Topics:

1. Follow whatever it is that you’re passionate about and live your truth in that
2. There are not people who are sitting by who have been successful who want to spend every minute of their life telling you the steps to take because the truth is, nobody ever told us either.
3. If you want to be an entrepreneur, you cannot expect handholding every step of the way.
4. If you as the entrepreneur do not have self confidence, you’re building a house on nothing.
5. Learning the strategies of what to put in place is not what’s going to give you long term success.
6. There is no such thing as perfect.
7. We have to do the things that we are most interested in. you can’t have a business because you think it will earn money.

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 #54: What I Can & Can’t Teach You About Building a Successful Business

Coming to you from the city by the bay, 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.

I had this conversation recently with a friend/colleague of mine about this whole business thing. How do I help you guys best? A lot of you know I’ve started this sort of #greatby8 challenge. I want people to wake up and get something done in the day that makes you feel not only productive but capable, like you can achieve something in the day, like if you set your mind to something and do it, and I honestly think it would be great to think the night before, what is my thing that I’m going to do by 8 o’clock in the morning? So if that thing ends up being, you’re going to sleep in, or if you go to the gym, whatever it’s going to be, you set the intention the night before. “Here’s what I’m going to do tomorrow morning”, and it’s a deliberate conscious decision to set yourself up for success, whatever that means.

It doesn’t mean it has to be a grinder of a workout, it just means you set an intention and then you stick to it, and that accomplishment and crossing that thing off for the day is going to make you feel totally different throughout the day than you might have otherwise.

So let me back up here quickly; anybody here totally new to my scopes, you jumped in, you don’t know who I am or what I’m talking about, and I want to make sure I introduce myself for those of you who don’t know who I am. My name is Diane Sanfilippo, I’m a certified holistic nutrition consultant and the New York Times’ bestselling author of Practical Paleo and the 21-Day Sugar Detox. Practical Paleo is a nearly 100-week New York Times’ bestseller, so when I talk about marketing and success and all of that stuff, I’m not talking like a flash in the pan.

I’m talking long term, how to build a business, build a badass business, build a brand, build whatever it is that you’re trying to build and follow whatever it is that you’re passionate about and live your truth in that, because I think there are a lot of people who can get very caught up in the sexiness and appeal of money and that’s fine, but it won’t last you very long and it won’t feel good for very long if that’s the focus that you have. And I’m totally cool with people teaching you how to earn money; whether it’s here on Periscope, wherever it’s going to be.

I have just been thinking long and hard about what it is I’m going to create and present for you guys, and sort of the tactical approach to do this to earn money at this point doesn’t feel like what it makes sense for me to teach, because I’ve never taken that approach with what I’m doing. I definitely want to maybe create resources that just show you; hey if you don’t have an Amazon Associates account, and it’s legal in your state, which I think Colorado is one of the ones that it’s not, you need to have that. Just to drop those little knowledge bombs here and there is cool, but for me; I’m sure somebody told me I needed to do that. Somebody then didn’t proceed to give me 10 to 20 steps of how to set that up. That’s up to you.

And if you think that you’re an entrepreneur, you want to be an entrepreneur, you cannot expect handholding every step of the way. Because that’s not how it works. There are not people who are sitting by who have been successful who want to spend every minute of their life telling you the steps to take because the truth is, nobody ever told us either. Maybe somebody just dropped a little note; like, hey, you should probably create a group program, instead of trying to work with people one on one. And that’s where it ends.

I can say, in the past, Robb Wolf perhaps was a mentor of mine in the sense that I was going to teach seminars, and I was like; hey, what do you think about this. And he was like, great, I think we need it. And I was like, what do you think I should teach? And it was like, there was nothing. There was no feedback. He’s like, you have to teach what you want to teach; and I was like, ok. You know. So that’s where it really ended and it was up to me to figure it out. I know you guys know that Marie Forleo teaches a lot of this stuff; her phrase, or catchphrase, is everything is figureoutable. That definitely resonates with me, because that’s kind of the approach that I’ve taken over the last, I don’t know, I’ve probably been an entrepreneur for almost 20 years of my life with different businesses, etc.

So, the stuff that I can’t teach you, but I hope to inspire, motivate, and instill in you over time are the following things. I can’t go back in your history, of your life, of your childhood of whatever has gone on with you and give you self confidence. I can’t give that to you. But I can hopefully perhaps create resources or inspiration or share things that start to rebuild that foundation, because it’s one of the most important parts of being an entrepreneur is having self confidence. Because entrepreneur, it’s a singular thing. It’s one person; yeah, you can build a business and then you are in charge of that business. But if you as the entrepreneur do not have self confidence, you’re building a house on nothing. You have no framework upon which to build this whole business. You have to have self confidence. So whatever it takes for you to build that consistently.

