I said I'd tell you how I actually solved for seven-figure growth, and this is that episode. Spoiler-free version: it wasn't marketing, and it wasn't sales (shocking, I know 😅).

This is Part 2 of my seven-figure series. I'm walking you through the exact assessment I give my Visionmind members – the Vision Anchor Assessment – and I'm doing it out loud, on my own business, with my real answers. Growth and scale are two different things, and before you can do either one on purpose you have to find the roadblock standing between where you are and where you're going. I'm sharing the questions, the scoring, the one change that fixed our community overnight, and the thing I realized while swimming laps that's about to change how my team works.

What you'll learn:

• The difference between growth and scale (and why most of us are chasing the wrong one at the wrong time)
• Why your "vision anchor" is the thing that clears the road – and why it's a GOOD thing, even though the word sounds heavy
• The two questions that come before everything else – if you answer yes to either one, do not pass go
• How raising my community price by about 2.5x, without touching a single word of copy, solved a retention problem completely
• Why "simple scales, complicated fails" applies whether you're at zero or eight figures
• The sneaky way selling two offers to two different buyers stalls your growth (web designers, this one's for you)
• How sunk cost fallacy keeps you holding plates you're allowed to put down
• The one-to-ten mindset scale I use, and what an 8 out of 10 told me about myself
• The fastest way to get your team to "read your mind" (hint: it involves recording yourself and handing it to AI)
• Goldfish finance syndrome – and a feeder fish named Finny who grew to the size of his tank

The Vision Anchor Assessment

Start here – if either answer is yes, solve it before anything else:

• Are you charging enough?
• Are you trying to do too many things?

Then answer every question through the lens of what you actually want:

• The way I’m marketing and generating leads isn’t consistent enough: #
• The way I’m marketing and generating leads isn’t sustainable: #
• I don’t like the way I’m marketing and generating leads: #
• My sales are not consistent enough: #
• The way I’m selling isn’t sustainable: #
• I don’t like the way I’m making sales: #
• I don’t believe it’s possible: #
• I don’t trust myself to do it: #
• It doesn’t feel safe to have it: #
• I would need a bigger team: #
• I’ll be doing way too much work: #
• (If you have a team) I don’t have the right team: #
• Everything already feels like it’s breaking: #
• Everything already feels disorganized / duct taped together: #
• I don’t have enough time: #
• I would need so many more clients/customers and there’s no way I could do that with what’s available to me now: #
• My work is too custom for each buyer: #

The vision I have for where I want to be one year from now would be amazing because:

• I would finally be able to pay myself properly: #
• I would finally be able to keep more of the revenue I make: #
• I would finally have higher profit margins: #
• I would finally be able to pay my team better: #
• The money I make could finally work for me: #

Connect with Adriane and Visionaries!

• Let's be friends on the 'gram – @visionariesonline or @adrianegalea
• Connect on Linkedin – with Adriane or Visionaries
• Visit us on the web at visionaries.co
• Join the community! Learn more about The Visionaries Collective
• Join us live in Los Angeles from Sept 27-20 for Visionary – ticket sales close September 10!

 In the last episode, I talked about growing a seven-figure brand inside of one year, and I gave an overview of what that year looked like, all of the ups and downs, the crazy things that happened. In this episode, I want to get into how I actually started to solve for seven-figure growth. When I realized that I had a company that was ready to experience true growth, not true scale, but true growth How did I actually figure out how to get myself into a position where that growth would be possible?

So to clarify, when I say true growth, not true scale, the general difference between growth and scale is that growth is while things increase in terms of what is incoming into the business, so more money, more audience, more community members, more of all the things that we all want for the most part. But we're also increasing expenses.

We're increasing the amount of time we're spending on things. We're, in general, increasing the amount of resources that we're using in order to create that influx of, of input into the business. So more input, but also more output. Whereas true scale is all of those numbers for input are increasing, more money, more audience, more community, et cetera, et cetera.

But numbers on output-- on the output side are either holding steady or potentially decreasing. So we're increasing our input while not needing as much time to do those things, not needing as many people to do those things, reducing the cost for doing those things in the aggregate, et cetera, et cetera. So we were ready for growth.

We're not gonna be ready for scale for a minute, which is fine. But so I realized that even to get to that point where we could really start to grow in an intentional way, I had to solve for a bottleneck. And so what I want to use this episode to do is to show you my thought process for how I looked at what I was going to need to do in order to solve this growth bottleneck, and it is the process that I give to the members who are inside of Vision Mind.

