the bossbabe podcast - 276. BBS: Save 87 Hours With This System

Episode Date: March 7, 2023

Are you the bottleneck of your own business? You want more money, but you don’t have the time to trade for it. So, you try your best to stay organized and productive, but you end up feeling burnt out and scatterbrained. Can you relate? We get it… Staying efficient and organized as a solopreneur or business owner can be super challenging, especially while you’re growing and pivoting. But there’s a special tool you can use to save time and keep making magic. On this week’s episode, Sara Loretta, Certified Notion Consultant and Founder of SYSTMS, teaches you how to use Notion to boost your efficiency, make more money, and unlock your freedom. Whether you’re building a passive online business, scaling an agency, or you just want to better organize your personal life, nothing works without systems. And it’s not just about becoming more organized… Notion saved Sara 87 hours of work last year. Imagine what you could do with that time! If you’ve been looking for a streamlined way to take your business to new heights without burning out, this episode is for you. Notion is exactly what you need to consistently reach those $10k-$15k months or grow from 6-7 figures. Highlights The secret to preventing burnout, increasing productivity, and making more money. The biggest mistake entrepreneurs and freelancers make in growing their business. What you can do right now to start systematizing your business and personal life. Links: Join The Société for instant access to Sara’s masterclass “How To Get Organized + Be More Productive In Your Business.” Try Notion today! Get Sara’s Notion templates - use code BOSSBABE50 for $50 off your first year. Follow: bossbabe: @bossbabe.inc Danielle Canty: @daniellecanty Sara Loretta: @thesaraloretta Systms: @systmsclub

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. Hey, and welcome to the Boss Babe podcast, the 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. Today, I am actually joined on the Boss Babe Business School episode by Sarah Loretta. And we are talking all things systems, you guys. We are going to help you avoid burnout. We're going to help you make

more money. And I'm really, really excited to dive in. So before we get started, Sarah, I would love for you to share a little bit about your story about how you were a burned out agency owner and how you've actually ended up becoming a certified notion expert. Yeah, well, thanks for having me. I think for me, you know, my business journey is very different than I think a lot of people's are. You know, I didn't start out wanting to be an entrepreneur. I worked in the nonprofit space for almost 10 years doing data, media, all literally everything. I managed like four departments at this organization. It was a nightmare.

But, you know, that was kind of my downfall because I am absolutely a yes person. I say yes to every opportunity that comes my way unless it really goes against my values, right? Like if it really just kind of rubs me the wrong way, you know, I'm absolutely like, no, like I'm out. But so for me, you know, I started job hunting and I couldn't find a job for two years. I live in Austin tech hub of the United States could not find a job because I had said yes to so many things at my day job. I kept hearing, well, you wear too many hats. Like you're going to get bored here. So I was like, well, okay, then I guess like,

I'm just going to be miserable forever. And in a weird way, we actually had a partner of ours who didn't have somebody doing marketing and media. And at that point I had done video for PBS. I'd run and launched a citywide campaign about women working in construction. And so this partner had come to me and was like, hey, can you come film this? And I didn't really understand what freelancing was. I didn't know

really about contracting. I didn't have a contract at that point. I knew nothing, right? I was like, okay, I'm going to charge you like $20 an hour, like no idea. And so I said yes to that opportunity and it spiraled. And I ended up landing about 40 clients in my first six months while still working full time. And so I had no systems. I was up till two, three in the morning working on websites and video and all of these things. And that, I think, kind of put me on this spear of I need to figure my shit out immediately, right?

Like if I'm going to make this last, because clearly like I have the skills and I can, I can run a business from like the creative side, not maybe necessarily like the accounting and this and that I had to figure it out. And so the other downfall to that is, you know, I was able to quit my job pretty quickly six months in and figure out those systems, but I didn't fix the habits that I had. And so I kept saying yes and yes and yes to clients, not because of the money, but because of the opportunities. I was able to work with some pretty big investment capital companies. I've worked with food brands, alcohol brands.

