S2E7: How to Create a Culture That Grows Your Business
Welcome to Women Rocking Business, where we are here to help you rock yourself, rock your life, and rock the world as a woman entrepreneur, because the world needs you and the time is now. I’m Sage Lavine, CEO, trainer, unretired, camp counselor, and best-selling author of the Hay House book Women Rocking Business. We’ve had the honor of serving over a hundred thousand women entrepreneurs around the globe, just like you, who are here to do more, be more and have more by giving your gift to the planet. I’m so honored you’re here. Let’s dive in.
Hello, beauties today’s training is all about how to send you into the week really focusing on the culture of your business. No matter how small or big your business, is focusing on creating the kind of culture that you want to wake up to every day.
Sage Lavine
00:00:52
How do you do that? How do you nurture a culture within your business that actually then starts growing your business for you… that starts growing your business when you’re, you know, playing on the weekend or taking a nap or in the middle of the night… culture can do so much for you.
So I want to talk a little bit about how to create a culture that starts to take things off your plate, can bring you so much joy and love in your business, and attract the kinds of clients and team members in the future that you’re going to want to have with you on this incredible thing called you know, the entrepreneurial journey. You know, when you sit down to work in the morning, when you have a meeting with a colleague or your assistant or meet with a client, like how do you want it to feel?
Sage Lavine
00:01:37
What’s the texture of that feeling? What’s the emotional component? What’s the temperature? You know, for a long time, I’ve wanted my business to feel a little bit like people feel when they go to a concert of a band or music that they love, you know, it’s that feeling of like, “Yeah, this is going to rock. We’re going to rock this. This rocks.”
It’s not like hard rock music, but it’s like this energy of like, “Oh yeah, like this is an experience that uplifts me, that uplevels me, that brings me into my, my potential.” It’s like this warm anticipatory sensation in the chest, right? So I’ve known that I want my business to feel that way. And I make decisions toward that, but it hasn’t really been until the last year or so that I’ve understood how contributing to that culture has been a huge part of a scaling into the multimillions.
Sage Lavine
00:02:29
I want to talk to you about a few things that we’ve done really intentionally, that you can do as well even in the beginning.
I went to a wedding last weekend that I want to tell you about. It was a wedding of my dear friend and trainer and rock star client, Meghan Neely. Meghan and her partner, Erika, have a podcast called Lesbians in Love. And they’re amazing. Meghan is one of our head trainers at Women Rocking Business. She comes in and our clients love her. She is really incredible social media marketing, and so she comes in and does various trainings for our clients.
At the wedding, it was, it was2 women getting married, right? They both work for me. A couple of years ago, Erika, Meghan’s partner started attending our events and she was one of the most helpful people in the room.
Sage Lavine
00:03:15
I literally didn’t want to do more events without her. So we hired her. So now they both work for us and they also have their own incredible quickly growing business. The reason this matters is because we’ve been able to create a culture of not just celebration and yeah, we rock, but a culture of inclusivity, a culture where Meghan and Erika felt super safe to fall in love with each other, invite the whole team to the wedding. You know, the big theme at the wedding was “2 brides are better than one.” And like, how cool is that? You know, how amazing is it that we get to be at a wedding where two women are starting their entire lives together as romantic partners, business partners, life partners.
Sage Lavine
00:03:56
It hit me when multiple people at the wedding were coming up. Some of my team members were there. Some of my clients were there and they were coming up and saying, “Thank you for creating the kind of culture at Women Rocking Business, where all of this can happen.”
It’s a culture of celebration and inclusivity, and not just celebration of going out and making 10,000 or a hundred thousand or a million dollars, but also celebration of every small step and every act of courage that we bring as leaders and as entrepreneurs, how are you celebrating your clients?
Sage Lavine
00:04:31
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Sage Lavine
00:05:35
Fast forward to my business, which is now about 10 years old. We now have this company where we have dozens of people that work for us, and we’re attending events of each other’s weddings. We love each other. I can take a month off if I want, and my team can just handle things. If this is something that you want, something you want to grow toward, where people just feel a certain way, whether they’re a client or a team member, I recommend that you always start with celebration. Start every call in celebration. Start every meeting in celebration. Even when it was just me sitting down with my assistant, we would start by bragging about what we had done in the last week that we were proud of.
Sage Lavine
00:06:18
Even if it was just creating a spreadsheet or signing up one new client or creating a system for email responses, like, yeah! Right? We did that. Because when you celebrate something, what are you going to get more of? When you get on your, your calls, your training calls with your clients or your one-on-one sessions with your clients, first thing, “What can we celebrate?” Yeah! You got your Facebook profile up. Yeah!. You put up your online dating profile. You did it! Awesome job.
There’s not enough celebration that happens in this incredible world that we’re living in. People are constantly measuring themselves with everybody around them, stuck and complacency, complaining, mediocrity.
Sage Lavine
00:07:01
When you start and you bring a culture of celebration to your business, it’s going to take you so far. It becomes a part of the culture of you guys having more and more and more things to celebrate, whether it’s you and an assistant and a few clients, or whether it’s growing even faster than that, whether you have five people that work for you and 500 clients or customers, start in celebration.
