In this episode, Megan Huber shares how to go from hustling entrepreneur to seven-figure leader and CEO, stop the chaos, and finally find true freedom (which is why you started your business in the first place, right?)
Resources mentioned
Contact info for Megan:
Podcast: Build to Last
Website: MeganJohnsonHuber.com
3 Key Points
Create systems if you want freedom
If you want to sell your business, it has to make money without you (that’s another reason why you need systems)
What works is changing rapidly and you have to keep up with it and continually be learning to stay in business.
Transcript
02.129
Ellen: Hi and welcome. I’m your host Ellen Violette, and you’re listening to Episode 110 of the Books Open Doors Podcast. Today my guest is Megan Huber and we’re going to be talking about how to go from hustling entrepreneur to seven-figure leader and CEO. So, let’s do this.
Now a word from our sponsor this episode is brought to you by ShipYourBooks.com, if your book as a lead magnet for higher-end services such as coaching. you’ll want to get your buyers onto your email list but KDP does not give you their names. Shipyourbooks.com does when you print your books through shipyourbooks.com, you get the name of every single buyer.
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[1:28]
Ellen: Okay, so now, let me tell you about Megan Huber. She is a business-growth strategist empowering high-performing six-figures service-based business owners to transition from hustling entrepreneur to seven-figure leaders and CEO. She brings along a combined seventeen years of experience in the fields of teaching coaching, consulting, and entrepreneurship so welcome to the call Megan.
Megan: Thanks for having me. I’m excited to dive into this conversation.
Ellen: I am too because I get very upset with people talking about the hustle.
[2:02]
Megan: We hear it all the time don’t we.
are men and women.
Ellen: Yes, we do. So, how did you come to this being what you do?
Megan: Yeah great question, so my first career in my 20’I was a high-school teacher and I did not go to college for teaching I always tell people that it was never in my plan to become a teacher. I got a degree in business management and thought I was going to go into the hotel and hospitality industry because I worked at a resort when I was in college, and I really loved that industry.
Everybody’s on vacation everybody’s really happy when you’re serving them, so it was very enjoyable. when I graduated I did not know what I wanted to do, I felt really lost. And my mom was an educator for thirty-four years; she was a high-school teacher at the high school I graduated from (and) she was also a principal.
And one day, she said to me, right after I graduated college she goes, “Megan, you would be such a good teacher why don’t you go back to school get your master’s degree and you’re teaching certificate?”
[3:09]
So, you know, I did what a lot of young women do when they don’t know what to do next at that age, and they do what their parents say. And I grew up in the classroom as well. I grew up in a school building. My mom was there all the time. And so that’s what I did. I went back to school, right after I graduated college. I spent two years getting a master’s degree as a teacher. I taught school in my high school I graduated from. My mom’s classroom was right beside mine, you can just imagine the dynamic there.
Ellen: Yeah, I was like of that.
[3:44]
Megan: Yet, but she was my greatest mentor in the classroom. She was amazing at what she did and I didn’t teach very long. I taught in the public classroom for five years. And then I also taught for a virtual public school in the state of North Carolina. Most states in the United States have a virtual public school system; a lot of people just don’t know that. And I did that, for five years as well.
So, in 2010 my husband and I welcome to our daughter Brighton she’s now eleven and we had her right at the beginning of a school year. And it was very uncharacteristic of me to just quit my job and come home.I was someone who…I worked seventy to eighty hours a week as a teacher, and I was the tennis coach I was the athletic trainer for the football team. I was the advisor to lots of student organizations. So, to go from that kind of…talk about the word hustling. That’s kind of know teaching isn’t really a hustling; it’s not like you’re in sales, but I was a worker bee; I was working all the time.
[4:46]
And it was my identity, so when I came home I didn’t- I’ll be really honest I didn’t enjoy being a mom in the beginning, I didn’t know what to do with myself, I had never even baby step before. She was planned; it wasn’t a surprise. But just being home by myself with no one to talk to that was where I really got to get to know myself so much better and identify like what who am I moving forward? Who am I five years from now? Ten years from now? And I just got really, really antsy.
And my husband recommended that I go get a coaching certification, just to work on my own personal development and kind of like figure myself out. He had already was a certified coach at the time. So, I went into a coaching certification program, and it was a six-month-long program to get certified-no intention of starting a business or becoming a coach. And this was at the end of 2011. I thought, “Oh, my goodness, this is going to allow me to be creative, innovative, still be in a leadership position.”
