Scaling a business is a balancing act of maintaining the success of what currently exists while simultaneously thinking long-term. Making decisions on hypothetical and limited information and enhancing your decision-making filter to hopefully make good decisions that pay off in your favor. All while gaining tools to better self regulate your own nervous system. So you don't freak the fuck out in the midst of holding all the responsibility and weight of risk.
On social media, it can feel like everyone is out here, balling out, making millions, and it can feel like you just aren't doing enough. And that's just not the reality. Mhm. Thank you for tuning in to this season of the drisha said podcast titled homecoming. When you're stuck in survival mode, it's easy to lose touch with your true self. And this disconnection inevitably seeps into how you build and manage your business.
This season we'll explore what it means to build from a place of significance rather than survival. So far, we have touched on why I took a sabbatical, how I prepared for it. And the top 10 lessons I learned from scaling my business before taking seven months off without having to change the quality of my lifestyle. All while navigating death grief and a divorce. I'm thrilled to have you here for this season of this show, let's get started with today's episode.
Do you know what your owner's intent is? Is that a question you've ever consciously asked yourself? If not today's episode is going to be perfect for you because we're going to get into what an owner's intent actually is. How identifying your personal owner's intent will simplify your life and business this year.
Four key differences between a growth focused business and a profit focused business, and some red flags to help you indicate a business model is not in alignment with your owner's intent. So what exactly is an owner's intent? It's a decision around what your end goal is, what your intention is as a business owner. This is your deep rooted. Why the nucleus of why you embark on this journey of running your own business. It's the priority that drives all of your actions within the business.
So for context, let me give you some examples of what an owner's intent might sound like. To build a company. My adult kids would want to work at someday if they so choose. To build a business to grow and sell. Your owner's intent could be to build a lifestyle business with high profits or to build a business that maximize profit while working part-time hours.
Your arm's intent could be to build a business that prioritizes family first, while making meaningful money to contribute to your household. All of these are different versions or different types of owner's intent. And it's about articulating what your definition of success is. This is personal to you, your current season of life and ultimately about prioritizing what matters most to you. As you hear these different types of owner's intent.
You can start to see that depending on what your specific intention is that will dramatically change and shift how you run the business, the type of offers you sell and what you prioritize in your decision making as you're growing your business. Over the years. My owner's intent has changed based on the season of life I was in and what I wanted most. When I first started my business back in 2016, I was still working full-time as an engineer and my corporate job.
And my owner's intent was to replace my corporate engineering salary and have the choice to work full time for myself. This took about two years to accomplish. At the time I tested lots of offers at a wide range of price points. When I started to work privately one-on-one with coaching clients at a four figure price point. That's when I started to see real financial traction. And I was working on somewhat part time quote, unquote schedule in my business because I had a demanding full time.
50 hour a week job. I worked with a handful of private one-on-one coaching clients. And that's what got me to my first five figure month from there, I started to notice that patterns that I was seeing with all those private one-on-one coaching clients and decided to launch a smaller, still intimate, but higher ticket group coaching program. The launch of that higher ticket group coaching program, really made a huge difference for me.
I was able to book my entire annual salary in sales and one month. talk about life changing. My business model at the time. was serving private one-on-one coaching clients and the small group coaching program. Each of these two offers were four figure investments. And that was the only way to work with me. I decided to flip the funnel, going Garlin and higher ticket offers rather than focusing on higher volume, lower ticket digital products and courses. I didn't have a ton of time.
And I didn't have a large audience. I didn't have a budget for running paid advertising. Focusing on serving and selling to a smaller number of people. Led to the biggest client results and personal results. This helped me achieve my definition of success. It was a lot of intimate coaching support focused on helping clients achieve a specific outcome. That was the business model that really allow me to buy myself the option and the choice to choose how I worked.
Full-time whether that was staying in corporate or working for myself. Wow, this wasn't scalable or leveraged at the time, my approach to work for what my owner's intent was. And I think that's really important to highlight and understand. In the beginning, you may be doing things that aren't leveraged that aren't scalable, but that doesn't mean that it's misaligned with what your owner's intent is. It got me to the point where I was making $15,000 per month. Take home, pay.
