Hey, hey, everyone. Welcome to The Bold Money Revolution. I’m Tara Newman, your host. I’m excited today because we have another guest. If you’ve been listening to this show, you know that I’m in a series of podcast episodes where I’ve invited either my team, friends, clients, or women in The Bold Profit Academy to interview me because I haven’t been feeling well. My health hasn’t been great. One of my strategies for getting around that is that when I have to create content like this, I invite somebody on to just hold the energy of the podcast with me instead of me holding it all on my own. It makes it a little easier. Today, I have Lisa Carpenter with me. Hello, Lisa.
Lisa Carpenter: Hello. I love this strategy. I may steal it for myself.
Tara Newman: You absolutely should because so many women, especially my clients who come to work with me, they’re like, “Oh,” like they’ve got chronic health issues. A lot of women have started their businesses out of necessity and one of those necessities have been health issues. Like me, that’s what I did. It was all about, “How do I create a business that’s in service to my health? How do I create a business where I could make great money but utilize strategies that are easy on my energy?” which is also why I don’t run an online business, but we’ll save that for maybe a little later, right, Lisa? The reason why I’m really excited to have Lisa on is because this is going to be wild.
Lisa Carpenter: We should just take some boxer chats and we have to slice them together.
Tara Newman: This is going to be like a girl’s gone wild episode of my podcast because like the one with Stacey Harris, these are women who I really trust and they seem to get me out of any filter that I might be using or anything when I speak. This is like very much raw Tara content, which I actually know my listeners like. They like it when I’m very honest. They like when I rant. They like when I’m a little extra New York-y.
Lisa Carpenter: Let’s talk about that a little bit because I think that’s important because so often, we filter who we really are, we don’t say things because we’re trying to say our messaging right or get it right or not be judged by other people. I’ve known you for a long time. We met in the time of Periscope. Some people don’t even know what Periscope was. What was that? 2014, 2015. Oh my god, we’ve known each other for a long time, both of us have gone through so many iterations and so much growth. I remember when you first launched your podcast, then you lost your shit.
Tara Newman: Yeah, I spent two days in bed.
Lisa Carpenter: That was so big and bold for you to give yourself that type of platform, and that type of voice. I have watched your messaging evolve over the years and you really step into this boldest version of yourself, which always is like fire. I love it. I love it. I think because as well, I appreciate the work that you’ve had to do on yourself to get there. I would love to hear more about your journey around how you work through, I guess, a little bit of the mindset around really owning who you are and what you are here for, and what you stand for because even now, you are taking such a bold stance and we can go down this rabbit hole of online marketing, and math versus mindset, and what holds us back. I think I would like to hear, and I’m going to guess your listeners would as well, how you work through that.
Tara Newman: True story, funny story, I started out in the online space in 2012 blogging. I love to write and finding my voice, and all that stuff, fell into a group of other bloggers who at the time were very much getting featured on The Huffington Post was a big deal back then. Everybody’s like, “You need to be on The Huffington Post. You need to write an article for The Huffington Post, blah-blah-blah.” It took me two years and coaching to write a single blog post that I pitched to Huffington Post. Lisa is laughing.
Lisa Carpenter: That was the ROI of those two years.
Tara Newman: I’m going to back up after I move forward for a minute because I don’t get a chance to tell this story. The article was like something about success. In the article, at the time that I wrote it, I had started my business but I was still working in corporate. That’s a whole other really interesting visibility nut to crack that when you’re either side hustling or when you’re trying to transition from a career to your own business, you feel like you might not be wanting to post on LinkedIn or you might not want to be really out of the gates about it but at the same time, you need to be visible and people need to know that you’re doing a thing. That was a really interesting dance.
I very clearly told my employer at the time that I was leaving. It was like they already knew. When it got published, I think in the article—I’d have to pull it up again—I literally said like, “I’m basically on my way to starting my own business and leaving my corporate job behind.” I don’t know how the hell it happened but the entire building that I worked in, I don’t know if they had my name in Google for an alert but so many people ended up getting their hands on this article. Maybe I posted it on LinkedIn and it went like wildfire. All of a sudden, it’s like, “Tara quit.” I’m like, “No, actually, I’m still here,” but everybody thought I’d quit. It was really, really comical.
But what really took me so long to get over was my mom, all the time growing up, kept telling me to filter because what I didn’t realize until I was 44 and finally diagnosed with ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder), that hyperactivity piece is actually a misnomer. It’s not that you are hyperactive, like the stereotypical boy bouncing off the wall, but you have impulsive thoughts and you have an impulsive brain that tends to just act. It tends to not have that pause from stimulus to response.
As a child, the world conditioning me, I have a lot to say. If you think I have a lot to say now, it was really on fire back then too. My mother did not have a fine appreciation for this. It was, I’m sure, embarrassing to her that I would say certain things. It was probably I had this habit of she’d have a room full of people, like a Tupperware party and I would walk in, and the first thing on my mind is the thing I needed from my mom, so I would not say hello to anybody in the room and I’d walk right through them, and up to my mother and ask for what I needed, and she would be incensed. She would be like, “You have to say hello to the people in the room. This is rude.”
It was all this around how I communicated and how I shared, and won’t even get into how it got worse in corporate around what I could and couldn’t say to people—even though I did—and I had to really train myself. I used to count to 10 repeatedly before I would respond. Otherwise, they would get the raw form of Tara. Sometimes, that was okay but sometimes, it wasn’t. I would learn to count to 10. There was a lot of me filtering as a coping mechanism for having a very impulsive brain.
