Hey, hey, bold leaders. It’s Tara from The Bold Money Revolution Podcast. I’m so excited to be here today because I am interviewing The Stacey Harris from Uncommonly More who is, well, she’s the producer of this podcast but she is also a member in my Mastermind program, the Bold Money Mastermind, and she’s actually been with me for quite a number of years. We are going to be chatting today along the timeline that she has gone through and her ups and her downs over the time that we’ve been working together, one, because I want to normalize these things for business owners and two, because we are opening—it is open now—the Bold Money Mastermind for 2022. We are in the process of enrolling new members into the mastermind and I thought it would be really helpful to bring Stacey on to share her story, to answer some questions that you might have if you’re considering joining us.
If you are interested in joining the Bold Money Mastermind in 2022, I want you to put in your application, we are going to be chatting with all the amazing people who want to be joining us in 2022, and taking you through a game plan call where you can see how we can be supporting you next year in making it really a breakthrough year. That’s what we’re here to talk to Stacey about is, I want to help you see some of the breakthroughs that are possible for you when you have this level of support. So Stacey, welcome
Stacey Harris: Hi. I’m excited.
Tara Newman: I’m excited too. Can you give us some of your background? Tell us what you do. I want you to share how long you’ve been in business. I want you to share some of, maybe the different iterations. So give us some of your background.
Stacey Harris: The readers’ digest version on the Stacey Harris, let’s go. I own a company called Uncommonly More. We are a podcast production agency. I’ve been in business for 10 years. However, this agency has only existed for three. When I started my business 10 years ago, I had been a stay-at-home mom for a while and really it was not for me, it was not for me. Great choice for some people, but it was not for me. I needed the part of my brain that functioned when I work to start working again, like start functioning again for my mental health. But I actually also didn’t want to go do anything I’d always done. So I did the thing that was a really bad idea in 2011 and is maybe a worse idea in 2021, which was how to work from home, and I figured it out. I did some VA stuff for about a year and then I really fell in love with the marketing side of things, and I focused on social media for a long time, but I’ve always, always, always in my business even when I had a membership, even when I had info products, I’ve always, always, always had some service based offering. It is the one consistency in my business because it’s always been my most reliable income.
I had spent a long time as a service provider, I was booking and delivering everything I sold and three years ago, I decided I wanted to launch an agency and I wanted to really focus on the service delivery part of my offerings, but I didn’t necessarily want to be the person that delivered all the things, so I was going to launch an agency. When we launched Uncommonly More, it was going to be full-scale digital marketing—the only word that comes to mind right now is monstrosity, but that could be the experience of the first year, more on that later. Then after a couple of years of doing that—and doing that somewhat successfully, which is probably why it was so difficult—I decided to streamline and go back to my educational routes, which is that I have a degree in audio engineering and we decided to focus on podcasting. I’ve been podcasting for eight years, we’ve been editing and producing podcasts as part of our digital marketing services, and so we streamlined it. That takes us to today and the podcast-production agency
Tara Newman: Yeah. Actually, you gave us a lot so I want to take a second. First of all, I want everybody to hear something really, really important that Stacey said, and I didn’t pay her to say it, she probably doesn’t even realize what she said, but she hit on something that I believe in so strongly and that is when we show up for our ambition and for our most important work in the world, it is in support of our mental health. There are so many messages out there that say, “Working equals burnout,” and I think we’re really creating a lot of fear in women around putting in an honest day’s work and that is so upsetting to me because I know so many people who sure, we have to be careful because we’re passionate about we what we do, and do we tend to overwork? Of course, it’s part of our default—Stacey’s shaking her head—but when we can find that sweet spot, which is what I hope I help people do, it really is in service to our health, it’s in service to our mental health.