And I was living my dream, honey. I had a small number of clients I supported every year. I would hire contractors on a project basis from time to time when I, when it was needed. It was super light support. There wasn't a ton of pressure on me or a heavy responsibility to hold. It was light, fun and easeful. I had the choice here to maintain this lifestyle and definition of success. Or to choose to define a new owner's intent. I want to highlight this because it's 1000% okay.
To sustain what you have accomplished. And that be enough. There are zero obligation to keep striving for more, just because you accomplished your goal. Our industry tends to put this pressure on us, to feel as if we need to always be answering the question. What's next. What more do you want? And sometimes the answer is to enjoy what you have accomplished to sit in it, to embrace it, to just be, and that's what's next, the full enjoyment of where you have arrived.
Not too long after my owner's intent started to evolve and I gave myself space to set a new definition of success. I was in my late twenties at the time. And since I took a non-traditional approach with my career, leaving behind good benefits and a highly respected career field, I craved financial security. I wanted to leverage the profit of my business to build my personal net worth to seven figures.
Becoming a millionaire felt like this audacious and wildly aspirational goal that had zero legs to it. I read a few books to work on my money mindset and really helped me think differently about how I approached money, which helped give me some context around what would be required. One book that stood out that I read back then was called millionaire next door by Thomas J. Stanley.
A few facts that I found interesting at the time that if you desire to become a millionaire or make a million dollars in the course of your lifetime, you might find interesting too. First fact becoming a millionaire takes time, especially if you are starting with a negative net worth, which I was 80% of current millionaires did not reach their net worth until they were at least 50 years old. When I read this. It relieved a lot of self-induced pressure that I was putting on myself.
I felt so behind. Which was in some sense. True. But also I had to give myself some grace because my journey began well behind the starting line. I'm am not a trust fund, baby. I was not raised in a two parent household. I did not come from money. But the book also show me that only 19% of millionaires inherit their wealth. Most are first-generation rich and come from modest backgrounds, hashtag new money. This gave me some hope.
The second fact that I found really interesting in this book was that being a business owner is a fast track to building your personal wealth. 66% of millionaires own their own business, including self-employed professionals. The book also notes that most affluent business owners interviewed were in stable, but Dole businesses. Now, this is something that I think is really important to highlight because in this online space, we think that we need to be famous. We need to be micro celebrities.
We need to have this massive influence, or we need to have this super complicated. Wildly innovative business, but the reality is the doll boring, repeatable businesses are aware. Most millionaires are finding their biggest success. And I think that's where me and you were that category of business owner. And I think there's a lot of opportunity for us when we give ourselves permission. To let it be simple to have more of a dull business, but OCDEL business, that's making bank.
The third thing that I found really interesting in the book is I had read somewhere. Maybe it wasn't actually in this book, but I had read somewhere at the time that it takes the average business owner, like seven to 11 years to make their first seven figures. I don't know how true that is today. But this helped me get clear on what's required and start taking action in alignment with that. I approached business with a sprint perspective.
I would buckle in and double down for a period of time sprinting and then take short breaks before jumping back into work. I wanted to make as much money as possible, as quickly as possible, but also as strategically as possible. I prioritized high profit offers, which led me to solving more sophisticated problems for a niche and specialized group of people. I was always on and I was riding the adrenaline high of that.
I had the capacity to handle the strain that comes from fast growth, real time. I had all the energy in the world. I was bright eyed, bushy tail, and enjoying the race of the ride. I didn't have kids to pick up from school at 3:00 PM every day I was in good health and physical shape. I didn't hold the weight of being responsible for other human beings in my household. I had a larger cognitive load to hold and support clients because of that.
I want to acknowledge my lifestyle because all those factors directly impact how you show up in your business. My personal life was scheduled months in advance. I would black out the dates at the beginning of the year. I wanted to take time off because remember I was moving in sprints.
I knew I had to schedule time off throughout the year to recharge with vacations trips, to see family and friends or to participate in group mastermind events or in-person retreats to help me fully unplug and be in community. As time went on and the business started to double and triple in revenue. I doubled down on one core front facing offer. This allowed me to standardize the offer. Streamline and document every aspect of the delivery and stabilize the marketing sales efforts.
So I could actually scale the offer. Someone recently asked a great question about this over on Instagram. She asked. Do you have a team of coaches that does this for you? How are you able to scale the number of clients you worked with while maintain the quality of delivery? And as your CEO responsibilities grew, how did you continue to coach clients without being the only person doing everything?
