Expand Your Fempire Podcast #130 Transcript

How Rethinking Can Refresh Your Business

Welcome to Expand your Fempire with Caterina Rando, the podcast for women in business on a mission. Sharing ideas to support you to grow and thrive. Now here’s your host, Caterina Rando.

[00:00:00] Caterina Rando: welcome back to another episode of the Expand Your Fempire Podcast. I’m your host, Caterina Rando, and I am blissing to be with you today.

[00:00:38] I want you to imagine that an old friend, reaches out to you and says, “Hey, I’m in town. I wanna come. I wanna hang out with you for the day.” And you’re excited for your friend to arrive and you greet each other.

[00:00:55] As the day progresses though, they point out all these little things that are not quite right. “Boy, you’ve seemed to have slowed down. Wow. You’ve put on a bit of weight since I saw you last. Gee, is that really what you’re doing with your life?”

[00:01:19] These kind of comments you’re hearing all day long, and as the day begins to come to a close, you notice yourself looking at your watch, hoping that the rest of the day goes by fast and your long-ago friend is on their way.

[00:01:42] Well, when it gets time for your friend to say goodbye, they say to you, “You know what? I’ve had so much fun with you today. I think I’m I’m gonna stay in town for another day. I’ll see you for breakfast in the morning.”

[00:01:59] And as your friend smiles and says that to you, your heart drops. You get this yucky feeling all over, and you think to yourself, “I’m certainly not up for another day of this.”

[00:02:16] Here’s the thing, we have old friends like that. Unfortunately, they are with us every day. They’re our thoughts. Or they’re our negative self-talk. They’re messages that we heard from other people in our life when we were younger. And all of these thoughts are still with us, and sometimes they’re very loud in our heads during the day.

[00:02:52] I’m sure in past episodes I’ve discussed the importance of no negative self-talk. Something that we really have to train our brain to notice when we’re having negative and worrying thoughts. To reframe those. To do our best. To be our own best success coach, and be on our side, not on our back. To remember that, “Hey, we’re supposed to be our biggest cheerleader, not our biggest critic.”

[00:03:24] Now hopefully on your personal journey, on your entrepreneurial journey, you’re already doing good in that vein.

[00:03:33] What I wanna focus on with you in this episode is to begin to rethink all of the thinking that you think is great thinking, that you think is right thinking, for you and your life. Let me give you an example.

[00:03:57] As you know, I do lots of retreats. I love doing retreats. We’ve done retreats for businesswomen in Napa Valley and Hawaii and on lots of cruise ships.

[00:04:11] I love getting the ladies together for retreats. I know it is an awesome and amazing way for them to cultivate community… connections. And you know what? I’ve had more than a few gals say to me, “Caterina, I had so much fun and did more business on that ship in a week than if I was at my office sitting at my desk.”

[00:04:38] I have always thought that to do an amazing retreat, there had to be several gals. In fact, the more, the better. The more gals to meet, the more women to connect with, the more potential revenue for the company. All good.

[00:05:03] Then this year in April, I did a retreat with five participants. Let me tell you something. This was an amazing retreat.

[00:05:20] The ladies loved it. I loved it. It was easier to do than the big retreats. They created even more connection than the big retreats.

[00:05:35] Also, I have always thought, “Okay, well, when you have a retreat, you have to have a lot of programming because if they don’t have something to do, they’ll get bored.”

[00:05:48] Guess what? Rethought that too, because I’ve seen free time is very important. Relaxation time, rejuvenation time. Very important.

[00:06:02] Also, there’s this thought that you’ve heard a hundred thousand times that content is king, which means when you’re doing something, you gotta have a lot of content.

[00:06:17] You know what? Forget about King. Let’s talk about engagement is the queen of everything.

[00:06:24] Now, engagement means people are interacting with you. Yes, social media, but that’s not what I mean. I’m speaking specifically about retreats right now, and group programs and events. And on this fabulous, small, intimate retreat that we did, we had a lot of activities. We did group karaoke. We did afternoon tea with telling stories. We did a city tour of San Diego.

