Ask Me Anything: Business Growth, Money Management in Marriage, and More!

You're listening to The Jewish Entrepreneur Podcast with Debbie Sassen, Episode 150. 

Welcome to The Jewish Entrepreneur Podcast. I'm your host, Debbie Sassen. I went from being a financial adviser, author and chronic under earner to building my business to six figures as a financial planner and money mindset coach. And then, on to multiple six figures as a fulltime money and business coach. 

I help entrepreneurs create money making businesses and build wealth using sales and money mindset strategies in alignment with authentic Jewish values. Now, let's dive into today's show.

Hello, my friends, and welcome back to the podcast. I am so excited to bring you the 150th episode of the podcast. This has really been a life mission of mine to show up every week and help you to build your businesses.

Before we jump into this episode, which is an “Ask Me Anything” episode, I want to let you know that on October 30th, Rivka Malka Perlman and I, we did an interview together last week. So if you want to go to Episode 149, you will hear our beautiful interview together where we talked about coaching and building coaching businesses.

And now Rivka Malka and I are collaborating on October 30th, and we're going to be running a masterclass together. It's a free masterclass, Three Secrets to Growing Your New or Old Coaching Business. If you go to my website, DebbieSassen.com/register, you can sign up. The masterclass is going to be at five in the afternoon, Israel time - 11 a.m. New York time. And if you can't be there live, that's okay, register anyway and we will send you the replay. 

It is so important, we both think, for coaches to show up in the world and build their businesses. You came to this industry, if you're a coach, because you have a story, and coaching probably helped you. Rivka Malka spoke specifically about her journey and how she turned to coaching. 

And when you have healed something, upleveled your life, experienced a transformation, and then you decided to become a coach, the world is missing out when you are not showing up and sharing all of your genius and your coaching tools and skills with the world. We really, really want to help you build your business.

Rivka Malka runs a coaching school, a certification program for coaches, and she does some foundational work for business building. But, together, our goal is to help coaches build thriving, profitable businesses. So go to my website DebbieSassen.com/register and sign up for the free masterclass. 

All right, let's jump into this amazing episode, “Ask Me Anything”. A couple weeks ago, I mentioned on the podcast that hey, whatever you want to know, send me an email, reach out, and let me know what you want me to talk about. And I'm so grateful that my listeners did. Thank you, if you were one of those people who sent me a request. 

I jokingly, or maybe not so jokingly, mentioned that if you want to know about my kids' names, let me know. And somebody reached out on Instagram… you know who you are, if you're listening in… and said, “Yeah, I'd really love to know about your kids' names.”

So here's the thing, I have eight children. Thank G-d, Baruch HaShem. Praise G-d, He is good, that I have eight beautiful, healthy children, 16 grandchildren. And please G-d, in the coming months, we're going to be having a few more grandchildren. 

So I'm going to start with my four children, oldest children. I will talk to you about their names, and then I'm going to pay attention to the time… if this episode is not too long… I have some other questions, then I'll come back to the other four. And if I don't, we're just going to have to talk about them on another podcast episode. 

All right, so let me start with my oldest daughter, Eliana Bracha. Eliana is a Hebrew name, and it means “G-d answered”. And Bracha means “blessing”. So she was our first; G-d answered with a blessing. G-d blessed us with His answer; however, you would put those two words together. And her middle name is also after my husband's grandmother Bessa, and we called her Bracha. It's just been such a beautiful name.

We are so blessed she made us parents, and G-d, HaShem, really did answer our prayers. It's been a beautiful journey with our lovely first daughter for over 30 years. So that's number one. 

Our second daughter is Meira Tamar. She was born just a few days before the holiday of Hanukkah. Meira means “to enlighten”, “to make light”, and Hanukkah is the festival of lights. 

We celebrate on Hanukkah what happened in the Holy Temple in Jerusalem. This was when the temple was destroyed by the Greeks. There was a little flask of oil, pure olive oil, that we found, that the Maccabees found, and it was used to light the menorah in the temple. It was just a little flask of oil that was supposed to only stay lit for one day, and the miracle happened that it stayed lit for eight days. 