Lisa Carpenter: What I’m also appearing underneath that is I think our parents really grew up in a world and this happens today too, it might just look different where we’re always trying to navigate how do we do this without being judged by other people because if we’re judged by other people, what is at risk? Your mom might look like a bad mom or what would people think of her daughter? I can only imagine what my mom is dealing with these days with me because I have become more bold in the things that I’ve been sharing as well. How have you now lowered that filter? Because I still think that there is something important around being able to take a step back, not filter but pause before we react.
Tara Newman: Sure. Process the emotion.
Lisa Carpenter: Correct. There is this learning curve but it’s not about filtering. It’s about, “Okay, how do I want to respond in a way that’s powerful but isn’t watering down the message?”
Tara Newman: Correct, 100%. Over time, oddly enough, I picked The Bold Leadership Revolution, The Bold Money Revolution as the title of my business and I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about what bold means because it’s not loud. Bold does not mean loud. Bold to me means that you’re willing to say or do the thing that you’re uncomfortable saying or doing. It’s not about what I am willing to do, it’s about what I am unwilling to do, and looking at that, and saying, “Okay, are you unwilling to do this because it’s going to cause harm?” We don’t want to cause harm, “Are you unwilling to do this because it’s not in alignment with your values? If it’s not going to cause harm and it’s in alignment with your values, then what’s stopping you?”
Then I think over time, what happens is there you have a process for regulating the fear around doing it. I just want people who are listening to this to realize that, at least, once a week, I message my team and go, “Oh my god, I said it. I feel like I’m going to vomit.” They go, “Well, hold your hair back,” with the puke emojis. It’s very rare that a week goes by that I don’t feel uncomfortable. It’s around training myself to be uncomfortable.
Lisa Carpenter: I love this story so much because I think you remember me talking about when I was first starting my kind of “deconstruct Lisa”, I lived my life for a year from the George Costanza rule. If it didn’t feel good, that’s what I needed to do because if it was comfortable, I was in my unhealthy behaviors. I had to condition myself to be comfortable being uncomfortable, which is what you’re doing. From the outside, watching your message, I’m like, “What the hell?”
Tara Newman: You should spit in fire.
Lisa Carpenter: Yeah. Why would you need your hair held back for this? This is you, this is your message. I think it’s really amazing that you’re sharing what it feels like for you behind the scenes because I think so often, we look at other people who we admire as experts and we think that they’ve got their shit together. They’re so grounded in their message and they know what they’re doing. They feel super confident. I have learned from myself that’s rarely true.
Tara Newman: Rarely. I just posted on social media today, on an Instagram story saying, “Hey, I’m taking a step back from social media.” There will always be a podcast every week. I will always send emails. Those are the things that podcasts are batched, this is probably going to come out a month from after we’re recording it, and emails are super easy on my energy. Instagram stories, that’s my journal. I journal on stories. I say things and I journal. I have been getting real into my edge lately on stories. I have a lot more to say.
I’m still trying to manage my health. I’m in this space where if I keep going on stories, I’m going to lean so hard into my edge, I’m going to dysregulate my nervous system and that’s going to have a negative impact on my health and healing right now because I’m in a burn fucking burn mode—burn, baby, burn—and I need to pull myself back not to filter. I’m still going to say the things, it’s just going to be through my email but to really take care of my own nervous system around saying it.
Lisa Carpenter: That’s really important because it’s your responsibility, it’s my responsibility, every business owner, to look at what they need to manage their energy. This isn’t something that’s really talked about a lot in the online space. It’s you just pushed through. You just do the thing.
Tara Newman: Yeah, grind. Hustle.
Lisa Carpenter: You override what your intuition is telling you. If you can’t override that, there must be something wrong with you. You must have a mindset issue.
Tara Newman: I said the other week on Instagram—I think you saw it—I said we have a problem with work in this country, in the Western world where we believe that the harder you work, the more success you will have or the more money that you will have. So many women have come into the online space and they see these messages that are seemingly anti-hustle but they’re not, and all we’ve done is replace fluorescent lights with pink, glittered, hustle culture bullshit, but like anti-hustle, to make it look like it’s anti-hustle. It’s nonsense. It’s not true. They’re hustling their fucking asses off for the volume of leads that they need, for the stupid 1% to 2% conversion rate in their funnel. They’re burnt out. We haven’t fixed anything. We’ve made it worse.
Lisa Carpenter: Talk more about that, talk more about the online space, online coaches because that’s a fun one. That’s part of the…
Tara Newman: No. I don’t want to talk about that actually.
Lisa Carpenter: You’re like, “No.” We can bring ease to our work. I can choose to bring ease to my work. I honestly had to do a lot of work around what does ease even look like and feel like because I was such a doer, an achiever, and a multiple plate spinner, so I had to learn what it meant to bring ease to my work. I still have to work. I still have to do the doing in my business. You can do all the mindset work till the cows come home in terms of working through stuff. We all have stuff. You had stuff around your message. I have stuff around stuff but I could spend all day working on my stuff and not actually do the things in my business that are going to move my business forward but that doesn’t mean I need to grind and hustle, but I do need to be committed and responsible about what those things are.
One of the hardest lessons for me was learning to do the things that I didn’t want to do because those were the things that were going to actually move my business forward. That’s a lot of the stuff that you talk about. It’s not sexy. I even had to come to terms with the, “Oh, growing a business isn’t really sexy when you put down all the drama around it and the pink glitter, and do the things.”
