Listen to 5 Things Every Entrepreneur Should Know

00:04 

Hey there and welcome. Are you a woman who is unapologetically ambitious but you're also deeply focused on honoring God, loving your family well and pursuing meaningful work? Well, you've come to the right place. My name is Dana Byers and you and I are going to be fast friends. Let's get started.  

 

00:29 

Before we get started today, I wanna take just a moment to share with you a recent Google Business review that I received from Andrea. She is in my 10 hour confidence transformation course and she is a one-on-one private coaching client of mine. Here's what she says. I was in a major crossroads in my life and needed a professional's perspective in making some huge life decisions. Dana Be's coaching and teaching modules were key for me. The one-on-one private coaching sessions are priceless. Andrea, it is a joy to partner with you. Thank you so much for trusting me to be your coach. To learn more about working with me, go to dana byers coaching.com/get coached.  

 

01:17 

Hey there friends. Welcome back for another episode of Been There, learned that This is Dana Byers. And today I wanna talk to you about five things I wish I knew before starting a business. I grew up in a very entrepreneurial family. I'm married to an entrepreneurial person. I am entrepreneurial myself. I have spent many of my years working in places where I'm a really good, what I would call second chair. I'm really good at being kind of a behind the scenes person to support the person in charge. Maybe the visionary, maybe the person who either owns a business or a company or who is in a significant leadership role. You know, maybe not the senior pastor but the executive pastor or there have been just a number of settings I've been in where I've been very comfortable in roles like that. However, I've always been entrepreneurial and had an interest in a couple of small initiatives over the years that I've tried that I wouldn't necessarily say failed 'cause I did learn a lot from them, but they never really took off over the long term.  

 

02:26 

And now of course I've had my business, Dana Buyers coaching for about three years. And really in the last year, even at least three people I know personally who've started businesses since I did, they've already shut their businesses down. And what you need to know is these are very smart and capable entrepreneurs. They're great at what they do, they provide amazing services, but still didn't work out for them. And that is a pretty common thing. You know, starting a business is not for the faint of heart. And so I wanna talk to you about kind of my approach, how I walked into things, some things I wished I knew, or maybe some things I've learned, but even have to do that from a place of where we stand today. And where we stand today is a lot of my friends who own businesses and myself would find it very easy to say that things aren't going great because of the economy, or things aren't going great because of, you know, kind of fill in the blank.  

 

03:27 

There's so many things that I could look at that I would say, this is why things aren't quite going the way I want them to. Sometimes the reason things aren't going the way I want them to yet in my business, or that God is doing something in me, or it has to do with timing. You know, there's all kinds of factors that play into whether or not a business is succeeding at a certain point in time. And I use that word succeeding loosely and lightly because I think the definition can be different for everyone. My friends, my contacts, who I know who've decided to end their business, two of them are sad, one of them is really not. And that's okay. You know, we approach being entrepreneurs for different reasons, and I think we come in with different degrees of preparedness. I sure could have been more prepared, but I also think delaying to start would not have been wise for me.  

 

04:20 

I'm really glad I jumped in when I did. So I wanna talk to you, as I said, about five things I wish I knew before starting a business. And I began planning and really developing my business about three years ago. At the end of 2021, it launched with success beyond what my hopes were for the business. And then about a year, year and a half ago, I hit a really big dip that was pretty shocking, surprised me, confused me. And if I let it, it would've, I would've just ended my business if I had let myself believe that it had something to do with me, or that there were people at fault or there were factors outside of my control, I think I would have just ended things 18 months in. But I'm really thankful that I've been able to, through the support of loved ones and my coach and my friends and my clients, to really just kind of try to take things more lightly.  