Um, I call it a g- uh, a Vision Anchor Assessment. And so it's a list of questions that we ask as an assessment. This is, uh, if you're in your car or whatever, I don't encourage you to take notes, but if you are somewhere where you can sit and take notes on this, like it is a really good list of questions.

Maybe I'll just include them in the show notes. That's maybe the easiest thing to do. So if you want to sort of do this assessment for yourself to see what your growth bottleneck is, you can go for it. So in general, this is based around the seven pillars of scaling, which is not my, you know, super proprietary, very original framework that I use, but it is my framework that I use for operational growth.

But it's... I think it's pretty obvious, like if you look at any business that has-- if you look at any business, period, I think these are the seven pillars that every business has to be looking at in order to figure out operationally sort of what's going on. But it's my condensed way of saying it. That is how I've talked about this for years and years.

So the seven pillars of scaling are marketing, sales, mindset, team, delivery, uh, finance and- What did I not say? Marketing, sales, mindset, team, operations, delivery, finance. That, those are the seven. So I can just recite them off the top of my head at this point. So the questions that we ask in terms of creating this assessment are based around these things.

So if you are listening to this and you have ever had access to this assessment that I'm giving you, Vision Mind members get access to this. I did a free training not too long ago, it's no longer available, but I did a free training not too long ago where I presented this. I presented this at Visionary, my conference that just happened.

I was s- I actually recorded this episode months ago, and I went back and listened to it and I was like, "No, I have so many more things that I have to say," I'm just completely re-recording it. It should've come out months ago, though. But I presented this in a couple different places, and I want you to know that I practice what I preach, and the framework that I gave f- to other people in order to figure out what is the thing that you are trying to do in order to solve for that growth bottleneck, it's the same thing that I do, and it makes it very, very clear, in my opinion, what is going to be the most helpful thing.

So what this does essentially is if you imagined where you are right now and where you're trying to go as your point A and your point B. So where you're at right now is you're in the car, you're getting ready to leave on a journey, you're trying to get to a specific destination. Where you're trying to be is that specific destination.

When you have a strategy to get you there, that's like plugging that destination into a GPS. However, there is at some point going to be a roadblock, almost always, where there's a lot of he- there's super heavy traffic and there's a better way to get around it, or there's literally a roadblock, or something happens that's going to either slow you down or stop you from getting to where you want to go.

Your vision anchor is the thing that removes that roadblock. I had someone very recently say to me, who's in the Vision Mind, as this person is trying to wrap their head around the concept of a vision anchor, because this person has always thought of the word anchor as being something positive, and I was like, "Oh, maybe I'm not explaining this well enough," because the anchor is a positive.

The anchor is the thing that solves the problem. When you understand the thing that's going to help you solve the problem, that's what the vision anchor does. So when you are first starting out in business, your vision anchor is always, always, always, always going to be market validation. You have to figure out your messaging.

You have to figure out how to market something to get people interested in it. And then you have to figure out how to have strong enough marketing and marketing at a frequency that people are going to see what you have to offer enough times, whether that's once or 10 times or 30 times or whatever, that a percentage of people are going to be willing to actually purchase that and that your messaging is tight enough that they understand why they should buy so that they do ultimately wind up buying it.

Once you get past that, and this probably takes you to the high five figure, low five figure or low six figure mark, your vision anchor after that is figuring out how to make those sales consistently and predictably. So if you are under six figures in your business, like, there's a really good chance that you don't have to figure out what this assessment is.

You just have to do either, you either need market validation or you have to figure out consistent, predictable sales, and that's really the beginning and end of that. So there are two exceptions to that when I go through this assessment, I will tell you what those are. They're the very first two questions that we ask.

Like, it-- I have not made a s- I have not not made a sale in a very long time. So that for me, I had solved that problem of predictable, consistent sales, and there was, there was a lot more that I had to figure out what I needed to do. So to get into the actual assessment of this

What I want you to think about is what is the thing that you want, and that is going to be the lens through which you answer these questions. So first of all, there are two things that you have to ask that are going to very, very much s- like, I would say do not collect $200... Do not pass go, do not collect $200 if your answers to either of these two questions are yes.

The first question is, are you charging enough? And the second is, are you trying to do too many things? If you are not charging enough, before you try to figure anything else out, you have to solve that problem. And if you're like, "Yeah, I am doing too many things," you have to address that before you do anything else, in my opinion.

Maybe you don't have to, but I'm gonna go ahead and say very strongly that you're probably gonna want to, because I say this all the time, it is kind of cliche, but simple scales, complicated fails. Simple scales, complicated fails every time. So if you're trying to do too many things, there's a really good chance that that alone is going to bottleneck your growth, because it's overly complicated.

