Building a Million-Dollar Business as a Mom of Many

You're listening to The Jewish Entrepreneur Podcast with Debbie Sassen, Episode 146.

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. This week's episode has been a long time coming. Because since I opened my coaching business, meaning I transitioned from financial planning to coaching, which was just over five years ago, my coaching business has aggregated 1 million dollars of income.

The truth is that I looked up my income two weeks ago, I calculated it to the dollar, and at that time I was at $994,000. Since that time I have crossed over the 1-million-dollar mark, and I have receivables also coming in for the rest of the year that are definitely going to bring me over the 1-million-dollar mark.

I'm not going to give you a very specific year by year breakdown. This is what I will tell you, is that in 2018, which was before I opened my coaching business, I was still working with someone and we're going to talk about that today on the podcast, my revenue was about $40,000 and it had been pretty stable at that level. We're going to talk about that today on the podcast.

And then it was $100,000, $150,000, $205,000, $255,000. Now that was in 2022, that my business had its highest revenue year. And last year, in 2023, my business revenue dropped to about $142,000. And we're going to talk about that, what happened in 2023, on the podcast because it is part of the evolution and growth of my business. And this year already I've managed to earn enough money that I have tipped over the 1-million-dollar mark.

Before we go into the specifics of what I did, and really who was my identity as a CEO during the time that I was growing my coaching business until today, before we do that I want to let you know that my group coaching program Wired for Wealth is currently open for enrollment.

Wired for Wealth is a one-year coaching program for coaches, creatives, healers, service-based business owners in the Jewish world, but not limited to that. We have some non-Jewish, beautiful, beautiful, non-Jewish women in Wired for Wealth at the moment.

It is a one-year container where you will learn how to add $50,000 to your business in 12 months, and that's regardless of whether or not you're a brand-new business owner or a seasoned business owner. And of course, a seasoned business owner can even add more to that, depending on you as a mom, how much time you have to put into your business.

Although time is not a limiting factor, a lot of times it's your money beliefs and your self-leadership that get in the way. But as a mom of eight, who has seen my income grow in $50,000 increments, I feel very, very strongly that that is something that every mom-of-many can achieve if she is really focused and dialed in, and she really has her own personal power and authority over her time and her energy and her money.

If you enroll by the end of this week, this podcast is dropping on September 11^th, if you enroll by tomorrow, September 12th, the price is $5,000. After the early enrollment time, the price jumps to $6,500. So if you are curious, you can definitely go to my sales page DebbieSassen.com/wealth and look up the program. You can see if it makes sense to you.

If you just want to get on a Zoom call and chat with me, then go straight to my calendar DebbieSassen.com/consult and get on my calendar so we can talk about if this is the right move for you.

I feel very strongly that the last quarter of the year is always a time when people are making investments and people are buying. People are in a buying mode. It's around the Christmas holidays, if you're in the non-Jewish world. It's around Hanukkah. Really, people rev things up in their businesses so that they can hit the new calendar year running.

And I don't want you to miss out on that opportunity for your business. I really do believe that when you have the right support, and you have the right strategy and leadership, and mindset around money in particular, you can quantum leap your business and your income in the last quarter of 2024.

So if you want to find out more about that, please go to my consult calendar DebbieSassen.com/consult, and let's talk about if Wired for Wealth is the right next step for you. Enrollment does close, by the way, on September 19^th. So if you are listening to this podcast a little bit after the date that it drops, you can still get into the coaching program. We would love to have you there.

Alright, my friends, let's talk about Debbie's million-dollar business. It has been something that I've really, really wanted to talk about for a long time. I've been holding off until I could get my numbers exactly right, and it had to be the right time also.

So here is the backstory to my business, my coaching business. Before I started as an entrepreneur, I worked on Wall Street in New York and in London. And then when I moved to Israel. I worked in the Bank of Israel, the country's central Bank. I worked for a little bit less than half of my time there; I worked there for 18 years.

I was in the Foreign Exchange department for the entire time I worked at the Bank of Israel. For a little bit less than half, I worked in the Dealing Room, the trading room, where we managed the country's portfolio of foreign currency reserves.

When I left the bank, the portfolio was worth about six billion dollars. Today, it's multiples of that. I haven't worked at the Bank of Israel in over 16 years. But still, with my background when I came from Wall Street and doing Investments and Portfolio analysis and New Product development on Wall Street, I went into the Dealing Room. That was a really fun job for me.

