Stress impacts my income, my partnerships, world events, world disasters, war, chronic illness, divorce, death. Like it's asinine to me that we don't consider these things when we're comparing our businesses. And we just look at like, Oh, last year I made 60, 000. And this year I made 62, 000. Like, I don't know, I guess that's good, but it's not that great. I should have made a hundred thousand. And what merry go round are we on? Where we created all these like false narratives of what it means to be successful. What's good everybody? Welcome back to my non expert opinion. I'm your host Chelsea Riffe. Okay, so we're gonna start out with a game. Five fingers up. Put a finger down if you thought you were bad at business because you didn't hit your sales goals with the launch. Put a finger down if you measured a year of your success only by the sales that you saw in your payment processor like Stripe. Put a finger down if you thought that you should close down your business because your income dipped for a few months. Put a finger down if you almost went into a tailspin because you didn't beat your year before sales goals. And lastly, put a finger down if every time you get on social media and you see how someone had another 10K, 20K, 50K launch, you were like, I suck at this. I'm so bad at my job. Like, I need to get out of entrepreneurship. Okay, well, I'm out and I'm here to tell you I've been through all of those things. I've been in business for just a little over three years now, but something I had to learn quickly was how to find success without sales or numbers. And today that's what I'm sharing with you. Okay. So this whole pivoting in public series is about facing the obstacles that happen when you decide to make a change in your business. I started my business in 2020 as a yoga teacher. I literally had a company and brand called yoga girl next door. I had incredible branding by the way, like The logo was insane. I was putting so much effort into it. I hired a brand designer. I was calling PR teams to help me get in like wellness magazines. I had a yoga Facebook group. I was teaching private clients. I was teaching Zooms. Like that was going to be my thing. After probably three months, I was like, This is not my thing. I can't teach yoga at this level. I just don't think it's my long term passion. Like, I love teaching and I love yoga, but long term, I just knew I'm not gonna be like the Melissa Wood Health of yoga. Like, that's just not happening. I'm not gonna do that. So I decided to pivot. I used all the tools that I collected from yoga trainings to offer mindset coaching. Then I did that for probably like a year and a half and I loved it. And then I was like, Oh, this is feeling a bit heavy and dense and I don't know that I want to do this anymore. So then I switched to podcast coaching and consulting. That's really what I've been doing since the middle of 2021. And that brought me so much fulfillment, so much financial success. And I was like, I don't think I want to do this for the rest of my life. I love doing it, not going to do it for the rest of my life. So if you felt that before where you're like, I love this, but I don't want to do it for the rest of my life, then you're probably someone that's going to go through a pivot. And a pivot basically means you're switching directions, right? You're probably not going to offer the same things you are anymore. You're going to do things differently. You might have different followers or listeners or like a target customer. You might completely switch industries. Like to me, that's what a pivot is, is You were walking one way and now you're walking the other way. So when you go through a pivot, it's obviously very scary because you're like, um, I'm going to lose everything I've built. And like, what's the point? What would be the point of me pivoting if I'm going to lose all my financial success and all my listeners and all my followers and all my customers? Like this is scary and it sends us into a state of panic, especially if what you're doing is your full time thing. You're like, I can't lose my full time income because I want to like change industries or try a new course. Sometimes you just don't have that financial flexibility. So pivoting feels truly like nervous, system wracking, terrifying because you're like, I'm leaving people behind. I'm changing directions. Like I'm starting a new path and inevitably, you know, you go down a different ski trail. Not everyone wants to come with you. You might be going blue square. Some people are going black diamond, vice versa. Like that's, that's just how life works. Everyone is multi hyphenate, multi passionate. It has like 10 things going for them. I think that's very normal. I think that's innovative and up for debate. It's also something a lot of people have to do to make ends meet to live. If you're going through this pivot and you're like, my financial success is going to get fucked up after I do this, you need to train yourself to find other ways to find success out of numbers. I was really inspired by Jason from Basecamp. He's the CEO. I don't know if he's anymore. Actually, I heard they had some drama, but point is, I heard him on a podcast a very long time ago and he was talking about how he built his company. And I remember he just kept saying things that were so like non CEO visionary that really stuck with me. For example, he said, if my company gets like within 1 percent of revenue from the year before, like let's say we made, I'm making this up right, a million dollars and the next year we made like 999, 999, like whatever, he's like, that