In this episode of The Bold Money Revolution, I sit down with Alyssa Labrecque to talk about how Profit First helped her both inside and outside of her business. She shares insights from her time working with me and inside The Bold Profit Academy.
Hey, hey, everyone. Welcome to another episode of The Bold Money Revolution Podcast. I’m your host, Tara Newman. I’m here with Alyssa Labrecque. Alyssa is really awesome. She’s a health practitioner and she focuses on your guts. Alyssa, tell us what you do.
Alyssa Labrecque: I do. I’m a holistic nutritionist and I help people who are struggling with the gas, that really stubborn bloating, constipation, diarrhea, and even pain, be able to feel normal again without living on restrictive diets and being medicated the rest of their life.
Tara Newman: I love Alyssa because she talks about poop.
Alyssa Labrecque: Right. We talk about poop a lot.
Tara Newman: But you do it in such a great way. I really appreciate the work that you do and the courage and the boldness in which you do it.
Alyssa Labrecque: Thank you. If we’re going to break the stigma around hard topics, we might as well have some fun while we’re doing it, right?
Tara Newman: Right. If you’re someone who’s listening, make sure after the show if you have some gut issues, you go find Alyssa Labrecque and we’ll give you all of her details at the end. Alyssa is here today and we’re going to talk about our experience, Alyssa’s experience working with me. There are some really cool pieces about Alyssa’s story that I can’t wait for everybody to hear and I can’t wait to share. But before we start, what made you want to start a business?
Alyssa Labrecque: I’ve always said I’m unemployable. I’m a bit unemployable in the sense that I have always been a big dreamer. I’ve always seen a big vision for even the very few places that I was employed and I wanted to grab the reins myself and make something big. Even when I was in university, I had my own interior-exterior painting business to pay for school and so I’ve always had this entrepreneurial streak in me. My parents are entrepreneurs. But really, for me, what ended up moving me forward again as an entrepreneur in this field was I was really passionate about helping people fix their guts after watching my sister suffer with colitis for so many years.
On my mission to go help her, I started realizing that my gut was quite a mess and ended up changing my life—lost 70 pounds, went back to school, became a nutritionist, and became really passionate about it. I knew one thing for sure was I didn’t want to just work in a health food store and I didn’t want to work in a white walled clinic environment. I really wanted to be able to help more people than just the people who were in my hometown. That, again, meant that I needed to take the reins myself and build something.
Tara Newman: There are a couple of points here that you made. I love that you come from an entrepreneurial family. I do, too. I’ve always talked about entrepreneurship as being for the unemployable. It’s not until recent years that it’s become like in vogue, like a fashion or a fad to be an entrepreneur and run your own business. I’ve seen it over my lifetime with my own family about how they just really weren’t cut out to take marching orders or anything like that. They were very rebellious and so they wound up running their own businesses.
Then I love how you were looking to create something you didn’t see in the world. I think that’s what so many women are looking to do; they’re looking to do their most meaningful work, they’re looking to create something that they don’t see. I know many women who I work with are just true experts and they’re tired of being what they feel as undervalued or under-recognized in their traditional roles. They’re looking to start a business that allows them to really reward themselves differently, both monetary and non-monetary, to really do the work that they were put on this earth to do their mission, fulfilling their mission. You’re hitting a lot of those buckets.
I also really think your story is interesting because you were raised by entrepreneurs and you’ve had some stuff, some beliefs—like we all have—from our upbringing that were actually not really true. They might have been true for your parents but that didn’t mean it was going to be true for you.
Alyssa Labrecque: Oh, 100%. I’ve had quite a bit to unpack around that actually.
Tara Newman: You have. Can you think of one or two things?
Alyssa Labrecque: I think the biggest one that I have to really keep myself grounded to stay out of is that it doesn’t have to be hard, I don’t have to constantly work so hard. Even saying that still is very uncomfortable because it’s like, “Are you sure, Alyssa? But you’re supposed to work really hard.” I’ve really learned that that’s not the case. That really only cost me my health. It did actually cost the business profit in the long run, year over year. I really had to—and I’m still learning—to really embody the idea that it doesn’t have to be hard, I don’t have to work so hard.
