not who I am.
    So if I Meridian something, it does not come out pretty out of my mouth, so that would not be a good option for me or somebody else.
    That may be great and that might be where they’re you know, they’re strength is for me. I just need to look at the outline and then I can teach the outline cause I will.
    And also, I should say this. I don’t record a podcaster. I don’t teach a podcast in an area where I am not very well qualified or an expert in right.
    I’m not just kind of like Polian podcast episodes and Training’s out of thin air and hoping to give somebody results.
    I really don’t teacher training and less. I have extensive experience in getting clients results in exactly what I’m teaching.
    I don’t have to go back through and read a word for word because I already know it. I just really need the outline to help my mind stay on task so I don’t go on too many tangents throughout the episode,
    which I still do anyway, changes their fun, though, so don’t get rid of all the tangent.
    Okay, but now that we’re in the process of talking about what it’s like when you sit down and record,
    why don’t you want the listener through what that is like recording your solo episodes and recording with your guests yet.
    So after I’ve outlined my notes with the sole episodes, I use GarageBand, Britney has All of our sounds are music,
    so she mixes it. So I just go through and I just record the hold. Everything in garage man,
    there are some times we all have to stop and delete in. Usually, I stop in the lead and start again.
    If I look at the timer on garage Band and I’ve been talking for eight minutes and I don’t think I made a point After eight minutes of talking,
    I will even look at me like, What did you just say? If in somebody’s valuable eight minutes of their time,
    it’s all totally start again. So I will say that that would be the time when I have to come back to the beginning and say,
    How can you get this message across faster without his many, you know, mumbo jumbo words? And so I’ll do that’ll take me a few times in Garage Band to go through that.
    But once I’m on a roll once, the show is usually with the intro. Once I’m on a roll.
    Michelle was started at Flo’s really Easy and Then I export and upload that MP three file to our shared Dropbox folder.
    And then I’ll shoot Britney and email and say, Okay, you know, 1 56 is in the box is really all the email says Our system is so smooth now I don’t have to send anything else to her.
    And she actually even gets probably a dropbox alert that I’ve uploaded it. So technically, I probably don’t even need to send her that particular email.
    And then when I’m recording with guests, I use Skype, which is super archaic. I will say that you guys,
    Skype is like, who uses Skype anymore? But we d’oh! And I know there are a lot of other podcasts recording platforms,
    so we get switched to. We’ve always used Skype. Our audio quality is really great on Skype, and so we continue to stay with Skye.
    But that’s certainly something that, you know, we revisit every single year. Britney and I have a conversation about that and,
    um, talk about if that makes sense, still to stay there and then with those files, I actually record video.
    So many of you guys might follow us on our YouTube channel where I share behind the scenes video of the podcast.
    Super funny. I even share like the pre recording time and all the bloopers and dogs barking and people spilling coffee and everything before we actually hit record.
    So if you’re a youtuber, you should check out the YouTube channel for the podcast and you’ll see those on there.
    But then we export split tracks and audio files and bring me Why is that? See, this is when we get into your area.
    Talk to me about recording this separate audio files on why that’s important. Yeah, so when it comes to recording multiple people,
    so even if you have a show where you don’t necessarily have a guest B of a co host. So anytime there’s more than one person and you have to use like 1/3 party recording program like Skype and the recorder that comes with it,
    squad cast is another one. Any of those programs you need to have each person on their own track because if you’re both on the same track and one of you coughs,
    for example, while the other one is talking, there’s nothing that can be done about that from an editing standpoint,
    that cough is gonna stay in there and live in that content and annoy the listener forever. But if they’re on a separate track literally,
    it’s a matter of just highlighting it. Clicking one button and that cough is gone, and no one knows that it ever happened.
    And it makes it a much, much more enjoyable experience for your listener, which should be just about your main ultimate goal.
    From this podcast. You want your listener to love your show. You never want them to be annoyed or think that it’s poor quality.
    Yeah, 100%. Thank you for taking care of all that for us. And then we. So we export this guy files same place,
    send him to drop box, and then Britney. Britney’s team produces them and and then she sends us a message back after the files have been produced and she and her team manage.
    Uploading it. Thio, do you want to share where we put our files and our distribution processes for us?
    The tech side to read me? Yeah. So what? This looks like in terms of what I do in this process,
    April sends me the files you know, she sends the email like she just mentioned, so that I know I can go and download them from Dropbox.
    I do all of my magic, the program that I used to edit. I have some other programs that are way more expensive.
    But audacity, which is a free program anyone can edit with it. There’s some basics you can learn.
    It’s one of the easiest programs to get started with, and that’s what I use for the actual content at its still as a professional.
    I have, like a $900 editing program that holds me clean it up, but I don’t do any of my contact editing in it because audacity is still better to use for that.
    So we put it all together with the music and the intros and the Outro owes. And then we have a final MP three file that we upload to April’s hosting service,
    which is listen, and that is who I recommend going with. Once we have that in there and reschedule for publication,
    it automatically pushes it out to every platform that April is on, which right now is every one of them.
    I’m pretty sure I don’t think we’ve missed one. So So we only have to put it in one place and then lips and sends it everywhere.
    So it’s not as complicated or difficult as some people think it is before they start a podcast. It’s not like you’re going and submitting this individual episode every single time toe all of these different platforms.
    Yeah, and just a little plug there. You guys, we are now on Pandora. I think we’ve been on panderer for a couple of months.
    So if you’re a Pandora listener and you have not searched podcasts, I know they’re really doing a big face lift to their home terrace.
    Sight, Please describe to us on Pandora. We would love to have more listeners over there because it’s a whole new podcasting platform That would be super cool for us.
    It is podcaster only available on Pandora’s mobile platform at the moment. Just kind of us. Enough. I gotcha.
    Okay. Cool. Thank you. Yeah. All right. So and then one of the things I wanted to mention about this,
    you know, this is when it comes to business delegation in the production, the podcast. There are some things as a business owner.
    You should totally delegate that somebody else could do for you and that somebody else should be doing for you.
    And there are some things as a business owner that make you happy. One of the things that make me happy that I could totally delegate is selecting pictures and selecting the photography for our podcast episodes.
    If you’ve ever been to sweet life podcast dot com, you’ll see there’s a lot of photography on that site because I think the photography tells a story.
    I personally choose every single picture for every single podcast episode. And if you’d haven’t noticed every single picture with maybe the exception of a couple and and it’s still in there somewhere,
    even if you can’t see it, it has water in it. And that’s just my brand. And it’s our company,
    and it’s the soul of our company is really the ocean. And so every single photograph will have some aspect of water in it someplace,
    and that just brings me joy away. And so I just wanted to share that you guys don’t. If you’re thinking about launching a podcast,
    you you don’t have to delegate everything and the things that make you happy? That’s an important part to mention.
    It just makes me happy. And so I do it. I’ve tried to delegate it before, and it made me sad.
    So I keep that in house after that. So the podcast goes to different places. What we talked about goes to Britney to produce it,
    and then the other half of it, which is the last part of producing this show, is I send it to my marketing in my content quarterback team and what that means is there so much podcast?
    There’s so much information. There are so many tips and there’s so many steps with an ever single one of the business training podcast that we now need to distribute it out and get in in the hands of everybody.
    And so that goes in their direction. And this is also an important reason why I need to match record because it makes everybody’s life better,
    makes Britney’s life better, that she has the audio files ahead of time. It also makes my marketing teams life easier because they already know that they have four weeks to create the content in the social media posts in the little video snippets and all these things that go out for every single episode well in advance.
    So when I do my job and makes it easier for everybody else to do their job, I will say that it is very hard to match record sometimes when things were going on with my life and my kids and when I’m doing a lot of traveling.
    So this fall I did not do a great job match recording. There were a couple times where I was getting Britney and episode look right on the deadline for her to be able to produce it.
    So it’s not always perfect, and I’m not always great at this. But when I am, my stress is much less in.
    Everybody’s able to do their job much better, and that brings us to that last part, which is the last part of producing the show is really the impact on you guys.
    I’m always asking myself, How can I make this show more impactful, more actionable, more usable, more simple for you to implement in your business?
    So how can I help you? Our listeners take the tree means and actually apply them to your business or help you to think or strategize or help you to turn your thoughts into reality based on each one of the episodes.
    And so a couple ways we’ve done this in the past, and we’re honestly, we’re always revisiting this to see what you guys are actually responding.
    Thio. So we’ve done live streams on Facebook. We’ve done weekly live streams on instagram. We’ve done behind the scenes videos like I mentioned in YouTube.
    We have published the full audio file in a video format to our Facebook page, and I also have hosted and still do.
    I host a monthly live question and answer business training session for those vests that are in our podcast insiders community.
    And so we try to make sure that we’re not just giving you the information, but we’re helping you implement it,
    because in the end of the day, this is for you. I heard you know all this. I’m the one teaching it.
    I’m not doing this for me to sit there and share a business training. It’s making sure that you,
    our listeners or getting the help in the support you need that honestly will have other business coaches charged thousands and thousands of dollars for in a way that you can actually them in your business right away.
    And that’s part of being a social entrepreneur. That’s part of our mission of the sweet life podcast is to give you guys trusted,
    proven business training center free and that you can take to the bank and applying your business right away. And so I Oh,
    the third part of this is just really asking ourselves, How do we help you implement it more? How do we help you actually use the content in the training that we have created?
    So before we wrap up, I have a couple of things that I am just curious about even myself,
    as someone who has seen you grow and this podcast grow over the past three years. And I’m sure your listeners a curious about this as well,
    especially if they’re considering starting their own podcast. What have been some of the biggest struggles or some of the biggest growth moments and opportunities over the past three years with this podcast,
    what have you really maybe learned the hard way and and now you know, you’re gonna take those lessons and move it forward to just make this podcast even better in 2020.
    Definitely scheduling and having to stay on top of my schedule in batch recording. That has been very difficult for me to d’oh.
    So that struggle number one, number two in the beginning. And I’m sure this before in the beginning,
    I thought that I could do everything myself, and I learned very quickly that I couldn’t produce the show without you,
    I didn’t get the first episode off the ground, so I identified very well that technology and April don’t get along that well,
    and I needed to get that off my plate. But then the third thing, I would say we’re just for me.
    Personally, I feel like I have grown as a leader in the fact that I have to be very clear about the injuries.
    Old I’m giving people from each episode. So in the beginning, and I don’t no, that I was quite is clear.
    And I still think that I have a lot of work to do to grow into this, but I’m trying to always share that in the beginning of every episode,
    you know, this is what you’re gonna learn This is the end result of hanging out with me for the next 25 minutes if you are in this place than you need this.
    So I’m trying to do a better job, actually communicating the expectations of listening to every single show and the better it outlining the show tree means I’m also trying to be a better speaker and not go on as many tensions.
    And that’s a little hard, because I I just wanna hang out with my listeners. You know, like I’m just talking just to you right now,
    and we’re just talking to one other person listening. It doesn’t matter who else is listening. We’re talking to the one person that is tuned into her computer or her phone listeningto us talk right now,
    and I really am striving to make sure it’s like we’re sitting across the kitchen table from each other. But she’s getting a kick ass business training for free,
    so I think I need to continue to work hard at being better at that, too. So you mentioned a little bit ago about outsourcing and figuring out what isn’t exactly your strong suit.
    I am curious, and I think that this is going to apply to more than just podcasting. This can work for a social media manager,
    a marketer via any of these things. We have had moments in the past to be, you know,
    completely real and honest, where because I think of a lack of communication, things just weren’t clicking between us,
    where we’ve had some tension in some moments of confusion. So what is that like? I mean, we have been working together for technically over three years at this point,
    and there have been times where you’ve had to set some boundaries. I’ve had to set some boundaries, but I love that we do it in such a respectful way.
    At least I feel so that it doesn’t really impact our working relationship. And even, you know, at this point,
    I consider you a friend. So what is that like? How do you navigate that world of outsourcing and working with in other people’s boundaries while also still making sure that you set your own?
    Mmm, That is a very hard question. And honestly, answer it. So I am not a great delegator.
    I am an entrepreneur. My who I am and my strength that completely into that entrepreneur personality and that is creating and teaching and,
    you know, mental rain. When it comes to stopping to think about what I need and then creating a system for it to delegate it,
    it’s something that I’m really, really bad out. And so when I bring somebody on board my team,
    I have Thio have a very healthy understanding that I’m bringing like you onboard this team because you know more about this than I do.
    I don’t have to know everything about everything. And so when you say this is how this has to be and as long as I understand the why behind it,
    then I submit to you in that because I’ve given you that place of authority and my company and on my like extended team because,
    you know, and I don’t in. So although it pisses me off that I don’t know everything, and sometimes it really hurts and ruffles my feathers when you’re like April,
    you have got to get this episode in right now or whatever, you know what I mean? I need that and that’s why I hired you.
    And I think that all women, as they’re growing their team. They should have a healthy level of respect for the people that they bring in their team.
    You need to take the time. If you identify like me that you’re not a great delegator. Understand that you’re not a great delegator because therefore,
    you need to be a better communicator because you understand that you understand that you might not be a great delegator,
    and there has to be this incredible level of trust and mutual respect. The other thing that I will say is that you know,
    when you’re growing your team, a lot of people start out bringing people on their team, especially women as their best friends.
    And you can’t be too nice, but they’re overly nice. Let’s have coffee. Let’s take our kids to the park or whatever,
    right? You’re hiring somebody to do a job. And so I think that friendship develops after the establishment,
    and that’s what I’ve found. Two. Because I used to do that all the time, and it was very hard to then draw find hard lines in the boundaries between Frank,
    my team. So I used to want to be in everybody’s best friend and they could come over for dinner and you know all those things in a night In the last five years,
    I haven’t grown my team that way. First, I hire somebody for their area of expertise, and then we develop mutually respectful,
    you know, boundaries in a relationship. And then the friendship grows like you went and saw Jacob dancing on the dance with me.
    I mean, the way we do stuff together, that’s a business relationship. And I will say this,
    you guys, this is why you see men do a better job growing teams and women, cause we all just want to be already is friend.
    But it comes down to the bottom line of getting a job done in finding the right person that believes in your mission that believes in what you’re doing.
    The resonates with the purpose behind what you’re producing, whatever that may be, and that they have the right area of expertise.
    If you do all those things, the friendship’s gonna come out of that. But that’s where I believe that it starts.
    Okay, so as is the case when I normally interview someone, this is going on a little bit long.
    So let’s wrap this up here and I am curious. What are your three favorite episodes from the podcasts over these last three years?
    Okay, I’m so glad you asked me that. So I have to say, in year one, my favorite episode that we did is still the podcast trailer.
    It’s episode number 00 if you guys haven’t listened to it before, I cried in that thing like I was so moved and I was so determined to get this podcast off the ground It totally start crying in it.
    And I remember reaching out to Britney and being like, I can’t do this. This can’t be the trailer.
    And you’re like, No, this is the trailer were producing this and this is in the beginning, we were producing this.
    This is what we’re putting out there because this is who you really are. April. It’s just like six minutes long.
    It’s my lifestyle entrepreneur manifesto because all of it is still so true. And it’s just everything this partner.
    So I love that one. I would say in 2018 it was pretty awesome having Amy Porter field on the show,
    and I really love that one. That’s episode number 87. If you guys haven’t heard that one yet.
    I love that one because I had known Amy for a few years before we recorded that episode, and I was able to get her on the show and talk not about online courses or marketing until was a really cool show for her to share some vulnerability.
    That show is about being brave and bold and being authentic to communicate with your TRIBE. And I loved the opportunity also for Amy,
    but then for us to see and hear her talk about things she doesn’t always talk about on her own podcast.
    And so I really liked that one. And then for 2019 this shows that I’m a business modeling geek.
    It’s definitely number 122. How to choose the best business model for your life because I think that’s way where it needs to start.
    For all of you guys, if you don’t choose the right business model the build you’re gonna be totally miserable.
    You could even make all the tea in China, and you’d still be miserable if your business model isn’t right.
    So it would be episode number 122 from this year. Awesome. Well, I know that you have some incredible listeners,
    and you have an audience that absolutely adores you. And I don’t know why they wouldn’t. So is there anybody that you want,
    Thio particularly give a shadow too? Yes, In here something. It’s so hard just to pick a couple.
    And so I’m just gonna read some reviews for those you guys that have taken a chance. I’m to leave us some reviews on iTunes,
    and I would just appreciate you guys being listeners. So much. So the domestic diva said this podcast is informational,
    interesting and educational. Thank you so much for posting this violet. And I really, really appreciate that.
    We’re going back, like, a couple of years, too. And, uh, see, Nam Lee said this is just what everybody who needs a business who’s starting a business needs step by step all the tools at your fingertips making it clear and easy.
    I absolutely love this. Jay said Creative, informative, very enlightening. You totally have to check this out.
    And then Caroline Cole said April is terrific. Tune into your strategies you can use immediately to move the needle on your life in your business.
    Well done, April. I do appreciate you guys so much. There are so many reviews on here.
    It was really hard, really hard to pick. I will say one more from Lila Davidson. She says she loves his podcast for its practical on actionable advice,
    and she finds a pro to be more personal than some personable than some other podcast does with the Miller content is probably because I tell why let all my dirty laundry behind the scenes,
    I could relate to her mom, entrepreneur and sensibility and reminders on keeping things real as we work hard and build our businesses.
    And so, Lila, thank you so much for taking the time to write that review and all the guys,
    if you haven’t reviewed us yet on Apple, we would totally love it. And thank you so much,
    Britney. We have to give, like, clap my golf club behind the scenes. You guys wouldn’t have this show without Britney.
    And so for our third podcast birthday, stay tuned here after we wrap up and we we say goodbye to Britney and I’ll be giving you a bunch of information.
    That, and gifts and cool things that you guys can take with you after today’s show. So thank you,
    Brittany. I appreciate it. Of course. Thank you. April. Thank you so much for sticking around at the end of this episode.
    I know it was longer than most far our episodes. I appreciate you so much more than me sitting here can say in this Mike.
    But when I record this show, I don’t imagine myself speaking to hundreds of thousands of people that have downloaded this show.
    I just imagine sitting here like me and you with a glass of wine woman to woman talking about business,
    talking shop and me pouring into you every time you connect with me on instagram or you share this show with your friends.
    I see that on on the other side, too. And I just fully appreciate it so much. Your support for the sweet Life entrepreneur a podcast.
    I am some massively awesome episodes plan for you guys in 2020 who? Just wait where I really get your business to the next level.
    I’m so excited to pour into you in 2020 and beyond. So as we talked about your birthday present,
    the sweet life podcast is giving you a birthday present. I’m giving you completely free access to my ideal client Avatar Master Class.
    This is an hour long training and a complete workbook to help you hone in on your ideal clients really decide on your niche and actually write the copy that could go on your website and in all of your marketing,
    so that you can make a ton of money. That’s the thing. When you get your messaging right,
    that’s when your business is just catapulted to the next level. And so I’m giving you completely free access to my eye.
    I see a master class, and one person is also going to receive a free to our deep dive business strategy session with me,
    which is $700 value. So in order to get the free master class and have an opportunity to work with me totally free in the deep of strategy session,
    here’s a recap. This is the three short steps you need to do Number one share this episode and number two take a screenshot of what you’ve done sharing this episode.
    Then number three email s your screen shot to podcast at sweet life co dot com. But the rule is you have to do that this week,
    so this is only valid. January 13th through January 1920 20. So that’s rule. So I appreciate you guys.
    Thanks for tuning in to the show. All of the show notes can be found by visiting Suite Life co dot com and again email your screen shot of your share to podcast at Sweet life co dot com.
    Thanks so much.
    No more resu

