Anne Carden, tell me about your vision.
Yes, so my vision is I'm actually building out
an agency side of my business for a media company.
So just launching a brand new magazine,
just actually got the first issue today.
So I'm going to show them.
Congratulations.
Yeah, I'm super excited about this
because this goes along with my podcast, my books, my brand,
but I wanted a platform, a media platform
because I help my clients with high impact influence
marketing.
And so it now gives them a platform
to be featured in my magazine.
And so that's sort of the reason behind it.
But my vision is really to build that up.
And over the next few years into just a larger company
that maybe I can sell someday because I have already sold
five previous businesses and then do charity work.
Nice.
I don't know whether to go down the charity work
path or the five businesses that you've sold.
Which one do you prefer going down?
I want to see both these visions.
Either one.
I've just been at this entrepreneur thing for I've
been in business for over 40 years.
So I was in corporate for 13 and business management.
And I started my first business 30 something years ago.
So I've been at this a long time.
I love helping other people be able to accomplish
what I've been able to accomplish with business.
And but I also have a passion for anything with kids.
Kids that really struggle, whether that
is in their home life or with illness,
kids in other countries.
It does not matter.
I have a passion to help kids.
So that's where I see myself.
I already do charity work around those things.
But I would love to get into that bigger, maybe even.
And I'm not positive about this, but maybe even
start my own charity around helping kids in some capacity.
That's awesome.
I mean, it's worth exploring.
You never know what doors and windows will come your way,
right?
Right, absolutely.
That's fantastic.
So since I'm on your brand website right now,
I'm going to go down that route a little bit further.
And I'd love for you to tell me about these past five
businesses that you've sold.
What were they?
What types of businesses?
And what does that look like?
Yeah, so the very first business was 30-something years ago.
And I started, it's going to sound crazy to people now,
but it was kind of a craft business.
It turned into a designer doll business that I did globally.
So that was before the internet, before we
had all the luxury of what we have today.
And I really started that out of my home,
out of financial hardship.
I had left my corporate career, my corporate income.
We were struggling financially trying
to live on my husband's paycheck.
It wasn't enough.
And I literally sat down and cried
because my son, my four-year-old, needed shoes.
And we just didn't have a dime.
So I didn't want to lose our home and everything.
So I started looking for a way to make money.
I've always been creative and crafty.
And I started making some craft items.
And long story short, that turned into a business,
basically running a manufacturing company out
of my home and shipping my dolls all over the world.
So I sold the designs when I exited that.
And in about seven years, I employed a lot of people.
I had moms coming in and out of my home.
So I was a stay-at-home mom and was building that up
and built that up globally.
And then I went into the fitness industry,
started teaching classes out of a community hall.
And that turned into two health clubs, two weight loss centers.
And I sold all four of those when I got into coaching.
Wow.
OK.
So kind of like Alex Hermosy before Alex Hermosy even.
Actually, I think Alex and I actually
crossed paths when I was in the fitness industry.
I think he was just getting into his gym launch.
I had already been in the fitness industry
for a long time.
But I think he was out there promoting, kind
of a funny story here.
He was out there promoting his new marketing.
And I was just kind of coming online,
like with Baydress Killian, and he was teaching email marketing.
And so I was just sort of learning that.
And Alex was out there promoting in email
to help people with their marketing.
And I think I even put in for his program,
but I never heard back from him.
So that must have been another time everything fell apart.
But that was a lot of years ago.
Oh, man.
Well, and supply and demand.
He does such a great job of driving in his favor, too.
It's like you can't take everything, every opportunity
that comes your way usually.
But OK, so anlcardin.com, the expert in you.
That is amazing.
Let's shift gears.
So and what's the story behind your why?
I know we talked about a little bit in the last segment,
or part of it, but sometimes these go really deep.
So I'd love to hear what one of you did.
You talked about your son.
You talked about not having the money for the shoes.
But if you have another angle or another story
that you want to share here.
I do.
Yeah, yeah.
So obviously, I have a heart for kids
and to do charity work for kids.
But I also have another why sort of before that.
And it is when I came into the coaching space,
I was taught a lot of these strategies
that are out there in the online world,
a lot of the strategies that did not serve me.
And I found I was in this coaching business
that I didn't love.
And I didn't like the paths that I was taught and sort
of all the rabbit holes that I went down.
And that's really where my expert in you brand came from.
I was working with clients who weren't
ready for what I could do after building multiple businesses.
I wasn't making enough money off of those clients
in the way my business model was structured.
And I really just found a business
I didn't enjoy very much.
But I knew I had all of this experience and expertise
and knowledge and loads of mistakes
that I made along the way that I knew
could be valuable for other people.
Because I was able to actually financially change
our lives through business and what
we were able to accomplish, I wanted
to help other people do that.
And I know so many businesses that struggle
and that they're not profitable.
And what are the statistics, 87% of them fail.
So I just was on a mission.
I wanted to do something different.
I wanted to teach a better way.
And I didn't intend to originally work
with coaches, consultants, experts.
I was working with small business owners to help them.
