Topics:

In this episode, I’m answering listener questions:

1. Jeffrey asks: What different ways are there to reach a million people and generate passive income, and how would you go about it?
   
   I am not exceptionally educated in nutrition or fitness. I am certified as a personal trainer. I am not sure if acquiring a more thorough education is a must in order to make this work.
2. Claudia asks: What are some of your best strategies to get customers? And do you have a specific marketing strategy–like posting to social media X amount of times a day, amount of times you market your products, do you market in-person as much as online? Sorry, that’s more than 1 question!
   
   It’s been a slow start to sell my online programs as well as get a larger client base. Thanks!
3. Sherry asks: I am wondering about the pros and cons of using your own name or creating a business name.
   
   I have a couple different websites that have their own names – one is entertainment that I do with my husband and the other is health related. I also do freelance copywriting, content, social media, and marketing consulting – I currently do that under my own name and I’m going back and forth on creating a business name for it.

And come follow me on Periscope! I’ve been posting videos often, and would love for you to hop on and interact with me, LIVE! Download the free Periscope app, then find me by searching “Diane Sanfilippo.” Replays available after at : Katch.Me



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Build a Badass Business: Episode #10: Are You Moving Fast Enough? 

Coming to you straight from her basement home office in suburban New Jersey, this is Build a Badass Business with Diane Sanfilippo. Diane is a New York Times bestselling author and serial entrepreneur. She’s here to teach you how to grow and develop a successful business you love, and how to create raving fans along the way. Here she is, your host: Diane Sanfilippo.

Diane Sanfilippo: Hey guys, welcome back to the show. Not sure exactly how the sound quality will be on this episode, but as you have heard in the past handful of episodes, sometimes I’m at what I would call a studio set up, and sometimes I’m with a friend doing an interview. Today I just wanted to walk around and record right into my iPhone, and I just had some thoughts on the top of my head that I wanted to go over with you guys and share with you, and I think that this whole set up, being perfect or recording a certain way, having that as a barrier for me and a requirement means that I would just hold back and not deliver content to you guys quicker.

So that’s one of the lessons that I want to give you today, around speed and delivering content. Or just delivering on your ideas and whatever your business is in general. I posted recently on Instagram a few times about this concept of, what lights you up? And it’s something that I talked about a little bit in last episode, the talk from PaleoFx. But I want you to think about what that thing is that when you start talking about it, and I know for a lot of you, it’s going to be health and wellness and nutrition, or fitness, something like that. But it might not be. You might be in this field, and it might turn out that that’s not the thing that lights you up.

Or, maybe if you’re like me, maybe it light you up for a really long time, but there’s something else that maybe lights you up more. I still get excited to teach people about health and nutrition and talk about paleo and the problems with sugar and all of that stuff. In certain settings, I can light up a little bit more about it than other settings.

However, the thing that really gets me going, and this is something I would say at some point last year, even Scott pointed out to me. He heard me on the phone with somebody talking about their business, and he’s like, what was that, because you were really lit up. So that’s the kind of thing I want to encourage you guys to think about. If you can’t notice when it’s happening for you, then ask a friend, because chances are, even if your friend doesn’t know off the top of his or her head, oh when you talk about this thing you just kind of can’t stop.

And I’m not really talking about stuff like your kids, or maybe even just the meal you ate. Because I feel like we all can light up about that kind of thing. I’m talking about that intersection of something that lights you up that also could be something that could turn into a career.

Of course, if helping your kids out with something or even food does light you up to that degree, and you find that there’s a way you want to turn that into a career, more power to you. You could start a certain kind of child care set up or maybe you want to do food blogging, or photography, or recipe development, any of that stuff is totally possible.

But I just want to throw it out there that it’s not really what I’m talking about, because I do think that we can all light up about different things and a lot of that we can have in common, but it’s something that you would light up about that’s a little more unique to you that somebody else is maybe like, I don’t know how you’re so excited about this. For me, that thing is business and marketing and getting you guys pumped up and motivated and just pushing you to drive that extra distance when it comes to this stuff.

Ok, so I want to touch a little bit on this concept of drive and a long with that, a pace and a speed. I see this a lot, and I see it with all different types of entrepreneurs. I see it with some of the coaches I have in my Sugar Detox program, who are all entrepreneurs in different ways with that program. I see it with myself, I see it with my team, all of us who have this entrepreneurial spirit. We may have different levels of drive, and also a different concept of a pace or a speed at which we want to work. Something that I want to throw out there, if you’re somebody who is kind of sitting with these ideas and you just are not pushing forward, you’re just not taking steps to get them out there to execute to get things done, and you’re seeing people kind of whiz by you.

Maybe you want to start a food blog, for example, and 10 other people have launched them in the last month, and you’re like, what the heck? You know, they seem to be doing it so easily and they’re getting this stuff out there. I just want to encourage you to start taking action. So if there’s something you want to get done and create and do with your business, you have to start taking action, because that’s the only way to move things forward. Anybody who seems like they’re doing it more easily, or faster, or more efficiently, that’s not necessarily the case. There are things that some of us may just be more efficient at than others.