Tara Newman: Because I think you’re probably the one of the first people who has linked this belief around having to work hard to profitability, how do you think that’s cost you profitability in your business?
Alyssa Labrecque: Working from a place of feeling like you constantly have to work hard to be profitable in business means that you’re operating out of a place of fear, at least it did for me. I know that when I’m in my fear, it squashes my creativity, it makes me not want to show up at full capacity for my clients or my community and content creation for my team. It makes it very difficult to run a profitable business when you’re in your sh*t. What I really witnessed is sure, working hard, I was successful, I grew a business, but the fear is also what made me make decisions that made the business grow slower in fact.
Tara Newman: Can you give me an example?
Alyssa Labrecque: I was so committed to it having to be hard, it actually stopped me from hiring and outsourcing on tasks that I shouldn’t have been doing, that a team should have been doing instead so that I could be in my zone of genius, so that I could be focusing on doing the tasks that generated profit for the business. Instead, I was designing images in Canva, I was still responding to emails. Even though I had a team that was still in there, I’d still be poking my nose in other areas because I felt like it needed to be hard so I kept myself busy. I kept myself in all of the different departments when I had an incredible team to do those things.
I again needed to expand out even further than that to really have back-end tech stuff, design stuff, video editing, just all of those little nitpicky things that it feels easier, the story I told myself is it’s easier just for me to do this because it’ll take less time than me trying to build out all the SOPs and all the processes to be able to train someone else to take this on. That story cost me hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Tara Newman: It actually cost you more because now I’m thinking about some of the other things that you had going on. But we’re going to talk about this because I do want to ask you about what things looked like for you before we started working together because you had a very successful business when we started working together, you were doing great, but I do remember you being very burned out, like physically ill.
Alyssa Labrecque: Yes, I was very sick when you and I started working together.
Tara Newman: You started working with me in The Bold Profit Academy and you said it was like business therapy. I think you needed a soft place to land and a step back.
Alyssa Labrecque: Yeah. There was a lot. Before you and I started working together, I was again in this story of it having to be hard. My day-to-day life was really unhealthy. I was working 12 to 14-hour days and my schedule was back-to-back. I had zero boundaries. I wasn’t carving out breaks or space, hardly any time to take pee breaks or even eat lunch. It was everything from running up to 25 sales calls a week to running a full client load on top of doing all the front-end marketing and private messaging with my free community. It was so much. I don’t even know how I did it. I got to such a place that I was so burnt out, that I became very, very sick. I spent the last year working with you really learning how to heal myself.
Tara Newman: What do you think got you hooked other than the fact that you already had this belief around it having to be hard? Was there anything that was happening in your business that particularly hooked you around that made it hard for you to let it go?
Alyssa Labrecque: Do you mean what made it difficult for me to let go of the idea that it doesn’t have to be hard?
Tara Newman: Yeah, what kept reinforcing it for you? What were you getting out of it?
Alyssa Labrecque: It’s interesting because I was in the work so much so every sales call that I ran and the client signed up, it was reaffirming like, “Oh, this is working. The business grew.” My business grew four times that year. I was like, “Okay, this must work.” When I was really starting to get sick and I had to pull back and I wasn’t able to show up on video as much, which has been a really big lifeline of my business, I could feel the direct hit of that. Again, it really felt like it was affirming this belief that I needed to keep pushing, I needed to keep working harder because it’s only when I show up that income comes into the business. That’s just not true. It’s just not true at all. I really had to restructure things and change my thinking.
Tara Newman: When we started working together, you and I just went and opened up our DMs because it started in a DM conversation, you’re interested and you were like, “What are the next best steps?” We went back and forth. You were talking about how you’re not interested in growing a big business to pat your ego, that you want financial freedom, you’re not resonating with the whole model of just spending more money on ads or hiring more people, charging more, giving less, scale-scale-scale, and lose touch with delivering a transformative experience; that you want financial freedom but you also want to sleep at night.
