Tips to build your startup from two 7-figure business owners

After 15 years combined that Tim and I have spent in business, we thought we'd share some advice that we think that startup business owners in 2024 should know.

If you want to be just above broke forever, then, you know, stay in your career. That's fine.

When we say build a business for your customer and not for you, I think people are immediately going to be like you. No one wants to work with a company whose mission statement is, I got into business so I could support myself and make bank.

What has been your biggest fuck up in business so we can avoid it and learn from.

Foreign.

Welcome to the Success School podcast. Today we're talking about startup advice. I wish I knew. Welcome back, Steph. We are on another version of our podcast studio today, guys, so if you're watching on YouTube, let us know what you think. The visuals are getting pretty cool now. Steph and I are slowly merging closer and closer together. Next episode we might be on top of each other. So if you're watching YouTube, we might be lying in a sandwich position. Steph, how you feeling?

Sandwich position. I love today's topic. It actually came up because we were at a restaurant the other day just talking about how we're launching a new program which is called Startup School. And just like some of the things we see from startups now and how startups are now versus, like when we, when we started and we were like, there's so much stuff that we wish we knew now, like that we wish you knew then, that we know now. And so we're really excited to go into this, but before we do, we're going to get into some personal updates.

Yeah, a couple of personal updates, guys. And also, big thanks to everyone that's messaged us about the podcast. We love your feedback, guys. So if you have something to say, maybe nice, please send us a DM on Instagram. Especially me. I really appreciate the DMs. Steph gets them all the time, so maybe not so much for her. All right, guys, so my personal update is I had a call with my mindset coach last week and I was like, look, man, I'm feeling a little bit of the O word, okay? And I won't say what the O word is, but you can probably assume what that is.

It's orgasm.

It. Orgasm. Yep. It issues with an M. So. Orgasm, yes, that could be. It's not orgasm, by the way. Anyway, I think I might be burning out. And he said to me, well, what would happen if you were working out seven days a week, not taking a rest day and doing three hour sessions. And I said, yeah, you'd get injured and you fuck up and you'd burn out. And he was like, what would happen if you treat your business the exact same? And I was like, damn, kick me in the face, boy. And say, boy, that's probably the wrong context for that, but kick me in the face. And I just realized I'd been working way too much. So Steph and I, we do promote hustle, and we are the hustle people. Maybe in the small business entrepreneurship world, you know, getting results does come by hustle, but you also need to take time off. It's a slippery slope when you take too much time off, because a lot of people fall into that trap and they're like, maybe I'll just take today off and then the next day and the next day and the next day and end up getting nothing done. But if you're someone like me that works seven days a week and you're feeling a little bit of the O word and you might be burning out, then maybe it's time to take your foot off the gas a little bit.

If you're new around here. The O word, just to really clear, it's overwhelm. I just thought that I would clarify what that actually was if you. If this is the first episode that you were tuning into. We don't believe in the word overwhelm. We. We hate it. We avoid it at costs. And so that is why he is not saying it. So my personal update, I've actually got some slides in front of me. My personal update that literally says hot tub, baby. We are so excited because we actually bought a hot tub and it's getting delivered this week, which is so freaking cool. Tim was like, what do you have for your birthday? And I was like, literally nothing. He was like, should we get a hot tub? And I was like, yeah, but that's actually.

That's as much thought as we put. Yeah.

It's interesting, though, because that is actually a slight lie. And so I want to talk you through what actually happens. So we were like, we would love a hot tub. And then we just kept delaying the purchase of said hot tub because we were like, we kind of just didn't feel like we'd earned it or. I don't know, there was some sort of feeling.

The bank account said we'd earned it.