[5:56]
And when you’re a high-school teacher. And I was also a tennis coach so much of what you’re doing goes beyond just standing at the front of the room teaching, I mean you’re really coaching… these kids are teenagers. You’re coaching them on like all their new emotions and what’s going on at home, and what’s going on with friends, and who they’re mad at, and being a better version of themselves, and what are they going to do. So, there was so much coaching that I didn’t even realize that’s what I was doing.
[6:24]
So, I was able to really combine my strengths of coaching, the business world teaching, and I thought that’s exactly what I’m going to do; I’m going to start a business. Brighton was a guess a year old when I started my first coaching business so that’s that’s how it came to be so I have my husband to thank for that.
Ellen: Wow well what a stroke of luck that he already was a coach first of all.
Megan: Yeah, yeah. For sure.
Ellen: Most people wouldn’t have known to say that.
Megan: Exactly
[6:55]
Ellen: Yeah so, I assume you were hustling at first.
Megan: I was. I remember you know, I was working from home right, and Brighton was at home with me, and I was upstairs in this kind of little nook area in between a bathroom and a bedroom with my little desk, and I remember sitting behind the computer and learning everything I could possibly learn. This was back in the day when Facebook ads were just coming about, and they would show up on the right-hand side of the screen, and you only had like ninety characters.
I was doing that this was like the craze of selling $197 six-week courses, I was doing that, all the email sequences, and beyond that, I was also going to every in-person networking event I could find. And one of the things that I recognized was that the person speaking at the front of the room was the one getting all the business.
[7:57]
And so, I happened to join a networking group that had twenty-six chapters and you could speak at every single chapter. And they were all across the state of North Carolina, which is where I lived at the time. And I would drive… I lived in the center of the state, it was about a two-and-a-half-hour drive to either end of the state, and I would do it just to go speak for ten minutes at a networking event and network with people.
So yeah, I was playing the whole networking circuit, I was sitting behind my computer like hours on end, trying to figure out all the Internet-marketing stuff, trying to figure out the pricing, the packages. How do you make automation work? And just honestly never really feeling like I was finding my lane, and my place and just…
[8:48]
I think you know we see this happen, all the time in the online space everybody’s watching what everybody else is doing, and then you’re seeing well this person’s making millions of dollars doing that. “ I’ll go try that.” And that’s what it looks like for me, for the first two years. And I barely made any money.
The first year I made $8,000, but I was doing all of that work as a new mom you know pounding away behind the computer, and it was really discouraging in the beginning. And you know it’s so cliché because everyone says it but it’s like if hard work was the answer and just working more hours was the answer, we’d all be rich.
Ellen: Right
Megan: And that, I mean that I proved that I was working fifty hours a week, making nothing, and also when that happens you’re you get really deflated.
Ellen: Yes, you do.
Megan: And your confidence just goes into the dumpster. And that was my first year-and-a-half in entrepreneurship, and it was a lot of hustle.
[9:51]:
Ellen: Yeah and I think we all go through it, but you know I could really relate to what you said about work being your identity, I was the same way that work was the identity, and I was very blessed because I fell into, I got in before you, I got in like 2004. And there was a course that was like the course that everybody was taking it was called Teleseminar Secrets with Alex Mandossian. And lucky for me that I fell into that course because he told us what to do, I did it , and I made almost $50,000 my first year.
Megan: Wow
Ellen: Yeah so, I was very lucky, but in that sense, but I also did everything he told us to do, which most people don’t.
Megan: Right
[10:35]
Ellen: And then, but after the recession hit, and then social media came in, and everything changed, and people listen to my pocket all the time, know this story well but that’s when. I started going through what you’re talking about where it wasn’t growing, it wasn’t working, and you just get so deflated, and that’s when it’s really easy to give up. So, how did you get past that?
Megan: Yeah so, I had a very interesting turn of events. My pathway has not been very traditional in terms of entrepreneurship so at the beginning of 2013, I had worked with coaches, I had been in coaching programs, but I wasn’t overdoing it. I’d worked with the same coach who taught you how to grow your business through speaking, and she’s amazing. She still does the same thing to this day, and I still connected to her. But I still wasn’t making more than
$3, 4, 5 $6,000 a month. And then I do remember, it wasn’t until the end of 2013, I finally started raising my rates and. generating five figures a month in revenue and cash flow.
But, at the beginning of the year in 2013, I just kept thinking. “I want a real mentor, ”which, in my mind, was different from a coach who was just going to tell me what to do. I wanted someone who was going to show me the behind-the-scenes and almost like follow them around. And I wasn’t using the word apprenticeship, but one fell in my lap.
And in the beginning of 2013, someone who I was not following and did not know anything about, a video of her popped up on the top of my newsfeed and Facebook. And it was an eight-minute video. She was wearing all white and the ocean was behind her. And she was talking about creating an apprenticeship program and passing the torch over to other people who were newer and kind of coming up in the industry.
