No Risk No Reward

Foreign. Hello and good evening. I'm Katie McManus, business strategist and money mindset coach, coming to you live tonight on the Facebook's LinkedIn, YouTube, Twitter, or X, whatever we're calling it now, and Instagram over here on my phone, which, if you're watching on LinkedIn, Facebook, and everywhere else, you can actually see how badly cracked my phone is. Yeah, one of the downsides of living off of your phone and working off your phone is that, like, if that happens, you just kind of have to deal with it until you have a period of time where you can actually get it fixed. Just gonna adjust my lighting here because the green light sometimes makes me look a little washed out if I don't have the warm lighting on. Anyway, good evening. I always think that, like, short weeks always throw me through a loop. Like, it just feels. I don't know. I feel like it's both a Monday and a Wednesday already, and I'm completely thrown off. I don't know about you guys, but anyway, today is the first day of fall. In my mind, yesterday was Labor Day. Today is the day that we are just getting to work. All right? School's back in session for pretty much everyone. And that means that you have no more excuses. Summer's over. It's time to get to work. Now, I want to talk tonight about good risk and bad risk or smart risk and dumb risk. All right, now, where do I want to start? So I use the example of skydiving. Hi, Justin. Let me see. See if your cell carrier has an open enrollment period for Insurance, then wait 30 days and file a claim. Oh, my God, you're so smart. We're actually switching from AT&T to Mint Mobile, so I don't know how that'll work. Maybe we just wait. I don't know. But anyway, I appreciate that. But also, like, what if they come and investigate? What if they, like, check out my lives? Hi, Sandy. What if they check out my lives and they're like, excuse me, you just broadcasted that your. The back of your phone is smashed. Anyway, I don't want to get in trouble. I don't want to do insurance fraud. That's bad. Anyway, so, okay, so smart risk and dumb risk. All right, so let's imagine. And this is real imagination for me, because there's no fucking way I am ever going skydiving, all right? I made a deal with myself a long time ago that I will do scary things, but not scary to the point where I might pee my pants of fear. All right? So skydiving and I are never going to be a thing. Suggested. Just trade it in that. Yes. Yeah, yeah, I'll figure it out. Don't worry. So skydiving and I will never be a thing. All right? And there's the smart way. Like, but if I were going to. There's a smart way to go skydiving, and there's the dumb way to go skydiving. All right? So, like, the smart way is you go to a certified professional skydiver who is verified. They take people out all the time. They have, like, a success rate, 100%, hopefully, right? That's. It's really, like, you don't want to fail your rate when you're skydiving. Like, it's either you live or you die, and that's it. And you want equipment that is tested and true and has been checked over and is properly set up. And you want all the things you want, all the safety, you know, precautions to be taken. The dumb way to go skydiving is the DIY way where you find your way onto some kind of flying aircraft. Who knows what kind it is, with your backpack where you've put one of your sheets in that you've tied all four corners together, and you just figure you're going to jump at some point and, like, open your backpack on the way down and then hold up this sheet. That is not going to work. Like, if you're thinking about skydiving, I hope you understand how, like, the best way to go skydiving and the worst way to go skydiving. And I hope you choose the best way. Right? Because you, I imagine, are an incredible human. We want to keep you around. All right? And of course, I'm talking through this, and you're probably like, but, Katie, like, that's asinine. That is like, a completely ludicrous way to look at this. No one would ever do that. But here's the thing. People do risks or commit themselves to risky things like that all the time. And these risky things are actually life and death, all right? Starting a business can be a life or death decision for some people, all right? If you don't have a lot of money and you're hoping that this is going to make you money so that you can buy food and pay for shelter and all the things, guess what? Those are things that you need to be able to get to survive, all right? That is a life or death decision. And yet every single day, all over the world, people start businesses, and instead of making a smart risk to invest in, help to get guidance, to find someone who can show them the ropes and really show them best practices and show them the things that they want to avoid. They figure, I'm gonna do it myself. I'm gonna do it myself. I'll figure it out along the way. How hard can it be? Well, it's pretty hard. It's pretty hard because here's the thing. If you've never done this before, if you. You don't even know the questions to ask, right? I took a computer programming class at one point in San Francisco. I am not designed to be a computer programmer. Anyway, the whole class was just teaching us what questions to ask the Google machine, right? Because technology changes so fast. Like, they couldn't teach us one version of HTML and CSS and blah, blah, blah. Like, they had to teach us how to ask the right questions. So that when those things changed, when new tools and whatever and doodads, see, I really paid attention in the class when they came out that we'd be able to navigate it. We'd be able to figure out and problem solve and ask the right questions. When you're starting a business, you don't know the right questions to