Our bank account was definitely like, you could go ahead, buy the hot tub, pay cash. It's all good, Go crazy. But Tim and I have this almost like, I think it's Like a delayed gratification potentially where we like, we're like, okay, once we hit this, then we can have X. And it was so crazy because, like, it was literally like, we know that every single day we would use the hot tub. We don't know every single day in the afternoon we would sit down and we would debrief in the hot tub and we'd have really good connection and obviously there'd be no phones. And so we'd be really present and really together. And we knew that it would impact our lives in a really beautiful and very positive way. Like, if you are on holiday with me and Tim, you'll find us in the hot tub every single time. And so we knew it would impact our lives in a really positive way. But the thing was that we were not allowing ourselves to actually do it. And so, you know, we kind of had a chat together. And also Tim's life coach was kind of like, bro, like, what if you died tomorrow? You never had the hot tub. Like, just get the friggin hot tub. It's not like you can't afford it. So we bought a hot tub. It gets delivered next week. You will see many, many photos of hot tubs in the coming weeks on social media. We're really excited.

You think Steph is thotty now on her stories. You wait till we get. You wait till we get a hot tub. It's going to be felt.

You guys tell us, Tim, that I'm.

Not thotty at all up in. All right, guys, my lesson of the week. It's all about improving the quality of your presentations and videos. Depends where you're at in the business journey. Maybe you're just on Zoom and using webcam for now. We have actively tried to increase the quality of what we do. So we found this thing called an Elgato Stream deck. Essentially it looks like a big keypad, but you can program each of the buttons to do stuff. Okay. And what I mean by doing stuff is you can press a button and it switches cameras. If you're using multiple cameras, can switch screens. You can also sync all the buttons to do multiple things. So if you're running a podcast setup, you can set all the buttons up to press one and then it starts recording on multiple programs at the same time. Pretty fucking sweet. And then when we are presenting on Zoom like we do in our coaching program, Success school and startup school coming up, wink, wink. If you guys want to get more information on that set as a dm, but it essentially just allows you to really switch between Screens, buttons very quickly so you can increase the quality quality of your presentation. I didn't know this thing existed and now have found it. I don't know how we've been living without it previously. It's so cool. But yeah, upgrades are coming in terms of presentations, video quality, podcast, all the. I think if you're not moving forward and trying to make things better, you're probably going to be going backwards.

Yeah, totally. And it's one of those things where guys I know we get a lot of dms, a lot of questions about our podcast setup. So we actually will record a YouTube pretty soon on just everything we use, how it's set up, how it looks behind the scenes. If you would love that from us, please send us a message. Tell us yes, you would love to see that because I reckon I get DMS about it every single day at this point. So thank you for your interest. My lesson of the week, this actually you showed me this, but I thought it was profound and it actually blew my mind. Did you know that the average wage that someone needs to earn to own a house in Perth is 140k per year? Like to have a mortgage in Perth is 140k per year and in 6 Sydney it's $243,000 to. You'd have to earn that much money to be able to afford a mortgage in these locations. And that blew my mind honestly, because most people aren't earning that. So like you'd have to definitely have a dual income. And then even then, you know, even if you were both earning 70 or 80k a year, like most of your income would be going to mortgage, like. And that's just blows my mind that we're living in a world now where yeah, the cost of living has far out is far outweighing the actual earning capacity for people who work in day jobs. And then it really comes as no surprise to me that more people are starting up businesses because you will need a secondary stream of income. You know, I know a lot of people who also drive Uber as well as having their day job and things like that. And so I think side hustle, I think we're going to see a real big emergence. We already are, but I actually think it's going to be even more so we're going to see more and more side hustles emerging and that's why we wanted to record this podcast. So for anybody here who is side hustling and anybody here who's maybe been in business a few years, I think you're going to find this super valuable. But especially if you're in the startup phase right now, guys, or if you're thinking about getting into business. Yeah, this is going to be a phenomenal episode for you guys.

I just have something to say on that note, guys. The cost of living is only going to get more and more and more and more and more and it's going to outpace how much you earn. If you have a job, okay, job actually stands for just above broke. Okay? So if you want to be just above broke forever, then, you know, stay in your career, that's fine. Some people have good careers. But you know, you can stick your head in the sand. You can say, oh, why me? And complain and the government and all the tax and all the. Or you can get ahead of this and put, you know, the right foot forward every single day in your business and you can create the life that you want. Like, you do have the choice around this, guys. It is not impossible to create a high paying business or career. You just need to follow the steps and, and people that have done that before you. And if you need help, reach out to Steph and I. We would love to help you guys with that. So if you're on YouTube, guys, thanks for watching. Hit that subscribe button. We're up to 90 something subscribers now. We're fucking killing it on YouTube, obviously. 90 something subscribers. Let's go.