Tara Newman: Lisa has been on this podcast before. It’s one of the most popular podcasts on the show where Lisa and I unpack burning down her business. In 2018, Lisa came and visited me in New York, and she sat on my couch and she had concocted a Franken-Business. She’s laughing.
Lisa Carpenter: Be gentle now, will you?
Tara Newman: A Franken-Business with all the online schemes, strategies, and stuff like that. But I think you’d really wound yourself in a circle. You were making money but you weren’t making the money that you wanted to make. I was watching you do this for a while. I can’t tell anybody anything. They gotta come to their own conclusions. This pisses Lisa off to no extent that I do this to her.
Lisa Carpenter: All the time. I’m like, “Can’t you just tell me, Tara? Can’t you just tell me what to do?” “No, I’m not going to tell you what to do,” which is really what great coaches do. They don’t tell you what to do. You gotta find the answer.
Tara Newman: In a lot of cases, yes, which is why I’m big on frameworks, why I’m big on teaching women in The Bold Profit Academy how to coach themselves, how to challenge people’s perspectives, and what they think so they can have an insight. It’s called learning. It’s amazing. It’s called learning, which the online learning space doesn’t do so well. Lisa creates a Franken-Business, then sits down on my couch in a heap of tears wanting to burn her business down, so fucking frustrated, so exhausted.
She says to me, “I just want to build a coaching practice, a well-known, high, and expert coaching practice.” She loves working one-on-one. I swear to God, Lisa and I come around this story every so often where she decides she’s going to do a group program or she’s going to do something, and she wants it to be six or eight weeks because she wants to be in and out, then she tries to jam 24 years of knowledge into 6 to 8 weeks where she’s going to also do some depth coaching.
Lisa Carpenter: I gotta share the Trello Board story.
Tara Newman: You’re going to kill me.
Lisa Carpenter: Oh my god.
Tara Newman: And I almost killed you this time.
Lisa Carpenter: Yeah. I think that was the first time that you were like, “I am not here for this.”
Tara Newman: I can’t remember what happened that day. I was really tired. Something happened. It was like we’re in a different time zone. It was like three o’clock my time and you started it with me, and I literally slammed my hand on the table. I was like, “Lisa, today’s not the day.”
Lisa Carpenter: I remember I was so taken aback because I’ve known you for a long time. I was like, “She is furious.”
Tara Newman: I’ve never talked to you like that but I’m like, “Today is not the day.”
Lisa Carpenter: But what had happened is I had taken my life’s work. I had covered a wall in sticky. I had put everything on it, then I’d taken those stickies because I’m not a systems person. This is why I love you because you can take the craziness of my brain and help me put it into boxes. I put it all on this Trello Board and I was like, “Tara, I’ve got my course,” and you took one look at it and you’re like, “You will kill people with that.” You said to me, “You see that one little tile there, Lisa? That’s your program.” I was like, “No. No, it’s not. I’m doing all of this.” That was when you completely lost your shit. You’re like, “I’m not doing this with you today.” That Trello Board is still sitting there.
Tara Newman: It’s a great Trello Board.
Lisa Carpenter: It’s got courses for a decade. Oh my god, but it was a great learning for me to see how much I know and what I’m here to teach really allowed me to establish like, “Oh, I am an expert here.” But you’re always willing to say the things to me that I don’t really want to hear where somebody else in the online space would have been like, “Yes, go for it. Let’s roll this out.”
Tara Newman: Manifest it.
Lisa Carpenter: Yeah, we’ll manifest it. Anyways, that’s why I ended up with a Franken-Business in the first place because I had created a program, brought it online, then I was like, “Where are the people that are going to buy this?” I was shocked. It didn’t work that way, then I had to learn about messaging and marketing, and basically every online program, every online course I bought, trying to fix the problem, not realizing what the actual problem was. We’ve had a few moments together, we’ve had a few moments but that’s why you’re here is to talk about the online marketing space and what it’s selling to people versus what we actually need if we’re going to grow a sustainable long-term business. Do you want to go down that rabbit hole a little bit?
Tara Newman: I’m curious. You had a brick and mortar business, you’re doing well.
Lisa Carpenter: I was making money, then repelling money as fast as it came in.
Tara Newman: Okay. How did you find the online business space? What was the desire, what were you looking for?
Lisa Carpenter: I’d been teaching a nutrition course in the studio and having great results with it but I knew that I wanted the freedom, I knew I wanted to make more money, and I knew I didn’t want to have a lease anymore. I’m like, “I’ll be able to reach way more people if I move online,” that’s why I decided to move my practice online. I took a program that I’d been teaching for years that I developed, then was like, “Here was the online marketing world.” My first course was with Brendon Burchard. I never finished it. That was my gateway drug, then it was Marie Forleo, B-School, so now I’m up 4k, then in B-School, I was like, “Oh, I still remember this as an opt-in bar. I don’t have an opt-in bar on my website. What is this opt-in bar thing?”
That led me to somebody else that I needed to work with, then it went into, “I’m going to hire this designer to brand my course and build my course,” yet I hadn’t ever sold my course online, yet I spent thousands of dollars making it look perfect and pretty, basically hiding behind all the things that I thought I needed instead of looking at, “How are you going to sell this?” Then being really resistant around what the marketing needed to look like because I didn’t want to say the things that I needed to say to sell this program. Anyways, that’s a whole other story but it was just like one rabbit hole after another because I can see it now, the way the online space works, there’s always a problem and they’re always going to have a solution. You just keep going down rabbit holes, avoiding actually doing the things.
