My first podcast episode of every year is really about setting the intention, setting my intention for the year. That’s what this podcast is all about because I value your time, your energy, and money in a noisy world where we have 26 seconds to capture attention, you being here is not lost on me.
If you’re like me, you might have been noticing your capacity isn’t what it once was.
My family who got sick three times, three of us actually, I don’t know how much dirt my son must have eaten in his childhood, but he did not get sick at all, however, three of us got sick three times. I did this back-of-the-napkin math, I realized we lost over 18 weeks to illness.
Do you hear that, parents? Eighteen weeks, that is wild to me. It has really changed the way I’m thinking about life, work, family, scheduling, and all the things money going forward. Instead of trying to figure out how to do more with less, we need to be able to discern what is worth our energy and what isn’t. That is why I’m doing this podcast.
This year is about even greater transparency where I show up as explicitly as possible because we don’t have time to waste.
We might be navigating all different normal ups and downs of life and then we might be navigating illness, some kind of family crisis, some kind of health issue, or whatever, so we need to learn how to be more discerning. This year for me, it’s about transparency, leaning into what I think is already a superpower for me, and being even more explicit. This way, you know if you should continue to tune in on a weekly basis or whether you want to be even in a reciprocal relationship with us.
What a reciprocal relationship means is that you take some time and leave a review. You share an episode with a friend. You take an action and email me or you join one of our programs. Because that’s how business works through reciprocity.
The one thing that I see missing the most in small businesses today, especially if they’re doing business outside of their local community and online is that feeling of “main street”. The reason why “main street” works for businesses, and the local community works, is because you’re in relationship and you’re being reciprocal.
I’m trying to bring that back into what I do and taking a stand for that. The only reason why you’d be reciprocal is that you’re gaining value. You’re the right person here with us. Especially if you’re considering working with me, you need to be sure you have the problem we solve, you need to be able to tell if now is the best time to do this work, if I’m the right fit, and if what I teach will work for you.
The quickest way I know how to do this is to be direct, honest, and speak in plain language. Nothing flowery, sexy, or internet market-y. We’re just going to be real humans on this podcast. How do you know if you should spend your time listening, signing up for our email list, or joining The Bold Profit Academy?
I’m going to tell you right now.
Let’s talk about who you are.
You are an expert running a service-based or education-based business.
When I say expert, I mean you’ve been doing what you’ve been doing for a long time, you have the experience, you have the expertise, you have the qualifications. That doesn’t mean it’s a degree but you have some certification or the requisite qualifications to be doing what you’re doing.
I’m going to give you an example of what is not an expert because I get people who email me all the time and I had this woman who emailed me who was an accountant. For her career, she has been an accountant. That would make her an expert. However, she had recently taken a coaching program and had a transformational experience and now wanted to get into some kind of transformational work like the experience that she had been through.
She wasn’t sure what her modality was going to be in doing this. Was it going to be coaching? Was it energy work? She’d taken a whole bunch of business-building courses and none of them had seemed to really move the needle for her and she was really stuck.
I said, “Hey, well, I love that you’re considering joining The Bold Profit Academy, what I think you really need right now is something to help you with your career transition. You’re not quite ready to build a business yet. You’re still really focused on changing from being an accountant to being this other person, identifying what your process is going to be, what your modality is, and where you want to land. You really need to work with a career transition coach or take some certification program to get yourself up to speed.”
Now if she wanted to build a business like an accountancy, we would have been a perfect fit, because she was going to be working in a way that will leverage her existing expertise.
I hope that giving you that example was helpful. I don’t work with people who are one step ahead. I work with people who are miles ahead. Likely, they have worked for somebody else to gain the experience that they have.
If you return to the workforce, you would earn a six-figure salary, but you value your autonomy and agency above everything else and you’re not looking to work in a traditional work setting. You’ve already ditched your nine-to-five. When you did, it wasn’t because you were looking for $100K months, it was out of necessity and all you wanted was more time for yourself and to replace the salary that you had.
You wanted to be able to make that amount of money independently from an employer.
But now you’re not making the money you want to be making.