I say all the time my dad retired and he started a service-based business because he wanted something to challenge his mind. He calls me all the time and he’s like, “Talk to me about business, I want to hear about these things, it makes my mind work.” I think that whether it’s colleagues who I know who have been going through, maybe messy divorces or just personal life crises, I experienced this myself that work became a grounding and anchor for me at times. Thank you for sharing that Stacey. Let’s talk about where you were prior to joining the mastermind because I would love for us to really paint a clear picture for people. I have a really clear picture of your transformation, which has been astounding on all the levels not just a business level but on a personal, emotional, mental, all those levels, the one thing that really stands out to me the most from when we started working together was how you would get yourself in this point of a looping thought pattern that would cause you to isolate.
Stacey Harris: Let’s see. When I joined the mastermind, it was three years ago, so seven years into my business, we had just privately launched the agency, we had launched Uncommonly More. When I say we, me and the mouse in my pocket, because I had yet to hire any team. I was basically spending some time trying to figure out if this was going to be a viable thing. I knew it was not going to be a viable thing if I did it alone though, because I, at that point, had shifted mostly away from the service delivery side because I was convinced it would burn me out, because in the development of my business, I had gotten really, really tired being the person that both sold and delivered in the past. I was really nervous launching the agency and getting back into actually delivering the things, before that, I had been doing a lot of consulting, I built strategies and hand them off to clients, there was no really hands-on delivery and so I was really anxious about not getting to a point where I was doing all the things and just utterly exhausted. Also, I was not great at communicating when that was happening before it happened, which meant I would just get real, real quiet. It’d be like, “Wait, wasn’t Stacey here before?” It’s like I would Irish goodbye life. I’d just be like, “You know what, I’m going to be over here alone in this room for a while.
Tara Newman: And suffer in silence.
Stacey Harris: No one will know what’s happening, which is still something we’re working on but there’s been growth. That was definitely where I was. It’s funny because I say this to you a lot, I knew I could no longer do business unsupervised. I needed someone else to help be the grown-up sometimes, and be like, “No Stacey. Stop burning it down.” That’s where it was before we started, before I joined the mastermind. It was very much so me figuring out what starting all over was going to look like, while still running a business that was existing and successful.
Tara Newman: Yes, correct. I think that you’ve made a lot of good points because I was going to say, in general, what problems do you think business owners have for like that $250,000 and scaling phase experience. I think you’ve touched on some of them. One, it’s the balance of—and I hate to use the word balance—but the balance of selling and delivering. It’s not only about making delivery easier, it’s about making sales easier, because you’re going to pick up the time and the effort, either on selling or on delivery. I don’t think that people realize that sales have a cost. When you are running a webinar, when you are launching, when you are using social media, when you are using a podcast, there are costs for ads, there are costs that come with selling, so how can we decrease the cost of sales, make them more efficient, decrease the time it takes, but as well on the other side with delivery. I think that you actually spoke to a common problem that my clients also have is around wanting a level of supervision. Am I setting the right goal? Are these the most efficient actions that I could be taking? Help, I’m distracted, and I’m noticing my time is being thrown around everywhere or I feel like I’m overworking and I don’t know where this is coming from.
Stacey Harris: For me, I’m the one I want to throw in there, because I think it’s an important one, to the point of what do you think the problem is at that place where I certainly was, was this idea of it’s no longer about burning it down. I needed someone to supervise me with the matches because I would get uncomfortable and want to start over. Except, I put a lot of work and energy into this thing that does actually work, but there is just a part of it that needs to be tweaked, and so a big part of it where I needed supervision and where I think mistakes and difficulties laid for me, there was the idea that it was now about efficiency, and streamlining, and evolving a system that I had created or was creating, not destroying and starting over every time
Tara Newman: I think that when we wind up with, and you said it yourself too, you were making money like it wasn’t broken, it wasn’t completely broken and it’s like, how do we take what’s working and amplify that and put some juice behind what’s already working? Then what can we do slightly differently to complement what’s working to get it working even better? This is really a high performance business strategy because it’s not about doing all the things, it’s not about doing more, it’s about refining, fine-tuning incremental change that leads to some of these really big breakthrough moments, which is what I wanted to talk to you about next. First, what has been or was particularly messy and uncomfortable in that journey for you when you were on your own or before you were getting into deciding to join the mastermind? Because I want to normalize for people that business is actually messy and uncomfortable.