Hi, miss.

All right, Steph, what are we talking about today?

Today we are talking about the startup advice that we wish we knew. Okay. We were, like I said, we're sitting in a cafe last week reflecting on how crazy the startup world is now compared to when we started. No one was really in business when we got into business, like that was kind of like naughty. I feel like everybody here has a side hustle these days that everyone's talking about it. Everyone knows that. I have people reaching out to me from primary school being like, hey, Steph, I've heard that like having a secondary business is like a really good way to make money. And like people like, it's like people are hearing that it's becoming more and more mainstream. But when we had our side hustle so when we got into business, no one was really doing it. We had to figure it all out. The messy way, let me tell you that messy way is trial and fail, try and fail, try and fail over and over again. And after 15 years combined that Tim and I have spent in business, we thought we shared some advice that we think that startup business owners in 2024 should know. So Tim, let's dive into point one.

All right, so the first one is, guys, build credibility in your market. So I think a big mistake we see and we've seen with our clients is they, they are like, cool, I want to start a coaching program, I want to do a service and I want to do X. And then they go in and they charge what everyone else is charging in their niche. Problem is they have no reps and they have no runs on the board, they have no experience and they have no social proof. So then you're going in and you're getting compared against someone who's been doing this thing a long time and you're getting absolutely nowhere. So, you know, our advice is always keep prices low when you start so you can get clients, you can get social proof, you can get feedback, you can improve your service offering and then build credibility and demand. Okay? So the pricing from there can increase slowly over time rather than going in and charging what everyone else is charging. And then I think like, what comes up here is people have this mindset, well, I'm worth more or, well, like I deserve to be charging X or I want to make $150 an hour. And I hate to break it to you, but that's completely incorrect because you're just getting started. No one wants to pay someone above market when they're just getting started. They have literally no proof. You don't even know if it works. And so many people have been burned in business these days by people who say one thing and they can not deliver.

And I'll just on that really quickly, guys, like, it's not that you're not worth it. First of all, detach your worth from your business cost and how much you charge. Because at the end of the day, I know people who have very, very, very successful product based businesses that charge 30 to $60 per item of a product that means nothing about their personal wealth or their personal worth. Right? So that first of all. And second of all, you will get to the price you want to get to. But like, we all had to start. If you listen to anybody, every single entrepreneur that has been anywhere will tell you they started like this. They started just charging the bare minimum. They started just, you know, just trying to get a client to say yes. Now I want to just tell a little anecdote, a very, very quick story here about a client in our mastermind. I think it's just a really beautiful story and something that really has been so profoundly awesome for her and for everyone around her to Witness. We have a client called Anne, and she has been in the coaching world for a little while now, and she came in and she was charging kind of, you know, on par with what everyone else was charging. But the problem was that she hadn't built an audience, so she didn't have anybody, you know, to sell to effectively. So she had to go out and kind of build that audience. She also hadn't built the confidence yet because even though she knew she was really good at what she did, it's very, very different to have to actually go out and get clients and post on social media and, you know, do talking to camera video and do sales decks and put offers together. And all of those things are very confronting when you first get started. And so she had, you know, she didn't really have the confidence to actually go out there and get clients. She didn't. She was charging what everyone else was charging, and she didn't really have an audience to sell to. And this is the. The three main things that we see kind of go wrong. And it's. It's not really for us to tell her to charge less, because at the end of the day, like, if a client comes to us and they say they want to charge a million dollars, we'll be like, sequel, cool.

Good for you.

