This is going to be for you if you’re experiencing decision fatigue or inertia because you aren’t making decisions. I had a client come to me this week and they were feeling really wobbly and a little bit directionless, and they wanted to know what they needed to do next. I said, “You don’t need to actually do anything next. You need to make decisions.”
This is a big thing for business owners and this is going to help you beat back that decision fatigue, make clearer decisions, be less distracted by shiny objects, stop bouncing from one strategy to another, and maybe pull you out, if you feel stuck in a never-ending eight-second hellscape of comparison-itis and FOMO, otherwise known as Instagram and Instagram reels.
This might help you, this might be the panacea that you need to pull you out of that space. Shockingly, the answer is not another social media strategy, the perfect copy, or giving away any more value that you should really be charging for. What we’re talking about today is called an owner’s statement.
An owner’s statement, or an owner’s intent, is your purpose for owning a business.
Crafting an owner’s statement is a simple, but not always easy, way to create focus and boundaries for yourself as an entrepreneur. Your owner’s statement acts as a filter and helps you clearly communicate, to use Brené Brown’s language, what is okay and what is not okay, what are you willing to do, what are you not willing to do as you earn income independent of an employer, and for a lot of women, explore your ambition and desire to lean into what is possible for you.
If you have left a traditional role, like 87% of my Instagram community has said they’ve done, you’re really looking to explore what’s possible for you now that kind of like the training wheels are off, like you’re on your own, you get to be your own boss. An owner’s statement determines how you work, who you work with, and can keep you motivated and moving forward when things are messy and murky. It makes tough decisions easier to make. It’s the ethos behind everything you do. It personally helps me and my team question growth and silence the noise.
How to create your owner’s statement.
First, understand why you want one and the purpose it will serve.
We just covered that so you’re probably in one of two camps right now. Either camp A where you’re like, “Tell me more about that, Tara, because I know you know what you’re talking about,” or camp B which sounds like, “Oh, this sounds like navel-gazing and a waste of time. Just tell me what to do to get clients now.”
As always, I’m pro slowing down, pro connecting with your intuition, pro deep self-discovery as the primary way to enhance your money-making capabilities. Really, there doesn’t even need to be two camps. You can slow down and you can create this owner’s statement, and you can be making money and enrolling clients right now. This is not navel-gazing. I do not do navel-gazing. I think that for most of you who have been listening to this podcast long enough know exactly that, that I only share the things that will absolutely get results.
Two, be honest with yourself.
If you take the time to create an owner’s statement, will you actually use it? Or do you care too much about pleasing others, being right, getting it perfect, and comparing yourself with what other people are doing? Now, we all do those things, that’s perfectly normal. There is nothing wrong with you. It is not your fault if you do those things.
But what I’m asking is are you ready to do the work to begin shifting out of that energy? That is the important work, not being stuck there and not being distracted by it, resisting it, denying it, or bypassing it, it’s to go in there and are you ready to challenge some of those beliefs and thoughts that you have around some of this conditioning that we all have? Are you ready to do that work?
Three, journal on why you own a business.
I know some people are like, “I’m not a journaler.” Listen, this is one of the best ways that we can process our thoughts. If you’re not a handwritten journaler, maybe try voice noting things, but we really do need to be getting things out of our head and into some kind of format that we can assess and make decisions from.
Here’s what I want to talk about: Women start businesses out of necessity; we are not talking about this. There are usually three reasons that I hear women leaving their jobs: childcare issues or a lack of childcare opportunity, their job is so stressful, it’s making them sick, or they have chronic illness (that was mine).
There are three general aspirations for what women want to move to from where they are: They want to have some kind of financial independence, they want to be able to do meaningful work that brings them purpose and satisfaction, that aligns with their strengths and their gifts, and they want more time. That’s just it. Personal freedom. They want more time to be with their family. They want more time to take care of their health. They want more time to do the things they love. They don’t want to be working as hard as they were working in a nine-to-five.
The original intent is to replace their corporate income or the income they were making from whatever traditional job they had. What happens next is unfortunate. They get bombarded with Facebook ads. This has happened to you. These Facebook ads hit you while you’re at your most vulnerable and take you down a path of distraction and further away from your original intent and your values.