And so in recognition, commemoration of the holiday of Hanukkah, we named her daughter Meira. Her middle name is Tamar. Because that is the week that we read in synagogue, in shul, the weekly Torah reading that talks about the incident between Yehuda, Judah and Tamar. So we named her Tamar in commemoration of that event. 

And Tamar was a very strong and very righteous woman and my daughter is also. She brings us a lot of light, and she is very strong and very determined. So I think it's a very fitting name.

Our third daughter is Rachel, Rachel Lena. Lena is the name of my maternal grandmother, my father's mother. You've heard me talk about my father. We went to Paderborn to Germany in the summer, in July. And this was my grandmother, who also was there in Paderborn. She wasn't originally born in Paderborn. She was born in Mannheim in Germany. 

Her name was Lily Lena. “Lily” was really how she was known, but her official name was Lena. And so we named her daughter Lena, because that was in memory of her. 

And “Rachel” is her character traits. Rachel, Our Mother, Rachel Imenu, had beautiful character traits. When her husband, Yaacov, went to get married, Yaacov wanted to marry Rachel. And Rachel was the younger sister; Leah was the older sister. Rachel was able to stand aside to let her older sister get married before her. She gave her certain signs so that Yaacov would be maybe confused and think that he was actually marrying Rachel.

It's all written in the Torah, you can go and read it. But she was someone who was willing to let others go first. She was willing to serve others, give to others. She was willing to be mevater, we say in Hebrew, to forfeit her place. 

And that was my grandmother. My grandmother was such a caring, giving, serving person. I remember that every year around the holidays, around the end of the year, Christmas season… it does overlap sometimes with Chanukah… my grandmother just took care of everybody with such generosity. 

Whether it was the postman, the dry cleaners, her seamstress, the green grocer, my grandmother gave them all gifts. She hand dipped her own chocolates, the most delicious chocolates in the world. And she would give boxes of these beautiful gifts to everybody who took care of her, she would give back. That was my grandmother. 

A beautiful, beautiful character trait. And so we gave that name to my third daughter, Rachel Lena.

We have three girls followed by five boys. But you're only going to hear about boy number one. That's my oldest son, Yaakov. He was named… he does not have a middle name… he was named for my husband's grandfather, his mother's father, who was known as “Jack”. 

And interestingly, when we went to look for the records of what his name was like, was his name really Yaakov? He had four names. There was Yaakov and Yonah and Yisrael, and I forget the fourth one. Anyway, we just chose among all of those, because he was known as “Jack”. We chose Yaakov. And that's what we've called him all these years. 

He's our oldest boy, and he is beautiful. He is in engineering school at the moment. He's also doing his civil duty, his national service, working for Hatzalah. He's doing an amazing job automating and helping them with their workflows and their data analysis. We could not be prouder of our son, Yaakov. 

Those are my four oldest children. If we have time, then I will come back and tell you about my other children. 

All right, let's talk about some questions that came in.

The first question that came in is, could I talk about how my husband and I manage money together? This has been an evolving process over the course of our 34 years of marriage. In the beginning of our marriage, we had no money. I think like most people when they get married, they have no money.

We were… I mean, I had worked on Wall Street. My husband came to Israel. He came to learn in yeshiva. He hadn't really had a full-time job. He had had really good high-level summer jobs, but he did not have a lot of money. In fact, he had no money. 

He was cleaning houses when we got married. Every Friday, he would clean for a couple of families. So that's how he made money. And he was so proud of himself because he had that money to buy himself lemon wafers and to take me out on dates. And he also did some library work. The summer before we started dating, he did some library work and some research work for somebody, in his field of metallurgy. He's a scientist and a metallurgist. So he had some more money. 

We started like most young couples, with nothing. I did have money in savings, in the bank, from when I had worked on Wall Street. But I came to Israel, and I had been in Israel for about a year and a half when we got married. We really wanted to hold on to that nest egg, but we used it.

Back in the day, we used that $50,000 that I had saved up to put a down payment on an apartment. Now, if you know anything about prices of apartments in Israel today, it's actually kind of laughable. You're like, “Wow, I don't even know if I could buy a window in a house for $50,000.” But back in the day, that worked for us. 