Tara Newman: I need to correct you.
Lisa Carpenter: Please.
Tara Newman: They will always create a problem.
Lisa Carpenter: Correct.
Tara Newman: You don’t actually have a problem, well, you do, but they’re going to create a problem. The only problem that women experts have is that they often don’t know what they want. They don’t know what they want to create and they’re not supposed to know what they want to create. I work with all these experts who should be making expert pay because if they were working in a traditional nine to five, they’d be bringing in expert level pay, they’d be bringing in pay commensurate with their expertise and experience, and the effort that they’re putting in and that doesn’t always translate when we have our own businesses. They get blindsided because they’re not an expert in business. Being an expert in business gets translated in the online space into being good at marketing.
Marketing is not running a business. I can get you multiple six figures without marketing. You don’t have to market but they tell you that you have to market, and technically, you do because they’re trying to get you to sell $297 products to 40,011 people, then you need marketing because you need to reach the volume that you need to get through this Rube Goldberg machine—that’s the second time I’ve said that, third time—of a business. That’s not really how business works. There’s a lot of lies being told in the online space but they’re keeping women stuck. Among all these problems you have around marketing and not having 40,000 people on your social media, and all that stuff, you have mindset issues.
Lisa Carpenter: What you said there was really important because you and I have talked about this. I don’t believe that everybody can be an entrepreneur.
Tara Newman: No, they can’t. That’s the biggest lie.
Lisa Carpenter: I was a great practitioner, I was an amazing coach, I was great at what I did but I actually had no business sense. I started my business, even when it was brick and mortar, having no idea what I was doing. I thought I just had to make money. I thought that that’s what running a business was. I didn’t actually know what running a business was or what it meant to be a CEO, or what it meant to have a proper bank account set up. I didn’t understand any of that stuff. In fact, many times, I reached out to you and I’m like, “Tara, I don’t know what this phrase is. I don’t know what you’re talking about here.”
Tara Newman: And I always appreciated you for that. I always talk about this because again, I work with women. You had a business for 10 years before you came into the online space.
Lisa Carpenter: Yeah.
Tara Newman: And three or four years into working together I think, when you say this, I don’t know what you’re talking about. I’m like, “Thank you, thank you.” I know the least sexy thing for me to do is to be like, “Here’s the terms and definitions sheet,” but that’s what I’ve started doing because we don’t know what we don’t know. Really smart women are being bamboozled because they don’t want to look like they don’t know.
Lisa Carpenter: I didn’t even know the questions to ask. I didn’t know the questions to ask, so I didn’t even know that this was right or wrong or good or bad. I thought that these were the things that I needed to create the success that I wanted.
Tara Newman: I think that courses are a great drug for high achieving women who don’t want to look like they don’t have their shit together. Because they get to learn in private and no one is going to see what they know or don’t know, they tell themselves they’re going to figure it out and they’re going to cobble it together, and it’s exhausting, it’s a lot of hard work instead of just adopting a beginner’s mindset, being curious, acknowledging that you’re not supposed to know these things.
Lisa Carpenter: Yeah. I was very attached to the outcomes I wanted to create because my identity was attached to I’ve always achieved things. I’ve always gotten what I wanted, whether it was in athletics or whatever but when it came to things that required me to be smart because I never felt smart enough, it was just this rabbit hole that I was constantly stuck in.
Tara Newman: I was talking to a woman yesterday who is incredibly lovely. This is absolutely not about this woman in case she’s listening. She wants to sell a course that she created during COVID and she’s very passionate about this topic that she wants to talk about. She has created the course and she wants to sell 50 of them, and she’s got a lot of pressure on her of what it’s going to mean if she doesn’t sell 50 of these things.
Someone would probably tell her, “Think positive, see the 50 courses, see them, see the PayPal, see the ching-ching-ching on your phone,” Lisa is barely going to hold it together by the time I get done with this and like, “See it coming in, see it, visualize it, write in your journal every day, I get 50 sales from my course.” That’s not how this works. You’re not going to sell 50 of these courses the first time.
You don’t have any idea how to sell them. You’re very overly concerned about the landing page and the copy. That’s not what sells things. What’s the math, why 50? Did you just make it up in your head and it sounded good, and that would make you feel warm and fuzzy? Why 50? Why do you want to make the money you want to make? Why $10,000 a month? Why $100,000 a year? Why? What happens with that? Where is it going? What’s it for? What are you using it for? What’s the math?
Lisa Carpenter: I love you in your math.
Tara Newman: Math versus mindset.
Lisa Carpenter: You and my fitness coach have made me learn to love and appreciate data, which I used to be very anti-data. I was very pro-feeling. Now I’ve been able to marry the emotion but also the data. The data almost always is the thing that guides my decisions now but I also don’t get attached to the data either.
Tara Newman: It’s a process. I remember having a very severe reaction every time I looked at my bank accounts, my first year in business. Very severe, like taking my breath away, chest constricts, like an almost anxiety attack feeling. What I decided was, “I’m just going to look at it every day. I’m going to look at it every day until that feeling in my chest, that tightness in my chest starts to loosen and starts to relax.” Not then go avoid it. No, you got to go in. You got to do the uncomfortable thing or you got to look at it.
Ramit Sethi says we over-prioritize math and under prioritize, whatever he talks about, mindset, inner psychology, whatever his thing is. I’m like, “No, actually, you’re wrong or you’re half right. Women will over prioritize mindset because that’s comfortable to them and under prioritize math because that’s not comfortable to them.”