Alyssa Labrecque: Yes. I’ll share this, I’m in such a different place now, it’s hard to even remember that place but also it’s very nauseating to actually hear that again because I do remember that feeling and it was debilitating.
Tara Newman: Then you ghosted on me.
Alyssa Labrecque: I did.
Tara Newman: But this is a part of the process. This is really what I want to have this very real conversation around—and Alyssa has agreed—to have it in a way that is so beneficial for others. You dipped out and I remember following up with you. For everybody listening—and I’ve explained this before—the things that you all struggle with, I struggle with too, I’m no different. I’m a human being. Things like following up with people, things like sending sales emails, all that stuff, I struggled with it too.
I remember very specifically going back and tapping on you and being like, “Hey, checking in.” I was actually thinking of one of your posts that came up in my feed, you were talking about poop or something and it was very relatable. I made that comment and we started this conversation again. You thanked me for reaching back out to you because you were sitting in what you called mad resistance and you knew that you needed to sign up for The Bold Profit Academy, that you needed it on so many levels, but money had a debilitating hold on you was what you said.
This is not uncommon that folks will say this to me, “Money has a debilitating hold. I’m a penny pincher. I’m just super freaked out about money.” What I always like to do is have a conversation with somebody, not to actually enroll them in the program, but as a business owner, this is troublesome to me because we need the exchange of money in our businesses. I said, “Hey, let’s just hop on a call and chat this through. Let’s just talk about it.” What were you feeling at that moment? Because you said you tend to freeze.
Alyssa Labrecque: My relationship with money at that point, I can only describe the feeling, let’s put it that way. The way I would word it is it had a debilitating hold on me. I’ll even share, to a point where there were times where it felt even uncomfortable opening up my bank accounts. I would know there’s money there but there was just this fear of what if there’s none?
Tara Newman: Behind the scenes look, there’s actually a lot of money there that Alyssa was hoarding. Why I said it costs her more than what she’s saying is because she was keeping a lot of cash in the business that could have been used to yes, support her with hiring people but also be invested so we could get it working for her and not have her working so hard for it. But that’s a tell for later on down the line.
Part of what happened is you had a lot of growth in 2020 in your business, in the year of the pandemic, really. How did you get a tremendous amount of growth? How much of this was just that you became overwhelmed by how much money you were making and you didn’t know what to do with it?
Alyssa Labrecque: A big part of it was that I wanted to grow a big business but it wasn’t to pat my ego or just to be able to throw big numbers out online and say, “Oh, look at me.” I really wanted to have a great impact on people but I also wanted financial freedom because remember, my biggest fear was not having enough and/or running out. When the business started growing and I was working so hard, I’m like, “Oh my god. It’s working.” I also realized, “How do I be a steward of this money?” I don’t even mean being a good steward of being able to make donations, which was something I wanted to be able to get to, I just meant like knowing the logistics of how do I make this business profitable because everyone in the online space just keeps talking about revenue, spending on more ads, hiring and hiring, and all these additional expenses. That didn’t make sense to me.
I was like, “Well, if I’m just spending more money, I’m not making more money, I’m just growing a bigger business but the margins are still the same.” I really wanted to grow a profitable business. I wanted to understand how to manage my money and the problem was as my income grew, that fear grew because it was like, “Holy sh*t, I actually have to confront this right now.” That was a really big piece of having to up level my game as an entrepreneur. I think that tipping point is probably different for every person, but when you start to realize that you actually have more money than you needed just to be able to pay your bills, when we all start our business, everyone thinks $100,000 is the sweet spot like, “When I get to $100,000, I’m going to be made,” you get there and you realize, “Cool, made it, but I also personally still need more money.”
This is the problem with focusing on revenue, your actual profit take-home at $100,000, I don’t want to say that you’re still broke, but it’s not enough to live on. Anyways, when you start to get past that $100,000 though, and you start really expanding and you realize you’re more than okay at home, the bills are covered, and now you have all this extra money like “What do I do with that?” like taxes, all the questions, all of the things, retirement, investment, there were so many questions, it was so debilitating. I couldn’t even take action. I couldn’t move. I just kept thinking about you. That’s why I was so grateful when you reached out because I was in this place of I so badly want to and need to but I can’t get myself to move. Being able to have you say, “Hey, let’s just have a conversation,” it felt like the hand holding that I needed.
