the bossbabe podcast - 226. BBS: Stop Taking This Business Advice

Episode Date: June 24, 2022

Natalie drops in for the third edition of bossbabe business school…to make a confession. Mistakes were made, bad advice was taken and lessons were learned – we share these kinds of stories to help you avoid the same fate! If you want to know what business advice to STOP taking (and what you should actually be listening to instead) – this episode is for you. Listen now.  PS – What’s the worst business advice can you remember getting? DM @iamnatalie and @bossbabe.inc on Instagram with your stories. Highlights: The BIG mistake that bossbabe made last year (+ how you can avoid the same fate) The one piece of business advice you have to STOP taking. How to empower yourself (and your team) to make the right choices for your business. Links: The Société — Join our private, online community of female entrepreneurs where you can connect, build and grow. Follow: bossbabe: @bossbabe.inc Natalie Ellis: @iamnatalie Danielle Canty: @daniellecanty

If you have someone that's giving you business advice from a place of, I read this in a book or I seen this on YouTube and in essence, it sounds right. But in practice, it's a whole different ballgame. There's a big difference between it sounding great and it actually being practical. I want you, if you're listening to this episode, to leave here with a new lens of discernment of how you take advice and how you action advice. A boss babe is unapologetically ambitious and paves the way for herself and other women to rise, keep going and fighting on. She is on a mission to be her best self in all areas. It's just believing in yourself, confidently stepping outside her comfort zone to create her own

vision of success. Welcome to the Boss Babe podcast, a place where we share with you the real behind the scenes of building successful businesses, achieving peak performance and learning how to balance it all. I am your host Natalie Ellis and I am coming in with a solo episode in a bit of a different format than I've ever done before. So firstly I'm really curious if this resonates with you so please let me know at the end, drop me a DM, tag me on Insta or leave a review because when you give us feedback, it really does shape how we create this podcast for you. So the reason that I wanted to create this podcast episode was I've been in a very reflective mode lately and asking myself a lot of the questions around if I was to start from scratch,

knowing everything I know, what would I do different? Or looking back on my biggest failures, what led me to these failures? And this kind of reflection has been so incredibly interesting. Honestly, I feel like I could do 25 episodes on this with just so many insights of things that I would say don't do. Probably more things I would say don't do than I would say do, which I don't know if is a good or a bad thing. I guess it means I'm trying. This one in particular is around business advice. When I look back on some of my biggest failures or some of my most difficult points in business, it's because of this one thing. And it's because I took advice that I shouldn't have taken. And what I mean specifically by that is I took advice from people that quite frankly were not qualified to be giving

me that advice. Now that's fine, right? People can give advice left, right, and center. That is up to them. What's not okay is me not being able to discern whether this advice is advice that I should take or whether I shouldn't. So if I take that person's advice, that's completely on me. That is my responsibility. That is no one else's responsibility. But as entrepreneurs, I don't know about you, but imposter syndrome is real. Doubting yourself constantly is real. Even when you have all of these accolades and achievements and you've maybe came so far, it still creeps in and you doubt yourself and you end up kind of, I would say, giving your power away, trying to source that power externally. And whenever I have done that and I have stopped listening to my gut or I've stopped basing my decisions based on real research, asking people that are qualified, asking my clients, making decisions out of fear, making decisions out of self-doubt or imposter syndrome,

I've really came up against challenges. Now, this happened quite prominently for us last year. We made a mistake in someone that we hired, completely our responsibility. And, you know, we hired someone for a role that they were totally not qualified to be in. The issue was they weren't necessarily coachable in a sense of they couldn't see that they weren't qualified to be in that role even though they'd not done it before. They were very convicted in their advice even though they'd never actually implemented the advice before or seen results from it. My mistake was listening and I have to be honest when I was listening to that advice, I was in a place of burnout. I was not my best self, you guys. I was burned out. You know,