    Episode 156: How To Create Your 2020 Strategic Plan: A Guide For Lifestyle Entrepreneurs – with April Beach

    SweetLife Entrepreneur Podcast April Beach

     

    Subscribe: iTunes | Google Podcasts | Spotify | Android Devices | iHeart Radio | TuneIn | Stitcher | Facebook Messenger
    Episode Tools:

    Join Commitment Week 2o20

    Episode Highlights:
    1. What a strategic plan is and why you need one for your business.
    2. The three steps to identifying your strategic plan.
    3. The five core areas you should focus on when creating your strategic plan.
    Why This Episode Is Awesome:

    You’ve been dreaming big and know that the next decade will define your life, you just may not know exactly how yet.

    Now is the time to claim your leadership, influence, and role in your own future – and that starts with your business.

    Based on what we’ve seen the past few years and what the trends and research tells us about the next decade, there are five core areas you should be focusing on when planning for 2020 and beyond.

    This podcast episode will help you lay out your strategic plan to kick start your best decade ever.

    How to Take Action:
      1. Join Commitment Week 2o20
      2. Take the Lifestyle Entrepreneur Roadmap Quiz to find out where you’re at in your business so you know what to focus on in 2020!
      3. Join me in my business mentorship and mastermind, SweetLife Launch.

    [Tweet “You’ve been dreaming big and know that the next decade will define your life, you just may not know exactly how yet.“]

    Links Mentioned:

    Mel Robbins

    April Beach on Instagram

    Episode 155: Clear Space To Make Big Moves In 2020: Detox and Declutter Your Business – with April Beach

    SweetLife Entrepreneur Podcast April Beach

     

    Subscribe: iTunes | Google Podcasts | Spotify | Android Devices | iHeart Radio | TuneIn | Stitcher | Facebook Messenger
    Episode Tools:

    Take the Lifestyle Entrepreneur Roadmap Quiz to find out where you’re at in your business so you know what to focus on in 2020!

    Join Commitment Week 2o20

    Episode Highlights:
    1. Software recommendations that will help clean things up in your business.
    2. Routines that will help you get in the flow of a clean mind and business and remove distractions.
    3. Different ways this podcast and the SweetLife Entrepreneur community can help you move into 2020 in an intentional way.
    Why This Episode Is Awesome:

    As a mom who owns two companies and has three boys, the reality is that sometimes my life gets a little messy.

    Unfortunately, this carries over into my businesses and I just can’t do great work or produce very well when things are cluttered and disorganized.

    I know you’re planning big things for 2020 so, if you’re anything like me, let’s help declutter your business so you can focus on the things that will bring you those big results.

    Whether you’ve just gotten your first idea for a business or you’ve been in business for years, this episode is going to help you sort through the mess in your mind, clean-up your business, and start this next decade off on the right foot so it can change the course of the rest of your life.

    How to Take Action:
      1. Take the Lifestyle Entrepreneur Roadmap Quiz to find out where you’re at in your business so you know what to focus on in 2020.
      2. Join us for Commitment Week 2020.
      3. Join me in my business mentorship and mastermind, SweetLife Launch.

    [Tweet “As a mom who owns two companies and has three boys, the reality is that sometimes my life gets a little messy.“]

    JOIN COMMITMENT WEEK 2020

    Links Mentioned:

    SaneBox

    Unroll.Me

    13 Outlook Productivity & Organization Tips

    3 Differences Between Goals and Intentions

    Marie Forleo

    Kookslams on Instagram

    April Beach on Instagram

    Episode 151: How To Plan Your 2020 Lifestyle Business Calendar, To Live Your Best Year Yet – with April Beach

    SweetLife Entrepreneur Podcast April Beach

     

    Subscribe: iTunes | Google Podcasts | Spotify | Android Devices | iHeart Radio | TuneIn | Stitcher | Facebook Messenger
    Episode Tools:

    FREE LIVE WORKSHOP: How to Plan Your 2020 Lifestyle Business Calendar to Live Your Best Year Yet

    Episode Highlights:
    1. The five steps to plan your entire 2020 lifestyle business calendar.
    2. Behind-the-scenes examples of how we’ve personally done this as a family for the past five years.
    3. Details of the FREE bonus you get for being a member of my community.
    Why This Episode Is Awesome:

    This is a time of year where we’re spending a lot of time focusing on giving gifts to those around us, but I want you to use this episode as a time to focus on giving yourself a gift that will last you all throughout next year.

    Taking the five steps mentioned in this episode will help you have a business that will finally allow you to have the freedom lifestyle you’ve always wanted.

    How to Take Action:
      1. FREE LIVE WORKSHOP: How to Plan Your 2020 Lifestyle Business Calendar to Live Your Best Year Yet
      2. Begin working your way through the five steps mentioned in this episode to create your 2020 lifestyle business calendar.
      3. Join me in my business mentorship and mastermind, SweetLife Launch.

    [Tweet “Taking the five steps mentioned in this episode will help you have a business that will finally allow you to have the freedom lifestyle you’ve always wanted.”]

    Links Mentioned:

    Speakers Summit Mastermind

    Taki Moore

    April Beach on Instagram

    Episode 138: How to Reset & Refocus Your Business for the Next 90 Days

    SweetLife Entrepreneur Podcast April Beach

    Subscribe: iTunes | Google Podcasts | Spotify | Android Devices | iHeart Radio | TuneIn | Stitcher | Facebook Messenger
    Episode Tools:

    Join the Reset & Refocus Challenge to get your FREE action planner!