Lisa Carpenter: Correct. Because the math made me feel not very smart. The math put me into that place of, “I’m not doing a good job. I’m not doing enough. I don’t know what I’m doing.” I just focused on the mindset piece, which was important for me but eventually came to a point that focusing on the mindset all the time was actually the thing that was keeping me stuck and not moving forward until I moved into the action pieces of what needed to happen around my money.
Tara Newman: Here’s how I see it. Sometimes, a lot of times, especially if you’re a small business owner or whatever you want to call yourself, a freelancer, an entrepreneur, sole provider, service provider, whatever, your stories around money have been seated by somebody who’s not a business owner, so your beliefs are beliefs of Muggles, not wizards. Everything about owning a business, running a business, being an entrepreneur is the exact opposite of our default human psychology. Sometimes, if we just look at the facts, the black and white, the math, does it change that belief? Does it shift things?
When somebody comes to me and they’re flipping out about all the fees they’ve been charged by PayPal, and we look at, because fees are bad in non-business space, so if we look at the fees in comparison to your revenue and we look at the fees in comparison to what Profit First would allot for operating expenses, and you realize that it’s a ridiculously small amount of money, negligible but it’s the price of doing business, does that change your mindset around fees? What are your other options? Are you going to be running to the bank and cashing checks? No, we don’t want to do that.
If you look at the math, does it change the belief? Does it change the mindset? Does it calm you down to go, “Oh,” because most of the time, a lot of times when I do the math, someone goes, “Oh, I’m a lot closer to where I thought I wanted to be. I’m a lot closer,” instead of thinking that you’re so far away. How many, if I had a dime for every time one of you, my clients, told me that they weren’t making money, then looked at their actual numbers—Lisa Carpenter—then realized that they’re making more than they were making the last time they checked or the month before the year before or whatever? Your feelings are not facts.
Lisa Carpenter: That was really big for me in terms of stepping into being a CEO, was making that decision like it was no longer an option for me to not have a sight line on my money. Regardless of how setting up a spreadsheet felt uncomfortable, which I think you initially gave me a template for, one of my biggest wins, this was two years ago, was like, “Oh my god, Tara, I set up my template and I plugged in my numbers.” I wasn’t even excited about the revenue. That was cool too but it was the fact that I did the spreadsheet. Every year, I do the spreadsheet, so I track my bank revenue, I track my booked revenue so I have a great sightline on my money.
By doing that, by doing the thing that I didn’t want to do, that’s where I got more confidence around my money and around my leadership in my business because everybody wants to have this bigger business, yet they haven’t worked on the skills that build that capacity to hold a bigger business, “I want more money. I want more clients,” but they don’t actually have the system set up in the back end.
If I look back on my Franken-Business, if I had actually created the launch that I wanted to create, I didn’t have the capacity. I would have absolutely collapsed. I wouldn’t have known how to handle the money. The money would have gone back out the window because I wouldn’t have known what my expenses are, what my profit is. Many people in the online space do not understand these things. They’re talking about seven-figure launches and blah-blah-blah, yet they’re not profitable.
Tara Newman: Losing hundreds of thousands of dollars. Somebody told me yesterday that somebody they know put $100,000 into Facebook ads and it worked but it doesn’t always work, blah-blah-blah. lt didn’t get them the result that they wanted, even if they would have made the money. How many people do I know that have put $100,000 on Facebook ads and it hasn’t worked? I know a lot of people. But if you took that $100,000 and put it in the total stock market index for 25 years, and I get y’all don’t have patience, I know, this is why the internet marketers are winning because they’re winning the game where you don’t have the patience to wait 25 years but if you made $100,000 and put it in the total stock market index for 25 years, you would have over $500,000.
Lisa Carpenter: This has been the next step for me, which I know you’ve wanted to ring my neck around this as well. I’m a little bit of a slow learner.
Tara Newman: No. You actually said something really important. You said you had to figure out how to make money before you could figure out how to get your money working for you.
Lisa Carpenter: Right. There’s a very big different mindset, which I’ve also had to come to understand, between generating revenue versus building wealth. That’s two different ways of being and it’s two different ways of navigating your money, and things I need to educate myself on. Do I want to spend my time educating myself on better marketing? Not really.
Tara Newman: Which is where a lot of people are spending their time.
Lisa Carpenter: Right. Or do I want to spend it on okay, now I have this revenue that’s coming in, what do I need to learn so that my money can go make me money, so that I’m not actually the one having to do more? Because the reality is I love my one-to-one boutique style coaching practice. Every now and then, I’ll do a small group thing, but for the most part, this is what I do and this is what I love. It’s easy on my energy but that is always going to lock me into time for dollars. But I don’t believe that the solution to that is putting together a course and marketing to more people. That actually doesn’t give me more time.
There’s a lot of energy output to create something. I know it’s a much longer game than people understand. If I were to build a course today, I probably wouldn’t even be looking at scaling it for a good 12, 18, 20 months because it would take me that long to nail down the messaging and understand how I’m going to sell it, and who’s the person this is for and, “Do I like it?” Because that’s what I get into too. I’m like, “Wow, that was really fun. I don’t want to do that again.” Do you want to talk about sales skills?
Tara Newman: I do. I do. I want to pull it back though for a second and say when we did this workshop this week, this is the week that we did the workshop in March, and we were talking about financial independence, what happens is the journey looks like women in a professional position have a necessity to leave so they think that the better option is working for themselves. Necessity being lack of child care, cost of child care, health issues, job is making them stressed or sick. They’re tired of watching their mediocre white boss get all the promotions over them when they’re doing exceptional work and they’re not feeling valued for their contribution and their strengths.
