Episode Show Notes
Lessons I've Learned Launching My Business
While launching and starting to run my business, I certainly learned many lessons along the way. And to help you launch and run your own business as successfully as possible, I’m sharing the lessons I learned in episode 7 of the Breakthrough Business Babe Podcast!
But before we dive right in, let me introduce myself in case this is your first visit. I am your host, Jen Gitomer, creator of Breakthrough Business Babe and author of the best-selling book, Sales in a New York Minute.
And it is time to make massive breakthroughs in YOUR business. With each episode, you are going to move past your fears of asking for the sale, learn to build deep connections that lead to meaningful business results, and master sales strategies that will help you grow and scale your business. Each week, I will be providing you with tips to avoid common mistakes in your business, tech hacks to help you grow and scale faster, and teach you to ALWAYS ask for the sale with confidence.
It is time for you, the Breakthrough Business Babe, to create more sales, income and connections in your business. Let’s get started!
In this episode, I’m sharing the most important lessons I’ve learned from launching my business, from key strategies you should use to mistakes to avoid. And for even more juicy details, listen to ALL of episode 7 of the Breakthrough Business Babe Podcast on your fave streaming platform.
Lessons Learned From Launching My Business, Point #1: Lead with value.
For many years, I haven’t really told my story and opened up unless I’m on someone else’s podcast or their Facebook Live. But sharing my story today was on my heart. And I feel like if I talk to you about where I’ve come from and how I’ve gotten to where I’m at and the lessons I’ve learned along the way, that may also help you learn from my lessons and get your own breakthroughs. But before I dive into my story, I want to give you a mini-lesson first that can be summed up in four words: value first, introduction second!
Let me explain. When you started listening to this podcast five episodes ago, if you didn’t know me and you were new, you didn’t really care about who I was. What you cared about was what I did and how I could help you. And that’s exactly what your customers care about when they don’t know you and they’re looking you up on Instagram or on your website.
Because of this, whenever I’m speaking or showing up for people, I don’t introduce myself first. I give value for like 10 or 15 minutes and once I’ve proven to the audience that I can deliver something helpful, I tell them more about me.
And the reason I’m sharing this story is that wherever you’re showing up – on stage, live video, your website, your social accounts, whatever – you need to give value first and then talk about who you are.
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Lessons Learned From Launching My Business, Point #2: My story of falling in love with business.
Now, let’s get into my story. (See what I did there?) I have always been into sales. When I was five years old, I started to design bracelets that I sold as people would walk by the supermarket. I had a little booth setup and I’m not even sure selling right outside the supermarket was legal, but no one stopped me, which was pretty cool. And so what I realized from the whole experience was that people didn’t care about the bracelets that I made, but they cared about the bracelets that they wanted. So what I would do was charge them like five to seven dollars for me to create a custom bracelet that they would pick up the next week. As a result, from a very young age, I started selling and I freakin’ loved it. And when people would ask me what I was going to do when I grew up, my answer would always be, “I’m going to own my own business.”
Can you relate? Or is this something that you came upon later in life? Because either way, I think you’ll agree that once you feel called to be an entrepreneur, you can’t ignore it. That’s why I’m so happy that you are listening to this episode, because I know that we share the same passion for business.
About your host
Jen Gitomer gained her prowess in NYC as both a salesperson and award-winning sales leader for a Fortune 500 company. She left corporate America to fulfill her entrepreneurial dream. Jennifer helps entrepreneurs increase their revenue and profit through her proven sales strategies. In addition to the Breakthrough Business Babe Podcast, Jennifer co-hosts the Sell or Die podcast with her husband, Jeffrey.
She is the best-selling Author of Sales in a New York Minute – 212 Pages of Real-World, Easy to Implement Sales Strategies to Make More Sales, Build Loyal Relationships and Make More Money, the CEO and Founder of Breakthrough Business Babe and a master business growth coach. When she’s not working, you’ll find Jen planning her next Paris trip, taking a yoga class, playing tennis, or hanging out with her family and Cavalier King Charles fur babies.
Lessons Learned From Launching My Business, Point #3: The real purpose of entrepreneurship, plus the importance of reflection.
Listen. Entrepreneurs are a crazy breed, and I am proud to be one of them! We face a lot of risk and unknown and uncertainty. But when you are able to manage those feelings, look at the opportunities and figure out a way that you can positively impact your clients, that is the most amazing feeling on the planet. And so, like I said in the beginning, being an entrepreneur is all about helping solve other people’s problems with your solution. I love that being an entrepreneur gives us the ability to create something that can impact so many other people on this planet.
Now, back in the day, I hired and trained a sales team and I worked for a Fortune 500 company. It was a blast until it really wasn’t a blast anymore, if you know what I mean. And all of the sudden I got that yearning pain inside my stomach and I knew it was time for me to become an entrepreneur.