 

05:15 

To certainly take myself more lightly and to take an approach that I can look at over the long term that barring any significant issues, I'll just be able to maintain things for the long term. I am learning so much. I am having fun. I am paying the bills, and I really love getting to share here in the podcast through my, my emails and with my clients all the things I'm learning because I think it's a win win. It's a win for me because I'm learning and enjoying it and having some fun, but I also think it's a win for the people I get to share with. So that's why I felt like it would be great today to share with you some of the things I've learned. So I'll give you a little bit of context and and background. I personally went into Dana Buyer's coaching, not wanting to have business debt.  

 

06:02 

So Chris and I invested a, a, a minimal, a small amount of money into my business account, and I have earned that money back and I do keep the business afloat with my revenue. And so 20% of my revenue, you know, when clients hire me, 20% of that goes to others, 10% goes to my church in the form of a tithe. 10% goes to a Christ-centered nonprofit, usually one that empowers women and girls globally. Now the remainder of my revenue goes into paying for software contractors and my personal coaching, I wanted to include in my expenses, my personal coaching, because I believe that that is a massive reward for me. That's a massive payment for me to get coached. But also if I'm getting coached, I'm only going to show up as a better coach. So that's part of my business model. So while I could pay myself that paycheck that I actually am using the money towards coaching, towards paying for coaching from others so that I can improve, I could pay myself that paycheck each month.  

 

07:09 

But at this point in time, and again, depending on when you're listening to this, if it's in real time, I'm using it for coaching. But if revenue increases, I will add to that by giving myself a small paycheck each month. But right now, the greatest benefit for me is to pay for coaching. So I opted to use that money to invest in myself and the business. And so once I hit my next revenue goal, I will begin paying myself more. But the expenses are covered at this time. So I am not in a rush and hear me say that that's something that I've learned over these last three year, these last three years, is to not be in a rush. Being in a rush to hit a specific goal means that I'm focused on my timeframe and not God's timeframe. And it also means that I am much more likely to hustle.  

 

07:54 

If you've been familiar at all with my content, you know that a big part of my coaching for ambitious women is helping them to achieve their goals without hustle. And I think that's very important because hustle is okay for a very short time, but it tends to lead to burnout in my experience. So I am trying to play the long game to stay the course and not be in a rush. So over the last few years, I've really, really recalibrated a lot of my approach to being able to navigate the highs and lows. You know, when you own a small business, when you're an entrepreneur, maybe you get two new clients a week and then no clients for a month. And there are all kinds of highs and lows. And whether or not we intentionally mean to, we can let that mean all sorts of things to us.  

 

08:41 

It could. We could let that mean that we are a bad, we could let that mean that our business is doomed to fail. We could let that mean that God isn't blessing or his favor isn't on our business, and those things may or may not be true. But I really wanna talk about some of these lessons I've learned with you. If you are in a season where you are trying to calibrate how you approach leading a business, or if you're thinking about starting a business so that the highs and lows that will inevitably come, don't throw you off your course so much. Okay, so five things I wish I knew before starting a business. First thing is to find your people. For me, I wanted to be very cheap. I was very careful about every penny in my business account and to be in my business account.  

 

09:28 

And to be honest, I think I'll always be that way. I love budgeting, I love knowing where every dollar goes, but I recognized over time that I needed to hire a coach. In my experience, a mentor really won't cut it unless you are meeting regularly with them. And if they're gonna hold your feet to the fire to bring you genuine accountability. You've heard me say before that the best accountability I've gotten is when I've paid for it. I know in the church, for those of us who follow Jesus, accountability is a really big thing. But I think we use that word way too loosely. I think good accountability is hard to come by. That's why paying for it a coach who will show up and say, Hey, I know you said you were gonna do this last week, did you do it? Now the coach like myself doesn't have to be ugly or rude about it, but we want to bring accountability and we want to receive accountability.  

