The Wake Up Call- January 30, 2015.
Click to listen to the recording or continue reading the transcript below.
Today I’m going to talk a little bit about my story for those of you who don’t know me and then I’m going to go into the six things that I did that basically took me from broke to making now over sixty thousand dollars in just a few months. And you guys can do it too and this is exactly why I am doing these calls every Friday is to just give you this information. Stuff that people don’t really talk about. If you know me from the group there’s a little bit of talk but I still think that there are some things that aren’t mentioned or talked about and I think it’s really important to really get down to the nitty gritty of what it takes to be an entrepreneur.
So a little bit about me… I’m Jenn Scalia and I am a confidence coach and business mentor. I work with women entrepreneurs and coaches to help them beef up their confidence and work on a lot of the emotional journey of being an entrepreneur as well as helping them with their businesses; so that’s where the business mentoring comes in. Kind of teaching you the tricks of the trade and what I did, everything that I learned over the past two years that I wish someone would have taught me. So for those of you who got my newsletter where you saw my little story about how in February, it’s actually my second year anniversary that I bought my domain name and I started my website.
However it’s only the first year anniversary of my very first paying client. So why? Where is that gap? Why did it take me a year to get a client?
So the truth is I was hiding. I wasn’t all there. I wasn’t sure what to do, I was sacred, I had a lot of fear, I felt like I couldn’t do it so I just hid. Instead of actually going out there and showing people my talent. I just hid behind my website, I hid behind an Instagram page, but I never actually did anything as far as getting clients, asking for clients, or getting people on the phone to coach. I didn’t even have packages on my website at that point. That was in 2013. In the beginning of 2014 I’ve had some really personal stuff happen to me. I was going through a divorce and I pretty much was losing my house. I was losing everything and my back was against the wall. I knew that I had to do something and I knew that I was either going to make my business work or I was going to have to go looking for a job working forty hours a week and probably only making about ten or twelve dollars an hour.
So at that point I really made it my mission to make this work. I felt like I didn’t have a choice. But I was still hiding a little bit. My soul wasn’t all there. I felt like I was on the brink of something amazing. I finally had reached my target niche and I had figured out what I wanted to do. At that time it was relationship coaching, helping women with their confidence and their self-esteem when it came to relationships- all based on my personal experiences. And I thought that that was it, but something just wasn’t clicking.
I knew that there was just something simple, a simple tweak, something in my life that I could change that would skyrocket my business but I didn’t know what that was. But also knew that I would probably never see it myself. So I needed to ask for help at that point. Real help. Not just taking a bunch of courses or watching a bunch of webinars. I needed somebody to guide me, and divine timing brought that perfect person into my life in September of 2014.
And that’s when everything changed for me. So from February of 2014 when I got my first paying client, my packages were around eight hundred dollars for three months and that actually made me really happy. But the problem is that from February until August I made a total of $6,715 dollars in my business in eight months. That’s less than a thousand dollars a month in my business. From September of 2014 to today I’ve made ten times that- so you do the math.
So what happened? When and how did that switch turn on? So I’m going to talk about exactly the things that I did. The changes that I made to go from making six thousand dollars to making sixty thousand dollars in a shorter period of time.
So the first thing is that I committed. In the beginning of 2014 I sort of committed, but not really. I knew I had to do something but I was still kind of playing around. I was just kind of hanging out on Facebook groups, wasn’t really putting my services out there, wasn’t putting myself out there, wasn’t promoting, wasn’t connecting with people. Being an entrepreneur takes a very special person. If I’m talking to any coaches here, lots of people can coach, a lot of people are born doing it, a lot of people have done it throughout their lives but actually being an entrepreneur is a completely different story.
So if you are ready to go pro and start making money in your business, you have to commit. Commit to yourself, commit to your business and commit to this dream that you have. So I want to ask, do you really want this? What are you willing to do? How far are you willing to go to make this happen so that it’s not just a pipe dream, it’s not something that just looks good on paper, it’s not like, oh I can coach people and make lots of money. No. It takes a lot more than that. So what are you doing? What are you willing to do to achieve these goals?
