How Simplifying Your Workflows is the Secret to Visionary Leadership

Transcript

You’re Listening to the AntiFragile Entrepreneurship™ podcast Episode #29! I’m your host, Courtney Elmer.

Have you ever thought to yourself, “I don’t know how to make the right decisions for my biz. There's just so much to know and I don’t even know where to start. What should I focus on? What exactly should I be doing?”

You’ve likely invested in courses or programs to help you figure things out but wound up feeling more overwhelmed and more confused. You feel like you STILL haven’t found the missing piece that will help you find the best strategy for business growth and give you the entrepreneurial success you're looking for.

DIY-ing your biz isn’t working: now you’re more confused and have too much information to sift through to what will help you reach your goals the fastest.

As a result, revenue is not consistent. Pieces of your venture aren’t working, but they’re like blindspots, so they’re hard to diagnose. You feel busy all day long but still don’t feel like you’re accomplishing entrepreneurial success, all of which contributes to you feeling frustrated, confused, and asking yourself, “Will I EVER figure this out?” so you can learn the secrets to scaling your business.

You want to know what I believe? You shouldn’t have to work this hard to get the results you want.

You deserve to have massive entrepreneurial success
You deserve to make a bigger impact without killing yourself or burning out
You shouldn’t feel handcuffed to your company like you can’t take a day off because you’re afraid of what'll happen if you do
It shouldn’t be this hard to hit your goals
You should know the appropriate strategy for business growth
You should be scaling your business ultimately

You want to know what else? It's easier than you think to find the best strategy for business growth, and it's entirely possible to build an EffortLESS Life™. Today, I’ll show you the secret sauce for stepping into your power as the visionary leader your venture needs, so you can win the inner game, unlock your full potential, start creating the bigger income and impact you deserve, and finally achieve entrepreneurial success.

This is something I’ve never shared here on the show before… are you on the edge of your seat? You should be!

You’re about to learn what most entrepreneurs, course creators, and small biz owners don’t know about business that keeps them stuck and struggling.

What you hear here today is guaranteed to help you SEE your business differently, so you can start DO it differently.

Let’s dive in.

[INTRO TRACK]

Before we jump into today’s episode, I’ve gotta give a shout out to our featured listener of the week: Kim, who says: Courtney is amazing! My life is hectic, chaotic, sometimes a mess. I’m a perfectionist and recovering workaholic, and Courtney’s EffortLESS insights are just what a busy entrepreneur needs. It’s refreshing to hear we don’t have to stress to create a life that fills us up!

Thanks for this incredible review, Kim. Reviews like these help us know what kind of content you want to see more of! Remember! For you listening, when you take 30 seconds and leave us a 5-star review, we might just feature YOU as our listener of the week and give you a shout out too, here on the show!

Have you ever felt like...

No matter how hard or how long you work, you never seem to make any progress
Despite how much you’ve learned, you can’t seem to find the secret sauce for scaling your business
You notice that you’re doing it ALL yourself and you rely on your hard work and effort as your primary asset for success
You feel meant for more, but somehow you can’t seem to get out of your own way
You can’t seem to find the right strategy for business growth
You ultimately want more and to achieve that elusive notion of entrepreneurial success but can’t seem to do so

...if you said “YES!” to one of these, then let me reassure you: you're not alone.

Here’s what most people won’t tell you: you are already deserving of everything and entrepreneurial success you want to achieve. The world’s most successful entrepreneurs know this, and it’s time for you to know this too.

What's crazy to me, is that most people remain struggling on a path to burnout than admit that they're struggling and seek help! Yet there comes a beautiful point in every entrepreneur’s journey where that struggle becomes so real, they open themselves up to change. Maybe you’ve reached that point, maybe you haven’t… but if you’re listening to my voice, I’ll assume that you’re at least curious and open to discovering a different way to reach entrepreneurial success and find the right strategy for scaling your business, without it taking you out in the process.

You might feel frustrated and exhausted because you’ve been reading all the books, listening to all the podcasts, following all the influencers, and doing everything you’re supposed to be doing, but still feel like you’re not making the income and impact you really want. You’re really struggling with scaling your business.

Or, you feel scattered and find it hard to focus when you sit down at your desk because you’ve got so much on your list, but it always feels like there’s more to do than time in the day. Scaling your business feels painfully slow because the little, mundane task bog down your time.