[00:07:00] And then I scheduled 90 minutes for a mastermind. That meant come together. Everybody join me in my mini-suite. We’ll get some munchies and we’ll talk about whatever you wanna talk about.

[00:07:18] That 90-minute session turned into a five-and-a-half-hour session. And it showed me that I had to rethink what I thought was the best way to spend time. What I thought was the right number for a retreat for women in business.

[00:07:42] As a result, in our year-long mentorship program, we will now always be including an intimate mastermind retreat. Yeah, we’ll still do some stuff, but we’ll do a lot less activities and more time simply for the ladies to connect, share ideas, resources, be together. Engagement is the queen of everything.

[00:08:14] Our business may often cause us to rethink our direction, may cause us to rethink our decisions, and may cause us to rethink the standard operating procedures by which we are running our businesses and our lives.

[00:08:41] I wanna tell you about one of my fabulous clients, Tracie Root, the founder of the Gather Community. She is also a coach for women to live boldly in their personal and business lives. I was working with Tracie to get her Gather location open in Santa Cruz where she lives. I remember opening day when many of the people from her community gathered in her beautiful space that she had created to celebrate the opening of this place.

[00:09:22] She had big round tables and lots of chairs for workshops and events. We hosted a workshop there. I remember taking pictures of all the gals as they came to the front of the room to speak and be witnessed presenting to an audience.

[00:09:43] It was a beautiful place, a very special space, inspiring. Tracie loved having her location. Having my own center i, of course, knew her bliss and her joy of having realized this dream.

[00:10:03] Then the pandemic started. It was only a few months after she had opened the door. And of course, like all of us in the beginning, we thought everything was gonna be fine. We’re gonna be back at it in a couple weeks. Worst a couple months.

[00:10:19] Well paying rent on a location that’s not getting any use, a business can only do for so long. Tracie was forced to rethink her Gather space, and that is where the Gather community was born. Instead of her live and in-person location, she created a virtual community, an amazing virtual community, lots of speakers, lots of connection.

[00:10:49] Game night, virtual game night, where we play Scategories and other games. My favorite is really Trivial Pursuit. I’m not that good at Scategories.

[00:11:02] Women connecting with women all over. It’s working. It’s flourishing. There’s no space anymore in Santa Cruz, and that’s okay because she has found a way. She had to rethink it to make it work.

[00:11:22] Because here’s the question I wanna make sure you are asking, not can it work, but how can it work?

[00:11:30] Well, I tried this, it didn’t work. Instead of throwing in the towel, how can it work? This is where your determination comes in. That’s a business skill that I wanna tell you we do not talk about enough.

[00:11:50] Determination is how you stay in business. Determination is how you grow. Determination is how you solve the challenge de jour. Determination, plus rethinking what you believe has to be the way.

[00:12:12] I used to have this belief that I wanted to serve clients that I could break bread with. I wanted to serve clients that I could meet for dinner, that I could go to their area and visit their live and in-person office if they had one.

[00:12:36] Here’s what I used to do. I used to go. To the 916, the 510, the 925, the 707, the 408, the 650, and the 831.

[00:12:50] Those are all the area codes, north, east, and south of where I live in San Francisco on the edge of the continent, about 20 blocks from the beach. Therefore, there’s no area codes west of me, only north, south, and east. I would drive to these different area codes to do a workshop. One hour, 90 minutes, live and in person in a different location, a hotel, a, a coworking space, maybe even someone’s living room… one of my favorite things to do,

[00:13:32] Because my thought was, “Well, people go have to meet me and I want them to come see me, and if they don’t know me, they probably don’t wanna come to Timbuktu. Let me go to them.”

[00:13:49] This was a ton of work and it worked for getting new clients. It took a ton of time though. And some nights it would go phenomenal, and some nights not so phenomenal.

[00:14:04] Here’s my point. When the pandemic started, I was already doing hybrid workshops, gals in the room, gals virtual at the same time. Going virtual was not a challenge or a concern for me.

