More peace and more profits - that’s what we're chatting about today. In today’s episode we are going to talk through tangible strategies you can use and questions you can ask yourself to get yourself more peace and profit in your business. Plus, we dive into how to build a business that's what you WANT, instead of the one you think you should have (because someone else told you to?).
Let's face it, so many of us burn out because our business gets really complicated. The truth is that in reality, we likely started our businesses seeking more freedom in our lives, but we often end up chasing the wrong things, which leads to us finding ourselves too busy and ultimately feeling unfulfilled.
My guest today is Becky Hoschek, and she's a wife, mom, and life coach, with a goal of helping moms and creative entrepreneurs reclaim their quality of life while building a profitable and sustainable business. You guys know I’m all about this, which is probably why Becky and I have always resonated so well together. I've actually known Becky for many years now and she's truly wonderful and has so much to offer when it comes to mindset work and business building.
Today, we are going to talk through three questions to ask when you want more peace and profits. Let’s get into it!
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Who is Becky Hoschek?
I help moms called to business as creatives and coaches simplify their businesses so that they are focused on the two things that my clients tend to care about the most: peace and profit. I do this through very high-touch, very personalized, one-on-one coaching and consulting, and it really looks like a combination of mindset coaching mixed with marketing and messaging strategy.
Personally, I live in the Midwest. My husband and I have been married for 16 years now, and we are in the middle school era. We have a daughter who's an eighth grader, identical twin boys who are in sixth grade, and we also have a dog (who I like to say is my favorite child) and her name is River.
I also host a podcast called Beyond, which is the podcast for moms called to business.
So many business owners start their business in pursuit of freedom, only to end up in hustle mode and working MORE than they did in their 9-5. Where do you think we do wrong in our quest for peace and profit?
What I tend to see is that somewhere around the mark of approaching or hitting the six figure mark in a business, there's this realization that sets in that “what got me here isn't going to be sustainable and something has to change because I can't keep going like this”. There’s almost a sense of “uh oh” that comes in.
First, the truth is that starting a business is really hard, but I think we make it a lot harder for ourselves than it has to be. I don't think we do this on purpose, but since we expect it to be hard, that kind of becomes our reality. We're all really good at overcomplicating things, and so we get into this cycle of doing more and more and more, and a lot of it isn't necessary. Before you know it, it gets to the point where business isn't feeling like freedom. Then, you have to start asking yourself some questions.
Second, we don’t define what “enough” looks like. A lot of times we just think we need more. More clients, more sales, more revenue. Then, we just kind of end up throwing things at the wall trying to make “more” happen to get that growth going upward. I describe it as running a marathon where there's no finish line because you've never identified where that finish line is. So you never know if you've reached the goal or done the thing that you set out to do.
The third mistake I see people make is starting to build the business we think we are supposed to have. It's easy to get off course when you start veering toward what other people are doing, and it can take some time before you start to recalibrate and think like, wait, how did I get here? What am I doing? Does this even make sense anymore?
Read More: The 5 Beliefs That Are Keeping Your Business Stuck
3 Questions to Ask When You Want to Focus on Peace and Profit in Your Business
1. What is my owner’s intent?
Now, if you've never heard this term before, I think of it as a less corporate version of a vision statement. Another way to look at this is: what's the end goal here? What is the purpose of my business? It's very different building a business when your goal is to get on Shark Tank and get an offer from a shark than it is to be running a business where your intent is really to stay small and maximize your profit working part-time hours doing work that you really, really love. I have a whole episode on this here!
If you are trying to grow and scale, or if you are trying to build a business that one day you want to sell, that is going to inform the decisions you make and what you do in your business so much. And if you don't have this defined, it's really hard to stay focused on things that are going to make the most sense to meet those goals.
When it comes to questions like this, how can we overcome the “squirrel mindset” where we might feel like we know our owner's intent one day, and the next day feel differently?
I think when you do have your owner's intent defined for yourself, it becomes an automatic filter that you can ask those kinds of questions through. It's a lot easier to get distracted and chase shiny objects when you haven't defined this because you're always looking for the next thing that's going to move the needle forward or the next idea you should try.
I think this is so common with creatives, especially because we do have a lot of ideas. It's tempting to pursue the new thing that looks more fun and more interesting than what we've been working on, but when you have that intent to kind of guide you, it's a lot easier to ask: does this make sense? Yes, someone over here may be doing this, but are they even building the same kind of business I am? Does this make sense for the goals that I have?
You have to be really honest here when you think about what success looks like to you. I don't think we realize how informed that becomes by what we see other people doing. And when you want to build a business that truly is fulfilling what is right for you, for your life, for your family, for your business, it will look like doing things differently. And that can be really uncomfortable. There’s this internal conflict between the part of human nature that wants to belong and be similar to what everyone else is doing, and there’s a part of us that feels called to do something different. Navigating that can be hard.
2. Are you building the business you’re “supposed to” be building?
This question is all about getting clear on why you are doing what you're doing. Are you building the business that you think you're supposed to be building? Are you following someone else's method, formula, or steps? Is it the business that you feel called to create?
I think that a lot of us are so busy at the beginning and we're just trying to get through the day doing all the things. Sometimes we're too busy to even notice that what we're doing is for a reason that's maybe not the best.
Give yourself some time to be introspective about this, whether that means going for a walk, thinking about it at the gym, or even writing it down in a notebook or journaling about it. I also think it can help to talk it out if you’re more of a verbal processor.
Read more: Visualization Techniques And Mindset Tactics To Create A Success In Your Business
3. Where does business feel complicated?
Most likely, if you just ask yourself this, your mind is going to go somewhere. It's where things feel the most difficult, the most stressful, or just overwhelming. It can look very different for each one of us, but one way I like to think about it is: where does it feel like there may be too much? Too much overworking, overthinking, overspending, overextending yourself and your commitments?