I've done some really cool things, but I was so burnt out. So for full context for everybody listening, if we haven't met yet, I'm a very transparent person. I really don't believe in putting things behind paywalls. You are going to get more information probably in this podcast episode than you planned on. But so for me in 2021, I actually did 27 websites, 15 full brand packages, nine notion builds, and 20 odd and end projects alongside doing all of my content. I was a solopreneur, didn't have a team back then. And it completely burnt me out to a point where I was missing little odd and end details that are just not me to miss. And so, you know, kind of what happened with that is in being burnt out, I allowed a client to kind of have more

control of a project than I normally do. And I ended up getting sued for it wasn't necessarily like my error wasn't necessarily the client's error. It just they weren't happy. And they made a decision that ultimately just was not good. And so at that point, I was like, okay, something has to change. Like I'm not loving what I I'm doing anymore because I'm literally killing myself over making fucking logos, right? Like, I'm just sitting here making a logo. And for what? Like, it's not fulfilling to me anymore.

And at that point, I kind of started dabbling in Notion. I had done a video on my YouTube channel that was, you know, like how I run my design business on Notion. And no one really in the design space was using Notion at the time, like web designers, brand designers, really those creative people. And so I made this video that took off in our small industry, our small space. And I had someone from Ireland email me eight times to build out their Notion account. And I was like, no, like, I don't, I don't do productivity. I don't do software. Like I make logos. Right. And it was again,

kind of going back to that beginning thing of like, well, what's wrong with saying yes to this opportunity? Like, where could this take me? And so I ended up saying yes. And it turned into my Notion operating system called Notion for Designers, which is now SystemsOS. It's the first ever plug and play Notion template subscription. And that was maybe like April. And within a year, Notion had contacted me and put me through their certified Notion consulting program. So I'm now the 10th certified Notion consultant in the US and the 40th in the world. There's only 52 of us at the time of recording this. And so at that point, like between getting sued, I had three eye surgeries last year because I have double vision and all of that. I was like, you know what? Notion's taking off. I'm done doing design. So I completely shut my business down last April. And now I've been doing Notion full time. And I'm

more successful now than I ever have been because there's more opportunities with passive income and teaching. Like I taught STEM. I taught's more opportunities with passive income and teaching. Like I taught STEM, I taught science for multiple years in K through five. I did adult ed before that. And I just, I'm an educator. That's just who I am. I love teaching. I love helping people solve problems. And so shifting my business now to, you know, from the design and the hard deliverables to now sitting down with a client, being able to say, this is a problem you're having. You're really struggling to work successfully online. It has opened up so many conversations and opportunities. And I'm really glad. I'm really proud that I

am a yes girl. I could be a pumpkin spice latte girl, but I am a yes girl and a black coffee drinker. So sorry. That was so long. It was beautiful. And I think it was a story that needed to be told. And I just want to kind of highlight a few things for our listeners, because there's a couple of nuggets in here, which I think are really powerful and empowering for other people listening. First of all, you didn't set out to be an entrepreneur which I personally really relate to you're also very much like me where you've had like several different careers so I too was like a chiropractor I hear you were a teacher then you started like obviously going into like more of the corporate side of things and then you had this other business and that led to another business

and I think this is like normalizing that is really really powerful like I use the example to my team the other day about slack like lots of us use slack now but most people don't realize that slack was actually born from a company who were making and doing something to do with like video and gaming and basically they were struggling to communicate with each other so they created this communication platform that they would use internally. And then people started asking for that. And then Slack was born out of that. And often we look at, Oh, this one business should be the ultimate path that we go down and we have to get it perfect first time versus listening to the cues, listen to the yeses, listening, allowing the direction to really unfold before us. And I

think that's really powerful in your journey and then I also want to touch on the fact that you spoke about passive income because passive income is my absolute favorite way like as a chiropractor I was trading time for money and I think a lot of agency owners end up trading time for money and then as they start growing they end up with a lot of people underneath them which then you have to have a really good people management skills and whether you want to go the passive route and create something digital or you're having an agency nothing works without systems now this is what I've been touting for years and I used to think it was the most unsexy subject but I honestly believe it is one of the

sexiest because when you have systems you buy back time oh yeah so you just shared how you you are now a certified notion consultant and i want to you know as system geeks out there i want to talk about what notion is and how it can actually help people in their businesses because that's what you've come in as a guest expert to talk to our society our women entrepreneurs in the society about and it's something that I'm so so excited about us starting to utilize in Boss Babe like we haven't we actually haven't been utilizing it before but I've been hearing so much about it I was like wait also by the way little little secret I always get people in the society that I want to learn from I'm like, we need something on this. I need something in this in my life. Who can we ask?

