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Elizabeth invites Mark Cravens, the Anti-Scam Doctor to share tips and strategies for avoiding investment and business scams, including how to tell the difference between a legit MLM/network marketing business and a ponzi scheme. Mark shares how he fell prey to an investment scam himself where he lost $376,000, the 10 Commandments of Investing that he learned from his experience, and why successful business owners are easy targets for Con-Artists. Visit The Anti-Scam Doctor where you get more information about Mark, a list of the top 10 states targeted by con artists, the top 10 investment scams and how to avoid them, as well as a free risk assessment quiz, Get R.E.A.L.

Click Here To Download The Show!

Transcript:Welcome everyone.  This is Elizabeth Potts Weinstein the host of the Wealth Spa Radio Show and you are listening to episode 69 of the Wealth Spa Radio Show. I invited Mark Cravens on with us.  He is the Anti-Scam Doctor and we’re going to be talking about the 10 Commandments of Investing.  We’re going to talking about How to Avoid Con Artist and Investment Scam.

Mark:              Good morning this is Mark.

Elizabeth:      Hi, how are you doing today?

Mark:              I’m doing great, and how are you?

Elizabeth:      Great.  So you know let’s get started in the idea of you know investment scam and all this stuff.  My understanding is that you fell prey to one of these at one time and the specific that I got was you lost $376,000.  So what happened?

Mark:              Yes I did.  It’s exactly an infinity fraud and what that is an uncle was involved in an investment.  It had been going good for almost 2 years and he told me about it.  And I did a little bit of investigation, ended up getting into an art and antique stores.  They were buying large estate and then breaking them and selling off individual items in their two stores and to other dealers.  However that was only 10% of the real business.  The other 90% was all a giant pyramid scheme and it’s true.  I lost along with 120 others, we lost $3 million.

Elizabeth:     Oh, wow.  And that’s kind of interesting because that part of the business sounds like legal.  You know they’re going out and they’re buying this stuff and they’re breaking it down that’s a legitimate business but it wasn’t the real story.

Mark:              Exactly.  And that was a good con artist does.  It take out enough of legitimacy on the front end to get you suck in but what’s really going on you have a dig a little deeper.

Elizabeth:      So you know people talk a little bit about Ponzi scheme and pyramid scheme, why don’t you explain a little bit about what that really means?  What is a Ponzi scheme or a pyramid scheme why is that such a fraud?

Mark:              Sure.  Pyramid is exactly what it looks like.  It’s a pyramid.  Those that get in are near the top of the pinnacle and then those are coming below are setting below more of the support.  In this case what’s happening is whenever if you come in below me for example.  Money that you put, the con artist actually gives some of your money to me.  I don’t know what’s coming to that way and you don’t know what’s going out that way but that’s what’s happening.  It’s feeding the people above.

Elizabeth:      So my understanding, you know, a lot of time and I actually have a friend who fell victims to one of these things.  That they promise 10% returns a month or these crazy returns.  And there’ll be people who bought into it, who are getting those returns and so they’ll say yes, I’ve been getting 10% a month or whatever it is.  But the reason that I was able to get that is not because the underlying thing that’s making that money but because all the new people who are investing into it, they give that buy in to the old people who have been it for a while as if that’s the return but its not.  It’s just the new money from the new people.

Mark:              Exactly.  What makes one of these implode is basically you have a call or a run on the fund that also and everybody needs their money or too much money shows up down low and someone let say puts in a million dollar or something into a smaller fund that put into a million dollars and all of a sudden wow I can’t get enough other investors to be giving you your type of returns. 

Elizabeth:      Right.

Mark:              It ends up falling apart.  In fact that’s what happened when the biggest one that’s going right now with Bernard Madoff there on Wall Street.  You know last week they announced that $50 billion pyramid Ponzi scheme is the largest that’s ever been done in our US history.  So this is very timely and that’s what happened, they have a run of $7 billion on him last week.  He said yes that’s it.  It’s over.

Elizabeth:      So you know I think so many people have fall back into this, a lot of people like you, they are intelligent people.  They’re not just uneducated people who don’t know what they’re doing.  I mean why do people keep falling victims to this over and over again when we all heard about this stuff?

Mark:              Yeah.  One of the things is we think it can’t happen to us.  There’s a certain amount of pride and one of the groups they that target is busy successful professionals.  So as you’re dealing with entrepreneurs they need to listen to this part.

Elizabeth:      Yeah.

Mark:              Here’s a misconception.  They think just because you’re successful in Category A whatever it is that you do for a living, you’ll naturally be successful in Category B that’s investment.  And it was recommended to me so I know it will go well and that’s not true at all and they prey upon that pride.  And the other thing is really just greed.  You look at those members.  If you have a lot of pressure built up, you haven’t been in good cash positions.  Your mortgaged or over mortgaged to the hilt and you have so much pressure and you don’t have time, you don’t have time to research and so you take the word of someone and you’re like.  Well I do know Joe.  I mean we’ve been in the same church or the same charity or the same golf club for five years.  I can’t believe he’s doing those kinds of returns.  Okay.  Great.  I’m in.  That’s about all the research that happens a lot of time.

Elizabeth:      Yeah and the thing is that’s how we do things a lot of time in business and in our normal lives is you know if we want to go higher, someone to clean our house, we find someone else who has a great house cleaner and we hire that person.  But that doesn’t necessarily work for where you’re going to put your money.

Mark:              Exactly.  And we need to be careful that to be able to look at the recommendations because by the way that’s what the con artist use.  You can tell just from all the things you share over yours shows is you’re what they called an influence.  You like to connect people, are able to connect people and its like that’s a great person, however, if a con artist tags in to a person like you and I’m like that too by the way is you end you can cost a lot of damage to relationships and to other peoples because the con artist uses your good reputation and your influences and your sphere of friends and wipes you all out together and imagine what that does to your relationships.

Elizabeth:      Oh, yeah and that ruin your business and everything.

Mark:              Absolutely.

Elizabeth:      Because it just permeates all that stuff.  You know one question I have and I know this is true to people who listen to my show.  There’s a lot of people who get involved in network marketing, in multi-level marketing and some of that are very legitimate and people can make money on it.  Where do we find the line between a legitimate network marketing or multi-level marketing organization and then where it becomes something fraudulent a Ponzi scheme or whatever?

Mark:              Okay.  It has to do with a research.  Two sections very briefly is you need to look at the history of the MLM.  Most MLM fails between two years.  So if you’re in that time period be careful.  And the basic premise most MLM and they have some great products out there but you may be paying $40 for something that if it really was at Wal-Mart it would probably be a $20 item.  They need that extra $20 bucks for commission and that’s okay, that’s their marketing that they’re going to go.  But the other thing you need to just look at the MLM as far as who is the representative that’s telling you about it and I’m talking about doing some research.  This is part of Commandment No. 3.  Look at the representative, look at the company and then look at the owners or the CEO of the company depending how they’re setup.  I have gentleman come to me and he was looking at an MLM and I’m like this stuff sound right, have you done all the research.  He’s like everything is coming in from the attorney general, everything looks good and he’s doing what I told him to do but he hadn’t contacted a private eye.  So this really goes to your question is I finally almost forced him to finally get a private eye cause he was fighting me on this.  You needs to do this.  Well the president and the owner of the MLN basically he had been put in jail for money laundering and check fraud.  His wife has five aliases and his third business partner cause the three of them own the company, the third business partner was totally a fictitious person.  Didn’t show up on any database in the entire United States and whenever we finally run down to where he said he actually live, it was an abandoned warehouse in a commercial district.  This guy is not real.  That’s pretty scary.

Elizabeth:      Right.  Oh yeah.

Mark:              Cause I dug in and I found that one of the representative I’m talking to him of the company cause I want to know a little bit more.  He said I’ve been with this company six years.  These are great people.  I’m like, oh my goodness they’re just taking people in.

Elizabeth:      Oh, yeah.  Well I think this is hard thing is you can’t just look at the person you know who’s bringing you in because they could be a victim, you know.  They can’t testify to it cause you don’t know what research they did and yeah its I think it’s upsetting to me cause I know so many people who do that where they know – I think the two years is a big issue because we all – anyone who knows anything about MLN being early in if is something that’s legitimate is great cause then you’re near the top of the pyramid.

Mark:              Absolutely.

Elizabeth:      You have the biggest down line and that’s where the money is.  So people want to get in on those MLN from the very beginning so we all know that to be true but that’s where the huge risk is cause there’s no history and we can’t tell if this thing is going to completely implode.  And actually it can implode just for pure bad business practices.  It doesn’t necessary because of fraud.

Mark:              Absolutely.  Absolutely.  And that’s all this that we’re talking about is really affinity fraud and its relationship and we really need to be careful about that is when you do recommend something to someone else whether it’s a company or whether it’s an investment opportunity is tell them upfront here’s what I did for due diligence.  Here’s my research and please before you do anything do your research cause really on those investment opportunities and high yield like you mention that at the beginning like 10% a month.  If you’re in a program like that really one of the best thing is not to be recommending that to other people.  It sounds crazy but with high yield investment, you’re probably not helping out your friend.

Elizabeth:      So one thing that I saw in your material cause I never heard of this before is that con artist target certain state and I never heard that before what’s states are they targeting and what’s the reason behind that?

Mark:              Yes, absolutely.  I’ll give you the top five states, No. 1 California.

Elizabeth:      That’s fine.

Mark:              No. 2 Florida which is where I am.  No. 3 is Texas then New York and then Illinois.  If we stop with just those five for a second, they have two things really in common high population count and two they have a lot of money.  I mean a lot of money that’s in the United States where in those five states.  And that’s why they target them and so they’ll go in and they’ll target those states and that’s a lot where the perpetrators are as well.  They’re keeping it within the state.

Elizabeth:      So you know if someone is listening right and now they’ve already started – they’ve already made some commitment, put some money into something and they’re thinking I totally didn’t due diligence in the front end but I already put the money in, maybe they’ve even brought some of the people in, what can you do at that point either to of course do more research and see what you’re end or to figure out how do I get out of this, what advice do you have for those kind of people.

Mark:              Sure part of what you need to watch out for is whether you want to hire a private eye to dig into the company a little bit on the side or whether you feel pretty confident that you can go ahead and get your money out right now is to go ahead and put in and say I need this money out cause some things have come up in my life, you know, this wouldn’t be lying at all.  The recession is impacting us all so I need that money out type thing.  You can also start checking with the attorney general to see if they have any complaints, anything on file, any investigations that are going on.  If you think you are already a victim and you’re getting bad news, you need to make one of two choices.  And choice number one is to get an SEC attorney.  Not an attorney that works for the government but deals with securities to see if you can get a civil law suit against them cause you want to be able to get your money out.  But if you think it’s a pyramid scheme like its really just going to people below and there’s no way any of us are going to get the money because let say the con artist is living a real extravagant lifestyle and is wasting the money that way.    

Elizabeth:      Right.

Mark:              That’s a good way to get your money but its not then its time to go to the local police, which will probably then put you at the FBI and the attorney general.  Cause once you goes down that route, you can forget your civil law suits cause they do restitution order which basically they freeze all the assets and they go in there and say we’ll divide whatever is left but please don’t count on getting any of your money its less than 1% recovery.

Elizabeth:      Oh, yeah definitely.

Mark:              It’s gone.  It’s gone.

Elizabeth:      I mean cause if you’re at that point, and there’s a very good chance that they get the money and gone to some foreign country or you know crazy stuff that has happened at that point cause the money is probably all gone.

Mark:              Absolutely and they live an extravagant lifestyle.  One of the thing is a pastor took $30 million from over 520 people up in Minnesota.  I mean if you just think about that now he went from living in a trailer to $1.5 million home on the lake and he was just burning through this money.  It’s all gone.

Elizabeth:      Right.  Yeah I have a friend who fell victim to a fraud and he actually have to declare a personal bankruptcy because he had borrowed money to put into this investment cause it was a guaranteed sure thing.  And its I guess I also have one of this, this comes from my mother, you know, if its too good to be true it probably is kind of bell that goes off when I read this thing like its guaranteed 10% return and its insured by the government.  I’m like well that can’t be possibly true.  There’s no such thing.  But it sounds so good and they’ll have this wonderful like they’ll give you all this piece of paper and this huge binders and all this technical stuff that people don’t really understand but looks really good.  Yeah it’s amazing.  He has to declare personal bankruptcy because there was no money.  Well he got almost nothing.

Mark:              Right.  And that’s one of the things I’m trying to get the message out and I’m so glad you invited me on today because it is so much more than about your money.  It really affects your health and your relationship.  In fact all your life, I mean people have heart attacks over this stuff and they end up getting divorce over this.  And they up – they can’t even be in the same social golf club anymore or anything.  I mean it’s just terrible.  I sat on a plane with a lady she’s like what do you do and I told her, she said I wish I meet you three months.  I couldn’t have lost $150,000 from six of us and nobody will talk to each other.  They’re all as livid as they can be.

Elizabeth:      Oh yeah.

Mark:              All the time.

Elizabeth:      And because it was all this relationship based of so you’re not just putting in money into something and you write a check and it’s gone.  It’s you brought in these other people and they brought in you so yeah its not just ruining financial thing, its ruining relationships.

Mark:              Absolutely and you mentioned the word guarantee and if anybody uses that word guarantee it’s almost a 100% guaranteed that its going to be a scam.  Okay.

Elizabeth:      Oh yeah.

Mark:              Because if they put in the word there regulated by the SEC.

Elizabeth:      And you know they’re actually not turning their stuff in to the SEC.

Mark:              Exactly and noticing that you mentioned your friend had borrowed money and that’s one of the commandment is never ever borrow to invite in a high yield investment program or high return.  You just cannot do that.  Because the bank doesn’t give a split what happened to the money.  You owned me my principal and my interest and you better pay me up this month or we’re coming after you.

Elizabeth:      Oh yeah.  Well you know now sitting in a time its like of course you should never do that because and I think when it comes down to is the guarantee that was what got my friend into it. And you know really nothing is ever guaranteed.  You could put a hundred grand into a FDIC insured savings accounts and earned 3% or whatever it is the insurance is paying that’s guarantee by the federal government, we’re assuming the federal government will bail the bank out which isn’t a 100% guaranteed is more guarantee than anything else and that’s pretty much all you got and especially if it’s something paying 10% a month or some crazy thing that’s going on.  There’s nowhere else you can get this return.

Mark:              Correct.

Elizabeth:      The higher the return, the higher the risk is always the truth.

Mark:              Yeah absolutely and one of the things that you need to ask yourself is if they say we’re paying 8% a month or 12% or whatever it is, you stopped for just a second and ask yourself one questions, its like what legitimate business can make that kind of money in a month.

Elizabeth:      And do it consistently.

Mark:              Yes because that’s the second questions.  It’s like okay you got lucky once maybe lucky twice how can you consistently do this.  Well you know if you’re talking about you invested 10 years ago cause that was 10 years ago this year to come in and do a company called Google.  Okay that was great investment and it paid off big time and they grew but most opportunity are not like that.  Remember they’re just a broad stroke of a scam and they tried to hide the truth from you and they tried to just buddy up to you to make you feel comfortable and please understand that everything you’re sharing with them, they’re taking notes on how they can use that information back against you.  You mentioned about having a 3-year-old that’s sick.  If I was a con artist, I’ll be coming back to you now or next week and ask how is your son or daughter doing, and hopefully you’re over your cold.  And your thinking man you just love me.