[12:41]
And I said I don’t know who this woman is. But what I see and what I’m hearing is what I’ve been thinking about asking for, for the last three months I’m going to apply for this I didn’t know who she was and I applied, and I was chosen. And so for the entire year of 2013, almost the entire year, I was under her wing. And I was her apprentice, there was a small group of us, I still had my own business, we were required to provide twenty hours of work for her.
But we were also receiving coaching, and guidance, and instruction and we literally helped her create. A brand new twelve-month signature coaching business coaching and coaching-certification program and that’s what we spent almost a year doing in fact she even flew us out to Paris that year…in August of that year, 2013, to work on the launch of the program and her video series to launch the program. That was an extraordinary experience.
At the end of that, she realized she needed to hire more team to help her on the delivery side of this program because her goal was to sell 200 spots into the program. And it was just her, and some assistant MBA’s, so she offered me a part-time job and one other apprentice a part-time job, and I took it. That was at the very end of 2013. I still had my business at that time. My business was doing $10,000, $12,000, $.15,000 a month. And so, I took it, and I was a certification director.
[14:18]
So, it was perfect for my teaching career became the certification director. Fast forward, she kept offering me a full-time job, and I kept turning it down because I was like if I’m making five figures, a month in my business, why would I leave that to go get a job, making less?
Ellen: Right,
Megan: And so, finally, we came to an agreement and in May of 2014, I took a full-time job. So, I left my business, and I was basically the director of all of her group coaching programs, masterminds, and online programs. At any given time, we had 500 to 600 clients, at a time. And I knew every nook and cranny of the entire business. And at that time, her company grew to about five to six million a year.And I even had my own team there that I hired, and I left there at the end of 2016, and then rebooted my business in 2017, and here we are today so.
[15:15]:
A little different you know. I really found my way by stepping away from my own business and working behind the scenes for someone else. And I was also in front of the scenes as well. And everybody always asks me like, why did you leave and what prompted that and was it amicable and the answer is yes. And I said, “You know going into that I never knew when I was going to leave, but you know, a truthfully also one of the reasons that compelled me to say yes to that opportunity…”
It’s going back to what we were talking about earlier, which is the pressure to make it work, the pressure to keep up with the amount of money so that you can pay your bills, keep growing, growing your business. The rate at which the online space changes if you’re not keeping up with that you’re left in the dust.
Ellen: Absolutely.
Megan: You have to constantly reinvent yourself, you really do like every two years about, and that may be happening even faster now. You almost have to like reshift everything you’re doing. And the way that the culture changes and society changes and how people communicate.
[16:25]:
You got to keep up with that and back in 2013 and 14 I got to this place where I just felt such immense pressure to keep providing financially that I didn’t want to do that anymore, and not only did that experience, give me a very big doorway into the entire house of what it actually looks like and takes to build a multi-seven -figure business online.
It allowed me to build my confidence, and it allowed me to get really clear on who am I? after being a teacher for all those years, what is it that I want to do moving forward? What is my actual message? and I left because
I didn’t really have anywhere to go.
I couldn’t go higher in that company than I already was. And I thought, “If I want to really learn who I am in the world, I gotta go spread my wings. I can’t just hide behind underneath someone else’s wings.” And that’s ultimately why I left.
And then, when I came back into my business, the second time, I knew what I was doing. It wasn’t a mystery, the second time, and I was confident the second time around, and I knew exactly what to do and the pace at which to do it.
And I knew how to avoid that whole burnout cycle as well because of what I experience working for someone else and watching 1000 other people try to do it to.
[17:52]
Ellen: You know it’s interesting people may think that what I just did was asked to your story, but you gave a lot of incredibly valuable information on learning how to run a business because, and I talked about this with Jeanette Cates in an earlier podcast.
She got on the Internet in like the 1990’s. She was in really early. And she was one of the first people that I ever saw on stage and looked up to and then she became a friend of mine, and we’ve been on Facebook for years. And I watched her get to the point where she retired, and I’m like, “Yeah, she’s not going to stay retired” and she tells her story on the podcast.
[18:36]
Ellen: But the point was one of the reasons that I had her on was we wanted to talk about how the Internet is constantly shifting and changing and you know her story was that she got tired of having to learn new things, and having to keep up, and having to reinvent herself and all that after like what almost thirty years.
Megan: Mm hmm yeah that’s thirty years I mean us that’s a lot of changes to go through, and we’re just we’re experiencing it right now at warp speed. We’re experiencing at warp speed on the online space and at the same time, and I think we forget this, especially when we’re kind of like in our bubble of the online space and working from home.