I had somebody email me and she told me something that was so fascinating. She is excited to join us in The Bold Profit Academy when the time is right for her. Right now she is getting some professional development around coaching, a coach certification. Before she even purchased the coach certification, she was just Googling coach certifications, and she starts to notice all these ads in her feed targeting coaches with “Get clients now”, “Go the million-dollar business”, “Clients on demand”, “Book Yourself Solid”.She’s not even done with her professional development yet and now she’s being bombarded.
You’re vulnerable. You’re just starting out, you’re not sure what to do. You don’t know who to ask. You want to be successful, you’re afraid of failing, and these ads are selling you the dream, so it really hijacks your attention. This is why we need an owner’s statement. It can be a way to recalibrate you at any time. This is a statement of your intention. This is what allows you to be discerning.
Some questions to consider when creating your owner’s statement:
- What was your aspiration for when you started your business?
- What about this aspiration is important to you?
- What does financial independence look like to you?
- Is it to replace salary?
- Go for upgrades?
- Plan for long-term financial stability?
- I think that you can do that right from the beginning with what does your exit strategy look like?
- How important is it to you that your work has meaning and purpose?
- What contribution do you want to make to your clients, your family, and your community?
- What will you do to bring yourself meaning and purpose through your work and what will you do?
- What brings you a sense of satisfaction and fulfillment?
- What does it look like to work with joy?
These are not easy questions to answer because we have not been told that this is possible. We have not been allowed to dream about what work looks like to be done with joy and to bring us a deep sense of satisfaction and fulfillment.
We have been told that we either have to choose between work that pays or work that brings us fulfillment, and that’s not true. We’ve also been told that we can monetize our passions, and I think that’s also a slippery slope. I think there’s a lot of nuance here. But what does this look like for you? Because that’s all that matters.
- What do you want your days, weeks, months to look like in terms of personal freedom?
- What does personal freedom mean to you?
These are the questions that you’re going to want to be asking yourself and I want you to have patience because you can’t Amazon Prime your owner’s statement. It’s not going to be delivered in two days. Hot tip to Hannah Corbin, one of my favorite Peloton instructors, for saying that during a ride.
Asking good questions that facilitate insight and growth is what coaching is all about. My goal is to help you coach yourself.
This is foundational teaching, or at the foundational level of The Bold Profit Academy and what it’s about, teaching you how to coach yourself so you can be self-reliant, resilient, discerning, and troubleshoot your challenges.
Not so that you never need a coach or that you do this on your own but so that when you hire a coach or step into a program, you’re more clear and connected to what your needs are and what your intuition is telling you, so you can stand shoulder to shoulder with that coach or the people in the program.
Because sometimes there’s a weird dynamic in coaching, a weird power dynamic, and sometimes we come into coaching relationships or into programs and we just hand that person all of our agency. We think that we don’t know anything, they know everything, and they know best. That’s not necessarily true, you know you the best. I want you to be able to feel some level of clarity and the ability to ask yourself these questions and to coach yourself.
Until you have clarity on these questions, you’re going to continue to operate in the land of confusion, ungrounded, unboundaried, not knowing what business model or strategies to use.
Behind the scenes, I have a 20-year framework for creating and sense checking, and it’s pretty simple and I call it the three Ps and sometimes I add Ps. I’m a lover of alliteration. It’s purpose, process, and payoff. Then when we’re talking about business, sometimes I add pricing.
The owner’s statement is a purpose statement.
That’s why I said you’re not going to know what business model or strategies to use. That’s the process. The results you want, the payoff. When we have the owner’s statement as a purpose, we can then decide what that process is going to look like based on a number of factors, but a lot of it being that owner’s statement. There is no checklist for this. There is no done, there is no perfect. There is only your intuition and evolution.
Sharing my own owner’s statement.
What I find is that when business owners hear my owner’s statement, it clarifies for them whether they are in the right place or not. What you create for internal use, whether it’s a vision, mission, values, or owner’s statement becomes a way to qualify prospects, even if you aren’t in the business space.