Elizabeth:      Oh, yeah we’re bestfriend.

Mark:              Exactly.  Exactly.

Elizabeth:      Yeah they’re good.  They know what they’re doing.  They know how to play people.

Mark:              Absolutely.

Elizabeth:      So you know I saw in you stuff that you sent over that you actually did stop your con artist and something really amazing happen and so what was the story with that?

Mark:              Yeah, a friend of mine was given a head of time and send me an email, I’m so glad to have the documentation, he said you know if you’re going to go up there and go approach her and see what’s going on whether this is legitimate or not cause I’ve been in for a few months.  I kind of got this dream that you’re going to face something you’ve never expected.  Your going to get slapped to the left, face something, don’t worry, God gave you the words you need.  I’m like what are you talking about.  If I go up there it’s all going to be about a business plan I want to see.  She didn’t know and I showed up unannounced and whenever I got there that morning she had decided oh-oh it’s all caving in.

Elizabeth:      Yeah.

Mark:              Just like last week with Bernard Madoff.  And so she signed away her 14-month-old baby to a guardian and she signed over her title and she signed with all the stores, all the merchandise and have gone across the street and gotten drugs at CVS and she had them in her lap and she was telling her bestfriend she was going off to go kill herself and I walk in the door.

Elizabeth:      Oh, wow.

Mark:              And they’re just going berserk.  They’re on my left.  They’re sitting there.  They’re crying.  I walk in to all that.  Well long story short, after about an hour and a half I got her to give us the drugs, got it away from her.  Talk to her about yes she’s going to go to jail but her life is not over and got her to turn herself in and end the scam.

Elizabeth:      Wow.

Mark:              It was very powerful day.  It was gut wrenching, a lot of weeping, a lot of – it just hurts.  I tried to help people.  I mean one of the ladies that got hurt, she was a single mother of six that has now filed bankruptcy, foreclosure, loss her house and her business and everything and three of her kids just don’t event talk to her anymore.

Elizabeth:      Yeah and that’s the thing.  All this stuff is not about the money.  Even though that’s a gigantic thing, its all the relationship that are destroyed and you know you do have to declare bankruptcy that affects you for a very long time and you got to foreclose a house that affects you for a very long time.  Its trying to get some lottery winning type of investment return is not worth the risk of not just losing the money but also destroying this other things too.

Mark:              Yes and if you feel like you’re a victim or you know for sure you’re a victim, one of the people that you want to talk to is go talk to your accountant.  Just show them all the records to see I have invested and done a few promissory note that were guaranteed by the company, I used that word because they used the word guarantee and we were able to write that all off, all the right taxes, it’s a big thing to see whether you can do that or not.  So you need to talk to your accountant about that.

Elizabeth:     And that the things that’s another red flag and this is because of my friend that I realize this.  He knows that I’m a financial adviser and he didn’t ask me what I thought of it.  And you know if you’re investing in something and you have a financial adviser, a lawyer, an accountant, a bookkeeper whatever and you don’t feel comfortable talking to them like you feel kind of embarrassed about it, then that’s probably a red flag you shouldn’t do it.

Mark:              Absolutely.

Elizabeth:      Cause you know that’s bad.

Mark:              Absolutely and that’s one of the things I bring up is talking to certified financial planner, to your accountant and get three friends that you trusted that you can talk to it and this would be great if you can get one that’s very positive in life, one that’s very negative in life and other one that’s just kind of even keel.  You get three different perspective to help you and lay it out before all this people and not necessarily at the same meeting and see if what their input is and you’ll be amazed what you’d be spared in pain in life if you all do that.

Elizabeth:      Oh yes and that’s true even in your business plan and all kinds of things.

Mark:              Absolutely.

Elizabeth:      That’s a great thing to do to get that feedback cause we can all – I don’t know we all drink the same Kool-Aid in something like that and great to get someone and to feel comfortable with talking to another person about it.

Mark:              Exactly because we all talk about things that you don’t discuss with people is politics, religion and then about your money.  People just don’t really share that much about their money.  But we do need some trusted advisers and usually especially if they’re not bias or they’re not in zenith base like this is a friend coming to you as a CFP that may or may not do things with you but its like look I trust you Elizabeth.  Let me just lay this out in the table.  You go wow here’s five red flag. You need to look into this first.  How great was that.  Is it worth either the money that you paid professionally to get that done or from a friend that’s a CFP.

Elizabeth:      Right and if you’re not comfortable doing that then you probably know in your heart that this is a problem.

Mark:              Yes.

Elizabeth:      You know and I think people do but they want to – they have hope and they want to believe in the dream it’s all going to work out.  But I think people do know that there’s something fishy going on and it can’t be that good.

Mark:              Yeah because then when it all comes down you’re going through denial.  You know it’s just like a loss.  It’s denial.  Then anger over this thing, and you’ve been bargaining all along just please God let this thing work out, you know.  And then you get into deep depression over it and then finding you just accepted it, it’s finally over.

Elizabeth:      Yeah.

Mark:              And that’s one of the message I’m trying to get out to people because it’s not like we’ve been saying it, it’s not just about your money.  And as far as for entrepreneurs you need to be careful right now in the recession if you can make something very timely, very quick.  As entrepreneurs you maybe looking at alternatives ideas that help bring money in the door.

Elizabeth:      Right.

Mark:              Looking at a new product line.  You need to check that company out cause there’s a lot of cons and pros that are going on that way and you end up writing a $3,000 check and they never send you the product or you get into venture capital and so many venture capitalist that are going under and a lot of them are stealing money.  That happened to a few friends of mine just in the last 30 days.

Elizabeth:      Oh yeah.

Mark:              So you need to do your research is all I have to say on that.

Elizabeth:      Oh yeah so before we get to the end of the show I want to give you a chance to tell everyone where to go to get more of these tips and more information from you.

Mark:              Sure absolutely its www.theantiscamdoctor.com, TheAntiScamDoctor.com.  We have on there you can get the top 10 states.  You can get the top 10 investment scam and how to avoid them.  There’s a free risk level quiz.  You can see what is, it’s called Get R.E.A.L your risk evaluation assessment level.  You know what kind of exposure do you have to a con artist.  And so you can get all that for free and depending what your answers are, they’re custom responses that come back to you plus we’re going to start scam of the month so everyone that for free.  It’s a first name and email address.  I promise I’m not going to spam you or anything – is to give you information to help is all I want to do.  Nobody deserves to go through what I went through last year.

Elizabeth:      Right.  Well thank you so much for being on the show today Mark.

Mark:              Well thank you having me Elizabeth.  I hope we just help thousands and thousands of people.

Elizabeth:      Oh yeah definitely.  Okay so everyone again.  That’s theantiscamdoctor.com to get that free quiz and a bunch of other great information from Mark about avoiding investment scams especially right now going on with everything in the economy, we all are trying to buy some hope.  To let everyone know I’m going to be not having a show for the next week.  Because next week show should have been on Christmas Day and the week after that should have been on New Years Day and I’m hanging out with my family and probably you all are hanging out with your family or loved ones or taking the day off so our next show we’ll be back on January 8 and I actually don’t even remember what the show topic is cause I haven’t check my calendar.  So see you over to the next year.  So thanks everyone for listening to the show and I look forward to speak with you all in the New Year.  Ba-bye.

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Elizabeth invites Patrice Dickey, Your Guide to the Life You Love, to speak about Convert Your Chaos to Cash: The Seven Secrets Blocking Creative Entrepreneurs from Getting the Life They Love. Learn how to re-ignite your understanding of time-tested principles to bring your vision to life, and convert your chaos to cash! Patrice shares how Right Brained and Left Brained people think, tips on how Right Brained Creatives can get over the delegation hurdle and the seven steps that block creative entrepreneurs.

To learn more about Patrice and to get her free report How to Convert Chaos to Cash visit the Intuitive Wealth Guide.

Click Here to Download the Show!

Transcript: Welcome everyone.  As I just said in the little recorded introduction this is Elizabeth Potts Weinstein and you’re listening to the Wealth Spa Radio Show which is live on Blog TalkRadio 11am Pacific Time on Thursday but is also podcasted and the recordings are available at thewealthspa.comAlright so let me go ahead and introduce today’s guest and today’s guest is Patrice Dickey who is Your Guide to the Life You Love.  And before I go in to her full bio I want to give you the topic for today which is Convert Your Chaos into Cash: The Seven Secrets Blocking Creative Entrepreneurs from Getting the Life You Love. 

Okay let me tell you a little bit about this show today and one of the things that we’re changing for those of you – this is episode 68 of the Wealth Spa Radio Show so some of you have been listening for a very long time.  We are changing some things about the show and one of things we’re changing is shortening the length of the show down to half an hour.  Really I’m doing this to make it simple for myself cause I have a lot of other ways in which I’m creating content for you all and I can only do so much in a limited amount of time and also cause I’ve gotten feedback from people that they really just don’t have an hour every week at the exact same time to dedicate to this and I want to get you some great content in bite size pieces that you can easily digest.  So this show is going to be half an hour long.  Let me know if you like this better or if you wanted it to be an hour please give feedback wherever you wanted to contact us either on thewealthspa.com or on Twitter or here on Blog TalkRadio

Alright so let me go ahead and introduce today’s guest and today’s guest is Patrice Dickey who is Your Guide to the Life You Love.  And before I go in to her full bio I want to give you the topic for today which is Convert Your Chaos into Cash: The Seven Secrets Blocking Creative Entrepreneurs from Getting the Life You Love.  Alright so Patrice, she is a registered coach.  She is a yoga teacher.  She’s a motivational speaker.  She’s got tons of different things going on and actually I’ve known her for the last year in a mastermind group we’ve been in together with Alexandria Brown.  And she has a ton of different things she does too.  She also reviews high-end spas and write articles about that.  I mean she has a ton of really great thing that she does very well-rounded.  Now her background, I guess you could say her technical background is actually in PR.  So she just doesn’t do yoga and all this kind of stuff.  She has a background in PR.  She’s a PR consulting firm since 1989, serves all kinds of big clients serves all kind of big clients like British Airways as well as surgeons, health and wellness group, all kinds of organization.

And I invited Patrice here today because she’s really an expert in the creative right brain stuff and what she has designed is something to help all of you creative people take that default position, that right brain creative position add in the logical stuff that you need to really create a good business.  So you’re not just floundering around creating wonderful creative stuff but not actually making any money.  So let me go make sure she’s on.  Patrice, are you here with us right now?

Patrice:           I’m here.

Elizabeth:      Okay good. I can hear you.  Good so thank you so much for being on the show today Patrice.

Patrice:           Oh, I’m delighted.  Thank you.  You’re just so – you’re wonderful and you are so knowledgeable and you are bringing so much great information out to all of us.

Elizabeth:      Great thank you so much.  Thank you.  Yeah and as I was saying Patrice is, you know, its interesting because her kind of default position comes from the other end where I tend to be.  My default position I’m, you know, the lawyer, financial adviser so my default was always to approach things from that left brain, logical, spreadsheet kind of side.  While Patrice is coming in from the other end, coming in from more of a creative side but either side where you come it really you need to create balance.  There’s things we need to pull from each side to take a business and have it not just be a hobby or not just something that’s boring and have it becoming this wonderful but also it makes money.  So you know Patrice tell me a little bit about the issues that creative people have when they’re trying to start a real business.

Patrice:           Well creative are operating in connection with the entire universe so what’s happening with us is we’re whole brain thinkers.  We’re sort of tapped in and I think it was really encouraging to read in Oprah this month about a book written by Daniel Pink called A Whole New Mind which explores how right brain thinker are wired for 21^st century success.  And the great part about that is for that anybody can tap in to the right brain aspect by learning to do certain things such as paying attention to the still small voice, using breathing, meditation, yoga, even moving meditation such as taking a walk just to tap in and become aware of what is sort of tickling you at the moment and converting that sort of chaos into cash product.  

Elizabeth:      So do you find that a lot of people who are – have a creative business or a spiritual kind of business that they’re having some of the same problems in making money.

Patrice:           Well I think everybody can have issues making money.  I think it’s a question of learning how to tap your strength and work with your strength and you know honor your own operating system.  For example you are very linear and you are able to work successful with spreadsheet and that sort of thing, I have never created a spreadsheet.  I mean you know and my PR career has been phenomenally successful because when I get that little voice that says call the medical reporter now I do it.  You know I don’t just set out with a sort of a rope, here’s what I’m going to do at every hour of the day.  I sort of pay attention to what my body signals are and what my intuition is telling me and I act on intuition consistently throughout the day and I try not to force myself, you know, the square peg into the round hole.  And I think this is the way creative entrepreneur needs to work.  I think in setting out a day, it’s important to have some parameters and I do operate with a list.  But I don’t say to myself, okay from 9 to 10 I’m going do this, from 10 to 11 I’m going to do that.  I just let if low.  And by honoring that it’s sort of the system that Wayne Dyre uses that it’s a child-like method of operation where you just move seamless from activity to the next without feeling like you’re in whip ride mode with the riding crop.  So yeah, okay.

Elizabeth:      And I can see this thing very true where you know a lot of the time management and productivity solutions that are out there are very structured, right?  And they have you need organizers and you’re supposed to plan it every minute of your day and all this stuff.  And I can see a lot of creative people who are trying to run a real business and they want to get more success try to force themselves to doing that stuff and it ends up of course not working because it’s against their own brain and their own thinking.

Patrice:           Right, right.  Well one of the best things that I have ever done for myself was getting a virtual assistant to off load all of that minutia that it really clogs up the creative flow for somebody with a totally right brain operating system and just to – delegation was a huge hurdle for me because I was accustomed to doing a lot of things with my PR biz but now I still have a PR business going but I do the strategic work.  I come up with a concept and then I hire other people to do the actual what I called smiling and dialing with the media interface.  So you know it works out great and same with any task that you are not strong on.  For example, in my case, web design or graphic design if you are not a graphic designer, don’t try to do your own graphic design.  It’s going to look amateurish.  You know, it’s important to know where you need to delegate things.  So that’s one of things that’s been extremely helpful is just getting over that hurdle.

Elizabeth:      Yeah and I can see with delegation especially to like a virtual assistant.  If someone is very creative and wants to be able to go with the flow of what occur to them but of course you know stuff has to get done.  Emails have to get answered and the phone has to get answered and schedules and all these things.  So having a virtual assistant you can recognize that the weaknesses that you have maybe in managing client appointment or something like that.  Delegate that to someone and let them be the bad guy.  So you don’t have to worry about it and they just give you the answer to what you need to or they go on and implement it themselves.  

Patrice:           Exactly.  And when I turn over project to my virtual assistant or graphic designers I do not meddle, you know, I just wait till they – I give them a general concept and let them come up with the answer and usually it’s great.  And you know it’s just learning to let go.  I think sometimes people can micro manage or be a control freak about some of the things they’re trying to put out there and that’s just going to drive you crazy.