    Episode Highlights:
    1. Why it’s so important to Reset & Refocus right now.
    2. The five core areas to Reset & Refocus in order to maximize the next 90 days.
    3. The free tools I have available to you so that you can Reset & Refocus.
    Why This Episode Is Awesome:

    You’ve spent the last few months traveling or transporting your kids to all their summer events and you’re needing to back into your business flow now that they’re back in school, but how? Over the past several years, I’ve developed a way to do exactly that.

    Last week was my annual Reset and Refocus Challenge that I do every August with my community. This is honestly something that I have to do every single year in order to make sure I make the most out of the next 90 days.

    In this episode, I’ll be explaining the five core areas we covered in the challenge this year so you can do one of your own.

    How to Take Action:
      1. Join the Reset & Refocus Challenge and download the FREE action planner.
      2. Watch the video for each core area of the challenge as they get delivered to your inbox over the next five days.
      3. Join me in my business mentorship and mastermind, The Committed.

    [Tweet “You’ve spent the last few months traveling or transporting your kids to all their summer events and you’re needing to back into your business flow now that they’re back in school, but how?”]

    Links Mentioned:

    The SweetLife Entrepreneur Podcast | Episode 125: What You Absolutely Must Know About Facebook And Instagram Marketing Right Now – Part 1 – Sarah Tomes

    The SweetLife Entrepreneur Podcast | Episode 126: What You Absolutely Must Know About Facebook And Instagram Marketing Right Now – Part 2 – Sarah Tomes

    The SweetLife Entrepreneur Podcast | Episode 130: Instagram Marketing: How To Set Up Your Profile and Use Hashtags – with Jenn Herman

    The SweetLife Entrepreneur Podcast | Episode 131: Instagram Marketing: Creating The Right Content To Grow Your Followers and Build Your Business – with Jenn Herman

    The SweetLife Entrepreneur Podcast | Episode 132: Break The Fake: How To Be Authentic and Transparent On Social Media To Grow Your Business – with Brian Fanzo

    The SweetLife Entrepreneur Podcast | Episode 133: The Power Of Superfans: How to Create A Community Of Superfans Who Love And Follow You Forever – with Pat Flynn

    April Beach on Instagram

    Episode 114: How To Get Press, Stand Out, And Become An Industry Influencer – with Selena Soo

    Selena Soo SweetLife Entrepreneur Podcast April Beach

     

    Subscribe: iTunes | Google Podcasts | Spotify | Android Devices | iHeart Radio | TuneIn | Stitcher | Facebook Messenger
    Episode Tools:

    Watch Selena Soo’s FREE Publicity Training:

    From “Best-Kept Secret” to Industry Leader:
    3 Publicity Secrets to Multiply Your Revenue, Reach More People, and Change the World

    Episode Highlights:

    1. What publicity does for your business, no matter what phase you’re in.
    2. The struggles I experienced getting press during the beginning phase of my company.
    3. The importance of relationships and connecting with other people when it comes to getting publicity and growing your business.
    Why This Episode Is Awesome:

    In order to become the go-to expert or influencer in your space, you need publicity.

    That’s where Selena Soo comes in …

    Selena is a publicity and marketing strategist for visionary entrepreneurs, experts, and authors who want to reach millions with their message.

    Selena has helped clients and students get featured in places like O, The Oprah Magazine, Forbes, and INC. and land interviews on popular podcasts and national TV.

    Selena’s signature approach comes down to building powerful and long-lasting relationships with influencers in the media in a thoughtful, authentic way.

    Many of Selena’s clients have become industry leaders with seven-figure businesses, raving fans, and hundreds of thousands of followers.

    How to Take Action:
      1. Watch Selena Soo’s FREE 3-part video series, How to Crack the “Publicity Code” and Reach Millions
      2. Share this episode with someone who would benefit from having publicity for their business as well. Bonus points if you tag me and Selena on Instagram when you share it!
      3. Join me in my business mentorship and mastermind, The Committed.

    [Tweet “In order to become the go-to expert or influencer in your space, you need publicity.”]

    Links Mentioned:


    Selena Soo’s Website

    The SweetLife Entrepreneur Podcast | Episode #00: Lifestyle Entrepreneur Manifesto

    Episode 113: 4 Key Areas To Create Space In Your Life, So You Can Grow Your Business – with Corie Clark

    Corie Clark SweetLife Entrepreneur Podcast April Beach

     

    Subscribe: iTunes | Google Podcasts | Spotify | Android Devices | iHeart Radio | TuneIn | Stitcher | Facebook Messenger
    Episode Tools:

    Download Corie Clark’s strategy sheet, 5 tips to SIMPLIFY YOUR LIFE starting today

    Episode Highlights:
    1. How to create margin in four different areas of your life; your health, home, finances, and time.
    2. Five different ways to simplify your life.
    3. The connection between mental, physical, and spiritual health and the success of your business.
    Why This Episode Is Awesome:

    If you want to start or grow a business, you need to make room in your life for entrepreneurship.

    That’s where this week’s guest comes in …

    Corie Clark is a business educator, creator of the Purposeful Planner, author of The Simplicity Project, and host of the Purpose with Corie Clark podcast.

    Corie loves not only helping others find their purpose but equipping them to live it out and turn it into a profitable business.

    Today, Corie and I will be discussing all about how you can create the margins and space in your life so you can grow your business.

    How to Take Action:
      1. Download Corie Clark’s strategy sheet, 5 tips to SIMPLIFY YOUR LIFE starting today
      2. Do an evaluation of the four key areas discussed in this episode to see where you can begin to create margins in them.
      3. Join me in my business mentorship and mastermind, The Committed.

    [Tweet “If you want to start or grow a business, you need to make room in your life for entrepreneurship.”]

    Links Mentioned:

    Corie Clark’s Website

    Corie Clark’s Shop

    Corie Clark’s Book | The Simplicity Project

    Corie Clark’s Podcast | Purpose with Corie Clark

    Corie Clark on Instagram

    John J. Ratey’s Book | Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain

    The SweetLife Entrepreneur Podcast | Episode 02: Don’t Make Perfect the Enemy

    April Beach on Instagram

    April Beach on YouTube

    Episode 111: Simple Steps To Create The Systems You Need For Profit And Productivity – with Kate Erickson

    Kate Erickson SweetLife Entrepreneur Podcast April Beach

     

    Subscribe: iTunes | Google Podcasts | Spotify | Android Devices | iHeart Radio | TuneIn | Stitcher | Facebook Messenger
    Episode Tools:

    Take a listen to Kate’s entire podcast season on creating systems for your business.

    Episode Highlights:
    1. Five simple, yet effective steps to create systems that build efficiency and profitability in your business.
    2. The three options you have for making the completion of a task more efficient.
    3. The importance of actually outlining the process for completing tasks.
    Why This Episode Is Awesome:

    Kate Erickson is a creator, engager, and implementer at Entrepreneurs On Fire, which is an award-winning podcast where John Lee Dumas interviews inspiring entrepreneurs every Monday and drops value bombs every Thursday. She is also the host of the podcast, Kate’s Take, and co-author of The Podcast Journal.

    Kate is passionate about helping entrepreneurs create freedom in their business and life through developing systems and processes that can help their business scale and grow.

    I’ve personally been learning from Kate for years and one of the things I love about her is her ability to break things down in a way that’s easy to understand and implement.

    If you’ve been trying to build a business but you don’t have the systems in place to gain traction, Kate’s simple strategies are sure to help.

    How to Take Action:
      1. Take a listen to Kate’s entire podcast season on creating systems for your business.
      2. Complete the five steps Kate listed in this episode and let me know on Instagram how they’ve helped you become more efficient and profitable.
      3. Join me in my business mentorship and mastermind, The Committed.

    [Tweet “If you’ve been trying to build a business but you don’t have the systems in place to gain traction, Kate’s simple strategies are sure to help.“]

    Links Mentioned:

    Entrepreneurs on Fire and Kate’s Take Podcasts

    The Podcast Journal

    Episode 110: Stop Second-Guessing and Start Profiting: How To Own Your Productivity – with Amber De La Garza

    Amber De La Garza SweetLife Entrepreneur Podcast April Beach

    Subscribe: iTunes | Google Podcasts | Spotify | Android Devices | iHeart Radio | TuneIn | Stitcher | Facebook Messenger
    Episode Tools:

    Get Amber De La Garza’s FREE High-Value Activity Identifier

    Episode Highlights:
    1. A discussion of how the way you’re supposed to be productive might not work for you and why that’s okay.
    2. How to use what does work for you already when it comes to your productivity.
    3. The four productivity buckets you must fill in order to be profitable.
    Why This Episode Is Awesome:

    You can’t expect to be profitable in your business if you’re not productive first.

    Amber De La Garza is The Productivity Specialist. She’s a sought-after coach, trainer, speaker, writer, and host of the Productivity Straight Talk podcast.

    Amber helps driven entrepreneurs execute actionable solutions to maximize your profit, reduce your stress, and make time for what matters most.

    In my conversation with Amber today, she’s breaking down the four “buckets” you need to fill in order to be productive and profitable.

    How to Take Action:
        1. Get Amber De La Garza’s FREE High-Value Activity Identifier.
        2. Take the SweetLife Entrepreneur Self-Assesment to see what phase of business you’re currently in.
        3. Join me in my business mentorship and mastermind, The Committed.

    [Tweet “You can’t expect to be profitable in your business if you’re not productive first.“]

    Links Mentioned:

    Amber De La Garza’s Website

    Amber De La Garza’s Podcast | Productivity Straight Talk

    The SweetLife Entrepreneur Podcast | Episode #02: Don’t Make Perfect the Enemy

    Episode 108: Stop Consuming, Start Creating, and Mother Like a Boss – with Kendra Hennessy

    Kendra Hennessy SweetLife Entrepreneur Podcast April Beach

     

    Subscribe: iTunes | Google Podcasts | Spotify | Android Devices | iHeart Radio | TuneIn | Stitcher | Facebook Messenger
    Episode Tools:

    Join me in my brand new business mentorship and mastermind, The Committed.

    Episode Highlights:
    1. The importance of setting boundaries for consumption time and creation time.
    2. The biggest problems that result from not setting proper boundaries.
    3. Kendra tips for setting boundaries in your work and life and how for sticking to them.
    Why This Episode Is Awesome:

    Kendra Hennessy is a mother of two, a home management expert, the Founder of Mother Like a Boss, and the Host of the Mother Like a Boss podcast.

    Kendra’s mission is to redefine homemaking in the 21st century and make the difficult and tedious parts of running a home smoother through systems, routines, and mindset shifts.

    In this episode, Kendra and I take a deep dive into the importance of having boundaries both at home and in your business. This is especially important when it comes to being specific about when you’re going to consume information and when you’re actually going to create things for your business because, as Kendra says …

    “If you’re in consumption mode, you can’t be in creative mode.”

    How to Take Action:
      1. Join me in my brand new business mentorship and mastermind, The Committed.
      2. Follow both @sweetlife_entrepreneur and @motherlikeaboss on Instagram to check out our live later this week!
      3. Say no to at least one thing this week.

    [Tweet “If you’re in consumption mode, you can’t be in creative mode.“]

    Links Mentioned:

    Kendra Hennessy’s Website

    Kendra Hennessy’s Mother Like a Boss Podcast

    Kendra Hennessy’s Blog

    Kendra Hennessy’s Courses

    Kendra Hennessy’s Free Vault

    Kendra Hennessy’s Community

    Episode 107: Are Online Courses Really Working? What Entrepreneurs Need To Know

    SweetLife Entrepreneur Podcast April Beach

     

    Subscribe: iTunes | Google Podcasts | Spotify | Android Devices | iHeart Radio | TuneIn | Stitcher | Facebook Messenger
    Episode Tools:

    Download the Guide to Disrupt Your Course and Help Your Students Succeed!

    Episode Highlights:
    1. The % of people who actually complete online courses.
    2. Do you have or are you launching online courses? What you need to do.
    3. Questions to ask yourself when deciding if an online course will help you grow your business.
    4. Why I’ve completely turned my 2019 business model upside down, because of this shift in online courses.
    Why This Episode Is Awesome:

    Listen, I love online courses as much as the next gal. I honestly, I’m sure I love them even more because online courses are how I’ve built my business and lifestyle for 11 years.

    I’ve been creating and selling online courses since 2008 and it’s what I teach my clients to do, but …

    The online course world is changing and, if you don’t change your approach, you’re going to be left behind.

    Whether you’ve already created a course, you’re in the process of creating of creating one now, or you’re planning to create on in the future, you’re going to need the information in this episode.

