Hey there. Welcome back to another episode of the Jereshia said podcast. It's been a little while since I've been behind the mic and I wanted to make sure that we wrapped up this homecoming season with the bank. Okay. I took some time off from the podcast over the past month or so to grieve the loss of my father. And if you're on my email newsletter, I sent out a really beautiful email, elaborating on that experience. So you can check your inbox to read that.
But I felt that it was really important to honor that space for myself. And now I'm ready to share something that's been coming up consistently. In my coaching calls with my current private one-on-one clients that I thought would be really, really, really impactful for me to share with you. And that's about carrying the weight of responsibility that comes with more success. This episode is actually recording from a live stream.
I did over on Instagram, where we dive into one of the most common struggles that many of my multi-six figure and seven figure private one-on-one clients are experiencing right now. Many of them had the biggest years of their business over the past few years. And now they are dealing with this new level of responsibility that comes on the other side of success. As personal brands who are selling their intellectual property.
Through courses through coaching, through a membership where your audience has access to you. And the reason why they're paying you is because of your perspective and your point of view. In the contextual nuance of you understanding their issues and what you're teaching and what you're coaching, how you're advising, how you're supporting them. They find themselves juggling multiple roles. When you are building a business like that, you are acting as the CEO, the ultimate decision maker.
You are functioning as the C M O the person responsible for marketing content and lead generation. And you're also operating as this C oh, the person was responsible for the operational decision making. That kind of goes all in to making the business, continue to run and operate all at once. It's a lot of responsibility. It's easy to feel stretched thin when you're trying to manage it all. Especially when you're holding this entire cognitive load by yourself.
If you don't have a coach, a mentor and advisor. People on your team that serve more in that strategic role to support you in the business, it can feel really isolating. So today we're getting real about why running your business can feel so heavy and what you can do to lighten the load. Let's jump right on in.
Every one of my private one on one clients is somewhere making between like a hundred thousand dollars in annual revenue But they might have had really big success in another area of their career Maybe they have a secondary business and they're trying to go to the coaching side of things and like their online education side of things all the way up to like clients that are making one two million dollars in annual revenue And one of the core themes that i'm noticing with all of my clients is that
when you are a personal brand where you are selling your intellectual property. When you are the CEO, you carry a lot of responsibility because you're not just the CEO, right? Responsible for decision making, responsible for strategic direction, responsible for making all the decisions, but you're also the CMO. You are responsible. You are 100 percent responsible for marketing and most, and majority of your marketing requires your face. It requires your creative energy output.
It requires your perspective. And you're also like the COO where you are responsible for, like, you're the head coach of the business. You're responsible for the delivery. You're responsible for client results. And the thing I've been really communicating with a lot of my clients during private calls is that the reason why it feels like a lot of responsibility is because it is. You are carrying three major leadership roles within your one title.
You are the CMO responsible for lead generation, sharing your perspective, creating content, creating marketing campaigns, generating leads for the offers that you sell. Then you're responsible for the delivery, especially if you have not yet started to delegate your client delivery. You're responsible for coaching. You're responsible for developing the curriculum of your programs. You're responsible for the client experience and all the touch points.
You're responsible for onboarding, offboarding, and then you're still responsible as the big title of CEO of decision making, where are we going? Like basically what strategic approach are we going to be taking to do those two core functions? So if you're in a season right now where you just are like, fuck, this is a lot. And I feel like my capacity is thin. It's difficult for me to think longterm. It's difficult for me to weigh the trade offs and the consequences of my decision making.
I just want to bring that perspective to mind that if the responsibility feels heavy, it is because it is there's a lot of roles that you play as a small business owner. And one other thing that I've been pointing out with a lot of my clients that I want to share with you is that it does not matter what stage of business you are in. There are always going to be more problems that you can identify in the business than. Actually need to get solved. Like, there's always gonna be problems.
Like I don't care if you're trying to make your first, thousand dollars, get your first client. If you're trying to have your first 10, 000 a month, if you're trying to have your first, multi six figure year, if you're trying to make your first seven figures annually, it does not matter the size of your business. Problems will always exist. And the thing that I want to encourage you in is that your job is not to solve every problem.
Your number one responsibility as the CEO is to properly be able to diagnose which problem you need to prioritize right now, which problem is most beneficial for you to be directing your resources to, which problem should you be putting your energy and focus on? And that is the ongoing dilemma of being a CEO. is being able to manage the current demands that your business is putting on you while juggling your personal life and those personal demands.
But you're juggling the current demands that are applying pressure with being able to have some discernment on knowing which problems you actually need to solve versus which problems can be put in the parking lot and dealt with later. And that is the never ending dynamic of being a business owner is juggling those three roles.