And quite honestly, one of the things that it takes to build that is figuring things out on your own, taking time to learn, make mistakes, relearn, go down a path, find out it was the right one, cool keep going; go down a path, find out it wasn’t the right one, reroute yourself and take a new path. I can’t teach you that self confidence. I can give you some tools, perhaps, but I can’t teach you that. I don’t know how to teach you that. Maybe I’ll figure it out, but I think that it’s something that you need to figure out, and I do think that having many successes throughout the day, partially with those great by 8 challenges, just one thing I thought of. What’s a tactical thing I can give you to make you start to feel better about yourself first thing in the morning, right?

And it’s not just about whether that’s meditation or exercise or a healthy breakfast. I don’t care what it is, because it doesn’t matter what it is. It matters how that feels to you. I can’t instill drive and a work ethic. I can’t instill that in you. I can’t tell you that you can build a business in 30 days because it doesn’t take 30 days. It takes months and years. It takes a long time to build this stuff, and the people that you see, and I know other people have talked about this, the people who you see who you think are like an overnight success.

For example, Christine from gauge girl training, I wouldn’t say that’s an overnight success because I don’t really know how big that’s gotten but I’m working with her and I started talking about it, and now things are really blowing up. But she’s been working on this stuff for years. This is not like she started when I started talking about what she’s doing, she just had her head down and was grinding and working, and opportunities arose that lead to further expansion and that’s how it works you guys. You don’t know when the next even that you go to and the person that you talk to at dinner, or the person that you talk to at a conference, or the person that you guest blog post for; you have no idea where this stuff is going. So if you’re early on and you’re trying to build some success, and build credibility and all of that; you have to keep working. You can’t sit still and be like; “well, you know, unless this big opportunity comes I’m not going to take it.” You have to take every little thing that comes your way. Not only do you not know when the big one is going to come, you don’t know the cumulative effect of what you’re doing. You don’t know who’s watching.

If somebody comes to me and says, “can I guest blog for you” or “can I be a guest on your podcast” and I’m looking at what else they’ve done, I’m looking at who else has had them on the show. I take a quick look at their website, and I don’t see much credibility, they don’t have much content there, they don’t have any following; and I’m not talking in the tens of thousands, they have no following on social media, then I probably am not going to give them the time of day. And it’s not because I don’t think they might have something valuable to say, it’s just I need to see that there’s time and effort and work ethic behind what they’re doing before I invest my time in them. For me to sit down for an hour with somebody and talk to them, it’s worth thousands of dollars of my time to sit down with them, so I want to see that you’re working hard behind that. I don’t want to sit down with you unless you’re working hard. And it doesn’t mean that you have to have been featured by anybody popular or big in the meantime, I just need to see that you’re working, otherwise we’re wasting our time.

I can’t teach you the self confidence, the drive, the motivation, and the work ethic that it takes to be an entrepreneur. I can’t teach you that. But I can tell you, for sure, that none of this stuff is going to come fast, even learning the strategies of what to put in place is not what’s going to give you long term success.

Point blank: there’s no magic. There is no magic; the hard work doesn’t end. Even if you build a product that’s successful that you sell a lot of to earn a salary; like, I created the 21-Day Sugar Detox, made it an eBook, later made it an online program and that product, I didn’t need to do anything else to be earning a salary, that was perfectly adequate, beyond adequate for me and perhaps one other person on my team. That would have been enough. But the thing that separates an entrepreneur from a “nontrepreneur” {laughs} perhaps is that drive to constantly make things better, constantly improve things. There is always something better and it’s not to say that it’s just that perfectionism because it’s not perfectionism. If you’re a perfectionist, you’d get stuck and you don’t ever launch something and you don’t ever put something out there because you’re partially afraid of the response and you’re partially stuck in your own ego that if it’s not perfect; which isn’t real, there is no such thing. That it’s not worth sharing, and you’re withholding your gifts from the world when you do that.

So if you don’t have that constant drive within you to improve something, if you guys listened to my interview with Dan Antonelli, who was my former boss at Graphic Designs, really similar mindset, Erich Krauss from Victory Belt Publishing, the president of Victory Belt who is like, for all intents and purposes, my boss now if I have a boss. Both of those men have the same mindset that I do, where it’s like, what can we do to make things better. Consistently, what can we do to make things better. And if you don’t have that drive and that motivation with everything that you do to consistently improve it, you launch it, and it’s not like it’s not good enough when you launch it, but it almost is like that.

