The Empire Mentality - Christine Kane

Entrepreneurs are vision people and often don’t enjoy getting bogged down in tedious details, I’m preaching to the choir here right? BUT… if you really want to set yourself up for success, you have to start treating your business like a business.

Whether you’re just getting started or your existing business needs a big ol’ reset, today’s episode may deliver a few wake up calls. And I promise each awareness will guide you toward your “Empire Mentality,” which is key to creating a supportive framework for the important work you do.

We’re going to take an honest look at the ways you might not operate from the level of business ownership and dig into the beliefs behind your actions, or non-actions, that keep you from claiming extreme ownership over your enterprise.

I’ll offer you 7 simple action steps to stop treating yourself like a hobbyist in your business and tips to start honoring yourself as head of a growing empire (or mini-empire if that feels better to you.) Plus, I’ll share some stories of my own growth from being an aspiring musician to becoming the successful CEO of Uplevel.

Let’s honor you today and that badass Soul-Sourced™ entrepreneur you know you are!

Episode Transcript

Once you start seeing it working, you realize how powerful this idea of empire mentality is.

Welcome to The Soul-SourcedTM Podcast, unconventional business advice for the highly creative secretly sensitive and wildly Ambitious entrepreneur. I’m your host, Christina Kane. Let’s do this.

Welcome to The Soul-SourcedTM Business Podcast. We are on episode number 13, where we are going to make sure that you’ve implemented some of the essential steps in your business, and we’re going to place it all in the context of something that we’re going to call the “Empire Mentality” and what we’re doing here is that, we are ultimately ensuring that your business is healthy and that it supports you. And that you’re living from a place of extreme ownership. You’re not half assing it anymore. And this may mean that I will be calling you out on some of the subtle ways that you unknowingly kind of dis yourself in your business with the actions or non actions you take or the things you keep putting off.

So, as I record this episode, I just completed our third virtual client retreat of 2020 here at Uplevel. We spent three days online together, working on marketing and strategy and mindset. And we even did a really great hands on session, teaching everyone how to set up their bookmarks bar and extensions in Google Chrome. And that was really particularly great. And I wanted to share that with those of you who are doing zoom stuff with clients, why was cool was because it’s the kind of organizing that you always tell yourself that you should do, but you never do. And what’s great about doing zoom retreats is that I have this opportunity to work with my clients while their computer is open and we all do work together. And when they have a question, I can show them the answer and my team and I did this whole training so that everybody was working on their laptops. We showed them what to do. And there were so many ahas. People were so excited about this thing that they know they needed to do. And now they’re just fired up because everything’s working better.

So with that said, September is a great, on-ramp kind of a time. It’s a time to reassess what you’re doing in your business and how you’re working. And some people want to hit the ground running when it comes to September and some right now naturally feel like they’re, they’ve totally gotten off track this year. And in other words, the general mojo is that it’s time to reset your business. So in the spirit of that, we’re going to cover some basics. Some of the essentials that are often ignored or forgotten or put off for some other time. And so what happens when these essentials are ignored is that your business behaves more like a hobby. So for some of you, this episode will be a review, a way to get on track and set up the foundation for you to move forward. And for others, this will be a bit of a wake up call where you really get to look at whether or not you’ve been actualizing and embodying the role of owner.

And that role, that mentality is a big thing. At Uplevel we teach each what we call The Empire Mentality to our clients. And what that means is that no matter what size your business is, you treat it like it’s an empire. Or in some cases, I call that a mini empire and you treat yourself like an owner, not like an employee. So most people are wired up from day one to have an employee mentality. And what’s at the core of the employee mentality is the energy of reaction. You tell me what to do, and then I will go do it. And in fact, some of my clients who have had the hardest time starting their business and owning this mindset have come from corporate, not because they aren’t really powerful people who know how to kick ass and take names and achieve, but because they’ve had years of training in being told what to do by a supervisor or a director or a board.