ask if you've never done it before, right? And I'm not, I'm not doing this. I'm not talking about this as a hard sell to work with me, all right? If you want to work with me, please, I would love to talk and see, you know, if it's a fit. But this is a hard sell for you to invest in you, right? Because here's the fear a lot of people have when they start a business or do something that's outside of their comfort zone. They honestly just don't trust themselves. They see this massive, massive goal that they have and they figure, okay, well, I'm going to do this the cheap way. I'm going to cut corners, I'm going to figure it out, I'm going to do it this way. And what they're ultimately deciding is that they don't trust themselves to invest in themselves up front, right? And what a crazy thing to do to yourself, right? You know, and the example of skydiving, for instance, you know, skydiving, like, you really don't have to do much if you invest in professionals, right? They're doing most of it for you, right? Hopefully, if they're not, if they're relying on you too much, then hopefully they are not in business for long because that is a big liability. But the thing about your business is you are responsible. You are the person who has to take action. You are the person who has to show up every single day and do all the things. And one of the things that people do to sabotage themselves without even realizing it is they don't set themselves up for success, right? Because if you're not a for sure, people always want to guarantee, you know, if you go skydiving, they. You want to guarantee that you're going to live, right? When people start a business, they want to guarantee that this business will work and there are no guarantees, right? If there are guarantees that it would work, like if I could guarantee that every single business idea that all my clients had were going to be massively successful, I could charge a crap ton more money for what I do. Unfortunately, that's just not the name of the game. That's just not how it goes. The only guarantee when you start a business is that you are going to fail a gazillion different times in a gazillion different ways, right? That is the only guarantee. Now, if you're taking. If you're making a smart risk and investing in some help, in some guidance in the beginning, if you're setting yourself up for success, those failures that you go through in the beginning won't be as big. You know, they won't be as big. You'll also be able to bounce back from them a lot faster. All right? You'll be able to learn from them. You'll be able to learn the right things from them. Because, you know, here's the thing. Like, if you're starting a business and like, you start marketing on social media and it doesn't work, you, who's never marketed a business, who doesn't know what you're doing, you've never done this before. You're not going to be able to look to see what you did and understand what you did that was unsuccessful, all right? Someone who has done it before will be able to look at everything that you did and identify the things that you did that were unsuccessful and help you tweak it, right? Don't have an expectation of yourself to know this naturally. I didn't come out of the uterus knowing French or advanced chemistry. I actually still don't know. I can't even say it. Advanced chemistry, I didn't know. Geometry, I didn't know. I didn't know how to make an omelette. I'm also really bad at omelettes, so don't ask me for one. But all these things I had to be taught, all these things I had to learn. From other people. I had to learn from books. I had to learn from resources out there in the world. I didn't have this expectation of myself to figure out on my own. All right? And also when I was learning all these things, these weren't like liver or life or death decisions. These weren't life or death situations. Like, sure, I needed to pass the test, but it didn't impact whether I was going to be able to eat that month. Right? You starting a business is impacting whether you can pay your mortgage, whether you can buy groceries, whether you can cover your utilities. You need to be able to make money. It is heartbreaking when I see new business owners just wanting, wanting so badly to figure it out on their own. Right. Wanting to do it on the cheap, wanting to just be able to test and throw spaghetti at the wall and all the things. And what ultimately happens more often than not is the spaghetti doesn't stick. There are too many tests. A lot of them fail. Most of them fail. And because they don't know any better, they don't know what they don't know, they're not able to course correct. Right. So what happens? They have to quit and they have to go back to their 9 to 5, or if they never left their 9 to 5, they have to stay with their 9 to 5. And there was a reason they wanted to break away. There was a reason they wanted to get away from working their corporate job. And so my, my, my request of you this evening is if you are worried about investing in yourself, if you do not see yourself as the smart risk, then who the fuck is? If you're not a smart risk, if you're not a good investment, then who is? Last night in my life, I talked about Jay Z and how, you know, he has all these posters all over his house about him. Right. And his belief system is that you have to be your number one biggest fan. Yes. And you also have to be your number one biggest believer. You have to believe in yourself. You have to believe that you can do this. You have to believe in it so much that you are willing to set yourself up for, for success. Without that, like, you're not going to have a business. And more often than not, you're going to run through a whole chunk of your savings trying to make this happen. I've seen