would be a stupid thing to be mad about. Do you know how many factors have to be consistent for you to repeat your income if not beat it? I There are so many things that go into your lifestyle that can affect your business. By the way, I'm talking about a guy that has a full on company, right? Basecamp is not a small company. Basecamp, by the way, is like a project management software. So, I'm talking about a software with teams, people, resources, etc. I imagine a lot of people listening to this podcast right now are more like small to mid tier business owners that maybe have a really lean team or don't have like multi millions of dollars to just pivot and not feel the financial consequences of that. Because sometimes there are. Not always, but sometimes, and something that was really clear to me was, especially with my traveling, was like, my lifestyle directly impacts my income, my stress impacts my income, my partnerships, I have a different energy and mental capacity of when I'm single versus when I'm dating versus when I'm in a serious relationship, that can affect my income, let's not forget world events, world disasters, war, chronic illness, Divorce. Death. Like, it's asinine to me that we don't consider these things when we're comparing our businesses and we just look at like, Oh, last year I made 60, 000 and this year I made 62, 000. Like I don't know, I guess that's good, but it's not that great. I should have made 100, 000 and if I'm not making 100, 000, I'm not good at business because that's the golden number. I'm like, what merry go round are we on where we created all these like false narratives of what it means to be successful? So that's what I want to talk about today are ways to find success that have nothing to do with numbers. Number one, not having refunds or your refund number is really low. This is a huge success. I had one refund in 2023 and it was accidental because we double charged her for something and I was like, obviously we need to refund her. That was the only refund when I go on my Stripe account and I can see my refunds are zero dollars and zero percent. I am so happy. Like to me, that's almost the same thing as having like a 10, 000 sale. It means my customer service is amazing. It means what I'm doing is incredible. The value of my work is incredible. It means people are happy with what they paid for. And I will add, I do have a no refund policy on all my packages and all my courses because of the nature of them. But to be honest, if someone messaged me and truly was like, I did not get any value out of this. I tried. I read it. I, I literally watched every video. I implemented it. Like this was not good. I did not get a single sliver of value before I even offered a refund. I would get on the phone with them and be like, let's talk about it. Like, I would love your feedback. Was it the pace of the course? Was The material, was it overwhelming? Was it underwhelming? Like, tell me because I would love to fix it. And I'm, I do that for people. And this is why I feel like I don't have a lot of refunds or like negative feedback because I'm happy to be the customer service person and be like, let's work on this. Like, tell me what you need. I'll build it. I'll fix it. I'll tweak it. And then hopefully get the value needed out of it. I feel fortunate to be in a position right now where that hasn't happened yet. I'm, I'm sure, you know, that's the nature of business. Like that will happen at some point or another. But as of right now, that has not happened. And if you're in a position now where you've never had to offer a refund or people haven't asked you for one, start clapping, start celebrating yourself. That's major. Like that is so, so major that speaks to the value of your work. And you need to put more weight into that. Number two, retaining clients. Client retention is so much easier than finding new clients. When you have people that already bought from you, know your style, know what you do, appreciate the value of your work, are very invested in your style or whatever you're teaching. It is so much easier to sell them another product that would fit their needs versus going out into the wild and being like, Okay, let's start from square one. Someone that's completely unaware of this. I have to market them through all the stages of awareness and get them to buy my product versus someone that's already like very aware and already a customer and selling. So if your client retention rate is high, more rounds of applause. We're going to do rounds of applause this whole time because that is such an underrated skill and it speaks volumes to your work if someone decides to invest more of their hard earned dollars into what you do. So if you have any repeat clients, you need to be doing a backflip right now off of your table because that is a massive win. Repeat clients, by the way, are also an amazing way to like conserve your energy. I didn't do a lot of live launches in 2023 because I had so much travel and I didn't have the capacity to. I had so many clients on retainers and repeat clients that were investing that I didn't have to go out and market to them. They already knew what I did. And a lot of clients, I sign them by simply emailing them and saying, Hey, we worked together six months ago. Just wanted to check in. How are you? Happy to do like a VIP day or a consult. Boom, booked it. That's how I booked two VIP days. A lot of you don't probably don't even know I do VIP days because I don't talk about them. They're not on my website. And this is exactly what I mean. I have relationships with people that I've worked