And when they suddenly step into the role of what I call the C.E.O of Y.O.U there’s an internal adjustment that is utterly indescribable. They often feel like something’s wrong with them, but it’s mostly because they just haven’t established the energy of extreme ownership of treating this business, like an empire, like a real business. They, they see how new it all is, or they don’t really take themselves seriously because they don’t have all the, what I call ego bling that propped up their sense of identity. You know, like it propped it up back when they were in corporate. So that might mean something like a really cool title you could stand behind or really cool company name that made you feel important, or a kicky little business card or staff of people who reported to you or whatever. Those are the things I call ego bling.

And if you’ve been employed before, you might get a sense that those things were kind of like costumes for your sense of self, for your sense of empowerment. And now that power, that sense of power has to come from within. And that’s an intense shift to make. So what can happen is that you neglect to do some of the basic essentials for treating your business like a business. And even though you have a business, there’s still a little bit of energy around it that makes it feel more like a hobby. So one of my coaches at Uplevel, Elaine Bailey, she started off with me as a client way back when I started UpLevel. And then she built a business and ultimately she became a coach here at Uplevel, and is a direct quote from her. And it was something that she said as she was trying to describe the shift from employee mentality to empire mentality.

She said, “I can still remember back when I was in corporate, my directors told me what to do. They told me my priorities and they managed me. Plus I didn’t have to think about what anything costs or costs our clients. I just got a check. Then when I started a business, no one was telling me what to do anymore. And I had to make decisions for myself. No one managed me on a day to day basis. And I had to figure out what to charge for my services. And this was when I came face to face with having to create my empire mentality. I had to stop being tempted to be what she called small Elaine and I had to start being business owner, Elaine, big girl panties, you know”,and that’s the end of Elaine’s quote. It’s not just by the way, former corporate people who do this, it’s everyone. And that’s because setting up your strategy to match a level of power, you don’t yet feel can be daunting. Like who am I to act all puffed up? It’s the ever ubiquitous “Who do you think you are?” voice that pummels us in the background. So we ignore some of the essentials that actually are there to set us up for success.

So on this episode, we are going to talk strategy. We’re going to look at how taking a few simple steps in the strategy track of your business can keep your mindset in a more powerful place. And this will apply to you if you’re just getting started, or maybe if you’ve gotten a bit off track. And even if you have some of these in place, what I teach here on this episode will hopefully anchor you back to your awareness of why these things do support you. And then you can go forward and create a supportive framework for the important work you do, whatever level you’re at.

So firstly, let’s come back to that empire mentality thing and really define it. So having an empire mentality means that you operate in your business and your life often from what I call a future based mindset, meaning you make future based decisions that honor the successful business that you’re building. Most people by default, they look around and they assess how things are or how they feel at this moment, and then they make decisions from there and they make decisions that often keep them stuck at that same level. So it’s a big shift to make future-based decisions. When I was a musician, I got to know many managers and agents in the entertainment industry. And I remember hearing one industry executive describe something that one of their artists did to kind of future base, to manufacture a new identity for herself. And I’m not going to name any names because I wasn’t in the room at the time. And I don’t want to act like I know all the ins and outs, but this was told to me by somebody who was in the room.

So this artist was a well known bluegrass artist who became a household name and then turned their entire career trajectory into a career where they’re playing at performing arts centers. And they were seen more as an elite level musician, no longer just someone who stole the show at the usual bluegrass festivals. But the whole thing was strategized in advance by this artist and their team. They set up new pricing like tens of thousands, more than before, they started saying no to old stuff. They began dressing in more classy clothing. The entire image was up-leveled to meet this new direction they wanted to go on in.

And it threw off a lot of people who didn’t like those new changes. And there was a lot of resistance from old promoters and old fans, but over time, it totally stuck. And you would know the name of who I’m talking about. And you probably wouldn’t even question that this person was at this caliber playing in these concert halls and performing artists, performing arts centers. But my point is that that empire mentality, even though they probably didn’t call it, that was created first. So as the late Dan Kennedy used to like to say, “Fame is manufactured”. And I think we all labor under the illusion that the outside will change first. Like you have to be discovered before you can truly honor yourself as a business, but that’s not how it works. You start by honoring yourself first. And that’s what today’s steps are about.