Starting to delegate aspects of those three roles and being able to manage the decision making and being able to, you know, enforce really like a criteria, a filter for you to have discernment to know which, which problems you need to focus on prioritizing. And I think that's been, again, a common theme for all of my clients, like the solution looks different for every single one of them right now. That's really the core mindset and the core philosophy that. Has been coming up a lot for people.
There's always going to be problems to be solved. Every, you don't need to have a perfectly problem free business for your business to grow. And I think that's the other thing. That's a major aha. Like I got to my first 150, 000 in revenue without a website. I've never strategically prioritized email marketing or list building ever in my business. Like it doesn't mean that I don't have an email list, but that's been like an open tab in my mind.
Since I started my business, like Jay, you, why aren't you doing list building? I'm like, I don't know, but that's not the way that I grew. And even though that problem, quote unquote has been one I've identified, like, yeah, sure. Like that's something I could be doing, but it's like. Do I need to be doing it right now? And is it something I should be doing?
Like I don't run paid advertising every time I talk to any of my clients or any of my peers that like run ad agencies, they're like, Drisha, you have no idea how much money you're sitting on. You're sitting on so much money. Like, you know how profitable your retargeting ads would be alone. Let alone like, you know, lookalike audiences and all of that. It's like, yeah, I know.
But when I think the thing is, is that it's very easy for other people to like, Hmm, you should be doing this, or like, hmm, you're leaving money on the table, or hmm, you should be like, uh, deploying this tactic. I always have to sit back and look at, okay, Jereshia, what is your owner's intent for this season? What is the specific outcome that you're trying to get to?
And, Is, are all these things that are either trending or things that you could do, is that the right lever that you need to pull to get the outcome that you want right now?
And for the last eight years of my business, those examples have never been in alignment with either my owner's intent and the type of business model that I wanted to produce at that moment, or it wasn't the lever that would fix the problem that was most pressing and like the biggest priority that would give me the biggest return on investment at that time.
And that's the never ending dilemma of being a business owner, is being able to identify which opportunities are actual opportunities versus just, shiny objects that you could be chasing. You know, like, what's, what's the best opportunity to get you the result that you want right now?
And based off of your business model, based off of your owner's intent, based off of your capacity, based off of what you're willing to sacrifice, based off of your current skill set gap, you have to layer in all those filters to help you make the most informed decision. So I just want to share that with you because it's been coming up with so many of my clients on calls and I'm like, from client to client to client, I'm like, okay, there's a theme here. Like, let's talk about it.
Oftentimes there's only like two or three things that you need to be doing as a business owner to make your business grow that's it pretty much everything else out of that outside of that is a distraction that we need to have some discernment around Knowing whether or not we need to actually do it Like I think like part of being a business owner is just like removing the distractions. How do we maintain focus?
How do we get back realigned and like that is the never ending struggle because it's like You Six months ago, you might be like, focused, dialed in, you got your stuff going on, and then you get sick for the first time, or you get, you lose a family member, or, like you get a flat tire and it throws off your personal budgeting, or you had this really great hire and then, like, suddenly, you're like, Six weeks into hiring them, they turn into a complete shitshow.
And it's like, everything was going so good until what? Life happened. Either people will happen or life will happen or whatever it might be. And it's just like, how do we juggle those demands and then remove the distractions and get back focused again? When I'm working with clients, like super long term, Half of my job is just refocusing them on the, the, on the original assignment. That's half of my job is reminding them to focus on their original assignment.
This makes me think about like spiritual. Assignments, I truly do believe that in any given season, God is going to give you an assignment and your job in order to play your part in blessings. Coming to pass is being obedient to the original assignment that God gave you. And half the struggle of life, is just like Remi reminding ourselves and remembering what the original assignment was and being able to combat the enemy.
When he comes in to try to distract, destroy and pull us off kilter, like, like so much of our job, even in our personal lives and just in living in general is to remember the original assignment that was given to us. And the same thing is true in business. There's so many distractions and so many things that can pull us in a million directions. And a lot of the time it's not that you don't know what to do.
I think that is the thing that creates so much inner conflict and inner resistance in us as business owners. You know what you need to be doing, you may not know exactly how to get to the ultimate end goal of where you want to go, but I can guarantee that everybody listening to this right now, you listening to this right now, you know, like the, this and that, you know, that you need to do a and B in order to get to your next step.
But the, the difficulty comes in, what is preventing you from doing the thing you already know you need to do.