Tara Newman: Yeah, let’s just have a conversation. I want this to be a moment where everybody hears what Alyssa said. She was so grateful to me that I found the courage to reach out and start the conversation again. How many people do you perhaps have around you who are waiting for you to start this conversation again because they might be paralyzed or having hesitations, not about you—you weren’t having hesitations about me per se.
Alyssa Labrecque: I knew I was going to sign up with you before you and I had even made contact.
Tara Newman: Right. What were the hesitations? What was stopping you?
Alyssa Labrecque: If I took action, I would need to confront the feeling. I would need to confront the fear. I would need to actually look this thing in the face and deal with it. It just felt a little bit easier to just ignore it and try to keep pushing through, to avoid it. But again, I knew it’s inevitable because this business is only going to keep growing. I had a lot of fears around taxes and all that stuff that needed to be unpacked. I really needed some confidence that I was managing my money just fine.
Tara Newman: I remember you saying to me, “If I don’t know how to manage what I have, how am I going to make any more?” That’s a really common thing that women say to me. We weren’t given these skills prior to having a business.
Alyssa Labrecque: 100%. I also just want to share too, if you’ve come from an entrepreneurial family as well, I really feel it’s important to normalize this because I always felt like why didn’t I pick up more, why didn’t they teach me more. That’s okay too. Just because you came from an entrepreneurial family doesn’t always mean a whole lot either. It sometimes means you have more to unpack.
Tara Newman: But I think what you did take away though was you were going, “Wait, something about the way the online space is teaching people to do business is not what I know.” You had enough business acumen probably from sitting around the kitchen table as a kid that unfortunately, a lot of very smart expert professional women might not have and you were like, “One plus one is not equaling two here.”
Alyssa Labrecque: Yeah, 100%. I admittedly drank the Kool-Aid at first. The idea of a lot of what’s being promoted out there felt really exciting.
Tara Newman: Yeah, very aspirational.
Alyssa Labrecque: Totally. But when I really started getting into it and listening to what was being taught, it didn’t make sense. They’re not running profitable businesses.
Tara Newman: I’m just curious, what were some of your red flags? Because there’s a lot of cognitive dissonance around this. What I find with my clients, especially if they’ve been in the online space, there’s a lot of cognitive dissonance because they intellectually know what you’re about to say but they keep seeing it over and over again in their news feeds being represented differently. That’s hard to break. What were your red flags?
Alyssa Labrecque: I’m going to also add there and/or you may be listening to this and you’re experiencing it as a client of a business coach and you’re feeling it. I’ll speak from that perspective. I really saw, in the online space, there was this lack of care for you as the client, or for clients in general, it was really driven by scaling and cutting back on personal touch, automation-automation-automation, and at some point, there needs to be community, there needs to be connection, there needs to be some touch point. That was a bit of a red flag for me.
I really feel as a person who cares very deeply for my clients, especially in health, there needs to be a little bit more of a connection between me and my clients, that just going sheer volume, I’m only going to be able to create so much change in that person’s life without me creating more of a high touch experience. But some other red flags were also this idea of just continuing to spend more money. If you want to make more money, then you need to spend more on ads. The whole thing was like I would hear silly things like, “Well, if you could spend $5,000 to make $2,000 extra, would you?” Of course, you’d spend $5,000 to make $2,000.
The idea was as long as I was spending money and it brought money in, then that was a good decision. That really didn’t make sense to me because with bringing in more clients, there are added expenses that happen on a back end, admin level, and it just wasn’t translating. Your ads are not your only expense. I started to see that what I was taking home was getting smaller and smaller with this method of hiring more people, hiring more subcontractors, and spending more on Facebook ads. That was a huge red flag for me.