I think we’re forgetting what we’ve all been experiencing for the last couple of years just culturally, and in society, and what the whole world has been going through. And you kind of like lift your head up one day and you’re like whoa I’m tired I’m kind of I’m tired.
Ellen: Yeah.
Megan: And it’s not just from I’ve been working so hard in my business, it’s all the things that are changing around us. And again, like you can really get left in the dust because what we’re recognizing right now, I actually just had this conversation about my own business with a coach the other day. And we were chatting about what I did the first three to four years of my business I didn’t change a thing as what I was doing was working so well.
Ellen: Me too.
[20:06]
Megan: It was Facebook, it was a Facebook group, all I did is all I did. I’ll like give it away it’s it was a Facebook group, build community, go live, and just give tons of value, have a call to action, focus on one program, and just rinse and repeat, rinse and repeat, rinse and repeat. And that’s really all I did for four years. Now that’s not as effective.
Now it doesn’t work, the way that it worked then. I can’t just go live, teach, make an offer, and have like fifteen people private messaged me that they want to work with me. It doesn’t work that way anymore, and if you don’t have your head up with what’s going on in the landscape, what’s going on in people’s lives because that’s impacting what they’re paying attention to-how long they want to sit and listen to something…
Do they want to watch? Do they want to listen? What platform? And we’re kind of in this space, right now, and I think we’ve been in it for the last six to nine months, where it’s literally flipped upside down and you got to figure out…not like what’s the next? I don’t mean like what’s the next hacker trick? It’s not that, because I’m not into hacks and tricks and tactics and doing all the things. But are we communicating in a way, and are we showing up in a way that the people we’re talking to are actually going to engage with? Because what we did two years ago it’s ineffective today.
[21:30]
Ellen: Yeah because people are in a different place and you have to connect with people where they are. .And so, you have to understand where they are.
Megan: And that okay what you just said, like that right there that you know that’s like a timeless principle.
Ellen: Yeah.
Megan: I love that, because that is never going to go away. And it’s a matter of staying in tune with that and not getting so stuck in “Well, this is the way it worked in the past, why isn’t working now?” And sometimes, we can hang on to that for dear life, and if we’re still hanging on to what worked in the past, then we’re not able to see what’s possible and what our opportunities are moving forward.
[22:10]
Ellen: Right and what happened to me was that I spent so much money in the early years learning and a lot of it was wasted. But then when it was like “Okay well this isn’t working,” and now I need to do something else I didn’t know what to do, and I was stubborn I didn’t want to spend more money at that point.
I was so in debt, and eventually we did go bankrupt, but that was really more from medical then from the business. And nonetheless.
it can be very frustrating and very deflating when you work so hard and you do what you’re told works, and then all of a sudden it doesn’t work.
Megan: Right.
Ellen: You haven’t recovered from all the money you spent doing it the first way.
Megan: And we see that, often, that is a really common story.
[22:59]
Ellen: Yeah and now I’m reading a book called what is it? A Million Followers in 30 Days.
Megan: Mm-hmm.
Ellen: I think his name is Brendan Kane, and he’s talking about the exact thing that you just said. He’s talking about… he says it’s not hard to get a million followers, you can buy followers doing it through Facebook ads, but what do you do once you’ve got them? Then it’s all about the engagement and meeting them where they are, which is what we were just talking about.
Megan: Yes, yeah.
[23:30]
Ellen: Yeah, so how do people go from hustling to that seven figures?
Megan: Well, a couple of things ahhh… I’m a really big fan of the things that most people do not think is sexy, and one of those words is systems, and I love systems and processes. And I’ll give you an example, one of the things again that we hear in the entrepreneurial and online space are words and sentiments, like, “I just want it, I want ease and flow.”
“I want to have fun; I want to give myself grace…all those things. “ I want freedom and flexibility” Okay? That’s why most of us start a business in the first place, we want freedom; we want flexibility. We want to do what we want to do when we want to do it, the way we want to do it, how we want to do it and that’s what everybody is after.
However, the way, most people have their business infrastructure setup and the way they’re functioning in their business, it is going to produce the very opposite of what they’re saying.
Ellen: Right
[24:43]
Megan: So, what that looks like inside of the businesses flying by the seat of your pants every single day. And winging it every single day, you know, one example would be creating content; content is something we all create.
The delivery format doesn’t matter if you write you write if you’re on video and video if it’s a podcast it’s a podcast. But if you decided to do it that’s something that you have to do every day; it’s got to go out every day and every single week.