Stacey Harris: Business is 100%, maybe always messy and frequently uncomfortable, at least if it’s working, because the better it works the more I’m like, “Wait growth, what’s happening?” For me, as I was going alone before the mastermind, I think what was so messy for me really does tie back to this, when I would get uncomfortable, I wouldn’t find the source of what was making me uncomfortable, I would decide that something dramatic had to change and because so much was working in my business, that meant I was going to add something else. I was just building and building on a decent foundation, but certainly not anything solid enough to take the height at which I was growing this building with things. I would get into this loop of overwhelm and then destruction, and that wasn’t great. I think that caused a lot of discomfort.
Tara Newman: Yeah. I think you’re always famous for saying that you don’t have feelings.
Stacey Harris: It’s true. Come on. I’m famous for that?
Tara Newman: Yes, you’re famous for saying that you don’t have feelings and I think watching you evolve over the years, it’s been me giving you an objective perspective when you’re in your feelings.
Stacey Harris: Yes, I frequently try to logic my way out of my feelings, and so I will get so wrapped up in trying to logic my way out that I’m actually just drowning in feelings, which is probably why I don’t love them. I have them, I just don’t like them. That’s where we’ve gotten to now.
Tara Newman: Yes. I think that the marketing messages that we get these days are making this worse to the point where it’s been through like self-reinforcing
Stacey Harris: Yeah. You and I have talked about this but I’ve gone through a lot of, in the course of developing my business, this pattern of “Okay, so what’s the next thing that I have to fix what’s broken about me before I could be successful too?” It was either broken about me or broken to my business or this thing I hadn’t figured out, or this thing I wasn’t doing the magic right way yet, and that is a rough loop to get caught in.
Tara Newman: Yeah. I think that having these objective conversations allow you to move through those things a lot more more quickly. Let’s talk about some of these breakthrough moments that you’ve had over the last few years, and I want to start with taking time off and getting clear on what you want.
Stacey Harris: That was, what? Last year I did that?
Tara Newman: Well, I hate to bring this up, because we’ve been not traveling but in Tulum.
Stacey Harris: Yes. Tulum. Yes, it did start in Tulum.
Tara Newman: Where you took that leap off?
Stacey Harris: Yes, I hadn’t taken I want to say two days next to each other off in the 12 to 18 months before that, because for me when in doubt I will work. It’s possibly my hobby, it’s what I would do if left to my own devices.
Tara Newman: I actually think that’s pretty common among women from what I know about the people that I’ve worked with that their default is to work, they work to avoid their feelings, they work to avoid having difficult conversations in their life, they work because that’s where they feel the most rewarded or confident, or maybe even the opposite, where they feel like they’re not as confident and so they have to just keep working to and then somehow they’ll become more better, confident, whatever, that somehow more is more. More equals more money.
Stacey Harris: True. There’s definitely stuff that I was having to work through. I don’t remember how I got here, how did we get here?
Tara Newman: Tulum?
Stacey Harris: Yeah. Tulum feels like a weird life time ago. I was definitely a different person before I went to Tulum.
Tara Newman: Yeah. Then you took the time off, and I think you used the time while you were there to get clear on why you were working and what you were working toward.
Stacey Harris: Yeah
Tara Newman: Then things really started to shift and I think some other breakthroughs started to happen.
Stacey Harris: Yeah. It’s funny because 2019 was the first official year of Uncommonly More and the agency. The team developing was the first crack at me handing some of this off, and that was probably the center of a lot of my focus in that year, was trying to figure out how to unclench my fists from doing the actual delivery of it all. God, it’s such a weird lifetime ago. I’m trying to think of specific instances, but we did some big things. We ran live events that year, we did a lot that year.