 

10:18 

You know, I wanna know if my business failed that it wasn't because I didn't give it my best effort and invite people in to hold me accountable. So for me, right now, I'm in a mastermind. I've tried a few different groups over the past few years until I found a good fit. I haven't found an ideal fit yet, but I'm in a really good place right now. It's much better than I've had so far. And personally, I feel like starting a business without support is like, you know, similar to maybe hiking a trail without having any snacks or water to support yourself, you are asking for trouble. If you start a business and you don't have a solid accountability person who of course is gonna support you spiritually, but practically who says, Hey, you were gonna make five sales calls, or Hey, you were going to post on social media, or reach out to this individual for a referral, whatever that is, you need to find your people.  

 

11:11 

That's number one. Number two, I wish I had thought more about setting boundaries to keep my business from sucking the life out of me. Now, I love my business, but something that we love can also become something that very quickly we let take over and consume our lives. I have recovered from burnout too many times for the last time it was in 2017, and I will always have, I think, this human tendency to be willing to get lost in focus on my work, enjoying my work, and unintentionally winding up, working more than 40 hours a week, working on the weekends, getting out my laptop in the evening, and really not having much to show for it. That is a recipe for resentment for me to not set a boundary like, you know what, Dana, this was enough work for today. I've made the decision this was enough.  

 

12:10 

I am literally going to shut my laptop and walk away, or I'm going to, you know, put my phone in a bowl in the kitchen and not pick it up, you know, until tomorrow morning or whatever that looks like. Because the fact is, it's okay for a short while to have some intense work sessions, but it really isn't sustainable. I had to identify my high value tasks. So even as recently as a few months ago, I had to list out, I got to a point where I thought, okay, I need to revisit this. I'm gonna list out all of the tasks I am engaged in daily and weekly in my business, as well as some monthly reporting, and get really honest with which actions are actually advancing my business, which clients are actually bringing in revenue or serving my existing clients. Well, that's my goal.  

 

13:00 

I'm thinking about my existing clients and the future ones. So I chose the top 30% of the high value tasks that I do. I chose those to focus on, and I didn't completely stop the other tasks, but I moved them to just focusing on them for a one to two hour block each month. Instead of taking those actions every week, it was getting tough for me to shift gears to maybe go between, you know, a group coaching call, my own coaching sessions with my coach, something else I do locally in our community, volunteering, and then trying to come home and consistently do some things that are not high value tasks for me every week. So I chose to put them in their place, which is again, kind of lesson number two, to set boundaries. To keep your business from sucking the life out of you.  

 

13:50 

You have to stay in control. You have to be steering things so that your business doesn't unintentionally take over your calendar. Something else I wish I had really thought about a lot, which there's a little bit of irony in this, honestly. Well, I'm not sure I believe in irony, but I'm using the word I. There's a little bit of irony, if you will, in the fact that this lesson number three, I wish I had known, was to trust the process. The humor in that is that in my coaching certification, we talked a lot about that, trusting the process, but I can be a very black and white thinker, sometimes a little bit too logical for my own good on occasion. And so trusting the process to me meant about like, you know, in my relationships or helping my clients trust the process. And I had a bit of a blind spot about literally trusting the process in my own business.  

 

14:42 

As an entrepreneur, you know, you cannot possibly know everything you need to succeed just yet. Whether you already have a business or you're thinking about starting one someday, you just can't know yet Everything that you need to know, you will get there one day at a time. So trusting the process means setting some rhythms to your life to help yourself stay the course. Trusting that, yes, I have a vision for X, Y, Z in the future. I may not even get there a year from now, but I am okay with that. I am going to enjoy this journey because personally from my own experience, so many times I've arrived somewhere and I'm like, gosh, I really pushed myself to get here and I'm glad I got here. But my brain will turn not to celebration, but instead to what's next. I think if I trust the process and allow it to go even a little bit more slowly than I would prefer for it to, or honestly a lot more slowly, in some cases, if I trust that process and enjoy it, I stay connected to God.  