So we just really counted our pennies. We counted our shekels. And then I got a job. I was the first one in the family to get a job, at the Bank of Israel. So we had a little bit more leeway, but we were always just very frugal. And both of us come from backgrounds where we don't spend more than we earn. So we just really counted together our shekels and made sure that we kept our finances very low. 

And then little by little, our children started coming; those eight beautiful children that I talked about. At that time, because I was working almost full time at the Bank of Israel… And then my husband found a job so he could also add to the income of our family. And between the kids and the work and the pregnancies and the house and the nursing, the cooking, everything… If you're a mom, you know what I'm talking about. If you're a dad, you might know what I'm talking about also… but my husband at that time was in charge of the finances.

And we would, again, we would be very sensible about what we bought. If we wanted to invest in something like beds or cupboards, we always had money that we saved, that we set aside for that. So we were not ever short of cash.

There were times, as our family expanded and we eventually moved house… and we live where I still live today. We've been here for 26 years… that we wanted to put in bedroom furniture or other things and we did not have the cash in our account. 

So I was very fortunate, at the Bank of Israel, that I could borrow money at a very, very reasonable interest rate. We were very cautious and very thoughtful about taking on debt, even at a below market rate. When I say “below market”, I mean it was lower than if we had gone to our bank and asked if we could borrow money at the bank. 

The truth is we have never bought a brand-new dining room table. Our first dining room table, if you can call that a dining room table, was a plastic-like garden furniture. We got that as a Rosh Hashanah gift from the Bank of Israel my first year that I was working there. They had a set of garden furniture with a plastic table and four chairs. So I took that so we would actually have dining room furniture. 

And then my next-door neighbor, when we were living in Jerusalem… she was my babysitter actually… she bought a brand-new table. I was always joking to her that I was paying her money to babysit my children so she could buy a dining room table. 

And so she gave us her used table. So our first wooden table we didn't pay for. Eventually, when my third daughter was a baby, we replaced our plastic chairs with dining room chairs. And so, you can see, we're very, very cautious about our spending.

And then, when we moved to Beit Shemesh, where I live now, it was many, many years and we were still using this hand-me-down wooden table. Somebody in our neighborhood was selling a used table that can expand out to four meters. And it's such a beautiful thing, because our family now is very large, and even that table isn't big enough. But we bought a secondhand table. It's very solid, very sturdy, very amazing.

Also the dining room chairs that we have, we have those ones that we bought when my third daughter, who is today 29, when she was a baby. So yes, those have been in our family for a long time. We bought some second-hand chairs, so now we have almost enough chairs, with the addition of some plastic chairs, when our entire family comes. 

When we do need to borrow some, we go across the street to our shul, our synagogue, and we borrow chairs when we have the entire family. 

So back to managing money. You can see our personality. We don't buy beyond our means. My husband was pretty much in charge of keeping track of the finances. I actually forgot that it wasn't so long ago that he reminded me that that's what he did. He made sure that we weren't overspending. 

And then, at some point… I don't even know when it was, it sort of happened naturally. It was probably at the time when I left the Bank of Israel to become a financial planner… one of the things that I did was I started managing the money. 

And our family was growing, we had way more expenses. The kids were buying bus tickets, and they were buying school books, and the girls would go out with our credit card to buy clothing. Again, we're being very sensible. We're not going loony and crazy about it. But there were just a lot of line items in our budget. 

I wanted to develop the skill of mine as a financial planner and as a money coach, so I took it over at that time. And that is already, probably 15, 16 years ago that I took it over and started managing it. I was managing our money very, very carefully, like really to the last shekel, for many years. 

And then we got in the habit of knowing pretty much what our expenses were, and rather than doing it monthly, I would do it more like quarterly or every six months, because a lot of our expenses don't fluctuate. I mean, I would notice if the electricity bill jumped or the water bill jumped. 

And this is really important to know, if you see something jumping. We had this with our water bill in particular, I remember it. We had a leak in our garden, and it was only because we were looking at our bills and noticing what was going on and comparing them… We weren't looking monthly; it was a few months… but we were able to pick it up and notice that we were leaking water. 

