Tell me about your vision.
Well, vision is a very big, big word.
And it's the concept that I always
talk to my clients about when I start with them.
That's actually the first step to my three steps
to creating an abundant business, which
is to learn about people's vision.
So my vision is to empower as many entrepreneurs as possible,
or I should say as many people as possible,
because there's a lot of people out there that
want to be entrepreneurs but are not yet entrepreneurs.
And the reason is because they don't feel empowered
to take action on their ideas.
Or they're already implementing their idea,
but they have challenges around making that idea grow.
So what I do is I coach new entrepreneurs
to get unstuck so that they can launch and grow
an abundant business.
My vision is to empower as many of those people as possible.
That's awesome.
Tell me more about that.
Well, my niche or the people that I'd like most to work with
are people that have usually a lot of people will say to me,
you know what, I wanted my entire life
to be an entrepreneur.
And I am tired of working nine to five.
Or they have corporate jobs or that they
thought there was a certain path that they
were supposed to follow in life.
A lot of our lives are very scripted
by the people we grew up with, our parents, our schools,
the ideas, the culture.
So a lot of the work that I do is really
helping people to uncover.
That's another step as to part of my system,
which is to uncover some of these older limiting beliefs
that you have about, well, what does it
take to be an entrepreneur?
What are the roadblocks that get in the way?
What's holding me back?
What did I learn about living my life that's not that helpful?
I'll give you an example.
My father was an entrepreneur.
Excuse me, he was not.
My mother was the entrepreneur of the family.
I grew up on a sheep farm, and we
had a cottage industry of selling woolen products.
My father worked for Westinghouse for 43 years.
He's an engineer at Westinghouse for 43 years.
And he had a lot of ideas.
And as a matter of fact, he had a lot of patents.
He has quite a number of patents in the patent office.
He's 95 now.
And he's invented things, but he never
had a good way, a system to be guided to actually creating
any of those ideas into being any kind of a business.
And so I'm inspired to help people like that.
Is that what your why is as well, Liz?
Well, tell me a little bit more about what you mean by my why.
What gets you out of bed every morning to do what you do?
Well, I think there's a lot of things
that get people out of bed.
And I think that one of them is, is this work interesting to me?
Is it impactful?
Is it making a difference in the world?
I think it's a little bit of social media fodder
to have to see people who wake up and go,
I'm so excited every single day to get up and do my thing.
Because there's a lot of smaller actions
that you take that really aren't that much fun when
you're an entrepreneur, to be honest.
So my why is the I have many, many projects
that I'm interested in working on.
And why?
Because I can.
Because I'm able to get out and take action
in a way that a lot of people feel trapped
and don't have that experience, that freedom.
That's a very authentic answer.
Thank you for sharing that.
But that still differs to question.
A lot of times in life, so there's
a lot of reasons why I get out of bed.
One that would be providing for my family,
or I love helping people.
And there are people out there, even from social media norms
that I've met personally, have come on our show, who
are actually excited to get up in the morning
to do what they do, because they love what they do.
If they actually meant it, I think so.
And a lot of that comes from purpose.
And that is my reason.
Do I personally get out of bed every morning cheering?
No, I'm not at that stage yet.
I'm still trying to figure out that exact why that I have.
But you, as a business coach, that profession is not,
if I put it, it's not a very common profession to be in.
We see, I mean, if you read the e-myth, 96% of businesses,
that's one of the stats that the book stated,
96% of businesses in the United States
failed within the first 10 years.
That's a pretty staggering number.
I have an opinion about that, but go on.
Yeah, that's a pretty staggering number.
Even if that number is not 96, even if it's 90 or 80,
within the first 10 years, that's a pretty high number.
And there's other statistics out there
that say 70% of businesses failed within the first five
years.
And then there's only like 40%, 50%, 60%,
depending on which stat you're looking at,
they go past the second year mark.
So how did you end up getting into the business coaching
world out of all the businesses you could choose?
Well, I definitely have a back story of how I got here.
And as I like to say, as I mentioned already,
I grew up on a farm.
And we weren't sitting around going,
I wish I was an entrepreneur.
It would be so great.
In fact, we didn't even know that word didn't
mean anything to us.
It was, how do we survive?
How do we make money from this experience?
How do we pay the electric bill?
That was what it was like in the 70s, especially
for farmers who did not have a lot of resources
or a lot of family farms that were going out
of business, et cetera.
So that was just the world that I grew up in.
So to be someone, how do I explain it?
I didn't grow up in a very traditional way
in which everybody had said, well,
you should go to law school.
No one ever said those words to me.
They said, what do you want to go to college for?
And I said, photography.
And they said, go do that.
And then I got out of school.
And they were like, what are you going to do now?