The second thing I did was invest. And I talk about his a lot because I was someone who was scared to invest at least on a fair level. I mean the first thing I invested in was B-School, which wasn’t cheap. It was two thousand dollars and then you know throughout that year and a half I had spent little bits of money here and there, nine hundred dollar course, a five hundred dollar course you know, two hundred dollars on my logo. It actually all really added up to like close to twenty thousand dollars. But the biggest investment that I made for myself in my business, yielded the biggest results.
Investing in your business, in yourself, it’s not questionable. You have to do it. You can’t not do it and I paid my coach and my branding for my website a total of over ten thousand dollars in September.
So I get this question a lot, how did I afford it? How was I able to pay for this if I had no money?
I was broke. Actually in August I had to borrow money from my parents to pay for my son’s tuition for his school. I was feeling pretty low at that point and you know, at that point was really my rock bottom. I knew I had to do something, I knew I had to bring somebody on board, I knew I had to invest in somebody if I wanted to get the results and that’s what I did.
So how did I afford it? Good question. I afforded it by hustling and by having faith. I sold things. I sold an old engagement ring that I was holding on to, I sold some things that were lying around the house. Old pocketbooks, name brand clothes and things like that. I had a yard sale. There’s so many different things that you can do outside of your business to hustle for money if you really need it, if you’re really committed to investing in yourself and your business and that’s what I did.
The money was hard, I will admit it was hard to put that amount of money out every month but somehow, someway, every month when it came to making that payment, I had the money in the bank. And I just want to go back to investing as far as I find courses and programs.
I did that and I feel that you know it’s good for a foundation but trying to figure this shit out on your own is not going to work. Bottom line is you need a coach, so group coaches are amazing. Yes they will give you the foundation and tools that you need, however nothing provides the level of support and accountability that a coach or a mentor can. And I will always have a coach or mentor even though I am what I consider to be successful. I’m where I wanted to be, but now there’s a new level. Now there’s a new goal. So I’m always going to have someone on my side, I’m always going to have that coach or that mentor. The guidance, because I like having somebody in my corner and I think it did amazing things for my business and so I will continue to do that.
So number three to actually listen. Now what you invest in your coach if you decide to have a coach or a mentor or whatever that looks like for you, it’s really important to take what they say and listen. You hire them for a reason and so is it because you value their opinion? Is it because it’s not where you want to be? Take their advice and leave everything else and I think that’s made all the difference. I was a very controlling person especially when it came to my business and my life.
When I hired my coach, I had to let go of that control. I had to surrender and say you know what, you’ve been where I want to be. And what I’ve been doing so far is not working. So whatever you say, whatever you tell me to do I’m going to go out there and I’m going to do it. Now at the same time you know I want you to listen but I also want you to shut off the noise. And what I mean by the noise is everyone else’s opinion, we all have one. So I see a lot of people in the groups that will constantly ask for opinions, constantly ask for advice. You’re already just going to get a crap shoot of people’s different opinions, people who aren’t experts giving you their opinions telling you what they did. And it’s all well and good and I love the support. However you are just going to get even more confused. So turn off the noise and really focus on what you want focus on you and your coach or you and your mentor. Whatever that is and get it done.
The fourth thing is to take action. So this is probably the most important step. Taking action is going to get you money in the bank. Taking action is what’s going to get you clients and it’s going to help you get even clearer on your messaging, your services, your ideal clients. You can think about it all you want but until you actually do it, you don’t know. So you may think want to work with a certain type of person but then you’ve never coached anyone. How do you know? You don’t, you don’t know unless you do it. So and along the same lines you can have a ton of ideas in your head but unless you actually get them out to the world, it means nothing. So action is the thing that doubled my income in a month. Action is what got me to my first five-figure month. Now it wasn’t easy, I’ve busted my butt to get to where I am. I hustled, I promoted myself and I just want you guys to know because I hear this come up a lot about people feeling weird about promoting themselves or they feel like they’re going to be sleazy or salesy. It’s not sleazy, it’s your job, you have to let people know that you exist. You have to let people know what you do and what you can offer them.