My owner’s statement is “To build a business that’s in service to my health, while creating extraordinary wealth for myself and others.”
I started this business from a state of burnout. I was already exhausted, like many women when they decide to earn income independent of an employer. At the time, I had two young kids. They were school age, and I knew from before they were even born, that I was most likely going to have to be working in my nine-to-five job while they were very young. But I had hopes of either becoming a stay-at-home mom or being home more when they got older.
That felt really important to me to be accessible, more accessible to them in their teen years. It felt very easy for me to drop infants and toddlers at a daycare where they were playing and being enriched and engaged. But when they got older, I thought it was going to be really my time to be with them, to be shaping them, and developing them through their teens and into their early adulthood.
Now, back then, my thinking was pretty binary. I either worked or I didn’t work. I didn’t realize this, what I’ve created, was possible because I had to create it. Anyway, so I leave, and I started this business. I’m exhausted. I’m in a state of burnout. I could barely get out of bed. I can barely shower at the time. I was really ill. All of those complicated adrenalizing hustle-y type tactics they teach in the online business space, I couldn’t do them.
I would watch as my peers loaded their days with Facebook lives, webinars, mapping out funnels, and over-delivering in memberships where they charged less than $97 per month per person and they had to build their lists into tens of thousands. I physically, mentally, and emotionally could not do that. That was not available to me.
A lot of social media even doesn’t do well for my ADHD. It hurts my brain. I also didn’t have a lot of capital when I started this business. We were just emerging from bankruptcy. I barely even had a credit card. I had peers who were buying all these courses and these teams and consultants. I didn’t have that. I didn’t have a credit card to put that on.
Everything I did had to be from the cash that I created in my business and then I needed to navigate that cash to how much of that was going to come and pay me as the business owner and how much of that was going to get reinvested. I need to build something in service to my health, physical health, mental health, emotional health, financial health. That didn’t work for me. I had to find another way.
Now, there’s this other part, while creating extraordinary wealth for myself or while creating extraordinary wealth, I believe that we can be healthy and wealthy. We each get to define what extraordinary wealth means for us. There are too many personal factors that go into this concept of what you need financially for me to dictate a formula.
I can ask you questions. I can point out blind spots, things that you’re missing because I think women often miss out on the cost of a lot of things. I can challenge you to think bigger and to really step into what is possible, but I can’t dictate a formula to you to define what extraordinary wealth means for you. You need to do that on your own, but I am here for it. I am here for this.
Then the last part “and others”, so “To build a business that is in service to my health, while creating extraordinary wealth for myself and others.” I’ve played with the statement a number of times, as you will play with yours.
If I take out “and others”, this collapses for me, this has no meaning. “And others” is really what signifies my commitment to the collective, and that doesn’t mean you need to be committed to the collective at all, you can be totally in this for yourself, totally cool. But for me, I’m someone who has a commitment to the collective. If I’m just doing this for me, it just doesn’t work.
If I can be a role model for even one person, not talking about impacting millions, but if I can be a role model for even one person, if as I become more financially independent, then I can use my money for a force of good in the world, I can redistribute wealth, create strong small-business economies, and teach you how to do the same, that is when I am my most fulfilled, that is what brings me the most joy. It doesn’t mean it’s easy, but that is what lights me up. So that “and others” is actually a very important part of that statement.
Let’s look at this owner’s statement in terms of boundaries and filters.
Everything gets passed through, “Is this in service to my health?” We don’t shame people for health issues or see them as incapable or tell you that it’s not possible for you to build a business with chronic health issues. I am doing it. This is my commitment to strategies that are simple and easy on my energy. That’s why I teach them. It informs what I am teaching.
I’m not going to build a business that is in service to my health and is easy on my energy, but teach you complicated nonsense, bullshit stuff. It’s all here. If my team is unwell, they take time off without question and they don’t need to apologize. We build in two mental health days a month because I’m fine building a business that is in service to my health, that means, it’s there for my team as well.
This impacts who I work with. Is this client robbing me of my health or peace of mind? Is this program easy on my energy to deliver? It informs all aspects of my business. How much time I take off.