 

15:41 

I'm more present with my clients and I do not burn out, which is a massive goal. Me not burning out is as important to me and maybe even more important, honestly, than my annual revenue in my business. The fourth lesson is this idea of setting parameters. And this is a little bit different than setting boundaries. Setting parameters means that I've got protocols in my life, not a big massive system. It's difficult to maintain, but a parameter that means it just reminds myself and others that I am unwilling to let my business keep me from travel and volunteering and my relationships. So these are things that are very important to me that are not enemies to my business, and my business is not an enemy to my travel or my volunteering things with the private family foundation that Chris and I do on the generosity side, none of those have to be businesses.  

 

16:35 

None of those have to be enemies. But I have set parameters in my business to limit the number of clients I see and to limit the times I'm available to meet with them so that I am able to keep engaged in those other areas of my life that matter. Again, this is different than setting the boundaries on how I work and how much time I set I'm working, but the broader parameters of my business. And that's very helpful to me because it means that I don't find myself again in a place of resentment where I think, gosh, if I could really just have a vacation or I would like to volunteer at a local place, but I feel like I don't have time, nope, that's not true at all. If I find myself having those limiting beliefs, then I know it's on me because I'm my own boss and I love being my own boss.  

 

17:21 

But I also have to remind myself that I can make those decisions to set the parameters that, you know what, there will be a few Fridays a month that I'm actually not seeing clients because I'm volunteering somewhere. Or if Chris and I want to travel and visit, you know, one of our partners with the Private Family foundation, we have the freedom to do that and to be engaged there and actually learn and be refreshed and bring things back to my business that actually actually make me, I believe, a better coach. So set your parameters on how you want your business to function and your availability and the other things that you don't want to choke out in your life. And the last thing I wish I had really thought about more that I'm in intentionally focusing on now is to know your value. Know your value friend.  

 

18:12 

You know, the last three years have brought some pretty painful comments from people who think they've known what's best for my business. Now I want to, you know, couch that with a comment that I've had lots of feedback that's very helpful, and I think even some of the painful comments that have been said to me, they meant to be from a place of good intent. Things like, you charge too much or you charge too little, or there's no way that coaching is worth that amount of money, or there's no way I'm going to get any value from your program if you're charging that small of an amount. Yeah, I don't think you can bring me the change. I'm looking for things like that that I've heard some from people I know and care about and some from pretty much strangers. Those comments have really forced me to sit with an understanding of my value.  

 

18:58 

Now, I don't think that a price actually indicates value. My personal business model is to underprice and over deliver. I like to tell my friends that I consider my coaching business to be like Nordstrom Rack, and that is you're gonna find high quality items, but you're not gonna pay a lot for it. You can partner with me, I can be your coach, and you are going to get high quality certified, ethically approached coaching that you could spend thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars on. Now I know my value in that. Am I saying I'm the best coach? Absolutely not, but I might be the best coach for you. So I am creating a little niche, if you will, in the marketplace for Christian working women, many of whom don't have businesses who will pay for their coaching. If that were the case, I would probably, you know, easily charge loads more money for corporate clients whose bosses will pay for them to be coached by me.  

 

20:01 

Instead, most of my clients are women who are paying on their own out of their own budget. So I have calibrated my business to reach the women who might not be able to afford coaching otherwise, that does not mean it's a low value product. And I know that I had my course, the 10 hour confidence transformation. I had it reviewed by a few peers and some other people who are quite good at marketing and pricing. My course is about $250 or $49 a month for six months. It was estimated, you know, for a few thousand dollars easily is what I could charge for it. However, I am trying to bring high impact. I know what coaching did for me when I took a risk and saved money up over the course of a year to be able to hire my own coach back in 2012.  

 

20:51 

So I know my value, I don't need to earn a certain amount to match that. However, it is interesting because you know, people's perspectives are going to cause them to think that I am overcharging if they're not familiar with the coaching industry, and that's really not something I can spend a lot of time worrying about. I had to figure that out and get coached through that a little bit over the last couple years. But you have to know your value when you're starting a business because there will be people who won, understand what you're doing. There will be people who mean well, but they speak up at a time that you, your underbelly feels exposed, you feel vulnerable. You're struggling because maybe you lost the client or maybe because you really have all these visions and you don't see it coming together yet. But you will be able to know your value to stand firm in your business model and take time to process all those comments and to respectfully take that feedback and make adjustments or to respectfully disagree.  