100%. We'll help you do that. Like, we're not here to say that you have to charge less, but over time, what we saw happen to Anne was that, you know, she was finding really hard to get clients. She, you know, couldn't. Every time she did get a client, it was like she was just desperate to get the next one. But it was really, really hard for her to do so. And because it was so difficult for her to land clients, and all she wanted to do was just coach. Like, all she wanted to do was coach. Because it was so hard for her to get clients, it started to impact her confidence even more and more. And so she started to, you know, get really heady. Like, she would take a really long time to write social media posts, and she was just getting really down on herself, really exhausted, and she was like, I don't know if I really want to do this. And it was all feeling really hopeless. I said to her, look, and do you just want to get people in the door and just help them? Like, wouldn't just be nice to help. She was, honestly, I'd probably help. She was like, I'd help someone for free at this point. Like, to be completely honest with you, I was like, sweet. Have your Prices go out to market, like, advertise that and just get people and just help them. Just. Just do the thing that you actually want to do because you just want to fucking do it. And she went out and she hopped a price and she locked in five clients straight away. Since then, she's had four more referrals from those clients. So she's now got nine clients because she just made that. And now she's like. Because she's got demand, now she can start to look at, okay, I need to start increasing prices. And that's all happened with the period of six months. With the six months prior, she only got one client. So, guys, and that momentum, the confidence, like, how is she? She's showing up. She's doing real. She's like completely, like, turned around. Her energy, her effort. Everyone who's witnessed her in the Mastermind has been like, whoa. And we're loving the way that you are doing things. The way they're showing up. She's trying new things because she's confident, because she's getting the runs, because her clients are getting results, because they're referring people to her. That feels way better than, yeah, holding your worth. And I put that in inverted commas. But also then not getting any clients, that feels like shit. And so sometimes, guys, like, when you're first getting started, like, I charge $50 for my first business coaching session. Tim was doing $1 PT. Like, we're not saying that you have to, but what we're saying is it definitely makes it a lot easier to get clients. And the fastest way to grow when you start up a business is to actually grow by word of mouth, 100%.

Just on that point, guys, I told this story before on a podcast. I moved to America. I was a strength coach at the University of Arizona. And when I came back to Perth, I had zero clients. So I moved back to a city I haven't been in for a year. Yes, I had a network, but how do I get people? I have a crazy offer. So what I did is I was doing $1 PT sessions. I got 50 clients in my first four weeks. Then I transferred them into a gym, and then I built a seven figure gym. Okay, it's not because I wasn't worth more money or insert X, Y, Z other bullshit. I wanted to show people what I could actually do, therefore they were sold on the value. And then I built a seven figure gym from that. Okay, $1pt sessions. Humble beginnings. You don't have to do that, guys. But, like, if I were you and you're sitting around twiddling your fingers, hoping for your next client. Can you come up with a better offer?

Totally. So point number two is build an audience. So I kind of touched on this with my story with Ann. At the end of the day, you need someone to sell to. It's really, really hard when you first get started. Like I first got started, I didn't have an audience. So my first ever business that I ran, I didn't have an audience. I basically had to rely on friends to buy my stuff for the first couple of, you know, workshops that I ran. And then I remember Tim will be able to remember this moment as well because it was such a big deal for me. I remember the first time that somebody who wasn't a friend bought a ticket to one of my workshops and I said to Tim, I was like, I had my first stranger purchase and it was like the biggest deal for me because it meant that we had started reaching new people, that other people had seen what we were doing. They were trusting that. It looked like they trusted us enough to actually buy a ticket. These tickets were well and truly underpriced. I was making absolutely no profit. I was just wanted to just do it. I just wanted to do it because I wanted to do it and see if it would work. And so you have to build an audience. And when you first get started in business, this is one of the hardest parts. Because you create an offer, you put yourself out there. It's so uncomfortable when you first get started to put yourself out there and then no one buys. Like, that's normal. Like, this is what happens in startup entrepreneurship. Like, you're not broken, it's just part of the, the process. And so if you are not in business, if you're listening to this podcast and you're thinking about starting a business or you're on the cusp of like, you know, building one, please build an audience from day one. Like start just like creating content on social media, start following people, talk about you start talking about your life. Like maybe a blog. Like, you know, one of our good friends and clients, Steph Pace, you know, she just started blogging about her motherhood experience and now has a almost eight figure business doing that. So it's like, it's crazy how much people are dying to connect with you. So just start building an audience, going to networking events. Even if you don't have a business yet, put yourself out there, start meeting people. I pretty much built all of my first lot of audience purely on networking. Um, but there's so many ways that you can do this. So if you're not in business yet, please start on building an audience. Now. If you're in business on re already, you have to have a focus every single day, week and month on building an audience, on finding new eyeballs, on getting in front of other people's audiences. That has to be a priority for you. The bigger that your audience is, the easier it is for you to make money. Okay? And we're not saying that you need hundreds of thousands of followers because like we built a seven figure business. We have like 30,000 followers between us. Like, it's not like we're not saying you have to have followers and followers don't equal money. Money. That's not the case. But you do need an audience. And I would say we have both have really highly engaged, highly active, really good ideal audiences because we spent time curating and building that.