Let’s look at “create extraordinary wealth for myself.” This means my focus is to make sure I’m financially cared for before I give to others. Put my oxygen mask on first, put your oxygen masks on first. Also energetically, I can’t teach what I can’t or haven’t done for myself. Every framework, every resource, every question I am asking in The Bold Profit Academy and I am teaching, I do for myself in my business. It’s how we’ve grown. I still do it because I need to be in integrity with my work and my owner’s statement in order for me to make money. I have to be congruent. Incongruence does not equal abundance.
Then others. So me first, then others. When I’m looking at “then others”, how does this piece of content help others create extraordinary wealth? What do I need to talk about to help others do that who around me wants to create extraordinary wealth for themselves? This dictates who we work with.
We’re looking for women who are curious about this, who want to lean into this, who you know you might stuff around it, but you’re going to show up for the conversation because this does have a level of significance and importance to you. You know that now is the time. Now is the time. That’s really what women are showing up for is saying to me, “I know now’s the time for this. I have a lot to learn. I’m committed. I want to do this. This is important now.” These are the folks.
Now it’s your turn. Set some time aside to think and feel into one of those questions that I mentioned earlier. Schedule time on your calendar each week to answer one additional question. Do not overthink this. Share your journaling with someone else. Use it to take action because you will never think your way to clarity.
Action breeds clarity, clarity breeds confidence, and so on and so on and so on. But you have to be able to take the action first. If you can’t take action, if you can’t implement, if you can’t learn from what you’ve just done, then we’re at a dead stop.
You can try and do this on your own or you can get the actual support that it takes to get the results that you want in your business.
Many of you are trying to figure this out on your own or are in the wrong programs for you and/or the type of service you offer. You’re trying strategies that aren’t getting you paid. I just want to give some examples of this so you understand what I’m talking about.
Listen, it’s painful. I’ve done this. I’ve circled and circled and circled and circled in my head trying to do it on my own. I’ve been stuck there. It’s heavy, it’s murky and stagnant. You’re literally just going in circles. You’re in the wrong programs for you or the type of service you offer; let’s talk about this.
I had a call with an amazing woman the other week who signed up for my Revenue Goal Calculator and then signed up for the 15-minute complimentary Revenue Goal Calculator call. She was having difficulty paying herself, as do many. We identified the revenue goal to get her where she needed to be based on what she wanted to pay herself. I looked at that, and I looked at her offer, and I said, “This is doable. You can do this.”
Why was she struggling? She wasn’t aligning her sales strategy with what works. All her sales were coming in through in-person networking. She was focusing all her time, effort, energy, and money on social media strategies. That’s a recipe for not getting where you need to be. But it’s not her fault because this is what all of you are being told will work. You’re being taught tools, social media is a tool, but you’re not being taught the process or how to think critically about your business specifically and what works for you.
Another woman recently joined The Bold Profit Academy who works with companies on high-level strategy, just like the work I do with larger companies. I get it. I understand what she does. She was considering going and getting a job, which makes sense. Also, very on trend, on theme right now with a lot of the women that I’m talking to. What they’re finding is that they don’t want to give up the autonomy of working for themselves so they need to figure it out.
When I looked at the strategy she was applying, the one she paid multiple-five figures for, it was the wrong strategy. Launching, Facebook lives, and group-program models weren’t going to work for her. Her target market is way too advanced for those strategies. We need to find a strategy that is going to actually get her in front of the people who will pay her what she deserves to be paid for the work she’s going to do.
Others in the program have taken a stand for the value they provide and have successfully increased prices, stopped offering early-bird specials, and added ways to upserve their clients instead of catering to the people who aren’t serious buyers. They’re rewarding the people who are taking action and who want to commit to working with them in a greater way.
If this resonates with you, if this concept of an owner’s statement, if my owner’s statement resonates with you, if what I just said in this last little bit resonates with you, then I want you to put your name on the waitlist for The Bold Profit Academy. We open the waitlist on a monthly basis so we only enroll serious business owners who are ready now.
