You’ve ticked all the boxes, and done everything right, so why isn’t success in business coming quicker? I recently had a light-bulb moment that could go a long way in easing your rush to the ‘finish’ line.

My path to do what I was born to do - to teach a million women about money - has not been plain sailing, and so this concept of success’s timing has been on my mind for a while.  In today’s episode I reveal a way to fast track success… 

After all, you were born to change the world, so get your future self ready!

Show Notes

• [03.32] Rock bottom

• [04.53] The light-bulb moment

• [05.28] The Four things you need for success

  • Skillset

  • Mindset

  • Structures

  • God’s blessing

• [09.05] Going back to the light-bulb moment

• [11.34] So how do you fast track success?

• [14.23] You will be ready when it comes
  

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Quotes

"And let’s be clear, for me successful means that the teaching business pays for itself and pays back the money I’ve invested in it.   I’m so not needing fame and fortune… it’s my joy and passion." - Lisa Linfield

"Turns out (surprise, surprise), life is very different when you have to build a brand from scratch, and you don’t have the millions of marketing spend that corporates have." - Lisa Linfield

"Selling yourself as the product uncovered a whole pandora’s box of self-doubt and insecurity, and so many old-fashioned beliefs I’d absorbed of how “vulgar” it was to promote yourself." - Lisa Linfield

"The current version of you does not have the skillset, the mindset, or the structures in place to handle the success the future version of you will be able to." - Lisa Linfield

"The same lesson will keep coming up, again and again, until you nail it." - Lisa Linfield

"Each and every one of us has the talents and unique combination of strengths and weaknesses perfect for your many purposes on earth." - Lisa Linfield

Script:

Why isn’t success in business coming quicker?

Hello everybody and welcome to today’s episode of Working Women’s Wealth.  I’m Lisa Linfield, and I’m creating a community of women passionate about making sure that their money works for them to create the life they dream of for themselves and their family.

I don’t know about you, but I’ve always said that when I die, I’m going to take a watch with me to heaven because God’s timing and my timing are often so far apart!

But a few things have happened in the last 6 weeks that have made me really think deeply on this concept of success’s timing.

When I started my financial planning business, my intention was to just manage people’s money.  One business.  But, within 4 months I realised that I needed to do more.  I possessed knowledge that could change the lives of many people if I could just find a way to get that knowledge out there.

The vision I had was of God’s children walking like prisoners of war – all tied together, with a heavy weight on their children, dark, sad faces, grey skies.  Who was holding them captive?  Money worries.  And my heart just broke.  I knew that my job was to empower, equip and engage them to change their path.

So I set a goal to teach a million women about money.

To do that, I started a podcast and blog and began teaching every week.  But it’s expensive to do courses to teach you to podcast, operate a website, promote your podcast, edit and create it, and run it all weekly.

And, as much as I felt this was God’s mission for me, I was facing the cold hard reality that this business was draining money.

So, I decided that the answer was to do online courses.  All the online business influencers I followed did courses that made the money to support their teaching, so that’s what I did.  So I paid for online courses, video editors, slide designers and built my first course – Side Hustle:  Business School for Startups.

And although it did okay, I had hugely over invested, and it ended up losing money.  And so I’d dug a financial hole even deeper than the last.  The answer, I knew, was that I needed to build a brand that people know-liked-and trusted, so that more people would buy the courses that generate the money.  And so I invested in a book coach, a course, and wrote a book.  That happened to launch in the middle of Corona lockdown.

I was following all the formulas these successful online influencers gave, but I missed the real issues.  I was focusing on throwing solutions at the symptoms and not treating the problem at its core.

It was then, that I hit rock bottom.

Did I misread my God-given purpose in life?

I had been working so hard at this business, spending all the profits of my wealth management company investing to teach women, and I was a failure.

So, after launching my book to silence, I then heard God saying – Step away from the business.

To be honest, it was a relief.

