Tell me about your vision.
My vision is I've always had the same vision,
despite it coming across a couple of businesses.
But this is the one where I have this vision that I feel
entrepreneurship is really such a powerful force that
can drive our world forward.
It can drive humanity forward.
And it does such great things.
But the problem is that along the journey,
so many business owners and entrepreneurs and founders
and their teams really blow their energy up.
It's quite stressful.
It can be very busy.
And I really feel that with the right operational architecture
and the right ability to delegate the support
layer in a business, that's what I like to call it,
the real support layer, and free your key people up
and the entrepreneur and the founders and the teams
to do great work and to actually move
the needle in their business and in this world,
I think it's vital, especially today,
that we can have a great cost effective team of support layer
assistance in every business, in every department,
that can actually free the time and energy of those people who
will drive it forward and make the impact
that they want in this world.
Thank you for sharing that.
Where would you say, Barbara, where would you
say this vision came from?
You know, it's funny.
I was always in the corporate world.
So I wasn't the traditional entrepreneur from childhood.
I wasn't something I set out to do.
I think I just, over my years of being in corporate,
I decided that I didn't really want to be a corporate mom.
That was the truth.
And high five to anyone who is doing that.
It's a very hard gig to do.
I think everything's hard, really,
when you become a mom if you're working.
But I decided I didn't want to do that.
And I guess maybe I was solving my own problem.
I really wanted to prove that you could actually
build a scalable company without blowing yourself up.
Because I knew that that was something I needed to do.
Because I made the decision to launch my own company
at the same time as having kids.
Now, my first company wasn't this one.
So this is interesting, right?
So the vision probably, I did have a vision that was similar.
But it was more around the financial end of companies.
Because my background was in the financial industry.
But I guess I started out doing some consulting
with businesses initially in the early days
when I first left corporate.
And I saw that one of the acute problems I saw
was this issue of them not being able to get out of the weeds
and actually get the work done and actually move forward.
And this is still happening.
I just had conversations over the last few days
with businesses where they don't realize that this is actually
a major problem, is the ability, the burnout,
that everyone's trying to do more, be more productive.
And my philosophy is more like, well, no, we
need to get better at creating dynamite processes and systems
and architecture and actually plugging great assistance
in to run those processes.
And actually, you bring the cost of your people's strategy
down, dramatically doing that.
So I think maybe in my own way, I
knew that I had to be a great delegator if I
was going to pull off my own vision for my personal life.
And from that, I sort of pivoted out of the first foray
into business, and I ended up going into this philosophy
point of view and into this business.
And that was nine years ago.
So here we are today.
Why do you think leaders hide from funding their vision?
Why do you think they hide from funding their vision?
Do you mean raising capital for it or from in what way?
It could be either or.
It could be time commitment, resources, et cetera,
or raising capital, whatever you would like to share.
Yeah, so let's start with the time commitment first,
because raising capital, that's a whole other gig.
Look, I think people, the easiest way to put this,
I would suspect that a lot of people,
in the early days of a business, you've all the energy
and motivation in the world.
But sadly, what happens, as we all know,
and I've gone through this myself,
is you reach a point where you become that burnout starts
to set in, and you go, I'm a bit jaded now.
And putting more time in is just not possible
because you're so burned out, and you're tired.
Even if you love the business, you're still tired from it.
So that's number one.
I think the energy sort of wanes,
and people just become comfortable with where it's at.
The second problem is that people
are at the bottom of a mountain looking up and going,
if I need to systemize this business,
even if they know what that actually means,
it's quite a lot of work.
And it's like an enormous project
that needs to be broken down into bite-sized pieces.
So that's number two.
And number three, I think by the time it gets
to all of those points, it's really far down the chain.
And in order to even start delegating
and fixing all these things becomes overwhelming.
I think that people just tend to stay at that plateau,
and they think, well, I'll just stay here.
So that's number one.
Raising capital, I think, is a complex one
because everyone sort of feels like that's the Holy Grail,
but it's not necessarily.
That brings with it a whole other set of challenges.
Now, some businesses can't be bootstrapped.
You know, like a lot of product style businesses are,
meaning if you're building SaaS tools and things like that,
they're hard to bootstrap.
Although I do know quite a few founders that have,
and they've bootstrapped them to tens of millions.
So it's very possible,
but you need to be super savvy to do that.
Service businesses and other styles of product businesses,
you can bootstrap them, but you'll only get them so far.
Like you might make seven figures, maybe in revenue,
but at that point, if you don't operationalize
and systemize and get scalable
doing the things that I'm talking about,
you won't scale that business.
You won't be able to.
That's where, and then you'll stop, you'll plateau there.
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 gonna 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.