I want to make sure that some of the basics are in place for you to stop treating yourself like a hobbyist in your business and start honoring yourself as an empire or a mini empire. If that’s a name that, that rings more true to you. And of course there is a caveat here. Some people hear me teach this stuff and they think I’m telling them to run out and get a big giant office downtown and rack up all kinds of overhead expenses so they can, you know, quote unquote, look the part of a successful business or they go buy a Lexus. So they, they can get all the goodies that all those Instagram entrepreneurs seem to have. And that’s not at all what this is about. The action steps you take are often found in much more subtle and insidious places then what kind of car you drive.

So to that end, I want to start off with a question here. And that question is what is one way that you don’t treat your business like a business right now, or you don’t treat yourself at the level of business ownership that you know, you need to be treating yourself at? And if you can find a few answers to that, then I want you to dig a little deeper and see if you can find out what is the belief behind that choice or that non choice as the case may be. What belief is back there. And as you start to look at that and we have that rolling in the background, I’m going to look at seven simple action steps. I think it’s seven. I think, yeah, it’s seven and the mindsets behind them. And let me just say that in no way, should you consider this to be legal advice or accounting advice when it comes to the administrative details of any of this stuff, this is something that you have to look into for your own local laws and your legal parameters and that kind of thing. So talk to your attorney, your accountant, and if you don’t have those people on your team, we’re about to talk about that.

All right. So the first action step is to set up a business entity for your business and a key way that you’re going to take your business seriously is this step. It is to stop filing your business as a sole proprietorship proprietorship. If you do that, you want to set your business up as a LLC, as an S Corp or whatever that entity might be. And like I said, I’m not going to be your attorney here. I’m not going to dive into all the details and specifics of how to do it, but there are three reasons why you do not want to stay as a sole proprietorship. The first is tax purposes. And that is because a sole proprietorship pays the highest taxes of any of the entities.

And the second is legal reasons. When you have a business entity, it means that you are personally protected in the event of anything legally, unexpected that might happen. In other words, you aren’t going to face a loss to your personal assets if anything weird or wonky or unexpected happens on the legal front. Again, not an attorney. This is not legal advice, but it’s, it’s something that I have been told many, many times over back, way back when I set up my, um, S-corp.

The third reason is the one I really love the most. And this is what I’ve already mentioned. It’s an empire mentality. The excuses I hear from people who don’t want to deal with the tedious legal or financial stuff range from things like, well, I don’t really make enough money to worry too much about my tax stuff, or, you know, I’m hardly big enough to be worried about legal issues.

The empire mentality sets up the mindset of taking your business seriously before it becomes a last minute rush. And because it forces you into the mindset of ownership and it removes the idea of this being just a hobby. You stop dipping your toe in and you start being in. And in terms of future based decisions, when you set up an entity, you are essentially telling the universe, I fully expect to make enough money to make this a great business, right? That just only makes sense. And I can speak to this from experience. And I always make sure people understand that I was a musician first, before I did anything of what I’m doing. Now, I was a songwriter. I was an artist. If I could make all of this stuff happen and succeed in the entertainment industry as an independent artist facing down every last little objection by that little starving artist within, then you can do this too.

I started working with my first coach at some point around the turn of the century. I love saying that, and it’s not a coincidence that my income went up that very year. And my accountant noticed this and suggested that I turned my music business into a corporation, that I stopped filing as a sole proprietorship. This was before legal zoom and all of the cool little sites that you can go to, to set up legal entities very easily. There’s so many easy ways to do it now, but the whole thing at that point was overwhelming. And it terrified me because at that time it was a few thousand dollars to make this happen. And I had to pay an attorney to do all the work I had to pay my accountant for extra hours. And that investment, it was a lot to me, not to mention, I had to spend hours in an attorney’s office and in my accountant’s office, filling things out, answering questions, signing things, and all the while,feeling like a total newbie. And it wasn’t fun at all.