Elizabeth:      Well it’s not helpful.  You can spend more time managing than to do it yourself then you end just doing it yourself, you know.

Patrice:           Right.  Right.  Well you’ve been a great example of delegation yourself.  You know with the way you run your radio show and you know all of the things that you have to manage to delegate this year so congratulations.

Elizabeth:      Thank you.  You know it is an issue like that’s one thing that I felt my radio show I have my assistant, Patty Ron, who is actually the assistant producer at this point, she schedules my guest and in the beginning I was scheduling the guest and I was emailing them back and forth and da-da-da and I was spending all this time and its like, well I need to delegate that entire job, you know what I mean.

Patrice:           Exactly.

Elizabeth:      To my assistant.  And I think a lot of people make is they delegate tasks, you know, go call this person but really the entire job needs to be delegated.

Patrice:           Yeah and any production issues, you know, having had a background in PR and advertising agencies I think when small, you know, solopreneurs get into this realm, they think that things are supposed to run seamlessly with production.  But of course those of us who’s been in production i.e. you know producing any kind of printed materials or anything we know that Murphy’s law is going to prevail so you know sort of have to get your mindset in the right place and know that you can overcome any of those little glitches along the way.

Elizabeth:      Yeah they definitely will happen and it’s good to have someone else helping you with that because it’s hard to be both in the troubleshooting mind as well as the person creating the stuff mind at the same time.

Patrice:           Yeah, you know some of the other things that discovered where solopreneurs or small business people shoot themselves in the foot or what I termed “The Seven Secrets Blocking Creative Entrepreneurs and I got this three special report at intuitivewealthguide.com that will spell this out but I did it in a creative manner and that is, you know, when the mood strike and when I have an idea, I seat down at the computer or I get the tablet and write long-hand which is really a closer connection to the spiritual source is writing long-hand.  But one of the major blocks to getting the life you love is the poison apple and that is the delusional myth that overnight success really exist.  You know so many people see what looks like she’s become a multimillionaire in just a few weeks and we all know that when we’re starting a business, you are ramping up for a few years at times.

Elizabeth:      Yeah.

Patrice:           And it takes 65% of the trust of rocket lift off or airplane or jet, you know.

Elizabeth:      Jet fuel, yeah.

Patrice:           Jet fuel is extended in the first few minutes of ramping up and blasting off and we forget that you just have to keep putting one foot in front of the others.  So you know the idea is don’t take that bite of that poison apple and give up before you get started.  In fact, I think that’s your current show Don’t Chicken Out.  I love that.  You know it’s just really refreshing how you have spent the time and effort and investment this year to get your foundation in place and it is fabulous.

Elizabeth:      Thank you.  You know I think that is a big issue because a lot of people especially I see with – there’s a lot of type of businesses but I know a lot of people were starting internet based businesses and they’re selling information product and they have a blog and they’re to do business that way.  You know, this stuff takes time to build that up and all you do is of course we all know this success people who now have you know a million hits a day on their site or whatever it is and make $2 million a year selling information product from their back porch or their vacation house or whatever and we don’t think about the 10 years they’ve been in this business.

Patrice:           Exactly.  Exactly and the background that we need to give ourselves the foundation, part of my background is that I taught sales training for 15 years.  And our trainings were such we were told that we needed to have a least 10 times the amount of reserved power that we needed just in case.  So you know when you get with people who are real sort of glib and sassy and act like they know it all, it might not be the best resource for you.  You know I think you really need to connect with people who have that kind of background and have the foundation and offer the level of depth.  So I don’t know the poison apple is one myth and I think another one is the dastardly duo that I called them.  That would be deserve-ability i.e. do we deserve this kind of success and the other one is perfectionism.  And perfectionism you know people think that things have to be perfect before they put it out there but many years ago my sister gave me a book called Compassion and Self Hate which was by a psychiatrist name Theodore Isaac Rubin and he included perfectionism among the top 10 forms of self-hatred believe it or not that it was right out there with cigarette smoking and abuse of alcohol or drugs.  So when we think something needs to be perfect before we put it out there that’s the not the idea either.  You need to have a lot of reserve power.  But it doesn’t have to be perfect.  It just has to be that we striving for excellence in that arena.    

Elizabeth:      Yeah and you know how its funny how often and I’m sure this happened to you too where I see someone at the same conference a year later and they’ll say to me, oh my god you’ve done this stuff da-da-da and they haven’t done anything.  They’ve been working on their website this whole time and I’m like there’s no way you work a year to do a website, okay cause I’ve done a lot of website.  And it’s because they wanted it to be perfect.  There’s two problems, one you’ll end up never launching it cause you run out of money or time or energy.  But number two is its actually impossible to make it perfect until you’ve launched it and you test it and you see what people like and then you can make changes.

Patrice:           Yes that’s a big lesson that we’ve learned this year.  You have to get yourself out there and put the energy out, put the effort out and then just tweak things as you go along.  Yeah, keeping in mind that there is no straight line to success.  I think one of the best lessons that we’ve learned in Ali Brown’s platinum marketing mastermind this year was when she demonstrated her trajectory to success.

Elizabeth:      Yeah I know what you’re talking about.

Patrice:           In the middle of the U-shaped table and you know she was sort of bouncing around like a pin ball and she said first I went here then I went there and I though you know that’s honest.  That is the true path to success cause there isn’t just a straight line.  And then you just have to keep bouncing off walls especially as a right brain creative because it’s your own originality and it’s your own special gift that is not define by anyone else that is going to tickle the fancy of your particular population.

Elizabeth:      Right and you know and you look at big incredibly successful people and a lot of them have declare bankruptcy multiple times and they have all kinds of – I mean most entrepreneurs who have a business that’s been successful and sold it for you know hundred of millions of dollars have multiple businesses that fails, bankrupt before that.

Patrice:           That is an extremely encouraging part.  I haven’t had to experience that.

Elizabeth:      Yeah I haven’t yet either and hopefully never have to do that one.

Patrice:           Yeah, well you know I thin another interesting thing is PR for me was a pure profit business.  I mean you know it’s all the brain, you know, it’s all my mind so and any production would charge to the client.  So its different moving into a realm where I am commencing my own publicity and building up my own list and offering my own information product like Convert Your Chaos to Cash and it’s a totally different mindset to think oh yeah I really do need to invest in advertising and I need to invest in production of my own which has been also a big leap for me but yeah you can’t do it all yourself.  You have to have a team of people to help you with your creative output and you know you work on what is your forte and your strength.  

Elizabeth:      So what would you suggest to someone who maybe listening right now who says, you know, I don’t have a lot of money to hire a bunch of people and I know that I’m this creative person what should I do?

Patrice:           Well you know as we’ve been told you get what you pay for but I think there are a lot of people out there who are, you know, maybe even high school or college student who could use some extra cash and if you’re not the one to be all over social marketing as I am not, I think that you can look for people for interns.  You know find somebody who like to example if you are an artist and you know put out a request at a university to find somebody who can help do your marketing and trade with them for some of your art or you know anything of that nature if you’re just getting started.  I think internships are definitely a way.  In addition to that just starting small, you know, having a particular budget as Ali says she has to get a whole new credit card to pay for her virtual assistant but she thought if she didn’t get somebody to help her with that she was going to explode or implode or one or the other.

Elizabeth:      Or quit and go get a job cause you know.

Patrice:           Yeah, oh perish the thought, you know, I not have a job since 1989.

Elizabeth:      Yean I figure out that I’m really unemployable, you know.

Patrice:           Yeah.

Elizabeth:      I can’t do it anymore.  And my husband will teasingly want me to work for him because he know I could be really good at it even though I would kill him and I’m like you know no I can’t work for you, also cause we’re married but that’s a whole other issues.  But yeah and I think you have to keep taking risk and over and over again.  I think that’s hard for people when they first started business too is you think like an employee in a lot of cases in a lot of cases where you’re not taking any risk.  

Patrice:           You do have to take risk and you also have to avoid the wild bunch.  This is another secret that’s blocking creative entrepreneurs from getting the life they love.  These are the crazy-makers, the nay-sayers, the times-suckers.  They are the friends and families whose purpose in life is to keep you on their level, part of the pack, you know, they’re the ones who want to maintain the status-quo and say may suddenly get very needy when you decide that you are growing a little bit big for your britches or whatever.  You know maybe that shows up as family drama or illness where you have to rescue them one more time or you know maybe they suddenly the car pool gets to be extremely important or you know you’re supposed to see in the TV room and let your mind go to [24:48].  So you know you got to be aware of the wild bunch too because so many study show that our income level is close to the income to the five people with whom we spend the most time and maybe its time to let go of some of the old and cultivate the new.

Elizabeth:      Now we only got a couple of minutes to the end of the show so I wanted to give you a chance to talk a little bit more about Convert Your Chaos to Cash and where if people want more information about that or anything else from you where they should go.

Patrice:           Okay, well great.  This was a product that I did at a teleseminars this summer and it worked out really well.  It was my first information product and it’s really design to help people who are moving from a hobby into a business, who are right brain entrepreneurs, you know.  Linear will not relate to this analogy.  But its got seven stages and it came to me in a dream which is the way so much of my information has come to me and I really honor my dream in a biblical sense, just like you know some of the great prophets and masters throughout the ages of time.  But the seven steps are first open to grace and a lot of that has to be do with how to deal with the myth of willpower and release yourself from its tyranny forever and also how to let intention and visions be your compass by tapping into the power of your subconscious mind using intuition and strengthening your sixth sense and you know a lot of things about synchronicity and that sort of things.  And then the second step is called creative space because when we let go of the old, we successful create physical, mental, spiritual and emotional space to let in our good.  Step three is to find your place.  Learn how to make the decision that will help you move forward rapidly and a lot of this is about tapping into the infinite mind to determine out of all the things that you enjoy doing.  What is the highest and best direction for you right now?  Because sometimes we have so many things that we’re good at, you know, what do we start with.  The next section is called state your case and these are a lot of the sales and marketing secrets that I have taught over the years you know as an instructor of sales training for 15 years and PR agent for 20 years.  And then the sixth aspect is called pick up the pace.  The game of tricking yourself into accomplishing more and it really has to be a game for right brain entrepreneurs otherwise if it ain’t fun it won’t get done.

Elizabeth:      Yeah.

Patrice:           And then finally the seventh aspect of it is called strength embrace.  How to develop expert status so that you are the go-to person in your niche and how to attract the best clients for you, the ones who pay well on time and are a joy to work with.  And  a lot of that has to do with intention and energy and what you’re putting out there.

Elizabeth:      Okay so we’re almost at the end of the show so the website for that is intuitivewealthguide is that the right one?

Patrice:           That’s right intuitivewealthguide.com you’ll get the free special report which is Seven Secret Blocking Creative Entrepreneurs from Getting the Life They Love and then there’s more information about Convert Your Chaos to Cash, the Simple Right Brain Recipe for Intuitive Wealth which is the actual class that you can receive.

Elizabeth:      Great.  Well thank you so much for being on the show today Patrice and everyone again that’s instuitivewealthguide.com and just so everybody knows next week we have Mark Cravens on.  We’re going to be talking about avoiding scams, avoiding investment scams.  So some great tips for you for that and again that show will be half an hour long just like this week.  So thanks again Patrice.

Patrice:           Thank you it’s been a pleasure.  You are great.

Elizabeth:      Great.

Patrice:           I’m one of the biggest fans.

Elizabeth:      Thank you so much.  Okay I’ll talk to you guys next week.  Ba-bye.

Patrice:           Take care.

Thank you for listening to the Wealth Spa Radio Show.  Join us each week on Thursday at 11am Pacific Time on Blog TalkRadio or subscribe to the show at thewealthspa.com.

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On this episode, Elizabeth shares her top 9 “take-away’s” from Ali Brown’s Online Success Blueprint Workshop (OSBW), answers a question from a listener about cash flow projections, and shares her Entrepreneur Success Tip of the Week: “Don’t Chicken Out.”

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Transcript: This is Elizabeth Potts Weinstein, your host of the Wealth Spa Radio Show and you are listening to episode 67 of the show.  But this is the first time we are here on Blog TalkRadio.  Now I was supposed to

you’re supposed to be listening right now to a lovely little music introduction, with an introduction to the Wealth Spa Radio Show, what we’re all about and everything like that which I recorded a couple of weeks ago.  But I forgot to upload it to Blog TalkRadio ahead of time and ironically Blog TalkRadio takes more than an hour to do whatever they need to do on their processing side to a 30 second of audio file.  So anyway the first time on Blog TalkRadio we don’t have all that stuff together.  So let me go ahead and give you that introduction right now.

So again you are listening to the Wealth Spa Radio Show and I am the host, Elizabeth Potts Weinstein.  What we have done on the Wealth Spa Radio Show is help you experience holistic wealth.  It’s really design for small business owner and entrepreneur and anyone thinking of starting a business someday.  We talk about a lot of different topic specially finance and laws cause those are my background and I give you a little more introduction to me a little bit later on the show.  As well as marketing, mindset, business management, we talk about a lot of things that are of interest to small business owners and entrepreneurs.  Typically on this how I start out with a guest expert for the first half of the show and then we’ll open up for question.  Of course you can always ask question anytime during the show.  I ask the question that has been sent be ahead of time and as we get to the top of the hour, I always share an Entrepreneur’s Success Tip for the Week which typical tends to be on the mindset side of business or more overriding principles of business.  Now for those of you who don’t know who I am and maybe listening to me for the first time since this is the first time we’re on Blog TalkRadio, give you a little, you know, one minute introduction into me.

So again I’m Elizabeth Potts Weinstein.  I’m an attorney and a certified financial planner.  But I don’t really practice law anymore in the sense of I don’t write contracts for you and I don’t create financial plans for people anymore.  What I do now is help people and teach people how to experience holistic wealth, and how to take their business and their life to the next level.  So I have a book Grow Up! Strategies: The 7 Legal & Financial Strategies You Need to Up-Level Your Small Business.  Of course I have the radio show that you’re listening to right now which is now on Blog TalkRadio.  I used to go on a different channel so I’ve been on for over year.  And it’s also podcasted on thewealthspa.com.  I also have a show that we do on YouTube and also on our main site which you can always go to thewealthspa.com to sing any of this stuff if you’re ever missing anything that’s the right place to go. I also have a bunch of great home study product that I sell and seminars that I teach and teleclasses and things of that nature specifically for small business owners and entrepreneurs.  So that’s really what we’re doing here on the show.

Now today since this is the first time we’re on Blog TalkRadio I wanted to make it simple for me so since I’m going to be managing all the technical stuff, it’s a little bit different on VTR.  I didn’t want also have to manage a guest experiencing the technical stuff when I haven’t done it myself so today we don’t have a guest expert even though usually that is something that we do.  For those of you who are coming over from Voice America Business, this is a little bit different doing on Blog TalkRadio, excuse me got a little tail end of the cold there, because I don’t have a second person, a producer who is also on the line.  I’m producing it myself with the help of the Bog TalkRadio software.  So I’m having to do two things at one, do the radio show and also manage the show, I mean do the production.  So it’s a little bit different of an experience.  Alright so let’s get into the show right now.  I wanted to check my audio level which I just listen to myself which is very bizarre listening to yourself on the radio.  Now I want to get into the content for today.  Before we get in to the exact content, I did want to remind you like I always do on the show if you’re going to miss any part of the show, if you don’t want to have to remember when and where to listen, if you don’t always come on Blog TalkRadio and listen to it live, you can always go to thewealthspa.com to sign up to have the show deliver to you automatically by email, via rss feed or via iTunes.  If you don’t know what rss feed is, you don’t have iTunes you can just sign up for the email and you’ll get email with the link so you can download the file at anytime.