When I started having my kids it became more of a challenge. Because we worked with the United States, we had to be able to keep US hours, and even European hours because Israel is one hour ahead of Europe most of the time, and people work till 5pm. So here it's still 6pm, so it's very normal that people would be working either a morning shift or an afternoon shift.

And as my family grew it became more and more of a challenge for me. I moved into the Economics Unit from the Foreign Currency department.

My nature is to be a salesperson. My nature is to be in business. My nature is to move fast. If you have ever done a Kolbe assessment to find out what your personality type is, I'm a Quickstart. I am not naturally an Analyst, but I was in the Economics department where I was doing Portfolio analysis for the Bank of Israel, and I was running equations. And I can do that, I have a good math brain, but it was not where my natural talents lie.

I was also writing at the time part of the annual report for the Bank of Israel on the performance of the portfolio. I would do that every year. And my writing skills are very good. If you're on my email list you probably have encountered my writing. Are there better writers? Of course, there are. I am definitely not JK Rowling. I would never be able to write a fantasy book like Harry Potter, that is just beyond, beyond.

But I can definitely write annual reports. And I did well in high school, college, etc., in English. But again, it's not by natural talent. It's not where I leaned.

Since I was 8 or 10 years old, I was the kid with a lemonade stand, the coffee stand, the donut stand. I'm a natural-born entrepreneur. And being in business and working on Wall Street was the way that I knew, as a young 20-something person, to really exercise my sort of entrepreneurial bent without really knowing where I could take it. But I felt very stifled at the Bank of Israel when I was working in the Economics unit.

Also, because it's a government office, a government agency, there is a very flat pyramid structure. Meaning, there's the governor of the bank, the vice governor of the bank, and the department heads. I could very easily see the writing on the wall. Because people have, what we call in Hebrew [Hebrew]… they're tenured positions, it's government, and people get their guaranteed pension… and they don't move very quickly.

In the private sector people rise and sometimes they move to different companies; either they're headhunted, or they're looking for a new opportunity, they're looking for a new challenge, and they move on. And that wasn't going to be possible for me at the Bank of Israel, because again the pyramid was just too flat for me to advance.

I was all of 44 years old when I had my youngest of eight children. I could see exactly what would happen for me over my career, and I was burnt out. I was like, “I am not spending another 20-21 years of my life here at the Bank of Israel doing the same stuff over and over and over again.” And maybe advancing a little I can move departments, but again other than the Dealing Room, it was a lot more heavy-duty analysis, which is not my natural gift.

So I decided I looked around. I saw some opportunities, and people that I was familiar with were looking for a financial planner to add to their team, so I was like, “Great.” I interviewed with them even while I was on maternity leave, and when I came back after my eighth child was born, I'm like, “You know what? It's time for me to go. I'm retiring.”

You get great benefits when you retire and you're still within one year of having a baby. So I left. Honestly, I have never looked back in the last 16+ years since I left the Bank of Israel, where I had spent about 18 years of my working life as a working mom. I have never even set foot into the building. Maybe I even have PTSD. I don't know. No, that's a joke.

But that's really where I got my beginnings in the financial markets. And it was very easy for me to transition to financial planning. I had some awareness, some understanding of financial planning, and I was really thirsty to learn more and to work with people to manage their finances better and to build wealth.

When I started working with what I love to call “civilians”, meaning real people, not governments, not agencies, not big companies, multinational companies… That's who I was working with when I worked on Wall Street. But people like you and me who have money and they want to invest it, or they have debt and they need to get out of debt.

I encountered blocks, money blocks, something that I had never experienced working in the public sector or working in the institutional sector. And I was perplexed about this. I was like, “Wow, this is so fascinating.” And I went back to school. I went back to school, by the way, at Florida State University to get a financial planning degree.

I did not graduate. I got what I needed, but some of their courses on taxes, for example, were not going to be relevant to me living in Israel. Also, same thing with insurance, because we have a different insurance system. But I really enjoyed being a student.

If you are a lifetime learner, and so many of my clients are like that, we’re just really thirsty for knowledge. We want to improve ourselves and want to learn more. So I was really thriving in the beginning of my career as a financial planner, learning everything I could about financial planning, learning afterwards about how to help people overcome their money blocks and manage them better.

It was such a fascinating world for me, and I did several coaching certifications. The first one was a very, very practical coaching certification through the Financial Recovery Institute. I have so much gratitude to Karen McCall... I know that I have mentioned that before on the podcast… for opening the Financial Recovery Institute and certifying coaches.