Women decide, “I’m going to go work for myself. This is going to be amazing. I know better than anybody how to do the thing that I do. I do it awesome. How do I replace my salary?” That’s their first thing that they’re looking to do is replace this salary. They come into the online space and it’s like they get completely hijacked, and all of a sudden, it’s a seven-figure business. We go from replacing $100,000 in salary to a seven-figure business and Insta-fame. It gets very loud and very distracting. We’re selling people self-actualization, we’re selling people the top of Maslow’s pyramid, top of his triangle before we’ve been able to show them how to provide for their basic needs, then how to regulate themselves in their business, and build relationships, all the things. But we’re going to go straight to the dream at the top of the pyramid.
What ends up happening is people come into small business ownership, entrepreneurship, whatever you want to call it, for personal freedom and wind up sacrificing it, chasing what they have been told is financial independence. What we went over in the workshop is that financial independence is a number. It’s math.
Lisa Carpenter: Correct, and that requires unplugging yourself from the noise in the online space and getting really clear on what is the most important thing for you. I know for me, I had to really unravel myself when we were burning down my business from what is it that I want, “Do I really want this or do I just think I should want this because I’ve been told for so many years in the online space that I should want this?”
Tara Newman: And that you couldn’t have it because there was that point where you kept trying for it and you couldn’t get it because you were doing things out of order, which is why it’s so important to have a beginner’s mindset. I can’t tell you how many women I’ve said to, probably in the last few months like, “Let’s walk before we can run.”
Financial independence is an actual number and that number ties into your revenue goal, and that revenue goal becomes your business model. That’s what we are not doing in the online space. We’re not zooming out, creating that exit strategy, so what winds up happening is we’re just swirling in this washing machine cycle that we can’t get out of. Somebody commented in the workshop, in the chat, “Oh my god, nobody’s teaching this.”
Lisa Carpenter: Nobody’s talking about what’s the end goal. It’s funny because I got off that workshop, funny, not funny because I’ve had to learn that for the years that I felt that I wasn’t financially savvy and that hubby had it all together, and since learned that I am actually much more financially savvy. I got off that call and I thought, “Gosh, I’ve never actually talked to him about where he’s at with his long plan wealth,” because he’s been investing since he was 18, whereas I’m 40 and “I’m like, Wow, I better double down now because I really poured everything into my business.”
But it had never occurred to me, this is wild, it had never occurred to me to sit down with him and have the conversation, and say, “What’s our end goal as a couple? We’re still operating as two independent beings instead of, Wait a minute, we’re a team. Do I actually need to be investing as much as I’m investing right now based on what you’ve invested? What’s our end goal?” I don’t know about your listeners but I don’t really want to die with millions of dollars in the bank. I’m here to leave some to my kids but I don’t need to kill myself working to die with a pile of money in the bank.
Tara Newman: Right. When we know what that number is, and again, math, manifestation, when we know and not plucked out of the fucking sky, and a revenue goal is not your financial goal—because this has come up on my Instagram stories as well—but when you have that number, then you base your revenue goal off of what you need to make that number and provide for your family, take your vacation, and do the things, shockingly, half the people—a bit anecdotal, don’t actually have the hard data—half the people are overworking.
They’re like, “Oh, I don’t need to have a gazillion clients,” or “I don’t need to have the volume of business that I need to have,” or “Maybe I need to shift my business model where I am really leaning hard into my expertise and I’m charging a premium price. I don’t have to sell the volume that I’m selling and make myself sick and pay for all the marketing.” Then the other half are going to look at that and go, “Oh, I need to go make some money,” because some people really do need to go make some money. Again, though it doesn’t need to be a situation that creates burnout at all. We just have to know what the most profitable strategies are to get us to the number that we want to get us to.
Lisa Carpenter: Yeah. I would say most profitable and I would also add the ones that are really going to support how you want to feel in your business, I mean that was a really big part of me switching to one-to-one. It’s actually easier on my energy [inaudible].
Tara Newman: Yeah, I know. I keep trying to tell people this. They don’t believe me.
Lisa Carpenter: Because the message has been, “You don’t want to sell one-to-one because you’re trading time for dollars.” “Yeah, I’m trading time for dollars but I’m making a lot of dollars, so I’m okay with the time that I’m trading. I’m not working 24/7. I have a very flexible schedule that I can move around as need be. I set my hours, I set the days I work. If I want a week off or two weeks off, I can move things around on my schedule. I have 100% freedom in working one-to-one.” I don’t know why people believe that they lose their freedom if they work one-to-one because they’ve been told, but it’s not the truth. I actually think one of the easiest ways to create profitability is working one-to-one first.
Tara Newman: 100%.
Lisa Carpenter: Build your skills. Build your expertise. Charge more for what you’re doing. In today’s world, when we need connection more than anything but we’re more disconnected than ever, that one-to-one high-touch container is very, very powerful right now.
Tara Newman: It’s also going to recession-proof your business. It’s going to recession-proof your business because again, I hate to speculate, I think there’s a pretty fair chance that we are going to have an economic downturn. I don’t know how bad, I don’t know how not bad it’s going to be but all signs are pointing to that as a go. The “online business space” is a fairly new game. As online business owners, have you really had to do business during a time that lacked peace and prosperity? If you’ve been doing business in this space for the last 10 years, the answer is no. Eleven, twelve years, the answer is no.