Ultimately, you feel like there’s a giant between where you are now and where you want to be. Because it seems like no matter how hard you work or how many late nights you spend at your desk, you still can’t figure out how to reach your goals and achieve entrepreneurial success without burning out or risking your sanity.

It feels like everywhere you look, someone else out there is making more money than you or has achieved the ultimate entrepreneurial success. They have more followers than you. They're scaling their venture faster than you. And they’ve been at it for LESS TIME than you! (this is where it really stings).

You might wonder, “What is it that they have that I don’t?”

I’ve been in your shoes. I know what that relentless pursuit of entrepreneurial success feels like. I feel your pain, because I also believed, at one time, that my success depended on how much and how hard I worked, and if I wasn’t working it meant I was failing. I didn’t want to fail, I wanted a life of freedom, one that gave me the choice to do what I wanted with my time and enough money to do the things I loved. But the harder I worked — which I thought was the way to success — the more it pushed me from my goal. I was overworked, overwhelmed, and completely exhausted.

Then I got sick with a devastating diagnosis and was forced to slow down. The break-neck pace I was living at had finally broken me. And it also forced me to find a new way. My own journey of healing and rethinking how hard we have to work to get the life we want, has created a global movement that has impacted more lives than I ever could have imagined.

Since then, I’ve designed a revolutionary approach that cuts through the noise and heals the root of the issues of why entrepreneurial success and finding the right strategy for business growth can feel virtually impossible despite how hard you're working. After spending more than six years researching stress, overwhelm, and wellness, I’ve built a life that allows me to pursue passion projects and spend more time with the people I love. And show others like you how to do the same. It’s called the Visionary Leader Formula™, and it’s a proven approach that helps busy entrepreneurs who feel stuck and frustrated find a new way to grow their businesses.

The Method itself has 5 steps and 3 key pillars. The 3 key pillars are what we’re going to dive deeper into here today. The 5 steps are what we teach you how to do inside of the Visionary Leader Incubator™, so if you’d like to hear more about that, you can get on the waitlist to find out more when you listen till the end of this episode.

If I could show you one of the biggest mistakes entrepreneurs and digital course creators are making that’s costing them their biz, would you want to know what it is? The truth is, there are a lot of mistakes I see struggling entrepreneurs making, that’s costing them clients and causing them to leave a lot of money on the table, which hinders entrepreneurial success.

If we could boil all of those mistakes down into one, it’s this: until you change the way you think about entrepreneurship and business, nothing in yours will ever change.

Here’s what people won’t tell you about achieving entrepreneurial success — you’re not (naturally) wired for it. None of us are.

As I mentioned at the start of this episode, you already deserve everything you want to achieve. The world’s most successful entrepreneurs know this, and if you're ready to stop hitting dead ends and start scaling your business, it’s time for you to know this too. True, you might not believe it, and if this is you, what I want you to do is to borrow my belief in you until you begin to believe in yourself.

The major problem in our fast-paced, digital world is that very few of the so-called experts out there have taught you how to cultivate the mindset you need for entrepreneurship. Don’t get me wrong, a lot of 'em say you *need to have* the right mindset in order to grow your biz and transform your life, but how do you make the shift from stuck and struggling to learn how to think like a successful entrepreneur when no one is showing you how? Few have given you the exact strategy for business growth and to achieve entrepreneurial success.

I don’t need to tell you that the entrepreneurial greats we look up to (like Steve Jobs, Richard Branson, and Oprah Winfrey), changed the world because they FIRST saw the world differently. And they saw the world differently because they think about things differently.

Learning how to cultivate a winning mindset is the first core pillar of becoming a true visionary leader. Without this key step, you’ll do a whole lot of work, but feel forever stuck. Real change has to start from within. You won’t find the solution to the real problem outside of you, so trying out that new marketing strategy or sales funnel approach won’t fix or change anything. The moment you begin learning how to evaluate your current mindset and consider it the way you're thinking about your venture is the reason you haven't reached the entrepreneurial success you want, that’s the moment you’ll STOP feeling so frustrated and unfulfilled. There’s a lot of freedom waiting for you on the other side when you do this meaningful work, including finding the right strategy for business growth and scaling your business!

Now, there are two other big mistakes that come up a lot when I sit down with someone for the first time.

The first one, which tends to be more obvious, is: Thinking you can grow your income and impact faster if you just work harder and had more time.