    How to Take Action:
      1. Download my Guide:  Disrupt Your Course and Help Your Students Succeed!
      2.  Join a free webinar I am teaching to help you get the results you want.

    [Tweet “The online course world is changing and, if you don’t change your approach, you’re going to be left behind.“]

    Links Mentioned:

    Free Webinar: The Status Of Online Courses and What You Need To Know

    Why No One Finishes An Online Course—And Why It Doesn’t Matter by Tyler Basu

    MOOC Completion Rates: The Data by Katy Jordan

    Episode 101: Want to Travel with Your Kids? Follow Our Family Entrepreneur Yearly Planning Guide

    This episode contains explicit language.

    SweetLife Entrepreneur Podcast April Beach

    Subscribe: iTunes | Google Podcasts | Spotify | Android Devices | iHeart Radio | TuneIn | Stitcher | Facebook Messenger
    Episode Tools:

    Download April Beach’s Life-First Yearly Calendar

    Episode Highlights:
    1. An explanation of why being intentional with your plans for 2019 can make help your business be more successful.
    2. A breakdown of the five steps that will help you maximize your time and efforts in 2019.
    3. How the Beach family utilizes this method to plan out our lives and businesses a year in advance.
    Why This Episode Is Awesome:

    It’s taken me 15 years to perfect the art of being able to plan out an entire year of my business ahead of time.

    Today, I’m sharing what I learned over all that time so you can know how to do the same thing!

    While planning out an entire year ahead of time can benefit everyone, it’s especially critical if you’re planning, launching, or have already launched your business but feel a little over the place.

    Here is a little secret for you …

    In order to create a life-first business, you actually have to put your life first.

    I know that can seem scary when you’re not making money yet or not hitting your financial goals but it’s incredibly important to the success of your business.

    What better way to put your life first than by actually scheduling right into your business?

    In addition to helping keep your priorities straight, planning all of 2018 ahead of time, will help you stay focused, know exactly what to work on and when, allow time for professional development, and have more control over your schedule.

    How to Take Action:
    1. Download April Beach’s Life-First Yearly Calendar
    2. Join us for Entrepreneur Commitment Week 2019
    3. Post a picture of your 2019 calendar on Instagram and tag @sweetlife_entrepreneur

    [Tweet “In order to create a life-first business, you actually have to put your life first.“]

    Links Mentioned:

    SweetLife Launch: 3 Month Business Mentorship

    SweetLife Entrepreneur Self Assessment

    Episode 97: Don’t Use Block Calendar Strategy? It Might Be Costing You Money

    Sweetlife Entrepreneur Podcast April Beach

    Subscribe: iTunes | Google Podcasts | Spotify | Android Devices | iHeart Radio | TuneIn | Stitcher | Facebook Messenger
    Episode Bonus:

    Download My Block Calendar Cheat Sheet

    For busy women, with awesome companies.
    Episode Highlights:
    1. A breakdown of exactly what a block calendar is.
    2. An explanation of the most common “blocks” to put in your calendar.
    3. Tips for how to handle the items that come up throughout the day that don’t fit into your current block.
    Why This Episode Is Awesome:

    Block calendars are used to block off times in your week for focused work and they are one of the most effective tools you can have in your productivity toolkit.

    They allow you to focus your time and energy on one thing at a time, help you say no to “shiny object syndrome,” and enable you to rebound more quickly if you do become distracted.

    Using a block calendar will help you take massive action and increase your productivity in ways that will help you see immediate results.

    How to Take Action:
    1. Download My Block Calendar Cheat Sheet
    2. Watch the YouTube video below to hear how a block calendar changed our lives and helped us out of a very stressful time
    3. Determine the blocks that should be on your calendar

    [Tweet “Using a block calendar will help you take massive action and increase your productivity in ways that will help you see immediate results.“]

    Links Mentioned:

    SweetLife Entrepreneur Podcast | Episode 04: The SweetLife Entrepreneur System

    SweetLife Entrepreneur Podcast | Episode 05: Become More Productive Right Now

    Evernote

    Episode 96: 2019 Business Plan: 5 Steps to Plan for the Year You Really Want

     

    SweetLife Entrepreneur Podcast April Beach

    Subscribe: iTunes | Google Podcasts | Spotify | Android Devices | iHeart Radio | TuneIn | Stitcher | Facebook Messenger
    Episode Tools:

    Download: 2019 Business Planning Action Guide

    Episode Highlights:
    1. A breakdown of the 5 core areas to consider when creating your 2019  business plan.
    2. Examples of how planning for each core area will set you up for success before the year even begins.
    3. How my action plan will help guide you through the process of planning for 2019.
    Why This Episode Is Awesome:

    If you haven’t thought about what your life and business will look like in 2019, now is the time.

    Even if you feel you’re so busy you don’t have the time to sit down and plan out your year, you’re wrong.

    Laying the foundation now for what you want next year to look like will make all the difference as you grow your business and work toward your dream lifestyle.

    Investing the time now to create a 2019 business plan, will save you time and frustration in 2019.

    How to Take Action:
    1. Download: 2019 Business Planning Action Guide
    2. Take a listen to The SweetLife Entrepreneur Podcast | Episode #46: The Template to Design Your Year for Profit, Family, Impact & Travel
    3. Share a picture of you working on your 2019 business plan on Instagram and tag me: @sweetlife_entrepreneur

    [Tweet “Investing the time now to create a 2019 business plan, will save you time and frustration in 2019.“]

    Links Mentioned:

    The SweetLife Entrepreneur Podcast | Episode 95: How to Create a Keyless Life And Live Like A Chillpreneur – with Denise Duffield-Thomas

    Episode 95: How to Create a Keyless Life And Live Like A Chillpreneur – with Denise Duffield-Thomas

     

    Denise Duffield-Thomas Sweetlife Entrepreneur Podcast April Beach

    Subscribe: iTunes | Google Podcasts | Spotify | Android Devices | iHeart Radio | TuneIn | Stitcher | Facebook Messenger
    Episode Tools:

    Take Denise Duffield Thomas’ FREE Money Blocks Workshop

    Episode Highlights:
    1. An explanation of what a keyless life is and why it’s so important for entrepreneurs.
    2. Specific incidences and examples of different ways you can start developing a keyless life.
    3. The importance of not overcomplicating your business.
    Why This Episode Is Awesome:

    As a money mindset mentor for a new wave online female entrepreneurs, Denise Duffield-Thomas helps women release their fear of money, set premium prices for their services, and take control over their finances.

    Like most entrepreneurs, Denise found herself bogged down with the minute tasks, daily frustrations, and shiny object distractions … until she realized she was going about it all the wrong way.

    When it comes to business, perfection isn’t the goal.

    Take a listen to this episode to hear how Denise came to this realization and how the concept of a keyless life changed everything for Denise and her family.

    How to Take Action:
    1. Take Denise Duffield Thomas’ FREE Money Blocks Workshop
    2. Check Out Denise Duffield Thomas’ Books
    3. Take a screenshot of this page, share it on Instagram, @sweetlife_entrepreneur and @denisedt and let us know you’re keyless life hangups or hacks

    [Tweet “When it comes to business, perfection isn’t the goal.“]

    SEE THE BEHIND THE SCENES VIDEO RECORDING HERE

    Links Mentioned:

    Denise Duffield-Thomas’ Website

    The SweetLife Entrepreneur Podcast | Episode 84: Inside The Life Of An Entrepreneur’s Kid – Interviewing My Son Tim Beach

    Episode 91: Saying Yes With Purpose: Setting Boundaries to Make Your Solopreneur Business Thrive – with Regan Walsh

     

    Regan Walsh SweetLife Entrepreneur Podcast April Beach

    Subscribe: iTunes | Google Podcasts | Spotify | Android Devices | iHeart Radio | TuneIn | Stitcher | Facebook Messenger
    Episode Tools:

    Download Regan Walsh’s Guide: 3 Life-Changing Ways to Shift From Survival Mode to Purpose Mode

    Episode Highlights:
    1. How this expert life coach designs her own life; including her strict rating system for deciding which opportunities to pursue.
    2. How Regan coaches her clients to take control and organize their life and business.
    3. Regan’s mission to give away a million dollars by the time she’s fifty.
    Why This Episode Is Awesome:

    Regan Walsh is a mother of two, speaker, and an NYU certified Life Coach whose gift is helping women get from a point of total survival mode to walking into their purpose.

    She is a contributor to Forbes and the Harvard Business Review and has also been featured by Elite Daily, Bustle, FabFitFun, Smart Business, and more.

    If you’re feeling overwhelmed and like you’re doing 1,000 different things without any of them actually moving forward towards your goals and purpose, this is one you won’t want to miss.

    How to Take Action:
    1. Download Regan Walsh’s Guide: 3 Life-Changing Ways to Shift From Survival Mode to Purpose Mode
    2. Connect with Regan Walsh on Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook.
    3. Visit Regan Walsh’s Website.

    [Tweet “Regan’s gift is helping women get from a point of total survival mode to walking into their purpose.“]

    Links Mentioned:

    The SweetLife Entrepreneur Podcast | Episode 02: Don’t Make Perfect the Enemy

    Flying Horse Farms

    Besa

    Greg McKeowon’s Book | Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less

    Episode 87: Being Brave, Bold and Authentic to Connect with Your Tribe and Grow Your Online Business – with Amy Porterfield

     

    Amy Porterfield SweetLife Entrepreneur Podcast April Beach

    Subscribe: iTunes | Google Podcasts | Podcast Addict | iHeart Radio | TuneIn | Stitcher | Facebook Messenger
    Episode Tools:

    Check Out Amy’s Free Webinar: The Ultimate List Building Catch-Up Plan

    Episode Highlights:
    1. How Amy develops her own content and how she teaches others to create content to build their first online course.
    2. Amy’s advice on how long you should wait before creating your first online course.
    3. Why being vulnerable and transparent helps you connect with your tribe, and how Amy practices this in her own business.
    Why This Episode Is Awesome:

    Amy Porterfield has worked with mega-brands like Harley-Davidson motorcycles and peak performance coach, Tony Robbins; where she oversaw the content development team and collaborated on groundbreaking online marketing campaigns.

    Amy inspires over 250,000 online entrepreneurs through her bestselling marketing courses, thriving social media community, and popular podcast; Online Marketing Made Easy.

    Even though I’ve been creating online courses for a decade, it wasn’t until I connected with Amy two years ago that I finally streamlined my systems and lowered my “workload”.

    Whether you’re just starting to launch your first online course, or you’re a course creation veteran like me, you’re going to learning from Amy.

    How to Take Action:
    1. Check Out Amy’s Free Webinar: The Ultimate List Building Catch-Up Plan
    2. Take a listen to Amy’s Online Marketing Made Easy Podcast.
    3. Find out What Phase of the SweetLife Entrepreneur System You’re In

    [Tweet “Even though I’ve been creating online courses for a decade, it wasn’t until I connected with Amy two years ago that it all finally clicked.“]

    Links Mentioned:

    Amy Porterfield’s Website

    Online Marketing Made Easy | Episode #179: The Real Truth Why I Hate Video (Hint: It’s My Weight)

    The SweetLife Entrepreneur Podcast | Episode #65: Doing Things That Don’t Scale – with John Lee Dumas

    The SweetLife Entrepreneur Podcast on Instagram

    Episode 85: Back to School Business & Family Reset – with Suzanne Brown

     

    Suzanne Brown SweetLife Entrepreneur Podcast April Beach

    Subscribe: iTunes | Google Podcasts | Podcast Addict | iHeart Radio | TuneIn | Stitcher | Facebook Messenger
    Episode Tools:

    Download: Suzanne Brown’s Know Your Why Guide

    Episode Highlights:
    1. Suzanne’s thoughts on why routines, especially at bedtime and in the morning, are critical for keeping your family organized.
    2. Suzanne’s tips for staying focused and maintaining your new routines.
    3. Why Suzanne’s advocates for outsourcing certain parts of your daily or weekly routines.
    Why This Episode Is Awesome:

    It’s that time of year when our kids are getting a fresh start by heading back to school. It’s also the perfect time of year for our families to get a fresh start as well.

    Implementing strategies and structures as a family as your kids head back to school can lead to less stress and more revenue.

    This week’s guest, Suzanne Brown, is a strategic marketing and business consultant, work-life balance speaker, and the author of Mompowerment: Insights from Professional Part-Time Working Moms Who Balance Career and Family.

    If you’re finding your home to be a little chaotic with the start of a new school year, take a listen as Suzanne shares structural systems and formulas for ways we can capitalize on the current season we’re in and how we can leverage these systems, both for our business and our family.