with before that I can tell might need one on one help that I can just email them as a repeat client and say, Hey, let's do this. And boom, they're on the books. I wouldn't have to do a whole live launch to bring in new income. So in 2023, one of my biggest clients re signed and a lot of people bought more than one offer for me. And that is a. Massive success, especially considering my travel lifestyle. I traveled to like 15 cities, like maybe 10 countries, constantly on the go. There were months where I was really burned out. I took October basically off and I still had my biggest client re signed. So if you're in that position and you're getting repeat retaining clients, you see their name popping up every month on a subscription, you see like the lifetime value of what they are in your strip account. Snaps. Start snapping. Okay, number three, your schedule. Can we talk about how a lot of us get out of a nine to five job to be able to coordinate our own schedule? And then we get there and then we don't celebrate because we're like, Oh, I haven't made a hundred thousand dollars. I've had a 10, 000 a month. I don't have a team yet. But hold on. Wait, wait, wait, wait. Yeah. You may not have all those things, but you're telling me you take Mondays off and you don't start work until noon and you take a two hour lunch break and go to yoga. And you end the day early and get to have dinner with your family or partner or cat, like, that is success. That is what most people that want to make more money and go freelance are trying to do. They're trying to create their own schedule and not be bound to someone else's timeline. To me, this is like the mecca of entrepreneurship. If you can create your own schedule and decide what times you want to work, when, for who, for how much energy, like, This is the dream. If you've gotten to any place where you can map out your availability on Calendly and get to choose when you want to work, Again, pop the champagne. I need to hear corks popping. This is so, so major and again, a lot of us are breaking out of the constructs of a 40 hour work week or sometimes longer. So the fact that you get to choose your schedule, even if it's as small as like, I only do client calls on Wednesdays. Right? You might have a full time job, so you might not get to choose and pick your hours, but if you're like, Yeah, I offer tarot readings, and I choose that I only do them on Wednesdays because that's my easiest day. Congrats! Like, you are choosing how to spend your time and who you want to work with, and that needs to be celebrated. Speaking of time, number four, the way you spend time. The way you spend your time offline is a huge success and a reflection of how you manage your time and live out your values. I did an episode in 2023 literally called How to Manage Your Time and Live Out Your Values. Because I don't think a lot of us know what to do with free time when we get it, and that's what we're chasing when we want more money. We're like, oh, when I become a millionaire, I'll take a week off and go vacation in Greece and bring my family. When I make 100, 000, I'll finally stop working on Mondays and use that time to do pottery. Constantly, we are chasing this free time, and then when it comes, we're like, Oh, but I need to fill it up. I need to use Monday. No, no, no. I'm not doing pottery class Mondays. I'm going to batch record. I'm going to get ahead of my content. I'm going to use that time to plan a new offer or that week I have off now. Nope. I'm not going to go to Greece. I'm just going to fill it up with busy work and get ahead on tasks and finally delete all those screenshots from my desktop and clear my email inbox like that's going to be my time. We have lost the plot. Okay, if you are not using your free time to do the things you love with people you love, to me, what is the point of all this? What is the point of working for yourself? What's the point of choosing your own calendar and your own system and your own clients if you don't also get to choose how you want to spend your free time? So if you're in a position right now where you have free time and you get to spend it with friends, family, pets, volunteering, giving back, learning new skills that you don't have to monetize, This is a massive, massive win. You can track this stuff. Again, I've done episodes on this of like how to actually track your time to see if you're living with your values. Because if you're someone that's saying, I want to be more artistic, or I want to be more generous and give back to my community, and then you have a free Monday off, and you're using it to just be on your computer, I would argue that's not really living out your values. Now, of course there's nuance here, right? I'm not speaking to every single person's specific experience. I understand Monday you might need to get ahead because that's when you have a burst of energy and you have chronic illness and that's when you need to batch or you need to survive, right? You need to pay rent. You have bills coming up and you're like, I just need to use that time to get ahead. That's not who I'm talking to right now. I'm talking to people that have all their basic needs met. They have their schedule set up. They get the Mondays and Fridays off. And then they're just filling it up with busy work. If you've gotten to a place where you have filled your time with leisure, fun, joyful, exciting things, that's a success. To me, that's like one of the ultimate pillars of success is choosing how you spend your free time. Number five, figuring out your business model. More claps. If you've figured