So yeah, totally. Yeah, totally. So, you know, the easiest way I like to explain Notion is that it is an open box software compared to, you mentioned Slack. We want to think about Asana or Trello, right? So when we look at Trello, Asana, Monday, ClickUp, HoneyBook, Dubsado, like all of those things, those engineering teams sat down and they decided

how you are meant to use their software, right? So we think about HoneyBook of you have somebody come in the pipeline and their engineering team is dictating, okay, now you have to set up this workflow. You have to do this in order to interact with their software. Notion is more open source tool in the sense that every time you open up Notion, you open up a quote unquote new page. It is a completely blank slate document. You can build any page completely different than something that you've built in the past. So you have your databases, you have dashboards, you have pages. And so for instance,

like I'm building out a Notion resource wiki right now for my clients. So I can film a quick video, tag it with, you know, how to share links in Notion, right? And it's living in this database that I can then reference in the future. Or I also do things like client portals. So we use a single page to share docs for projects, to collect feedback, to comment back and forth. So you can decide whether you're using Notion for school, work, or life. You can use it for any different way. You can embed things like Loom or Figma, all of these different tools in there to get it

to be useful for you. I actually came from Trello. And what I hated about Trello, I used Trello all through undergrad and then I built it into the organization I worked for and everything always felt so siloed, right? You had to remember to click into a board to learn about something going on or to see project progress. But with Notion, everything can be interlinked. So I can see, so for instance, like my client portals, I can see at all times the progress of every single project that I have going on

without having to click into every single portal. And so there's a lot of opportunity there, but I will say, and I, you know, it sounds sexy. It sounds exciting. Like there's so much FOMO around Notion. The last number I heard is that there's about 30 million users right now on Notion. So it's definitely like high demand, but it's not meant for everybody. And I do like to tell people that is, you know, you have to have an architect mind to be successful on Notion, or it's going to be very overwhelming for you because you can build any all day long. And so you have to, you know, either decide, okay, I'm going to do this template. Like, so for those of you listening, if you're not in the society,

my masterclass this month, I actually built a goals dashboard in Notion for society members to utilize. So like you could take that template, right. And just stick with it. You never touch it. You never do anything. Or you can be like me who have free, like four or five days is like, I hate my bill that I'm going to rebuild my Notion account. So there's a lot of opportunity, but also you have to go into it with a mindset of like, hey, like this is the intention. Okay, so Notion is basically can replace some project management systems like Trello, like Asana, like ClickUp perhaps as well. I know a lot of people are using ClickUp. Yeah, ClickUp very specifically, like you think about their tagging know a lot of people using click up yeah yeah click up very

specifically like you think about their tagging system and kind of their database setup notion and it's great for project management but it's also i have a lot of friends that utilize it for like their personal life and stuff like keeping like okay folders of like this is how this is how i like my home cleaned or like this is our passwords or like these are like home organization systems as well so it has two kind of uses right so let's talk about how the let's lean into the business side of things first so let's say someone's in their business and they're a solopreneur and they're just feeling right now, oh my goodness, like you, like you as an agency worker, I am the bottleneck of everything. Like I want to earn more money, but money just basically means more of my time right now.

A lot of my time is going to admin. A lot of my time is like organization, trying to keep up with things. How can Notion help give them more hours back in their day? Yeah. So, you know, again, it goes back to the architect mind. You know, anything can be goes back to the architect mind, you know, anything can be automated and set up with workflows if you take the time to do it. And that's where I think a lot of creatives struggle, right? Because they're like, I'm a freelancer. I'm creative. I don't want to be put in this box because it's going to harm my creativity.