And that's why it's really important to stay on top of your bills, to look at what's going on in your bank account, so that you can know what's going on. 

But in terms of decisions, it was pretty much the two of us, together, making decisions for our family. And we weren't extending really beyond the basics and a little bit more. We're not, as I said, we're not big spenders. We have never owned a car. You've probably heard me say that before. My husband has a company car from work, and it's never been a value of ours to go and buy a car. 

I actually did at one point look at buying a second-hand car. We took it for testing, but we just never went through with it. At the time, it was just exhausting traveling on the buses from my home to Jerusalem to where I worked every day. 

But I figured that one out. We rent cars when we need them for our family, but we don't have the insurance. We don't have the maintenance. We don't have all of the upkeep that's involved when we have a second car. It's way less expensive when you need it to take taxis. And of course, when you walk, you get the exercise as well.

So you can pretty much get an idea of who we are and how we spend. Now, what happened when I opened my own business, is I started having an entire set of expenses that were mine alone. My first big investment in coaching. That was my first certification, that I got from the Financial Recovery Institute. That first certification, I asked my husband about it. 

It was a $10,000 certification program. It was a big, scary investment for me. The energy in my nervous system was feeling very, very afraid of spending that much money, even though we'd already spent large sums of money on a house and on other things for our family. But that was for me alone. 

But after my husband and I discussed it, he said, “Yeah, okay, go for it. Do it.” All the other expenses in my business that I have ever made have all been me alone making the expense. I haven't consulted with my husband at all. 

And here's the thing. If you're a business owner, and you're listening to this podcast, I want to give you this idea. You are the business owner for your business. You make the decisions for your business. You set your prices. I mean, unless your husband or your partner is going to be your financial consultant, your CFO for your business, your chief financial officer. 

Unless your husband is going to be helping you to make money in your business. But my husband has a job. He goes and he does his thing in his job and he makes money his way. He is not involved in the day to day running of my business. He doesn't decide when I'm going to run a webinar, a master class. He didn't decide when I was going to write my book or when I was going to open my podcast. Those are all my decisions. 

So he leaves the financial management of my business to me, any big or small investments in my business. And believe me, I have made some very large coaching investments. In fact, we talked about this when I recorded my episode a few weeks ago on building a million-dollar business.

I've spent over $300,000 on my business, on coaching alone over the years. But those were my decisions, and I'm the one who has to make sure that I have a return on investment. It's my business. I'm responsible for the bottom line. So I'm just dropping that little seed.

Maybe it's like a mango seed, but it's very important if you have questions about that, who should be involved in the decision making for your business. Please reach out to me, because I would love to discuss it with you. 

If you're allowing your partner, or you're asking your partner somehow to be involved in the decision making, my question for you would be, is your partner also involved in making money for the business? Because if your partner is involved in making money and bringing in income and cash and revenue, then that's legitimate. 

But if your partner isn't involved in bringing cash into the business, why is your partner involved? Question, where are you afraid? All right?

So let me just evolve a little bit more through our money management. As our children have grown up, moved out of the house, gotten married, our financial management as a couple is much more relaxed. It's much looser.

My husband does what he wants. I do what I want. Again, you know our personalities are not huge spenders. But where we do run into conflict sometimes, is with giving to our children. My husband is way more generous than I am. I mean, I'm miserly. I like to say I'm mean and bad with the kids. 

We recently had this incident over the summer where one of our children wanted something. I'm going to leave it vague. And my husband threw out a number and mentioned that number to the child. And it was only afterwards that I heard about it. I was like, “Hey, that's not how we make decisions in the family.” I mean, I said it nicely. I said, “Listen, I'm disappointed that you didn't involve me in this decision.”

I do like to be generous sometimes. But I'm also of the opinion that just like my husband and I had to figure it out, we had to figure out how to make it in this world, make our businesses work... I mean, when we were at the age that this child is, we were both making money.

And I know different country, different opportunities, different whatevers, but my husband and I both took a lot more in earning money as young adults. All right, enough said. So, there are times where we don't consult with each other. Sometimes it is by accident. Sometimes it is by design.