But it was also not deep enough on the emotional level, the emotional triggers, and even the psychological level. It was a much more practical kind of coaching certification. So the next place I went was to get an EFT “tapping” certification; that's mind/body/nervous system. It really deals with the energy in your body.

People shut down, they clench up, they get stressed when they think about or talk about money, want to raise their prices, go into sales conversations, or when they look at their financial accounts. I had clients, when I was working as a financial planner, who could not open their bank accounts, their online bank accounts, and look at what was going on. It was too triggering for them.

So that was the first place that I really started getting the education that I wanted and needed around mind/body/money work. And I loved it, but it was a more general certification. And then, five and a half years ago… I remember this as clear as day. I was going into Jerusalem. There is a place called The Place, for therapists. I was going to give a talk there.

I can even remember, I can see in my mind, the pink sweater that I was wearing at that time. And I know it was five and a half years ago because it was right before my first son got married. And as I was walking into The Place I was speaking with another woman. We were just talking about our businesses, where we are, what we're doing, and I sort of mentioned, “You know, I'm thinking… It's not the right time, but if it was the right time, I would do the Tapping Into Wealth certification with Margaret Lynch.”

Two things you have to know: Margaret Lynch is now Margaret Lynch Ranier; she's gotten married since I took a course, and she no longer offers the Tapping Into Wealth coaching certification. But at that time, because I was about to make my son's wedding in February of that year, I was like, “No. No, I'm not going to do it.” But we're going to talk about commitment, like we talked about last week on the podcast.

I hear an idea, and it simmers for about a nanosecond in my mind, but when I make a decision, I make a decision. And I came home from giving that talk in Jerusalem, and I started looking up Margaret Lynch’s Tapping Into Wealth. I think I knew that she was in the middle of a launch, and I also knew that it was going to conflict with my son's wedding. In fact, if I'm not mistaken, she even had closed out the launch for her coaching certification.

But I emailed the office and I was told that I could join. I remember asking about the time and could I really start in March because my son got married at the end of February. I was told yes, it was all good. And then, in true Debbie Sassen fashion, I'm sure that I jumped in even before the wedding.

I did as much as I could, and I very quickly got myself an accountability partner there; we had peer coaching. My friend, Cornelia, and I were going through the coaching certification, so I would coach her on module one and she would coach me on module one. I would coach her module two, she would coach me on module two.

And this is really important that I share this with you because it was in March 2019, which was five and a half years ago, that we were doing the work on toxic money. Before that it's your family of origin story around money and understanding how that impacts, but then we got to this topic called Toxic Money.

I looked at my background, and I didn't really understand how this module was going to apply to me. I come from a middle-class background; we've talked about before. My dad was let go. He was made redundant when I was 12 years old because my mom's father had been my dad's boss, and when my mom and dad split up my father was kind of persona non grata in the family business. So he had to start all over.

That might have been some money trauma, but it was definitely not toxic money. So it's really fascinating when you do this work, and you just relax into the work, and you invite your subconscious mind to be part of your mind/body money work, what comes up. And what came up for me was that my financial planning colleague at the time, who is an amazing individual, an amazing person full of integrity, but our relationship, our money relationship, was toxic for me.

Which means… and I want to explain this especially if you're listening to this podcast episode and you are in Israel, you're an American citizen. We have these complicated, convoluted tax situations where we have to pay taxes to two countries. We have to report in Israel and the United States. I wanted to avoid that.

I had money fear about my business getting too complicated. I was trying to find a loophole so I wouldn't have to own my own business; I wanted to work under somebody else's umbrella. Which is a way that you get out of being the CEO of your business. And that's what was keeping me small.

The relationship was toxic for me because I really wanted to grow and thrive in my own direction. Financial planning, again, was much more of this very boxed-in analytical type of work. I mean, I loved it and I still love empowering women around investing and growing their money and growing for wealth.

But when you hear about this mind/body money work, this nervous system work, this understanding what the emotional triggers around money are, it wasn't really congruent with a financial planning business. Even though some financial planners do have money coaches on their staff, it wasn't where my colleague’s business was at that time.

I tried to bring it in a little bit, but he also wanted me on his team. He invited me on to his team to be a financial planner, and it was this like pull. So when I had this super-duper a-ha moment around, “This situation in the moment is toxic for me,” I was out of there. In a moment, I made a split-second decision. I told you, when I'm committed to something there's a nanosecond and I commit to something.