I get it. Our culture has told you that the harder you work, the more money you’ll make. The more money you make, the more freedom you’ll have. And the more freedom you have, the easier scaling your business and achieving entrepreneurial success will feel. But the culture has sold you a lie. Our rise-and-grind culture has made us feel guilty for taking a vacation. It’s made us feel guilty when we take time away from work to spend with our families. It’s sneaky and deceptive, because for many people, even if they DO take time off, their mind never gives them a break. They’re always thinking about work, worrying what’ll happen because they’re not at their desk, worrying about all the things still unfinished on their never-ending to-do list.

You want to know something really ironic? Wanna know what separates struggling entrepreneurs from successful ones?

The answer is: those who have achieved true entrepreneurial success have spent their time working on the hard things instead of working hard.

Let me ask you something: if hard work was what it took to be a successful entrepreneur, then why isn’t everyone who works hard successful?

The world’s most successful entrepreneurs know that how we see business is what determines what is possible. It’s time for you to discover this, too.

Because if you choose to keep struggling on the path to burnout, I don’t think you need me to tell you if you keep going down that road.

And it’s easy to get swept up in it all. But time, energy, willpower, and effort -- these are all limited resources. If you rely solely on them when it comes to scaling your business, you might experience periods of growth, but they’ll be mixed with experience problems like inconsistent income and periods of extreme exhaustion and fatigue. Why? Because there’s a human behind every startup or venture. This means if the human is on their game, the business may grow for a time. But since energy, willpower, and effort are all resources you only have so much of, guess what? When those things are in short supply, your venture is going to suffer too.

So what happens? People burn themselves out, and their level of commitment drops to an all-time low that ultimately is a hindrance to entrepreneurial success. They tell themselves, well, I was really committed to my business in the beginning, but now I’m not so sure. I’ve tried everything, and nothing seems to work. And this is why it’s powerful when we teach our students how to separate their energy, work, and effort from their commitment. When they do, guess what happens?

Commitment goes UP, scaling your business gets easier, burnout goes away, and you achieve entrepreneurial success. You feel inspired, motivated, and have a renewed sense of joy and excitement for your company and the work they’re here to do, because of the impact you can create. This is why the second pillar of becoming a true visionary leader is all about commitment.

Now, if someone doesn’t take the time to learn this stuff, and they just keep doing what they’re doing, hoping for a different result, it… creates a real problem for people, which leads to the other mistake that I see entrepreneurs making: which is hurrying to consume content and implement strategies to fix these issues of inconsistent revenue, get more leads, and hurry up and try to apply all these strategies quickly without a clear plan. It's like putting a puzzle together without the box.

Trust me, there's no shortage of people teaching you all the business secrets via how-to steps and strategies for growth, creating content that converts, running Facebook ads, writing good copy, and all kinds of things you can learn and apply to your business.

If you’re currently experiencing that never-ending struggle of trying to get a company off the ground, but no matter how hard you try, nothing seems to work...do you think the latest funnel or software or tactic is really the “missing piece” that prevents you from scaling your business?

How many funnels and new strategies have you tried (and you’ve watched others try) and still nothing?

That's because true entrepreneurial success isn't found in a funnel. If those things haven’t worked, do you really think trying another new “tactic” is going to solve all your problems? You’ve already learned here listening to me today that until you change the way you THINK about entrepreneurship and business, yours WILL never change.

Yet looking to ourselves and the space between our ears is the last place most struggling entrepreneurs ever seem to look. (Hence, why they keep struggling!)

To experience true entrepreneurial success, and in turn, work on scaling your business, you have to be willing to let go of old habits.

It's been said before, “What got you here, won’t get you there."

Trying to find the right strategy to scale your business with the current mindset, thoughts, and HABITS that have gotten you to where you are now is like trying to compete in the Tour de France with training wheels.

There’s a lot of things out there people are telling you that you SHOULD be doing when it comes to scaling your business. And guess what? YOU don’t have to do them all. Once you learn what the revenue drivers are in your company, it’s going to give you a whole lot of clarity and freedom to focus on less and make more.

A perfect example of this is a conversation I had the other day with a friend of mine. She was feeling torn about shutting down her free Facebook group. The Facebook group wasn’t making her money, it was sucking her time, and it just wasn’t the right strategy for business growth. She was afraid of letting it go because when she first built her business, she relied on a Facebook group to generate warm leads. It had served her well for a time. As she was telling me all this, all I did was ask her one simple question that changed EVERYTHING for her.

Want to know what it was?

“What if it's not about needing a Facebook community to grow, but needing to let it GO to grow??”

