Latest / Your Money, Your Rules | Financial Mastery, Wealth Mindset, Leadership Principles, Intuitive Decision-Making, Human Design / 212 | Your Business Is Only One Part of the Equation
Transcript
- 0:01Erin Gray: Welcome back to the podcast.
- 0:03Erin Gray: One of the things that I have been thinking about is I don't believe that we can separate the business from the woman running it or from the life that you're creating.
- 0:12Erin Gray: Although I think that the business world has tried to do that.
- 0:15Erin Gray: They've tried to separate it and keep it isolated or compartmentalized for many years.
- 0:22Erin Gray: And I think that we're recognizing it doesn't work so well.
- 0:24Erin Gray: Because I really truly believe that, like, what good is a successful business if the way that you have built it and what you have created does not actually create the life that you actually want.
- 0:36Erin Gray: Now, when I work with a client, there are really three areas that I am constantly looking at and we are diving deeper and deeper into our work together over the year.
- 0:47Erin Gray: And I start from the end actually.
- 0:49Erin Gray: So I'm looking at what kind of life are you actually creating?
- 0:53Erin Gray: And are you actually creating what is alignment for you and what you truly like a truly heart's desire?
- 1:00Erin Gray: Or is this something that you saw or someone else doing and you're coming from that angle?
- 1:05Erin Gray: So that's first and foremost.
- 1:07Erin Gray: I'm always using that as the lighthouse, like our compass.
- 1:11Erin Gray: And then I look at how are you actually creating and leading?
- 1:15Erin Gray: Like what is your self-trust like?
- 1:17Erin Gray: What is your leadership look like for yourself and also for your team?
- 1:22Erin Gray: And then also we get into what I call the more so 3D, the actual operations, like whether the operations actually support all of that.
- 1:34Erin Gray: So let's dive in.
- 1:36Erin Gray: So I call it like the first pillar is like life by design.
- 1:40Erin Gray: You can call it whatever you want, but really what I get to is what are we building and scaling this business for?
- 1:47Erin Gray: So often when someone comes to me, that is one of the things that they want to do.
- 1:52Erin Gray: Obviously, it's natural, it's in our inherent state is to grow and to expand.
- 1:57Erin Gray: Like that is what we were sent to planet Earth to do.
- 2:01Erin Gray: But I don't think that that's actually where we need to start.
- 2:04Erin Gray: We need to first decide what do we actually want our life to look like?
- 2:09Erin Gray: So the first what I call pillar that I look at and that I'm constantly going back to, which I think is our north star, is life by design.
- 2:18Erin Gray: Like, what are we actually building this for?
- 2:20Erin Gray: What kind of life do we actually want?
- 2:22Erin Gray: What do you want your days to look like?
- 2:25Erin Gray: Which ultimately is going to be a feeling, right?
- 2:27Erin Gray: Like, what do we want our life to feel like?
- 2:30Erin Gray: What do we want our days to look like?
- 2:31Erin Gray: What do we want our months and our years to look like from a health perspective, from a spaciousness perspective, from a business perspective, from a mom perspective, from a partner perspective, like all of that?
- 2:46Erin Gray: Like, what do we actually want our days, our months, our years to look like?
- 2:53Erin Gray: And before we decide, you know, that the business needs to grow, it needs to be bigger, we need to make more revenue, we need to hire more people, we need to grow and scale because that's what a lot of times people come to me with is like, okay, I want to grow, I want to scale.
- 3:06Erin Gray: But are we actually even doing that in an aligned way for what you actually want your life to look like?
- 3:13Erin Gray: So I would stop and I would say, like, start there, like start from the end and like, what do you actually want your day to look like?
- 3:22Erin Gray: And look at is your day actually like that?
- 3:26Erin Gray: Are your offers actually set up that way to support that?
- 3:30Erin Gray: Is your team actually set up that way to support that?
- 3:33Erin Gray: Like, I think in the business world, we follow or we just take this advice or this blind advice from people that say that we need to grow.