And my accountant, he was the kind of person where, when I didn’t understand something, he would just talk louder. Like he would yell like, but like when you go to a foreign country and you try to speak the language really loud as if someone’s going to get it, he was not exactly what you would call a good hand holder for an artist. But I made it through getting yelled at my, by my account. And yammered at, by my attorney. And I got these massive stacks of these giant three ring binders and a giant silver embossing tool, which admittedly, I spent a few hours just embossing things when I first got it. And then my S-corp was underway. And as I started to make more money as a musician and I began to hire people, I was so happy that I taken those tedious steps back then those tedious steps will set you up for future success.

And then another little story is about a fateful night. When I did a performance, I was at a first night festival and brilliant me,I decided to light a candle on an old advent wreath , because I wanted to provide atmosphere. It was new year’s Eve, and I wanted to provide atmosphere. And in the middle of my performance, that thing turned into a veritable conflagration in the venue. It was like a fireball started because there was dried pine needles on the advent wreath. And so I ended up being very grateful for the legal protection I had having an S-Corp. So I learned to appreciate the fact that my accountant and my lawyer had set me up for eventualities and unexpected bone headedness on my part.

The main point is that the action step of setting up a business entity contributed to my taking myself seriously as not just a performer and songwriter, but as the owner of an entertainment company and record label, which of course then grew into a different company when I opened UpLevel in 2010. So entrepreneurs, we are vision people. We are idea people. And sometimes we don’t like to get all bogged down in tedious details, but this is something that will pay off years and years down the road for you. All right, moving on. We’ll get less tedious as we go. I promise.

The second action step is that you need to get a business bank account. And if this seems like an obvious and ridiculous step to be taking, um, and talking about, I want you to stop rolling your eyes. Cause I cannot tell you how many people I coach, who just let all the money roll into one place.

So entrepreneurs in particular, in their rush to just start a business, they don’t think about the flow of money. This is that whole future based decisions idea in action here. A new business owner looks around and thinks, well, I’m not making enough to justify getting a business bank account. So they throw everything into one account and they pay their groceries and they pay everything else out of that. And then they figure they’ll just set it all straight at the end of the year at tax time. Please treat your business like a business, get a business checking account, even if there isn’t much in it at first. If we think of money as an energy and your intention as the navigational path, the navigational tool, then you’re telling your money where to go and how to act. And if you’re in chaos all the time, then your money will be in chaos too.

If you treat it all like a hobby again, the excuse being well, I don’t make enough to justify this extra tediousness or more, more often than that, I hear, oh I’ll be embarrassed if I set up a bank account that doesn’t have much in it. What you’re doing when you believe those thoughts, when you act from those thoughts is that you’re letting your fears run your business. You have to let your intentions run your business, which brings us to action step number three. And that is to pay yourself a salary.

Most likely you have heard someone at some point tell you that you have to pay yourself first. And it always sounds like a great idea, doesn’t it? And it is a great idea, but if you’re like many quick start entrepreneurs, the idea hits you and then a week or two later, so does the end of the month and you think, Oh, okay, now what, how do I pay myself first? And at this point, writing yourself a big fat check before paying bills and invoices just seems wrong. And of course it does, and that’s because the idea of paying yourself first has become just another reactive knee jerk idea that you didn’t put much time or energy into doing. And again, you’re not honoring yourself by making future based decisions.

So back to my music days, I will tell you how I began doing this, when I was still a lowly songwriter making about 40,000 a year. The whole concept of teaching money, what to do, started to make sense to me. And I had been reacting for so long that my music business, even though I was on tour, I was making money. I was selling CDs. It still felt like a bit of a hobby. So at that time, and I can’t believe I’m admitting this to just anybody out there listening.