When I say you’re not making the money you want to be making, you’re not paying yourself the money that you want to be paying yourself. You’re in a financially vulnerable place because you’ve poured a lot of money into things that you feel didn’t work. You don’t know what your enough is. You don’t know what that magic number is that you need to hit so you can pay yourself, so you can run your business, so you can pay your taxes and have that cash flow.
You’re probably feeling burned out from building a business that work to bring in initial sales but has become overly complex.
You’re tired from jumping through all the hoops and navigating what seems like a never-ending learning curve despite how long you’ve been in business. When you see marketing that is overly aspirational around crushing it, and eight figures a year hoopla, you swing between “I’m over the hype” and “Why don’t I have the success I want?”
That is the one thing I hear from experts: “Why don’t I have the money to reflect my level of expertise? How come so and so over there on the Instagram grid next to me is crushing it and I feel like I’m on the struggle bus and I don’t feel like I’m doing as well as that person is doing?” You’re trying to find your center, the place where you can feel confident in your approach to your business and you’re feeling good about your success.
If that sounds like you, welcome to a place where we put our mental health first, we charge grown-up prices to solve complex problems, because we are experts and we care about keeping more of our money. We care about keeping more of our money. We build businesses that are in service to our health. We build businesses that regulate our nervous systems and build wealth.
You’re likely struggling to trust yourself.
I hear this from every single woman that I talked to. You’ve made some decisions and you’re being too hard on yourself about the decisions that you made. Honestly, I hear this from women who are in low-revenue businesses and I actually hear this from women who are running $10-million businesses. We have all seemed to make mistakes with our money that we are still beating ourselves up about and we don’t trust ourselves.
If this sounds like you, make sure you sign up for the Revenue Goal Calculator. It’s the first step in reconnecting with what you truly want and need your intuition. The first 30 days of emails you will receive are specifically designed to help you trust yourself again.
Confession, I don’t want a seven-figure business.
I have no interest in putting in that level of work for my money. I like to make my money, make them really profitable, have really juicy cash flow, and then take that money and put it into other cash-generating assets that will work for me so I don’t have to work so hard for my money.
This could be the stock market, this could be a dividend portfolio, this could be real estate, this could be another business that you’re not particularly running, that you’re not working as hard as you are for this business. This is where we start to look at wealthy people who have seven streams of income coming in. How can we start to take the money that you have, that you’re making in this business and start investing it in other revenue streams so you don’t have to always be working so hard for your money?
That’s really my biggest confession.
My goal is to build a business that is in service to my health and builds extraordinary wealth for myself. I know that I can build wealth, that I can be a millionaire, I can be a multimillionaire without having a million-dollar business.
I’m against performative business and celebrity entrepreneurship. You are never going to see me really making income claims about my own income or posting any kind of income statements.
I do use past P&L from my businesses over the years in The Bold Profit Academy as teaching, for lessons. But that’s not something that I would be doing forward facing as a marketing tactic. That’s what I’m really here to say. There are things that are relevant for you to know as someone who is looking for a teacher and mentor.
Here’s what I think you need to know about me if you’re considering working with me.
As a kid, I grew up in a family that owned a small business. I have a very different relationship to small business than a lot of people have. I have seen my dad fall on hard times. I have seen him be really scrappy. I’ve seen him take big risks. I’ve seen him take out a second mortgage on the house to make things work and they did. I have a lot of early proof that small business ownership is amazing. It could work even when it’s hard or challenging.
I personally never felt like I fit in anywhere. You could find me watching curiously from the sidelines as my peers participated in all the activities and events. I was what I like to call the fringe dweller. I guess I thought if I studied them long enough, I could make them and immediately fit in. This taught me to be an astute observer of human behavior and likely led to my pursuing a degree in psychology.
By middle school, it was clear that I had learning challenges, but this wasn’t a time that focused on inclusive learning. We weren’t testing kids for ADHD and such and so there were really no resources or support and that made middle school and high school incredibly trying for me.
By the time I applied for college, no school wanted me, not even the ones who took someone with a pencil and a pulse. This experience gave me a crash course in negotiating when I demanded the school to reevaluate my grades and my application based on my senior year because, in my senior year, I actually made honor roll for the first time and realized I wasn’t lazy, unmotivated, boy crazy after all.