That day, or the next day, I called an accountant and I'm like, “That's it. I'm going.” I made an appointment. I set up my own bank account. I figured out how to file and open up a [Hebrew] they call it in Hebrew… My brain is spritzing out on me. I can't think of how to say that in English… I had to have a tax ID number as a business. I guess that's the way you say it.

Anyway, that is really, March of 2019, the time when I really considered myself a business owner. I didn't quite yet close my financial planning business, but that is when I opened the door on my coaching business. So that's kind of my line in the sand. So maybe I’m saying five and a half years instead of five years, it took me to make a million dollars. It's all good. It's fine.

I don't think, when I think about a 20-25-30-year business, six months matters here or there, but this is what I want you to know. Is that when you have an idea for a business, the most important thing that you can do is move on it. Make a decision. Go for it. Be decisive, because so many people spin around in their head, “Maybe yes, maybe no, maybe yes, maybe no.”

I did that for a while. I will be very clear and say that when I was in financial planning, I was also hemming and hawing a little bit. But there's a little bit of a side story to that, because at the same time I was also in the process of publishing my book The 1K Investor: Simple Smart Steps to Start Investing with a Thousand Dollars or Less.

In fact, the business coach that I had been working with in 2018, who's the one who encouraged me to write the book, had said to me… and I told her about my tapping and the EFT… “Debbie are you ready to come out of the closet?” And I remember like it was yesterday. I'm like, “Uh, no.” It was like I wasn't ready to share with the world that I was doing this different type of work.

Now at that time, we were calling EFT tapping “woo-woo work”. I would never call it that today. Because it is really your mind, your body, your embodied relationship with money. And it is so grounded. It is so not woowoo. I don't want it to be confused with any type of mysticism and things that we don't understand.

Maybe we don't understand the subconscious mind, but it is a very practical space, this mind/body work. And it's very, very important for so many things that we do, because our emotions are what drive all of our actions. And when we're feeling blocked by money, triggered by money, anxious, worried, stressed by money, that will absolutely get in the way of you taking the next steps for what you want to do. So that's why I feel that this work is very important for me to get out into the world.

All right, so let's talk about when I finally opened my business in March of 2019. It was an evolution, a beautiful evolution. And what I want to share with you is, I really have four pillars of how to grow a business that I share with my clients in Wired for Wealth. I want to share those four pillars with you, and how I evolved my business over time.

So my first pillar I call “Commitment”. Again, we spoke about commitment. We spoke about Dan Sullivan and his 4 C's. Interestingly, I also have my 4 C's, but they're different from his. I just call them my Four Pillars. And the first one is commitment.

My commitment includes your CEO mindset, your self-leadership, your authority, your personal power, the way you manage your time in your business. So many people are running businesses and they're not being as productive as they can be there. Their time is slipping through their fingers. There are leaks. There are time leaks. There are energy leaks. There are money leaks in your business.

And as a new entrepreneur, I totally get where this comes from because there are so many things that you need to do and you need to learn and you need to grow, and it all feels overwhelming, especially in the beginning.

Working with a coach is the best way for you to just focus on the things you need to focus on to take your business to the next level. And that was something that I did even when I was working as a financial planner. I hired coaches. My first coach I think was when I was only doing financial planning. Maybe I was a little bit dipping my toes into the money coaching world.

Actually, I think at the time I had already started adding the coaching into my financial planning. But the coach that I hired was too advanced for me. And I think it's really important to know if you're working with a coach who's taking somebody from $0-$50,000 or from $50-$100, and even from $50,000 and beyond.

One coach can do all of the above because every coach also started at zero at some time. But you have to know if you're in a container that works well with new business owners. This coach, and the group that I was working with, I could see that they were more advanced. And he was not so familiar with and skilled at working with brand-new people.

He had a heart… Also he was a very different kind of coach from the coaches that I gravitated toward afterwards, that were familiar with this mind/body money work. So much of our fear and our overwhelm can be dissolved at the nervous system, at the body level. That was my first, I'll call it a “so-so” investment in my business, because I definitely made progress but I made less progress, I think, than I could have made if I had worked with a coach who had been focusing specifically on new businesses.

Now do I think it's a problem? No, I don't think it's a problem, because we make mistakes all the time in our business, and we can't let those mistakes hold us back. We can't give ourselves a beatdown. It's very important that we take those lessons and we learn from them so that we can make different decisions the next time.