But, as an overachiever and workaholic, it just baffled me how I could have studied diligently the experts, implemented what they said, worked my butt off and still hadn’t seen success in my teaching business after 3 years.

And whilst I had an inkling of part of the answer – and could have parroted it off to anyone who came to me with the same problem – it struck me in the last 2 weeks.

For those of you that don’t know, my daughter had a horse-riding accident two weeks ago today and broke 4 of the vertebrae in her back.  Thank God there was no spinal cord involvement, so she is going to live to dance and run once we’ve made it through 6 weeks of bed rest and another 6 weeks of rehab.

So I’ve spent much time in prayer and reflection as we’re house-bound with her stuck to her bed.

The light-bulb moment

This weekend I was reading Exodus, the story of God leading the Israelites into the promised land… when this part just struck me like a sledgehammer.

“I will not drive them out in a single year, because the land would become desolate and the wild animals too numerous for you.  Little by Little I will drive them out before you until you have increased enough to take possession of the land.”

This is when I hear you say… ummm---jaaaa--- meaning..???

So let’s step back a little.

The Four things you need for success

OK, there are way more than four, but I want to talk to you about four of them today.  You need

1.       Skillset

2.       Mindset

3.       Structures

4.       God’s blessing

Now when I look at myself, I totally thought I had all of the things mentioned that I needed to have a successful teaching business.  And let’s be clear, for me successful means that the teaching business pays for itself and pays back the money I’ve invested in it.   I’m so not needing fame and fortune… it’s my joy and passion.

Skillset

From a skillset perspective – I know my content, money, and I had 20 years of running businesses in corporates, so I thought I had all the skillsets I need.  Turns out (surprise, surprise), life is very different when you have to build a brand from scratch, and you don’t have the millions of marketing spend that corporates have.  And I’d never before had to manage cashflow and other entrepreneurial challenges – including doing every single thing from IT to branding to bookkeeping to social media, to building websites.

I invested A LOT of money in building my skillset where I lacked.  I learnt to podcast, I learnt to build websites, I re-learnt social media implementation, I learnt how to do online courses.  I learnt and learnt and learnt.

Mindset

As you all know by now, mindset was another one I totally underestimated.  As I mentioned in this podcast, and in my book, Deep Grooves, I had never understood how much of my confidence came from everyone telling me what a great job I had done.  Now, it was me and my pot plant.  And that was it.  Especially with podcast as a medium because you never get feedback, you broadcast out. 

Also, I discovered that despite having run sales and marketing in different businesses, selling yourself as the product uncovered a whole pandora’s box of self-doubt and insecurity, and so many old-fashioned beliefs I’d absorbed of how “vulgar” it was to promote yourself.

But, I actively embraced changing my mindset.  I researched, I interviewed experts, and I even did the deepest work of all, putting everything into a book – which as they say, if you the best way to learn something is to teach it.

Structures

One of the great lessons I learnt being part of an exec that managed 20,000 people was the lesson of Structure, Rigor, Analytics and Discipline.  You can’t make that many people become a high performing team without it.  The problem is when you’re not making money, and this is your passion and service, it’s hard to invest in people.  Also, I needed to do everything first to learn how it would be done in order to put the processes and systems in place.  So my little teaching business had very few processes and systems.

God’s Blessing

I deeply believed that that God’s blessing was on this business.  That this is what I was born to do.  Yes, as I look back now, I was doing it mostly in my strength, and wanting him to rubber stamp it, so it took rock bottom to make me realise that.

So if I know all of this, and I actively worked to plug the gaps I had, why wasn’t I more successful?

Going back to the light-bulb moment

So let’s go back to that verse and why it put the remaining

  “I will not drive them out in a single year, because the land would become desolate and the wild animals too numerous for you.  Little by Little I will drive them out before you until you have increased enough to take possession of the land.”

And it was then that the problem of the one-hit wonder sprung to mind.