And what most people are doing is they’re getting to like 12 0’clock in the afternoon they’re like “Oh no I haven’t written my post today. What am I going to do?” and then we’re like a flurry, trying to get that stuff done that is that’s operating inside of your business from such a heightened state of anxiety and angst and stress. There’s nothing free about that. There’s nothing flexible about that. There’s nothing in flow about that. There’s nothing easeful about that.
Ellen: Right.
[25:42]
Megan: And what I teach people is, “Okay imagine this… would you rather run your business that way, or what if you set up a system. And then you plop that system into your calendar, and/or you plop that system into a standard operating procedure that you print it out and you had sitting beside your desk every day.
You wake up in the morning, you go about your morning routine, you do your thing, you come and you sit down at your desk, you open up your system, whatever format that’s in and your system tells you what to do today.” You don’t have to wing it; you don’t have to fly by the seat of your pants; you can enter into your day from an easeful flow state versus an “Oh my gosh, what am I going to do today? How am I going to get clients to do that?”
There’s nothing fun about that. And systems and processes and infrastructure gets such a bad rap because people will say, “My natural tendency is not to be locked into a calendar and to a system.” And I’m like, “Well, how’s that working for you? Because your natural tendency is causing you to have adrenal fatigue.”
To work ten hours a day, to make your team feel like they’re crazy and want to leave your business because they can’t take it anymore. Everything is chaotic and you can even identify what’s working when you do get clients, and you can’t pinpoint what the problems are to even fix them.
So, your natural tendency to feel like you’re in a straitjacket because you have a calendar and/or a system to follow is very incorrect. That is not the truth. Let’s just look at the facts here. The system, the name, you know the name of our company is Structured Freedom…
Ellen: I love that.
Megan: …because the more structure you have the more freedom, you have yeah and the more flexibility, you have.
yeah so.
[27:40]
Ellen: That was a huge shift for me what I realized that the chaos wasn’t cutting it and that you actually got more freedom from having structure.
That was a huge shift for me.
Megan: Yeah, yeah. I mean imagine waking up and my system tells me what to do every day, it means you’re not in the state of urgency and like low-grade panic attack every single day when you wake up in the morning. And I would even…I’ll even give another little tip: put your personal life inside the calendar, even put like block out white space. Like literally put if you want white space like don’t just leave it white, don’t just not put anything there literally block off in your calendar and type in “white space” or “time to be spontaneous”.
Ellen: Yeah. Personal time is what I call it.
Megan: Yeah. Personal time, and then it’s like you get to do whatever you want because you already structured your week and your day for the purpose of that owning a spot and having a purpose.
Ellen: Right.
[28:42]
Megan: Instead of just flying by the seat of the pants every day because here’s what people do, and we’re like, we’re human we all do it. “I don’t feel like doing that; I don’t feel like writing that email; I don’t feel like doing that podcast; I don’t feel like following up that that person, so let me just go like watch TV or go for a walk.”
No. Build it in like actually constructing your life and your business the way that you actually want it to be, and then follow the system. And look, your system is going to change. So, as you change, you evolve your business changes and evolves you grow you’re not going to stay in that same system, it’s going to have to… it needs to be malleable, and you’re going to change that over time.
[29:24]
Ellen: Yes, you are, and my mind wandered there for a second, I was just thinking about one of the things that was a huge wake-up call for me was reading The E-Myth.
Megan: Um.
Ellen: Because I don’t know if you read it?
Megan: You know I don’t know that I have ever read that book but.
I must Everybody talks about that, but yeah and.
Ellen: Here’s why, because so many of us enjoy what we do, or we have a skill and so we go “Oh, I think I’ll start a business because I don’t want to work for somebody else.”
Or, like, for me, you know, the main things more than anything, was like I’m from Los Angeles, one of the main things for me was I didn’t want to drive in traffic. I mean I literally have an ex-boyfriend who’s a tv director and he was telling me he was sitting on Sunset Boulevard for four hours to go three miles
(on his way to work). Right? So, I mean, working at home was huge incentive for me that was a big thing and also not having to get dressed and go to the office as well.
Megan: Well it’s a quality of life.
Ellen: Yeah Those are my two favorite things to not do.
[30:35]
Megan: Yeah sitting in traffic four hours a day that’s not a good quality of life. Exactly no I think whether it’s sitting in traffic or it’s an access to healthy foods, nutrition, you know I think so many of us are starting businesses in the name of elevating and increasing our quality of life.
Ellen: Yeah, and the opposite happens.
Megan: That’s what this whole conversation is about, but then we literally just go create the same dynamic.
Ellen: Right
Megan: Having the job in our businesses and our quality of life is not it’s either staying the same or it’s actually diminishing.