She replied back with a ton of mind-blown emojis, and said “OMG you are RIGHT! The entrepreneurial success and level of impact I want to achieve require me to be more removed.”

So yes, strategy is the critical third piece of the Visionary Leader Formula™, but not just any strategy. The RIGHT strategy for business growth. Maybe you’ve tried other things in the past for scaling your business and those processes and systems didn’t work for you. That’s because they weren’t the best strategies for your growth.

We help get you focused on the critical few things that really move the needle, so you can create a bigger impact, and finally feel what it’s like to have the true entrepreneurial success you want and the freedom you started your business for in the first place. Even better, we show you how to follow through. No more unfinished courses or half-read books, and no more jumbled pieces of the puzzle. We give you the box, and a clear plan for scaling your business so you can put the pieces together, step-by-step.

Without Mindset, Strategy, and Commitment, I won’t say your venture is doomed… but I will say that it’s going to take you a whole lot longer to experience the entrepreneurial success you want and to get where you want to go.

Now, there is a 4th pillar. But that's beyond the scope of our conversation here today. It is the key that helps our students simplify their workflows and get the right support and systems in place to step out in front of their business as the visionary leader they're meant to be, and spend more time in their zone of genius.

And we have a 100% success rate for people who take this system and use it for scaling their business. Why? Because it’s simple, and it works. With the Visionary Leader Formula™, you’ll

Gain more control of your life and company so you can finally experience true entrepreneurial success
Learn the best, most effective strategy for scaling your business
Get a series of benchmarks to know how to measure your progress and establish better systems for bringing more consistent revenue streams
Stay focused on the right tasks and experience greater satisfaction and a sense of accomplishment
Empower yourself to step into the vision you have for scaling your business
Know how to apply what you’ve learned to achieve entrepreneurial success -- no more DIY-ing it or trying to figure it out on your own

It’s the difference that makes a difference.

Now of course, you always have a choice. You can choose to level up your biz and step into your role as the visionary leader your venture needs and experience unbelievable growth and real entrepreneurial success, or you can stay where you are and figure it out the hard way alone, working really hard without a lot to show for it… feeling burnt out… feeling trapped in your business and overwhelmed by the lack of control you have in your life.

There IS a better way, but the choice is yours. So, what are you going to choose?

Will you be like our student Christina, who took this strategy for biz growth, applied it to her career, and went from making virtually $0 to generating over $3M in sales in a single month?

Or Crystalyn, a single mom who celebrated a $5 figure launch of her dream jewelry business, and now has celebrities like Jamie Kern Lima and Rachel Hollis wearing her jewelry?

What about Casey, who gained the confidence in herself to step out and pursue her life-long dream of becoming an actress that had been on the back burner for too long?

Or Tiffanie, who learned how to use this Method and felt more empowered from within in just 3 days than she’d ever been able to attain before, even as the CEO of a highly successful company

We love sharing our students’ stories here on the show, so if you're ready to know how these women did these remarkable things, make sure to listen to these episodes:

So to wrap it all up today: if you’re working 12-14 hr days, nights, and weekends, doing literally ALL THE THINGS as your current strategy for business growth without a team to support you, chances are you already intuitively know that what you're doing right now isn't working and hindering entrepreneurial success. It isn't a sustainable approach for scaling your business. You already know deep down working this way isn't going to work for you long-term.

If this is you, I want to help you reach the entrepreneurial success you deserve.

I’m going to show you how to close the gap between where you are right now and where you want to be, so you can start hitting your goals faster and more consistently and experience what scaling your business feels like without working 24/7 or worrying if you'll somehow fail if you're not hovering over your laptop.

Just promise me one thing: that you won't be like most struggling entrepreneurs who continue down this path just hoping that they can reach entrepreneurial success before they burn out.

Imagine what it'll feel like when you’re finally free from the voice in your head. When the self-doubt is no longer there and you finally feel you can trust yourself and the decisions you make, and stop second-guessing yourself and overthinking your decisions. When you no longer believe you might fail. When you know exactly what action steps to take for scaling your business. When you have a clearly defined path to success. When you feel comfortable and confident stepping into the role of visionary leader your business needs to succeed. When you have the right strategy for business growth. When you are in the driver’s seat of your biz and know how to get to the next level. It’ll feel pretty incredible, right?

I’m going to leave you with that picture in your mind’s eye, right now. That does it for today guys. Your entrepreneurial success is inevitable. I’ll see you back here next time on the AntiFragile Entrepreneurship™ podcast. Until then, go live your EffortLESS Life®.