we just came out of the 2020 rollercoaster, which was COVID. We were all physically and mentally exhausted. It had also been our biggest year in business ever, right? Which, amazing, but you all know, big years in business, that right? Which, amazing, but you all know big years in business that can often be the most exhausting. I was just looking for someone to take stuff off my plate, to be quite honest with you. The fact that they weren't completely qualified to be taking this stuff off my plate wasn't really a big issue for me. I was like, you know what? They're willing to do it. Let's go ahead anyway. And it really backfired, like really backfired. I'm not going to get into detail on this podcast

of the way in which it backfired, but it was bad. Let's take a quick pause to talk about my new favorite all-in-one platform, Kajabi. You know, I've been singing their praises lately because they have helped our business run so much smoother and with way less complexity, which I love. Not to mention our team couldn't be happier because now everything is in one place so it makes collecting data, creating pages,

collecting payment, all the things so much simpler. One of our mottos at Boss Babe is simplify to amplify and Kajabi has really helped us do that this year. So of course I needed to share it here with you. It's the perfect time of year to do a bit of spring cleaning in your business, you know, get rid of the complexity and instead really focus on getting organized and making things as smooth as possible. I definitely recommend Kajabi to all of my clients and students. So if you're listening and haven't checked out Kajabi yet, now is the perfect time to do so because they are offering Boss Babe listeners a 30-day free trial. Go to kajabi.com slash boss babe to claim your 30-day free trial.

That's kajabi.com slash boss babe. I really want to share this with you because I want you to have a level of discernment. Now, especially if you have, let's say you have employees, right? Your employees have not had the experience you have employees, right? Your employees have not had the experience you have of building the business to where it is to this point, making all of the tough calls, taking on 100% of the risk and responsibility, which makes a big difference when you're making decisions, trust me, or scaling the business perhaps to the place in which you want to go as the founder who is holding 100% of the responsibility. Because some of your employees might actually be super experienced

in certain areas and those are the areas in which you should be listening to them. But if they're giving you advice on how to scale the business and things that you should be doing, we can often listen because we really respect and value our employees. That's why, you know, they are our employees because we know we can learn a lot from them. But we need to know where to take advice and where to leave advice. And so I want you, if you're listening to this episode, to leave here with a new lens of discernment of how you take advice and how you action advice. Maybe this is advice you're seeing from random people on YouTube. Maybe it's a business coach you hired that, you know, doesn't really have much experience out of coaching businesses, not actually running their

own businesses and the way in which they've done it. Like if you have a specific niche and you found a coach that's built a successful business in that niche, in the way in which you're doing it, and I say in the way in which you're doing it because that's really important. If you have someone like that, super valuable. But if you have someone that's giving you business advice from a place of, I read this in a book or I seen this on YouTube, and in essence, it sounds right, sure. But in practice, it's a whole different ballgame. I could sit here and give you so much advice on how to scale your business and it would all sound great.

All these systems you could implement, all of these sales tactics you could use, it all sounds great, but there's a big difference between it sounding great and it actually being practical. What I mean by that is you actually having the time and space to implement it, or it actually working and paying off for you and your business model, you and your skillset. Because every single one of us is completely different. We have a

completely different business model, a completely different skillset, completely different way of doing things. And if we are not confident in that ourselves and know that about ourselves we will take advice and be you know creating this hodgepodge strategy which doesn't really have a lot of basis to it so I really want you to take away from this episode the idea of having discernment and knowing where your advice is coming from. Is that person qualified to be giving that advice and whether you should take it or not? I'm not saying you can't learn things from other people. People are opinionated. People have a lot of opinions on what other people should be doing. And when we take a look at ourselves and we're like, okay, I'm telling everyone else what they

should be doing, but am I doing that? Am I actually implementing what I'm talking about? It's not always the case. So I don't know who needed to hear this today. I feel like some of you did and if that was you let me know. I just felt really called to share and I want to do a few more episodes like this where I do share some of my biggest learnings and lessons and failures in the hopes that you can save so much money and time and headache and tears. That would be my hope. So I hope you've enjoyed this episode. I hope it's given you some food for thought. And if you want more of these, let me know.