There’s nothing worse than seeing a miserable entrepreneur pretend to be excited and happy about owning a business. It actually hurts to see this. This means the person is not experiencing true freedom as an entrepreneur, and I wanna show you how you can make sure that you avoid this mistake.
Hi, I’m Shayla Boyd-Gill, your Family, Freedom, and Affluence mentor, and I love helping family-centered women entrepreneurs to create generational wealth while doing exactly what they love and experiencing more freedom.
So are you ready? Let’s talk about this. First we are going straight to the dictionary. What is freedom? Freedom is defined as the power to act, speak, or think as one chooses without any restraints.
Now let’s bring this into the entrepreneurial world. What is freedom for an entrepreneur? Do you have the freedom to act, speak, or think on behalf of your brand without any constraints? There’s a good chance that you don’t.
The Challenge
One of the big things I see with entrepreneurs, especially my family-centered women entrepreneurs is what you don’t have is time freedom, that’s one. You are spending a lot of time delivering services, creating programs, creating more content, and you can’t figure out where all the hours have gone for the week. You still don’t have enough time in your head so that’s one of the places where you’re probably not experiencing freedom. Let’s take this even further. If you left corporate America it’s probably because you thought you were gonna become an entrepreneur, work less hours, have more money, and really have the freedom to do what you desire. It didn’t really look like that, did it? For most it doesn’t.
As a matter of fact, another freedom that you probably are not experiencing is money freedom. You’ve decided to become an entrepreneur, you have a dream of making six figures, seven figures, eight figures. You may be falling in the trap of the statistic where many women entrepreneurs are making less than $50,000 a year. Look, you could make that in corporate America, so if there’s no money freedom now you’re really upset because you’ve been spending all the time delivering services, creating programs that you think people are going to love, and the cash flow is just not coming in.
Another place where you may be suffering is your health freedom. If you’ve been stressed out because of the money and the time, now you have ulcers, now you have headaches, you’re not feeling amazing and maybe you’re not even looking amazing.
So that’s another area where you’re not experiencing freedom, and the big kicker that no one likes to talk about is the lack of freedom in your relationship. Who was with you with you when you started this business? If you are married, if you have children, one of the things that happens is you end up spending so much time on this new baby, your business, that you forget the people that were there before the business came, or you’ve entered into a new relationship and you’re not nurturing the people that are now there while you’re building your baby. Yes, your business matters but your relationship matters, too. You don’t wanna fall into that other statistic for entrepreneurs where we have a very high divorce rate among entrepreneurs.
So what can you do about it? How do you actually experience freedom? Freedom comes when number one, you are happy and joyful with yourself. One of the things I learned when trying to teach about freedom was the fact that I was trying to share freedom and sell freedom to people that weren’t happy. They can’t even think about freedom if they’re not experiencing joy in their lives, so we had to dive deeper and say, “Where’s the breakdown? Where are you not experiencing happiness?” Once we resolved that area, then we could start establishing more freedom.
Refine Your Services
So, for you it starts with, if you’re an entrepreneur delivering services, for example, then we need to make sure the services that you are delivering don’t consume you. Do your services, right now, make you highly accessible to your clients? Is it time-consuming? Are you the only one delivering it? If that’s the case, how do you scale this so that other people can deliver for you or less of your time is used in the delivery? You want to look at your services. This is one of the first things I look at when people come to work with me. They typically have established businesses but something’s wrong on the back end. The system’s not working for them anymore. Maybe it worked in the beginning but now they’re tired. So, we look at the services. How can we scale them so that they’re not as involved or their time is not as involved in the process?
Create Boundaries
Another thing that you wanna look at is the boundaries. Do your clients have all the access that they need to you? I remember when I did a lot of one to one coaching my clients were always able to get me weekdays, weekends, evenings, mornings. I had to put some new boundaries in place where they understood I don’t start business until 11 a.m. Anything before 11 a.m. it’s family, it’s self care, I get up in the morning, I do my meditation, I go to my gym and do my boot camp, but we don’t do business early in the morning. The other piece was I could do not do evening coaching anymore. I suck at it. That’s not my energetic time. So I stopped taking clients after 4 p.m. I created those boundaries and I taught my clients to respect those boundaries.
Price Appropriately
Another area is your pricing. Does your pricing make sense for what you say you want and need in your business? If your pricing is not a match then you need to take a really strong look at it. If you’re doing one too many, how many people do you have to serve? Do you have the capacity? How are you getting them in? And if it’s one to one, or one to a few, like my model is a high ticket model, the pricing has to make sense, but before you go and throw a big number out there, you gotta make sure that it’s a transformational service, meaning it’s something that’s making a difference in their lives so that they’re willing to invest in themselves and it makes sense, okay?
Honor Your Relationship
Another thing I want you to look at is your relationship. You need to put that time in there for the relationship. I remember in the beginning of my business I was so committed to the business that there were times I would miss eating dinner. I wasn’t sitting at the table with everyone when they were at the table. I’m at the computer banging out things saying, “I gotta get this thing done,” while everyone is having family time. I wasn’t there. So I had to learn to shut things off in the business. One of the dangers of working at home is you always have access to your business. So I literally had to say, “Business is closed,” and close the door to my office. Go and spend the time with the family. Put the phone down. Be the person that you desire to be. This is how you start creating more freedom in your business and more joy and happiness.
So, as stated before, one of the things I really love doing is working with my clients and helping them to get the sales they desire so they can live the life that they really, really want to live, and this is while creating more freedom for themselves. One way that you can do that is to go down in the link below and grab my high-impact, high-ticket sales challenge. It’s a five-day challenge that will teach you how to create a program that you can leverage to create more freedom for you, for your family, and for those around you. So go ahead and grab it. It’s going to be in our Family, Freedom, and Affluence Academy. You get a free pass to the academy. The link is below, and as soon as you sign up for the free academy, you will get access to the free challenge. I hope to see you there.