Tara Newman: You had actually a really complicated sales process.
Alyssa Labrecque: Yes, the sales process too.
Tara Newman: Because you’re dealing with having to warm up cold leads, which was I think what was making it pretty complicated. I think those are really important red flags for people to check in around. I want to talk about some of the breakthroughs because I think that the breakthroughs that you’ve had will speak to the flip of the red flag. We’ve been working together for, we just checked, it’s about a year since you joined The Bold Profit Academy, and then we started working together one-on-one. I adore you. You have had so many shifts, perspective changes, breakthroughs, real moments, real big wins, but can you capture some that maybe have stood out to you?
Alyssa Labrecque: Let’s start with money. I think that the big thing that I really had to process was when you said, “Alyssa, you are a wealthy woman.” It’s just a totally different thing to be able to really have that land. It doesn’t even really matter where you’re at in your business right now, for me what that represented was a comfortability around money and being able to be in relationship with money; not being scared to make purchases. Even though, again, knowing money is there but just that old fear, being able to invest in the business and myself, understanding Profit First, I truly have zero worries now because my fear was driven by a lack of data, a lack of understanding of the finances in my business. Now because I have such an easy system that literally takes me minutes once a month, I have so much data to show my nervous system, “Hey, you are more than okay.”
Tara Newman: I also think it gave you a framework to have conversations with your partner.
Alyssa Labrecque: Yes. It’s really changed how my husband and I even talk about our finances and how we spend our money too. We really stick to making purchases around what helps us thrive. I remember doing our thrive list training with you. My husband and I did it together.
Tara Newman: Eric is very happy that I said he can have his coffees.
Alyssa Labrecque: Yes. I was counting all $45 a month that he was spending on coffees. These are the things that I laugh at now but I know many of us experience. Especially when you’re growing a business, there are so many unknowns and when you are trying to chase after all of the pennies, I had to just trust and surrender a little bit. But I could only do that when I implemented Profit First and I had an actual system that was showing me I’m more than okay. That was a really big thing. But we’ve even gone so far, Tara, to really simplify my business. There’s still a lot of moving parts but we’ve really simplified the process and unf*cked the sh*t that was infused into it from the online space (pardon my potty mouth).
Tara Newman: Yeah, I have an e-warning on my podcast so it’s totally cool. I actually have something that you had written in The Bold Profit Academy. I remember there was this whole thing about you posting your prices.
Alyssa Labrecque: Oh, yeah. I was so scared to post my prices because I was taught you never post your prices, that you have to get them on a sales call so that you can get all of their objections out of the way and basically get them to a place of seeing that they have to value whatever you’re trying to sell them.
Tara Newman: What energy is that?
Alyssa Labrecque: Scarcity.
Tara Newman: Proving energy, scarcity energy, desperation.
Alyssa Labrecque: It’s toxic. As an entrepreneur, when you’re running from that place, you’re trying to build from that place, that energy is infused into your business and that impacts how you manage your money. How you’re expecting other people to invest their money in you is going to impact how you manage your money. I needed to unf*ck my energy around money with my clients and potential clients.
Tara Newman: We’ve done a lot of that. You wrote “I’ve never had my prices posted,” and I remember you asked this on an office hours call. It says, “It was recommended to me with the thought that by listing our prices, we scare our clients away and don’t get the opportunity to reframe someone’s objections.” You said, “Our call about a month ago really resonated around listing prices,” so within 30 days you made the change. I think you made it immediately. “It never felt right to me to hide them but I was scared and I think I just needed the nudge or permission. To be clear, I worked 10 times harder for every conversation and sale, not listing my prices.”
Alyssa Labrecque: A thousand percent.
Tara Newman: “I used to run 25 sales calls a week. We were pushing about 300 PMs a week, 8% booked call rate, 30% close rate, 7 new clients on dead cold leads. #exhaustionakagotshinglesnotjoking. Today, people message us, we have done nothing to change but change my energy around this. We still send about 100 welcome messages a week. We’re running four calls a week and about four to six new clients a week. Our calls are radically different. People are showing up on the call ready. The conversation isn’t us convincing people the program works but discussing if they are ready for the program and which coaching package makes the most sense. Everything feels so much lighter. I feel in integrity. I didn’t realize how much this was blocking me energetically in my business. It’s a breath of fresh air.”
