Episode 6: Two Things Nobody Tells You About Building a Business

Welcome to the Create youe Laptop Life podcast, where entrepreneurs all around the world come to learn how to market and grow their online business right from their laptops, wherever they are. We don't have traditional nine to five jobs and we don't want them because financial and lifestyle security and freedom is too important to us. We know the world is changing for the better and that the freelance and entrepreneur economy is the cleaner, greener, smarter way to work for both families and businesses. My name is Julie, and this podcast will teach you everything you need to know about creating and growing your laptop life. Hey, what's up, guys? This is Julie and today I want to talk about the stuff nobody talks about when you begin your laptop life. So, you know, I don't know about you, but if you go onto Facebook and you scroll on your newsfeed for like five minutes, you're going to see ads for all kinds of business opportunities and they're all going to be flowery. There's usually pictures of Paris involved, maybe the beach, maybe pina coladas, at least some really good makeup. Everything looks so shiny and new, especially like if you're in the coaching and consulting space. It seems like everybody is making millions of dollars and you are the only one who has not yet cracked the code on the laptop life. And it's such bullshit. Now, this is not to say that you don't want to put your best foot forward or you don't want to when you get out there and you start, you know, doing, doing your own advertising for your own business, that you don't wanna give people the best stuff you've got because of course you do. But the majority of people who are advertising the laptop life are only showing you half of the pie. They're not showing you all the other stuff. And I feel like on the one hand, I want to encourage all of you listening that the laptop life is absolutely 1000% the only kind of life that I will ever. On the other hand, I feel like if I don't, as an expert or a guru or whatever, set the expectation for what it actually is, like, you will think you are crazy and you will think that it's not working for you when it absolutely is. And all of us just have the same issues. Some of us just hide it better than others. So first of all, I want to tell you that when I started my laptop life, it took my kids probably nine months to even figure out what the hell I was doing. I had gone from stay at home mom to work at home mom. And as you can imagine nobody liked it. And the amount of guilt that I felt as a mother was extensive because they would say to me, oh, you're just always on your screen now. Oh, you just. You don't have time to do fun things with us anymore. I mean, and I had like, younger kids and older kids. And it was like nine months of saying the consistent message, which is, I now work here at my office. In fact, at the time that I started, it wasn't even an office. It was like a spot in the dining room. So they just couldn't understand. And so if you feel like your family is really struggling to get this through their heads, especially your kids, like nine months was how long it took before they finally started to get it. Then the husband, and this is like an ongoing thing. I see a lot of entrepreneurs with really supportive spouses, but it is very difficult if your spouse is not an entrepreneur. They don't know what it feels like truly to have the buck stop with you. And so when you're in a traditional job, right, you can leave, you can clock out, you can go home. And even if you're in the kind of position where people may call you after hours, the whole ship doesn't go down if you don't answer your email, right? There is, there's buffers in place. When you start a laptop life business, an online business, it is very hard to convince your spouse, or maybe it's your parents, if you're like, you know, hanging out with them on the holidays or whatever, to convince them that you are literally the end of the road. The buck stops with you. That, yeah, pulling out your cell phone on Christmas morning is probably not a great idea, or, you know, you need to step away from table at dinnertime because you know there's some financial emergency in your business, it's very hard to convince the people that love you around you why you, why you have to answer these calls or why you have to answer this email. And of course, there are ways to, like, put, put things in place, right? You can hire VAs, you can hire customer support team, you can put email autoresponders on, on the weekends. Like, there's all kinds of things you can do. But when you're just starting, when you're really like, bootstrapping, getting to your first, you 10 to 100k, there's not a lot of room in the budget and the buck just stops with you. And in those really, really young businesses, there's not a lot of standard operating procedures in place. And so if you feel like there's something wrong with you or wrong with your business that your family or your spouse doesn't quite understand why you have to take these calls. Like, that's normal. I still, it's still, even with customer support team and standard operating procedures in place, there are times when I have to just answer the call. That is the cost of being an entrepreneur. I mean, the beautiful benefit of it is that I can, yes, I can decide when I'm going to work and when I'm not. But it is a baby, you know, it's a baby business. And you can't just not get up in the middle of the night and feed that baby. And so if your family is really struggling to understand that, the best thing you can do is create as much opportunity in your life to make them a priority. Knowing, build it into the expectation that there will be times when you're on vacation or when you're at the family table and you have to step away. And as long as you build in that expectation and you leverage the times when it's not stressful and make them a priority, they will adjust and they will adapt. The next thing that nobody talks about in building a laptop life is the mind game that you're going to play with yourself. And there's a meme that goes around on Facebook and it's like, I love being an entrepreneur. I hate being an entrepreneur. I'm amazing at this. I'm ready to quit. The highs and lows when you start a business are extreme. Like, you may start to wonder if you have bipolar. I know I did. I was like, how can in one freaking day I can go from like, I love my life to I want to kill myself in like an hour's time. And this is like across the board. So my advice to you as you're building your business is to remember this conversation that I'm having with you right now and to not make any decisions about your business that are long term decisions when you're either in an extreme high or an extreme low. So what happens for me is like when I'm in the extreme lows, I usually just repeat to myself again and again, okay, today I feel like crap. Today I want to like burn my business to the ground. Today I think that all my offers suck. Today I think that I'm just the most boring human on planet earth. In that moment, I remind myself that this is a low. This is all you have to say, this is a low. I'm not going to feel this way forever. I guarantee you you'll come out of it. And if you make a decision to, like, kill a product or change your business name or like, run off into the sunset and do something completely different, you're going to regret it because this is a low and you're not going to feel this way forever. Now, the same thing is just as dangerous in a high, right? In a super high, when you're just like, you think you can take over the. And you agree to launch a new course, or you agree to take on a new project, or you decide that you're going to whatever, build a, you know, brand new whatever, you're going to probably come to regret that because you were in a super, super high. And so maybe it was just like, enthusiasm sort of took over. When you're in that high, it's much harder to not make decisions because you're in a high, right? So you think you can do anything. So in those highs, what I do is if I have ideas or I have stuff that I get so excited about, I write it down and I tell myself, this is a high. When the high ends, these ideas will still be here. This way, I'm not writing them off because I've had some great ideas in my highs, right? And you might too. But I am writing them down so that when the high ends, I can go back to them and I can be like, all right, well, that sounded like a good idea at the time, but like, let's maybe refocus this, or maybe it'll stand the test of time. Because the really good ideas, they will persist even when the high goes away. So that's the second thing. Just remember that you will feel an extreme high and extreme low sometimes within the same hour of the day. And you have not contracted bipolar disorder. This is just the entrepreneur life. And so these two things, like my family spouse adapting to it, and then my own mind adapting to it, these things, like, they sound fluffy. It's like when we start a business or we're growing a business, we just want to know about the tactics and the finances and all this kind of stuff. And that's all fine and well and we can dive into that. But these two things here, your family response and your own mindset. If you don't set those expectations correctly from the get go, man, the minute you hit, like, an actual hiccup, like a financial hiccup or a customer support hiccup, you're not going to be equipped to deal with it. So just remember, the more consistent and repetitive you can be with your family and with yourself, the faster, you will acclimate to this kind of lifestyle and you will know that the highs are amazing, that the lows suck so bad, but that the middle of the road, it starts to get easier and easier as time goes on. So thank you guys for listening. Please, please. If you enjoy this podcast, share it with people, Leave a review, subscribe and I will talk to you again soon. If you're ready to create, grow, scale your online business, you can go to createyourlaptoplife.com podcast and get a free plan on how you can get started today.