Alright so let’s get into today’s content.  First I’m going to be sharing with you some takeaways I received and realization I came from going to the Online Success Blueprint workshop.  A couple of weeks ago, I went to the Alexandria Brown last on Online Success Blueprint workshop with Los Angeles and this is the third time I’ve gone.  It’s amazing how you can go to the same event and actually get presented with a lot of the same information, multiple times and come away with completely different takeaways.  So I want to share a lot of those takeaways especially for those of you who weren’t able to go and get some of the benefits even though you may not show up at the bus to go to that event.  The second part of the hour I’m of course going – the whole show I’m always able to take question from you all.  But typically people will send questions in ahead of time by email or via twitter or on our website.  This question I wanted to answer is about cash flow projection especially as you’re moving out of 2008 in 2009 thinking about the next year what things you need to look at in your business to help plan for 2009.  So I wanted to talk about cash flow projection and explain you know even what is that stuff, how do you create them, why are they useful, etc.  And then as we get close to the top of the hour, I’ll be doing the Entrepreneur’s Success Tip of the Week and this is the tip that something I actually shared at the Blueprint workshop, excuse me got the tail end of the cold.  It just really get me when I’m talking on the radio show.  I also did a video about this but I want to make sure I shared with you all too.  And tip is called Don’t Chicken Out.  It’s amazing how you can say something very simple and people can get so much about it.  I’ve gotten a lot of feedback about this kind of concept and really it’s an incredibly simple idea.

Okay for all of you who are listening live right now on Blog TalkRadio you of course may call into the show and the call-in number is 347-838-9617.  We also have a chat open.  You can always go in and just ask the question right there if you don’t want to have to call into the show.  Now if you have a question for me that is a little more sensitive nature especially if its about legal or financial stuff, you may not ask it live and have it recorded for all time, feel free to go ahead to thewealthspa.com and send us the message on by the contract forms there and then we can go ahead and answer it on the show and we don’t have to even give your name if you’re not comfortable doing that.  But you can still get the great benefit of getting your question answer for free.  Alright so let’s get into the first thing I wanted to share with you today. 

So for those of you who don’t know about this, Alexandria Brown who has been an internet marketing expert for many years and now doing a lot of other things also she has a – this is the fifth time she did a workshop called the Online Success Blueprint workshop.  And what this workshop has been was teaching the steps, the blueprint, for designing an online marketing kind of business.  Either by a free standing business or really as an add-on to a service type business for example like a coach or a consultant or any kind of solo entrepreneurs.  And this is the third time that I went to this workshop.  So you may think the takeaways I would get would be about internet marketing stuff.  And the interesting part of is it that and actually one of the reason I think she’s moving in doing other kinds of event is that especially going the third time and even through all three times that I went, the big takeaways were not about internet marketing.  They were not tool of internet marketing or tips or some info product that I bought and took home and went and implemented their seven steps for X, Y, Z.  The big takeaways were mindset stuff.

Now I’m going to go through the nine things I want to share with you.  The number one actually is about the tools which is you can always refine what you already know.  So you can imagine I’m going on this for the third time and the same information.  Now just to let you know, this event is not one of those horse and pony shows or whatever those, you know, when people just get up on stage and they talk for 45 minutes so they can sell from the back of the room so you can go spend $1700 on their latest info product.  It’s not one of those events I mean they do sell some stuff there.  Most of the event Ali is on stage teaching the whole time.  And the speakers that she’s had do a lot of teaching, even though they also do sell product.  So a lot of information is presented.  And of course this third going, a lot of the same information was presented each time.  The interesting thing is that even though I now, you know, allegedly know internet marketing, I’ve been doing it for a couple of years now and know her step and her blueprint by heart.  And know about you know how to define a target market.  You go out and find this people, use a traffic, get them to sign up for your eZine, give them the special report and then you keep them on your eZine or give them a great content over and over again.  Even though and all that stuff then you sell them right?  I know the whole system and I’ve been doing it for a while.  There’s always refinement to make.

Some of the refinement were things that I have had on my to-do list for years and I haven’t gotten to do or like little dumb things, like I own you know like over a hundred domain name and I haven’t gone back and redirected them all.  Like so I have this domain that I own that like didn’t go anywhere.  Like there’s a lot of little things like that that you can always refine and it’s easy to get distracted by all the business that you’re doing or the normal part of life and forget to go back and kind of clean up the things that you didn’t completely done.  So stuff like that and little things I was trying to implement, some pop-under that I was going to do and getting people to sign up.  I have offer on my site that if you – once you sign up for the electronic newsletter and get on the Wealth Spa Insider list, you’re then offered to get a free CD in the mail which is actually an episode of the Wealth Spa Radio Show.  But I didn’t offer that anywhere else, you know.  It’s about the great thing that I already have set up that I can offer in other places.  So there’s a lot of great takeaways that kind of went under one big subhead of there’s always more refinement.  So you know if you have sitting there with a bunch of info product that you’ve used or seminars that you’ve gone to, you have those information, it’s a great idea to simply go back through one more time.  If it’s a seminar you went through about internet marketing or about your particular area of expertise six months ago or two years ago spend 20 minutes paging through that stuff.  Even as little as 20 minutes, and you may find a bunch of things that six months ago or two years ago you just weren’t aware of or you’re overwhelmed at the time.  You couldn’t get everything completely implemented and that way you get a lot more value about stuff that you’ve already purchased and things that you’ve already done.  That’s number one is that you can always refine.

Number two and this is funny thing that I’ve known forever and like stubbornly refuse to do.  Number two is ask your target market what they want and then you know go make that stuff.  It sounds incredibly obvious, right?  Of course, you should serve all your target market and make what they want.  But I do have surveys in the past but its ironic how often instead of asking my target market what they want, I create what they need.  And this probably comes from being a lawyer and a financial adviser that as an expert, its like I feel like I know what you need, I know you should have and what you should have and what you need for business so I go out and make you habit and I make you do it.  Cash flow project or something and I’m going to teach you how to do this.  But of course people don’t want cash flow projection.  They want to make more money or they want to have more time or maybe they want more clients.  But they don’t really give, you know, anything about cash flow project.  And specifically I was kind of [13:54] of this concept is not just asking your target market what they want but being very open ended.  One mistake that I’ve made when I design service in the past is that I would say, you know, what are the subject areas that you’re most interested in and I would give them titles like cash flow, financing, trademarks and copyrights, blah blah blah.  I have this category.  Something which I feel like I’m expert and I can teach people something.  Well the problem is I wasn’t their words.  I was using my word.  A lot of people don’t even know what cash flow.  I mean they know the word cash and the flow and it sounds like a good thing but it’s not a word that someone uses.  People think in terms of I want to make more money or I want to take home more profits at the end of the day.  This is the kind of thing that people think about.  And so one thing that I’m going to be doing as I do survey both online service as well as talking to people is be much more open-ended, be much more what issues do you have in your business right now as opposed to which of these checkboxes do you want.  So I can use their language to help figure out what they want and of course designing something that would solve that problem for them.  So number two ask your target market what they want and be very open-ended.  Don’t kind of ask leading questions.  Ask more question like what do you guys want or how can I help you or what’s the biggest challenge you have in your business.  You can figure out what their real issues are.  Alright that’s number two.

Number three and this is a quote from James Roche, who’s also called the info product guy, “How do I solve problems with my unique gift.”  How do I solve problems with my unique gift?  And James said it’s a lot where people where – they called him the info product guy or he calls himself that and of course he does teach people how to create info product but really what he does is help people figure out what info product to create.  Because you know the mechanism of creating it is really pretty easy.  The issue is what should you be teaching people about.  What do they want to buy?  And its not just want they want to buy but also what are you going to be good at delivering.  What are you going to enjoy and be passionate about?  We want to figure out that match.  And sometimes I will go one extreme or the other.  Sometimes I’m creating what I think people need and what I want to do and then try to go find the people who will buy it and that’s always a big problem.  Or I’ll ask people what they want and then try to deliver that but its not something that I know or interested in or that I’m a good fit for and of course those don’t do well either.  Either cause you don’t want really to sell it cause you’re kind of bored with it by the time do all the work or there’s a disingenuous kind of thing going on so people can tell that you’re not the right match for that and its just not going sell as well.  So I think one of the big secret in any kind of business and especially if you’re in a business where you’re the expert with a personal business is to find that match.  Take that unique gift that you have and match it up with the problems that are out there.  So how do you solve problems with your unique gift?  Alright that’s number three.

Number four, this is a quote from Ali Brown and she went to a bunch of tip on how to grow your business and be a much bigger entrepreneur.  One of her tips was “You need to consistently raise your money thermometer.”  Consistently raise your money thermometer.  This is something that definitely happened to me over the last five years and I’m still pushing the envelop on this.  So you know a couple of years ago when I first went to Ali’s Online Success Blueprint workshop I think it cost – I think it was the same than it is now.   It was like $3000 to go to this workshop.  I never paid to go three grand to go to workshop.  I mean as a lawyer we pick up a hundred bucks, you know, and what happen if I was in the law firm still.  The law firm will pay for it and if I wasn’t it will stay pay for my business but I mean that was it.  You know and that was like a couple hundred bucks for like a multi-day conference.  Okay so three grand to go to this workshop was a huge stretch for me.  And then of course you have to pays for your hotel and your airfare and all that stuff.  Now over the last two years I joined her platinum group.  And her platinum group when I joined I think it was $15,000 to join that group, huge amount of money.  So I did join the group and went on the payment plan.  But here’s the thing doing big things like that and then I was starting to be around different kind of people who made hundred of thousands of dollars in their business.  People who flew first class staying in five star hotels or four star hotels and I don’t do this stuff all the time.  I still occasionally stay in Comfort Inn and still fly Southwest airlines all the time.  But I spend some of my time in that world such that that stuff becomes more normal.  And spending tens of thousands of dollars investing in my business and myself becomes normal.  So when Ali came out this year with her Diamond program which I actually did not join not because of the financial reasons exactly, it’s more for other reasons.  She has a diamond program that was a $100,000, a hundred grand for this year – for 2009, the coming year that was not shocking to me anymore, because I’ve gotten to a point now where that level of money is not just ridiculous to me anymore.  And here’s the amazing thing.  Ali has her own coach that she studies with and I went on the website for that coach okay and she has all this different levels.  Her highest level of her coaching program is over a million dollars a year that you pay to coach with this woman.  I mean can you imagine, for those who are listening who are coaches.  Can you imagine if you’re charging like a million dollars for someone to coach with you for a year?   The idea of that seems insane to me and it still seems insane to me right now.  I’m not that just pushes my money envelop level.  But that’s what I’m talking about its really important to keep expanding, you know, what level you’re comfortable with.  Also that same woman has a business that’s an info marketing business like a lot of us have where she sells, you know, she has a website, she gets traffic and she sells information product and things.  She makes $250,000 a day, a day in info marketing.  Now I can see $250,000 a year I can totally see that, $250,000 a month I can kind of see it’s a little unreal to me sitting right here but you know I can kind of like do calculation and see, you know, if you have a lot of traffic and had some great product or kind of you know you have a funnel of lower end products and higher end product like I can see $250,000 a month.  That didn’t seem completely insane.  But $250,000 a day, excuse me, right now seems completely unrealistic and insane and no possibly way can happen.  But this woman does it.  So wherever you are, if you’re someone who’s making $250 a day or $250 a week or if you’re making $250,000 a year wherever you are, whatever level you’re at you don’t want to get comfortable thinking in terms of that level.  You always want to look for other people, other ideas, other businesses, read books that you can read, whatever it is to expand your awareness of what’s possible.  If you’re person who’s making $250 a week you want to be around people who make $250 a day.  If you’re a person who makes $250,000 a year, you want to be around people who makes $2.5 million and etc. etc. etc.  So that’s why, you know, like Ali she makes seven figure, its not eight figure this year she wants to be and is around people who makes you know over a hundred million dollars a year because you always need to be pushing that envelop.  Alright how much time do you get remaining?  Well I got a lot of stuff to go through.

Alright number five takeaway, this is also from Ali is “Have a bigger why”.  This is another thing about you know really expanding your business as an entrepreneur having a much bigger why.   You know I started my business five years ago.  I left for a lot of reason part of it was cause I was like hospitally  bored like what I mean is bored to the point of being hospital like I was just pissed and I hated my job and I was bored and it wasn’t interesting and I try to do stuff and no one will let me.  I mean it was just  it sucks and so one of the reason I started a business was cause I just needed to do something different.  I also start a business to help people and because the subject matter was interesting to me.  But I didn’t really have like a mission or like a big you know how I’m going to change the world kind of thing going on for my business.  And that’s something that just now I’m really starting to discover is that big idea of the business.  And for me it’s actually only tangentially related to what I’m doing in my business which is fine.  See what I’m thinking about looking at your business why am I doing this and part of it is to make money and that kind of stuff but you need to also have a reason that’s much bigger.  And you know I say how to change the world.  It doesn’t mean you have to do something where you don’t make money or something or you change the world or make everyone happy but it needs to be something that’s important to you.  It may be about your own life.  Maybe you have your family have a much better environment to live in.  But you leave a message that you want to teach people.  Whatever it is go back to that and that’s something that may take you years to kind of figure out, find that bigger why.  And it may change overtime.  I know mine definitely have to change over time.

Okay number six, this came from Michael Cage.  Number six is marketing is not something you do to people.  Marketing is something you do with people.  So marketing is not something you do to people.  Its something you do with people.  You know when I was at the Blueprint workshop and Michael was on stage, this is a great quote that a lot of us scramble to write down because this really works very well in social networking and the new kinds of marketing that we’re doing now.  You know it used to be when you’re marketing stuff in your business, it was one direction, you know, and it was people pushing stuff into someone.  You know think about when you go to buy a used car especially years ago.  It was very much someone trying to force this transaction onto you.  They were trying to do something to do to you and sales people still try to do this.  If you still get phone calls, you see this and even charity even do this, they’ll force it on you.  And it really doesn’t work anymore and I don’t know if it ever works that well.  But now especially when you’re involved in doing relationship marketing and social networking, anything like that it is a two way transaction and marketing is not something that you do to somebody, you do together or you do with them.  So the idea is about developing that relationship.  Alright so that’s number six with the takeaways from the Online Success Blueprint workshop.