After working with that coach, I hired a different coach. I worked with her for about three years. And here is something that I want to point out to everybody listening. Whether you would work with me as a coach or somebody else as a coach, after that initial experience, anytime I worked with a coach… I always worked with coaches for two or three years at a time. And I've worked with coaches when they're overlapping, so I could be in two different coaching containers.

I think, by the way, that that is part of my success for my million-dollar business. I have probably spent $300,000 on coaching in the last five and a half years. I would have to go and do the math. I didn't prepare that number for this podcast episode. But I don't think that's a problem. I think that is a huge part of my success especially as a mom of many.

I can let my household take ownership of me. That's me not having selfleadership and ownership of my time, but it's allowing my house, my kids, my laundry, my food, my shopping… I can allow so many other things to really suck away my attention if I'm not being intentional. And being in a coaching container is something that really helps you to manage your mind, and your time and your energy, because you have someone looking out for you.

You have someone stretching you. You have someone who helps you get answers when you're feeling stuck. And that is such a beautiful thing. My coach that I hired, I was still in between financial planning and coaching at that time, and I worked with someone for several years at a time. She was extremely helpful writing content. As a new business owner, even if you have good writing skills, learning how to write as a business owner is a skill set that you will develop.

It's just fascinating how many skill sets you will learn and develop that you have just never known before. A couple weeks ago I was creating the landing page for my most recent master class, Meant for More, and I was creating signup forms. My husband came to me and I was like, “Look what I just did! I created this signup form.” I was writing some CSS code by totally copying a YouTube video; I had no idea what I was doing, but it worked.

Those are skill sets that you grow and develop as a coach. And as someone who loves to be a lifetime learner it's just so much fun to be in a space where I am learning and I am growing and I'm stretching myself over time. I really think that you have to look at entrepreneurship as this learning, growing, your brain continues to develop, your skill set continues to develop.

And every time you have these little micro wins, where you're like, “Wow, look at this. I created a signup form on my website,” then you're encouraged to take the next step and the next step and the next step.

All right, so let me just go back to my 4 C's. We've talked about commitment, and at the end of last week's podcast I talked about the idea of “burning the boats.” You commit to something. You commit to going all in on your business and there is really no plan B.

Because there is so much involved in building a business we have to take away any possibility, any idea, of turning around and going backwards. I think that is something… When you're building a business, it's kind of like marrying somebody. When you get married to somebody, you and your partner you say that you guys are committed to each other. It's a onetoone relationship, and you are constrained.

You are not looking to all those other people you may have dated, or all the other people who are still single in the world who you might date, you're making a commitment to this person. And growing your business is the same way. You're committing to this living, breathing entity called your business through all of the changes that your business will encounter over the years, through the evolutions, through the iterations, through the gray hairs, through the saggy muscles and stomach. I'm joking, but maybe not.

But you get what I'm saying. Burning the boat, that idea that I talked about last week, that there is no going backwards, there is no alternative. It means the only way you can go is for it, and that's the commitment. That's where you draw up your inner resources, your resilience and your strength and you are going to go all-in.

If there's just the shadow of a doubt, and we know in our Hebrew tradition the shadow of the doubt, the doubt, [Hebrew.] This is Haman. This is the snake in the Garden of Eden, right? It is just going to pull you down. So you have to get rid of the doubt. You have to get rid of the possibility, and you have to decide that you're going all in on your business, whatever it takes. Beautiful song; whatever it takes.

You have to be able to think about your business that way. Sometimes whatever it takes means you will get a part-time job so you have money coming in while you're building your business. In my first year of building my financial planning business, I actually did have a part-time job working for my mentors. Where I had a set salary, monthly salary, coming in.

Now it wasn't anything great. I was definitely working… I wanted to say slave labor… but I was working for way, way less than I was working for when I was working at the Bank of Israel. But that was okay, it was like onthe-job training. I was learning, I was growing, and I was really happy doing what I was doing.

But that's what it took for me and for my family so that we could continue to feed eight kids while I was learning how to build my business. So when you look at how you are leading yourself, leading your team, if you have already one, two, five employees or contracted workers working for you, that is part of your business assessment that you want to be able to do.

“How committed am I? Do I have one foot halfway out the door? Fully out the door, so I'm kind of in, kind of out? Do I have self-leadership when I show up in my business? Am I in my personal power? Am I showing up? Am I sharing what I do? Am I sharing how I help my clients from an empowered, bold, authoritative place?”