Handling great success requires an entirely new level of skillset, mindset and structures.  When it comes before we’ve had time to build a solid, steady, reinforced foundation of those, our house is too flimsy and will crush and fall and the wild animals will devour us – and we won’t have enough people, processes and structures to make good use of the opportunities available to us, and the land will slowly become desolate – those opportunities will die out and fizzle away.

At its center is letting go of control and your role changing from being able to do the things you like doing to having to be the face of your brand – working on your business, not in it.  Doing the sales and marketing.

A one-hit wonder I totally loved was the New Radicals.  Their song “You get what you give” resonated for me on so many levels, as did their other songs on their one and only album.

In reading about why they disbanded the group even before their second hit was released, their lead man explained it by saying "the fatigue of traveling and getting three hours sleep in a different hotel every night to do boring 'hanging and schmoozing' with radio and retail people, is definitely not for me”. [source, Wikipedia]

And that’s the crux of the matter.

The current version of you does not have the skillset, the mindset, or the structures in place to handle the success the future version of you will be able to.

So how do you fast track success?

The answer is simple, be really intentional about facing the pain head on.  There are no short cuts, but you can delay it by avoiding pain.

So what do I mean by that?

My biggest pain that I avoid is fear of rejection and so I’m a people pleaser.  In my business that translates itself into NOT doing sales, not approaching people for partnerships, not doing sponsorships, and hoping I can hide behind online marketing.  I hate saying to someone – I charge this much for a financial plan, and that much for a media partnership.

Just this weekend I was asked to do something by a company, and I struggled to raise in the conversation payment.  So, to avoid the difficult conversation, I put a number in an email afterwards that was heavily discounted for the time I would spend.

I was so frustrated with myself for woosing out.

Another thing I haven’t done is put enough people in place, so that I can focus on creating content and selling.  Because I’m scared of selling.  And, I like control of my work, and being just me.  And, if I’m honest, I’m scared I won’t find the right person… and then I’m going to have to have difficult conversations with the person I’ve hired, and so I just avoid the whole thing.

Now, you might be great at sales… but terrible at money.  Or great at sales and money, but a complete control freak.  Or great at all of that, but terrible at following and putting in place a process.

The one thing I’ve learnt, is that we all have something.  And until you master that, go through that storm, and get out the other side, you will NEVER be successful.  It doesn’t mean that you personally have to be an expert at it – it’s about getting over the fear, not the action of doing it.

The same lesson will keep coming up, again and again, until you nail it.

If you really want success, You need to be intentional about building the skillsets you actually need to succeed and putting in place the systems or people, processes and technology to enable that success.  You need to master the mindset skills you need – pushing through despite your fears, letting go of control, and the discipline to work on what you have to do, not want to do.

And then lastly, you need to trust the voice of God and learn to “listen to your gut” as I talk about in Deep Grooves. 

You will be ready when it comes

One of the tools I talk about in Deep Grooves of listening to your gut is synchronicity.  Last week, just before I read this article, I was reading an email from an influencer I follow, Julie Stoin.  In it, she talked about her business reaching the $6m target, nearly R100m. 

I want to read you what she wrote as I found it powerful.

You grow into the person who can handle it so when you finally arrive there, it feels normal.

That said, this growth period has been tough. It's mentally draining to uplevel in systems and operations, dealing with teams, employees, taxes, payroll, etc. There's a lot of moving parts and never a day where there isn't a hair on fire moment.

Learning how to find equilibrium when the needs and asks never stop is an art form and I'm in school full time learning this principle.

Friends, you were born to change the world.  Each and every one of us has the talents and unique combination of strengths and weaknesses perfect for your many purposes on earth.  But success requires you to grow to become a different, stronger, more resilient version of you with skillsets, mindsets and structures in place to maximise those opportunities to the full.

Face those things that are pulling you down… those traps you seem to fall into again and again.  Because if you don’t push through them, you will never be able to make the most of success when it comes to you.

And if you want support in the journey of building the mindset to face your fears and get out of the Deep Grooves that are keeping you stuck, get my book Deep Grooves on Amazon or my website, LisaLinfield.com