[00:14:24] The rethinking part was giving up the on-the-ground. The rethinking part was losing this idea that I could only have clients that were in my area because if they lived on the other side of the country, I wouldn’t meet them live and in person and I wouldn’t be able to go to afternoon tea or have dinner with them or visit their place of business. That is a fact. I can’t do that on a regular basis.

[00:14:57] The other part of the rethinking though, was that I thought, “Well, I can’t serve them as well.”

[00:15:05] Now, while it’s so much fun to have afternoon tea with the ladies, and it’s so much fun to be with them live and in person and give them a hug, they still get massive value when they live on the other side of the country or they live in Canada or Barbados or even in another country, they still get massive value. That is what I had to rethink.

[00:15:35] Now, I’ve even let go of all the big live and in-person events that we used to do at the big hotels, invite people to come and yes, we would gain clients. We would have a great time and we would give massive value. Now though, we do it virtual, we do our Bliss Summit, our Shero Speaker Summit, our Fempire Summit. We do it virtual. And it is different and still delivering massive value.

[00:16:09] I want you, I encourage you, to rethink what you’re offering, who your clients are, how you do your sales, how you deliver your service. Rethink it all with the intention and the plan to do it even better.  To do it so that it does two things: brings you more bliss, and brings your clients more bliss.

[00:16:45] I had a client tell me yesterday that I have brought so much happiness to her life. This warmed my heart more than most things I’ve ever heard. That’s what we’re doing with our business when we’re doing it right.

[00:17:05] A few years ago I asked myself a very good question. It’s the questions we ask ourselves that give us answers that help us continue to be innovative and help us re-look and rethink.

[00:17:25] In the past, I would start in October to look at all of my clients and see if I wanted to serve them next year, if I had a way to serve them well next year, and I would start to talk to them in October about next year. Then I asked myself, “Well, what if I started to talk to gals in September?”

[00:17:55] And so that year I started to talk to gals in September, and you know what? It may have been as many as 30 signed up in September for the next year. So then the next year I said, “Oh, September went well. Let me see if I can start in August.” Now, in August, I will say, some gals said to me, “Caterina, it’s too early to talk about next year.”

[00:18:20] Many gals were ready to sign up for next year in August. That went well.

[00:18:29] So last year I started in July and I said, “Well, if August went well, and September went well, maybe July.” Now, I did not get as many signups in July as I did the year before in August, but I still got some. Which meant I was ahead of the game for August and September, and by the time the year rolled around, we were way ahead of the game.

[00:18:55] Well, this year I was planning to, to do it again in July. Thing is though, in April, a couple gals said to me that they wanted to be in the big, Expand Your Fempire Mentorship Program next year. Well, I learned early in my career if somebody wants to give you money, you better figure out how to take it. And even though I wasn’t planning on figuring out the next year in April, I certainly did within a few days.

[00:19:27] And not only did those two gals sign up for the next year, I decided to keep going and the program for next year was 80% full by the end of April for the whole next year!

[00:19:45] Here’s what I learned. It’s never too early to start having conversations with people that are already working with you, that are eager to continue to work with you.

[00:20:00] So I’m asking you, when do you start to talk to your clients about sticking around?

[00:20:08] I’ve also had clients sign up for two and three years at a time. I didn’t think that was possible either.  So what I’m asking for you is for you to rethink and re-look because if you wanna scale and grow, yes, it’s about SOPs and expanding your team and expanding your visibility and all of that.

[00:20:37] The thing it’s really about though, I want you to hear, is what are the thoughts that are informing your actions? And let’s rethink those.

[00:20:49] My friend, you’ve got a lifetime supply of value to bring.

[00:20:58] I’m hoping that our conversation today is supporting you to rethink how you’re doing your thing so that you can do it even better moving forward.

[00:21:13] Caterina Rando, always an honor and a privilege to be with you. Join me for an upcoming workshop or summit. Workshops are free every month. Summits are always awesome, small fee.

[00:21:29] Because I wanna do everything I can to support you, to be yourself, do your thing, serve your people, and massively monetize your mastery. Love to you. Talk to you next time.

We hope you enjoyed this episode of Expand Your Fempire with Caterina Rando.