Because that will 100% impact the success of your business. And that, by the way, your self-identity as a CEO, it grows and it evolves and you expand your capacity to be that CEO. In the beginning of our businesses, I think we just self-identify as the thing we do. Like, I'm a financial planner. I'm a coach. I'm a copywriter. I'm a healer. I'm a website designer.

Whatever you are you sort of identify as the result that you give to your clients, when actually you are a CEO who sells coaching or sells healing. A CEO who sells website designs and delivers websites, beautiful, gorgeous websites to your clients. So you have to start changing your self-identity.

With the second pillar of my business… and this is something that has totally evolved day by day, year by year, as I've been in my business… is your client. That's really just the chapter heading. Your client means you have to know who you serve. You have to know how you serve them. Meaning, you have to know who your ideal client is, your target market is. You have to know the people that you are showing up to serve, and the way in which you serve them.

What is your product? What is your process? What is the result that your clients are going to achieve when they work with you? When I worked as a financial planner, it was very client focused. Meaning, one client might have wanted to invest their money. Another client may have wanted to get out of debt. Another client would have wanted to increase their savings. And some of my clients wanted help with their business.

It was a very client led. It was very custom. Every client had a different need. Every client wanted different results in their life. I was doing financial planning for people in their lives. There wasn't business coaching involved at that time in my business.

And as I grew, and as I developed in my business, I became a financial planner also for entrepreneurs. I started learning how entrepreneurs managed their money, or don't manage their money. I think that many entrepreneurs… and there's absolutely no judgment, no shame involved… in the beginning stages of their business, they're not managing their money.

They're going out there. They're marketing They're selling. They're serving their clients. And I think that there's absolutely nothing wrong with that, but there will come a stage where it will pinch you in the bum if you're not managing your money. But I do believe that client acquisition is the number one thing you want to be focusing on in the early stages of your business, because most businesses fail due to lack of money.

I evolved over time from working with just civilians to working with entrepreneurs. That was a gradual process. And after I made the decision in 2019 that I was going all-in on my coaching business, and after I published my book in May of 2019, it was June or July of 2019 that I sent an email out to all of my clients and people on my email list that I was no longer taking new financial planning clients.

I think that that's something that's really important, again, that commitment. If you’re on the fence and you're wobbly, “Maybe I'll do a little bit of this. Maybe I'll do a little bit of that,” it's going to slow you down and keep you stuck.

But my ability to make those decisions quickly, I think really impacted the growth of my business, and the growth of my business as a mom of eight. During this period, the entire period of building my business, I was also marrying off a lot of kids. Five of my children have gotten married in the last 12 years, so that's all during the time that I have been growing my businesses.

I am very, very blessed as of today to have 16 grandchildren. And it has been such a blessing that I have been there for my daughters for every single one of their births, except for one. I have been the on-call doula. And it's only because I'm running my own business that I have that time flexibility to take off and be with my daughters.

And even when one of my daughters-in-law gave birth, her son slept here overnight. So we've been very, very involved parents/grandparents for our children and our grandchildren because I've been involved in my business and working out of the home.

My client has evolved. And here's something that I want to speak with you about in terms of your clients. We talk about “niching”. And one of my coaches that I was working with, as I was making this transition from financial planning to coaching, very much wanted me to focus on financial planning for entrepreneurs.

It was her target market that she was working with entrepreneurs, and it wasn't my target market. And so there was a little bit of a conflict there, because I was having a hard time really niching down to where she wanted me to go. Plus the fact that I wanted to bring in this other coaching element. I had no problems that she was doing that; we learn from our experiences.

But I do think there was a little bit of friction involved in my relationship with her. I do also want to say, and I started saying this earlier, that I worked with her for three years. I did mention I work with my coaches for two, three years at a time.

And I think that that's important, because when you choose a coach, she or he has developed years of experience. They are usually ahead of you in where they are in their businesses, and you've come to learn by them, to grow with them, to be stretched by them. They have created a body of work, and in a short time it is impossible for you to really soak in their full genius and their full body of work.

And so I think it is actually a disservice to you if you jump around from coach to coach to coach. Because the only common denominator that you take with you when you jump around from coach to coach is you. Meaning, each coach is going to have his or her own personal road map for how to get you from point A to point B to point Q-R-S-T-U-Z.