Ellen: Right well what he talks about in The E-Myth is that you have a skill and so you say, “ Okay well, I’m going to start a business” so, then what ends up happening is you’re working in the business instead of on the business.
Megan: Mm hmm.
Ellen: Because it’s different skills to actually run a successful business than just to have a skill. Skill is great for starting, it’s not great for growing a business.
Megan: Right.
[31:29]
Ellen: Yeah and people don’t understand that, and so what happens is they get caught in working in their business and that’s what happened to me also. But all the other thing was I was making good money, and so I kept putting off creating systems.
“Oh well, I’ll do it later because I got another boot camp coming up; I’ve got another workshop coming up, and I’m making good money, and it just kept going until it just became too much just doing that for years and years, and it’s just it’s exhausting.
Megan: Yeah and you almost feel like there’s no end in sight.
[32:03]
Ellen: There is no end in sight, there is no inside, I mean I was reading an article with Michelle Pfeiffer and she calls herself an accidental entrepreneur.
She was actually looking for products for her kids that were all natural and when she reached out to the manufacturers, they wouldn’t tell her what was in the products. And she got really upset and so then she created her own line
And what she said, and I was saying to my husband, this is me to a T.is that when you’re in the creative arts like whether it’s a movie or in my case, a song you do that, and then at some point it ends, and it doesn’t go on for a long time. And even in a movie, if it goes on three months, you know it’s going to end, but what she talks about is when you start a business, there is no end.
[32:47]
She was talking about how exhausted, she was from that and constantly putting out fires and how. She had to get a different mindset to run a business versus being creative.
Megan: Yeah, yeah. There’s a really good mindset shift that I think is really useful, and that is imagine that one day your intention is to sell your business, and so that’s like a mindset shift because most people aren’t you know, most of us in the service-based industry, we didn’t come into the business with the mind frame of “I’m doing this, so I can sell it in five years or ten years.”
Ellen: Right, right.
[33:31]
Megan: So, we’re not thinking that at all out of the gate. Now with that mind shift, you know mindset shift that we think of that. Then, think of, okay, someone coming in to buy a business or invest in a business- to them what makes a business most valuable?
Now, what a lot of people in the service-based industry would say, is “My product and my service is what makes it valuable.” Now, again, most of us are the ones delivering on our service or our product and it’s at a certain point, maybe you have other people on your team who are delivering part of that as well, but certainly, in the service-based industry, I mean just that mindset shift of. “I can have other people come in and deliver for me and it’s not just me,” so if we in our minds think our product and service is what makes it most valuable to an investor, and we’re the one providing the service and the value and the product.
Ellen: Then you can’t get out.
Megan: Then you can’t get out. And so the investor and someone coming into by what they see as most valuable or two main things they’re looking for.
Do you have a team of people who run it, and can run it and grow it not just run it but grow it without you?
And number two do you have all the processes and systems and infrastructure in place in the big five categories, which are marketing, sales, client delivery, operations, and finance because someone coming into buying a business they’re not buying it to operate it. They’re buying it to make money, and they want it to already be functional without you there.
[35:12]
So that’s like a really good mind frame of thinking like, if I were going to sell my business five years from now, what do I need to start putting in place now, so that someone would come in and see it as viable, and I could sell it?
Or, to your point Ellen, you’re never getting out of your business. You’re going to work until the day you die because you have to work to make the money to feel the lifestyle that you keep upgrading and we all, you know everybody’s doing it, and it’s like this vicious cycle that we don’t even realize we’re in until it almost gets too late. So. don’t let it go too far, just start thinking that way now.
Ellen: Right. Well, the other thing is a lot of people think they’re never going to want to retire, and I can tell you, as you get older your mindset changes.
It just does, I mean I talked to my friends, and who they’re older than I am, some of them, you know in their 70s and they’ll say to me things like ‘I just don’t want to work that hard anymore; I want to enjoy life. ‘
And now they’re trying to figure out how they’re going to do that because they didn’t do what you just said.
Megan: Yeah you know yeah, I was in a mastermind for four years, and I remember a conversation. This is probably like seven months ago on a group call and most of the people in the program are, I would say the average age is probably fifty-five. And a lot of the participants in the program and this particular conversation, and they all do great financially they’ve all had their businesses, for many, many years. And different iterations of the business and there were probably four or five of them.
That said, I don’t want to be doing this in three to five years and it was something that they had like kind of just come to terms with because when you’re in a coaching program or you’re working with a coach it’s all about more, growing more, making more doing more product.
And again, that’s another rat race, you really get caught into and hearing and seeing everybody else doing that right. And again, they had like just really come to terms with like, “I want to spend more time with my partner, with my family, with my kids, my grandkids. I can’t do that the way things are going now, and I want to be out of this in three to five years.”