But when you set up automations and systems, literally all like my business is named systems because I believe in this so much. But it literally is taking the time to set up things to give you back more hours in the day. Right. So some specific things that I have in my Notion account that make things simple are templates. So Notion is very template heavy in their databases. So I don't have to manually add in anything for my client portals. I have a templates for my VIP day. I have a template for my workspace in a week offer. And then all of the documents that are if within that, whether it's contract or onboarding checklists, you know, all those different things we can have pre-made. And so when I shifted over

to Notion, I did this data when I did it, I saved an average of two and a half hours for every client I onboarded by being able to use templates. So there's a lot of differentux of inquiries, either from, you know, Instagram, email, you know, think about all those channels, you can actually set up a Zapier automation to dump in the data into your CRM and create an inquiry in your leads tracker. So that is a database that I heavily, heavily rely on is all the proposals that are out all of those things. But again, you know, it just depends, right? Because if you are doing retainer work, you're going to have to really build this out a little bit differently than someone doing, you know, like a one-off web design. I think this is a beautiful thing to highlight about systems though, is like, maybe it takes you two or three hours, four hours upfront to do it. If you're building from scratch, let's say, but it will save you,

like you said, like an hour, an hour and a half, every single client after that. Or like you said, you can utilize templates, which are built by you and other notion consultants that really actually like, Oh, if you have this type of business, you can plug this in automatically and it's going to save you this. So if you don't have the architect mind, then you can find other people that do. And I also believe this is a really really big thing if any of you are listening and you're trying to get to six from six figures to like multiple like or to seven figures or even if you're trying to go from freelancer to like you know that first like maybe I'm doing like two three four five k a month and

I'm trying to get to consistent 10 15 k. The biggest thing that helps you make those leaps is systems and people. And just because you say people does not mean you need to hire teams. It's sometimes like investing in, okay, I'm going to find someone like Sarah, who is better at templates than me. I'm going to buy those because guess what? I could spend 20 hours trying to figure out what she's done and it's going to cost me x amount. 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 and i remember being in this situation back in 2016 you guys so i was really trying to explore as a chiropractor i was really trying to go online and i was like okay how do i make a pdf pretty like that's how that's where i started guys i was in a word document being like how do i turn this PDF pretty? Like that's how, that's where I started guys. I was in a Word document being like, how do I turn this into a PDF? Canva was like barely coming out. Like it probably really was out, but I really didn't know how to use it. And so I went on Fiverr and I paid someone $50 to make, actually I don't even think it was that, I think it was like $20. So I can make it pretty because I realized that my hourly rate of working that out was actually greater. So if you have a side hustle or you know that you're good at marketing or you know you're good at the sales calls or you know that you have a job already and you're starting this off, really look at, don't think the resources and the people the consultants that you can buy for like a fraction of the hourly rate of you trying to figure it out yourself because i think

that's the biggest mistake that people make is they oh i'm not earning enough to warrant this investment in this next stage but it actually slows you down and stops that momentum and stops you growing so i think utilizing people like Sarah and people Fiverr and where else do we get, where else have I used? There was another one that I used to use as well for contractors. Upwork. Upwork's another great one. Like I think, yeah, really, really important. So we're doing a little bit of the business side. But I think the other thing about it too, I think the other thing about it is get it, like you said, is getting out of that mindset of, oh, I'm not earning enough for this to matter yet. And for me, I look at it as

like, if I didn't set up a system. So for instance, when I had my design agency, I was known for website in a week. So I was knocking six, seven page websites out in four days. Like that is my bread and butter because I built the templates on the back end. And it doesn't make you any less valuable because you're setting these systems up and you're building templates ahead of time. You're already doing the work. You don't need to charge less or be less valuable. You are saying my time is worth more. So I'm going to template these out so I can spend time educating, providing value, whatever

it is that you want to do. This is the way to save the time to do that. I mean, I would have never had, like we talked about at the beginning, passive income if I didn't have this system set up and these automations to give me time in order to actually build these out. There's no way I would have been able to create the stuff that I've done had I not said, I'm done looking at this. And one way to do that too, I actually was on Had I not said, I'm done looking at this. And one way to do that too, I actually was on a call on a consultation call on Friday, someone picked my brain about this. And it's like, for your automations, you need to be looking at your data.