    How to Take Action:
    1. Download Suzanne Brown’s Know Your Why Guide
    2. Explore More SweetLife Entrepreneur Podcast Episodes
    3. Follow the SweetLife Entrepreneur Podcast on Instagram

    [Tweet “Implementing strategies and structures as a family as your kids head back to school can lead to less stress and more revenue.“]

    Links Mentioned:

    Suzanne Brown’s Book | Mompowerment: Insights from Professional Part-Time Working Moms Who Balance Career and Family

    Suzanne Brown’s Blog

    Suzanne Brown on Twitter

    Suzanne Brown on Facebook

    Suzanne Brown on Instagram

    Suzanne Brown’s TedxSMU Talk | It’s Time to Create Professional Part-time Working Mom Opportunities

    Episode 83: How to Clear Mental Space with a Creative Entrepreneur Cleanse with Cindy Van Arman

     

    Cindy Van Arman SweetLife Entrepreneur Podcast April Beach

    Subscribe: iTunes | Google Podcasts | Podcast Addict | iHeart Radio | TuneIn | Stitcher | Facebook Messenger
    Episode Tools:

    Download: #CreativityCleanse Strategy Quadrant PDF

    Episode Highlights:
    1. Cindy’s system for clearing mental space and getting your business, and personal life, organized.
    2. What to do with ideas that aren’t a priority now, but that you’ll want to explore further in the future.
    3. Why you need to have something that allows you to walk away from your business for a little while and helps you come back recharged.
    Why This Episode Is Awesome:

    We’re approaching one of my favorite times of the year.

    The kids are heading back to school (or three different schools in my case) and we can start shifting our focus back to our businesses.

    However, sometimes coming back to a business after a hiatus can be chaotic or overwhelming.

    As this week’s guest says, “Chaos is nothing but fear. That’s what overwhelm is.”

    Cindy Van Arman is a highly sought-after accountability and kick-you-in-the-butt speaker who is super passionate about empowering solopreneurs to get stuff done and giving you the tools you need to conquer overwhelm.

    In this episode, Cindy shares with us her proven system to help open the space needed to finally take control of your time and energy so you can have a business that you run instead of it being the other way around.

    The great thing about Cindy’s system is that it can work no matter what phase of the SweetLife Entrepreneur System you’re in and it can also help you take control of your life outside of your business.

    How to Take Action:
    1. Download: #CreativityCleanse Strategy Quadrant PDF
    2. Take the SweetLife Entrepreneur Self Assessment
    3. Check out the new SweetLife Podcast Instagram account

    [Tweet “Chaos is nothing but fear. That’s what overwhelm is.“]

    Links Mentioned:

    Cindy Van Arman’s Website

    The SweetLife Entrepreneur Podcast | Episode 30: Organize Your Thoughts to Get S*** Done

    Stephen R. Covey | The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change

    Trello

    Episode 72: 3 Focused Stages to Launch Your Business Successfully – April Beach

    Listen to the Podcast Here:

    Are You Feeling Overwhelmed Launching Your Business?

    You’re ready to design and control your life; to travel, spend more time with your family, and stop the daily 9-5 grind.

    I totally get it!

    Here’s the thing… you have to actually launch your business before you can control your life.

    And to successfully launch your business,  you need to have intentional “tunnel vision”.

    In This Episode:

    If you keep experiencing problems while trying to launch your business, it doesn’t mean you’re failing as an entrepreneur.

    Launching a business can be confusing, overwhelming, expensive, time-consuming, and stressful … if you’re not smart about it.

    You just need a plan that will take you from start to launch in a strategic way, and that’s exactly what I’m breaking down for you today.

    [Tweet “If you keep experiencing problems while trying to launch your business, it doesn’t mean you’re failing as an entrepreneur.“]

    In this episode you’ll learn:
      1. The three focused stages of launching your business.
      2. How to prioritize your time, money, and efforts to help you stay on track.
      3. The incredible resources I have for you to help you finally launch your business.

    Resources Mentioned:

    Join the Free Live Training Inside the SweetLife Launch System – Monday June 4th (sorry this is now closed)

    Join SweetLife Launch: 12 Week Business Launch Program (See the updated program here www.committedlaunch.com)

    Serious about growing your business? Get the podcast delivered to your inbox every Monday – Sign up here. 

    LOVE IT? Please leave us an iTunes review. Here’s how! 
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    Episode 69: “Crushing It” by Gary Vaynerchuk: Book Review & Strategy Session for Active Parent Entrepreneurs

    Take a free SweetLife Entrepreneur Self Assessment
    Listen to the Podcast Here:

    You’ve just read “Crush It” by Gary Vee…

    You’re all fired up.

    It’s time to lay it all on the line.

    It’s time to be your brand and share your message.

    And then…

    Someone pukes on you.

    You have to break up a fight over legos.

    Or leave your white board to take your kid to lacrosse. 

    Welcome to parent entrepreneurship! 

    But guess what…

    Your reason can’t be your excuse.

    In This Episode:

    Gary Vaynerchuk is an expert at entrepreneurship, so I jumped at the chance to check out his latest book, Crushing It!: How Great Entrepreneurs Build Their Business and Influence-and How You Can Too.

    Truth is… this book made pick up my big-girl-britches and get my act together.

    When I first started listening I got a little pissed. Gary shares how spending hours on twitter and publishing massive content on a regular basis is the way to go…

    I immediately had thoughts like:

    “You have no idea what it’s like to grow a business with babies at your feet”

    “Yea right… 11 hours a day on twitter. Whatever…”

    “There is no way I can apply these strategies…” 

    And then I told my self to shut up and listen.

    And instead, I developed serious strategies that would allow me to “Crush It” with kids, and not allow my reasons to become my excuses. 

    So tune in with me and let’s “Crush It”

    [Tweet “I developed serious strategies that would allow me to “Crush It” with kids, and not allow my reasons to become my excuses.”]

    In this episode you’ll learn:
      1. Four different strategies to crush it as a parent entrepreneur
      2. Why you should read this book if you’re on a relentless pursuit of gaining control over your own life
      3. How this book inspired me to make changes in my own business

    subscribe on itunes51iny-KaNzL

    Resources Mentioned:

    SweetLife Entrepreneur Podcast | Episode 68: 4 Systems Every Entrepreneur Family Needs

    Crushing It!: How Great Entrepreneurs Build Their Business and Influence-and How You Can, Too by Gary Vaynerchuk on Amazon

     

    Serious about growing your business? Get the podcast delivered to your inbox every Monday – Sign up here. 

    LOVE IT? Please leave us an iTunes review. Here’s how! 

    Episode 68: 4 Systems Every Entrepreneur Family Needs

    Take a free SweetLife Entrepreneur Self Assessment
    Listen to the Podcast Here:

    Do You Have Systems In Place For Running Your Family & Business Together?

    Being an entrepreneur and taking care of a family can leave you feeling like you’re being torn in a thousand different directions.

    When you’re with your family, you’re worried about work and when you’re working, you’re constantly interrupted by your family.

    Here’s the kicker, though …

    It’s not just your business. It’s your entire family’s business.

    In This Episode:

    In our family, there’s not just one entrepreneur parent, there’s actually two!

    Between multiple businesses and three kids, we’d never get anything done if we didn’t stick to strict systems for running our family and businesses cohesively.

    In fact, we’ve noticed that life starts to pretty much suck if we deviate from these systems for more than a week or two.

    That’s why I want to share them with you.

    [Tweet “It’s not just your business. It’s your entire family’s business.“]

    Why You Can Expect:

    In this episode, you’ll learn:

    1. The 4 systems we use in my entrepreneur family to keep things operating smoothly
    2. Why you need to regular check-ins with every member of the family
    3. How to stay in your sacred workspace; even if you work from home

    subscribe on itunes51iny-KaNzL

    Resources Mentioned:

    SweetLife Entrepreneur Podcast | Episode 50: Behind the Scenes of a Lifestyle Entrepreneur Family – with April & Aaron Beach

     

    Serious about growing your business? Get the podcast delivered to your inbox every Monday – Sign up here. 

    LOVE IT? Please leave us an iTunes review. Here’s how! 

    Episode 65: Doing Things That Don’t Scale – with John Lee Dumas

    Take a free SweetLife Entrepreneur Self Assessment
    Listen to the Podcast Here:

    The Power of Not Scaling!

    There’s a lot of focus right now on business growth, diversifying your revenue streams, developing multiple services, programs, and courses, and a lot of other things that sound great in theory, but are not always the best move for your business.

    I’m a firm believer in doing one thing so well that you become the go-to expert in your niche for that thing. Once you’ve mastered that one thing, then should you start to consider branching out.

    Figure out your signature offer and then take the time to master it.

    In This Episode:

    Today John Lee Dumas and I are taking about the importance of doing things that don’t scale.

    John Lee Dumas is the poster child for mastering one thing. After having conducted over 2,000 interviews for his podcast, Entrepreneurs On Fire, and creating a wildly successful podcast launch program, he’s the go-to podcasting expert.

    In fact, this very podcast would’ve have launched if it weren’t for a conversation he and I had during an event in San Diego.

    Now, John Lee Dumas is at the point where he can focus more on passion projects thanks to the success he’s seen from sticking to one thing for several years.

    [Tweet “Figure out your signature offer and then take the time to master it.“]

    Why You Can Expect:

    In this episode, John Lee Dumas and I talk about:

    1. The importance of mastering one thing before doing anything else
    2. The various passion projects John Lee Dumas has been able to work on in recent years
    3. Why he decided to change the format of his podcast after 2,000 episodes
    4. Why losing isn’t a bad thing and how he hopes to help people find their one big win
    Take Action:
    1. Take the SweetLife Business Quiz –SweetLife Entrepreneur Quiz
    2. Discover the SweetLife Business System Map free here. 
    3. Join the beta launch of Your Signature Offer now (limited time opportunity)

    subscribe on itunes51iny-KaNzL

    Resources Mentioned:

    SweetLife Entrepreneur Quiz

    Connect with Me on Instagram

    Entrepreneurs On Fire Podcast

    Memoir Podcast

    Podcasters’ Paradise

    The Freedom Journal

    The Mastery Journal

    How to Finally Win: Create Your Dream Life One Step at a Time

    Serious about growing your business? Get the podcast to your inbox every Monday – Sign up here. 

    LOVE IT? Please leave us an iTunes review. Here’s how! 

    Episode 51: Entrepreneur Commitment Week

    Take a free SweetLife Entrepreneur Self Assessment
    Listen to the Podcast Here:

    Are You Ready To Take Action In 2018 That Will Finally Yield Real Results For Your Business?

    It’s that time of year when people feel compelled to make resolutions even if they know they’re not going to stick to them. Empty resolutions are just a distraction and will keep you from making real progress with your business.

    In today’s episode:

    Instead of giving in to this behavior, I want to encourage you to set goals with some substance behind them so you’ll not only have the satisfaction of achieving them, but you also have a better business and life.

    That’s exactly why I’m hosting my Commitment Week challenge for the third year in a row.

    [Tweet “Empty resolutions are just a distraction and will keep you from making real progress in your business.”]

    What Can You Expect?

    I break down the four core areas we’ll be focusing on during Commitment Week 2018 and in each of the next four episodes of the podcast.

    Join Commitment Week 2018 & Download Your Action Planner:

    “Commitment Week 2018 Action Planner“

    51 Download SweetLife Entrepreneur Podcast April Beach

    Serious about growing your business? Get the podcast to your inbox every Monday – Sign up here. 

    subscribe on itunes51iny-KaNzL

    Resources Mentioned:

    SweetLife Launch: 3 Month Business Mentorship

     

     

    LOVE IT? Please leave us an iTunes review. Here’s how! 

    Episode 49: 3 Strategies You Can’t Ignore from 2017

     Take a free SweetLife Entrepreneur Self Assessment
    Listen to the Podcast Here:

    Do You What Themes from 2018 Are Going To Be Even More Important In 2018?

    We’re coming close to wrapping up the first calendar year of the podcast and I want to take this time to highlight some of the things I’ve talked about on this podcast that I think are going to be even more important in 2018.

    Why You Should Tune In?

    The basics of growing a business are simple but they absolutely cannot be ignored.

    Mastering these items from 2017 will help you have a more productive and profitable 2018.

    [Tweet “The basics of growing a business are simple but they absolutely cannot be ignored.”]

    What Can You Expect?

    In this episode, I break down the three themes and strategies I’ve talked about on this show that I believe are absolutely critical to your success in 2018.