Tara Newman: Right. I think that was the year where you were finding yourself like, “I’m going to do this agency. What is the work that this agency is doing and how do we want to do it?” It was actually, even though you had been in business for seven years, it was very much a back-to-the-drawing-board in a way. Starting this new revenue stream is often like starting a new business but with the knowledge and skills that you had from the business you already had. By the end of that year, I think you had decided to close your membership because you were still running a membership back then.
Stacey Harris: That didn’t happen until we got into 2020. That wasn’t until spring of 2020. In 2019, I really, really wallowed in as much discomfort as maybe I could humanly stand because I did actively grow my membership and have work in that while getting to get Uncommonly More off the ground. By the end of 2019, I knew that something had to change in 2020 but I didn’t know what it was yet.
Tara Newman: It was like, “All right, we we tested this, we experimented with this,” to your point earlier, a digital marketing agency that at that point was doing lots of different things, you were delivering podcasting services, you were delivering digital marketing services, you were delivering strategies, you were delivering trainings and workshops.
Stacey Harris: Yeah, and everything was custom, which is important to mention because that changed in 2020 and we’ll talk about that. The efficiency in my sales was also completely not there because every time I got a lead, I had to assess what was happening, we had to go through a completely customized sales process, a completely customized proposal process, and follow up. We were literally reinventing the wheel every time in sales and delivery. I was very tired at the end of 2019.
Tara Newman: Then what I remember happening is starting to really clarify your target market and the best way to support them, not what they wanted but how you wanted to support them. I think too many business owners create offers and services around what they think their people will want and not around what they actually want to deliver and then finding the people for those offers. We started to really clarify your target market.
Stacey Harris: Yeah. I just remember we were at the end of 2019 and we were talking about 2020. I was like, “Of course, I’m going to do the mastermind, again, I’m not allowed to do business unsupervised,” and then I said, “But we’ve got to find a way to get me to work less.” You were like, “Great, welcome to the conversation I’ve been trying to have with you for eight months.” I’m like, “Okay, I’m ready now.” Because Tara’s really good at letting me swim in my discomfort for as long as I’m going to need to as safely as possible until I finally come around.
Tara Newman: This is actually a really good point to make if you’re planning on joining the mastermind. I don’t tell you what to do. I make suggestions, I can share with you what I’ve seen work, but you ultimately have to choose and make the decisions for how you want to run your business. Yes, I have a system, yes, I have a process, yes, we have fundamentals that we teach, but what we’re really helping you do is think critically as a business owner. Sometimes, I can see where things are before you see where things are and I nudge, I suggest, but you ultimately have to come to that point.
Stacey Harris: Yeah. I think for me, one of the reasons I love working with you and will work with you for as long as you’ll have me, is this perspective of you also understand specifically about me—and I know this is true for other people because we talk about you—you have a tendency to see, “Okay, nope, she needs to be uncomfortable with this.” There’s no telling me before I decide that I’ve sustained the discomfort long enough and I’m ready to fix it. It’s just not going to happen. Just try to keep me on the track until then but I had to get it. I remember at the end of 2019, before 2020 saying, “Something has to change,” and that’s when we started really defining, “Great, who do you want to work with and what do you actually want to be doing?” That’s what 2020 was all about.
Tara Newman: Yeah. We clarified the market, we simplified and got really specific on what the offer was, so that’s when you stopped doing digital marketing.
Stacey Harris: First, we closed the membership, closed all the info stuff because it wasn’t what I wanted to be doing, it wasn’t what I wanted to be selling, and it was taking a huge amount of effort for me to do that. We closed all of that stuff in the spring and then that summer, I completely stripped all of my offerings down to one offer, and that was podcast production.
Tara Newman: Yeah. You did two things here, you decided to productize the offer to make it easier to deliver but in making it easier to deliver, you developed your own IP as an expert, created your own system, you’re not regurgitating what is already out there so you now can stand out in the marketplace and deliver something, an experience that is unique and highlights your strengths and your expertise. Let’s talk about that.