- 3:42Erin Gray: And that is true, but it's like, in what way?
- 3:46Erin Gray: Like, how are we actually doing it for us?
- 3:49Erin Gray: That is what we want it to look like.
- 3:52Erin Gray: So, the questions that you need to ask yourself is how much do you actually want to work?
- 3:58Erin Gray: Like on an actual weekly basis.
- 4:00Erin Gray: This is some of the stuff that I will actually get into the nitty-gritty with clients and in the weeds with, because I think we need to be really clear here.
- 4:07Erin Gray: How many hours a week do you actually want to work?
- 4:09Erin Gray: How much money do you actually want to net?
- 4:11Erin Gray: Not gross, because that's a whole nother topic, but like, have you actually sat down and done the math of like, what do I want to contribute to my family?
- 4:20Erin Gray: If you are the sole breadwinner, okay, what is that number?
- 4:22Erin Gray: If you are have a partner and you want to contribute some of it or whatever it might be, like you need to sit down and you need to do the math of like get in the weeds in this stuff and like what does that actually look like?
- 4:33Erin Gray: What are your household expenses?
- 4:35Erin Gray: What do you want to contribute to travel and to play and to give back to the community or whatever that might be?
- 4:41Erin Gray: Like, actually do the math there to figure out what is the amount you actually want to net.
- 4:46Erin Gray: And what do you want to use your time for?
- 4:48Erin Gray: I think sometimes we use our business to fulfill some of the things that we actually need to fulfill on our own.
- 4:55Erin Gray: And what I mean by that is we can easily work in our business because that's something that we love to do.
- 5:01Erin Gray: It's an extension of us.
- 5:02Erin Gray: I think that that is part of our soul transformation.
- 5:05Erin Gray: And also sometimes we use our business to try to meet that need versus actually developing hobbies.
- 5:12Erin Gray: You know, I meet so many women that when I'm like, what do you like to do for fun?
- 5:15Erin Gray: They look at me like a deer in a headlights.
- 5:17Erin Gray: And this was me.
- 5:19Erin Gray: This used to be me.
- 5:20Erin Gray: So I'm not berating or dogging on that part.
- 5:22Erin Gray: But I really truly believe like we need to be able to play.
- 5:26Erin Gray: We need to have hobbies, we need to have things outside of our business that we enjoy doing for so many reasons.
- 5:33Erin Gray: So you really need to sit down and think about like, how much do I want to work?
- 5:37Erin Gray: How much do I want to be in my business and then working on my business?
- 5:41Erin Gray: How much money do I actually want to net?
- 5:43Erin Gray: And what do I want to spend my time when I'm actually in the business doing CEO stuff?
- 5:48Erin Gray: And sometimes we have to do employee stuff, right?
- 5:51Erin Gray: Because we are the magic.
- 5:52Erin Gray: And then also, like, what do I want to do outside of it?
- 5:55Erin Gray: And really start like from that back end and then work, you know, forward.
- 6:00Erin Gray: You know, think about travel and family and playing and spaciousness.
- 6:05Erin Gray: And what I truly believe is that our business strategy should actually come from the alignment of what our soul wants, right?
- 6:13Erin Gray: And the and to support our life, not to dictate like the what I did for 20 years is like, okay, I'm just gonna make the money and then I'm gonna go have fun, versus I'm going to have fun and I'm going to enjoy every single day.
- 6:26Erin Gray: I'm not gonna make retirement be something that I get to experience and enjoy in some future event.
- 6:32Erin Gray: I'm going to now have a life that I love being in, business that I love working in, along with everything else that I do.
- 6:42Erin Gray: So it's not this like you have to withhold the fun and withhold all of the joy until some later time.
- 6:49Erin Gray: Like really start to think about what do I want my business to look like and what do I want my life to look like so I can enjoy all of that now.
- 6:56Erin Gray: You know, I had a mentor early on where she talked about how we all needed to have, this was more so kind of coaching wise, but we needed to have 20 clients a week.
- 7:07Erin Gray: And I remember thinking when I heard her say that, that feels absolutely exhausting and terrible.