Alyssa Labrecque: 100%. Feels really cool to take a walk down memory lane because we’ve even gone so far now. We have a whole program overview page. Everything is so upfront, so transparent up front that when people come on a call with us, it is really just to sign up, it is to figure out what program is going to make the most sense for them and for them to be heard, for them to have space held for them, to understand what’s been going on for them and their health, and to ensure that they’re the right fit for the program.
It’s very much more like an application process now. Whereas before, my energy was very much like, “We need to get anyone who breathes on the phone.” The energy around it is very much “We’ll take anyone who’s willing to sign up for the program.” Today, we turn down people from our program if they’re not the right fit. We let people go from our program if they’re not the right fit. That’s a very different posture to have. That’s a very different energy to have even around your money, which you and I have even talked a lot about that little nugget as well quite a bit.
Tara Newman: The other way was going really against the data and the statistics that only maybe 15% of your leads are ready to buy now. Here, you’re trying to force some greater percentage the way that you are doing it, whereas if you put your sales process, all the things that you were doing on that call anyway forward-facing to help them make decisions as they continue on their journey with you, by the time they get to the sales call, then they’re going to be a much better prospect and a much better client overall because you’ve really prepared them on how you work, on what you do, on when they’re going to be ready. It becomes a much more enjoyable process to be transparent instead of keeping everything under wraps.
Alyssa Labrecque: It’s interesting because I often think back to when I was first starting my business and just being surrounded by other entrepreneurs who were starting their business. I often heard concerns and fears from people around not wanting to feel salesy. But the fastest way to build trust with your potential client is that full transparency essentially. I was just thinking about what happens now, we have clients that show up on the phone call and they’re like, “I know everything about you. I have binge-watched every video. I’ve read through every single page on your website.” I love them. I love the stage 10 clingers. I don’t have to do a thing but hold space for what I’m actually here to do, which is to help them fix their gut because we were just so transparent up front.
I don’t mean to switch gears on you here, Tara, but the other thing that really blew my mind was when we actually started talking about “How are these things actually converting for you, Alyssa? You’re pushing so many cold leads.” I just learned that sheer volume would bring income into the business.
Tara Newman: I’m not going to argue with another person’s method of doing things, and I can see how, in the beginning, that works. I think that the best thing to say about when you landed on my doorstep was it was working until it didn’t. It worked, it got people in the door, it got you started but it caused other problems that needed to then be fixed if you were going to grow with any level of not having shingles.
People come to me that their hair is falling out from stress and also just a huge out spend on marketing that doesn’t pay off in the long run for a whole lot of reasons; the one being I think what I hear from business owners is “I spent all this money on marketing.” This isn’t even necessarily in the “online space”, I work with people brick and mortar and they will tell me the same thing that they have spent a lot of money on Yelp ads, on Google ads, on print ads, whatever, and that the marketing person is telling them that they will deliver customers, but that’s not the marketing person’s job, it’s the sales person; the person responsible for sales that converts the lead into a prospect, into a buyer.
If you don’t have sales skills, no amount of marketing in the world is going to actually work. There’s just these disconnects that eventually start to show up and become problematic. This constant chase for new leads will just burn you out.
Alyssa Labrecque: I thought that the way for me to create financial freedom meant that I had to work my ass off because I was going to have to become a million dollar business.
Tara Newman: Oh, right. Then we had that conversation around how you can become a millionaire without a million-dollar business.
Alyssa Labrecque: Not only that but basically how I can become a millionaire and not have to grow my business any more than it has already grown. If I just sustained where I’m at–
Tara Newman: Yeah, in 10 years you’ll be a millionaire. I think you had more than a million when we calculated it.
Alyssa Labrecque: Yeah, I think it was over two million.
Tara Newman: Yeah, in 10 years. How old are you?