Similarly, I would say, that recently I personally made a real estate investment. It was something that I checked out. I researched. I did the due diligence on it. And I did consult with my husband. I didn't sign on the dotted line. It was way more than we gifted this child, but it was all my doing. And because I'm involved in investments and money and financial markets… I mean, I manage our stock portfolio by myself. My husband doesn't get involved in that. 

So he just listened to me, trusted me. And yes, I have made mistakes. My whole book, The 1K Investor is based on my $50,000 money mistake and all the learning that came after that. But that was something that I took on myself. He was a willing partner, but it wasn't that he was involved. 

And I think that's also important. When you are running a house, two people together, you both can't do everything. That's just an overlap of duty. So there has to be trust. There has to be discussion. There has to be a willingness, if my husband says X to a child and I disagree with it, of letting it go. Because really, it's the team, it's the family, it’s the partnership that is most important, and we want to maintain that.

So I think that's about all I have to say about money management. I think conversation, discussion, and trust would be the three most important elements of managing money as a couple. 

All right. So that was a very long-winded question, we almost don't have time for many more. I'm going to go through the rest very quickly.

The third question that we have… And I really don't think we're going to get to the other four kids this episode, so you'll have to wait. I'm leaving you in suspense… One of my clients asked me, in my group coaching program Wired for Wealth, and I thought this was a great question to bring here, will I teach a masterclass on AI? 

I thought about it for about a millisecond. No, I'm not going to teach a masterclass on AI. I have my zone of genius, the things that I teach on; on your CEO mindset, your CEO self-leadership, marketing, sales, money. I talk a lot about money, you know that. But AI is not my zone of genius, artificial intelligence, so I'm not going to teach a masterclass on something that I don't feel is the thing that I do best. 

What I will say on this podcast is that I do use AI. I probably don't use it as efficiently as I can. But I want to talk about two different aspects. There's AI, like ChatGPT. There are workflows and there are systems and processes.

So when I write my emails, sometimes I get stuck. I really do believe that a person writes better than a computer. Although I think that the computers have come a long, long way, even in the last two years. 

This happened maybe three, six months ago. I was writing an email and I got stuck on what I wanted to say. And because ChatGPT knows me… You can train the robot to know you. You can train this robot to know your tone of voice, know who your clients are. You can ask ChatGPT, first of all, to give you an outline for an email. I don't think I've ever done that. 

But I wrote this email and I said, “I can't finish it. I don't know how to start it.” I don't even remember what I said. I was in shock by how well ChatGPT knew my voice and finished this letter, this email, almost as well as I could. I was blown away. I read it, then I edit it so it sounded more like me.

And then I sent it to my assistant. I asked Amanda, “Hey, what do you think of this?” She tweaked a few more things. I mean, there was some kind of flowery language in there that I would never use, I'm much more blunt. But you can really use ChatGPT, which is AI, or Claude or other services to shorten your work.

Now I will take an email that I've written, or a social media post… sometimes, not all the time… and I'll just throw it into ChatGPT and say, “Hey, can you tweak this for me?” I did this a couple of days ago. I had written a post that I wanted to put up on social, and I asked ChatGPT if it could tweak it for me, and it made it sound a little bit better. It made it much tighter; it edited it down.

People don't have time to read War and Peace every time you post on socials or every time you send an email. So if you put it into ChatGPT or Claude, that's another one, you can definitely get a higher quality piece of written content.

But I do believe it starts in your brain. Or you can ask ChatGPT for bullet points. It can save you a lot of time, and it can improve the quality of your output. 

There is Fathom, which is another AI, another artificial intelligence. It is a transcriber that I have hooked up to Zoom. So when I'm doing my Zoom coaching calls, I always have my transcription service, Fathom, in the background. Shout out to my former client, Irit Levy, who told me about it I think two years ago already. There are a gazillion transcripts of my meetings on my computer.

Here is where I am not so good with AI, but I'm getting better. Fathom will give you a summary of your meetings, and that will, if I can figure out through Zapier how to get those summaries into my client files… and I know it's possible. It's just all about workflows and processes and systems and making your work more efficient… then I would have great summaries of what I'm doing. 