Stacey Harris: It made it so much easier to deliver. It really did.
Tara Newman: We productized your offer, which is when you take a service, systematize it, and make it into something that is repeatable as you deliver it even though it’s a service.
Stacey Harris: Yeah. This was really funny because it was one of the many great examples of where I tripped and fell and accidentally landed in the point because I had gotten sick of our project management software and was not using it and moved to a new one. In, I don’t know what, like 90 minutes, built out what is now our dashboard. That was how I figured out that I had built an offer. That’s how I caught up with what Tara had been trying to tell me to do because I was like, “Wait, this is a system,” because I had to put it in our project management software so that the team could function through, I was like, “Oh, wait, here’s a physical thing,” I mean it’s digital but I can see, and that was really probably the most dramatic shift, moment wise, because I was like, “Holy, moly. Now I see all of it. I see how I deliver it. I see how I sell it. I see how I build our team. I see how it grows. This is the thing.” That was really exciting and also really scary because also I realized I had the system and this thing we were going to move forward with and so that meant after spring turning off revenue, we turned off more revenue, which was scary but ultimately, again, really, really, really good.
Tara Newman: We were like, “Have you thought about a productized offer?” You’re like, “What’s a productized offer?” Then you were like, “Oh,” that led you to the next things and the next thing to the next thing through a series of happy accidents where you create this productized offer that doesn’t require you to deliver it, and even if you had to be the one who was delivering it, it made it easier to be delivered. You saved a lot of time.
Stacey Harris: And the team is essentially levers. I don’t mean this in like a dehumanizing way, like the positions and the roles on my team are parts of the system and so we have built-in people more than one set of eyes, more than one set of ears, but also when someone’s out, we have a really clear “This is how someone else in the team can pick that up, this is how we all stay in communications with each other.” It made running the team easier, it made delivering the product easier, it made selling the product easier because there was a really clear process.
Tara Newman: Did you increase your price?
Stacey Harris: We did increase our price. What we did most importantly though, because we didn’t actually increase our price a ton, and considering how much revenue I had cut off or shut off in streamlining, I was really freaked out, but what we did was we increased our profitability. It took me a lot less money to make the money. I didn’t really need to increase my price or increase my revenue to walk away financially ahead. Does that make sense?
Tara Newman: Almost like magic.
Stacey Harris: A little bit. She’s making a very annoying face right now that she makes when I say things that she’s like, “Yeah, welcome. I’ve been here a while waiting for you, there are snacks.”
Tara Newman: This is a scalable offer, which means that you can sell more of them without necessarily adding more time or cost in delivery. Because I think that people confuse what scaling is and they think that scaling has to be more and more and more and more, which is I think what we were talking about earlier in the sense that you were trying to make more money by doing more and more and more and then we streamlined the business, we created the productized offer, and now you can add more revenue without necessarily adding more work.
Stacey Harris: Yeah. It’s great because we’ve reached a point now where after X amount of additional clients, there becomes an expense of additional team but that additional team has already been paid for in the gap between, it’s built in that it covers the cost and again, it stays profitable. I think for me, and it’s funny, as we move through 2020, it was so much about efficiency and it was so much about pulling things that I had built out back and streamlining and cleaning up as we went into 2021, I really wanted to do that same thing to our sales process because I had productized the offer and I had productized the delivery and the system behind the scenes for the team and it was so easy to then make selling it more efficient. Now I’ve increased the profitability even further because it’s not costing me as much time to sell it. We were able to do the things that we help our clients do like build assets that become part of the sales process that help clients get on sales calls and like, “Oh, this is how this thing I sell works for me too,” and proposals and all of those things because this is what the thing is.
Tara Newman: The other opportunity that this created was as you got very specific, as you niched down—if you will, I know we don’t always like that word—and you got really clear on your process that these are the steps, this is what we do, this is who we help, this is who we don’t help, you started to really create clarity around that target market and that offer. As you did that, you found opportunities where your existing clients needed other things done, and because you had streamlined that offer, you were able to take on things on a project basis to what I call up serve, the people who you are already working with, creating even more efficient revenue because you didn’t have the customer, you already acquired them.