out your business model and what works for you. This is truly one of the things most business owners struggle with is I don't know if I should have a membership and one on one or I don't know if I should do like audio courses and subscriptions or Should I only do one on one and get rid of my high ticket mastermind? Like we are spinning our wheels all day trying to figure out our offer suite What leads to what? Who's taking what? What tiers are people in? It's a constant experiment. I think that's kind of the fun of entrepreneurship is you get to be risky and you were very like motivated by new challenging things and novelty and urgency and excitement. So even if you have your business model figured out, I'm sure you're like. Oh, but I kind of want to try this like weekend bootcamp or this one day intensive and like see what happens. So I don't know that you ever have like this steady one, one and done business model. But if you got into a position in your business where you're like, yes, I know what my business model is. Like I know where my income comes from. I can predict it. I can look six months ahead. I can look even three months ahead and see that I'm going to make this amount of money because I know my business model. That is a success. That is a success. Say it with me. That is a success, okay? I get so excited when things finally click for business owners and they're like, oh my god, I think I like, I got it. Like, I just opened the floodgates. I understand this product leads to this, which will then bring in a high ticket client. And if I just keep repeating that over and over again, it's a well oiled machine. Now I have consistent revenue. Now I can put all my bills on auto pay. Now I can like buy the extra Christmas gift because I can figure out my finances ahead of time because I figured out my business model. So what I mean too is like, have you figured out if monthly recurring revenue is best for you or a membership where people actually have to commit to a year long program with you? Or you figured out you can take on three one on one clients at a time, and that's it, and then you renew them every quarter, like, those are business models, right? So once you figure that out, not only are you able to predict your income and figure out what works for you, you actually get to relax your nervous system. A relaxed nervous system is imperative in entrepreneurship. How many entrepreneurs do you know that have burned out, closed down their businesses, Completely ghosted because they're like, I literally was on the verge of a mental breakdown because their nervous system wasn't regulated. When you have your business model figured out and you know what works and what doesn't, you get to relax. I was able to go into 2024 and see that I already had like 20, 000 in contracts coming in and I'm like, This is fucking crazy. Like I think my first year of business I made like not even close to that I mean, I started my business in the middle of the year. So technically it was like a six month year, but that's what I mean I'm like wait the fact that I went from Not even knowing where my next like stripe payment was coming from to being able to predict all the way out until Q1 My baseline of what's happening in 2024 was like the ultimate baller move. I was like, I can't believe I've gotten in this place. And I feel like I'm just getting started at figuring that out. I want to get to a place where I can predict my whole year's income. Where I can have like a baseline of being like, Oh, my baseline is 100, 000 and anything else on top is extra. So this completely relaxed my nervous system. I didn't have to do this like big huge launch at the end of the year to produce some type of like cash injection or calm me down. And I was smart with my money because remember one of my year in review episodes I became financially baller that I was able to actually like pay rent ahead of time, get ahead of bills, pay people up front earlier, which also meant that I could take a break going into 2024. My VA and I actually planned out my Amplify mastermind, which is coming by the way, and we were pushing it. We were like, let's get this all done before winter break. The checkout, the early bird pricing, like let's set up the car, everything. Like we had a two hour meeting. And then the next day I felt so overwhelmed and I got a tarot card reading and I was like, this isn't it. Like, this is not the time. Why would we push ourselves right before break? Right before I went to Denmark, like. It doesn't make sense. Like, let's just push it out. And the reason I was able to be so calm about that decision and make it pretty quickly was because my nervous system was relaxed because I had figured out my business model and I had that recurring revenue going into 2024. So this is why I'm really like harping on this point is when you figure out your business model and you get that flywheel of income coming in, that is one of the biggest pieces of success of entrepreneurship. Number six, being consistent, and I mean being consistent at anything. Consistent does not mean weekly, by the way. I think there's a very big myth that like consistent means you're posting once a week or more. I think that's just what we got used to with everyone posting that much, but that doesn't mean you have to post weekly. Your newsletter could be once a month. I know people that have bi annual offers, okay? Bi annual means every other year. Okay, but they're going to be consistent, they're going to do it every other year. I know that's not that common, but I think it's important to point that out. I also know people