One of the things that happened at the wedding is that Meghan stood up during the reception and honored a few of her mentors that were at the wedding. It was really an honor to get to be the third and final mentor that she honored. She just said some really beautiful words about how I’ve gotten to make a difference for her and Women Rocking Business has gotten to make a difference for both her and Erika, her partner, and there wasn’t a dry eye.
Sage Lavine
00:07:49
I had tears in my eyes just thinking about how many times I had doubted myself over those years. You know, Meghan was a resistant client. Like she was one of those clients that would kind of question what I told her to do and throw things back in my face. I just remember being steadfast and kind, and letting her find her way, but also letting her know that this was something that I recommended she try. I recommend you open yourself up to this strategy, this idea, right? Get curious with yourself about why you’re resistant.
Years later she’s done several six figure launches, $250,000 launch. She’s crushing it. To get to be acknowledged at her wedding was this reminder to me that we oftentimes underestimate the difference that we’re making in people’s lives.
Sage Lavine
00:08:39
All those years that I was coaching Meghan, I was making her the shero of her journey. I didn’t want to be her hero. I wanted to be her guide. I think this is an important distinction. I think that this distinction can really support you in your marketing, that you don’t want to be people’s hero, stop making yourself the hero. Start making yourself the guide, the one who can show the way. When you focus on celebrating your clients and having them celebrate themselves more importantly, what happens is you set them up to be the hero or the shero of their own journey.
Sage Lavine
00:09:20
Isn’t that what we all want, right? We all have to be the hero or shero of our own journey or else it’s not going to, it’s not going to be worth it. Everything that we do in life is there. We stretch, we grow, we put in effort. So it’s gotta be worth it. It’s worth it when we become the hero or the shero. And it’s our mentors that can turn us into the sheroes of our own journey.
So in terms of creating this culture that’s going to grow your business for you to not forget that your clients are the heroes, your clients are the sheroes. If we could just leave you with that one thing this week, “How can you make your clients, the heroes and sheroes of your journey together?” This week, your business is going to naturally grow that you’re not trying to control your clients.
Sage Lavine
00:10:10
You’re not trying to get them to do the exact thing that you’re recommending. You’re inviting them to use your teachings and your tools as a framework for where they’re going. You know, even to go so far as to not over template your clients, like your clients, don’t want to be templated. They don’t want to be controlled, they don’t want to be given a hundred step system that they have to follow exactly. They want to feel that support up underneath them, a framework that they can put themselves into and go out there and thrive.
That’s exactly what Meghan and Erika have done. You know, they pivoted their business. Meghan had an incredible business and she was coaching entrepreneurs herself. When she fell in love with Erika, she had, you know, had a deep and long desire to support people, to come out, to tell their truth, to be in love regardless of their gender identity.
Sage Lavine
00:11:03
She realized there was a real need on the planet for someone to have a voice empowering those who are moving along that gender spectrum, or who are not choosing the traditional gender based identity to be out there in their love. That’s exactly what Erika and Meghan are doing with their podcast, Lesbians in Love. And so even in the middle of the world, shutting down, they pivoted, they launched a podcast. They filled a retreat on the big island, sold out their retreat and took a bunch of incredible lesbian couples over there to step even more fully into their own highest potential of love and impact. It’s just so beautiful. I get tears in my eyes thinking about how proud I am of Meghan and Erika.
Sage Lavine
00:11:44
I think about over the years, how my ego has wanted to control my business in so many ways and how the more successful we get as it can be difficult to stay in our hearts when we have so many decisions to make and so many people and things in details that we’re managing.
I just encourage each and every one of you to make sure that you allow that level of allowing and level of heart opening to exceed your level of awareness, because the more successful you get, you know, you tend to start to accumulate a level of awareness that can lead to maybe a level of judgment or even feeling like you need to control things to be safe in an even bigger way.
Sage Lavine
00:12:32
But to really do the work as your business grows, as you grow as a leader, keep doing the work to open your heart, because that work is the work that’s going to take you further than any other work. Your potential clients feel that, when you genuinely care, you genuinely give a shit. That’s really what we’re here to do on this planet. You know, we’re all in this together. And so why wouldn’t we just open our hearts and keep giving each other the best that we can possibly give and then let it go so we can enjoy our lives. Thank you to Meghan and Erika, lesbians in love or so proud of you. Erika wrote meghan, a song at the wedding and she said, “I’ll be your king and your queen.”
Sage Lavine
00:13:16
It was one of the most beautiful expressions of love I’ve ever seen. So we’re lifting you guys up right down the podcast, Lesbians in Love, i you want to go check that out. Thank you so much for being the very best part of Women Rocking Business. Remember that your clients are waiting for you. They’re not just waiting for someone like you. They’re actually waiting for you. By everyone!
You’ve been listening to Women Rocking Business. I’m Sage Lavine. The next step is to join our private Facebook group. The Women Rocking Business Sisterhood and introduce yourself over there for the real and vulnerable conversation of what it really takes to launch and scale a business you love in that Sisterhood group. We have each other’s backs, each other’s sides and each other’s fronts. This is true collaboration. So go grab a seat in the Sisterhood because we can go so much further when we go together, you’ll find a link to the private Sisterhood group and do our upcoming events in the show notes.
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