154. What $1M in Revenue Actually Means to Me

Welcome. I am marketing expert and business coach Melissa Kellogg Lueck. And this is the Doing Business Like a Woman podcast where we are exploring and teaching you how women are reinventing the way business is done and money is made to help you create greater impact and financial freedom one business at a time. Hello friends. How's it going? Welcome. I am excited to be back with you today and I'm nervous. I'm just feeling that nervousness in my body and I'm calling it out because I have a big some big stuff to talk with you about today and share with you and I'm really excited about it. So maybe I'm nerve sided as we say. I'm nervous and excited and I've just been thinking about today and what I want to share with you and it's a big deal to me. And so here we are, let's jump right in. In case we don't know each other, my name is Melissa Kellogg Luick and I'm a marketing coach for women entrepreneurs and I absolutely am passionate about helping women to own their value, see their worth and be able to communicate that out to the world as their business and be able to have an impact and make money from it. So that's the work that I love doing. So here we are. How's it been so far? I feel like I was shot out of a cannon. Everything got started very quickly at the beginning of the week and yeah, we are all in and I'm excited and so many exciting things happening and I hope you are as well. How are you feeling about your year? What I want to talk to you about today might not sound sound like it's related to marketing but I'm going to bring it all back around by the end. So bear with me. What I want to talk about today and if you know me, how important celebration is to me and what I want to talk to you about is celebration and why it's so important and tell you my story of celebration and why I wanted to celebrate with you today. I want to tell you more about what's coming up and what you can expect in 2026. So I don't know if you have this problem at all or have experienced this in the past, but I talk to a lot of women that also can relate so maybe you can as well. But celebration is hard for me. Right? I am a person, I'm an action taker and when there's something to celebrate, I'm like, oh great, it happened. I did it. Let's keep going. Let's what's the next thing. And so it's been something that I have worked on, had to intentionally work on, because what we celebrate, what we focus on, we create more of, right? And so I find my mind goes very easily to all the things that are not going right or not working or whatever. I have no problem going there. But the things that are working and the celebrations that are happening, those are just as important. And it's important and you know, it comes back to your marketing. I'm gonna bring that back to your marketing a little bit. It's important because what we focus on, we create more of, right? So when we're celebrating, then we're going to create more of what we're celebrating, right? We're going to create that more accomplishment, more fulfillment, more satisfaction. And that is a much greater place to be attracting clients and business and marketing and going out into the world from. It's a great place, right? So I'm just going to put that out there. But celebration can be hard for you. It feels a little awkward sometimes. But I'm going to celebrate with you today and be the example of celebration. Because when I realized the accomplishment that I'm going to share with you today, immediately the thoughts came up for me that it's not a big deal. There's so many others that have done much bigger things much faster and I don't need to share this. Like I'm just going to keep it to myself. But then. And I'm going to get emotional. Dang it. Then I began to share it with some clients and I shared it in a mastermind that I'm part of. And I began to think about what me of 20 years ago would think about this accomplishment and what she would say if she knew. And then I knew I had to share it because I knew she would say, girl, you gotta celebrate the out of this. That's why I'm here with you today, to celebrate with you and to also invite you to celebrate all the wins in your business, in your life. And I want to challenge you to also think of an accomplishment that you want to celebrate and so we can celebrate together. Okay, here it goes. So what I'm here to celebrate with you today is that I have been in business for 20 years, running the same business as an entrepreneur, going on 21. And I just realized when I closed my books at the end of 2025, that as of the end of 2025, an all time revenue in my business, I have made $1,010,850 over the life of my business. And I'm celebrating that milestone. And why do I want to celebrate it? Because what I know for sure is that when we celebrate, we create more of what we're celebrating, what we're focusing on. And I want to create another million, and I want to create it faster. And not for the sake of the money, but for the sake of what the money means to me. Although, yes, I'm in business to make money, we're in business as entrepreneurs to make money. But what it represents to me is 20 years of helping entrepreneurs and helping small businesses market, grow and make money and make an impact and do it simply and create greater freedom for themselves, right? As a coach, it represents helping women entrepreneurs see how valuable they are and their work is and then communicate that out to the world in their marketing. The milestone also represents to me a million different lessons I've learned all along the way and represents the possibility of creating the life and the work that I wanted, Especially after living through 911 in New York. I made a decision after seeing so many people perish that I was going to devote my life to living my life to the fullest because they never got to have that