But I've started using them now to remind myself of what I talked about when I was on my coaching calls. And Fathom now has a new service called Ask Fathom, where I've started playing around with this. I've asked Fathom, “Can you write for me five social media posts based on this coaching call?” I did that a couple of times this week. 

This is a new idea for me. I haven't played around with it a lot, but I'm letting you know that it's a possibility. It gave me social media posts. Now they weren't long, and they weren't meaty and fleshed out. So the first time I said, “Can you make it meatier?” And they did. And they gave me better ones, but still wasn't good enough. But it gave me great ideas that I could use as a launch pad to then go and write a different social media post. 

And here's two things that I used it for this week. I asked, for two of my different coaching calls, I asked Fathom to write me five social media posts. It did. One time it was a complete and utter disaster. And then I had to ask it to shorten it. I basically just took some of the ideas and I did create an Instagram post that I put up today before I started recording this podcast. 

There was another post that I put up on LinkedIn earlier this week, based on some of the other summaries. So I'm learning how to use it more efficiently. 

Now, the second part of AI is creating a process, a workflow, so that every time a new transcript is created in Fathom, there can be a trigger that will be created. So this transcript will go to a Google Doc or Google Sheet, or something like that, and then it can be sent automatically to ChatGPT to write me the social media posts. Then they would be dropped in a Google Doc where I could review them and see if I wanted to use them. So that, for me, is next level. 

But you might be listening to this podcast episode and be telling yourself, “Debbie, you are so far behind the times. There are way better ways of doing it.” And if you know how to use tech better than I do, then please send me an email and let me know how to do it, because I'm just getting started. 

That's why I'm not the one giving the masterclass. But I do know this is how I'm going to make my business more efficient in the end of ‘24, 2025, ‘26 and beyond. Because all I do is talk into a mic all day long, and all of this content should go somewhere so that I can share it with the world in bigger, better ways. 

All right, that was question number three. I hope you learned something, and I hope that you will start using the power of AI. Or improve the power of your AI to improve the content that you're putting into the world. There are other things, webinars, masterclasses, all sorts of ideas that you can use AI to generate for you. But I am definitely not your address if you want to know more about it. 

Question number four. Somebody asked me, is it possible to build a referral-based business? Like you don't want to have a podcast. You don't want to do sales conversations. You don't want to be out there marketing. You only want people coming to you on referrals.

So here's the thing, you have to find a way to market your business. It might not be for you through a podcast. It might not be social media. In fact, there was a podcast that I released a few months ago on how to market your business without social media. There are a gazillion ways; maybe not that many. 

There are many ways to market your business, and having referral partners, having collaborations, having satisfied clients refer business to you is one of the ways that you can do it if you don't want to be on social media. And that was kind of where this was coming from. This client was asking, “I don't want to be on social media. I just want a referral-based business.” 

Number one, until you have a very large network of happy, satisfied clients… Because people sometimes refer you. People sometimes don't refer you. People might say, “Hey, do you have an accountant that you can recommend? Do you have a lawyer that you can recommend?” Maybe they will ask you that.

But depending on what kind of work you do, not everybody is out looking for a referral. So that might also be one of your considerations. But you can reach out to your family. You can reach out to your friends. You can say, “Hey, this is my business. This is what I do. If you know anybody who could be using a business coach,” for example, “send them to Debbie Sassen.” Or if you have anybody who's looking for a lawyer for their real estate transaction, send them to somebody else. 

So you can build your referral network that way. The other way to do referrals is through collaborations. Finding people that are in parallel industries, or finding people that do something that's very, very similar to you but a little bit different. And that way you guys can refer business back and forth. 

One of my clients is a therapist, and he does get referrals from other therapists who don't work in his specific areas. He also gets referrals from rabbis who know people. So you can use that as a way to get referral business. 

So, yes, it's possible, but I also want to encourage you, unless you're really, really against having an online presence, to have an online presence if you only want a referral-based business and you don't want to be on social media. 

Having a website, writing blogs, making sure that you have content constantly being uploaded onto your website, and making sure that it is SEO optimized, is very important so that people will find you, so that you will show up at the top of Google searches.