it so many times that people spend too much money on marketing services, virtual assistants, bookkeepers, like all these different business services that they think, oh, cool, well, once I invest in this and then have this part of my business taken care of by someone else. My business will be great, but usually not all the time. But usually it's way too early for those services to actually do anything for your business and it ends up just being a massive waste of money. And I'm not saying this from a judgmental place. I've been there, I've done that. It sucks. Because when you don't bet on yourself, when you see yourself as massive risk and you're not willing to take that risk on yourself, it's easy to convince yourself to trust other people. It's easy to see other people as a smart risk. But here's what I know about you. And I don't even know who's watching right now, but I know this about you. You are a good risk. You are a good investment. If anyone is going to make this business happen, it's going to be you. All right? You are not expected to know anything that you have never learned before now. All right? And there is help out there. There are so many different resources and humans who can show you the ropes, who can guide you. You know, I work in a very narrow field. If you are starting a service based business, meaning like a legal practice, if you're doing coaching, consulting, copywriting, online marketing, I'm your girl. Anything else? There are a gazillion different coaches out there. I'm happy to help you find one. You know, if you want to start a restaurant, if you want to do a retail store, if you want to do a whole slew of other things, you can absolutely find the right support for that. But what I don't want to happen is you're too afraid to invest in yourself because you don't trust yourself. You know, there are a lot of ways we don't trust ourselves, right? Like, let me show you how I do not trust myself. So this is my plan for the week, right? These are all the things that I need to do on here. It's workout every single day. So there was an extra yesterday. I did work out yesterday. There's no X through today, okay? There is no X and it is almost 8pm There will not be an X through the workout for today. All right? I have proven to myself time and time again that I cannot be trusted to stick to my own workout plan, right? So I break trust with myself all the time on something that really does matter to me, right? I want to be healthy, I want to be hot, I want to, you know, be fit and I want to like, you know, be able to do all the things and live for A really long time. And yet I break my, my own trust all the time. Right? The key here is that you have to know, like, what is that line? Okay? Because every single day in your business like this, this plan that I've set up for my workouts is like, if I were perfect, if every single day worked perfectly, and if I were perfect, you know, this would be the plan that I could absolutely follow. A good creature coach or business strategist will not set up your business with a plan like that that's designed to fail. All right? Like, we all have plans like that where we've shown ourselves time and time again that we just can't stick to them. Like we can't be trusted to stick to our own fucking plan. And I totally understand it when you're thinking about investing in your business and investing in yourself, why it's so scary if that is who you think you're investing in. But the beauty of finding someone who can guide you, who can help you create a strategy that works for you, is they're going to factor in that you're not going to do it every single day. They're going to factor in that you're not going to be 100% every single day, that you're going to have off days, that you're going to be tired, that you're going to get sick occasionally. The job of any good business coach or business strategist is to help you design a business that works for you, okay? With whatever trust level you have in yourself, all right? You don't have to figure all that out on your own, all right? It's kind of like hiring a personal trainer, which I should honestly just do. Probably it would make my life a whole lot easier and I would be able to stop hating on myself for not sticking to my own plan. Anyway, if you are thinking you want to start a business and in the services, like you want to start a intellectual service based business, consulting, coaching, legal services, copywriting, online marketing. I have a link in the, in the notes. If you're on Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube or Twitter, go ahead and book a call with me, a generate income strategy call. And we will talk about what your big dreams are, what your fears are, what, what is getting in the way of you building this on your own. If it's a fit, then we will talk about different ways to work together. Now, if you are not trying to start that business, if you're trying to start like a retail business or restaurants or something, maybe you're in, in real estate like Sandy is, then I want you to DM me and I will help you find the right support for you, okay? I will help you vet people because here's what I don't want to happen. I don't want you to set yourself up to fail. Right. I don't want you joining the people who go skydiving with their bed sheet tied together. Okay? It's not effective. We're not doing that. No. Also, if you're watching this on Instagram, then I'm going to put that link in my bio. So just go up to my bio and it's there. Anyway, Justin and Sandy, I hope this is super helpful to you guys. Thank you for joining. And I am going to go to bed. I am tired anyway. I am Katie McManus, Business Strategist, Money mindset coach. Hope you have an amazing night and thank you for joining. Bye.