Alyssa Labrecque: I’m 33.
Tara Newman: Oh, so when you’re 43 years old, if you just keep doing what you’re doing and sustain the business you have–
Alyssa Labrecque: Yeah, that was a mind f*ck moment. The other one was when you shared the size of your business and the size of your email list. I came from a place of understanding where I thought I just had to grow this massive email list and my life would be made. Then 15,000 email subscribers later, it’s just costing me hundreds and hundreds of dollars a month, I didn’t know how to convert them but also, this is the most important takeaway, we’re focusing on profit instead of revenue, and focusing on conversions instead of just volume. This has been such a massive shift for me.
Tara Newman: To Alyssa’s point by the way, there’s a quote here, I just pulled it up from my friend, Warren Buffett. He says, “If you don’t find a way to make money while you sleep, you will work until you die.” What he means is your investments, not selling things for $17 as you sleep. I don’t need to do that because I have investments that work way better for me with less effort.
But I think what you’re pointing to is that every part of the system that I teach, whether it be lead generation, whether it be how you create your offer, whether it be how you structure your sales process, or what you do with your money, is designed to be profitable. You might decide that you want a business of $150,000 in revenue, that’s not for me to say, that’s your choice for whatever your personal reasons are, but that $150,000 is going to be the most profitable revenue you could possibly make. We’re not wasting money, time, energy, any kind of resource any more than what we have to.
Alyssa Labrecque: 100%.
Tara Newman: It’s been really fun working with you.
Alyssa Labrecque: I’ve had such a blast working with you. It has been so expansive. There just are no words to really describe it. Just when I think I have gained clarity on a particular topic—I’ve shared this with you before—you’ll come back with a whole other perspective that just blows my mind in a whole other direction, and by the time we’re done, I feel so confident with such clarity. That only comes from understanding that everything has nuance, there’s never a right or wrong, there are so many different angles and perspectives.
Tara Newman: The reality is I’m not changing your perspective, I’m bringing you home to who you are.
Alyssa Labrecque: 100%. It’s the things that I never even considered.
Tara Newman: You’re actually unf*cking the way that you’ve been programmed to think so that you can come back to who you actually are.
Alyssa Labrecque: Yeah. When I say expansive, you’re offering these perspectives that I was just so stuck in whatever my current thought process was or thinking, and it was just so nice to have someone be like, “Have you considered this side or that side? Or what about that side over there?” Then for me to be able to land on what feels best for me. I truly feel like I have steered the ship. You’ve been my GPS. You’ve given me route options, but I’ve steered the ship. That’s been a very different feeling and experience than what I’ve had before. It feels really cool to feel like for the first time, I’ve built a custom business based on what serves me and serves my clients, what fills me up and brings me joy, instead of this one-size-fits-all online approach. I am an entrepreneur using online tools.
Tara Newman: Yes.
Alyssa Labrecque: I’m no longer an online business.
Tara Newman: You’re leveraging the tools of the internet.
Alyssa Labrecque: That’s right.
Tara Newman: Which could be anything. It’s really important right now because big tech is a hot mess. What do you think someone needs to know about me to work with me, before they work with me, as they’re making this decision to work with me? Is there anything that you think somebody needs to know about me or how I work, of what it’s like in my programs?
Alyssa Labrecque: This is such a good question. The hesitation is not from not knowing what to say, it’s how to put it into words. I think the most important thing is you’re going to come into Tara’s world and your mind is going to be blown. All you have to do is just keep coming back and stay committed to the course because what’s going to happen is your mind will shift and evolve, and again, expand. The only thing you have to do is be prepared to take responsibility but also take responsibility and know that Tara’s not here to make decisions for you.
I once shared with a friend of ours, a colleague of ours, another client of yours, and I said, “Tara does such a beautiful job at answering your question while not answering your question.” That is because your job is not to give me the answer, your job is not to tell me what to do, your job is to help me expand and upgrade my thinking and my systems so that I can do a better job at making decisions in my business. I, as an entrepreneur, gave my power away and my choices away. I looked for other coaches, mentors, and online people to tell me what they thought I should do.