Alright let’s get into number seven.  This came from when Baeth Davis was on stage.  She’s the hand analyst and by the way I’m getting my hands read the first week of January so I’ll tell you more about that when it happens.  She had one of her people who have had their hands read and gone her seminars and things give up a testimonial about their experience.  And one thing that was really interesting to me is that this woman who is very qualified in a lot of areas is moving into a new area for her.  That was something that really resonated with her and her life’s purpose but she didn’t have degrees in it, right?  Now one thing that was really important for this woman was that she has come to a realization that why is she qualified to do this new thing.  People would ask her cause she would you know be on TV and she’d get ask, you know, you don’t have a degree in X, Y, Z and her answer is well I have a gift.  This is something that’s really important for me personally and I’m sure some of you who are like this as a lawyer and a financial adviser I always thought that the reason I was qualified cause I have a bunch of degree and a bunch of stuff, right?  And it’s definitely helpful, okay.  Being a lawyer is incredibly helpful in credibility.  However a lot of the things I teach now, a lot of the things I do has nothing to do with being a lawyer.  Okay.  And so there’s always this strange thing for me is I felt now am I big fraud, I don’t have degrees in this, you know, why am I qualified to do this?  And one of the big answers is having a gift.  So for example, I teach now people about social networking, you know.  I don’t have a degree in marketing.  I don’t have some sort of qualification – is there a degree in social networking, I don’t know if there is.  But the idea that will have a formal qualification to teach social networking or marketing for that matter.  But here’s the thing, I’m good at it and people think that I’m good at it which is why they want me to teach them, and really actually what I’m really good at is taking things that seemed complicated and making them simple.  And that’s one of the gift that I have.  And so suddenly that really help when that women help me, when that woman was talking about her experience was saying to myself, yeah maybe I don’t have you know letters after my name about this thing that I’m teaching but I have  gift at it and I’m good at it.  And it’s important for me to share that with people.  So it’s funny how little language things like that can be very helpful and powerful at least for me.  Alright that’s number seven.

Number eight takeaways from the Online Success Blueprint workshop and number eight and number nine which are the last two ones are both takeaways from David Neagle.  Number eight, “What would you do if your business or actually hold on – what would it be like what’s your business or life be like if it wasn’t hard.”  What would your business or life be like if it wasn’t hard?  And I mean hard as in requiring a lot of strain and effort and stress.  You know David Neagle is very good at asking very upsetting questions that really get to the core of thing.  He was the guest in the Wealth Radio Show back in what April or May, I think May.  One of the most difficult guests I have ever had because he’s not afraid of silence.  Most people will keep chatting if there’s silence and it’s a great tool to use when you’re interviewing in the radio because they’ll fill up the silence and good stuff will come out when they’re kind of blabbering a little bit.  David totally doesn’t do that.  He just lets the silence be there, you know, completely freaks me out.  But also ask a really hard question and the idea of this question and this is something that you can journal on and really ask yourself what would your business or life be like if it wasn’t hard.  That may help reveal the things you should get rid off and may help you figure out how to design a business, how to design your life right now without all of that stuff that makes it hard.  Another way to say this is to describe your ideal day.  This is something that I did back in early May I guess it was.  I journal about you know I design what would be an ideal day be like.  You know I’ll wake up in the morning at a certain time.  What would I do?  Who would I be with?  What would I do for my business?  What was it would I be doing?  Ordinary day that would be perfect or perfect as anything could get.  And suddenly I found and I actually did after I wrote out that big day, I look at it was like why don’t I just go do this tomorrow.  Now of course, some of those things you can’t do tomorrow.  Some of those things where you know my husband not working in a law firm and having his own business and things that aren’t going to happen in the next 48 hours and maybe will never happen because that’s up to him.  Some of the things were things that took time to occur and how to get implemented.  But the idea was as soon as I wrote out what my ideal day would be like I realize a lot of it I could do immediately.  Some of it I could implement in just a couple of days or couple of months and some of the things I could get the same result even if I couldn’t completely implement it.  So for example, I had wanted to home school my daughter.  Now at that time she was going to preschool all day long because I felt like I needed to work in my business all day long.  And I was like and I was waiting for some time when my business would be running itself and I could take her out of school.  But of course it’s like never going to happen so I don’t know what was up with that.  I’m always going have more stuff going in my business.  I decided you know what I don’t want to wait to home school I’m going to start like now.  Now it did take some time because I had appointment on my calendar and I have to deal with child care issues and I still got to get my work done and I have to figure out all kinds of system to put in place so she could be home with me almost all the time.  She still goes to school two mornings a week and that’s where she’s at right now.  But I’m having interference with my computer.  I’ll figure that out the next time I’m on the radio show.  Sorry.  But I can do that over just a period of few weeks have her home with me that was one of the big things.  I also change my business and I have been doing this gradually over the year but I decided to just cut it off.  I used to do a lot of consulting work and do financial plans and estate plan for people and I was still doing that because it was my main source of income.  I got to a certain point in the summer where I said you know what I’m not doing this anymore.  This is not part of my ideal day and even though I get some enjoyment out of it what I love doing is all this other stuff, is the teaching and the radio show and all this kind of stuff so I have to just cut that off.  And you know my income did definitely go down.  My bookkeeper is still freaking out I think but I’m actually not freaking out ironically.  I’ve become much more easy about this thing.  Alright so that’s number eight, what would your business or life be like if it was not hard.

Number nine is another David Neagle quote is “act as if you have complete faith.”  So one of the things that they teach a lot in law of attractions and universal principle and all this jazz is you need to like receive and accept the things before you’re actually going to get it.  So you know you have this vision or these things you want or what you want your life to be like or whatever or your business to be like and you like feel as if you’ve already received it, you’ve already have.  It has already happened.  It’s a 100% sure and you’re completely decided and all this stuff and then it will happen.  But I don’t know about you but you know it’s really hard to do.  Okay.  I mean its all nice and good to say you know I have this vision for a million dollar and I can like make a vision board and I can meditate about it and da da da but dude I know I don’t have a million dollars.  Okay my bank account does not have a million dollars in it.  So it’s really difficult sometimes to take both sides of your brain and put them together.  Cause that logical side of your brain still like dude you don’t have a million dollar and the other side of your brain the creative is like, oh yeah let’s step forward in faith.  So this is one of the things I still have and trying to figure out how to implement which is act as if you have complete faith.  And sometime what I think David means is you may not yet have complete faith but act as if you did.  Make decision whatever choices you’re taking in your life in your business, act as if you have faith and then the faith will come.  So that’s an interesting thing to kind of play around with.

Alright so those are the takeaways from the Online Success Blueprint Workshop and give me a couple of seconds cause I’m going to drink a waters.  Now I’ve recorded a commercial break, just a one minute commercial break so I could like get a drink of water and stuff when I’m doing my show but of course those files didn’t get uploaded so hold on a second.  Actually let me go and check on my switch board and see the intro and outro are out there.  Okay so we actually have a closing music on the show, aren’t you excited.  Cause some of the files have been uploaded, very exciting.  Sorry for the little segway there.  Okay now we’re go into the second segment of the show which is where I can answer question.  Now of course if you’re listening right now and you want to ask question go ahead and ask one on chatter call in but if not I’m going to go ahead and ask a question that I get very often which is about cash flow projection.

Now for those of you who don’t know what a cash flow projection is let me give you the little basic explanation.  So the idea of cash flow is there’s a flow of cash, flow of money that comes into and out of your business and also into and out of your life.  The money coming in is your income and how the money goes out is your expenses, right?  And here’s the thing it’s not just about the amount of money that comes in and goes out.  Of course it’s very important but not just the amount it’s also the when, it’s also the timing.  A lot of businesses and right now those businesses are going bankrupt not because they don’t make enough money.  They’re going bankrupt because of the timing.  Perhaps they have people who owe them money so the money exists kind of, you know, like they have this accounts receivable.  On paper they should be okay but they don’t have the money in their checking account and they can’t make payroll.  And it’s a timing problem with cash flow that’s coming up and that’s true for I think for most businesses and I know it’s for me.  I used to, for example my merchant account, you know, who processes the credit cards, most of my payment I get are through credit cards now.  It used to take them like three businesses days to deposit money into my checking accounts and then all of the sudden last spring they changed all their rules like pretty much everyone did and now they take a whole week so five full business days if not more to put money in my checking account which is a big problem.  You know someone and sometimes what is happens if someone buys something from me on a Friday, I don’t get paid for a whole week until next Monday.  So it’s almost like seven days, almost ten days in some cases.  That can be a big problem as you can imagine cause I got to ship this stuff out which means I have to pay for it to be shipped.  Because I have the general expense on my business, you know, it’s a normal stuff that goes on and this can be a big issue for my business and I’m sure it is for you too.  A lot of businesses people owe you money and they haven’t paid for it but the expense are still due etc.  So cash flow is not just about the amount of income and expenses, it’s also about the timing, the when.

So what’s a cash flow projection, the idea of the cash flow projection is to make an educated guess on how much income you’re going to make, what the expenses are going to be, and when they’re going to occur.  And I say it’s a guess because it really is a guess.  You cannot know when you’re going to get income until you get, right?  Until the check clears and the money is in your checking account.  You can’t know when the expenses are going to happen until you pay for them.  Expense you can have a little more certainty about sometime but not everything.  So cash flow projections are very much a guess, they’re educated guess.  But why do you do them because they are just a guess.  Why you do them though is to help you make decision about your business.  So when you create a cash flow projection, a guess of how much income you’re going to make, what the expenses are going to be either for one project or for you business overall.  It will help you make decisions about what you should do.  Should you do this project?  How should you price this new product or service that you’re going to offer?  Can you afford this expense?  Are you going to have a cash flow problems next year in the middle of April, right?  These are really important things to know now cause now you can make decisions so you don’t have that cash flow problems next April because you can fix it today.  So that’s really the idea.  Excuse me.

So what do you actually do to create cash flow projections and now is the time of year to start thinking about this cause I actually when I sit down and do mine, I do mine on an annual basis.  So you’re thinking okay I want to start planning for next year.  You start doing all your business planning; you’re marketing planning for 2009.  One of the things you want to do is plan for your cash flow and typically what you do is think of it, it’s kind of like a budget except it also has income in it.  So you have a nice a little spreadsheet.  I do mine on excel.  I don’t use thing super fancy.  You can do it on a piece of paper.  You don’t need anything fancy for this.  I typically break my mine up on a column based on the month of the year and think okay what I think the income is going to be on each month based upon how many clients or how many products you’re going to sell.  What are the expenses its going to be in each month and then ask how much income am I going to make or how much profit am I going to make or how much money you’re going to lose if you’re not doing very well.  These are incredibly powerful to help you make this kind of decision.  You know last year I was planning to offer this continuity program which I did not do.  The reason I didn’t do it was because I put it in my cash flow projections and realize that the price point, the amount of money I was going to charge and how many seats I knew I’ll be able to sell, then I wasn’t going to make enough for it to pay for the cost.  And there’s a huge amount of time to put this kind of program.  And it’s just when we’re going to make enough money from day one and I was going to have a major cash flow problem for the first few months that I just could absorb at the time.  And like the rate of the price wasn’t going to work the way this program was designed.  So I decided to go ahead and put it off and actually I ended up completely revamping it.  I’m going re-launch it something completely different really.  I’ve also done the same thing with price point.  I put together a program and certain price point and realize it wasn’t high enough for how many I knew I was going to be able to sell.  So I decided for that program I was going to offer it two levels.  I have the regular levels at the price point that I knew was the right price point and then I also have that teleclass series at a higher price point where people got the CDs and the mail and the transcript and all that stuff.  And half the people actually pay for the higher price point which probably means I could have offered a lot of it at a higher price point but that’s a whole another story. 

So the idea there is that you can test out things before they happen, new product launch, new service, before you do some big things for your business, you can test it out, you can play around with it so when you go do it for real it’s a second run.  You’ve already troubleshooted some of the issues.  Now the thing is, it is just guess and you maybe saying well it sounds like kind of a neat idea but how do I know how much money I’m going to make in April or August or how many product am I going to sell or what is the reason I’m going to be doing next year.  Well you’re right it is just a guess and there’s now way you’re going to know exactly.  So the important thing for you is to just make that guess and then troubleshoot it as you go along and refine your guess as you go.  Now one tip that I give to people cause I get a lot of people who say well you know I don’t even know where to start, you know, should I be conservative in my projection.  Should I have a big vision in my projection, you know, what should I do.  You may want to make more than one version.  This is what I typically do especially beginning of the year when I’m spending a lot of time in business planning.  I’ll make even three versions.  First version I make especially for a new business or a new project is the breakeven projection.  Cause I really want to know how many units I need to sell or how many seats I need to sell or how many clients I need to have for the business to just breakeven.  Now what it means to breakeven may depend upon your situation.  What I mean by that is if you’re a solo entrepreneur and this business is the way you provide for your family, your breakeven may not be the business breakeven it might be the point where the business pays for your personal breakeven expenses okay.  So you know where exactly that breakeven point does depend.   Now typically I do it just I do it one drop, it’s just the business breaking even.  You know what point will this new project or business pay for itself.  That’s a really important thing to know because you may do that and realize that this business is just not realistic.  You need a different price point, you need to be reconfigured or the expenses need to be reduced.

Second I’ll do kind of my mid-line realistic projection on how many I think I can sell.  And then I might do a third version that’s my like my big vision if the things takes off gang buster and it has this wonderful amazing things.  I get thousands of people to sign up what happen.  That can be really important because your expense may significantly increase if the business takes off.  I have someone on the phone a couple of weeks ago and we were talking about her new business, her new project, she’s going to be launching this software program or something and it’s like online hosted thing.  So if it takes off she’s going to need like lots of servers and it takes up times to get those thing up and it’s a big expense every time you add a new server or she may [45:33-45:36]  The idea though is if it takes off and she gets 10,000 people signing up on the first day and they all get a 30 day free trial and they’re not paying her for the first 30 days she’s going to buy more servers or [45:51] or whatever it is she’s going to pay for it on her end before they will pay here.  So that potential gigantic cash flow problem, the problem of being successful needs to be dealt with.  So that’s one thing to think about it is you’re sitting down to do your cash flow projection at the end of this year for 2009 you may want to do more than one version of your projection.  Alright so that’s my 10-minute version of cash flow projection.  One thing I want to share with you is if you’re really want to get into this more specially as you’re getting started to 2009, I have a home study kit for managing cash flow which is called the money tree system.  You can just go to themoneytreesystem.com.  And this program goes through a whole bunch of other stuff but one of things it talks about is cash flow projection.  So if you want some more information about that of course you can also go to thewealthspa.com and we have a bunch of free resources about cash flow especially I think there’s more article on our site than any other subject matter.  So go ahead and go to thewealthspa.com and search for cash flow and you’ll get tons of stuff.

Okay let’s get into the third segment.  Before I do I’m going take a drink of water.  One of the side effects of not having commercial break.  Its interesting coming from Voice America Business Channel where I used to be, they have commercial breaks where they got corporate sponsor, I didn’t get paid for it, it wasn’t that cool.  They have corporate sponsor that pay for commercial break.  It’s actually kind of nice to have like a minute or two like get a drink of water.  So people don’t get to hear you do that.  Okay but you guys have to hear me this time.  Okay.   This third segment of the show is called the Entrepreneur Success Tip of the Week and this week’s tip is called Don’t Chicken Out.  So this comes from the story that I share on stage at the Online Success Blueprint workshop.  Cause so many people came up to me and were so impacted by that story.  I went ahead and made a video about it that I posted on YouTube and Facebook and on my own site and I wanted to also share it with you on this show because it impacted people so much and its kind of a simple thing.