And so to your point, and I have a lot of clients a lot of my clients are in their late 40s and 50s and they don’t want to be working the way they’re working today and even five years, let alone like ten or fifteen years and they start to realize wow the way that I’ve structured everything and the way that I am making my company valuable there’s no way out. And so you really do have to start making some shifts sooner rather than later.
[37:56]
Ellen: Right, and that was one of the things that was also frustrating it’s like when I first learned was a business model that was always going to have you working.
Megan: Yeah
Ellen:…and people and nobody said, what do you want your ideal day to look like? and work backward, like, I never heard that in the early years I haven’t heard that till just a couple of years ago.
Megan: Mm hmm.
Ellen: And it’s a completely different mindset, and you would create a completely different business thinking that way than just learning a process that works that always has you coaching and working.
Megan: Mm hmm
Ellen: So, I think that you know what we’re sharing here is so incredibly valuable if people get it, I wish I had known this years and years ago. But I didn’t and now I’m really doing what you just talked about. And my husband and I were just talking about this yesterday, the idea of setting up your business as if you’re going to sell it.
With the possibility that someday you may decide to sell it or you may not, I was also talking to someone who helps people sell their businesses and they were saying and most people don’t do that and they just stopped working.
And then, this is just done.
[39:03]
Megan: And then just gone it’s gone, I mean I’m still gone yeah, yeah Oh, we can’t even get into we won’t do this today I’m. Sure, but it’s even getting into again like in this whole like build your business industry again there’s so much emphasis on just make more revenue. But nobody’s teaching, I mean, some people are but a lot of the business-building coaches and instructors are not teaching, how do you manage the money that you’re making.
Right? So, it is possible to be done with your business and it no longer exists and still thrive financially but you, you also want to be managing your finances properly as you are building, and then at a certain point, looking at how can I invest in other ways, so that my money is growing for me that’s not even connected to this business.
Ellen: Right, passive income.
Megan: So yeah, I mean that’s an that’s a conversation that I think we need to have a lot more of its. You know I work with a financial coach and one of the things it’s just really taught me and shown me how to do is you don’t even have to keep making more and more and more and more money and you actually have a lot more money, simply because of the way you’re managing it behind the scenes.
And I think that’s a really important conversation to have as well, obviously finances is one of the main pillars and departments of any company. And it just doesn’t get the it doesn’t get the quality conversation that it really deserves.
Ellen: Because it’s not sexy.
Megan: It’s not just about making more revenue, what are you doing with that money?
Ellen: Well, first of all, a lot of coaches aren’t making enough money right? And so they don’t think about well how can I invest if I’m not making enough instead of understanding that if they did, invest just even a little bit it would grow yeah right over time. And there was something else I was going to say, but I don’t remember what it was.
[41:00]
Ellen: Anyway, So, this has been really an important conversation I hope people really take it to heart, thank you, do you have any final thoughts before we go or tips.
Megan: Yeah. I would say my final thought… you were mentioning on them in the early days, which I think most of us were not taught how do I structure well how do I create an ideal day? Like what’s my ideal day in the life? And I was having a conversation with one of my mentors right before I got on this call and it’s in the personal development categories, specifically on.
How to increase your influence, but based on the way that you communicate first with yourself. And then, obviously, then, how are you communicating out in the world to anybody who you’re interacting with? It’s not a business group at all.
Although everybody in there is an entrepreneur, and we were chatting about something that I brought up to him that I had been stuck on for five years. And he said to me, is so this question was so good, and he goes, “Well, are you making your decisions today based on your like early=thirties self and how you operated and what satisfied you at that level and stage of your life and what you were making financially and what you’re capable of? and I’m thirty-nine, I’ll be forty this year he goes,
“Or, are you making your decisions from your forty-year-old self and what would satisfy the forty-year-old and not who you were when you were thirty-one” because he goes, “You’re stuck where you’re stuck because you’re still making your decisions based on that and the way you’re.
living and operating it’s satisfying, it’s very satisfying, but to that version of yourself and it’s not satisfying to the 40-year-old version of yourself.
And he goes, “You’re not even thinking about it that way, are you? You haven’t stopped to think about that you know what would you be doing differently, how would you construct your day? Would your habits be different? Would you interact with people in a different way? Would you show up in a different way?” and not just in business. We get so stuck on like just the way I operate in my business, we want to build a business that honors our life.
You know, do you want to have time with your children with your grandchildren? With your spouse? With your siblings? With your friends? Do you want to have time for yourself.
Do you want to have time to move your body and exercise and be in nature?