that do three episodes a week. I know people that post on Substack like every day, like there are so, there are so many ways to be consistent, but what my point is, whatever model you pick that you are sticking to it. So for example, my newsletter, I couldn't keep up with it because I was also launching my podcast on a weekly basis. I had all these very high touch, high level clients and I started my Substack. So I was like, you know what? I'm just going to do a monthly newsletter. And I'm going to be consistent at it. I'm not going to just stop doing it, but I think it needs to be monthly. I know everyone says do weekly. I, I understand that. Like I actually do think email is incredible, but I just couldn't commit to it knowing that I wanted to put more resources and time into the podcast and my sub stack. So I committed to being consistent with those. My podcast has been weekly now for months and months and months after it took a nosedive in early 2023, if you remember that, because of my laptop issue. But once I got things back in order, I was like, we are doing a weekly podcast. So it's been weekly. My subsec I've posted every Wednesday on time. I've delivered all the extra deliverables that come with a paid tier. And I feel so good about myself for following that schedule. Now if you're someone who's listening to this and you're like, I can't even like keep my podcast going each week. I want to remind you we are probably in very different life stages, have different access to resources, different priorities, different energy levels. Like you can never make an apples to apples comparison with someone. I used to do this all the time where I was like, I would make apples to apples comparisons based on time in the industry alone. I would be like, oh, well, she started her podcast the same time as me. So that means we're the same. What planet would that be the same? Like, who knows what access to resources she has? Like, who knows if her parents are paying her rent, or if she saved 100, 000, or she has an incredible job on the side that we don't even know about, or she has, like, a secret subscription. Like, we have no idea. We have no idea how people make their money or what they do. We can't make assumptions about their success without knowing all the bells and whistles that go into it. So, again, if you're listening to this and you're like, but I don't do a weekly podcast, That's fine. Do a bi weekly podcast. Do a monthly podcast. Do a bi monthly podcast. The point is that you're consistent with it. Now, I think you can also slow down and be consistent. If you're biting off more than you can chew right now, but you still want to produce something, it's okay to scale back and then you just be consistent with that new model. In the spirit of pivoting in public and being honest, I've thought about reducing what's in the paid tier of my substack, specifically like the audio readings of every post. I was like, do we really need audio readings of every post, or can we just have like exclusive podcast episodes? And I'm still trying to decide and I'm collecting data right now, but that was something that I was like, I don't know that we necessarily need that. Does that mean I need to shut down my substack and feel like shit about myself and feel so much shame that like, wow, I couldn't keep up? No, because I'm still very consistent with it and I love doing it. I also think transparency always wins, like, if you're being honest with your listeners or your readers or whoever it is of, hey, I bit off a little more than I can chew, and I'm not gonna deliver like, shit quality, you know, back of the nap, just recorded last night and aired it this morning energy, like, I don't wanna live in that energy anymore. So for me specifically, Being scrappy worked for a very long time, but that doesn't always mean the quality was good. So going into 2024, I was like, I do want the quality to be better. And that might mean paring down some things. It doesn't mean I'm inconsistent. It doesn't mean I'm bad at my job. It doesn't mean I like gave up on something. It's just like, I want high quality work. And sometimes quality takes more time. That's why people pay premiums for higher quality because it takes more time and effort. So if you've been consistent at anything, bi annual, bi weekly, weekly, three times a week, whatever it is, give yourself a huge round of applause. That is one of the hardest things to do in entrepreneurship. Number seven, launching, period. Launching anything. Launching a course, launching a substack, launching a product. I feel like this could turn into a jingle, like we might need some background music here, but launching takes a lot of planning and bravery. Do you know how hard it is to put yourself out there after what you think is the most genius idea in the world? It probably came to you in a dream or you saw a sign or you were like automatic writing and this idea hit and you're like This needs to be a course. I'm gonna turn this into a course and then you get into it. You make a mood board What is the course gonna be called? You create the graphics, you do podcasts, you write email newsletters. You're like This is, this course is going to be live. I'm going to help people do this. And then you actually have to publish all that stuff, right? You have to schedule the posts or publish them on Instagram. You have to record the episodes and air them. You have to write the email newsletters and hit send. That is an act of bravery to put yourself out there. To put yourself out there when you don't have concrete 100 percent certainty that it's going to land