Now I want you to think about that for yourself:
- When did you know it was time to become an entrepreneur?
- When did you know that you had this yearning to help others and make a difference?
- How did you figure out your passion? Where did that come from?
- When you look back on all the different jobs you’ve had and your work history and career, can you see that passion weaved through everything you were doing?
- When did you know it was time to take that leap of faith?
If you’ve already made the leap into entrepreneurship, I also want you to just think back for a second. Because we often think about the future and what our goals are and our dreams are instead of what we’ve already accomplished. So I want you to take a look at what you’ve achieved and the progress you’ve made over this time.
Lessons Learned From Launching My Business, Point #4: How I really grew a six-figure business FAST and what to keep in mind when designing your business model.
When I started my business, I turned it into a six-figure coaching business in a matter of a short few months. And I know you’re probably wondering, “How did you do that? That’s so fast.” And I could just say that I did it, and leave it at that, but I need to tell you that it was not easy. I had no life because I was working all the time, and I was living to work instead of working to live. So when you hear other coaches and other gurus talk about how they grew a business so fast, dig into that because often they skip over the part where they failed and learned lessons.
And so I want you to know that, yes, I grew a business really quickly to six figures and I was loving what I was doing. But it really wasn’t a very balanced lifestyle.
That’s why it’s so important to ask yourself: are you living to work or are you working to live? And I also want you to consider questions like:
- If you had to build a new business right now, what kind of business would you design?
- What would that look like?
- What are your non negotiables?
Those are the questions that I ask my clients based on the lessons I learned launching my own business. And I call them “lessons” not “failures” because I’m aware of how powerful labeling can be. And mindset is one of the things that really helped me grow my business. But what I didn’t realize was that I was building an unscalable business. I built a business that required me to coach people in person, and I was only getting paid for the hour I spent with each client versus the four hours I spent commuting, writing notes, etc. So after weeks of making great money but being freaking exhausted, I realized I needed a better model. And that’s when I realized I could speak on stages.
And it worked great, but again, I built another unscalable business that required me to show up. And what if I was out sick for two weeks? What would happen?
And I want you to think about that in terms of your business, too:
- Does your business require you in order to exist?
- Is that the type of business that you even want to build?
And while you’re thinking about your business, keep two important terms in mind: “income” and “impact.” Because I’m assuming you got into entrepreneurship for the financial freedom, time freedom, and the ability to make an impact. And reflecting on those two components made me realize that I needed to shift my business again because my financial and time freedom were actually really limited with my current model.
Lessons Learned From Launching My Business, Point #5: How I pivoted my business, and what you need to know about pivoting your own.
I decided to pivot my business and also help my husband transition his business because he had a speaking business as well. And in the speaking business, money can be good and the work can be fun. I tell you that is because I know that sometimes it’s super hard to walk away from something that seems so secure and routine, but that might not be the right thing for you.
So I walked away from this sure thing that I had created and built this new business where I could help people in a more scalable way by creating digital products that we could sell online. And I freakin’ love it. It’s like sales on the next level because you get to show someone how you can help them without actually talking to them directly. We can get up to 4000 people on some of our webinars, partly because I know exactly how to help them make a great buying decision. And that’s what I now help people do because so many people started coming to me for help launching their course, and that is a zone of genius of mine.
So now I’m teaching online coaches, speakers and authors how to turn followers into sales in 60 minutes because that’s the framework I’ve created, and soon I’ll be launching a group coaching program. But I also take on private clients and I have a few client spots open this next month, so if you’re interested, make sure you DM me on Instagram.
Lessons Learned From Launching My Business: The Bottomline
I hope that giving you some of my background story and where I’ve come from and where I’m going has just shed a little insight into all the ways that I’ve pivoted in my business and some of the lessons I’ve learned along the way. And I believe my story also shows that breakthroughs don’t just happen overnight. Breakthroughs happen because you’re taking daily consistent action and getting one step closer to your goal on a daily basis.
So I hope you not only consider the lessons I’ve shared in this episode, but also reflect on the questions I ask throughout it about where you’ve come from and the lessons YOU have learned along the way. Because those lessons are going to be guides for you. And if you really embrace that lesson and journal about it and remember it, maybe that will keep you from having to learn that lesson again. So my breakthrough challenge for you this week is to figure out where your breakthroughs came from. Figure out how you’ve gotten to where you are. And if you want to share any of that with me on Instagram, I’d be so delighted to hear any parts of your story that you want to share.
To hear even more about all five of the points mentioned above, don’t forget to tune in to episode 7 of the Breakthrough Business Babe Podcast. And if you love this episode, don’t forget to take a screenshot, share it on your Insta stories and tag me @jengitomer so that we can spread this important message to even more entrepreneurs and biz babes!