I used to have imaginary employees. So, you know, Todd Herman’s excellent book, “The Alter Ego Effect”? What’s funny about that is I started doing that long before I had heard of anyone else doing this. I thought I was kind of crazy, but obviously it works for other people and it worked for me. So I, I had, I had an imaginary HR director. Her name was Maxine. And I told Maxine that this business of mine had to start supporting the talent, which was me. I officially requested that I make for starters, $1800 a month, which was doable for me. And I, I asked my accountant to set all this up for me. I had him helped me set up the taxes and the withdrawals and start me on the company payroll. I did not tell him about Maxine, my imaginary HR director. I’ll let you know that, but you can think of this as a way to direct energy.

You’re saying I’m in charge here. And here’s how I want the company money to flow. And in the case of paying yourself a salary, you’re telling the money where you want it to go first. So I use the metaphor a lot. You’ve probably heard me say this, but I use the metaphor of “being an organic gardener in an unpredictable climate”. So if you want to reap the harvest, you don’t just sit back and pray for rain every year, you have to set up gutters and rain barrels to catch the rain or the energy. That way, instead of stressing out, when it doesn’t rain, you can now access that energy whenever you need it. You show that energy where you want it to go. You say, Hey, when you land on the roof, go into the gutters and then go down into the rain barrels. And in the case of paying yourself, that’s what you’re doing with money.

So when I set up my salary, rain barrel, something was set in motion. I told the money how it was going to work. And you could say that my decision made me more confident and relaxed and how I worked each day. And it let me stop feeling like I was getting the short end of the stick in this business of mine. And you could also get very metaphysical here and say that I was showing the universe that I was finally taking myself the talent seriously in my business. And the universe then responded. And it worked within months. I noticed that I always got the performances in the income. I needed to cover my starter salary and pay the bills in addition to having my salary. And eventually I gave myself a raise when I started to see how the power of my future based decisions worked. And I got very, very anchored to this idea because once you start seeing it working, you realize how powerful this idea of empire mentality is.

Action. Step number four is to get an accountant. And I know in spite of the fact that I have poked fun at my accountant, I’m not working with the same account anymore, but the way he used to talk loud at me, um, it is necessary that you have one and more than anything, you need to get over any excuses about not having one. And if you, like several of my clients in the early days of their businesses, if you have a spouse who says, Oh, I could totally do your taxes. Then it’s time to fire your spouse and get an accountant. And if your spouse is an accountant, I would still consider having someone else to do it. And you know, the whole cobbler’s kids who have no shoes idea, that kind of operates in that scenario. And also it’s just good to separate your business life from your personal life. It’s kind of just removes friction. Why add more friction when you don’t have to. Our world, our culture, our relationships are already hard enough as it is. Why not make this simple on yourself?

So when I work with a brand new business owner and they want to know who they should hire on their team first, I always make sure they have an accountant and a bookkeeper before they start in and start hiring anyone else. The hobbyist excuse, the person who doesn’t make future decisions tells themselves that you can just totally do this on your own with all the trainings out there and all the easy online forms. And yes, that’s true. You could be your own accountant. With that said, you could also watch a YouTube video on how to change your own oil and how to cut your own hair and how to even build your own house.

The question here for you is A, is this the best place for you to spend your time? In other words, is this your superpower? At some point on this podcast, I am going to walk through how to find your super power, but I am betting that if you’re listening right now, your super power is not numbers, details and accounting, alright? And B if it is, if you’re like, Hey, I’m actually pretty good at this. The B part of this question is how much energy does the perpetual dread of doing said accounting and numbers drain from you each month? Or if you’ve put it off until March and hate your life for a month, how much does that drain from you? And C, last question. How does peace of mind cost? How much is it worth to have peace of mind? Let’s put it that way.

I can remember back in my early days as a musician, when I had, I had my accountant all in place, I had a bookkeeper and I had my S-Corp going and I heard about a local music, they were a duo here in Asheville, a very popular duo, and they were getting audited and it nearly wrecked them. They were hit financially hard by the audit. They were on the road having to unearth boxes of old receipts. The process lasted months, and they were hit with an enormous fine at the end of it. They didn’t have an accountant and it was from everything, I heard a large slice of awful. Having an accountant, by the way, also reduces your chances of getting audited. And if for some reason you do get audited, you then have someone on your team, on your side to help you manage the bureaucracy and the communication back and forth with bureaucrats, who trust me, do not have any empathy for your pathetic management of numbers or the fact that you’re an idea person, not a detail person, they aren’t going to care.