    Are you ready to master these strategies and set yourself up for success in the new year? Then check out my Wrap Up 2017 Resources:

    “Wrap Up 2017 Resources“

    SweetLife Entrepreneur Podcast April Beach

    Serious about growing your business? Get the podcast to your inbox every Monday – Sign up here. 

    subscribe on itunes51iny-KaNzL

    Resources Mentioned:

     

    The ONE Thing by Gary Keller and Jay Papasan

    SweetLife Entrepreneur Podcast | Episode 01: Entrepreneurship by Design

    SweetLife Entrepreneur Podcast | Episode 05: Become More Productive Right Now

    SweetLife Entrepreneur Podcast | Episode 06: Create & Dominate Your Block Calendar

    SweetLife Entrepreneur Podcast | Episode 12: Online Business Foundations – What is A List & Why Do You Need One?

    SweetLife Entrepreneur Podcast | Episode 13: Online Business Foundations – How To Start Growing Your Email List

    SweetLife Entrepreneur Podcast | Episode 14: Online Business Foundations – The Power of Email Automation

    SweetLife Entrepreneur Podcast | Episode 15: How To Write Your Business & Life Story

    SweetLife Entrepreneur Podcast | Episode 29: Why You Should Stop Creating & Start Small

    SweetLife Entrepreneur Podcast | Episode 31: How To Hire Your First VA with Trivinia Barber

    SweetLife Entrepreneur Podcast | Episode 34: Why You Need A Lifestyle Entrepreneur Learning Plan

    SweetLife Entrepreneur Podcast | Episode 39: Turn Your Passion Into A Profession: The Kajabi Story and Why You’ll Want To Know These Guys with Travis Rosser

    SweetLife Entrepreneur Podcast | Episode 41: Find Your Voice of Influence with Andrea Wenburg

     

    LOVE IT? Please leave us an iTunes review. Here’s how! 

    Episode 47: 12 Month Marketing Plan Made Easy

     Take a free SweetLife Entrepreneur Self Assessment
    Listen to the Podcast Here:

    Do You Already Have All Your Marketing Planned For 2017?

    I actually suggest you have this task completed in October but, just in case, we’re diving into creating your 2018 marketing plan in today’s episode.

    Why You Should Tune In?

    If you manage all the marketing for your business, feel overwhelmed by everything your supposed to be doing on social media, end up with fragmented content that doesn’t provide a clear message, or you have no clue what your 2018 ad budget should be … this episode is for you.

    When things aren’t planned out ahead of time, they’re done haphazardly.

    Don’t do business haphazardly.

    Having a clear marketing plan for 2018 will help eliminate the confusion and stress of know what to promote, when, where, and why.

    [Tweet “Don’t do business haphazardly.”]

    What Can You Expect?

    In this episode, I discuss the free in-depth video training and marketing plan template I’ve created for you and explain the three things you should know before you sit down to create your 12 month marketing plan.

    Are you ready to put together your 12 month marketing plan for 2018? Click below to get started:

    “Video Training and 12 Month Marketing Plan Template“

    Download SweetLife Entrepreneur Podcast April Beach

    Serious about growing your business? Get the podcast to your inbox every Monday – Sign up here. 

    subscribe on itunes51iny-KaNzL

    Resources Mentioned:

     

    SweetLife Launch: 3 Month Business Mentorship

    How Much Should Small Businesses Spend on Digital Marketing in 2017?

    Traction: How Any Startup Can Achieve Explosive Customer Growth by Gabriel Weinberg

     

    LOVE IT? Please leave us an iTunes review. Here’s how! 

    Episode 46: The Template to Design Your Year for Profit, Family, Impact & Travel

    Take a free SweetLife Entrepreneur Self Assessment
    Listen to the Podcast Here:

    The Lifestyle Entrepreneur’s Yearly Calendar

    It’s taken me 15 years to perfect the art of being able to plan out an entire year of my business ahead of time.

    Today, I’m sharing what I learned over all that time so you can know how to do the same thing!

    Why You Should Tune In?

    While planning out an entire year ahead of time can benefit everyone, it’s especially critical if you’re planning, launching, or have already launched your business but feel a little over the place.

    Here is a little secret for you …

    In order to create a life-first business, you actually have to put your life first.

    I know that can seem scary when you’re not making money yet or not hitting your financial goals but it’s incredibly important to the success of your business.

    What better way to put your life first than by actually scheduling right into your business?

    In addition to helping keep your priorities straight, planning all of 2018 ahead of time, will help you stay focused, know exactly what to work on and when, allow time for professional development, and have more control over your schedule.

    [Tweet “In order to create a life-first business, you actually have to put your life first.”]

    What Can You Expect?

    In this episode, I teach you the five steps to design your 2018 to help you start the year off right and stay that way all the way through December 31st.

    Want to get a jump on planning 2018? Click here to download April Beach’s Life-First Yearly Calendar:

    “April Beach’s Life-First Yearly Calendar“

    SweetLife Entrepreneur April Beach

    Serious about growing your business? Get the podcast to your inbox every Monday – Sign up here. 

    subscribe on itunes51iny-KaNzL

    Resources Mentioned:

     

    SweetLife Launch: 3 Month Business Mentorship

    SweetLife Entrepreneur Self Assessment

     

    LOVE IT? Please leave us an iTunes review. Here’s how! 

    Episode 43: 3 Ways To Join The $243 Billion Knowledge Commerce Movement

     Take a free SweetLife Entrepreneur Self Assessment
    Listen to the Podcast Here:

    Are You Taking Advantage of the Knowledge Commerce Movement?

    Do you know what knowledge commerce is? If not, I’ve got you covered.

    Knowledge commerce is the future of online business and the key to a 20-hour work week.

    Why You Should Tune In

    Your knowledge is valuable and people will pay you for it. Taking advantage of the options in the #knowledgecommerce industry will allow you to generate additional sources of revenue for your business without interrupting your primary revenue source.

    Being able to do this allows you to grow and scale your business while generating passive forms of revenue which can, in turn, deliver the quality of life you’re looking for.

    [Tweet “#Knowledgecommerce is the future of online business and your key to a 20-hour work week.”]

    What Can You Expect?

    In this episode, I explain exactly what knowledge commerce is and provide you with three new business model ideas to help you cash in on the knowledge commerce movement, without interrupting your main revenue source.

    Want to dive in now? Click here to instantly access my micro-masterclass:

    “Successfully Layout Your First Online Course In One Day”

    Serious about growing your business? Get the podcast to your inbox every Monday – Sign up here. 

    subscribe on itunes51iny-KaNzL

    Resources Mentioned:

     

    Knowledge Commerce: What It Is & How to Sell Your Knowledge Online

     

     

    LOVE IT? Please leave us an iTunes review. Here’s how! 

    Episode 40: Why Being a Loser Is So Good [the value that losing provides]

     Take a free Entrepreneur Self Assessment
    Listen to the Podcast Here:

    You’re going to fail at some point.
    Do you want to know why that’s actually a good thing?

    We would all love to believe that our business will be a success from day one. But the reality is… that’s just not the case.

    You will have failures in your business, multiple times.

    The good news?

    Repetitive losses in your business don’t make you a loser. They make you an expert.

    [Tweet “Repetitive losses in your business don’t make you a loser. They make you an expert.”]

    Why you should tune into this episode –

    If your business or launch isn’t going exactly the way you’d hoped-

    Or if you’re one of the delusional people who believe your business will be immediately successful-

    You can’t miss this episode!

    Losing helps you build better teams, execute your strategies more effectively, have better communication skills, increase your drive to succeed, and appreciate the wins.

    When you tune in you can expect – 

    To learn the Four Values which losing provides, and how losing makes you better, stronger, and more strategic.

     

    subscribe on itunes51iny-KaNzL

    Resources Mentioned:

    The Start-Up J Curve: The Six Steps to Entrepreneurial Success

    Check out my Facebook page!

    LOVE IT? Please leave us an iTunes review. Here’s how! 

    Episode 38: Business, Boobs & Bravery – With Handful

     Take a free SweetLife Entrepreneur Self Assessment
    Listen to the Podcast Here:

    Want To Scale Your Online Business In The Fastest Way Possible?

    I can’t fully explain how much joy it brings me to share this episode with you.

    Jennifer Ferguson and Cary Goldberg, of the amazing company Handful, are here to talk about the emotional ups and downs of building a business and working directly with breast cancer fighters and survivors.

    They’re ladies are committed to helping women, especially those who’ve experienced breast cancer, feel comfortable, confident, beautiful, and happy.

    Why You Should Tune In?

    The Handful story is a perfect example of how unpredictable, stressful, and fulfilling starting a business can be.

    It’s also the perfect example of how to do more than just make a profit.

    It’s no secret that I firmly believe in building your business around your ideal lifestyle and Jennifer and Cary are living that belief while making the lives of those touched by breast cancer a little easier and more enjoyable.

    Handful Recording
    Jennifer and Cary’s crazy wonderful recording set-up for our interview.

    [Tweet The Handful story is a perfect example of how unpredictable, stressful, and fulfilling starting a business can be.]

    What Can You Expect?

    In this emotionally charged and powerful episode, you learn about the process of launching a business, the side steps all entrepreneurs must be willing to take to reach your goals, why it’s so important to have a purpose and vision behind what you’re doing, and the true power of building relationships.

    Don’t Forget: Enter “sweetlife” during checkout to receive a 20% discount during the entire month of October!

    Also, breast cancer survivors can receive a 30% discount for life on bras with their Breast Friends Forever program.

    Serious about growing your business? Get the podcast to your inbox every Monday – Sign up here. 

    subscribe on itunes51iny-KaNzL

    Resources Mentioned:

    Handful’s Website

    Handful’s Breast Friends Forever Program

    Cary’s Portrait for The SCAR Project

    #FUcancer

     

    LOVE IT? Please leave us an iTunes review. Here’s how! 

    Episode 36: The Secret to Launching Your Online Coaching & Courses Faster

     Take a free Entrepreneur Self Assessment
    Listen to the Podcast Here:

    >>

    Scale Your Online Business In The Fastest Way Possible

    When it comes to building an online business, time is of the essence. Because of this, I’m divulging some secrets to faster business growth, used by online business pros, that I want you to be aware of too.

    Should You Tune In?

    Entrepreneurship takes patience, no doubt about it… And business success takes time. 

    I know… that’s not a popular thing to say, but it’s the truth. 

    However, there are certain tricks of the trade that can help speed up the process to growing your online business faster.

    Surprisingly, these “tricks” are to actually work smaller and slower in the beginning.

    I know… this isn’t a popular thing to say either!  But it’s the truth too!

    And in today’s podcast you’ll hear why working smaller in the beginning, leads to big online gains faster.

    [Tweet “… why working smaller in the beginning, leads to big online gains faster.”]

    What Can You Expect?

    I’m giving you the #1 strategy for scaling your business for online growth faster; including specific tips you can apply right now to make these changes and get your business where you want it to be.

    WP Button (1)

    subscribe on itunes51iny-KaNzL

    Resources Mentioned:

    My SweetLife Project: SweetLife Entrepreneur Self Assessment

    LOVE IT? Please leave us an iTunes review. Here’s how! 

    Episode 34: Why You Need A Lifestyle Entrepreneur Learning Plan

     Find Out What Business Phase You’re In Now – Access the SweetLife Project: Online Business Roadmap
    Listen to the Podcast Here:

    What’s a Lifestyle Entrepreneur Learning Plan?

    Becoming an entrepreneur means you agree to embark on a journey of endless learning. As with anything else in life, this journey will go a lot smoother if you have a plan.

    And this is where the “Lifestyle Entrepreneur Learning Plan” comes in.

    “An Entrepreneur Learning Plan is list of things you need to learn over a defined period of time, to grow yourself and your business.” April Beach

    [Tweet “An Entrepreneur Learning Plan is list of things you need to learn over a defined period of time, to grow yourself and your business”]

    Why Tune In To This Episode?

    It’s important to always learn, grow, adapt, and evolve. It’s the only way to keep your business relevant and healthy.

    Having a plan in place for learning new systems, platforms, skills, etc. will allow you to not become distracted by the overwhelming amount of information entrepreneurs must consume.

    With a learning plan, you’ll have the confidence and power to know exactly what you should be learning and when; saving you time, money, and frustration.

    [Tweet “Becoming an entrepreneur means you agree to embark on a journey of endless learning.”]

    What Can You Expect?

    I’ll explain exactly what a “Lifestyle Entrepreneur Learning Plan” is, provide examples of what one looks like, how it can help you solve problems, and why this is so critical to the success of your business.