chance after that day. And this milestone for me represents countless failures and successes and heartbreaks and hopes that's all worthy of experiencing and going through over the last 20 years. Because of what I want to share with you now, all of the experience and every single one of those dollars that I earned and that I will continue to earn is in service of you, right? To help you, as a woman entrepreneur, have a more enjoyable, smoother, faster path to your first million, if that's your goal or whatever your goal is. And that's why I'm celebrating this journey. And that's why I want to share this journey with you. Because I want to give it all back to you in the form of all the lessons that I've learned all along the way. So the next part of my big news is that this year on this podcast, I'm going to be sharing my top 20 lessons with you that will become your playbook. I'll be offering never before told stories from my journey all along the way, as well as some really practical steps and takeaways and help you develop the skills to compress your time and difficulty to making money and having the impact in the business that you want to have. Why I wanted to share this and why I want to do this series of podcast episodes over the course of this year is for us. I call us regular people. We're Regular people doing extraordinary things, but we're regular people with regular lives. And I know that if I can do this, you can do this, too. And if you can learn from everything I've experienced, then you're going to do it faster and easier and hopefully have way more fun. I want to do this because I am not a get rich quick story. I am not an overnight sensation. I am not some outlier or extraordinary tale of wealth, right? I'm a regular person, just like many of you. I have built my business and made over a million dollars day by day, one foot in front of the other, probably much like you are, having a life, a family, relationships that I want to have also. And my hope is that this inspires you to stay in the game, to not give up, to learn some stuff from me, so it makes your journey easier and more enjoyable. And a lot of the stories that I see in the, in books and podcasts and things that I have experienced have all been a lot of extraordinary stories of massive growth and massive wealth in a very short time. And although I've enjoyed all of those, and I still will, I. I always felt like I couldn't relate a lot to those types of stories because a lot of times those folks didn't have lives like mine, right? They didn't have the responsibilities and the roles and the relationship. The things that I have, I think the power. You know what's so powerful for me and what I think about a lot is what would me of 20 years ago, what did she. What were the stories that she needed to hear, the lessons that I could tell her to really encourage and inspire her to keep going. Because this journey of entrepreneurship, as you all know, is. It's not an easy one, right? But it is the most fulfilling, most challenging, most growth inspiring journey I have ever been on. I think entrepreneurship and parenthood are both so challenging. When we rise to that challenge, they bring out the best in us, right? And I want to show, through this podcast, through these lessons that I'm going to share with you and all the stories, I want to show that even if you have all of these circumstances in your life that you think might keep you from achieving your dreams, I want to encourage you that they don't have to. They can go along with you, right? And I've had a lot of challenges and circumstances and crazy things happen and people say things or support from people that. Or lack of support from people that I really wanted to have support from, people telling me I'm crazy, all those things, right? So through the Lessons and through the stories, I want to just inspire you, encourage you, and also teach you what I've learned to help hopefully make your journey just that much more sweet. That's what I wanted to share today. And I know I wanted to bring this all back around to marketing. And it all has to do with celebration. You can probably feel my discomfort with celebration and having being a center of attention, having focus on me because it's something that is not my nature, but what I want to encourage and teach you as you're watching me go through this, that celebration is so important because of energetically what it creates as entrepreneurs, excuse me, we are problem solvers, right? We're great at solving problems and which means we're also really great at seeing problems, right? And yes, that can be super valuable and very helpful. But also I think for me at least, it can lead to lots of focus on all the things that are going wrong. And in order for us to continually be able to create the energy and the enthusiasm to build our business, to believe in things and go out and talk about them and bring people in effectively through our marketing, we have to be able to celebrate and shift into that positivity and see the potential, see the possibility, and really be able to believe in that hard, harder than everybody else around us. Because oftentimes, and what I have seen from much of my journey is that most of the time people, other people around you, people you love and trust, people that you work with, they are often not going to see. You have to have that inner strength and that inner fortitude and have your own back so hard that they can think and say and believe whatever they want about you and your business and the work that you're doing. You know, the power of the work that you're doing, you can see the future of the work that you're doing and what it's going to create in the world. So that really is the power of celebrating and being able to celebrate everything. I remember my coach once saying, you gotta literally celebrate every dollar that