I simply excelled at things like political science, economics, government, and psychology, classes that I didn’t have an opportunity to take until I reached my senior year. I then went on to shock everyone by graduating summa cum laude from a top research school and blew their minds by getting a graduate degree in industrial organizational psychology.
I burned out for the first time, one of many, many when I finished undergraduate school, so I chose to underachieve my way through graduate school. But I did score an epic internship working for a boutique HR consulting firm. This was an experience that is still with me today and informs so much of my own teaching and mentoring. Shout out to Evelyn.
My mentor Evelyn prioritized motherhood over the grind. She gave her knowledge freely to teach us. She challenged us with assignments well beyond our capability, like letting me analyze and write 360-degree feedback reviews for C-suite executives in Fortune 500 and 100 companies at just 22 years old. What did I really know? But she went on to share how I had gifted insights when writing these and I really understood what was at the core of human behavior and how they could go on to develop their skills and abilities further. That is really where I’ve hung my hat my entire career.
I also understand from my story not being good at math, not fitting in anywhere, and the loneliness that comes with that, being told I’m worthless, and the burning shame associated with feeling othered in an educational setting, trauma from being bullied and othered that impacts your ability to be a court jester on the internet, be visible, and to do lives, reels, and all of those things.
I understand the fine line between burnout and ambition.
I’ve been a working mom for the past 17 years so I also understand overwhelm and competing priorities. I have ADHD and chronic illness, which form the basis of all my business foundations and strategies that I teach. As a matter of fact, I built this business to heal from burnout, which I always laugh about because most small business owners are chronically burned out. But I started with that intention.
In 2010, my husband and I went bankrupt and that stayed with us until our credit report in 2020. We went bankrupt because our first business, the manufacturing business failed as we navigated the great recession. We have spent years recovering from something that I thought was a death sentence. I never thought we’d be able to move on from that. But both my husband and I own businesses now and we’re successful because of the mistakes we’ve made along the way.
I am 100% here for you to make mistakes, for you to fail and flub your way through business ownership because that is 100% the best way to learn. I’m committed to providing safe places that allow you to do that, because we get a lot of messages online that it’s not okay to fail, it’s not okay to struggle. I think that’s the only way that we learn.
One thing that helped us recover financially and become successful today is the Profit First methodology, which I have chosen to become a certified Profit First professional. Sure, I have a graduate degree and expertise but it’s the ability to blend those things with our experiences that make us experts. It’s not just about the content.
As we know, anyone can create content, but it’s the context that provides depth and richness. Combining these things with my over 20 years of business experience in the area of sales and leadership, training, development, and team dynamics, I am the perfect guide for those who want to step outside the brainwashing of online business culture.
Hey, I’m Tara Newman, a perfectly imperfect human who has a ton of knowledge in business growth strategies that don’t revolve around social media.
My work focuses on four components:
One: revenue acceleration, finding the buyers who are ready to work with you now. We all have them. We all have invisible leads. We need to get good at finding them, identifying them, categorizing them, and having simple ways to outreach and enroll them in our programs, our work, or services.
Two: understanding why people buy. Understand why your people buy. Buyer psychology or what I call actual marketing, not the shit you see online. Buyer psychology is empathy. It’s putting your buyer’s needs before your own.
Three: developing a sales process that aligns with your strengths, values, and target market.
Four: implementing a cash flow system that gets you paid and allows you to provide a stable financial future for your family.
If you’re here and nodding along, that’s awesome. I hope you find our content useful, and if you do, please leave a review and share it with a friend. Use our episodes to start meaningful discussions in your community. Take one action per episode. If it’s your time to gain the skills required for sustainable self-employment, then you’re going to want to check out The Bold Profit Academy and join the waitlist.
It’s 2023 and I don’t work for free. You shouldn’t either. I also don’t work for likes, follows, downloads. I work for actual money. I work to make an honest living, put food on the table, and provide long-term stability for my family. I will be 100% unapologetic about that going forward. If this activates you, as I suspect it probably activates some of you, all the more reason to stick around, listen to the podcast, and work with me.