Stacey Harris: And because what we deliver is so clear and so specific, it’s really easy for them to be happy to work with us again. It’s not a complicated ask. We become the default like, “Oh, yeah, we’re doing this, of course, Uncommonly More will help us with this,” it becomes the easiest way to continue to serve the client. It’s interesting, as I looked at how the future of my business is, I had, for most of 2020, said, “Okay, so when will I create that down sell? When will I create that small bite offer?” By the end of 2020, I was like, “There will be no small bite offers.” We will offer more supportive adjacent services, not just in the short term with projects here and there for existing clients but even the trajectory of our growth. What is the next thing? Now it’s not “I got uncomfortable and so I added something new to make something different to get the dopamine,” whatever it is, it’s “This works and now this could make sense as a way to further serve our clients and diversify our revenue.”
Tara Newman: How do you feel you and your business have improved or benefited from being in the mastermind specifically?
Stacey Harris: I think the biggest benefit for me personally, which pays off for the business is the balance of fact and feeling. Because I like to swing wildly—well, I don’t like to but I tend to—swing wildly between one or the other. I get real, real stuck in my feelings and I get real, real stuck in fact. For me, finding the rhythm there—I won’t even say balance because I think it’s still a dance—but finding the rhythm there, finding that sweet spot, most of the time, has been incredibly helpful in me moving to where I want to be but also seeing where I want to go next. I become less reactionary and more forward thinking. Not just from a strategic standpoint, not just from like, “Here’s my plan,” because I’ve always had that, but in the “What do I want my business to look like? What do I want my business to feel like? How do I want to support my team? How do I want to support our clients?” That stuff has been really helpful instead of being, “This is uncomfortable and so I’m going to do this as a result of that.”
Tara Newman: How do you think that you get that through the mastermind? Is it objective opinions? Is it time to work on your business?
Stacey Harris: For me, some of it is definitely straight up just a built-in—I’m going to say obligation just because it’s how it works in my brain but I don’t mean it in the negative way in which it sounds—having this time, it’s like when you get a personal trainer so that you know you’ll get your butt to the gym. I have this mastermind so I know I will make the time to work on it because we’re going to get into a conversation and you’re going to ask me questions I want to have the answer to. Some of it is that building in time because I am notorious for prioritizing client work over anything of mine. This is something we still have to slap Stacey’s hand about on a semi-regular basis but I’m more aware of the problem and I feel like that’s gross.
Some of it is just having the time but also having a place to process—I’m a verbal processor—and get an objective and honest, but also thoughtful, perspective. One aware of all of the things, certainly heightened awareness around this in the last 18 months of pandemic life because we did things like shut off parts of my revenue and then a global pandemic started, that was frightening. I was like, “Wait, what did I do?” But it was good, it all worked out, but having some place to go and process that because I am the leader of my team, my spouse is not an entrepreneur, I don’t have anybody else who has the perspective that you and the women in the mastermind have in my immediate life. I think that’s helpful.
Tara Newman: I hear that a lot that normalizing these conversations, having conversations about money, and them not being taboo to talk about growth, to talk about wealth, to talk about ambition and goals and working around being surrounded by people who are growth oriented.
Stacey Harris: I think having a place that normalizes ambition, it being okay to want things, to want an impact, to want, and even like a place you want to work hard, I like working hard, it doesn’t mean I want to work to the point of exhaustion or burn myself out—and certainly, that is a big part of the work I’ve done in these last three years is finding that rhythm and that dance—but I like sitting down at my desk and knowing I’ve got a day of working with my clients and figuring out things and solving problems. In my immediate life, that is not necessarily that conversation happening at PTA.