Okay, guys, I'll just say on that point, Steph and I both have a personal brand. I could say we could probably sell just about anything on our personal brand now because we have built the brand and we're going to have that forever. One of the best things you can ever do in business is build a personal brand or build a brand online. Okay? Then you can, if you change direction, you transition, whatever it is, you can always use that brand. And that's why I love a personal brand versus a business page online, because you can change direction so easily. Whereas like a business page, you just locked into that one thing that you started with your audience can carry with you. Steph, like, how do people build an audience?

Yeah, we spoke about this in episodes before, so I'm going to touch on it very lightly and then I'd highly recommend going and having a listen back. But one thing that, like, for me personally, when I first got started in business and I was literally no one knew who I was, I had a handful of friends who would buy from me and I was very, very grateful for that. But the way that I built my networks at the very beginning was networking. So I went to, in Perth, there's a beautiful community called Fusion Bizco and I used to go to their events and I was so nervous, my hands would sweat. I freak out. I remember coming home from my first networking event, I got into bed with Tim and I like cried because I was like so uncomfortable. I felt like such like failure and a fraud.

Worst sexy time ever after that.

And then I woke up the next morning and I remember I had an inquiry very the very next morning because Someone at that event had told their friend that they met someone who they thought would be really great for them, like we could host their bridal party. And that was like a game changer for me. I realized I was like, I just need to spend as much time as I can talking to people. Because it wasn't the networks that I made there that bought from me necessarily, although of course they did eventually, but it was their networks. Like they would refer me to other people. I got so many opportunities at those events to meet people who had already spent time building audiences, who would tag me in groups, who would refer their friends to me. It just meant that I had so much more reach than I could on my own. So for me, networking, you also networked. You went to a BNI for quite a while as well.

Had B and I for quite a while. Yeah, always like out and about networking, getting referrals, like especially in the gym, because you're seeing people so often every day you're seeing like 100, 200 people. It's. It's networking in itself and people tell their friends about what you do. So I just want to touch on a point here. We've got big audience versus engaged audience. So, you know, from what I have seen, and this is my view of the world, we have someone that has a big audience. Maybe it's around the way they look. And then they are promoting the way they look online, on TikTok, on Instagram or whatever it is, and they have a massive audience because people are drawn into the way they look. And then you've got an engaged audience and someone like a micro influencer and they're sharing their life, they're sharing their story, they're sharing about their business and they've got like a lot of brand rep in a small amount of niche. I could probably guarantee you that over time the person in the micro influence influencer is going to win because they're known for a thing, not what they look like. Okay. The problem with building a brand with what you look like is your looks aren't going to last forever. And then at that point you're not going to be popular anymore. Therefore, it's very hard to sell things. Step. Any, any points on that?

On that? I just would say like, you know, building a personal brand. The one thing that I see go wrong with building a personal brand is it works with. It's worked really well for Tim and I because ever since I've had a personal brand, we've talked about business.

Yeah.

And even for you, even though you used to do fitness, you would share because your fitness was always in business. Yeah, you would still share business content. And fitness and business are very closely linked in any case because it refines. It's like literally the most similar thing you could possibly ever do. And so a lot of the lessons that Tim learned about lifting are also completely applicable in business. And so we have found like, because we are always talking about the same thing where personal brands go wrong is they flip flop. So one day they're speaking about like spirituality and the next week they're speaking about business and then the next week they're speaking about, then you, you know, MLM product. And then the week after that it's water filtration. And the week after that they're back to like dance class. And then, you know, it's just like this thing that's like this revolving like your audience. If the key to a personal band is brand is building trust and so pick the thing like Tim and I always going to talk about growth pretty much is regardless it could be growth and success. It's always showing what we're talking about and showing and showcasing that. And so whether that's business or whether that's fitness or whether that it's like going after what you want and hitting it, making it happen. Like they're the things that the constant themes that we will talk about. But ever since I've had a personal brand, I've talked about business in some way, shape or form. And so over the last five years I've built up an incredibly niche audience of people who love to hear about that. And so my advice to you is if you're building a personal brand, find the thing that you know you're going to be passionate about forever and talk about that. Try not to pigeonhole deep into the thing that you're into right now.