The only way to scale a high ticket group coaching program is by crystallizing the promise of that program and standardizing the client delivery. So you actually have capacity to tweak and pivot your messaging and sales process as buyer sentiment shifts over time. From a delivery perspective, incorporating program coaches. Once you hit a particular client, enrollment is essential. Doing this at the right time is really important though. And that's the key. I think about it.
Like private school, there is a one to two or one to three. Ratio between students and teachers. And that's how I approached my group coaching programs. I've been selling leverage, which is my group coaching program for five years. So it was very standardized and streamlined, which made a huge difference when bringing on program coaches. There was a clear promise. There was documented and tested curriculum. There was documented onboarding and client experience.
Plus we had optimized all client touchpoints and client monitoring processes on the backend. All of that, made it a lot easier to bring program coaches onboard in a much smoother fashion. One thing I do want to note is that I personally am not a huge fan of hiring program coaches who are trained on the curriculum, meaning where you bring in outside people in.
But rather we had program coaches who were past successful clients who had achieved the program promise and had been clients of ours for 12 to 18 months or longer.
I'm not saying that hiring and training program coaches from the outside and bringing them into your programs won't work, but when you're a small business owner where it's just you running these programs, building these programs, developing the curriculum for these programs, and then you have to now think about the capacity and the new operational structure that's required to train outside people on that material.
I didn't have that type of bandwidth and most of us in the small business online space don't either.
Hiring past successful clients. really helps maintain the integrity of the curriculum when they were stepping into a leadership role to support other clients going through their process. Because they had been through the process themselves. They weren't just trained on the process. Outside of that core front facing offer that was leveraged. I ended up with about one to two full-time employees and maybe three to five project-based contractors at any given time that we are running the business.
I had a lot of support in the business and at home, I had a house cleaner. I would work with people to help me with meal prepping or having a chef from time to time. Especially during demanding times of the year, I had a personal executive assistant. And that support gave me more capacity to focus on what I could not delegate.
Refining my messaging, optimizing how we position the offer and how we ultimately sold it and developing frameworks and curriculum, both in the offer and on the back end operationally to improve client results. If you are thinking, whoa, this sounds like a lot. That's because it is. Listen, here are the facts. According to small biz genius, 9% of small businesses make over a million dollars in revenue. And according to Forbes, only 2% of women owned businesses. Break the million dollar mark.
According to the most recent data available for fiscal year 2019 in income of $540,000 per year puts you in the top 1% category. Listen, scaling a business is a balancing act of maintaining the success of what currently exists. While simultaneously thinking long-term making decisions on hypothetical and limited information and enhancing your decision making filter so that you can hopefully make good decisions that pay off in your favor. All while maintaining and gaining tools to better.
Self-regulate your own nervous system so that you don't freak the fuck out in the midst of holding all the responsibility and the weight of that risk. On social media, it can feel like everyone is out here balling making millions, and it can feel like you just aren't doing enough. And I'm just here to tell you that is just not the reality. This causes many of us to set arbitrary goals, trying to prove to ourselves that we are legit.
And deserving of being invited to the cool girls masterminds or to chase the wrong thing, especially if you are blindly mimicking what you see someone else doing. Many of the larger scale business owners in our coaching and education industry are selling us the lifestyle business. In their offers, but are running their business with a growth in scale intent.
So if you start blindly mimicking how they do lead generation or how they build team or how they operate their business, because you see them selling you something different, it can cause a lot of confusion and unnecessary complexity in your own business. And I really hope that gives you a frame of reference and a lens of perspective when you are, you know, idolizing or looking up to business owners in our space.
I'm not sharing this to deflate your bubble or to try and sway you away from wanting to become a top 2% income earner. Listen. I'm a firm believer that when women make more money, the world becomes a better place. But I hope this invites you to self reflect and be super honest with yourself about why you are pursuing something, being honest with yourself about what you are trying to prove.
And who, and being honest with yourself about what you're trying to prove and to whom, and to give yourself space to define what is enough for you, because at the end of the day, that is all that matters your life, your family, and your peace. This phase of my owner's intent lasted about five years. The last year, year and a half of this five-year time period is when my vision started to get murky.