Tara Newman: Yeah. I think that running a business can be simple, there’s a difference between over complicating things, unnecessarily complicating things, adding too much, being inefficient and hard versus easy. Business is simple but not always easy. It can be simple and uncomfortable, and holding space for that range that comes with it and just because it’s hard doesn’t mean you’re doing something wrong.
Stacey Harris: Yeah, you and I have had this conversation in the context of training and weightlifting. The times it’s hard are when you’re like, “Oh, my God, did you see the thing I did?” I think back to running my first half marathon and I was like, “That was the hardest thing I’ve ever done.” I had a c-section so childbirth was not that hard, running a half marathon was way harder, and I was like, “But I did that thing.” Business is like that too, I remember closing the membership and it was really hard to hit the button. It was hard to hit the button, to send the email saying we’re not going to do this anymore. Then to hit every subsequent button required to end every recurring payment that I had coming in as revenue. Those things were hard. But on the other side of it, I was like, “Did you see the thing I did?” Also having a place to go and say, “Did you see the thing I did?” And everybody was like, “Yes, we did.” The hard is good, I think. I think it gets a bad rap.
Tara Newman: What specific skills do you think you have been able to hone in the mastermind? Because I really think that it’s so important for my containers to not just be a place where women come, I mean it’s great to have sounding boards and objective perspectives and things like that, but I’m really committed to helping women build business skills.
Stacey Harris: I think for me it is a mixture of two. The business fundamentals, this is a conversation you and I have had extensively and you’re going to laugh when I say this, but I don’t have a business background, I don’t have a degree in business, I have no college education in a traditional sense. I have a degree in audio engineering but it’s not the same as a degree in business or marketing. I didn’t know anything about business. Everything I know now, I failed forward. I think some of it is the fundamentals of running my business and also there is a certain amount of coming up the way I did in a very traditional online way, which is very different than traditional business structures, being able to have conversations that normalize that things are hard sometimes and that’s cool too, normalizing things not going well and figuring out how we respond to that, those skills have been incredibly important to me.
Then I am somebody who came in with what I would call very good sales skills just because literally every job I’ve ever had has been in sales, I believe literally everything in life is sales and if there’s one thing I’ve always known to be true about myself is when I want something, I will get it, one way or another, I will get it and that’s sales skills, baby. But you have really helped me be more efficient in that process, be really aware of the skill that was there, and refine how to make it better so that it is easier for me to execute and also for me getting into those sales conversations is usually where I got sticky before, and that’s a skill I think I’ve really, really developed especially in this last year.
Tara Newman: Yeah. I agree. I think you have really good sales skills. I think your personality is super dynamic in those situations. For you, I think it was around helping you use the tools available to match up where you are in your sales process, getting more of those leads booked in on calls for sure.
Stacey Harris: That’s one of those ongoing things that everyone’s working on.
Tara Newman: Awesome. What would you share with people who are considering the Bold Money Mastermind for 2022, is there anything you would share with them?
Stacey Harris: So much. It’s funny because my brain immediately thought of seven sarcastic, smart ass things. You should definitely be prepared for that if you join us. I think for me, I really want people to selfishly join us who are really looking for a space that balances fact and feeling, it is not all feeling all the time, it is not all fact all the time, we have to find that balance, but it’s somebody who knows that when they know what to do, they will do the thing and they’re willing to do the thing. Because I think it’s really easy when we get to this part of our business—this is certainly the thing I’m still working on—it’s really easy to avoid looking at what actually needs to be done because you’re like, “Oh, but so much of this works so I’ll just continue to be uncomfortable in it because it isn’t killing me,” or whatever, or to get out of that loop of every 36 months I burn it down and start over, put myself back at the beginning instead of building that efficiency.
I think if you can come in ready to make the small incremental steps, stay present to the conversations that are happening and the things that are happening right now so that your business can respond to them, and build a foundation that you want to be using for a really long time to help you generate revenue and support your life and your team and all of those things, then this is a really great container to come in and do the thing. It’s not just about sitting and chatting and the community of it all, which I think is sometimes what is actually delivered in some of these containers and it can leave people, and I know it has me in the past before this, left me frustrated because I was like, “No, I want to come in and I want to do the thing and this is a place to come in and do the thing,” and I think that’s impactful. Was that an answer to the question?