Also, when you're doing those collaborations with other people, make sure, like if you're going to do a podcast interview, that you guys can share your networks. Referrals can also be accessing other people's audiences. So there are ways that you can grow your business without being on social media, but you have to be strategic about it.

You have to reach out to people like me who have podcasts and say, “Hey, do you invite people onto your podcast to do interviews?” For example, today somebody reached out to me and we're going to do a podcast swap. That's a way for you to access somebody else's business. But it has to be mutually beneficial. Nobody's going to just give you business, hand over business, unless it's your family members or your satisfied clients. You have to make sure that you are also giving.

It has to feel like an equal energy exchange, “I'll help you with your business. You help me with my business. If I find somebody that works for you, that's great. I'll pass them on. You find somebody that works for me, you pass them on.” So it has to be something that is created in a relationship with another person and it's to everybody's benefit. 

The last thing that I want to say on that referral business, sometimes people want a referral business because they believe that it's easier to sign clients who come on referral. Now, I would say sometimes that's true. But interestingly, one of my clients this week said that she had two people that came to her on referral, very good recommendations, and neither one of them signed in the end.

So I don't want you to mistakenly believe that it's easier to sign somebody who comes as a warm lead rather than somebody who comes as a cold lead. Sometimes the people who just find out about you, they just start reading your blogs, they binge your content, those could be the hottest audience that you have. Those are the people that are ready to sign. And it's really important for you.

If you're thinking that marketing is all you need, I just want to let you know that you're wrong. You need to have sales skills to build your business. You can't be successful in your business without knowing how to sell, without knowing how to close, without understanding somebody's problem. 

It could be that somebody will come to you through a referral and they will already be sold. And depending if you have sales calls or people just book and pay you on your website… there are different ways of doing it. I mean, we go on Amazon, we read all of the reviews, and that's how we get sold, right? So you have to have selling skills. 

You could be selling in your marketing. You can be selling in your emails. You can be selling in your podcast. Tou can be selling through your blog posts. But you must have sales skills which will help you to identify the problems your ideal clients have, make sure that you're the one who has the solution to their problems, and that is how you close the sale. And so referrals are nice but it doesn't always close the sale.

Let's go to the last question, because this is a great question. I thought about this one a lot. This is the fifth question, which is, what is the number one thing that you did to grow your business to a million dollars? I love this question because it really gave me like a trip down memory lane as I was thinking about what did I do. 

And there are two things that I think that they're like kissing cousins, they're connected with each other. They are courage and self-leadership. When I was thinking back to the beginning of growing my online business, I remember the first time that I put up my website. I was shaking in my boots. I felt like eight billion pairs of eyes were looking at my website.

Of course, nobody did, because they didn't even know who I was or that I had launched a website. I was doing live, in-person workshops at the time, and nobody was online looking for me. But that's not how it feels. That's how your body and your nervous system is freaking out when you do that. 

And I remember the first time that I ran a webinar or a masterclass and my coach at the time said, “Debbie go and do a photo shoot. You need photos that look good so that you can post them and share them. So that you'll get people to come to your webinar.” I was like, “Okay, what do I do at a photo shoot?” I didn't even know.

She gave me some hints, what poses what to do, and some of those pictures are still really great. I was so much younger then. I looked at them and I'm like, “Look at that, back in the day. I love those pictures.” And I just kept getting courageous. I remember in one of those photos I was in my garden, standing on a chair against the pole of my pergola. You can't tell that I'm standing on a chair… that way we didn't get the ground. 

So keep being courageous. Keep doing the thing that scares you. Keep posting on social media, writing your blog posts, sending your emails, running your master classes, doing your videos. That's kind of my next thing. 

I've done videos in the past, but I've sort of fallen out of habit of doing videos. So I'm going to go back to doing some videos, because live video is another way of marketing your business. It's not that it scares me, it's just I think I'm probably going to be a little bit rusty in the beginning. I think it's probably like a bicycle. Wouldn't you say that I'll get into the habit quickly? So that's the next kind of courageous thing that I'll be doing in my business. 