    4 Quick Steps to Create a Sample ELP:

    • Make a list of the items you need to learn at this time
    • Take an inventory of the courses you’ve already bought and downloads you’ve already received, and categorize your trainings into “skills groups”
    • Make a list of what skills you’re missing and go find those trainings
    • Create a 12-18 Month Learning Calendar of what you plan to learn and by when, based on the current phase of business you’re in right now (find out what phase you’re in here)

    Start Building Your SweetLife Project: Online Business Learning Plan Now

    SweetLife Project Online Business Roadmap

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    Resources Mentioned:

     

    My SweetLife Project: SweetLife Entrepreneur Self Assessment

    SweetLife Entrepreneur Podcast | Episode 00: Lifestyle Entrepreneur Manifesto

    SweetLife Entrepreneur Podcast | Episode 33: How to Choose The Best Business Trainings & Courses For You

     

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    Episode 33: How to Choose The Best Business Trainings & Courses For You

     Join my Reset and Refocus Entrepreneur Challenge
    Listen to the Podcast Here:

    It’s Almost Course Launch Season … Are You Ready?

    We’re coming up on another season of course launches and program enrollments. Are you confident in your ability to look past the shiny bonuses and crazy discounts to pick the course that is the perfect fit for your life and business at this exact moment in your journey?

    Well, don’t worry if you’re not because that’s exactly what we’re covering in this week’s episode!

    Why You Should Tune In?

    I would venture to say every entrepreneur has been lured into purchasing a course or program they didn’t really need and, while it may have been loaded with valuable content, it didn’t yield the expected results.

    Taking the wrong course, or even the right course at the wrong time, leads to a loss of time and money.

    Both of those resources are extremely valuable and I want to make sure you never waster either of them ever again!

    [Tweet “Taking the wrong course, or even the right course at the wrong time, leads to a loss of time and money.”]

    What Can You Expect?

    I’ll explain five ways you can get really clear on what courses or programs are the perfect fit for you and your business right now so you don’t become distracted or lose any more time or money.

    What you won’t get is me telling you my courses are the perfect fit for you. They may or may not be, but after this episode, you’ll be able to determine that for yourself.

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    Resources Mentioned:

     

    Reset & Refocus Entrepreneur Challenge

    My SweetLife Project: SweetLife Entrepreneur Self Assessment

    SweetLife Entrepreneur Podcast | Episode 32: Reset & Refocus Entrepreneur Challenge

     

    LOVE IT? Please leave us an iTunes review. Here’s how! 

    Episode 32: Reset & Refocus Entrepreneur Challenge

     Join the  Reset and Refocus Entrepreneur Challenge
    Listen to the Podcast Here:

    It’s Time to Reset and Refocus

    I took seven weeks off from my business this summer, to travel with my kids. Now that they’re heading back to school, it’s time to reset and refocus. I actually do a complete reset every August. It’s part of my #lifestylebusiness system.

    I’ve you’ve taken time off, or your business just isn’t where you thought it would be by this point in the year, I highly suggest you reset and refocus with me!

    … And that’s what we’re talking about on this week’s SweetLife episode!

    Why You Should Tune In?

    As an entrepreneur, you’re solely responsible for the growth and success of your business. It’s critical to make sure you’re in line with your goals and make adjustments when needed.

    I truly believe a successful entrepreneur never stops learning.

    Not only does that apply to new systems, platforms, and skills… This also applies to learning and assessing your own business status and growth needs.

    [Tweet “A successful entrepreneur never stops learning.”]

    What Can You Expect?

    I breakdown the five different core areas of resetting and refocusing and why they’re so important. You’ll learn about each and why they all affect your overall business goals.

    Join my upcoming Reset and Refocus Entrepreneur Challenge

    Reset and Refocus Download Button

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    Resources Mentioned:

     

    Reset & Refocus Entrepreneur Challenge

    Funnel Cure Masterclass

    SweetLife Entrepreneur Podcast | Episode 28: Discover the Power of a Digital Detox

     

    LOVE IT? Please leave us an iTunes review. Here’s how! 

    Episode 31: How to Hire Your First VA with Trivinia Barber

     Listen to the Podcast Here:

    When Should You Hire Your First VA?

    In this special episode, it’s my honor to have Trivinia Barber on the show. Trivinia is the Founder and CEO of Priority VA and someone I’ve known for a while now. She’s a walking entrepreneur-resource and always delivers value and whit.

    Today, she’s providing some excellent insights into hiring your first VA!

    Why is this important for your business?

    New entrepreneurs have juggle it all … customer service, content creation, website development, social media management, marketing, etc, etc But the truth is, you shouldn’t do everything solo for too long.

    “How do I outsource?”  is a question I get from my clients all the time. So if you’re launching your business or growing your online programs, I’m guessing you’re asking the same thing!

    Learning how to outsource certain aspects of your business can sometimes be the difference between success and failure. At the very least, not outsourcing some aspects of your business will lead to much slower growth.

    What can you expect in this Episode? 

    Trivinia provides trusted advice for when you should hire your first VA, what to outsource to them, and how to work with them successfully. You won’t want to miss this.

    And don’t forget to check out Trivinia’s free gift for you, The Top 5 Ways a VA Can Increase Your Revenue!

    [Tweet “Learning how to outsource certain aspects of your business can sometimes be the difference between success and failure.”]

    Serious about growing your business? Get the podcast to your inbox every Monday – Sign up here. 

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    Resources Mentioned:

    Priority VA

    The Top 5 Ways a VA Can Increase Your Revenue

    Upwork

    Fiverr

    99designs

    Fancy Hands

    Giftagram

    SweetLife Entrepreneur Podcast | Episode 04: The SweetLife Entrepreneur System

    SweetLife Entrepreneur Podcast | Episode 06: Create & Dominate Your Block Calendar

     

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    Episode 30: Organize Your Thoughts to Get S*** Done

     Listen to the Podcast Here:

    It’s officially August so we’re switching gears from the relaxing summer topics we’ve been discussing, and diving back into business building strategies. 

    Do you have too many ideas?

    You’re a creative… and you’re never lacking new ideas and problems to solve. This is what makes you a great, typical, entrepreneur. It’s also what is required to successfully develop unique, innovative products that people want and will rely on.

    But if you’re someone who always has new ideas for your business (floating around inside your head), to the point where it becomes overwhelming and you’re not sure what to do first…

    This episode is for you.

    Why is this important for your business?

    Having too many ideas isn’t a problem –

    It’s when you’re spread too thin, that creativity can start to slow you down. If your amazing ideas are sidetracking you, you’ll relate and appreciate this episode.

    Multitasking, in business development, is not your friend. Learning how to focus and organize your thoughts and ideas will allow you to see which ideas you should follow, help you become much more productive, and help you find consistent work hours.

    What can you expect? 

    In today’s episode, I explain how the Splashdown technique helps me organize my thoughts and how you can utilize this technique as well. Give it a try.

    [Tweet “Multitasking, in business development, is not your friend.”]

     

    Splashdown Worksheets

    Thank you for sharing this with your friends! I really appreciate it! 

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    Join me in my private FB community where I host weekly LIVE business chat sessions.

    Resources Mentioned:

     

    The ONE Thing by Gary Keller & Jay Papasan

    SweetLife Entrepreneur Podcast | Episode 06: Create & Dominate Your Block Calendar

     

    LOVE IT? Please leave us an iTunes review. Here’s how! 

    Episode 29: Why You Should Stop Creating & Start Small

     Listen to the Podcast Here:

    Are you constantly solving new problems or creating new products/services?

    If you’re someone who feels the need to be constantly solving new problems or creating new offerings for your business, you absolutely must listen to this episode because I’m explaining why that actually hurts your business instead of helping it.

    Why is this important for your business?

    Spreading yourself thin by offering multiple products/services will require more time and provide fewer results.

    When you focus on one problem or offering at a time, you’re able to really master it and allow it to reach its fullest potential. You learn who your ideal client is – inside and out.

    You become the expert in your niche…

    You earn more money and find more success…

    Small success can lead to great results!

    What can you expect? 

    In today’s episode, I explain the power of perfecting what you already have. I also help you learn to realize when it’s not the right time to create something new-

     And when it finally is!

    [Tweet “Small success can lead to great results.”]

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    Thank you for sharing this with your friends! I really appreciate it! 

    Join me in my private FB community where I host weekly LIVE business chat sessions.

    LOVE IT? Please leave us an iTunes review. Here’s how! 

    Episode 28: Discover the Power of a Digital Detox

     Listen to the Podcast Here:

    Do you need to take a digital detox?

    In last week’s episode, I talked about our addiction to technology. This week, I’m challenging you to a digital detox. This is an idea you’re either going to love or hate and, if you lean more towards hating it, you just might need to take a digital detox more than anyone else.

    Why is this important for your business?

    Technology takes the authenticity out of life.

    Relying on technology and social media to inspire new ideas makes us forget our own creativity and causes our brains to become lazy. This is dangerous for everyone, but it’s especially dangerous for entrepreneurs.

    What can you expect? 

    In today’s episode, I’m going to ask you some questions that, when answered honestly, will let you know if it’s time to take a digital detox.

    I’m also going to provide four steps to help your plan for your digital detox to make sure it’s as effective and successful as possible.

    [Tweet “Technology takes the authenticity out of life.”]

    Thank you for sharing this with your friends! I really appreciate it! 

    subscribe on itunes51iny-KaNzL

     

    Join me in my private FB community where I host weekly LIVE business chat sessions.

    Resources Mentioned:

    Lewis Howes’ The School of Greatness Podcast: The Power of Disconnection

    Stealing Fire by Steven Kotler & Jamie Wheal

    The New York Times: The ‘Busy’ Trap

    SweetLife Entrepreneur Podcast | Episode 25: 5 Steps to Prepare Your Business for Vacation

    SweetLife Entrepreneur Podcast | Episode 27: How to Avoid Tech Addiction & Maximize Daily Productivity

     

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    Episode 27: How to Avoid Tech Addiction As an Online Entrepreneur & Maximize Daily Productivity

     Listen to the Podcast Here:

    Are you addicted to technology?

    This week, I’m continuing to talk about how to grow your business while also growing yourself. The topic I’m tackling is our addiction to technology and how we can overcome it, so we can be more productive.

    Why is this important for your business?

    As online entrepreneurs, we have to use to technology. There’s just no way around it. However, when it gets to the point where we can’t even go to the bathroom without our phone, it’s become a problem. #keepingitreal

    Our brains are always going… Thinking up new project ideas, worrying about deadlines, responding to emails … it’s overwhelming.

    Taking a step back from technology allows your brain to rest for a second and it also allows you to focus on one task at a time – making your day much more productive.

    Technology should help you run your business, not control your life.

    What can you expect? 

    In today’s episode, I’m giving you some of my best tips and strategies that I use every single day to help combat my addiction to technology and maximize my productivity.

    [Tweet “Technology should help you run your business, not control your life.”]

    Thank you for sharing this with your friends! I really appreciate it! 

    subscribe on itunes51iny-KaNzL

     

    Join me in my private FB community where I host weekly LIVE business chat sessions.

    Resources Mentioned:

    focus booster App (Pomodoro)

    Forest App

    Lifehacker Article: When You Eat, Focus on Just Eating

    The ONE Thing by Gary Keller & Jay Papasan

     

    LOVE IT? Please leave us an iTunes review. Here’s how! 

    Episode 20: 4 Things To Know Before Building Your Website

    Listen to the Podcast Here:

    Grab your website pre-design checklist here.

    Just launching your business? You’re going to love what we’re talking about today!

    In this week’s episode, we’re covering the 4 things you need to know before you hire a web designer. My goal is to help you find your new web designer BFF and save you a boat load of trouble down the road.

    Why is this important for your business?

    Hiring a web designer is a big investment. Maybe one of the first “big” investments you make for your new business.

    Knowing what to do before you hire a web designer could potentially save you thousands of dollars and countless hours … not mention some of your sanity.

    Trust me!

    What can you expect? 

    By the end of this episode, you’ll know the difference between a web designer and a web developer, the main things you need to have figured out before you even start looking for a web designer, and the exact questions you need to ask the web designer before hiring them.

    [Tweet “Knowing these things before hiring a web designer could potentially save you thousands of dollars and countless hours … not mention some of your sanity.”]

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    CLICK SUBSCRIBE on your favorite Podcast Player below to be sure you don’t miss any episodes. 

    And thank you for sharing this with your friends! I really appreciate it! 

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    Join me in my private FB community where I host weekly LIVE business chat sessions.

    Resources Mentioned:

    SweetLife Entrepreneur Podcast | Episode 00: Lifestyle Entrepreneur Manifesto

    SweetLife Entrepreneur Podcast | Episode 04: The SweetLife Entrepreneur System

     

    LOVE IT? Please leave us an iTunes review. Here’s how! 