How many of the web celebs that are teaching you business, marketing, whatever the hell they do, circle jerking, how many of them have run a business during a time of peace and prosperity? I don’t know. I’d start asking. Let’s break this down again, the membership model, the membership model that everybody loves. I’m not saying it’s a bad model. I think there’s absolutely a place in your business for a membership model. I think it’s great if it’s a side hustle. I think it’s great if you already have a long-term established revenue stream coming in and this is in addition to if maybe you’ve reached financial independence and don’t need to be bringing in income that would be substantial enough to really provide for your family, I think it could work then.
I think that there are the top 10% of memberships that really, really work. I know in downturn economies, the first thing that people cut are dues and subscriptions. Given the fact that the membership model in a service type, educational type industry is relatively new, not one that we’ve seen 10, 12 years ago, I’m curious as to how that’s going to fare. I already know many of them are not faring well and we haven’t even gotten to the economic downturn yet.
Courses are another one. In general, when people start to feel like they need to tighten their belts, okay, gas prices have just really gone up. They’ve doubled in the last year. If you were paying $40 a tank a year ago, you’re paying maybe $80 a tank now. I don’t drive that much so I’m not 100% sure. If you are selling info products at $37 and people need to decide between whether or not they’re going to put gas in their tank or buy a $37 info product. Let’s look at another thing. Courses. How do most people pay for courses? Credit cards. Guess what’s going up, interest rates.
Borrowing money is about to get more expensive. People are going to be thinking twice before they pull out their credit cards. People are going to be thinking twice before they make those impulse buys in your funnel. I’d be really concerned, but do you know who doesn’t think about that stuff?
Lisa Carpenter: I’m not thinking about that stuff.
Tara Newman: I’m not fucking thinking about it either. I don’t mean to be brazen and a bit of an asshole but when you have money and when you have margin, and you’ve created a life that’s financially secure, you don’t worry about these things. If you were in this position, like Lisa and I, I need you to also consider how you’re going to spend your money to take care of the people who are really struggling right now?
Maybe you’re making the money, maybe you’re investing in one-on-one coaching, consulting, you’re in therapy, like my kids are in therapy, we’re investing in a lot of things for our family right now but we’re also going to make sure that the food pantry is secure because the cost of goods at the grocery store are going up. We’re going to be asking around in our school district to see if there’s any families who are struggling and we’re going to be present to this as well, which is why making money for me is so important because it not just takes care of me but it can really support my community as well.
Let’s really get clear on what is about to happen in the world and how we can be a part of the solution, and not fall victim to these circumstances. There are going to be enough people unfortunately falling victim to these circumstances. You’re in Canada, I’m in the US, so we have a little bit of a different situation. The US has shit social support for people.
Lisa Carpenter: We have lots of social support but our government is just printing money.
Tara Newman: So is ours. That’s a whole podcast for another day, girl.
Lisa Carpenter: That’s a whole other conversation. But this is why I’m so passionate about this as well is because women, when we actually create profitability and we create more wealth for ourselves, we make different decisions about how we give back in the world. That has been a real source of joy for me over last year and into this year around my capacity to give. You didn’t have before.
Tara Newman: Now, let’s talk about sales really quickly. It’s how you feed your family. I don’t know how else to fucking say this for people who are like, “Sales is sleazy, icky, and slimy.” I get it because I was there too. I was there. I did not start off as a human who liked selling. One of the things that I really want to do is help people reframe an outdated paradigm around selling and really step in and reframe what this could potentially look like for you going forward. But if you want to earn an income independent of an employer, which many people do, even if it’s hard, even if it means slightly less money, even if it means whatever, there’s still so many people who are like, “I am unemployable. I need to earn my income independent of an employer,” then you need to understand how money works. You need to understand how to make it, how to spend it, and how to keep it.
A funnel and a link that’s like, “Click here and buy,” this is not selling. Selling is actually—I’m going to flip it for a second—instead of asking ourselves, and I’m going to have Stacey, my podcast producer, put the episode in here where I actually go through reframing how we think about sales because I’ve done that in a podcast episode, but here’s the big reframe: stop asking. Stop making it about you. Stop making it about you feeling icky, you feel slimy, you feel sleazy. Stop making it about like it doesn’t feel good to you. Stop asking yourself, “When are people going to buy from me? Where’s my next client coming from?” and start asking, “Why do people buy? Why do people buy?”
This is what we teach in The Bold Profit Academy. We teach buyer psychology, the customer decision journey, and jobs to be done theory. All those things help you understand why people buy, the functional job they’re looking to do, the emotional job they’re looking to do, the social job they’re looking to do. It’s not about everybody always having a problem. It’s about making progress. How do people who you care about or looking for people in your area of expertise, whatever that is, what progress are they looking to make? How can you be a part of them making that progress? That is what selling is. Period. We need to get over it. End of rant. Lisa’s holding her breath.
Lisa Carpenter: I’m just sitting here holding my breath. I’m like a bobble head over here, but this is why I am so grateful that you’re speaking out more about this stuff because you’re talking about the things that other people aren’t talking about. You’re not holding sorry balloons in front of the Eiffel Tower wearing a pink tutu. You’re actually talking about the gritty things that we need to learn in business.