The best thing that has happened with Tara is Tara helped me realize that I’m capable of making those decisions and she gave me the tools to feel confident in doing that. You just have to show up and be ready to take responsibility and feel uncomfortable and then we grow through it. You come at the other end, you’re like, “Whoo! That felt wild and good. Let’s do it again.” You need to expand through another level.
Tara Newman: You are all more capable than you think. I’m here just to keep reminding people of that; that you’re on this path for a reason, you can do it, you are more capable if you show up. I’ll do anything for your success. Do you remember the call where I sat down and we went into your bank accounts together?
Alyssa Labrecque: Yes. I literally needed that hand holding. We arranged that. You were like, “Do we need to just log in together?”
Tara Newman: Yeah, you were feeling super uncomfortable about making your allocations for Profit First. You were being all awkward and weird about it and I was like, “Hey, we just need to have a call where I sit there and you log into your accounts.” Easy peasy. Handled. Like “Let’s just get it done.”
Alyssa Labrecque: Yeah. A lot of this was new territory for me and for my husband, and having someone who had been through it and could just sit there and hold space for me while I pushed through some fear was such a game changer. Because as soon as we did that, it was like, “Oh, that was easy.” Nervous system regulation and away you go.
Tara Newman: Right. You have given so many words of wisdom for women business owners. I really think that this is a very important episode on the podcast. I think you’ve probably spoken to things that people are really feeling, like confession. I’ve never gone through a lot of these programs that the people I work with have gone through. I’ve never gone through them intentionally. I understand what happens in them but I haven’t been in them. I certainly am experiencing what happens in the online space as a user of social media.
Early on in my business, I was in some free Facebook groups that I found very damaging and corrosive to my confidence. But it’s really always helpful for me to have my clients like you who are just coming at this maybe from a different lens. Any words of wisdom that you have for anybody before we roll out of here?
Alyssa Labrecque: I think the easiest way to sum this up is you need to trust your gut. I wouldn’t be a gut expert without sharing that. I don’t mean that in such a cliche way, I truly mean that because I think what happens is we truly lose touch with our gut because we’re putting so much emphasis on what others think we should be doing, including our family, friends, whatever, and we lose touch with our own sense of direction, our own voice, our own values, what feels good. Before we know it, we’re running a business that is not creating the feeling that we wanted.
That was ultimately just what happened for me. I got to that place from like, “Hey, it’s ‘worked’” and yet I feel worse. This isn’t what I thought it was supposed to feel like and that is because I lost touch with trusting my gut. That is crucial. It’s such a critical element of being the driver of your ship. When I say that I feel like I finally built a custom business, that was because I came home to trusting my gut and really getting in tune with what felt good. Do I like doing one-on-one coaching? Do I like group coaching? What parts of my business do I like? What do I not like? What sucks the living daylights out of me?
Tara Newman: Also exploring it from angles that you haven’t explored it from, that you’re only seeing it being done one way.
Alyssa Labrecque: Yes. That’s what I mean by custom. I was given a templated approach to running an online business—I invested in that, I chose that. I take responsibility for that—but because I wasn’t listening to my gut, I didn’t know that there was another option for me, I was scared to choose other options for me. When I say custom, I mean that you can build whatever it is that you want. That becomes just what you offer. If there are people that want something else, then you are not the coach for them and that’s okay. This has also been the thing that has led me to coaches in my life today that are truly in alignment with supporting the outcome I’m trying to create, including how I want to feel. Again, coming home to trusting your gut will guide you in all areas of your business and life.
Tara Newman: Thank you. Speaking of guts, if we’ve got people who are listening who are like, “Oh, I might need someone to help me heal my gut,” where could they find you, Alyssa?
Alyssa Labrecque: I love hanging out on YouTube. You can find all of my videos on my YouTube channel. You can also find me on Instagram and Facebook or on my website alyssalabrecque.com.
Tara Newman: Awesome. Thank you so much for coming on.
Alyssa Labrecque: Thanks for having me.