    Episode 17: Anatomy of a Sales Funnel

     

    Listen to the Podcast Here:

    What this episode delivers:

    Last week, we talked about sales funnels and why they’re so important for your business. In this week’s episode, I’m breaking down basic sales funnel anatomy and function.

    Why is this important for your business?

    Having a sales funnel is important for several reasons. Not only does it bring in more leads but it also pre-qualifies your clients before they even get to you. A good sales funnel walks your most qualified clients right to your highest level of service. This frees up more of your time to focus on building your business, instead of working in it.

    What can you expect? 

    This training for new online service entrepreneurs and will help you gain greater insight to create your first sales funnel.

    After listening to this episode and downloading the guide, you’ll have a better understanding of how to build your first sales funnel.

    [Tweet “A good sales funnel walks your most qualified clients right to your highest level of service.”]

    Ready for more? Join The Funnel Cure Masterclass waiting list here.

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    CLICK SUBSCRIBE on your favorite Podcast Player below to be sure you don’t miss any episodes. 

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    Join me in my private FB community where I host weekly LIVE business chat sessions.

    Resources Mentioned:

    The Funnel Cure, Masterclass for Rising Entrepreneurs

    SweetLife Entrepreneur Podcast | Episode 13: Online Business Foundations – How To Start Growing Your Email List

    SweetLife Entrepreneur Podcast | Episode 16: Is Your Business Missing a Funnel Cure?

    How to Architect the Perfect Conversion Funnel for Your Business

     

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    Episode 16: Is Your Business Missing a Funnel?

     

    Listen to the Podcast Here:

    What we’re talking about today:

    If you’re an entrepreneur or learning how to become one, you’ve probably heard the term “funnel.” It comes up so often because it’s such a critical part of a successful online business.

    This is why I’m devoting today’s episode to explaining exactly what a funnel is and why it’s so important for your business.

    What can you expect from this training?

    By the end of this episode, you’ll have a better of understanding of funnels, why they’re crucial to business success, and how they can save you valuable time.

    You’ll also learn what an inbound marketing funnel is and the difference between a conversion funnel and a sales funnel.

    Why is this important for your business?

    A funnel is a process, which you layout, that determines the path to convert leads to paying clients. It’s your strategic sales process that creates predictable results. Without a funnel, there’s no sales strategy.

    [Tweet “Without a Funnel, there’s no sales strategy #solopreneur”]

    Sales Funnel Superpowers

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    Join me in my private FB community where I host weekly LIVE business chat sessions!

    Resources Mentioned:

    SweetLife Entrepreneur Podcast | Episode 04: The SweetLife Entrepreneur System

    SweetLife Entrepreneur Podcast | Episode 14: Online Business Foundations – The Power of Email Automation

    Kathleen Booth: Why Inbound Marketing in Necessary at Every Stage of the Sales Funnel

     

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    Episode 14: Online Business Foundations – The Power of Email Automation

     

    This is part three of a special mini-series called “Online Business Foundations”. This series will help you learn the most powerful first steps to build your online business and virtual consulting practice.

    If you plan to coach from afar, deliver digital products or online courses… listen up!  

    Listen to the Podcast Here:

    What we’re talking about today:

    In episode 12, I explained why an email list is so important and in episode 13, I explained how to grow your list using lead magnets or free gifts. Today, we’re taking it a step further by utilizing the power of email automation after someone has signed up for your free gift or another initial offer.

    What can you expect from this training?

    I’m going to explain exactly what email automation is, why it’s so important, and provide you with some examples of the types of emails you can automate.

    If you need a little more guidance, download the “Email Automation Help Sheet” I created for you!

    Why is this important for your business?

    Automating certain aspects of your business is a sign that, not only are you serious about your business, but you’re serious about your time and your relationship with your clients.

    Automation is the first step in making sure your business isn’t your life, by freeing up the time to work on your business instead of working in it.

    [Tweet “Automation is the first step in making sure your business isn’t your life, by freeing up the time to work on your business instead of working in it.”]

     

    CLICK SUBSCRIBE on your favorite Podcast Player below to be sure you don’t miss any episodes. 

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    Join me in my private FB community where I host weekly LIVE business chat sessions!

    Resources Mentioned:

    SweetLife Entrepreneur Podcast | Episode 04: The SweetLife Entrepreneur System

    SweetLife Entrepreneur Podcast | Episode 12: Online Business Foundations – What Is A List & Why Do You Need One?

    SweetLife Entrepreneur Podcast | Episode 13: Online Business Foundations – How To Start Growing Your Email List

    Automate Your Online Business Article

     

    LOVE IT? Please leave us an iTunes review. Here’s how! 

    Episode 11: To The Driven Mompreneur – You’ve Got This

    Listen to the Podcast Now!
    What we’re talking about today:

    In today’s episode, I’m speaking directly to all the driven mompreneurs who have ever felt stressed, alone, guilty, or any of the other negative emotions that can come along with running a business from home with your adorable kiddos running around.

    I live this life and I know the struggles are real but, I’m here to tell you … you’ve got this!

    What can you expect from this training?

    This episode is here to remind you that you are not alone. Being a mompreneur does not make you selfish and you should not feel guilty!

    This episode is also here to provide some strategies for how to run a profit-driven business from your home in the most productive way possible.

    Why is this important for your business?

    Knowing these things will help you feel powerful instead of guilty. You’ll feel in control, inspired, and motivated to continue building your empire for your family.

    [Tweet “Being a mompreneur does not make you selfish and you should not feel guilty!”]

     

    CLICK SUBSCRIBE on your favorite Podcast Player below to be sure you don’t miss any episodes. 

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    I can’t wait to meet you! 

    Join me in the SweetLife Insiders now!

    Resources Mentioned:

    Jenny Frankel of NudeStix

    Katy Takaoka’s Article: How I Went From Breaking Even To Turning A Profit

    LOVE IT? Please leave us an iTunes review. Here’s how! 

    Episode 09: 3 Proven Steps to Craft Your Plan

     

    Craft Your Plan Now – Listen To The Podcast

    DOWNLOAD YOUR HELP SHEET here

    What we’re talking about today:

    In today’s episode, I am going to help you figure out what to do when you don’t know what you don’t know.

    Are you aware 50% of all businesses fail in the first two years due to the lack of having a plan?

    If this is alarming to you, don’t worry!

    What can you expect from this training?

    Today, I’m giving you three proven questions/statements that will help you craft that critical plan for your business; even if you have no clue where to start.

    Even if you’ve already launched your business but feel you’re doing a lot of busy work or just not growing at the rate you would like, these three questions will still be able to help you.

    Why is this important for your business?

    There is so much power in knowing where you are, where you want to go, and what actions you need to take to get there.

    Having this clarity will help you focus on only the most important tasks to make sure you aren’t spinning your wheels or wasting valuable time.

    [Tweet “There is so much power in knowing where you are, where you want to go, and what actions you need to take to get there.”]

    CLICK SUBSCRIBE on your favorite Podcast Player below to be sure you don’t miss any episodes. 

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    I can’t wait to meet you! 

    Join me in my private FB community where I host weekly LIVE business chat sessions!

    Resources Mentioned:

    SweetLife Entrepreneur Podcast | Episode 01: Entrepreneurship by Design

    SweetLife Entrepreneur Podcast | Episode 04: The SweetLife Entrepreneur System

    LOVE IT? Please leave us an iTunes review. Here’s how! 

    Episode 06: Create & Dominate Your Block Calendar

    Why is this important for your business?

    If you find yourself feeling fragmented in the name of multitasking, and inevitably not making much progress in your business, download the Block Calendar Cheat Sheet and take a listen to this episode.

    Listen to the Podcast Training Now:

     What we’re talking about today:

    In today’s episode, I’m talking about block calendars. They’re used to block off times in your week for focused work and they are one of the most effective tools you can have in your productivity toolkit.

    Block calendars allow you to focus your time and energy on one thing at a time, help you say no to “shiny object syndrome,” and enable you to rebound more quickly if you do become distracted.

    BUTTON

    What can you expect from this training?

    I break down exactly what a block calendar is, what some of the typical “blocks” are, and provide tips for how to handle the items that come up throughout that day that don’t fit into your current block.

    Using a block calendar will help you take massive action and increase your productivity in ways that will help you see immediate results.

    Have more questions? Join me in the FB Community!

    Resources Mentioned:

    SweetLife Entrepreneur Podcast | Episode 04: The SweetLife Entrepreneur System

    SweetLife Entrepreneur Podcast | Episode 05: Become More Productive Right Now

    Block Calendar Video

    Evernote

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    Episode 04: The SweetLife Entrepreneur System

    What we’re talking about today:

    In today’s episode, we’re going to be talking about the SweetLife Entrepreneur System™. The system is a roadmap consisting of five phases that will help you create your SweetLife Project™ (aka: your business life plan) and take your business from idea to impact.

    This episode is especially important because I’m going to be categorizing all future episodes based on what phase of the SweetLife System™ they’re applicable to. This will help you stay focused and only listen to business trainings that apply to where you are in business right now!

    Take the self-assessment and find out what SweetLife Entrepreneur Phase you’re currently in.

    What can you expect from this training?

    I use the SweetLife System™ when working with my private clients and now I’m sharing this system with you. By the end of this episode, you’ll have a better understanding of what phase your currently in and the knowledge to spring forward into the next one.

    Listen to the Podcast

    Why is this important for your business?

    In order to move forward in your business, you first must understand where you currently are.  Finding your location in the SweetLife Entrepreneur System™ gives you clarity and streamline productivity.

    The SweetLife Entrepreneur System™ will also help you understand what the future of your business can look like, and the Phases to get you there.

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    Have more questions? Join me in my private FB community where I host weekly LIVE business chat sessions!

    Resources Mentioned:

    Self-Assesment

    SweetLife Entrepreneur Podcast | Episode 03: Your 8 Step Business Launch Plan

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    Episode 03: Your 8 Step Launch Plan

    What we’re talking about today:

    As a business coach who currently has two businesses, I realize starting one can be incredibly daunting. That’s why I’ve made episode 03 about this very topic.

    In today’s episode, I break down an 8 step launch plan, and provide multiple resources, to help you push past the confusion and get your business launched!

    I discuss each step, in the order they should be completed, and make it simplified so you can stop feeling overwhelmed.

    What can you expect from this training?

    After listening to this training, and downloading the 8 Step Launch Plan Checklist below, you’ll have the ability to know exactly where you are in the launch process and the knowledge to know exactly what you need to do today to get your business up and running in no time.

    Listen to the Podcast

    Why is this important for your business?

    So many people with the potential to become great coaches or consultants never get their businesses launched because they get distracted and lost in the process of figuring out how to get started.

    This will not be you!

    Having a clear launch plan is incredibly helpful, and I would even say critical, to successfully launching and growing your business.

    Download your Guide

    Have more questions? Join me in my private FB community where I host weekly LIVE business chat sessions!

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    Resources Mentioned:

    Brand Revelation Podcast

    How a Block Calendar Saved My Ass

    The ONE Thing: The Surprising Simple Truth Behind Extraordinary Results by Gary Keller

    SweetLife Entrepreneur Podcast | Episode 01: Entrepreneurship by Design

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    Episode 02: Don’t Make Perfect the Enemy

    3
    What we’re talking about today:

    In today’s episode, I’m going to provide you with some strategies and resources to help you get out of your own way and push past your perfectionist tendencies so you can stop stalling and start doing what you’re called to do.

    Being a perfectionist is holding you back from getting your message, product, and/or service out to people who are wanting and needing it.

    It’s time to stop making perfect the enemy!

    I use the example of trying to make everything perfect before launching this podcast as a way to explain why everything doesn’t need to be perfect before launching your product, coaching, program, online course, etc.

    Why is this important for your business?

    Being a perfectionist is something nearly every entrepreneur struggles with. The reality of the situation is that being a perfectionist makes everything you do take longer than it should.

    Learning how to push past perfectionism is also important because it’s likely you’re putting more effort into the project than it really requires.

    Each day you spend tweaking your product, programs, etc in an effort to make them perfect, is another day you’re making your clients and potential customers wait for the solution they are desperately seeking to a problem their experiencing.

    What can you expect from this training?

    By listening to the strategies and downloading the guide, you’ll push past your current barriers to start making things happen now!

    Listen to the Podcast

    Download your Guide

    Download the Workbook Here (3)

    Have more questions? Join me in my private FB community where I host weekly LIVE business chat sessions!

    #TuesdayTraining

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