And I did that for actually several years
to really help them build something
that they could sell someday, to build something that
was more profitable, to be able to give back
to their community, give to charities, all of those things.
But it was when I took a step back and said,
what's wrong with my business here?
What's not working?
And that's where my expert in new brand came from.
It was, OK, I want to take all the experience and expertise
and knowledge and skills that I've developed.
And I want to not be taught some cookie cutter system
that I need to go build my business around.
I want to be able to leverage what I know.
And then through that process, I started
working with coaches and consultants.
I was part of an organization, a business coaching organization.
And a lot of the coaches were struggling.
And they kept promoting me and putting me
on the rest of the expert calls.
And look what Anne's doing.
I had figured it out.
So a lot of coaches started coming to me.
Anne, how do I do this?
How are you making this kind of money on these businesses
and helping them?
And I said, well, this is my process.
And so that's what I have been doing for years now.
And now I'm building out an agency side
to do a lot of done-for-use services
and help them with really the marketing side of it.
That's awesome.
You alluded to something that I'll hit far more directly
on the nose and head for the both of us.
Because it's just not fun to say to the market.
But the SBA, the stat is 96% of businesses
fail within 10 years.
And well, it's been there for years.
But there's different people who do different reports.
So one of the other reports out there,
I can't remember which government entity,
but they say 65% of business owners fail within 10 years.
And now sure is a big change there.
But here's what I would ask all the parents out there.
Would you ever send your kid to a school
where the failure rate is 65%?
Right.
Does it really matter?
When we're doing that bad in the business game,
it's like you recognized.
It probably means I shouldn't listen to most of the advice
that's out there related to business ownership
and business growth.
A lot of people can talk.
But very few people actually figure out
the frameworks, the formulas to make it happen.
And so it's neat to see that you've
been able to do this multiple times.
It speaks to the veracity of the path which
you started to create.
So that's awesome.
I've also worked in 80 different industries with hundreds
and hundreds of people.
So that also gives me deeper knowledge and experience
when I work with clients.
And I don't come across a whole lot of business coaches
out there that really have that depth of experience.
I know they're out there, of course.
There's few and far between, though.
That's the part we don't show we do,
is we're looking for them.
We're looking for the people like you.
And they're very rare out there.
There's this book that you reminded me
of, Hiring on Purpose, by Max Hanson and Brian Moore.
And they tell you very quickly from the beginning,
you should not read this book if you think the way you've always
gone about hiring is going to keep working
in the changing world of business.
You should not read this book if you
believe that the minute you put out a job posting
the right candidates should come begging you for a job, et
cetera.
And they give you a whole list of all these things
that breaking down the paradigms that exist out there.
And while it's not fun to do directly to somebody,
it's certainly enlightening once you help business owners see
past the challenges they may not even
be able to see for themselves yet.
So let's do one more segment.
And what's your goal for being on the show?
Well, I teach people to build their influential brand.
And I teach them how to really shine and be out there
and let people experience them.
This is my way of giving back also in the industry
and to entrepreneurs and business owners
is to put out content.
And I love the relationship building side
of doing a podcast and guesting on podcasts.
I have built the most phenomenal partnerships,
have found team members, obviously have gotten clients.
There's so many benefits to it.
But I believe nothing builds the know,
I can trust faster and the relationships faster
than doing something like this.
I love it.
It's one of my favorite things that I do in my business.
Absolutely.
And who are these authority figures?
Who are some that you'd like to highlight that have entered
your program and gotten the results
that they wanted to get out of becoming that expert?
Yes, I have had.
I've worked with a lot of different types of coaches.
But I've had mindset coaches that all of a sudden they
are doing big things.
They're certifying people now.
I've worked with entrepreneurs that
have been able to go from zero to seven figures in a year,
not making it.
You have a lot of people that you've helped, too.
I'm going to make sure to tee up with some of the assets,
too, because you've got a lot of people that you've
been able to help throughout your career.
So feel free to keep going.
But if there's any particular stories that happen to pop up
and you're like, oh, I want to talk about them,
just let me know.
Yeah.
It's really just so rewarding when I have people say,
it's changed my life.
You've changed my business.
You've changed my life.
You've changed my family's life.
To me, that is just really what it is all about.
But helping people really be able to sell their value,
not their value, the value that they can provide to the market.
So many people play small.
So many people don't do, they don't package everything.
I have a client that was able to close a $413,000 sale.
And it was with an existing client
that she was only making a few thousand dollars a month off
of.
But she was only selling a piece of what
she knew how to do.
And she didn't know how to put everything together.
And when we put that together and she went back
to that client, they're like, oh my gosh, yes, we
didn't even know you could do all this.
And that's what I see.
So yeah.
Thank you for being here today.
I'm really happy that you tuned in to Vision Pros Live.
I'm looking forward to seeing your reactions
as these episodes continue to move forward.
This is going to get more and more fun.
We'll have more and more engagement as well.
We'll invite people to participate in the show.
And thank you for giving us your time and attention.
Have an excellent time building out your vision
and becoming a Vision Pro yourself.