Tara Newman: Yeah, that’s an answer to the question. I think that you have to be willing to want to normalize that business is inherently problematic, that business has problems, that is the whole point of being an entrepreneur is you’re here to solve problems for yourself, for your clients, whatever, you’re a problem solver. You have to allow yourself to have those problems. I did a survey on my Instagram a couple of weeks ago and 91% of the people polled said that they believe that social media is over glamorizing small business ownership. I’m not here to over glamorize it. I want to hear about the struggle, I want to hear about the problem because as you can hear from Stacey’s story, she has gotten to where she is because she’s failed, because she’s made mistakes and because she’s continued to pick herself back up and keep moving forward and look at what she’s learned, and apply that. That is truly what I’m here to help you do is pick you backup to help you develop the resiliency to keep putting one foot in front of the other so you can learn from the mistakes and the failures and you can become better and better at what you do. That does take a willingness to do uncomfortable things, which is something I actually find tremendous joy in. Because when you can train yourself to do the uncomfortable things, they actually just become easier.
Stacey Harris: I think that failing can often look a lot like succeeding.
Tara Newman: I don’t really think there’s any such thing as failing to be honest. There’s that quote that you either win or you learn.
Stacey Harris: Yeah.
Tara Newman: That’s really what it takes to perform optimally in your business in a way that allows you to make more, work less, enjoy the money that you’ve made, build wealth, that’s the only way this happens. Stacey, thank you for coming on and entertaining us and for sharing your story so openly. I appreciate you normalizing the ups and downs of business ownership and not over glamorizing it.
Stacey Harris: I feel like now it sounds like it’s been really terrible, it’s been really great. It’s just harder than it needed to be for large sections of time.
Tara Newman: Listen, you know me, I’m here for an honest conversation. I’m here for what is actually happening because it’s really harmful when we see that, especially in the online space, that businesses only just keep making more and more and more money, month after month after month, year after year after year. That’s not always how it works. Sometimes you make more money, sometimes you make less money. Sometimes you make a mistake that costs you money. Sometimes you’re really flying high and you’re succeeding and it’s amazing and at the same time, you’re exhausted. There’s a lot of both/and in the small business experience that I think the nuance is being missed. I appreciate your candor. Where can people find you?
Stacey Harris: Uncommonlymore.com is where you find the podcast and all the things.
Tara Newman: But wait, you have a special secret podcast.
Stacey Harris: We do. There is a special secret podcast called the Podcast Newsroom. We have two shows, the public feed over at Uncommonly More with Stacey Harris, and that’s where we talk about all sorts of things podcasting, and then we have the private podcast called the Podcast Newsroom. That’s where I send out exclusive podcast episodes around what you need to know right now about podcasting. In fact, we just released a training on how to do exactly these private podcasts inside the Podcast Newsroom. Now is an especially good time to check it out if you’ve been thinking about private podcast feeds.
Tara Newman: I love that. Thanks for coming.
Stacey Harris: I’m really excited about it. It’s super fun.
Tara Newman: It is. Thanks for coming by, Stacey.
Stacey Harris: Thanks for hanging out.
Tara Newman: If you’ve found this podcast valuable, help us develop more bold leaders in the world by sharing this episode with your friends, colleagues, and other bold leaders. Also, if you haven’t done so already, please leave a review. I consider reviews like podcast currency and it’s the one thing you can do to help us out here at The Bold Leadership Revolution HQ. We would be so grateful for it.
Special thanks goes to Stacey Harris from Uncommonly More who is the producer and editor of this podcast. Go, check them out for all your digital marketing and content creation needs. Be sure to tune into the next episode to help you embrace your ambition and leave the grind behind.