However, you don’t know what’s happening behind the scenes. People are constantly making different sacrifices in their lives to get this stuff done. We all have the same amount of hours in the day and we all make choices about how we spend that time. So if there’s something that you find yourself doing that maybe you enjoy it. This is where I’m not going to tell you stop reading or stop spending time outside in nature, etc. All these great things to stop doing that altogether, but if you have a goal with your business, and you’re striving so hard for this work/life balance, I’m somebody who absolutely believes that there’s a period of time during which the balance needs to tilt and shift towards building your business.

Because if you expect something to grow and happen with your business at a speed that you’re not working at, then it’s just a mismatch. It’s a mismatch of your expectation and the amount of time, effort, energy, and even just that work ethic level that you’re putting into it. So, I think this is where we all really need to get honest with ourselves. This happens to me too, I have weeks where I sit and I’m like, what did I even do this week? I didn’t get anything done this week. And for me, at times that’s a matter of almost being forced to kind of chill out and take a break. And that’s good, I’m at a place in the development of my career and products and programs that that’s ok for me, because I did spend so many years working at almost a breakneck pace.

I do think this idea of work/life balance looks different for everyone, whether that’s on a daily basis, weekly, monthly, or yearly. Where you’re at with your family and the type of social life that you have and all of that. I had probably a year or two where I was not super social. I found ways, of course, to socialize and go out and whatnot, but every weekend night that came up, I wasn’t socializing. Most of the time I would say I was probably traveling 2 weekends a month to teach seminars. So, I would get a Friday evening maybe with people that I was teaching the seminar with and we’d go to dinner, but I wasn’t home socializing with my friends back home. So it was a sacrifice I made on that front, but always looking for ways to balance it on my own time frame.

I want to just encourage you guys to just think about those things. If you have a goal, or a vision, or a mission for your business, are you setting up your time and your life to contribute to that or not? I think there are always places we can be a little bit more honest about how we’re spending our time and whether or not that contributes to the goal that we have with our business.

So how this time and breakdown of what we’re doing with our time and the speed at which we’re doing all this, how that kind of ties back to this idea of what lights you up; I honestly feel like if you find the thing that lights you up, you can get sucked into it like a vortex for an insurmountable amount of time. And it’s the kind of thing that, if I look back over the years at different things that did light me up, for a long time I was making jewelry, and I talked about it at some point on the show early on, but I would come home from work. When I first started making jewelry, I was in college so I’d come home from classes, or come home from work. I was working at the GAP at the mall all through college, and I would make jewelry.

I just really loved it, I was into it, I was excited about it, it was a creative, colorful think for me to do when the work that I was doing at the mall or schoolwork wasn’t creative and colorful, and for me I always needed that colorful outlet. I kind of say it in that way, but if I look through my career history, there’s always something that I do that brings that artistic vision to life. So at that point in time, I wasn’t in art classes, I wasn’t working in something that was creative, so I did that on the side.

When I went to work at my first job in corporate America, and that was at the GAP in San Francisco; same thing, I was still making jewelry. And I was selling it, but for me it was this creative outlet, and I always had that kind of passion for that. As things kind of developed further, and I went back to school for graphic design, the passion that I had kind of evolved, and I wasn’t that passionate about my day job, so I was taking classes at night to fuel that passion.

Eventually I did kind of transition to where I was working as a graphic designer, and I was also making jewelry, and I had all of this stuff. I could get sucked into any of that for any amount of time. I did not have any problem working on a logo or a website and tweaking colors and kind of thinking about what I could do differently, and kind of designing and redesigning, and the time would just evaporate. I wouldn’t really be watching the clock if I was doing that kind of work.

I think that’s something that can help you identify what lights you up; if you’re really having trouble, if you’re friends don’t know, it’s those things that you just get excited talking about and that you can get sucked into a time vortex on. Now, if I want to work on recipes and cooking, I can cook for hours and take pictures and the time can just evaporate, and I just think it’s so much fun. I can talk to you guys about business and marketing and mindset and all of this stuff, and I could probably do it for hours on end. We could probably all get together in a room for a week and there would be so much to talk about, and the time would fly.

I think that’s part of trying to figure out what it is for you. I know that it’s not easy; I know for a lot of us we’re multipassionate. I know Marie Forleo, her kind of coined term on that, is just a multipassionate entrepreneur. I’ve never had that issue where I don’t know what I’m passionate about, because there are so many things that I get really pumped up about, and I’ve walked down different paths to try and figure out which of those things for me could be a career, something I could make money at.

I think at the end of the day, for me, my biggest passion is almost turning a passion into a career. That’s a passion for me. Whatever the thing is, figuring out how to earn a living from it. Hopefully I can help you guys along that journey and bring out what your passion is, but also help you figure out what’s the path to take in order to turn that into a career.

That’s all I’ve got for you guys today. Don’t forget to subscribe in iTunes so you don’t miss an episode. And drop me a review to let me know what’s speaking to you from the show. If you want to get in on the conversation, and you haven’t yet joined the group already on Facebook, head on over there and join the Build a Badass Business group. I share insights and tips regularly, as well as answer your questions right there on the page.

Do work that you love, and hustle to make your business grow like your life depends on it, because it does. Thanks for listening, and I’ll catch you on the next episode.