Now this is one of the big takeaway and principles that I have learned and still learning to apply in my life and in my business.  To give you a little background story, five years ago, a little more than five years ago, I quit working in a big gigantic law firm to start my own business.  At the time I started working as a financial adviser and as an attorney for individual so doing estate plan, doing financial plans, investment advice that kind of stuff.  And I did it for the first couple of years and then about 2 to 2-1/2 years ago I was just getting really bored.  And for me getting bored is like the worst, you know, a faith worst than death.  One of the worst things that could happen and because I was bored, I didn’t really want to market anymore.  I was thinking about shutting the business down I didn’t know what to do.  And that was the point where I hired my first life coach, Kim Fulcher.  I hired a marketing coach, Kelly O’Neal.  I went to Ali Brown’s Online Success Blueprint workshop for the first time and end up joining her platinum program.  And over the last two years, I’ve learned that what I really am is not an attorney or a financial adviser, really what I do is I teach people.  And really what I’m doing is really being a teacher and some of the stuff that I teach about is finance and law.  I teach about a lot of other things.  Really what I do is take things that are really complicated and make them simple.  So now I’m a publisher, I’m an editor.  I’m a producer.  I have a radio show and host of a radio show and author of the book and I have all this different stuff going on and I don’t think of myself anymore as a lawyer or financial adviser even though that’s part of my credentials.

So what does that have to do with don’t chicken out.   One of the things that I’ve done the last two years has been to add a lot of these big things on my business and I still have even more big gigantic ideas and projects that I’m adding that are very scary.  You know it’s interesting how often someone will come up to me and say, wow I can never do a radio show.  That’s sounds so scary.  That sounds so horrible and stressful and I’ll tell you the first radio show, oh my god I was like I was sick.  I had a horrible horrible hacking cough.  I was incredibly nervous like all day long I couldn’t eat and I was just like completely useless all day long.  I couldn’t get any work done.  It was incredibly stressful that first day, even that first couple of time.  Now you know here I am in Blog TalkRadio, I can’t even get the technology to completely work.  It’s like dead silence at the beginning of the show, gosh only knows, but you know I’m really not that stress.  I’ve been doing it for a while I eventually become comfortable.  Now I also have a lot of people said, they’re afraid of sharing themselves online and being more personal in their marketing.  For instants I’m on twitter and for those of you who aren’t twitter people.  Twitter is some micro-blogging platform.  Really what it is though is a place to have follow other people and for them to follow them back and for you to be friends with them and for you to have kind of an ongoing communication, kind of like standing at the water cooler in an office over the course of the day.  And anytime of the day you could do it all day long, you can do it once a week, whatever you want to do to have this kind of ongoing conversation with people.  So it’s kind of like a chat room combined with blogging.  It’s kind of a unique creature in a lot of ways.

One of the ways to be really successful in twitter is to be very personal and you always have a line that you draw.  Everyone draws line different place.  And I am very personal in twitter.  And but the thing is a lot of people are afraid to show themselves.  They’re afraid of offending people.  They’re afraid of being bigger than their britches or whatever it is.  What I’m finding in those activities and also in the new things that I’m doing for my business is that the difference between being successful and getting all these things that I envisioned isn’t the how.  Like the tools to have a million dollar multi-media empire which is my big vision for my business, the tools are all either things I already have or know how to do or they will arrive.  I mean obviously people do that so there must be ways to do it and I can feel confident that the hows on doing this big gigantic things that I have in my current business plan are all there.  The only reason the big stuff won’t happen is if I chicken out on little steps to get there.  So for instance, if I stop sharing so much on twitter, if I stop doing a radio show, if a TV shows call and I don’t call them back on time, a lot of it is self sabotage and I’ve done this like with press.  I get a press inquiry and I won’t call them right back.  Like what’s up with that.  Why would I not call a press back?  Why would I not want to get on the TV show?  Why would not be on a radio show or to get interview in a magazine.  A lot of this is because the choice to have that big vision be realized in your life that whether its for you getting the big house or having the successful business whatever it is choice to having that amazing thing happen and be realized in your life isn’t what choice that you make once that you want this big things to happen and it magically appears.  It’s a choice you make all day long, every single day.  So as you’re sitting there and little pieces of the opportunity arise and little decisions, little parts of it happens in front of you, that’s where the decisions are all made.  And the only thing you have to do is not chicken out.

So I think about $100 million multi-media empire thing and I don’t know how to do that, its incredibly scary even saying it on the Blog TalkRadio today.  But I know that it’s not like that’s going to happen like this afternoon and I have to figure out how to do it.  Its all little bit stuff and pieces and all I have to remember is that as each steps happen as the opportunity comes in, as the how to do it comes in, as the persons comes in to my life all I have to do is keep saying yes.  In little bits and pieces and not chicken out.  Cause its very easy to go back and just go back to the safe decision, just to say in the same place.  You’re good at this place that you are right now, probably, comfortable where you are right now to certain extend.  Wherever you are right now is where you’ve been for a while most likely and it’s very easy to just stay in the same place forever.  Now actually a lot of time you stay in the same place, you actually lose ground.  That’s a whole other issue there but taking a big leap of faith, changing, getting outside of the box, become different in all of your friends and your family is very scary and uncomfortable and every step you take  can be incredible scary.  And the mantra that I used for myself literally multiple times a day is to not chicken out and not self sabotage myself and to keep just taking steps forward and saying yes to every time that thing arises. Now I’m not saying you said yes to everything cause something opportunities will come in that don’t match with your big vision and so you should say no.  It’s not that you said yes to everything.  There would be things that would come in that would are horribly scary but you know they’re the right thing.  It’s like falling in love and getting married and all that kind of stuff.  The most horribly scary things that you can ever do are usually the most perfect right one that you could ever do.  Especially for those of you who are kind of logical and it’s very easy to talk yourself into chickening out cause you’re trying to be logical and safe.

So my advise to all of you as you going through out this next week is that if you have some inkling or even know exactly what your big vision is and you even if you don’t know the steps to get there. You most likely don’t know all the stuff so it’s a really big idea and big vision, little things will happen over the course of the week that will be the little steps to take you towards that and all you have to do to make the big vision arise cause its already yours.  It’s in your head.  If you weren’t capable of receiving it, if it wasn’t capable of being happening to you or with you, you wouldn’t have the idea.  All you have to do is not chicken out.  Those little opportunities go before you just take a step forward, little baby steps each time and step into it.  And eventually each of those steps will become and more comfortable for you.  Alright I only have one minute remaining at the end of the show.  Next week we have Patrice Dickey.  We’ll be talking about turning chaos into cash.  As always you can go to thewealthspa.com to sign up to listen to the show automatically or you can tune in to us at Blog TalkRadio.

Thank you so much for listening today and I’m not going to try to play the outro of the – so we’ll see if the outro of the show works.  Again if you want to listen to any part of the show or even read the transcript for the show, you can always go to thewealthspa.com just sign up for the show and have it to deliver to you automatically, listen to archive of the show or even read transcript of past shows or of course you want to listen to us live come to Blog TalkRadio Thursdays at 11 am Pacific Time.  Now I’m going ahead to play the outro and let’s see if that works.

Thank you for listening to the Wealth Spa Radio Show.  Join us each week on Thursday at 11 am Pacific Time on Blog TalkRadio or subscribe to the show at thewealthspa.com.

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Elizabeth speaks to The Barefoot Executive, Carrie Wilkerson about Finding Your Why.

Elizabeth and Carrie talk about how they made their transitions into working from home, how working from home brings to you so many changes and how there really is no balance…it’s life happening! 

Elizabeth then answers a listener question about avoiding networking overwhelm from your attendance at conferences or seminars and how to get the most out of the information, ideas and acquaintances you’ve made. Elizabeth then shares her Entrepreneur’s Success Tip of the Week: Listening to Your Intuition within Your Business. 

To learn about Carrie and to receive her free downloadable presentation on Finding Your Why visit The Barefoot Executive. 

Click Here to Download the Show!

Transcript: Welcome everyone.  This is Elizabeth Potts Weinstein your host for the Wealth Spa Radio Show and this is episode 66 of the Wealth Spa Radio Show if you’re keeping track or want to keep things in order.  Now, today we’ve got a couple different things going on, we typically do.  First, I have our guest for today, our guest expert who is Carrie Wilkerson, the Barefoot Executive. 

We’re going to be talking about a bunch of different stuff including finding your why then as we get close to the second half of the hour I’ll be answering a question from one of you all.  And this is specifically about, this week I’m actually in Los Angeles at a conference, and I know a lot of you go to conferences and seminars.  How do we keep from overwhelm? And how do we make sure that we’re getting as much use as possible about all the stuff and people and everything that happened at a seminar or a conference?  And then third, the Entrepreneur’s Success Tip for the Week which we’ll be talking about as we get close to the top of the hour, this week’s tip is listening to intuition in your business.  Of course, we both want to think with our heads but how do we also think with our hearts or souls or whatever you want to call.

                        Now, before we get into today’s content, I’ve got a couple of announcements.  The first is that we are actually moving from Voice America Business to Blog Talk Radio so we’re not going to be live on Voice America anymore.  We’re going to be live, starting next week, on Blog Talk Radio.  Now for those of you who listen to the recording through the podcasting on thewealthspa.com or your iTunes this doesn’t matter for you, you’re still going to get in the exact same way, shape and form.  If you listen to it live it will be on Blog Talk Radio starting next week.  Now second, we’re actually changing the day of the week and the time, the time stays the same but the day of the week of the show.  So instead of being Wednesdays it’s going to be Thursdays at 11:00am Pacific Time going forward starting on November 20^th.  Now if you can’t or don’t know where the news station is, you can’t remember where any of that is, you don’t have to remember when and where to listen, you can always go to thewealthspa.com that’s thewealthspa.com.  You go there and you can sign up for the show to have it automatically delivered to you by e-mail, RSS Feed or via iTunes, if you’re an iPod or iPhone kind of person and actually you can have iTunes on your computer too.  Also on thewealthspa.com you can listen to archive shows, past shows, write down the site.  You can read transcripts.  We’ve got transcripts of many of the shows for free right there on the site as well as tons of articles and other resources for you about holistic wealth, so if you’re ever confused just go to the wealthspa.com.

                        All right so let me get in to today’s stuff and start introducing the guest for today.  So today we have Carrie Wilkerson, the Barefoot Executive, she has a ton of experience in a lot of different areas.  She’s been in the corporate world, she’s taught high school, in direct sales, now this internet marketing.  She’s done a lot of different things, has been working from home for over 10 years and Carrie actually also has four kids so working from home is as chaotic as many of us who work at home because we have kids and it can be very crazy.  As the Barefoot Executive, she’s quickly become the definitive resource for helping others achieve extra income and career goals while also working from home so thanks so much for being on the call with us today Carrie.

Carrie:            Thank you so much Elizabeth.  I appreciate the invitation.

Elizabeth:       Great so tell me how, you’ve done all kinds of different things in your career what happened and what was the transition from where you were working before to starting at working at home?

Carrie:            That’s a great question and you know it’s one of those moments that I tell people that, you know, you can oftentimes look back at a pivotal moment in your life.  A moment when everything changes and you may not even realize it at that point but that’s its switch that gets flipped or something that changes everything in your future.  You know, what you thought you were going to do and I was teaching high school and really loving it and I was also working part time at a law firm because, you know, we were married and no kids and we had extra time.  And we were getting ahead financially.  We had just bought our first home.  And so I was teaching high school in an inter-city school and I really adored it and I loved my work.  So my husband and I decided to start our family.  And we adopted two toddlers a brother and sister and they we’re eight months and 2 years and so overnight I became a mom and just as quickly as I became a mom, my priorities changed and just as quickly as my priorities changed, my workplace changed.  I decided that the kids at school were great and yes they needed me and loved me but the fact of the matter is this two little people were now in my home.  I had vowed to a judge and to them that I would take care of them.  They were removed from a very negative situation and I just decided that they were not going to have one more moment of neglect in their life, not one more moment.  And so I purpose in my heart then to be at home with them.  Now I will say to be fair I just intended to be what we called the stay-at-home mom, you know, my mom had done that and she didn’t worry about generating a lot of income from home or working or whatever from home.

And so that’s what I was going to be.  I purpose in my heart to be the domestic goddess that my mother had been and that worked Elizabeth for about 7 weeks.  And I wasn’t cut out for that.  I really wasn’t.  I loved my children and I wanted to be there with them in there space but really the whole scene of being at home and devoting all my energy to that was not working for me.  Now, that is a fulltime job.  I don’t want anybody to go away saying that I said it wasn’t enough to be a stay-at-home mom.  It is absolutely a full time job but it wasn’t the full time job that I felt cut out for.  So I really wanted to be, you know, in the space with some adults and generating some income.  And really there so much going on in my head at any given time, it’s the entrepreneurial ADHD, you know, as what I called it now.  But I just really felt like I wanted to be generating some income.  I wanted to be contributing to the household and I felt like there had to be a way I could do that while I was also at home with them primarily.  So I didn’t start my business or any of my businesses out of a big passion or drive for what I was doing but out of my circumstance that I was committed to being in the space of my kids.  And so then necessity became the mother of invention for me at that point. 

Elizabeth:       So what was the first business that you started?

Carrie:            The first thing I did to generate income from home was actually one of the law firms that I worked with.  I knew because of e-mail and internet that there had to be a way that I could work for them from home so now it wasn’t nearly as it advanced as it is now.  But I did some collections for them and some bookkeeping for them.  And so it was kind of a VA type thing and at the same time, for the social interaction, I joined a direct sales company and decided that it would be a great way for me to get out and learn some business skills because none of my training was business, none of it.  And so I did direct sales while also doing a part-time VA, I didn’t know what to call it at that point but that’s essentially what I did first. 

Elizabeth:       Now as you were working at home with the kids, how difficult was it for you to balance the doing that work with having, you know, toddlers in the house with you all the time?

Carrie:            Well and not only were they toddlers but because of the situation they came from they were very needy toddlers.  We had a lot of therapists coming in and out.  We had a lot of appointments and you know honestly from zero to two kids with a husband that travels for his job, it was huge and it was very overwhelming.  And so, you know, obviously honest I didn’t handle it well.  I had no balance.  I’m kind of an all or nothing kind of girl anyway and so – and I struggled with that a lot.  I argued with myself a lot.  I felt like a failure a lot but now I firmly believed, 10 years later and two more kids later and three more businesses later, now I really feel that balance is kind of a farce.  Elizabeth, I don’t think it exists.  Balance is bogus is my new theme.  I think it’s more like a rhythm.  It’s like music sometimes there are fast times and slow times and it’s an ebb and a flow and until you really find your rhythm with it you’re going to have conflict with yourself because there is no such thing as perfect balance.  There is no pie chart, there is no magic formula, there’s no spreadsheet that can figure out what the perfect balance is.  There are times in your business and times in your life and seasons where you can run with the free head like a race horse and just really get a lot of momentum in your business and really things are quickening and you can do and you can work in some paces that you can’t also do.  And then there are some times that you need to scale back and you need to listen to your body and you need to listen to your family and, you know, kids are pretty great about communicating when they need more of you and, you know, husband are too but we just tend to tune them out.