- 7:13Erin Gray: Now, maybe in her mind she was thinking like getting your reps in and all of that, but I'm like, that is not, I don't want to be, I do not want to be at my desk for 20 plus hours a week because I know because I was coming from a place where I was working 40 plus hours and being at my desk, like I know I do really well with spaciousness, with being outside, with having some of my work be more so intellectual, it doesn't necessarily need to be right here in front of the computer.
- 7:40Erin Gray: And I think we really need to think about like what does that look like?
- 7:44Erin Gray: Because when someone suggests something, if you aren't so clear on what you want and what you are willing to do and not willing to do, and what lights your soul on fire and what gives you life force and what drains it, we can be so easily swayed.
- 7:58Erin Gray: So really start to think about what do I want my days to look like?
- 8:02Erin Gray: And does my calendar actually represent that?
- 8:05Erin Gray: You know, the second pillar that I always look at and think about is like the self-trust, the leadership.
- 8:10Erin Gray: Like, who are you?
- 8:11Erin Gray: What is your identity?
- 8:13Erin Gray: Who is the person while you are leading it?
- 8:15Erin Gray: You know, you can have the best strategy.
- 8:17Erin Gray: We've all been there, I'm sure, right?
- 8:19Erin Gray: But we can still second guess every decision that we have.
- 8:24Erin Gray: We can over-rely on mentors.
- 8:26Erin Gray: I've been that person.
- 8:27Erin Gray: You know, we can carry everybody else's problems because I think that we're really good at that.
- 8:31Erin Gray: That's what we've always done all of our life.
- 8:34Erin Gray: We can avoid those hard conversations that we need to have with our spouse, with our employees, with our children, whatever it might be.
- 8:43Erin Gray: We can constantly be looking outside of ourselves for answers.
- 8:47Erin Gray: You know, leadership isn't just about like directing, delegating, giving responsibility to people.
- 8:54Erin Gray: It's trusting yourself enough to make some of those more difficult or what I call harder decisions, right?
- 9:01Erin Gray: And when I say hard, they're not hard decisions.
- 9:04Erin Gray: It just feels uncomfortable in the body.
- 9:06Erin Gray: If you're used to people pleasing, if you're used to always being a yes girl, if you're used to putting everybody else before your desires and your needs, well, then yes, it will feel like in the beginning, a more difficult conversation.
- 9:21Erin Gray: And you need to be what I think is we need to be able to be an island of one at times.
- 9:27Erin Gray: Because I really truly think that as founders, we sometimes are, right?
- 9:31Erin Gray: We're gonna go against what our entire team thinks that we should do.
- 9:34Erin Gray: We're gonna go against maybe what some of our advisors, whether it be financial advisors or CPAs or whatever it might be.
- 9:41Erin Gray: And I think that the more that we resist that, the more that that doesn't allow us to actually step into our power and step into who we truly are.
- 9:53Erin Gray: You know, I think for a long time I always felt like I was an island of one, but now I've had to really change that belief and really think of it from a place of like, of course, I'm going to be an island of one, but it's not an isolating place.
- 10:04Erin Gray: It's just like I kind of go first.
- 10:06Erin Gray: That's typically my role.
- 10:08Erin Gray: And I'm okay with that now.
- 10:09Erin Gray: I think for a long time I felt bad about it.
- 10:12Erin Gray: I felt like I'm different than everyone else.
- 10:14Erin Gray: But there always is going to be someone, multiple people, right?
- 10:18Erin Gray: And as founders, I think that's where we live, where we're gonna do like the weird stuff first.
- 10:23Erin Gray: We're gonna do the stuff that doesn't make sense.
- 10:26Erin Gray: It's just something that like we didn't get to where we are by following the crowd and listening to what everybody else, you know, thinks or um suggests that we should do.
- 10:35Erin Gray: And so I think that when we can really settle into that idea of the island of one and from an empowered place, from a place of like, yeah, I'm gonna suggest some things that a lot of people are probably not going to agree with or they're not going to get at first.