well or, or be bought by someone literally is, is the ultimate act of courage. You don't know what's going to happen. It could flop. It could go viral. It could do okay. It could do mediocre. It could be the best thing you've ever sold. Like you don't have any idea. But the fact that you even launched it and put it out there, deserves a big pat on the back. I was putting so much pressure on myself to make my subsec launch perfect that I basically sat on the idea for a year. I had the name Slight Turbulence for months. Like honestly, Probably eight months before I even launched it and I was sitting there being like, it has to be perfect. Like I need to talk to every Substack consultant. I need to read every newsletter about how to monetize your Substack. I need to interview people. I need to do like market research interviews and see what people are thinking about Substack. Like I was going mental over the Substack launch and then eventually After loads and loads of discussion and consideration and asking people for help on slack and messaging people I was like, why don't you do it the same way you did your podcast? You just recorded one day and edited it and hit live. There was no rhyme or reason with the date or topic or anything I always laugh because the first episode of this podcast was with my chiropractor like that's how scrappy I was There was no like strategy And I was like, well, why can't you do that with your sub stack? Like, why can't you throw the clay on the, on the wheel and see what forms and see what happens. And then eventually I was like, fuck it, let's do it. So launching can feel scary, but I promise you, once you do it, the fact that you even did it is going to give you more confidence. As, like, visionary and big dreamer as I am, I also am a Virgo moon on Virgo rising with a Capricorn stellium. Like, I also live in a land of grounded reality. I knew my subsec wasn't gonna go viral and start making, like, thousands and thousands of dollars. I know how numbers work. I know how subscriptions work. I know how marketing works. Like, I just knew that wasn't gonna happen. So I didn't go in with the expectation of like, I'm going to hit launch and the first post my inbox is blowing up with paid subscriptions. I knew this is going to be a labor of love. And so I decided I'm going to post every week for one year. See how it goes see what happens. I'm probably gonna tweak the tiers I'm gonna play around with the pricing and the offer and the value etc But I'm not going to just give up because I don't have like a hundred paid subscribers And I'm telling you the day I hit publish on my first post that alone was so motivating. I'm like, that's it. We're done We're gonna do it. We're gonna do it for a year. We're gonna use this as a writing playground. We're gonna test your skills We're gonna refine we're gonna edit we're gonna connect like To me, SubSec right now is a very fun writing experiment, and the fact that I launched it gave me the confidence to keep going. I'm telling you, action breeds confidence. I did not feel confident for the whole year where I thought, by the way, I thought that was going to make me more confident. I thought sitting around and like trying to map out the perfect launch with the perfect amount of posts and all the consulting I could get, I thought that was going to bring me so much confidence that when I launched, I would be like, Bam! Like, nailed this. This is in the bag. I know exactly what I'm doing. I only felt confidence after it was live and I could see people subscribing and engaging with my work. That's when I started getting excited and developing any type of confident muscle where I was like, Oh, you can do this because I finally put it out there. So launching anything that was a champagne pop, we are popping champagne to that. Number eight, paying taxes and paying on time. If you have done this, you deserve a gold star. You deserve a gold star and you deserve a gold star. Anyone that's in business and has to pay taxes. No, it is so scary. You're like, Did I mark that thing right? Am I even, like, filed as the right entity in my state? Do I need to, like, actually open an LLC? Is it too early? Like, do I have to count those Venmo transactions? Like, it's pretty scary when you're a new business owner or even further down in the business and you're still figuring out accounting and taxes. So if you are paying your taxes and on time, to me that is a huge win. I know some people listening are like, what do you mean, like, people aren't paying taxes? That's irresponsible. I assume everyone knows how to pay their taxes. I think it's the fact that some people don't really know what they're doing and have to ask for extensions, or they don't know how to classify what they're filing, and they don't even know, again, like, what entity to file under. So to me, when you do figure that out, that's a massive win. My company's an S corp, and I have to pay quarterly taxes. And just recently, in the last six months, I also had to set up payroll. So now payroll runs every month and it pulls money out of my account for taxes. Now, I feel like I got lucky hearing horror stories earlier on where someone had told me how they didn't understand like how the taxes worked and they all of a sudden owed a 10, 000 bill and I was like, Why are you telling me this story so nonchalant? Like, you just owed, out of the blue, 10, 000 to the government. Like, that's crazy. Then I learned you can go on payment plans and, like, set up your payment schedule, whatever. But the point was, like, you still have to pay those 10, 000. And I'm like, what, like, how