When you really understand sales—and I’m not saying I’ve mastered it yet because god knows I’ve had my pushback on this as well, this is something I’m still working on as well—but when you really master sales and understand the importance of it in your business, and why it’s important that you master it, you’ll never really have to worry about anything in your business. When you feel confident in your ability to sell, it puts the power back in your hands versus, “Why aren’t people buying from me?” and being the victim of your business.
Tara Newman: What you have mastered that we work on, and we work on this at The Bold Profit Academy as well, is identifying opportunities that are right in front of your face. Finding leads and prospects that you didn’t realize were there. I call them invisible leads. Understanding who’s warm, who’s hot, and focusing on having conversations with those people. That’s the majority of the game, creating those opportunities and waiting for them to come to you because the online business space teaches you to wait passively for opportunities to come to you. You just sit there at your computer and I’m like, “I’m waiting for somebody to click on my link. I’m waiting for my PayPal things to ching in my inbox.” Refresh, refresh, refresh. No, that’s not how it happens. You actually have to get out there, talk to people, and build relationships.
Lisa Carpenter: Put in the unsexy work. It’s building a business. If I take it back to before I moved my business online when I had no idea what I was doing, I knew exactly what I was doing because that’s all it was about. When I came online, all of a sudden, it got complicated but I grew a very successful business. I grew a very successful business by building relationships, showing up as the expert, and talking to people.
Tara Newman: I don’t like the word stupid but I’m going to use it and I’m just prefacing that I don’t like the word stupid, and I’m about to use it so don’t cancel me. What happens is really smart, intelligent, expert, professional women come online and they lose their brains. It’s like they become stupid. It’s like all of a sudden, these youngins, because some of them are young, look like it’s pink, it’s glitter, and it’s sexy and it’s this, and it’s that and all of a sudden, you’re like, “I don’t know anything. I need to buy all the things.” No, that’s not how this works. You actually do know things. You still are an expert.
I sent out an email this week and I said, “Hey, this is why I like working with experts because we get to stand shoulder to shoulder. You get to be the expert of what you do, I get to be the expert at what I do, and we partner.” There’s no weird guru-esque power dynamic shit happening in my work.
Lisa Carpenter: Yeah, it’s really collaborative. You really guide women back to being able to trust themselves to learn the things, to grow their businesses, and to create what it is they want with a lot more ease but not without the discomfort of doing the things that they’ve probably been unwilling to do.
Tara Newman: Yeah. You do have to get uncomfortable.
Lisa Carpenter: Correct.
Tara Newman: You gotta show up and you gotta get uncomfortable. You gotta implement. You gotta stay in it every day. It doesn’t have to be a lot of work. It’s like little bits of work every day.
Lisa Carpenter: Yeah, same as how I would apply to the gym. I’m not always going to pick up an extra five pounds but maybe I can add a half pound on each side and that half pound every week, week-after-week after week will add up to a lot. Patience. Consistency.
Tara Newman: Yeah. Thank you for coming on. My message is going to be getting bolder.
Lisa Carpenter: Good. I’m going to be in the background, slow clapping.
Tara Newman: Sending me the fire emoji like you do.
Lisa Carpenter: Right. We all need those people in our lives that see us for who we are and really champion for us to be more than what we are, and hold us to what is possible for us. You have always been that for me and I love being that for you, so go you because this message needs to get out there.
Tara Newman: Yeah. Seriously, if you’re listening to this, it’s time. It’s time to make decisions. It’s time to decide whether or not you want to be here in three years with a business, earning income, making progress steps ahead. If you don’t, if you’re like, “Hey, Tara, the things you’re talking about sound good but I don’t really want to do it. I’m not interested in being uncomfortable, too tired,” whatever your shit is, that’s fine but make that decision and get out. Stop. Go get a job. There’s nothing wrong with that.
Unplug, unfollow all the business accounts. Stop listening to this podcast. Go have a life that is different and that is the one that you want to have because too many women are harming themselves by “trying” to be an entrepreneur or trying to run a business and we don’t have the bandwidth for that anymore. Nobody has that capacity. If you’re like, “You’re right. I’m done,” then be done, get out, go get a sandwich, drink some water, get some sun on your face, get a job. It’s cool. But if you’re in, you gotta be all in now. Now is the time, you gotta be all in. That doesn’t mean hustle your ass off. It means get in the right rooms, start shifting your perspective, start investing in what you want three years from now, not today.
Lisa Carpenter: Yeah, you have to decide to do the work. There’s just no way around it because trust me, I spent a lot of years looking for the easy button, “There’s gotta be a way to do this where I’m not going to have to do the uncomfortable things.” It doesn’t work. If you want to be an entrepreneur, if you’re hardwired to be an entrepreneur, there will come a time where you have to just do the doing. You have to commit to doing the doing. That’s it. It’s not sexy.
Tara Newman: Nope.
Lisa Carpenter: Worth it though.
Tara Newman: We’re like, “Peace out.” Now we’re done.
Lisa Carpenter: We’re done.
Tara Newman: Drop the mic. We got it for an hour.
Lisa Carpenter: Oh my god, I’m so glad I had the opportunity to do this. I hope you invite me back to pick your brain again. It’s good.
Tara Newman: Absolutely. Tell people where they can find you by the way.
Lisa Carpenter: Oh gosh, where am I hanging out these days? Probably the best place to find me is on my podcast, The Full Frontal Living™ Podcast. I’m occasionally on Instagram stories but like you, it’s an in and out where my energy’s at. They can find me over on my website at lisacarpenter.ca.
Tara Newman: Awesome. Thanks for coming by, Lisa.
Lisa Carpenter: Thanks, Tara.