When you don't stay with that coach for a long time, you could probably be part of the reason why you're not getting the growth that you want. You have mindset blocks, or maybe you're not showing up to coaching being coachable, you're not putting your all into it. But it could be that whatever you learned six months ago, if you stay for another six months, you're going to learn that same thing on a deeper level.

It's why in Judaism we read the entire Torah year after year after year. We start in Genesis, and we go through the entire Torah every single year. We don't say okay, we did that, and we throw it away and we finish it. No, we go and we learn it deeper and deeper and deeper. Every single year there are always new insights. There are always things that, “Oh, yeah, we know that,” but we're going to see it differently. It'll impact our lives differently.

Where you are in your life, where you are in your business is going to be impacted differently by being in that same coaching container. And your coach is also, if she's a good coach and she's committed to her work, she's probably also in one or two coaching containers where she is also learning from people that are further ahead than she is.

And so I think it is a tremendous service for you to stay with somebody for a long period of time, and a disservice to you if you jump around from person to person. Because then you're always learning new systems and new processes and new ways of doing things. It's kind of like a diet. All diets work, and you're the common denominator. And when you work the plan, the plan works for you.

All right, I digress. Anyway, I was defining my client, and my client evolved over time, until ultimately I landed on where I am today, which is serving business owners. It was a very natural progression in my business. People started asking me to help them to grow their businesses because A, they had money blocks. And B, they saw that as a financial planner I had grown a successful financial planning business, and so they were reaching out and looking for support.

It wasn't something that I had ever actually planned on doing. I was so stuck in the money world, from decades of being in the money world, that it didn't occur to me that I would do something outside of it. And now I can't imagine doing anything else other than what I'm doing right now. So isn't that a beautiful thing? It's just beautiful that as business owners, we get to keep evolving our businesses and we get to keep growing.

So back to what I want to say about clients, don't niche yourself too narrowly in the early stages of your business. I was not yet ready to be a financial planner for entrepreneurs. I was in a place where I could be a money coach for people who had their own businesses, people who worked, they were employees, and that was a much broader niche. But it was not yet time for me to focus and narrow down the people that I was working with.

Obviously, I wasn't doing marriage coaching, and I wasn't doing weight loss coaching, and I wasn't doing parenting coaching, so it wasn't like I was talking to everybody. My target audience was very focused on money and financial planning and money blocks. And that, again, can be anybody, but I was not yet at the stage… I didn't have enough experience in my business as a coach to narrow down to a coach for only one type of audience.

And that is something that I really, really believe in my business, especially whether you're a coach or you're a creative; you're working with graphics, with designs. There are so many different types of people that you work with, and if you narrow yourself down too early you might miss, as it were, the type of work and the kind of people that you really want to work with.

So allow yourself to be a little broad in the beginning. It's not like you're talking to eight billion people, but you don't have to narrow down so quickly.

All right, let's move on. I found my target audience. And now the third C is the “Content”. Meaning, what are you sharing out there in the world with people who need to find you? I chose fairly early on in my career as a business owner... First of all I was doing live workshops, and I was talking to people that way. And then, when I discovered the power of the internet… I was very, very hesitant at first I have to tell you.

But once I discovered that as an introvert I could sit at home and write on Facebook about my business, I was very thrilled. I tried for some time to be a blogger and write a lot, a lot of blogs and articles on my website. And I realized also… I made an investment in a blogging program to become a blogger so I could sell my book, so I could sell my course Investing Made Simple.

And it became very, very clear to me that that was not the right business model for me. And so I just kept moving on. That was a financial mistake. Speaking of content, I made another financial mistake. I invested with a coach specifically to work on my messaging and my marketing. And what I didn't check out was that coach’s program.

It took place on Thursday nights and on Friday nights, and she was in California time, which meant 11 o'clock for me. At the end of the week, at 11 o'clock on a Thursday, I'm kind of brain-dead. I'm not so focused. So it wasn't good. And Friday nights, of course I'm offline because of Shabbat, so I wasn't going to be able to join.

So that was a dead loss for me, one of my dead loss coaching programs. Other programs that I took I did get everything that I wanted out of them, but that was that was another one of my money mistakes that I made in my business.

Again, if you've joined something and you've made a mistake, you just take it as a learning experience. Nobody gets a 100% grade. In fact, in baseball if you're batting 300, meaning you hit three out of ten pitches that come your way, you're doing amazingly well. And I think I've done way better than that.