And that's one thing that I wish I could like hammer into creatives is data matters. I'm not just talking like your income dollars, but what are you consistently repetitively doing that you can say, okay, I need to template this or I need to automate that. I literally, I saved myself 87 hours last year by removing discovery calls and creating an experience guide. 87 hours on my calendar last year by setting this stuff up. So you have to look at the data to be able to say, okay, this is where I'm going to start. And it makes things so much easier. It really does. I can like preach this. You want to talk about going to church. Like this is the stuff that I live for. No, I love it. I think it's important. Like we get stuck in

doing the same thing over and over again. And I would just encourage everyone this week to have a piece of paper next to their desk and write down any repetitive things that they are doing. Like if you are consistently doing the same thing over and over again, you should be really investigating if you could automate this, if you could turn it into something, if a computer could do it better than you are, or could you template it? So I am in full agreement for all of this. And I also think that no matter what stage you are or could you template it so I am in full agreement for all of this and I also think that no matter what stage you are at your business this is always a checking point for everyone like even now like as I continue to grow I'm always like okay what do I need to automate now like what do I need to take off my calendar now what could I template now like how do I

delegate better to my team and so this is just a continuous process that I think a lot of entrepreneurs negate to really think about okay how can I systemize what I do and I want to talk a little bit about systemizing personal as well because there's a lot of things that you can systemize in business but there's also a lot of things that we should all be looking at how can we systemize things in our personal life and you know we chose you're coming in talking about goals particularly within society I always set goals I think they're actually the key of really creating success because if you don't dictate where you're going someone else is going to um and so I want to talk about the ways that you can use notion for not just goals but also like household things that might you know

alleviate and give people their hours and their time back. Oh my God, I'm so excited. So I have two specific things that I have built into my notion lifestyle. I have over 200 houseplants. When everyone was baking sourdough during COVID, I was buying plants and propagating things. I have two greenhouse cabinets specifically in my living room. But so I actually have an entire dashboard that is all plants. So it's when is their watering schedule? What is their growth patterns? What is the scientific name? What is the regular name? Where is it located in my house? Because specifically we face South. And so we have the sun kind of come up and over and we have more sun in the afternoon than in the morning. And so I actually rotate my plants. So I have all of that built into a

notion dashboard. I'm a little obsessive, but it's fine. So that's one way, right? So setting reminders, building things out to be able to set reminders and databases to say, Hey, I need to remember to water my Lily plant every four days because of where she's located. Or my greenhouse cabinet is healthy at 85% humidity versus going up to like 95. The other thing that I actually just built, and I'm really, I'm really excited. I was actually talking to somebody at Boss Babe about it and we were going back and forth with Notion, but I have built a recipes database recently because I am an obsessive cooker. I don't buy processed food. I make all my own breads, my own pastas, my own sauces. And so I am consistently looking for new recipes,

whether it's on Pinterest or cookbooks. And so I've built out this database in notion that houses my recipes, ranks them if I liked them or not. But then I have a further kind of setup where I list out the last day that I cooked it. And then after 60 days, it pushes it to say, Hey, you should go make this recipe again. Yeah. Because as an entrepreneur, especially like working from home, I get decision fatigue, like nobody's business. Like I'm sitting here making decisions all day long. Don't ask me what we're having for dinner. Like I have no energy to figure that out. And I'm just, I don't, I don't really like all of those like boxed meal kit things. It's just not, you know, it's not my, my diet, but so, you know, my boyfriend will come home and he'll be like, what are we making for dinner? I'm like, Oh,

let me check my notion database and see what we haven't cooked in a while. And it will literally suggest recipes for me. So I'm a little weird like that, but there's so many things that you can do in there, whether it's paying off debt, I'm in the process of going debt free by the time I turn 30 at the end of the year. So I have different databases and dashboards for stuff like that too. So there's a lot of, a lot of potential for life. I can also see it for um banking investments like just reminding you like oh like car insurance like hey car insurance is up car renewals up those types of things and I I mean I actually build mine out in Asana so far but I'm really gonna be think I'm gonna be moving everything to Notion because it's also so much sexier I'm like damn this looks like cute Asana was just

like you can make it a vibe. You can do pictures and aesthetics. Oh yeah. I am here for all the vibes. And let's talk about how the goals ones set up because you came into the society and you've taught that. So let's talk about how, you know, goal setting is such a huge part of being a boss babe and being like an ambitious woman. So how have you set up the goals one with inside notion? Yeah. So I'm kind of an anti-goal person. Um, I actually, I know, I will say, no, I actually had never set a goal in my life. Um, like an adamant, like sitting down and saying by this day, like when we think about smart goals, right? Like by this day, I will achieve X. I never did that until last year, maybe. Because again, like I was just this big yes person and one thing led to another. Oh, wait, wait a second. Does that goal coincide with your biggest year