For sure, this next one is great and I'll let you kick us off, Steph. But the point is build a business for your customers and not for you. And this is something we see go wrong all the time.

So when we say build a business for your customer and not for you, I think people are immediately going to be like you. Yeah, but like I got into business because I wanted time, freedom, it's okay. Like think about it would like, no one wants to work with a company whose mission statement is I got into business so I could support myself and make bank. Yeah, like that's. No one's gonna go work with that company. We want to work with companies who want to help people Right. We want to work with companies who's. Whose customer is at the forefront of everything that they do and every decision they make, not who's, you know, CEO is manipulated the bottom line so they can earn more money that never feels good. Right? So yes, you do need a business that suits your lifestyle, and yes, you can build a business that suits your lifestyle. You can have both financial freedom, lifestyle freedom, and also your offer should be designed around getting a result for your clients. Because where we see these go wrong is that people just go, oh, I have this skill and I want to make money, right? And so they're like, I will just use this skill to make all the money that I need to make so that I can just be wealthy and do what I want and blah, blah, blah. And they never think about, okay, how can this skill help somebody go from A to B? And then if I help somebody go from A to B and I do that really well, I'm going to get paid incredibly well for that. Right? Because you will get paid the most based on how much value you provide. So if you can help somebody to get a result, if you can help somebody to get result quickly, then you are going to be getting paid really, really well. Whereas if you just doing something because you have a skill and you want to make money from it, people can feel that. And also you're not optimizing the business to help someone get a result or faster or better or any of those things, because you just want to do the basics to get paid. They can feel that. And that's going to be a business that's not really. It's. That is going to be a business that stagnates for sure.

Yeah. I think the example I've got here is this is really common in the fitness industry, but gym owners will write programs for themselves and not for their clients. So you have a gym owner who's a beast, and they write this crazy program and they're like, this is sick for me. And then they have these everyday average people get into it. They get injured, get crushed, they can't get results on it. And they're like, I don't know why my gym's not successful because you're building a program for you and not for the actual client that's coming into your business. This is where it goes wrong in every business as well. It's like. And they'll be like, they'll put up these boundaries and then they'll tell the clients, like, only text me between these times because I want to chill with my family, like I get it and I get the optics and I fully agree with that. But the optics from the client's point of view looks like shit because they're like, oh, you actually don't give a fuck here. It just, it's all about the cons.

And it's like we have boundaries.

Yeah.

Like it's been Easter long weekend and we haven't checked in on clients at all and like, and that there are boundaries that need to be held and upheld and we're here for boundaries. But we're saying is like too often we see entrepreneurs getting to business to get rich rather than getting into business to help people. And that is 100% like the reason that Tim and I have been so successful because we genuinely fucking care about getting people a result. We genuinely want our clients to get where they're going. Six and seven figure businesses, every single one of them.

All right guys, we're moving into listener questions. So we have one from Nikki C. I'll get Steph to answer this and then I'll answer this separately. What has been your biggest fuck up in business so we can avoid it and learn from it.