- 10:49Erin Gray: And that's fine.
- 10:50Erin Gray: Like, there's been so many times that I have done things that from the outside it looked like, what the heck is Aaron doing?
- 10:57Erin Gray: And then the rest of the world caught up to that, right?
- 11:00Erin Gray: I was homeschooling before homeschooling wasn't cool.
- 11:02Erin Gray: I was eating plants, and you know, before I don't like calling myself a vegan, but like before that was super trendy.
- 11:09Erin Gray: Like there was a lot of things that I did before everyone thought it was so cool to do, or before mainstream.
- 11:15Erin Gray: Like that's just part of who we are.
- 11:18Erin Gray: And I think the more that we can settle into that, the more that we can recognize like that's just that's just what we do, the less resistance that we'll probably have.
- 11:26Erin Gray: And so I want you to think about leadership and self-trust is such an important pillar in your life.
- 11:31Erin Gray: It's not just, you know, delegating to the team.
- 11:34Erin Gray: It's really like, how do you want to lead yourself?
- 11:36Erin Gray: How much do you trust yourself?
- 11:37Erin Gray: How much are you there for yourself, even when everyone else thinks it's a terrible idea?
- 11:42Erin Gray: Because I'm sure you've already experienced this.
- 11:44Erin Gray: If you haven't yet, there will be times where you're going to be the one that thinks that that's a great idea and everybody else thinks it's terrible.
- 11:51Erin Gray: And are you willing to still have your own back and still move forward even when?
- 11:55Erin Gray: And then the third thing that I dive into is the actual 3D stuff, the business operations, like getting into the financials, getting into your business operations.
- 12:04Erin Gray: You know, does the actual business support what you say you want?
- 12:08Erin Gray: This is what I call all the 3D stuff, the money stuff, the profitability, the cash flow, expenses, the team, the labor, the insurance, the contracts, like whatever the bankers, like think about the whole system from that very 3D tangible place.
- 12:25Erin Gray: Because a lot of times what I have found is this is the thing too, is as business owners, as entrepreneurs, as founders, we say we want freedom.
- 12:33Erin Gray: But so often we say that, and then we are working like an employee, or we're working more than an employee.
- 12:40Erin Gray: So we can say that we want freedom, we can say we want, you know, spaciousness, we can say that we want all of these things.
- 12:47Erin Gray: But if you've built a company, which I know too many people that have done this with terrible margins, or you have people that you are having to depend on you.
- 12:57Erin Gray: You've got all of these employees that you haven't led in a way that they can make their own decisions, that they can trust themselves.
- 13:04Erin Gray: So now all of these employees that you've hired depend on you, or you have overhead that requires you to keep growing and growing.
- 13:12Erin Gray: That business model doesn't support the life that you say you want.
- 13:15Erin Gray: And I've met so many business owners in this way, right?
- 13:19Erin Gray: From the outside, you would never know that this is what's going on inside their business.
- 13:24Erin Gray: And when you actually talk to them behind the scenes, when you know they can actually let their guard down, they're like, I hate my business.
- 13:32Erin Gray: And I think we spend so much time with our business.
- 13:36Erin Gray: Like, if you think about the life of your business, of what you want it to be and how you want it to grow and how you want to be with it, like I think we should love our business.
- 13:44Erin Gray: I think we should love what we do and really being very intentional about how you set it up, about the decisions, because every decision that you make is going to either lead you closer to the life that you are wanting or having, or it's going to move you further away.
- 13:59Erin Gray: And you've got to be really clear on this.
- 14:01Erin Gray: And I think that it can be so easy to get distracted, to take what other people's suggestions are and to follow what they are saying, these mentors that you might have, you know, you have to really start slowing down.
- 14:16Erin Gray: You have to start connecting to yourself.
- 14:19Erin Gray: You have to start running it through your questions and your filters to really make sure that what you are deciding on a daily, on a weekly, on a monthly, on an annual basis is in alignment with the life that you want.