For someone who feels like they’ve built a really big complicated business right now, where should they start to simplify?
I think that asking these questions is a really good start to get you the clarity that you need to move forward and start taking a new direction toward peace and profit. Once you get that clarity and realize that maybe there's an opportunity here to change some things, then you really want to get clear on what's working well and what isn't.
Building on that question of, “Where do things feel complicated?”, on the flip side of that, you can ask yourself: where do I feel like I'm at my best? What do I feel was the best season of my business so far and why? What was I doing that made it feel so aligned with how I want to be working or how I want to be living?
How can we use these questions to set better goals?
I think the first two questions (identifying your owner's intent and questioning if you're building the business that you think you're supposed to be building), provide a lot of clarity in terms of purpose and direction, and then when we're setting goals and making decisions, everything you do can be filtered from the lens of the clarity that you found between those two questions.
Then with the third one, where your business feels complicated, it really shines a light on where some things might need your attention or where there's an opportunity to simplify.
What are the 2 keys to creating a simplified life and business that gives you more peace and profit?
The first one is the stories we tell ourselves through our mindset, and the second is the stories we tell everyone else through our messaging.
The two are actually very connected, and I don't think it's something that we give a lot of thought to. In fact, it's taken me a few years of working with clients to realize why this is so important. What I like to say is that the stories you tell yourself about yourself (about your business, about yourself, about what is possible), those stories don't only inform your level of confidence, but also how you show up as the leader of your business and the server of your client's.
Mindset is the most overlooked and underutilized strategy that we have as entrepreneurs because it's kind of tough to do on your own.
There are pieces of mindset work that you can absolutely do (like journaling or using different tools), but the truth is that it's really hard to see what we can't see for ourselves. And a lot of times we do need the perspective of someone else to shine a light on those things. If we can't see them, we can't do anything about them.
Then, there are the stories that you tell your audience and your ideal clients through your messaging. I think why I love the work that I do so much is that marketing and sales have everything to do with understanding psychology and human behavior and what it is to be human.
I've never had a client come to me saying, “Can you please help me work on my relationship with myself?”, but that is actually a huge piece of what we end up doing. The more you understand yourself, the more you're able to understand and relate to other humans, which is a super valuable skill set for an entrepreneur.
How can we work on the stories we tell ourselves?
The most important step is creating awareness around them. I think that there are a couple of ways to do this on our own. Journaling, or sort of doing an inventory of what's on your mind, can be really helpful in shining a light on some of those stories. When you see on a piece of paper that you've written down things like “I don't know what I'm doing”, or “I'm never going to figure this out”, when you start to see those in black and white you start to connect the dots of like, “oh yeah, so it's no wonder I feel so terrible.”
I think the next level of it is working with someone because so many of the aha moments (those big realizations that change the trajectory of what you're doing) often come when someone else is listening to us and is picking up on the things that we're not seeing for ourselves. So I can't recommend that enough if you've never worked with someone.
Rapid Fire Questions with Becky Hoschek
What’s an unpopular opinion you have about mindset in the online space?
That growth = success. I think we live in a world where the messaging in the business world is that you have to chase growth. But that is just a thought. A lot of us think chasing growth is what “I'm supposed to do”, but the hill I'm willing to stand on is I don't believe that growth equals success.
It may be part of it for you. It may not be. I have clients who have businesses where, yep, they
are growing this year, they are doing more and they have maybe a goal to make more profit this year. I also have clients who are super excited to have a year that just repeats what they did last year because they love where they're at. They have plenty of time. They are making enough because they've defined what “enough” looks like.
Do you have a favorite failure in your business?
Several years ago I launched a group program because I believed that's what the next thing I was supposed to do was. So I (significantly) invested in working with someone whose expertise was in growing a group program, and I realized pretty quickly that the direction didn't really make sense for me, my goals, or the business I was building. I did not want to be spending all my time creating curriculum and doing a lot of other backend things that was keeping me from working personally with clients, and it was a costly lesson financially.
On the flip side, what I learned that year has impacted so much of what I do now and played such a role in something I needed to learn in order to kind of unpack my own way of doing things that is different.
What’s your favorite thing about being a mindset coach and running the business you run?
I always like to say that my job is to help you grow your business, but my mission, I think that what it is deeper that I'm called to is to help you grow as a person. Even from a faith perspective, I see God working in our lives through motherhood and business, and I think about the way it builds character and shapes and refines us. There’s such a ripple effect.
Get On The Waitlist for SIMPLIFIED with Becky Hoschek
SIMPLIFIED is the high-touch coaching and consulting intensive created by Becky Hoschek exclusively for creative entrepreneurs and coaches who want to create 6-figure profit in their businesses – without working all of the time, and without having the stress of mountains of expenses.
Inside SIMPLIFIED, we combine mindset support with strategic simplicity to create a life and business that you don’t want to quit. This one-of-a-kind experience is for committed entrepreneurs who want to pay themselves considerably, without working a considerable amount of time. If you’re tired of scaling yourself into a business you can’t stand, it might be time to simplify. And you don’t have to do it alone.
Working with Becky inside SIMPLIFIED is like having a business therapist, marketing consultant, creative director and mindset coach, all in one. If you’re ready to SIMPLIFY: to do less, better and see abundant profit margins, join the waitlist for SIMPLIFIED. Applications will reopen later this summer.
This 1:1 experience is completely private and unique to your personal business goals, and by joining the waitlist, you'll be the first to know when applications reopen. Get on the waitlist SIMPLIFIED now and let her know you heard about it on the Breakthrough Brand Podcast!
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