But you have to have content. You have to have a way to talk to your people to create awareness around your products, around your services, and you have to be able to use the power of your words, whether it's through a podcast or videos or written words, webinars, workshops, inperson retreats.

You have to create content that is going to activate your ideal clients to come to you, to find you, to work with you, so that you can help them get the results they desire. And that has been a continual learning process for me, exactly how to write, how to refine my messaging, how to write more succinctly. Because I have a tendency to write very long blogs, or very long emails. Even this podcast is already quite long.

But that is something that as a business owner you must do, is to let people know that you exist. And your content has to be compelling. Your content is what is going to invite them into your world. It's what's going to create that relationship. It will create that know, like, and trust factor between you and your potential clients, so that they actually show up and they have a sales call with you.

And when they have a sales call with you, then you can tell them what your process is. You can tell them what your price is. And they can say yes or no, both of them are equally good. I'm very neutral about yeses and nos. If it's the right fit, it's a yes. If it's not the right fit, it's a no. But we must have content that we can share to create awareness that we exist in the world.

If you're the best-kept secret, then you're not going to have a very thriving, profitable, successful business.

The last one of my C's that I want to talk about, and it's the most important, is “Cash”. The way you set your prices, the way you ask for money on your sales calls, the way you receive money, the way you manage money. Will you spend money in your business? Or invest money in your business for the long-term growth of your business?

As I said, I have spent probably $300,000 on coaching in my business, and I think that that is really what has allowed me to create such massive growth in my business, while having a very hefty household and having a lot of responsibilities. I probably don't spend as much time in my business as many other people because my phone is often ringing, because my kids are calling me.

I mean, now they're all back to school. And the craziest thing happened. Because all of my children are in dormitories, all of my single children are in dormitories. And my husband and I were even laughing with each other tonight, that we feel like we're sneaky little kids, because we're in this house all by ourselves. It's kind of funny. There's nobody watching us. We could do whatever we want. As if we couldn't do whatever we wanted anyway.

But it's really an important point, that the Cash is the underlying thread. The money is the underlying thread of everything you do in your business. And your money blocks will absolutely, 100% show up in your business through your money.

And being able to heal your relationship with money, any family of origin stories around money, any need for your money to validate you, your income to validate you, that you can't make any mistakes, you hold on to money so, so dear, and if you make a mistake… And that's why I'm very open about having made different coaching investments that didn't work out the way I wanted them to.

Because we're all going to make mistakes in our businesses, and we just have to let go of the shame, let go of the guilt, let go of anything that's holding you back from going out there and really believing that you have an amazing, awesome, transformational product or service that you can offer to your clients. And you're allowed to charge more money for it.

Then you have to bring it in. You have to have invoicing. You have to have billing. You have to have accountants and bookkeepers. The way you manage money, and the way you think forward about your business… and not just what your business is going to need in two weeks from now, but in two years from now.

What sort of bottlenecks are there going to be in your business that you're going to have to solve? You might need to buy software. You might need to invest in automations and improve your processes. And that's another way that you use money in your business, so that you can smooth things out and you can grow for the future.

So that, really my friends, is how I have been able to grow my business in the last five, five and a half years, my coaching business, from zero to a million dollars total aggregate income in the last five and a half years as a mom of eight, grandmother of 16, and wife who does many things in her community.

But I am so committed to this business. I am so committed for my people that all women need to earn more money in their business. And they need to have money saved for their future, to take care of themselves when maybe you don't want to work in your business so much.

Or maybe you don't have the physical strength, or the emotional capacity. Or maybe you just want to get on the floor and play Legos with your grandchildren, and you don't want to do your business anymore. And that's fine.

You can only give yourself the permission slip to do that if you have money saved and invested for your financial future. And your business is the tool that you use to create money and save money and invest money for your future.

All right, my friends, I am so thankful that you are here to listen to this podcast. I do hope that you have taken away what you need to take away for you to be in your business, to grow and to thrive. And I just want you to know that it is possible for you. Wherever you are in your business right now, if you are 100% committed, you can grow your business. You can make another $50,000 this year in your business.

And you can take so much of that and put it away for your future; your future for your person. Your future for your business. So that you can continue to change more lives, starting with you.

And if you want to know more about my coaching program, my 12-month coaching program Wired for Wealth, please reach out to me at DebbieSassen.com/consult. Let's talk about how we can grow your business in the next 12 months.

All right, my friends, thank you so much for tuning in, and I look forward to seeing you next week on The Jewish Entrepreneur 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.