- 14:32Erin Gray: And none of these pillars or areas that I look at live in isolation.
- 14:38Erin Gray: They're all everything is intertwined.
- 14:40Erin Gray: It doesn't help to grow a business without knowing the kind of life that you want, right?
- 14:43Erin Gray: Like if I would have said yes to the previous mentor and just gone off on and like, well, I have to have 20, you know, people because that's what she says.
- 14:51Erin Gray: There probably would have been a lot of resistance in the body that probably if I would have had 20 in a week, I would have been exhausted.
- 14:58Erin Gray: I would have burnt myself out and I would have hated what I did.
- 15:01Erin Gray: And so we really have to take a step back and we have to ask ourselves, like, what is an alignment for me?
- 15:08Erin Gray: I don't think that you can create the life that you want without trusting yourself, without leading yourself.
- 15:13Erin Gray: And you can't self-trust your way and high vibe your way around not so great business operations, whether that be money, whether that be a team, all of it, right?
- 15:24Erin Gray: So that's why I'm always looking at the whole person, the whole business, right?
- 15:28Erin Gray: We aren't in isolation.
- 15:30Erin Gray: I know that, you know, sometimes the CPA will make suggestions based on obviously numbers.
- 15:35Erin Gray: Your insurance agent is going to look at it from a risk perspective.
- 15:39Erin Gray: Your attorney, like all of these people are going to have their ideas for you, but you have to look at yourself and your business as a holistic, as the whole person, as the whole business.
- 15:50Erin Gray: How does it fit into everything?
- 15:52Erin Gray: And this is exactly the type of work that I do in my private advisory with my clients, you know, across all of these three areas.
- 15:58Erin Gray: And we keep going deeper and deeper because awareness gets broader, things come up to the surface that maybe you weren't aware of, you know, for the first three months that we worked together.
- 16:09Erin Gray: And we just keep diving into this at a deeper level because I don't think that we can separate the woman that runs the business, you know, from the life that she's trying to create.
- 16:17Erin Gray: And so if you want a strategic thinking partner in your corner who can look at the whole picture with you, who isn't emotional about it, but also feels safe to be with and to tell these things too that you don't or don't maybe want to tell other people.
- 16:32Erin Gray: I had a client once say, Erin, you've kind of replaced some of my friends that I used to talk to about my business because I don't need to go to them anymore.
- 16:41Erin Gray: You serve that along with all of the other things that you do for me.
- 16:44Erin Gray: And so if you're wanting someone who can be in your corner, who can be non-emotional, but can also be a safe place for you to bring this stuff to, you can find the details about working with me in the show notes.
- 16:56Erin Gray: So I want to leave you with this.
- 16:57Erin Gray: Take the three pillars that I suggested or the areas, however you want to call it, and think about them this week.
- 17:02Erin Gray: Think about what is the life that I actually want?
- 17:05Erin Gray: Like, get rid of the money, get rid of like just allow yourself to dream and really think about what do I want my days to look like?
- 17:12Erin Gray: Second, how are you leading?
- 17:14Erin Gray: How are you trusting yourself?
- 17:16Erin Gray: How are you treating yourself when you make a decision?
- 17:18Erin Gray: How are you treating yourself when, you know, your CPA makes a comment about your numbers?
- 17:22Erin Gray: How are you treating yourself?
- 17:23Erin Gray: How are you treating yourself when your team thinks that you should do one thing and you think you should do another?
- 17:29Erin Gray: And you people please, and you say yes to the team and you say no to yourself.
- 17:34Erin Gray: Think about how you're leading.
- 17:36Erin Gray: And then really be able to look at, you know, am I taking care of my business from an operational standpoint, from a 3D standpoint?
- 17:44Erin Gray: Is there anything that I am not looking at?
- 17:46Erin Gray: Maybe I'm avoiding.
- 17:48Erin Gray: Am I running an efficient business?
- 17:50Erin Gray: Those are the three pillars that I keep going back to over and over with clients.
- 17:54Erin Gray: Okay, I'll see you in the next episode.