yet in business? I will say it's, I would say it set me up to have my biggest, but it wasn't like direct. Right. So, you know, I think not being afraid and just kind of letting the pieces fall and say, okay, like I'm over this, I'm done. I'm going to shift. Um, but this is the first year that we're sitting as a team. So I have four employees. We're a team of four or team of five, I should say. And this is the first year we're really sitting down and going, okay, like in 12 weeks, this is what we're going to achieve. And, you know, we hired an intern and we're doing all these things in marketing, but in terms of, you know, goals inside of notion, I think it's really cool because again, nothing is siloed. So I have our, we're doing the 12 week year in my business right now, if you guys are familiar with 12 week year. And so I have that page actually favorited. So every time I open up notion,

it automatically opens my goals dashboard and it shows us, okay, like this is the progress that we're working on. Um, and there's some really fun formulas that you can write that show you progress bars and things like that. But I have that set up in a way that's not overwhelming for me. Because again, I don't come from the goals mindset. I went to college because I thought I had to, not because I was like, yeah, I'm going to do this. I'm going to have a degree. I'm first college gen graduate. No one talked to me about that stuff. And so for me, when I started, I was like, I don't even know what I want to achieve. And so I've built my notion dashboard to be more minimal, to help me ease into it and not feel like I'm a

failure for putting big astronomical goals on this thing that just make me not feel good about myself. So there's things you can do. Like what did we put on, on the, the society goals dashboard? We put stuff about like water intake and diet and little minimal things that are your day to day that help you get better personally. And then you can say, you know, if and I teach this in the master class in society as well is if you're trying to reach an income goal. Right. So I teach this entire method that I've coined as annual mapping.

And it's very simple. You start with the big picture, right? I want coined as annual mapping. And it's very simple. You start with the big picture, right? I want to earn a hundred K. I have two offers, which means I need to make 50 K per offer. Okay. And I charge, I don't know, five. I'm trying to do real easy math. Y'all I tried five K per offer. You know, it's only 10 clients that you need. And that becomes so much more attainable than going, Oh my God, how the heck am I going to earn a hundred K? Like how are all these, all these individuals earning that much money? And so when you break it down that way and you build out a dashboard that really just simplifies it, you are going to achieve so much more. I really, I really believe that. Completely. And I also think as

well, like the power of goals, it's not whether you hit it or not. It's the fact that you make progress towards it that's why I always do like vision boarding like there's so many things on my vision boards that I've not achieved and they've been on there for the last five years but it means that I whenever I'm making decisions I run it through that lens of okay is that moving me closer or further away from my vision and I always swear by the fact that the year I met and found met Natalie and founded Boss Babe was four months before that um a mentor asked me how much I wanted to earn in a year and at that point I was earning like a hundred thousand and I said two hundred thousand he's like

you two hundred thousand you already were earning one hundred thousand he's like let's double it four hundred thousand and I felt sick i was like yeah i had no people who earned that much money yeah like i that was i had i'd have no examples of people who earned that much money except maybe him but he also lived far away and i just didn't relate to him like he was like a 45 year old man i had no like like nothing in common with and in fact he wasn't even official mentor he just like offered to have a call. I think he felt sorry for me or I bugged him enough that he was like, let me get this chick off my back and have this call with her. And so like I had this and, you know, I set that goal. But what happened when I set that goal was that I started looking at

things differently because that's when I realized I was like, oh, I have to create passive income. I can't keep trading time for money. I have to look outside of chiropractic and think about what I could possibly do online. I have to realize that actually to get this goal, I'm probably not going to do it in my career and I need to start a business. And what does that business look like? And so it wasn't necessarily about whether I hit or didn't hit that goal. It was realizing that I needed things to change in alignment with trying to get to that goal and I think that's also like the biggest things you can make I think setting goals and businesses is a little bit different you need to like your budgets and stuff like that eventually which you kind of like map against but when you're just really trying to create shifts