And I'm like, I think I'm going to open a little store
to sell the things that we make on the farm.
OK, that sounds good.
Oops, that didn't work out so well.
Maybe that wasn't too authentic.
Let me go to New York City and be a rock star.
OK.
Oh, and I went there and I got a job.
So every place that I, everything that I did,
every job that I had, every business I started,
led me to this point because it was all
feeding into the experiences that I was learning.
When I got to be just married, which is 28 years ago,
I started a business with my husband.
What did I do?
I looked around and I said, what are the opportunities right
now that are available to me?
This is the way an entrepreneur thinks.
What are the opportunities that are available to me?
And at that time, customer relationship management
software was very new.
It was almost like when they discovered penicillin.
It's like people were going from Rolodexes to computers
that gave them an alarm when they were supposed
to call somebody.
That was like a thing.
Before that, it was all pen and paper.
So I started doing that because I saw a very good opportunity
there.
And I think that a lot of people see a need.
What is entrepreneurship anyway?
It is where you see a need where someone has a problem
and you believe you can solve that problem for them.
And from there, I learned a lot.
I love working with small businesses.
I have a lot of experience for myself
building my own business and bringing myself
further into the business.
I basically decided I wasn't that interested in the technology
aspect of it anymore.
And then instead, I really wanted
to just focus on the skills, the skills part of it.
And you brought up this statistic,
the staggering statistic, which I am not in any way disputing.
But I've worked with enough entrepreneurs
now to know that the reason businesses end,
I'm not going to say fail because some of them don't fail.
Sometimes people choose out of businesses
or they find that they're not authentic anymore
or they did them for a while.
Or like me, I did a business and I
decided I wanted to do something else
or it grew into something else.
So we could sit down sometime over coffee
and have a conversation about what is failure.
But in my experience of working with new entrepreneurs,
you'd ask the question, why?
Why would businesses fail?
And I believe a very big part of that
often is because people decide they don't want to do it
anymore.
And then another big part of it is because they don't really
know what to do.
And I'm absolutely sure people in the world and people
and your guests have gone on the show and said,
I'm very excited to get up.
I never wake up and go, oh, I'm going to dread my day.
What I'm saying is that challenges are really
a very big part of what we're doing as entrepreneurs.
Because at the end of the day, I can't go home
and forget about my job.
I'm always thinking about it and thinking about my clients
as well.
What challenges you every day then?
I'm sorry, say that again?
What challenges you every day?
Oh, what challenges me?
Well, when you have big ideas and they don't necessarily
pan out the way you expect or hope, for example, I do events.
I'm growing a side business right now
where I am very involved in bluegrass music.
Are you familiar with bluegrass at all?
Never heard of it.
Bluegrass music, it's a whole thing.
And there is what bluegrass musicians do.
If they're not performing, if they're not professional,
is they get together and jam.
And it turns out a lot of people really like to do this.
And I've been organizing jams in New York City.
And now I'm growing it into monetizing it,
which came about very organically.
So one of the things that I am doing
is I'm putting together some events where people will come
and pay money to learn how to jam, which I'm,
the answer is jam.
But they don't know how to do that.
So they come.
And so I'm putting together an event in the end of this week.
And turnout is lower than I had hoped.
And it's costing money because it's at a site
and I'm paying money for it.
So the types of challenges that I always
say I'm in the one step ahead program.
In other words, I am being challenged at the same time
everyone that I'm coaching is.
I'm just one step ahead.
So for example, I've put together probably 150 or 200
events in my lifetime.
Every time I do it, new level, new devil.
I'm taking on a new challenge.
I'm finding new people to come in.
And so events aren't necessarily the easiest thing
to put together.
So what's challenging me is my own experience
of my own mindset of what's possible.
And I think that's always what challenges everybody
is our mindsets around what's possible
and how to implement it.
Thank you for sharing that.
I have one more question for you before we enter a segment.
What is your goal for being on the show today, Liz?
Well, my goal for being on the show
is always to help to implement, excuse me,
to influence people that might be listening
to have them have an experience where they've learned something
new or they get an insight on something.
And that's why I like to share with people that, again,
you mentioned there's people coming on the show.
They're very excited.
They're happy to get up every day.
If I don't, if you listeners don't necessarily
relate to that experience, you might think
I'm not cut out for this.
And I want you to know that there's
a lot of different types of entrepreneurs
that are out there.
And you don't have to match the super smiley, exuberant person.
In fact, I have a quiz on my website
that people can take to help them discover
what their personality, their CEO leadership style is.
Because you might feel stuck in a way
that you don't realize that it's because of your style of how
you work.
And so I really want to make sure
that people are hearing that if your idea is something that
will solve problems for people, then there's
a way to get you to get to find those people so
that you can solve that problem for them.
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.