All right, so next we are going to move into some more subtle ownership ideas that clean up your brain and the scattered tendencies that you may be prone to. And I say all of this with love, by the way, because I am you. So I share these because they are just easy ways to create a different habit for how you manage your energy and your time and yourself. So, action. Step number five is to schedule out your appointments for the year in advance. I want you to take some time to consider any appointments that you have regularly, and that would be anything from hair to mani-peddis, to massage, to dentist, OB GYN, eye doctor, personal trainer, acupuncture, mammogram, basic physicals, blood labs, whatever it is that keeps you going and make sure that all of them are scheduled out through the end of the year.

And I know, supposedly we all already know to do this, but I am sharing this just in case you are one of those. Wait until things get desperate kind of people, and then freak out an inconvenience yourself by making a bunch of calls and spending a lot of time, trying to get fit in somewhere. My first breakthrough doing this, back with my first coach, again, back when I was a musician again, and the reason I bring up the musician times is that I wasn’t making a lot. And you would think that I didn’t have the means to justify all this, but my dream was to have one massage a week. I had that on my vision board. And instead of waiting until that could be a reality, I decided that I would, one year I decided I would schedule one massage a month and to really hold my feet to the fire and to prove that I really truly wanted this. I actually scheduled all of them advance for a full year, and thats when I discovered the power of maintenance and how it frees up your brain power and your creativity. And it creates an ecology of self care all around you.

In my first year of coaching a mastermind, my clients used to get two calls with me every single month and somewhere around month, six of that year, one of my clients got on a call and she told me the, now that things were going really well, she asked if she could postpone all of her regularly scheduled calls and instead wait until she quote unquote really needed them rather than using them as maintenance. And this is unfortunately how most people approach health and wellness and coaching or whatever. We wait until rock bottom hits, and suddenly we are forced or compelled or shamed into getting on someone’s schedule. And it turns your life into one where you’re putting out fires rather than preventing them in the first place. So when your schedule is managed in advance, then you don’t have to use extra brain power to keep telling yourself, Oh, crap, I need to get in with the dentist or worse, wait until your tooth is aching so bad that you then have to cancel all your zoom meetings that day and get an emergency dental appointment and pay extra money for that appointment.

So to that end, I told this client to really examine her mindset here. And what I shared with her was that coaching is not about waiting until things get desperate. That it’s really about keeping things on track, which is how we, we got her into such a good place six months into the year at all, was that we had spent so much time staying regular with our coaching calls. So when you schedule your appointments for the first year in advance, you get to stay on track, which is important for us as idea people. So here’s the call to action. If nothing else, now that everything is opening back up, get the basics that you need, scheduled in advance. And just sit there one afternoon with your Google calendar open and do the tedious work of setting these up and creating all those little reminders. Or if you have an executive assistant, sit down with that person and have a meeting to assign, like, have that person, mine these out of you and assign the appointments that this person needs to schedule out for you.

Action step number six is also about your schedule. And this is especially for starter businesses, or if you are in a shift in your business, like so many people are right now, but this is for you guys. This is that you want to schedule a business development day once every single week. And that’s the same day every week. It is nonnegotiable. It is on your calendar. And again, we are speaking here to the whole idea of stopping that habit of putting out fires. This action step means that you carve out a day in your every single week. It is devoted to nothing but business development. And on this day, you are not doing any client work at all. You are not reacting or responding to anything else. And if you can’t take a full day, then make it a half day. And I’ve talked about this before on this podcast, but it is way too easy to let your business turn into a situation where all you’re doing is reacting or you’re responding to needs and requests, and perhaps urgent items. You’re letting clients determine your schedule. You’re searching your emails for your to do list and you let outside forces lay out your plan or your non plan for the day.