I use this example a lot. I actually like to use a real life example as opposed to online entrepreneur examples. But think about huge corporations like McDonalds or Coca Cola or Starbucks. They still promote. Do you think that not everyone in the world knows what these companies are? Of course they do but they’re still promoting, they’re still buying commercials, they’re still buying billboards. They’re still putting it out there; they’re still doing sales. Does anybody get turned off by that? Does anybody think that’s sleazy? It’s not; it’s your job. You have to get out there, you have to hustle and you have to let people know that you can help them.
Number 5 is don’t stop, AKA don’t quit. So things will get rough, this is not an easy thing to do. Being an entrepreneur is not for the faint of heart. It’s not for the quitters and it’s not always a fun ride. Shit is going to get hard, you will have doubts, you will have fears, you will think that it’s all been done before so why even try. Don’t stop, you have something amazing that you have to offer. You have something different to offer, and this is what separates the successful people from the unsuccessful people so the people that I see that don’t succeed as a coach or an entrepreneur it’s because the quit, they quit too soon, they stopped trying. It got too rough for them. So if you’re in this and you really want to make this happen for you, keep going even when things get tough, keep going.
And number 6 is my absolute favorite and that is to be yourself. Be in absolute alignment with who you are and what you do. For a long time I was kind of living this double life. So I had months before that I started as a relationship coach and I did that because I kinda went through myself and I felt I could help lots of women get out of that. And I did. I did help lots of women and I was really good at it but I wasn’t aligned with it, I didn’t feel good about it. I didn’t want to go and tell people on my Facebook profile that I was a relationship coach or that I was helping women with their self-esteem after toxic relationships. Whenever I went to write a blog or a guest blog I hated it. So I knew that even though I was good at it, even though I thought that this is what I was supposed to be doing, it wasn’t.
It wasn’t until I got in total alignment with what I was really good at and how I could help people that things actually started falling into place for me. Once I was actually at that point where I was like yes this is exactly what I am supposed to be doing, these are exactly the people I’m supposed to be helping, the flood gates opened, that’s when things really started to happen.
I had joy and excitement when I was as talking about my business, I wanted people to know what I did, I wanted to shout it from the rooftop, I knew that I could help people. So this one step, being in total alignment, being yourself will just make that journey that much easier as opposed to doing what you think you should be doing, as opposed to doing something just because you are good at it. I know a lot of people come from corporate and they have these backgrounds in certain things and they think, hey I’m good at this, why not package this? Why not push people around this, and a lot of times I find that it’s not enjoyable to them. It’s just something that they fell into. It’s just something that they learned to do because they had this specific job for an amount of time but it doesn’t bring them joy. It doesn’t fulfill them. So really be in alignment with what you’re doing and having that passion show is also going to help you be successful and make more money.
So just a recap the six things are to commit, invest, listen, take action (that’s the most important one), don’t stop and be yourself. So now five figure months are my new normal, and I’m not saying this to brag, I’m not saying it with arrogance, I’m telling you because I want you to see that anything is possible once you decide to get in the game and that’s what I did. And I did it by doing those six things (probably just more than those six things) but those were the main things that really turned it around for me.
I’m having so much fun with these wake up calls and we are just about at 20 minutes today. There is a lot of people on the line so I am not going to do a Q and A today just because I think we’ve been on the line forever. What I would like is once I send out the recording, I’m going to give you a link to my private Facebook group which I think a lot of you are already in anyway, and I am going to have you post your questions in there and I will be there all day and all weekend.
So if anybody has any questions for me, anybody have any questions about how I was able to turn it around, how I was able to afford my coach, and my lessons, anything like that please feel free to go in there and send me a message on any questions. And I’m also going to be sending out a bonus with today’s recording so make sure that you pay attention to your inbox and open that up because I will have something special for you guys and I just want to thank you again for joining me and you will also get a notification for next week’s topic. If you have any suggestions for that feel free to also send me those suggestions. Thank you very much again and I will talk to you guys again next week.