Nikki, I loved this question. For me I did a bit of digging. I actually don't think I've honestly and maybe I think it's just maybe because I've had you but I don't think I've made that many fuck ups and, and when I say that I made heaps but none that I would see as being like very, very bad. Like none that I would see as being like oh man, I would never do that again. There have been lots of little things, lots of lessons I've learned and like while yes I would love for you to avoid making all the mistakes that we do, the like blessings here are the lessons. Like you, you will learn it so viscerally when you go through it versus like I could tell you right now but at the end of the day like you have to go through it to know that like that's a real thing for you. Like Tim's told me so many times about things that I should avoid and then I go and do it anyway and then I learn and then I learn full bodied. Why that was a no. Right. So I will tell you though Nikki, in my first business I ran stories like I'm not very good at math and I have really bad money stories and so I was, I've always been very good at earning money both in my day job and also in business and so I've always Been really good at bringing money in, but I've always been very, very, very good at spending money as well. Great at spending money, very good at spending money. It's a gift. And so I, Because I didn't like math and because I told myself that, you know, whatever I saw was money coming in, I just told myself that like it didn't matter because there was just enough money coming in. And what my biggest mistake here was that I was always measuring revenue instead of profit. My gut instinct was telling me that this was not right. And I could feel my bank account was going backwards, but the money was coming in more and more. And so I couldn't understand, like we were making like, you know, 30 grand a month and then. But my bank account was going backwards and so I was like, oh, it must just be spending too much, like in my personal life or whatever. But I didn't want to do a deep dive because deep down in my gut I didn't want to know. Until one day it came to a head and I said to Tim, I'm freaking out about money and we've got a tax bill and I had no money to pay it and I was freaking out. And we sat down and we did a big P. L look and we realized that I was spending way, not way more, but definitely more than I was making way more. Probably five grand a month out of pocket, which at the time was a lot of money. Like we didn't have five grands just laying around. So it was a really big wake up call and a reality check for me. And while I please guys like you have to measure revenue and profit. You have to look at what comes in and then what goes out and then what you have left. And it's okay if some months you're not profitable, that that happens. Like this is business. But what matters is that you make a new decision when that happens. So, you know, I looked at the P and L and you know, I didn't. I did at the time, but now I would look at it and I wouldn't make it mean anything about me. But what I did do is I was like, okay, well something has to change. And so we changed everything about the business and we. I went from running 10 workshops a week to running just running four a month. Scaled them back, put more like people into the workshops, got them really highly profitable and did that for a period of time. And then we sold the business. And so I, yeah, measuring revenue instead of profit was one of the big fuck ups that I've made.

Great Lesson, I think everyone does that as well. If you don't make like financial fuck ups, you never really learn from it. So I think they are, they are bred from mistakes, you know, financial fuck ups. So I'll give you a mind. So we, it was a crazy Covid period and we were locked down for about 10 weeks. We came out of lockdown and we had the dickhead in charge of our state said we had the crazy 2 meter rule, so which meant we could only fit like eight people in a session. So we went through the 10 week lockdown. We retained most of our clients about 2:50 and they were paying us. Some of them were paying us, some weren't. Like you know, we were running online training, we learned out our equipment, we did all the shit. So we said, well, I said I made this decision by myself, didn't consult with anyone, which was good and bad. But you know, we had to increase the price because we had to put on more classes and stuff and all that type of stuff. So we increased the price by 30%. And if you put yourself in the clients shoes here, some of them were paying us, some weren't. We went through this crazy lockdown. No one knew what the future was holding. We lost 193 clients in a week, which is a huge loss. It was about 85% of our revenue. So we went like seven figure gym to like 3k a week. That's how much we were making. And I had bills, I had staff at all the other. And I think the problem and the mistake was the communication. I didn't communicate it well with my clients. I didn't communicate the reasons why I didn't communicate like to my team. I didn't really thoroughly like think through this. It was kind of a rash decision. It was a very emotional decision. It was an emotional time. If I would go back and do it again, I probably wouldn't lead with a 30% increase like a week after a lockdown. I'd probably go like 10, wait a couple months, 10, wait a couple months, ten. And then I would just communicate a little bit more thoroughly to my clients. So that was probably one of the most expensive lessons ever. Cost myself like seven figures in revenue over the, like the years coming after that.

And probably years of your life.

Yeah, I lost some years of my life in stress from that as well.

Yeah, it was very stressful.

All right guys. It was an amazing episode. We only asked one thing, if you're a listener on the successful podcast and that's to subscribe and follow the show. So if you're on Spotify or Apple or YouTube, wherever you're at, hit that follow subscribe button. And we truly appreciate it. Thanks, guys.

Thank you so much. We'll see you next week. Sam.