 

21:50 

So I think the, you know, the ability to have an awareness for loving where my business is at. I love where my business is at. I love that I get to give 20% of every client's purchase to things that matter to me. I love that I get to hire contractors who do great work and they get to support me in my work as well. And this is the type of business I want to run. I don't want to hustle to make it happen. I get to determine what success looks like and I don't need to make a lot more money or have, have a lot more clients than my fellow coaches do. Some of my friends in my mastermind have amazing, massive coaching businesses and I love that for them. Mine is really healthy. I think it's going to continue to grow and I'm gonna scale that with my life and my learning over time.  

 

22:39 

But I'm also in my own lane. I love the scenery and the experience of running my own personal race of growing Dana buyer's coaching. So I think something that's really helpful as I share these five things I wish I had thought about more before I started the business that could really help you. It's really helpful for me to process that. Enjoying the scenery and the experience of running my race means that I can sustain. It means I can do it for the long term and I like to take actions that reflect the belief that I'm already successful. You see, if I'm graspy, if I'm out there trying to get new clients all day every day, then I'm failing to recognize what God has already done. You know, before I sit down and record a podcast like the one I am right now, my prayer is simple, God, would you use this episode to inspire, to give guidance to at least one woman?  

 

23:32 

That's my prayer, and that's enough for me. I think he does more than that. You know, I do check out my stats. I do know that a lot of you're listening that the audience is growing, but for me, I take actions by showing up to meet with clients or to record a podcast episode or to write an email to my email list. I'm taking actions that reflect my honest to God belief that I'm already successful. I don't have anything to approve, you know, anything to prove or anything that I have to do to become more successful. I think God will bring the right people in the right time if I am faithful with the things that he has given me to do, faithful to use my spiritual gifts in a way that don't lead me to burnout and allow me to be present for the clients who have hired me.  

 

24:16 

I also like to think about the fact that my actions create my identity. Think about that. It's kind of this benevolent cycle that feeds into itself. If my identity is in, you know, being a woman after God's own heart is in being a coach who is empowering and developing women in so many areas and someone who can show up to bring helpful accountability and encouragement and prayer and pastoral support to these women, then I will do that. And the more I take actions that help me be that woman, the more I engage and believe in and support that identity that I want to live out. I also like to focus on the fact that I believe I'm already successful because I'm already getting the results of changed lives. I'm already getting the results of seeing women say things back to me like, oh my gosh, Dana, this was so helpful.  

 

25:07 

Thank you for coaching me. Thank you for supporting me in my business. Thank you for supporting me as I pastor a church, thank you for that podcast episode you shared. Or someone replies back to an email and says to me, oh my gosh, this is exactly what I needed today. It's like you're in my head. These are the evidence, the factors of success that support me as I continue to watch my business grow over time. I don't lose sleep because I know God is at the heart of this. So if you are a woman who already has a business or you're thinking about starting a business, let these five things I've been learning over the last three years encourage, inspire, and motivate you, and really, hopefully, I hope it's challenged you a bit because I wouldn't want you to walk away from this episode thinking that it is light and easy every day having your own business.  

 

25:58 

But I do want you to know it's entirely possible for you to develop a business that honors your clients. It honors God and it honors you. If you would like to learn more about what it looks like to coach with me, go to dana coaching.com/get coached. Thanks for joining me for today's episode. Have a wonderful week. Are you a Christian working woman who is looking to boost your confidence and transform your life? Well, I have got just the thing for you. My online course. The 10 hour confidence transformation is available now. This course is designed to fit into your busy schedule and provide you with actionable strategies to increase your confidence. Plus, with your purchase, you will get access to a private monthly group coaching call where we can connect and grow together. Get all the details right now@danabycoaching.com.