Elizabeth:       Yeah.  They’re big boys.

Carrie:            Yeah, we tend to think that, you know, they are just being needy but you know, like with baby Barefoot, you know, she’s seventeen months old now and I can pretty much tell when she needs a little more mom time or when I spend too many hours.  And you know she’s also pretty good.  I have an open door policy at my office unless I’m on a call like I am right now.  Most of the day she can come and go pretty freely and climb up in my lap and we called that the baby Barefoot break, you know, she’s pretty good at letting me know when she need me and when I need to be a little more hands on with all that.  So all that to say there’s really not a balance, now the hard thing about working at home is you tend to work all the time or, there’s two extremes.  You tend to either work all the time and never walk away from it or you tend to be distracted by your home and the people in your home so that you never really get down to business.  So there does have to be a balance between that and the best way to figure that out is some scheduled focus work time.

Elizabeth:       Yeah. I guess for me like there’s, you know, I agree with you that there’s no such thing as balance and I kind of have an article that I’m eventually going to write like balance is bull and s-h-i-t because it really is.

Carrie:            Right.

Elizabeth:       And the thing is like, especially I think as if you’re working at home and you’re a mom but it isn’t true for everyone there’s always something that’s going to happen.  You know, my husband hurt his back and was actually diagnosed with having a slip disk this summer and had like weeks where he was just at home, you know, barely able to get out of bed and use the restroom and that and there’s all these things that I was going to launch.

Carrie:            Right.

Elizabeth:       Didn’t get launch at that time or didn’t get finished and realizing that well you know what right now I need to be a wife and a mom.  And a lot of stuff in the business went on so I didn’t go under but things had to get put aside and that’s always going to happen and the same thing with the business.  And I grew with the concentrated time, like for me, my daughter goes to pre-school two mornings a week and I want to be at home with her most of the time but I need to be able to write and do my radio show and there’s some things where I need to be intent, you know.

Carrie:            Right.

Elizabeth:       And scheduling that intense here’s my six hours week of intense time and then the rest of the time it really depends on how much work I get done depending upon what is going on.

Carrie:            Right.  Well and the truth is if everybody focus on their part-time or fulltime business with six hyper focus hours a week.

Elizabeth:       You’re probably going to get some done.

Carrie:            Oh my goodness.  Oh my goodness, you know, if you can and you know that.  Think of the day before vacation.  Think of how much you get done the day before vacation.  Think about how much you get done the day before an annual review or before, you know, a regional inspection or the day before, you know, the kids are coming home for a summer break.  You know, we fill the time allotted and we’re focus when we need to be.  The fact of the matter is when you work at home, you just tend to think you have all this time and that you’re, we bought into the line  of oh I work for myself.  I can do what I want when I want.  Well, yes you can but then you’re not going to have the results that you want.

Elizabeth:       So we’re about to go to our first break.

Carrie:            Sure.

Elizabeth:       So we’re going to the break.  After the break Carrie will still be with us.  We’ll be talking more about this stuff so stay in tune for that after the break.

BREAK

Elizabeth:       Welcome back everyone.  Again, this is Elizabeth Potts Weinstein, host of the Wealth Spa Radio Show. We have Carrie Wilkerson on with us, the Barefoot Executive and before this last break, we were talking about balance and how there really is no such thing and really specifically talking about focus time and its funny when I think about, I left my last job 5 years ago actually Halloween, 5 years ago.  And thinking about what I actually did, I was an attorney in a law firm.  I mean, I work a lot long hours but the productivity, you know, how much time we spend chatting and like all this junk.  You don’t work even the 60 hours a week I work, I really wasn’t working 60 hours, you know.

Carrie:            Right.

Elizabeth:       And now that I have less time that’s concentrated business time, I’m so much more productive during those hours because those are the hours that, you know, that’s all that I have.  I’m not chit-chatting during that time unless I get on Twitter or something.

Carrie:            Right.  Well and even then we’re also conditioned to the yes we’re going to work at the law firm and we’re going to put in the 60 hours, and we know what are guaranteed pay check is going to be whether we do 40 hours or 60 hours or regardless of what our results are.  But then you come home and then you realize, okay I can spend 6 hours working and filing papers and dusting my desk or you know on Twitter or on Facebook or whatever but then what’s your paycheck going to be?

Elizabeth:       Right.

Carrie:            You know, when you become result-based pay oriented as oppose to time-based pay oriented, we become more masters of our time.

Elizabeth:       Right.  Yeah and I found like for me one of the reasons I left practicing in the law firms because I’m very very efficient and was incredibly productive and wasn’t compensated for that.  You know, the guy in the office next to me got paid the same amount of money and I was like dude, I did ten times the productivity of you.  How was this possibly fair and equable?  And it wasn’t and they had no way to compensate for that and that’s one of the benefits of being self-employed and also the challenges.  But you can be, if you’re super productive you can get paid based on that, assuming that you’re not just billing by the hour and you know that’s a whole other issue.

Carrie:            Right.  Service-based versus result-based.

Elizabeth:       Yeah but once you switch over result-based, the more efficient you get then there is really no limit on how much money you can potentially make.

Carrie:            Right and that’s a scary leap but it’s also very empowering.  You know, this year all that, I don’t watch TV but you know all the noise about the recession and the economy and this and that and cutting back and all those things.  Honestly, Elizabeth, we’ve had our best year ever.  We’re not accepting that as our reality.  We’re saying that okay if we want to increase our income then here’s where we need to make our changes and here’s where we need to work a little differently and all those things.  We’re not becoming a victim to circumstance so when you take your income in your own hands and set your own pace scale and you know, focus really on results then you take your power back.  I mean, I hate to use one of those bumper stickers slogans but seriously, you take your power back and both of us are self-employed here from the home.  It’s not like I have a salary to fall back on with another job.  We are full-time self-employed 4 children, you know, all here working from home depending on our own income and it doesn’t have to be a scary place it can be a very empowering place.

Elizabeth:       I was at a law firm, two law firms, the second to last [19:57] that declared bankruptcy and went under.  And it was literally like on a Wednesday there was a rumor and on a Friday the partnership voted to disband.  And then the next Monday come in and office depot was coming to repossess the paper, reams of paper. 

Carrie:            Oh wow.

Elizabeth:       And they were taking the soda machine away.  I mean, it was absolute insanity and I mean, I ended up getting taking with a bunch of other attorneys’ law firm cause I was productive and did a good job but I realize that there was no security in a job.

Carrie:            Right.

Elizabeth:       And there’s no such thing is that the only security you have is in yourself.  And so people say isn’t it risky to be self-employed?  I’m like, Yeah but then now I have control instead of being indebted upon some other person or any other business.  I have to go do it myself which means that I have the power to do that.

Carrie:            Right.  Well, exactly and you know it’s difficult to be your own boss.  It’s, you know, it’s a retraining period so that you quit thinking hourly.  It’s a retraining period because you don’t have to be as accountable to somebody for your time or for your efforts.  It’s, you know, there’s usually kind of a detox period after you leave a job.  You come home and you want to hang out in your pajamas and typically, I see this happened a lot there’s the ten pounds, the elastic factors, that I call that.  All of the sudden, you’re with your refrigerator all day, everyday and you’re back and forth and back and forth.

Elizabeth:       And you don’t have to get dress so you don’t.

Carrie:            Right.  So you don’t notice the 10 pounds right away because you’re wearing elastic pajamas and ponytails and no make-up.  Anyway, there is a retraining.  There is a period where you have to discipline yourself.  Because if you are not willing to discipline yourself, someone else will be willing to discipline you for the rest of your life in the form of a job or a boss or, you know, the golden hand cuffs that tie you to your job.  But it really is a powerful thing and so people will ask me all the time, what keeps you going?  What motivates you?  Is it just about the money?  And well, I do have a responsible to support our family.  You know, my husband and I do this together.  We have a responsibility to support the family.  I am really not that money motivated.  I am not a money motivated kind of girl.  But and so this is how where we came up with the whole concept of finding your why.  When I realize that the money wasn’t enough for me to work for.  I mean, Honestly Elizabeth, if we were all that money motivated, we would all be Donald Trump.  There would be nothing that would stop us from achieving our financial goals if we were truly motivated by the dollar, wouldn’t you agree?

Elizabeth:       Oh yeah and if we were willing to compromise everything to do that.

Carrie:            Right.  Right.  And so what you have to find – you have to keep asking yourself what is your why?  And so this is something that I teach people.  Before you can succeed in business, before you can succeed in any personal goals whether its weight loss, whether it’s a relationship that you’re mending, you know, whatever it is you have to find out your why.  And for most of us, especially women, but most of us the money is not enough so you have to say to yourself why am I doing what I’m doing?  And this is where people cross their arms over their chests and they sit back and they say, well it is the money.  You wouldn’t understand my bills, you don’t understand what I’m responsible for or the pay cut that I just took or how much gas is or you know the economy that’s about to have some even more interesting turns.  I do understand that but we are not motivated by the dollar or we’d all be working multiple jobs.  We’d all be working extra businesses so for example, Elizabeth, what was the reason, let’s just role play for a minute.  Let’s talk about your why if you don’t mind.

Elizabeth:       Oh yeah.

Carrie:            That works?  Let’s talk about you were working at a law firm.  What was the main reason you came home?

Elizabeth:       Really the number 1 reason is because I was really kind of bored and angry all the time and frustrated.

Carrie:            Right.

Elizabeth:       And that was what started me looking for something else.  And I knew there had to be something else.  Something where I’d have more, I would just be able to enjoy what I was doing cause I was getting paid a lot of money.

Carrie:            Right.  Right.

Elizabeth:       And I was like but I was just really pissed all the time.  I knew there had to be something else and then as soon as I had that first idea like wow, you know, I could do this.  I’m as smart if not smarter than this people who do this kind of things.  And then that was part of it.  The other part of it, my husband is a partner in a law firm and does work insane hours and travels all over the world and is gone for weeks at a time and I thought we wanted to have children and we couldn’t both be doing that.

Carrie:            Right.

Elizabeth:       Unless we had a nanny raising our child, you know.  We need balance.

Carrie:            Right.  So you just came out with several whys.  Your first why was that you’re dissatisfied with where you were.  But even then that’s not enough to get most people to make a change because where in a nation.  We’re actually in a, it’s rampant in our society.  People are content being discontent.  It’s the American way where content being discontent.  We’re not dissatisfied enough to make a change but then you also had a why of you want to start a family and so you realize that it’s not going to work with both you doing what you’re doing.  Then you also saw some opportunities.  Now did you have a plan or did you quit and come home and then come up with a plan?

Elizabeth:       I came up with a plan while I was still working.

Carrie:            Okay and so then, then you come home, and do you have any kids now?

Elizabeth:       Yes, I have one daughter.

Carrie:            Okay so then you come home and you start your plan and all of the sudden you have freedom and not a boss and now you’re not angry and upset all the time and so but what keeps you going?  Yes, you’re at home but what’s so great about that?  That’s the question I tell people to answer themselves over and over.  So tell me what’s so great about that?

Elizabeth:       So now, it actually has very much change.  It has fundamentally changed my business.  From the beginning, it was still seeing clients.  I was still trading the hours for dollars.  And I had my daughter in day care and the whole like part of the time because I needed to have that face time with clients.  And I changed my business.  Part of it was I so much enjoyed spending much time with her and I wanted to be able to set up a business where I could be with her and you and I enjoy doing that, it’s the most fun I’ve ever had.  But also for my business side I saw, it’s more about changing people’s lives and the kind of mission of my business.

Carrie:            Right.

Elizabeth:       And of course, making money is wonderful but that’s definitely not the number one reason.

Carrie:            Well and I’m glad that you brought that up and I usually used myself as an example for that, you’re why does evolve.  It doesn’t evolve immediately but you’re why evolves so let’s talk about when I came home from teaching.  We were in a significant amount of debt.  We had overcome over a $100,000 worth of debt.  I was very overweight.  I became more overweight when I initially stayed home.  I gained a lot of weight.  I’ve now lost over 100 pounds.  You know I had a lot of obstacles and I had a lot of reasons why not to do what I was doing but we chose to do it anyway.  So my why initially was these two little people in my home, not the money but being a teacher at the end of the summer, my pay check was going to run out because you know with a year long contract, you still have a little residual income.  So I needed to kick it into gear, I needed income but I also was not willing to leave my children.  So they were my primary why.  So I wanted to be home with them.  Well, what’s so great about that? Well, in my situation my two kids had a lot of special needs.  The primary one being nurtured and loved but my oldest son has also have some needs that were based on choices of his birth mother while he was in utero and so we had a lot of that going on too.

So what’s so great about that?  Well, I’m the primary care giver, I make sure they’re in their appointments, they’re loved, they’re taken care of and I can handle that even when my husband is traveling.  That was my why, that was my driving then they got a little older and then we did pre-school part day pre-school because of their needs and because of their needing to catch up on some of their academia and development and those kinds of things.  We had day pre-school so then I had half the day free but then also we still had the money issues, etc.  So then my why for a brief time became money but it wasn’t enough.  And I look at that time period, Elizabeth, and it’s powerful to me that I see that I see how we got further in debt even while I was working harder than I had been working before because my why was not clear enough.  It was not focused enough so then I said okay my why needs to be to get us out of debt.   Well, what’s so great about that?  Well we would like to have the freedom to not have to make choices on medical care based on money, not to have to make choices on therapy based on money, not to have to worry about, you know, to offer my husband the opportunity to come home from his job.  Well, what’s so great about that?  And that’s how you drill down.  What’s so great about that?  That he was traveling all the time, he was missing so much of their childhood and we wanted him to be able to experience it.  So that being said I was so much more motivated by thinking of us raising our kids together at home fulltime than I was about paying off the credit cards.

Elizabeth:       The thing is, yeah, the paying off the credit card isn’t – getting out of debt is never the real goal.  It’s what do you get by the money or getting out of debt or whatever.  We’re actually almost ready to go to our next break. I wanted to give you the chance to share the website that people can go to, to find out more about this stuff.

Carrie:            Okay, I did a live presentation on finding your why to a women luncheon in Greensburg, North Carolina which was kind of the first time we had really talked about it a lot.  The feedback was so great that now I make it downloadable online.  And you can sign that at www.the-barefoot-executive.com.  It’s a free download, the-barefoot-executive.com.  It’s an audio and a written transcript.

Elizabeth:       Great, so if people want more about this they can go to that.  I’ll share that link one more time.  Thank you for being on this talk so much today, Carrie.

Carrie:            You’re so welcome.

Elizabeth:       Great.  So we’re going to our next break.  After the break I’ll answer the question for the week.  So stay in tune.

BREAK

Elizabeth:       Welcome back everyone.  Again, this is Elizabeth Potts Weinstein your host for the Wealth Spa Radio Show.  And we had Carrie on, Carrie Wilkerson, the Barefoot Executive.  If you want to have any or more information from her, especially, we were talking about the end of the call about finding your why for your business.  You can get that free audio and transcript of her presentation about finding your why and here’s the URL, it’s the, T-H-E – barefoot-executive.com, so the-barefoot-executive.com.  And again that URL will be up on thewealthspa.com once this show goes up whether this afternoon or tomorrow morning.  You can also go there if you missed out on that.