did you find the money? And this person told me, oh, I borrowed it from my partner. I'm like, oh. Well, guess what? I'm single. I don't have a partner. So if that bill hit me in the face, I would be fucked. So I was like, no, Chelsea, you're never getting yourself in that situation. I remember my other friend told me this too, where she's like, oh, I was just like classifying things wrong. And so yeah, my bill ended up being like three times what I thought it was. I'm like, what is going on? Like, what? This is freaking me out. As rebellious as I am, I do follow the rules a lot. So hearing that people were like, not getting these numbers, right? freaked me out. I was like, are people going to jail? Like, do you go to, do you literally have to go to jail if you don't pay your taxes on time? Like I was so worried about this that I actually created a tax account very early on. So I have a separate account, a savings account with Ally that I put a percentage of each payment into that account. I usually doubled the percentage. So usually I set aside like 30 percent and again, everyone that pays me immediately, I go, it goes into this account. So I was very lucky because now I have enough to pay my payroll plus extra. So I'm like ahead, so I don't have to worry about it. That is a Massive win to me. The fact that I don't have to freak out every month of what I'm paying taxes and where and who, where, how's it happening? And do I have to guess like, no, I have payroll set up. So it's automatic. I have the numbers, so I know exactly what to pull and I have more than enough. I'm like four months ahead. I could literally scream into the microphone because that's such a big win for me. I won't scream. I'll save your ears. But if you're someone who's figured this out, congrats again, gold stars. Speaking of money, another huge non financial win that you should be celebrating is if you have separate business accounts and personal accounts. When I really started to take my finances seriously, I understood that accounting would be so much easier for everyone involved, including myself, if I just had separate accounts. So I got a business debit card, and then I had my credit card. And I started to actually use them for their specific purposes, like anything business I'm going to put on the debit, anything personal I'll put on my credit card, and then I'll pay it off. Now I have like tweaked my system a little bit, I'm actively trying to get like an international card because of how I work, I live abroad, I don't live in the United States, so. Again, this is like a very nuanced, different situation, but my point is that I have separate accounts, right? I have my separate tax account. I have my separate emergency savings account, separate business account, so on and so forth. This is such a massive win because to me, it's that level of like going from scraping by and just like throwing spaghetti at the wall to being excellent and being like, I'm going to take this seriously now. I know business owners have business accounts with business cards. I am going to start doing that for myself and not just throw everything on like my Chase debit card and work it out at the end of the year. So if you've done that, amazing. If you haven't, I highly recommend it. It makes you actually feel like a real business owner. It's what real business owners do. It's something that I think will give you a lot of confidence. It helps you personally for budgeting. It helps your accounting team. It helps taxes become easier. It's a way to categorize that makes everything 10 times easier. So congrats if you've gotten there. And again, if not, highly suggest. And the last non financial win that I think would be incredible to celebrate is having any kind of automation set up. So whether that's Calendly, where you go in and people book a date and then they get a zoom link and they send you a few prep notes and you get to see all that in your email and just show up to the call. That's incredible. Congratulations. If you've set up a thank you email where someone checks out and then gets a thank you email and then maybe like a 10 percent discount code for their next booking. Congrats. That's an automation. I had a lot of automation done in 2021. Shout out to my old VA Zofie. She set up so much automation for me. I do not think I would be at the level of my business if she had never set that up for me. What happened was I was on a really big podcast and I had a lot of inquiries. And I freaked out because I was like, I have no way to bring these people on. Like, I'm manually sending them contracts, having them like Venmo me, recording everything in spreadsheets, following up manually to book their calls. Like, it was honestly a hot mess. She cleaned all that up, automated everything, so we had this onboarding process. It cleared up so much free time for me that I was like, holy shit, like, How did I not know this before? Like, automation could have saved me so much time and headaches. So then I started putting more resources into automation and hiring people that were good at automation so I could take more rest and have more space in my calendar to not do all these manual tasks. So just recently, my VA and I overhauled this huge video project. Like, all the video courses in my library, I wanted an email sequence for each one of them, which means we had to segment each one of them. We had to plug in the sequence for every single one of them. We had to update the banners for every single one of them, like everything, right? There was a specific, there was almost like a specific project for each course, which