And I think it’s making those decisions first and really honoring like where’s my heart and my soul leading me, and then let’s construct a business and strategies that support that. And then I’ll end with this- it’s constructing the life and the business, but understanding what’s required of you in order to make that a reality. And that’s the piece, where people say they want a certain thing then they don’t want to do what’s required.
Be very clear on what it’s going to require of you, and are you committed to that? And if the answer is no, go choose what you will say yes to and what you will ultimately commit to, so I’ll end on that. Life first, business built around the life.
[44:09]
Ellen: Yeah. I’d like to say something about that, which is one of the things that has really helped me.
is first of all the power of now like really staying in the now really forcing yourself, because I do this, a lot where I’m looking into the future, and I have to bring myself back because when I look in the future, I see all this work, I have to do right because I’m putting the systems in place, so I go, “Oh my God, this is a lot.”
So, one of the things I learned from a friend of mine Jamie J who runs bottleneck. I don’t know if it’s called bottleneck staffers whatever to be a company, but he sat down with me one time, and he said okay let’s just make a list of every single thing that you have to do in order and then you just do it, you know you just check them off and you do it.
And I was just like everybody else you know, like when I teach book writing I say you know you’ve got to do a detailed outline first, so that you know exactly what you’re going to write and yet I wasn’t doing a detailed outline of what I needed to do, so it was that same thing of like well I haven’t my head.
It is not the same having it in your head and having it on the paper, so you need to get it on the paper, and then the other thing that helps me a lot is my focus, what’s a call?
Focus Forward Planner from Michael Hyatt because there’s only a spot for three things each day, so that you don’t you know you don’t get too much on your plate. And you also see your priorities, so I have a list in the back of all the things that I know I want to do this year, but then I’m picking off one at a time and then working on the pieces within that one. But if you but you really do have to stay in the present to do that, because otherwise it’s so overwhelming it runs.
Megan: Yeah those are great resources.
[45:53]
Ellen: So, are you an author.
Megan: I’m not an author yet Ellen. I need to get on the train write a book.
Ellen: Okay, well we’ll have to talk about that another time.
Megan: We will.
46;09
Ellen: So, how can people contact you?
Megan: Awesome Ellen there’s two great places to contact me number one if you are listening to this podcast you’re probably someone who enjoys listening to podcasts I have a show it is called Built to Last. And it goes right along with what we’ve been talking about here it’s all about how do I build a business and a life and relationships that are built to last right out of the gate. So, go check me out Built to Last at with Megan Huber and then, if you want to jump on over to my website and see what we’ve got going on over there, go to
MeganJohnsonHuber.com.
Ellen: Great, that’s it for today. Thank you so much for coming on this has really been great.
Megan: Yeah. I enjoyed it Thank you so much.
Ellen: You’re so welcome.
[46:58]
If you’re not on the website and you’d like to get the transcript of this interview, you can go to https:BooksOpenDoors.com/podcast/stopthehustle.
And if you’re new to the show or you haven’t gotten a chance, be sure to grab your copy of the Rockstar Author’s Toolkit. We’ve got checklists in there for writing your book in three days or less, writing a bestseller title. Simple Strategies to Jumpstart your Book Marketing Online and the Kindle Planner. So if you don’t know how to get started, or you just want to write your books better and faster and easier, this is the place to start.
Also, I’m excited that we have updated the website, so you can now check out the 3 Day Bestseller Program for writing publishing and launching your book to number one bestseller that’s it BookOpenDoors.com/coaching and if you’d like to know more, you can tap on the click here button on the page and that will take you to the next step, and we can set up a time to chat to see if it’s a fit for you as well as for us. If (it’s) not (a fit) I’m happy to give you some other resources.
Also, be sure to join us next week, when my guests will be Jim Scniechowski and we’ll be talking about the fear of being fabulous and how Jim’s having a stroke did not slow him down one bit. BTW (His wife Judith Sherven, Ph.D. will also be on. I convinced her to join us!)
So, that’s all I have to say, for now, but I want to remind you please check out ShipYourBooks.com and tell Brett Ridgeway, who owns it, that that I sent you. …if you’ve got a book and your marketing offline then you’ll want to have your books printed, and he’s the guy to go to. So that’s ShipYourBooks.com.
Okay, till next time Bye-bye.
Music: You’ve been listening to the Books Open Doors podcast, with your host, Ellen Violette. If you’d like to connect with other mission-driven speakers, coaches, consultants, thought leaders, founders, creative entrepreneurs, and authors who are changing the world one book at a time, join us in the Books Open Doors community at facebook.com/groups/booksopendoors. Let’s rock your business with books.
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