in your life I think it's also really important to have what I we do this in our company actually this might be helpful um for anyone listening we do conservative goals and we do stretch goals and this also might um be something for you Sarah so we do a conservative goal is like what we absolutely have to hit like that isn't that isn't even a negotiable like we have to hit this to make sure like everyone is paid and we hit our profit margins then we have this stretch goal that we're always shooting for because when we shoot for stretch goal we think differently we do different things we like think outside the box and we're pushing and it doesn't we're not judging or putting our self esteem on whether we hit that stretch goal if we hit anywhere between that conservative and stretch

we've done a great job and I think really just like what I tend to do with my home goals now is like very similar so I'm like okay a good goal for me a conservative goal is like I have to go to the gym three times a week but guess what if I do five awesome but if I just had five and then I only went three I would feel down on myself but I should be proud that I went three so I'm like okay no my non-negotiable is three and my stretch is five and likewise like reading a book and doing these other aspects and these pieces so I think goals is just always like creating them that set you up for I can never base your self-esteem on goals and always just like create them up so that you are going to be successful in doing them but they also take you a little bit outside your comfort

zone where quite often the magic really happens yeah yeah it's interesting um if y'all have ever heard of a athlete trainer entrepreneur his name is joel runyon i've actually been following him for god oh my god i'm gonna age myself when did i go to college um let's just say like 2011 2012 um not that long you're absolutely fine you're too young to be aging yourself but when you hear like oh i've been following someone online for 10 plus years it's crazy like with how much how much the internet shifted but so joel runyon is known for what he calls his impossible list and it actually got started for athletes of oh i can only do five pushups. Okay. Once I hit five, I'm going to try to do 10, then 15. And so I think the boss babe conservative or stretch is really similar in the sense of like,

okay, this is what we have to do, but once we've hit it, how do we get to the next level? And so that's kind of how I, and I think why too, I like the 12 year planning a little bit more is because what the idea is is once you hit that goal, it's not done. It's not over. It's like, okay, you got to do something else after that. And so it's okay. If we hit a hundred K this year, what's next year? Is it two 50? Is it doubling? You know? And so you're consistently growing upon your goals. And I actually have, um, an impossible list tracker for personal slash business andion as well. And it's really fun because every year I start a new list and it shows this is where I started. This is where I'm going

and can really show you. Cause I think too, you know, we're so, I would say tunnel visioned in the day to day, right? Especially as solopreneurs, it's hard to like take a step back and say, this is all that you've achieved. Like my marketing director, Mary, all the time is like, Sarah, you need to celebrate what you're doing more. Like you are doing these incredible things and you're not taking the time to celebrate. And that's something I'm working on in therapy anyway. But the idea is, you know, that you really have something to look at over time to say, you know, either I earned this or I worked with a dream client or I keep putting off building this ebook. And now all of a sudden I have an ebook that I'm selling and look at all this passive income

I'm making, you know? Oh my goodness. I love that. Well, listen, Sarah, it's been such an honor having you inside the society as our guest expert too. And I know we released it at the beginning of February and already so many people are getting so excited so much more organized hitting their goals making their moves and just being able to find themselves as ours because I think that's what you really offer like there's so many I would say like the currencies in this world are like obviously money

but time is the other currency that you can never get back and so if you're not already investing in how you can save time and be more efficient in your life you're really actually missing out on a huge trick and being an entrepreneur because that is ultimately a goal that you always come back to like how can I save more hours how can I automate things and so the lessons that you've taught inside there about how to you know set these up and utilize notion from like just being a beginner and then taking it to a more advanced level is just really really amazing so for anyone who wants to learn from you and that masterclass I'm going to put a link it's bossbabe.com forward slash membership so you can sign up if you are not

already a member it's just price of a latte a day less than 48 dollars but also I want to yeah I want to put some links as well for you Sarah because I know we have like a discount code etc for people to get access to your templates that are a little bit more robust shall we say yeah and so we'll put some links in the show notes for that as well but we really appreciate you and thank you for coming on thank you so much for having me I appreciate it thank you so much for listening. And if you enjoyed this episode on the Boss Babe podcast, then I'd absolutely love it if you leave us a review.

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