I had achieved my owner's intent, building a personal net worth of seven figures, but I never dreamed beyond that. My future felt like it was at a standstill. Starting a family still felt out of reach. So the only other things I knew to focus on was making more money. So I did that. Making more without meaning was a hollow achievement. I felt like my entire identity was rooted in how much I made. My personal life was bleak outside of my business.
The majority of my friendships were attached to people. I had met inside of paid masterminds or group programs. But when I believe a program, many of those friendships would fizzle. I had my close circle of friends from years back and family, of course, but I wasn't feeling the warm and fuzzy feeling of fulfillment. I wanted a richer life, more color, more laughter. More meaningful moments.
This time period led me to my sabbatical and redefining my owner's intent yet again for this next chapter of life. The words that encompass this current season of my life and my new owner's intent is peace. And profit with the driver being parenthood. Building with babies in mind. For me that looks like having two to three days max per week, where I need to be front stage. Whether that's on a zoom call with a client in person hosting a retreat or on camera for some marketing effort.
It's about being mindful of my cognitive load and energy management. As I structure my business model. It's about knowing how much is enough and giving myself permission to do less without the pressure or the self guilt of striving. For more. Once I have reached my definition of success. I want to have a great business, an incredible partner. And support 20 to 30 incredible clients per year. And feel peace to turn my brain off at the end of the day.
My business is a huge part of me, but it's not my life. It supports my life. Approaching the growth of the business from a marathon perspective, which is very different than the race I was running for the past five years. I want more spaciousness. In real time, flexibility in my calendar for the moments that I can't plan or predict in advance. I want structure, but I don't want to feel the pressure that if something comes up last minute, I can't adjust and be available.
Stepping back from constant output and fast growth is also a really important component for me right now. I don't want to lead a team of full-time employees anymore, either. I don't want a business that requires that level of operational manpower. Well, I have team support 100%. Of course. I made a new rule though, to no longer do big or hard things alone, just because I'm capable doesn't mean that I should.
And it doesn't mean that I need to prove anything to myself or anybody else, but I don't want my day-to-day role to be a manager. So more project based contractor work or repetitive ongoing retainer work, possibly maybe one full-time executive assistant. That's really my right hand in the business. And that being the. Really heavy load of my internal business support.
This looks like working with a business mentor to serve as a sounding board and a thought partner to think things through and also being in community with other business owners to do business with. This season, my new owner's intent is really rooted in easeful systems. Purposeful pace. Peaceful profit. Just rooted in enoughness. Not overextending myself. Not overfilling offers or over promising.
Not overloading my business model and my commitments, not over producing content, not over-engineering everything trying to control everything around me. My focus is to align my strategy with my energy versus the other way around. I'm getting really emotional right now, sharing this with you because building a business is truly a blessing. It has been a blessing from our life. What's coming up for me is that we are allowed to pray for more after blessings have been received.
We are allowed to be deeply grateful for all that God has given us. We are allowed to be thankful for living in answered prayers and we are allowed to pray new prayers. To be obedient to new seasons of life and new instructions for those new seasons of life, we are allowed to evolve. And God will contain to support and bless us in every new chapter of life. All right now, let's make this directly applicable for you. Your owner's intent helps you operate with an end goal in mind.
It gives you a level of operational discipline on how you run your business. So there are typically four types of end games for business owners, one an exit strategy, meaning you sell your company or pass down your company with someone else inheriting it. To a self-funded retirement strategy.
You are your exit plan meeting the profit that you make, the profit that you manage and the profit that you ultimately multiply is the funding you'll have to achieve financial security and what you'll live off of in your older years of life. Three, an absent strategy. This is more of an intermediate game plan, depending on life events, meaning you are planning for an extended period of time off in the short-term or the long-term.
This could be a maternity leave, medical leave, or just wanting to have a much lighter business load for a period of time. This is you choosing to work less and in some cases make less intentionally. This has been the plan I've been living out the past seven months since I've been on sabbatical. The profit I saved over the years is what afforded me this time off without having to change the quality of my lifestyle.
And the fourth end game that I see a lot with business owners is the burnout blow it paycheck to paycheck strategy. This is where business owners spend all of their profit real time. You are tethered to whatever your day-to-day looks like right now. And with the cost of your lifestyle, probably creeping as you earn more, you're going to be forced to stay in hustle mode. Spending more, making more repeating the stressful cycle of barely having enough.