And I mean, like, I think it's very common for like, you know, going back to what we talked about earlier when you're managing or you're trying to manage the demands that your business is putting on you and also the load of responsibility that you are carrying being the CEO, the CMO and the head delivery individual, depending on how long you kind of stay in that stuck season, it can really start to erode at our sense of self confidence.
That erosion of our self-confidence will start to raise the voice of our inner doubts and the things that we are worried about. And then we start taking up energetic and mental cognitive load over problems that aren't even real. You know, like we start spending hours worried about like worst case scenarios that have very little likelihood of ever coming to pass.
And because we spend so much energy and mental load, like stressed out or worried or, you know, our doubts becoming so loud, like that, that energy that we, that's energy we could be using doing the things that we already know that we need to be doing. And that, I mean, so yeah, that's like a lot of the dialogue that's been coming up for clients in just different scenarios and different situations.
Um, but for you, I think it's just like understanding, okay, I'm always going to be juggling three, three roles in my business.
The decision maker as the CEO that decides like the how and the specific approach that we take the CMO the person that's responsible for like marketing and lead generation and value articulation and getting clients to rate like getting profits to raise their hand and show interest and like selling them and the delivery like me Actually fulfilling the thing that I promised and at any given time you're probably going to be better at two of the three things at any given time.
So if you start to look at that in a Venn diagram or as a triangle, like start to pay attention to, okay, in this season, which area am I weak in? This is what I see for most clients. Like there might be really strong marketers and really incredible client deliverers, but they have a really difficult time with strategic decision making on the specific approach they're going to take to do those two things.
Like the how of it, they're really good at doing the two things, but like operationally it is chaos on the backend. Their organizational CEO decision making like hat is weak or they might be really good at strategic decision making, really great at delivery, but they've totally neglected their marketing. Most people are really good at two out of the three. So become more self aware of, okay, which area am I weak in right now?
And also which area needs to be prioritized to move the business forward in this season. It's okay for you to be weak in one. If you're weak in two, you probably have a severe business problem, right? But it's like, okay, what's the problem for me today? Do I have a lead issue, a sales issue, a delivery issue?
It's going to be one of the three that's going to be most pressing, and it's like, if I can identify that and then identify where my skill gaps are, I can start to be more mindful of what support I actually need. And that can help you know what support to ask for, what support to hire for, what skills you need to develop and groom in. And it can also help you give yourself permission to be like, yeah, here are these other problems, but I'm going to put them in the parking lot.
I don't need to worry about them right now. And it's not to say that, they don't exist, but it's like, we don't need to fix them right now. Like, I was at a, At an event during my sabbatical, and it was a really incredible event for female, fund managers, like, women that had VC funds or, like, were, they raised capital and deploy capital, um, for small business owners, like, angel investing type of thing.
And one of the speakers said something really profound about, like, managing motherhood in addition to managing her business, and she's like, you just have to know which balls in the air are glass and which balls are rubber. And And at any given season, the balls can change. So it's like, there are certain seasons where like certain responsibilities that you hold, they're glass. If they drop, that's detrimental, but there are certain things that you're juggling that are rubber.
If they fall, they'll bounce back and that's a hundred percent okay. When she used that analogy, I thought that was really good because it's like, okay, in this season, which balls are glass and which balls are rubber? Some balls are allowed to fall, but guess what? They're going to bounce back. Like nothing detrimental will happen. Versus some balls or glass and we need to be very mindful of those dropping and hitting the floor So, yeah, yeah, that's what I had to share with you
All right. I hope this episode gave you some insight into why running your business can feel so heavy. Especially when you're carrying the weight of multiple leadership roles. It's completely normal to feel the pressure. And I want to remind you that you're not alone in this journey. Having a mentor or a business coach can help distribute the weight of responsibility so that. You don't have to carry the load of decision-making all on your own.
If you're thinking about remodeling your business model, making pivots or transitions and how your offers are currently structured or what your team dynamic looks like. And if you just are ready to lighten the load and you want some personalized support with that decision making along the way. I invite you to join my waitlist for private one-on-one coaching. You can join the wait list now to be the first in line for when I open up spots, because I do have limited availability and capacity.
I will include a link in the show notes for you in case you're interested in that. Whether you're just starting out, we're scaling to seven figures. The responsibilities will always be there, but it's about learning how to discern which ones truly deserve your time and energy. If this episode resonated with you, I love to hear your thoughts as always tag me on your Instagram stories, or even better.
Take a moment to leave a review on whatever platform you're currently listening to this podcast so that the algorithm can put this episode in front of other people who need to hear this message. And if you're in a season where you're feeling overwhelmed, just know that you have the power to lighten the load by focusing on what truly matters. Thanks for spending your precious time with me and as always keep showing up. Keep doing the work and keep trusting your journey until next time.