It’s almost like you know that you have more in you, you know that you have an ability to revise something as you get feedback. It’s dropping the ego of; when I put it out there, it was perfect. To say, well let’s see what happens. Let’s see what the response is, let’s see what the reception is, let’s see what problems people have. Whenever I change my program; or not even when I change it, I go in and look at customer support tickets for weeks on end to see what are the problems that people are having. Did we not explain something clearly? Did I not support people in a way they needed to be supported? Is it user error? Is it user error because we didn’t explain something or is it user error because I can’t control the fact that there’s not a license to use the internet and people don’t understand how to download a PDF. That’s a different story, but I’m always looking at it from the angle of, “is it something we did.” And that’s not in a lack of confidence way, it’s honestly in a “what can we do to make it better” kind of way.

So there’s a lot behind here, and I don’t think there’s just one thing that makes an entrepreneur successful. I think it’s the culmination of a lot of different things that push somebody forward all the time. And I think that can really be an issue.

One of the things that is so problematic about social media and the internet is that it creates this false sense of success. And I think that you guys can see other people; and I’ve talked about this so many times. You can see what other people are doing on social media, because that’s got a public view, it’s got a public number count, but you have no idea what’s happening behind the scenes. Some of the people who earn the most money or maybe the most successful financially, which I know that for you guys when you talk about building a business, that’s it; it’s a means to an end in terms of financial freedom and financial success. People I know who are earning probably millions of dollars a year have virtually no social media followings. They’re doing things totally differently, so social media is just one aspect, and a lot of you guys see that as everything.

I can get caught up in it myself too; I can look at lots of other people who have much bigger social media followings than I do and at the end of the day I just have to be confident and happy with what I’m doing, what I’m teaching, what I’m moving along with, and quite honestly we have to do the things that we are most interested in. you can’t have a business because you think it will earn money.

How do you keep balance when it comes to family, kids, marriages; etc. Well, I don’t have kids. So first of all, that’s a huge decision of mine to not have kids. There are plenty of entrepreneurs that I know who are very successful who do have kids. It might be best to ask them how they balance that. This is me, it’s my life, so how it gets balanced with my marriage and my relationships with friends, etc.; yeah I mean balance is kind of almost saying perfection. There is no such thing, it’s just what makes you happy. You have to do what makes you happy, and those around you. So it’s not something; there is no, “you need to spend X amount of time per week with these people, and these people, and doing this, and doing that”. It’s about what makes you happy and keeps the relationships in your life in a good balance in terms of, you know, you’re not pissing anybody off {laughs} because you’re not paying attention to them perhaps.

I think there’s something that happens, you guys, with technology barriers that as soon as you run into a barrier with technology and not knowing how to do something, instead of giving up and being like, well I don’t know how to do this. You have to realize that nobody really knows how to do it. Unless you are an expert in that one thing; unless you’re a Word Press expert, every entrepreneur is figuring it out as they go. And what separates you if you’re not going to be successful from if you are, is if you press forward. You have to keep trying; you have to keep figuring it out. You have to say, I need to learn this stuff. If you are not up for learning anything new or gaining new skills or figuring new things out and you just want to be focused on; let’s just say you’re selling T-shirts. If you just want to be stuck with being an expert on the T-shirts themselves then you better have a lot of money to pay other people to do everything else. Chances are, you don’t. And chances are, the people you see that are successful with a huge T-shirt business, for example, they learned all that stuff along the way, then they became successful and started paying other people to do it.

So you guys, I didn’t start out with a team; I started out as one person. Then I hired an assistant, and now there are almost 10 people on my team. Not all working full time, but I just got to the point where I’m like, I don’t want to do this part anymore, let me pay someone else to do it. And it gives them a job that they’re working towards a cause that they thing is helpful and beneficial to people out in the world, and I think that feels awesome. I love to give people a job, because if you’re going to work as a graphic designer, for example, why not do that in something that you feel good about that you want to promote?

Hey guys, I’m so glad you’re loving the show. Let me ask you to do me a favor; come follow me on Periscope. You can find me; I believe you can search Diane Sanfilippo, or you can search @BalancedBites, which is my Twitter handle, which is the account name over on Periscope. I am going to start doing live sessions, really quick thoughts for the day. I’m not sure if it I will be every day, but it will be pretty often, and some Q&A on business topics and motivation, inspiration, etc. So make sure you’re following me over on Periscope. Download the app in the app store, and I will see you there.

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.