Thinking through these end games can help you start to define your owner's intent. How you run your business based on your owner's intent, typically falls within two buckets of either being growth focused or profit focused. And I want to break down the four differences between those two. Uh, growth focused business typically is having team hierarchy, leadership management, and individual contributors. Usually full-time teams. Of maybe 10 to 30 specialized contractors.
That's typically what we see and what I have seen from a lot of peers who have more of a growth focus business model. Second is getting outside. Investors are funding to fuel. The business growth typically means giving up equity and being responsible to a board of directors or your investors to give them a return on their investment.
The third aspect of a growth focused business could look like a volume-based lead generation approach, spending hundreds of thousands of dollars per year on paid ads. You need a larger amount of leads to funnel to your offers in order for you to actually make profit. And the fourth being growing the business to appeal to investors and future potential buyers. So those are the factors that typically describe what a growth focus business looks like.
When you think about a profit focused business, these are the four things that typically make up what that looks like. Working with more project based or retainer contractors possibly having one to three full-time team members. Self-funding the business and the business growth more so dependent on your personal growth and your business acumen, meaning having mentors, advisors, coaches, peer learning, and masterminds or group programs.
Your growth in the business is really dictated in base on your individual skill development. For profit focused business models. Typically we see more of a value based lead generation. Thought leadership, organic content focused referrals. And relationship-driven. You need a small amount of qualified leads to hit your revenue goals and more importantly, to maintain higher profit and being able to retain higher profit from the offers that you sell.
And lastly, growing business to achieve your definition of enough. And using the profit to pay for your lifestyle, plus build your personal net worth your retirement accounts. Kids' college plans, 401ks, IRAs, real estate investing, things like that. So, this is the difference between outside funding versus personal freedom. Based on these factors, you can start to see how you run a growth focus company is very different approach to how you would run a profit focused company.
Your owner's intent will dictate how you structure, operate and run your business. It will be the thing that you use to filter in. Dictate your decision-making. Where you put your energy and effort in what you prioritize. If you notice that you are running your business, like a growth focus company. But your true desire is more personal freedom. This is a clear red flag that your efforts are out of alignment with your true owner's intent.
So let's do a quick recap of what we discussed and define clear next steps for you. One define what your definition of enough is. And if you need help doing this give episode two hundred and thirty six, ten lessons learned from planning my sabbatical and advance alyson. Number two, clarify what your definition of success looks like and define your owner's intent. Three. Audit your existing business and make necessary adjustments to be in alignment with your owner's intent.
Four. Look at how you are operating your business and make necessary adjustments to run your business in a way that supports your end goal. Five, once you achieve your owner's intent, give yourself permission to rest, enjoy where you have arrived versus forcing yourself to keep pushing without any real meaning. Six live your life. And enjoy what you've worked so hard to create. You've literally earned it. From the depths of my heart. Thank you for listening and spending this time with me.
And next week episode, we are going to get to the paper one time, but I hate us. We will be digging into business, money management, best practices, and what to do with your profit and take home pay. If you're interested in private one-on-one business mentorship with me or attending an in-person business mastermind retreat. I'll be announcing openings to my email list as spots become available.
Each coaching partnership is customized to help you achieve financial success in a simple, stable, and streamlined way. For more information on joining my email list, check out the episode description. Be sure to subscribe on apple iTunes, Spotify, or your preferred podcast platform to stay updated on new episodes. I love to hear your feedback. So please leave a review and share your thoughts. Let's keep the conversation going.
I want to give a shout out to someone who recently left a review on the podcast, Jodie star. She said Theresa's gift simplifying complexity with heart and clarity. Drisha is truly operating in her God-given talents. She has such a beautiful way of breaking down complex information and making it so easy to understand. She generously shares her insights so freely and has been such a blessing to my business. As I enter the online coaching space.
I love her straightforward, no nonsense approach combined with her loving personality. Jodi star. Thank you so much for listening, for leaving a review and continuing the conversation. And I hope you do the same. Remember that your words are needed, you are needed, your presence is needed and your guidance is needed. Show up for you so that you can show up in integrity for others until next time stay tuned.