was a very massive project. But I knew once this all gets automated and it's done, we can just chill out and relax. And that was a huge win to me. So if you've set up any kind of automation, that's incredible. That is. truly a skill. Like I said, I've hired people to do that for me because I don't like doing it. And you are absolutely winning if you've set up automation. Okay. Those are my 10 tips for finding non financial success. And I wanted to do this because I feel like a lot of times we really only celebrate sales or big contracts. And we have all these private wins that we don't even know how to celebrate or even consider successes. And I think we need to stop doing that because that's a very easy way to give up on anything you create. The second you're only judging yourself based on financial sales, you will kill your creative and artistic dreams. So you really need to find a way to carve out time and give yourself credit. I do this every single night. I do a gratitude journal and then I do a self acknowledgement list. So literally I split down the page. On the left, everything I'm grateful for. On the right, I will do very specific things that I'm proud of myself for. It could be the smallest thing from like, sent booking link to client all the way to signed a 10, 000 contract. Whatever it is, I'm celebrating it. Sometimes I celebrate that I just planned my week. Or I'm like, great job, like you actually plugged in everything in your calendar, you can see it, you know what you're working on. Like, that's a skill, so I celebrate that. I do this the same way I gratitude journal, like I don't miss it. And I think that's why when I have months for my income dips or, you know, I'm not getting as many like words of affirmation on the podcast or like, there's no new like sub stack subscribers. Like I'm able to like instantly calm myself down and find equilibrium because I'm like, well, look at all these other amazing things you're doing because I've built that muscle and that skill to give myself credit every single day. Another thing you could do is screenshot all the nice things people say to you, whether that's an email, DM, a testimonial form. Screenshot it and make an evidence folder in your phone. So any time that you go open your Stripe account and it says zero and nothing's coming to be paid out, or you look at the last time you made a sale and it was like four weeks ago, you need to be able to find these like little nuggets of motivation and show that like you're good at your job. You're good at what you do. You might just be experiencing a lull for whatever reason. Like, Lolz happen. That is literally the game of entrepreneurship. No one is up and to the right the whole time. Like that's not real. Everything is like up and a little down, up and a little down, up and a little down like that. You have to get used to that. And if you're, if you're hitting those down periods and you stay there for a very long time and you just start to hating your work and getting depressed over anything you're creating, you're going to shut down and obviously go out of business. You're going to be like, fuck this, I'm not doing this anymore and just hate it and you're going to regret it. Even if you shut down, I would love for you to shut down from a place of like. gentle compassion and like, you know what? I gave it my best shot. I did the best I could. That was that and I'm moving on. I would just hate for you to close a chapter with so much like resentment and anger towards it because you didn't know how to give yourself credit from non financial wins. So go get your journals, do the self acknowledgement, tell me how it goes, I think you should try it for like a week and just see what happens. Even doing it forces me to like review my day, cause again like I'm still in the habit of like, did I make a sale, did someone shout me out on Instagram, did someone DM me? And when I sit down and carve out like 20 minutes to be like, okay what did I actually accomplish today? Like what can I give myself credit for? It forces my brain to find answers and I'm telling you, every night I can find like 12 things. And I'm sure you can too. All right. Thank you so much for listening. Let me know what you think about this episode. Go to my Spotify. There's always a question up there or a poll where you can engage with. You can find me on Instagram at Chelsea Riffe. You can email me info at chelsea Riffe dot com. And just a reminder this month, anyone who either leaves a review on Apple podcasts or engages with my poll on Spotify will be entered into a giveaway to win a one on one 30 minute session with me. So just screenshot it before you submit your review on Apple or screenshot your submission on Spotify to the question and then send it to info at chelseaRiffe. com or DM me on Instagram at chelseaRiffe. I'll enter you into that giveaway. All right, I'm excited to hear what you think of this episode. Go check out my website if you want to work with me. I have courses that can help you with everything from interviewing, building community, monetizing. And if you want to read my writing about my travels, then check out Slight Turbulence, my Substack. Rate, review, subscribe, share this in the group text, include this in your weekly favorite things newsletter. Shout it out on Substack. And let me know what you think of this series, by the way. I'm really excited to, like, pivot. Didn't mean to use that word, but I'm excited to pivot into series, and I'm excited for this whole series, Pivoting in Public. I'm Chelsea Riffe, this is my non expert opinion, and I'll see you next week.