comes in. Because so often we make money and we're like, oh, that's great, but I want to make more, I want to make more, I want to make more. And so were dismissing what we've already made. And you can see today, my tendency was to dismiss this accomplishment, but I knew that I had to overcome that by leaning in and celebrating it anyway. So I want to just encourage you to experience the power of celebration in your business, in your life, and any accomplishment, any dollar that comes in, any penny that Comes in, right? Let's celebrate all of it. Let's feel that gratitude. Because gratitude and celebration is all at such a higher plane, vibrates at a higher level, right. And at a much more attractive level. And when we do that, we attract opportunities, people to us because they want to be part of that. We all want to be part of something that's growing, something that's positive, something that is elevating. Right. And I love celebrating all the money that comes in. But also one of the things that I do that I'll share with you, here's a tip, a skill, is that every single day, I end the day, the majority of days, not every single day. I'm not perfect by any means, but as many days, more days than not. And I love this. I've gotten to love this is. I will make note and actually I make it in my phone of three wins every day. I journal three wins from every single day. Some days they're fabulous wins. Oh, I just found out all time revenues over a million dollars. That's a fabulous win. Some days the wins are like I breathed today, I didn't die. Right. But they're always wins, always celebrations that you can find in your days. I really encourage you to to keep those front of mind and go back and look at them. I love to go back on a weekly basis when I evaluate my week and go back and look at my wins because oftentimes we'll forget. I'll go back and it's only been five days at the most. Right. I go back on Friday and look at my wins from Monday and I'll have forgotten some of them. Oh, that's amazing. I really just encourage you to play with that spirit of celebration. It feels so much better, you guys. Yes, there's tough things happening. Yes, we'll be having failures and difficulties and problems in our business. And there are also things to celebrate. And if the celebrations and the positivity is what fuels you and lifts you up and energizes you, lean into that. It doesn't mean you ignore the other things, but it means you gain energy and don't let the other things drag you down. This is the kind of support that I love to give my clients to help you as women entrepreneurs grow, really own your value and then go and communicate that out into the world through great marketing. And so if that is support that you are interested in that you would like to talk with me about, I would be happy to chat with you. You're welcome to Visit my website, melissamkellog.com. and there is a link right at the top of the homepage to book a call. And I invite you to book a call. And I would love to help you strategize and how you want to grow your business yourself this year in 2026. And like I always say to my clients, entrepreneurship is just as much about personal growth as it is about business growth. Right? It's a huge personal growth journey. And as entrepreneurs, that's. That's what we're walking into, whether we ask for it or not, right? And so thank you so much for being with me today to celebrate. I really appreciate all of you. Thank you all so much for being here and for being part of this. And please tune in next week. Throughout this year, I'm going to be sharing stories and lessons with you that have come out of those stories, as well as some real tangible takeaways and skills. So, yeah, I'm just going to be teaching what I've learned over this last 20 years to really help you in your journey, to make it more enjoyable, because that's really what we're in this for, right? And to help you really express and become the best version of yourself on this entrepreneurial journey, because it has that potential to really call you to that growth of. Of understanding your calling and the work that you're meant to do in the world. And I believe in you. I believe the work that you're doing in the world is amazing. And I'm so glad that you have the courage to start a business and offer it to the world. And whatever I can do to support you in being successful in that, I am here. I am all here for it. I also would love this podcast to be a conversation between us. So if there's challenges that you are experiencing that you would like to hear me talk about and tell stories about, because I'm telling you, my friends, there's probably nothing that you're experiencing or challenge that you're facing that either I or one of my clients has not been through. So I have stories for days, and I'm happy to share any and all of those. So if there's anything you would. Any topic or subject you would like me to address. And of course, we'll be bringing it all back to marketing and helping you to really grow in your confidence and in your courage to really own your value, your worth and get out there in the world as a business. This. And offer it to the world. This is fabulous. Thank you so much for being here. I will definitely see you right back here. Again next week for another episode. All right, I'll see you then. Thank you. Love you guys. Bye. Hey, if you like this podcast, I want to invite you to become part of my community by signing up for my Friday Selly. The link is in the show notes each Friday. Today, I'm going to deliver to your inbox my weekly celebration as well as my thoughts on the latest in business and marketing. I want to keep you in the know about my upcoming events, free trainings, book clubs, all the fun things, even some free gifts. And of course, I'm going to let you know about these new podcast episodes. I'll see you there.