What this does, is that it creates an addicted brain. Our brains are wired to easily just react to stuff, and it is very hard to develop or create or build when you are accustomed only to reacting. So on your schedule one day or half day per week, set up a time that is batched strictly for development. And this is when you’re going to map out your marketing, you’re going to create the emails for your onboarding sequence. You’re going to plan a campaign or create a new offer. This is the kind of thing that should not be stuffed in the free time that’s in your schedule because there won’t be any, there just won’t being a business owner means that you have to understand the many demands on your energy.

And one of those demands is determining what gets created here in this business, where are we going? What’s our offer. And you’re the only one who can do that. And it’s worth having a day where your vision has the space to get created. Okay. Our final step is one that may seem a bit outside of the norm here, but I’m going to share it. Anyway. One of my Uplevel mastermind graduates is a screenwriter in Los Angeles and he messaged me this year and he said, he’d been thinking about me. And he wanted me to consider never, ever dismissing the soul track as woo anymore, and never, ever making any kind of jokes about the softer side of how I teach business, because it helped him so much and it’s helped him help his clients do and things that he does. So shout out to Jamie here.

I will not dismiss this step, but I will place it in context. How about that? So sometimes I might use that language or joke about something being woo. And that’s because as a teacher now for over 15 years, I never like to assume that every one of us is on the exact same plane when it comes to the ideas and concepts that work, when it comes to mindset, that comprise what I call the soul track of business. We’re living in kind of a cynical world right now. And it may seem like managing mindset or speaking in terms of your energy. Isn’t going to do anything when so much hard stuff is happening out there. So I would rather people be able to enter the softer ideas, the more woo ideas, knowing that it’s okay if they feel a bit dubious or cynical. And it’s okay to add a little humor to that because I would rather that you try out an idea while having permission to feel that doubt than to just dismiss it as you’ve always done.

Because I always say that the worst that can happen, is that you feel stupid. And who cares, who cares if you feel stupid because the payoff is what can be really huge here. So with this last step, I can honestly tell you that we have had hundreds of people write to us, message us, Facebook, message me about how this one little action steps worked for them. And they always accompany it with a photo of the actual check they did. And I’ll tell you what that means in a second. Um, so you’ve heard lots of people probably share similar strategies as this, but whenever I work with startups or whenever any of my clients is growing their business and they’re setting new pricing, I always have them do this. And it just does the trick. And that is this.

You’re going to write yourself a check for the new high amount that you want your clients to pay you for your services as if that check is coming from one client. And then you’re going to post that check by your desk. Date it for the time that you’re going to be making this kind of income and sign it, you know, a very happy client or a really excited customer. Doesn’t matter. Find the words that work for you for how to sign it, just do it. And if you need to be dubious, then be dubious. What’s the worst thing that can happen. The dubious thoughts will roll their eyes. Oh, well, they’ve done it before. I just have way too many success stories from this one step to think that it doesn’t work for people. So go for it.

So we’re going to wrap this episode up by saying, of course, that there are more levels and layers to creating and building the empire mentality and to stop treating your business like a hobby. But these are the starter steps. And I’m hoping that even if you’ve already done some of them, that you’ll use what we’ve walked here through here today to mine for your own little ways, that may be you’ve stepped out of empire mentality right now and discover how you can now reset and make that fix happen and really honor yourself as an owner again.

So the fourth section of my book, the Soul-SourcedTM Entrepreneur is all about the energy and the making of decisions. And all I want to do is remind you here that each one of our decisions either feeds us or drains us. It either pulls us towards the future or keeps us stuck where we are and what we are here to do here on the Soul-SourcedTM Business Podcast is move you into that, that future and open you up into all of the things that you’re becoming as well as honoring who you are. So I want to thank you for listening today and as usual, please subscribe to this podcast, if you’re getting value here. And also as usual, my book, the Soul-SourcedTM Entrepreneur an unconventional success plan for the highly creative secretly sensitive and wildly ambitious, it hits the streets on November 17th. You can preorder a copy now on Amazon and thank you to those of you who have done that. And thanks again for being here with me. And I will see you guys on the next episode.