But being courageous is also raising your prices. And I just want to shout out some of my clients this week who are raising their prices. One of my clients raised her coaching package prices by $200. Yay. Another one of my clients also has a consulting fee, and he raised it by $200/hour. That seems to be a theme, $200, right? 

My clients are raising their prices. One of my clients put a consulting fee for the first in the intake session that she does with her clients. She also established a new fee. And I just love this. That's courage. When you do bold things in your business, that keeps moving the needle forward and you'll make more money. 

You'll expand your nervous system. You'll expand your capacity to do new and bold and scary things. And that's why I think that your courage goes hand in hand with your self-leadership. Because it’s how you lead yourself, in these scary moments that you feel the fear and do it anyway. 

That is so important for your business, that you keep showing up. You stay committed. You are courageous. And there is one more element of selfleadership that I want to mention, and that is managing yourself around time. This is where so many entrepreneurs lose time. 

They procrastinate. They doom scroll on their phones or on Facebook or whatever. They're watching the news, especially the last year in Israel. We have been living in a war zone and I'm 100% totally guilty of this. Watching way too much news definitely has, I think, impacted me and my growth and my nervous system this year.

And it's one of my New Year's resolutions, as it were, to have a higher level of self-leadership, especially around the news. Because I can't do anything about it. I can pray. I can pray for the hostages. I can pray for our soldiers. I can pray for all the victims and the wounded. 

But me, here in my office, I have a mission. And you have a mission. Your mission is to go out there and serve your people. Be courageous. Manage your time. Don't let the hours of your day get frittered away. We each have the same 24 hours in the day. We each have the same seven days a week. I take off for the Sabbath; I am not there. I do sometimes a little bit of work on Friday, but not much. 

I take off for the Jewish holidays. I take off for my daughters when they give birth because I'm their doula. I want to make sure that the minutes that I'm in my business, the minutes that I am not exercising, I am not being with my husband, I am not doing all the other things that normal people do, I am focused. And that's why your self-leadership is so, so critical. 

When you can stay committed to your business, stay focused on what you're doing, you can make a lot, a lot of headway. And so being courageous and leading yourself. You see, it's not about the strategy. And I think that that's really important. You can have a six-month coaching package. You can have an hourly fee. You can have consulting fees. You can have intake fees. You can be a course creator. 

You can have all these different strategies around your business, but you have to lead yourself. Because all ways work. You can look out into the world, at all sorts of different businesses, all different types of business models, and they all work. But what really works is the CEO behind the business. 

So be courageous. Lead yourself. Step into your personal power, because that is the thing, way more than the strategy. And also your personal power. And your leadership includes your mindset, right? Make sure your mind is clear. Make sure your mind is focused. Make sure that you are not letting fear get in your way. 

All right, my friends, those are the five questions that I had that I wanted to talk about with you. One was my kids’ names. We got four out of eight this week. My money relationship with my husband, how we manage it. AI, it is the wave of the future so figure out how you can incorporate AI into your business. If you're already doing it, I'm sure that there are more ways and you can probably tell me about some. 

Can you create a referral only business? Yes, and you're going to have to create those referrals through collaborations, partnerships, other people's audiences, and probably SEO’ing your website. And number five is, be courageous and lead yourself. Be committed, be focused, and step into your personal power, because that is how you're going to grow your beautiful business. 

All right, my friends, thank you so much for tuning into this “Ask Me Anything” episode. 

I want to remind you that on October 30th, Rivka Malka Perlman, who is the founder of the School of Coaching and Transformation, she and I are running a masterclass together, Three Secrets to Making Money in Your New or Old Coaching Business. Go to my website, DebbieSassen.com/register, and register for the masterclass. If you can't make it live, we will send you the recording. 

Have a beautiful week. I will see you next week on the podcast. Bye.

Thanks for listening to The Jewish Entrepreneur Podcast. If you want to stop underselling and underearning and close more sales, you need to clear the limiting money beliefs that are sabotaging your business growth. 

Head on over to DebbieSassen.com/mindset and download my free Money Mindset Workbook. Uncover and dissolve money blocks, like hundreds of other entrepreneurs who are now building six-, multi-six-, and seven-figure businesses and creating true financial freedom.