Okay so let’s get in to the question for this week.  And it came up because this week I am in Los Angeles at a conference, the Online Success Blueprint Workshop by Alexandria Brown.  An amazing conference, it’s going to have almost 500 people there.  So it’s huge, huge conference for usually I go to things that are a little bit smaller than that.  It’s you know, it’s very easy to get overwhelmed and if you go to conference, you go to seminar whether it’s something that 20 people are at or 20,000, there’s 3 areas that we tend to get overwhelmed.  You know first, the information.  You’re learning tons of information.  You’re presented with tons of ideas that you may want to implement in your business or even in your life.  How do you, it makes you implement some of those so how do you not get overwhelmed?  Second, is with the people.  So, you know, we all go to these conferences, one of the reasons is to network, is to meet new people.  How do you manage that?  How do you meet the right people?  How do you follow-up?  How do you make sure that you don’t lose all those business cards, right?  And third, is the stuff and here I’m talking about the physical stuff, all the junk that you get when go to a trade show, buying information products of the things that you may pick up, physical things.  So how do you deal with all that stuff?  So I wanted to go through the strategies that I use when I go to a conference or a seminar.  And you may be able to get some great ideas for what you can do the next time that you go.

So first let’s talk about ideas and information.  So every time I go to a conference, you know, I always have tons of ideas for my business and I’m not just talking about the stuff that you learn.  I’m talking about the next step.  So you know, you’re sitting there at the conference and they’re coming up with a presentation or they have a panel or whatever.  You can of course take notes about the information that they’re providing and that’s a good thing to do especially for those of you who are kind of visual and it may help to remember, to learn that information.  But a lot of you, like me, may get ideas from what people are talking about.  You get an idea, something you want to implement.  Oh that would be a great article that I could write or that’s a great product that I could develop.  Sometimes it’s not even what they’re talking about.  It’s like it puts things together in your head.  Oh it’s something that I should about my website or I need to tell my assistant to do this or all those ideas that you get at a conference.  You want to make sure that you capture all that stuff.

Now, I’ve done a lot of different things over the years, sometimes, I would take notes on the margin of the hand-outs and sometimes I would take loose sheets of paper or use a paper that you get at a conference.  Here’s what I do now, what I do now is I actually have a journal that I keep.   And it’s not like a diary kind of journal, even though I write all kinds of stuff in it.  The idea of this journal is that whenever I take notes from something, notes from a telephone call, notes, ideas, whatever, all goes in one journal bound hard cover journal, mainly so that I don’t lose anything.  So I don’t have all these random pieces of paper.  So when I go to a conference and I bring my journal and sit there with it.  And I write down all these ideas, all in one place.  It’s a different place than like the notes that I take about a presentation.  If someone is having a presentation, let’s say it’s a legal conference.  It’s about this area of internet law.  Well, I’m not talking about where I’m going, this isn’t where I’m going to necessarily write down, you know, taking notes about this new case that just came out and about that case.  In my journal I’m going to write down, here’s the title of the article that I’m going to write about this case and how it will be applicable to my audience cause you know, my audience are not lawyers who view my websites.  So it’s going to be taking another leap that I’m going to write down or maybe I’m listening to that talk about this internet law and it gives me an idea for a product that I could sell.  So I write those ideas down on my journal.

Here’s the secret.  You’ve got to take another step.  You can’t just write down all these ideas, typically, I’m a crazy entrepreneur, I would leave the conference with like 50 ideas or 100 ideas for my business, I mean it’s insane.  What end up happening in the past would be those would get stuck in a file folder and I wouldn’t use them.  I might implement some of it coz’ some of it you just remember but tons of those ideas would never happened, part of it because there’s just so many, right?  You may walk away with 100 ideas from an amazing conference.  You’re not going to implement them all on the first day, it’s impossible.  You get back to your office and you’ve got tons of work to do.  What I recommend is, the evening of the last day of the conference or on your plane ride home or in the airport, you sit down and get some quiet time, look through that journal.  I love to this in the airport or either on the plane.  You look through your journal of all your ideas and you prioritize and you say who they’ll be delegated to.

Cause it maybe some of those ideas you could literally write one e-mail to your virtual assistant or to a member of your staff or to your webmaster or whatever and send them 5 of those ideas to implement this afternoon.  Or there’s a couple of ideas that would be very fast for you to implement or are the most high priority things that would make you the most money.  So I sit down with all those ideas and I prioritize them.  And I also say who they can be delegated.  Actually, what I do is, I put a little VA with a circle around it and who it’s going to be delegated to.  And then I also, for mine, I put a little dollar sign against which ideas are going to make me money.  And if something is going to make me a lot of money, I put 3 dollar signs next to it.  That way, later on, when I’m trying to get ideas about something about my business, I can easily go back to that page and say okay I want to make more money today.  So I can look through all my ideas on my journal and look for the dollar sign and see where some money making ideas.

I occasionally will also put a little code for things that are just article ideas cause I write a lot of articles.  I have a radio show, I’m generating a gosh awful amount of content and so I always need ideas for the show, ideas for the articles.  So sometimes I put a little code next to things that are ideas.  So I categorize things.  The important thing is you need to this as soon as the conference is over.  It may literally be in the lobby or your hotel room at night.  I typically do it either at the airport or on the plane.  Being on the plane is a great place to think cause it’s nice and quiet unless you’re with your kid or something which I’m traveling who’s 3 ½ it’s not an easy quiet place when I’m by myself.  Then it’s something that I can do.

All right that’s the first idea.  Second is people.  It’s easy to get overwhelmed.  Now, when you’re going to a conference, I suggest that you have specific rules about the kinds of people that you want to meet or what you want them to do for.  So when you’re going to a conference saying okay, maybe, don’t just say I want to get clients or something cause that’s, of course you want to get clients.  But maybe you want to me, for example for me, I might want to meet 3 people I want to do a joint venture with or I want to meet 5 people who will be great guests for the radio show or you may want to have specific people you want to meet.  For example, at a conference that I’m going to this week, Marie Smith, who has been a guest on the radio show, I know she’s going to be there speaking.  And I haven’t met her yet in person.  I’m like, yes, I would definitely want to meet her in person.  So she’s on my list of people to speak to at the conference.  Have a list and write it down so you make sure that you get those goals met. 

Then when you have a stack of business cards, as people are handing you cards and you’re having conversations with them, write on the card.  It may be writing, sometimes I write yellow shirt coz’ it helps me remember who that person is or I’ll write the city they came from or you know has 3 kids or something to remind me of who that person is coz’ I get easily get overwhelmed about the number of people I meet and I kind remember who was who.  Then as soon as you get home, sit down with those business cards and write a really short e-mail and it can be literally be a sentence.  It doesn’t need to be anything [42:24] just it was great to meet you at that conference and I look forward to connecting with you.

Okay, the idea being that you started the dialogue.  So it’s not going to get lost and their e-mail is somewhere in your address book in your computer.  The idea being that you started that conversation cause it’s so often that we don’t follow-up at all.  And following-up doesn’t need to be a big deal even just sending one short e-mail especially when you have 50 people that you have a follow-up with.  Send a short e-mail to start that conversation and then take the stack of business cards and hand them to your virtual assistant or a member of your staff to input them to you know, your address book or contact files or whatever.  Don’t automatically subscribe them to eZine unless they said that it was okay or would say affirmatively wanted to be on that.  But get them in your, however you keep track of all your contacts.

Third is the stuff.  This something that I tend to do at conferences that I get too much stuff and this goes back to your plans for a conference.  When you’re going to go to a conference have a goal for the information you want to walk out with or the things.  Cause it’s very easy to get all this junk that you don’t need and you’re burdened taking it home or buy a whole bunch of programs and information products and all kinds of stuff that was beyond your budget and really isn’t strategic to the goals you have for your business.  And so set before you go to a conference and say I’m not going to spend more than $500 in this conference or you’re only going to buy stuff related to this specific problem that you’re having in your business or you’re only going to take stuff home that’s specifically related to something.

Now we’re about ready to go to our next break.  After the next break I’m going to wrap this question up real quick and then we’ll then be talking about the Entrepreneur’s Success Tip for the Week.  So stay in tune for all that after the break.    

BREAK

Elizabeth:       Welcome back everyone.  It’s Elizabeth Potts Weinstein, host of the Wealth Spa Radio Show.  Right before the break, we were talking about conferences and avoiding getting overwhelmed.  And I was specifically talking about all of this stuff.  It’s like going to a trade show?  You can get all this little knickknacky things and all this special stuff.  While you’re there before you stick it all in your luggage, look at the stuff when you’re sitting in your room.  And think about do I really need to take this home with me?  Just because someone gave you something for free doesn’t mean that you have to take it, that you have to keep it.  It maybe that some of stuff are some of the things that you’re going to review when you post about them in your blog.

Some of them may be things that you’re going to take home and give to a specific person or things that you are really going to use.  So it may be information that you want to follow-up on.  But you don’t have to take it all with you.  It’s a great idea to leave that out while you’re still sitting at your hotel room than to take it all home and put it on a pile on the box.  Cause what will happen is then the really great stuff winds up getting lost.  I’ve open up boxes and some stuff from conference that was, you know, a year and a half before that I should have follow-up on.  And would have been a great thing to do or have or use but because it was mixed in with a 100 junky things or things that weren’t applicable.  It never got applied and never got used or utilized.  So the real theme of all this is right after the conference is over, before you come home is when this needs to start.  To prevent overwhelm, you need to prioritize, pick what’s the most important things, doing the follow-ups, taking the notes as early as possible while it’s still in your head.  So when you get home, all you have to do is go ahead and implement the most strategic things for your business or follow-up the most strategic people who are important for your business and yourself.  All right that’s the question for the week.

Next, I want to do the Entrepreneur’s Success Tip for the Week.  This week’s tip is about listening to intuition in your business.  You know, as  a lawyer and a financial adviser I talk a lot about, personally, I talk a lot about, you know, taking action, specific things that you can do in your business and looking at the numbers and business plans and all that stuff.  But we also have a lot of guests in the show who talk a lot about intuition, law of attraction, universal principles and all of these and one of the big issues is balancing both sides.  For those of you, who approach things from that analytical goal-oriented side of things which is a lot of ways my learn default position that I have had growing up and as an adult.  You may start losing touch with your intuition and here’s where it tends to happen, this is where it has happened for me.  A lot of times, other people will have ideas for my business.  So for example, back when I originally started 5 years ago, my husband said you should do estate planning cause at that time I was doing personal financial planning.  And he’s like, you know, you’re a lawyer, doing an estate plan is really easy and actually a straight-forward estate plan is pretty easy.  It’s like you could easily use your practice, you know, you can make another 1000 or a couple thousand dollars a person or a couple on your estate planning or something simply thing that you have to do yadi yadi yada all these logical reasons.

But I’ll tell you, I did not want to do estate plans but I was like, well you know maybe I should.  Anytime you say I should to yourself is always like a big sign that it’s not your intuition.  I was like well maybe I should and so I did.   Also I added estate planning and I got the entrance that you need, and I’ve got the software that you need and all that stuff.  I did estate plans and I did a fine job with people’s estate plans but I hated doing these estate plans, it was boring, I didn’t like talking to people about death.  It was really actually, for the kinds of people that I did, they were very simple.  And I don’t like things that are simple.  I like things that are complicated.  Simplicity is kind of not kind of fun for me.  So I found that I didn’t like doing it and because I didn’t like doing it, it ended up not being very successful.

Now, it made money in the sense of the gross income of estate planning was, you know, thousands of dollars but when you add in all the cost, put the cost and me dealing with it and the time as well as the overhead, I actually didn’t make money on the estate planning stuff.  Now if I had loved it, I probably would have.  I probably would have found a way to make money out of it because it came from someone else, it wasn’t really resonating with what I like to do.  I didn’t really enjoy selling it.  It didn’t succeed.  And it has happened to other things in my business.  You know, people would say you should do some consulting work.  And so, I’d be like, well it would be a way to make money quickly and you know, I threw up some sells pay and sent a bunch of e-mails and blah blah and it’s totally unsuccessful.  Why not?  Coz’ I didn’t want to do it, right?  Even though intellectually, it’s a great idea and on paper it seems a great idea.  It wasn’t something that I resonated with.  When you don’t resonate with something, it makes it hard to sell and people will not want to buy from you.  So if there’s areas in your business where you’re having problems, if there’s things that where you’re, you know, not very successful in a certain area, I want you to think about, you know, should, is this something that I should do? Or someone else told me that I should do?  Or is this something that I actually personally want to do?  Is this something that I personally resonate with?

There’s a wonderful quote that says “if it’s not hell yes, then it’s hell no.”  If there’s something in your life or in your business cause we were talking about business.  And you decided to create a new product, you started to offer a new service line, you decided to put up a new website and you’re not looking at it going oh my god, this is wonderful.  I’m so excited about this.  This totally resonates with who I am and my mission and my purpose in life and blah blah blah.  But if you’re kind of just like, uh okay, I guess, you know, this is okay.  This is pretty good, it can potentially make a lot of money and my coach thinks it’s a great idea and my spouse and these other people.  You know what?  If you really look at yourself to think whether it’s right for you and if you look into the idea that intellectually looks good and it looks good in paper and it makes you feel drained and it makes you feel down.  And it kind of gives you this over-all yucky and depressed kind of feeling then letting that go, you can go to something else you resonate will be the best decision that you can do.  And I found that, when started letting go of all of that stuff that’s when not only did I start enjoying my business a lot more but that’s when I started having a lot more of success and things become more easy and fun.  So that’s the tip for the week.  You know, listen to yourself, listen to your own intuition in your business and stop doing what other people think you “should” or even what you think you “should” do.

All right, again I want to give you a little wrap up.  Again as I talk about the top of the hour, next week we are moving stations.  We are moving to Blog Talk Radio.  If you don’t know what that is, that’s fine.  Just go to thewealthspa.com, sign up to get the show delivered to you automatically, by e-mail, RSS Feed or via iTunes or if you go to thewealthspa.com we would have information about how you can listen to it on Blog Talk Radio.  So you don’t have to stress about getting about getting to the right URL or anything just go to the wealthspa.com and that will tell you what to do.

Now, we’re also changing the day of the show so now we’re on Wednesdays 11:00am Pacific, we’re moving to Thursdays at 11:00am Pacific just coz’ it matches better with my schedule and I don’t have to pre-record as much.  The show will be live most of the time if not all the time so you can call in with questions.  The neat thing about Blog Talk Radio is that there’s a chat feature if you don’t want to call in, you can always actually send me little messages right there and ask questions to be answered on the show.  Of course if you have any other questions you would like answered on the show, you can always go to thewealthspa.com and there’s a little link at the top that says be on the show.  If you would make a great guest expert that’s where you can go to find out how to be a guest expert or if you have a question you want me to answer about law or finance or marketing success or any of that stuffs that’s where you ask that question.  All right, thank you so much for listening and of course, go to thewealthspa.com with any more information about the show and I look forward to speaking with you all next week.  Bye.

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