I also always say that the opposite of hard is not easy, the opposite of hard is actually simple. Right? The same way that the opposite of easy is not hard, the opposite of easy is in fact complicated. So if you are doing too many things and you are overcomplicating things, it is probably stopping your growth in some way, shape, or form.

We're trying to do too many things. So for me, when I look at these questions, it was interesting recording the last episode where I ... the part one of this series . Even though part one was, like, two months ago at this point, it's fine. I've been really busy. So when I looked at this question and I said, "Am I ch- am I charging enough?"

The answer was very clearly, no, I was not charging enough for the community. So I started to talk through in that episode, I think I need to charge more, I think there's more going on here. I could see very clearly when I looked at the data that people who were coming in for $19 per month were not staying.

Most of them were not even ever creating their Circle account to get into the community. Like, there were just a lot of issues. So in terms of the quality of member that it was bringing in, and obviously they, as a human being, are extremely ... Of, they're of a high quality, of course, but in terms of being a member in the community, the, the quality...

I hope you can understand what I'm saying here, because I'm not trying to, trying to, you know, g- get down on their character. But they're just not the right people, because they're not bought in enough to wanting to be there, to ... Like, $19 is just not very much buy-in. And so I realized, without a doubt, that I was not charging enough.

And so since then, in the last It's been almost two months, month and a half, two months. I switched from $19 per month and $190 per year to $49 for a guaranteed 12-month commitment. It is no longer a cancel anytime membership. It is a 12-month commitment, and after 12 months, if you don't renew, then you don't have more payments.

So I completely dropped the membership model in favor of doing, like, a, an actual program. So it's a 12-month commitment. So it's either f- $490 or $495. I can't r- right now, in this moment, I can't remember if it's $490 or $495 for 12 months, or if you wanna break it up into monthly payments, it's 12 monthly payments of $49.

And I did not change the copy. I did not change the emails that I was sending. I don't talk about this almost ever, except for it is in one welcome sequence that I talk about it. And d- so I have done absolutely nothing else, and it has completely solved the problem. Simply going from 190 per year to... So essentially 200 per year to 500 per year.

So increasing the price by 250%, not doing anything to change the sales page, nothing, zero, zip, nada. It has completely solved the problem. So like I said, I do not talk about this at all. Like, I do-- I've not made any active effort to sell the membership community at all, and we have on average gotten a couple people per week that are new into the community.

And this week is my goal to fix the I'm not even trying to recruit new members problem . Like, we're gonna solve that this week. So, so I'm never this popular. Can you hear that I'm just getting text message after text message after text message? I don't know if the recording is picking up on that. Um, but anyhow.

So that for me, I said, "No, I-- before I do anything, I have to start charging more." The second of those questions is, am I trying to do too many things? When I did this assessment to figure out what do I need to do to solve for growth so that I can actually become that seven figure per year company, I would've said, "No, I'm not doing too many things."

I knew that I was doing a lot of things, but for me, it was not too much. I feel very at home doing ver- a great many things. However, me today, sitting here recording this, I'm doing too many things, and this is something that as of the time of recording this, I have a team meeting two days from now. The day that this gets released will be the day of that team meeting, actually.

And the thing that I'm going to tell them is we're cutting back on some of the things we're doing, and I think I think they might feel a sense of relief, but what I realized is, like, I'm just going to... I'm gonna be the problem because I refuse to let things go, and it's not necessarily I'm letting them go forever, but we need to cut back on the amount of things that we're trying to do all at the same time.

I could do them all if it were me, ironically, and I could keep doing them all if it were just me, but I would not have the rest of the growth that I'm looking for because I need to allow these very brilliant human beings that I have trusted with my business and have hired to do a job, I need to allow them to figure out how to be the very best that they can be at their, their job without trying to constantly shove new things down their throat that they have to figure out how to do just because it's easy for me to do that many things.

You know what I mean? Like, I... So interesting, I've been in LA now for, um, like almost exactly one month. I got to LA over Labor Day weekend. It's about one m- one month almost to the day from there since then, and I have not swam at all. I'm a swimmer. And it's because I've been so busy with Visionary, the in-person event that I hosted.

It was our first in-person business event that happened this past week. And finally, since then, I have started swimming, and this hit me like a sack of bricks while I was swimming, which is where I get the best ideas, which is where I clear my head, which is what I've been needing to do for weeks and I have not been able to do because I've been that busy.

It was so obvious that I was like, "I'm doing too many things." So I really want to encourage you, this is, this is something that is problematic for people at every single stage of business. I don't care if you are making $0 per year or $10,000 per year or if you are making $10 million per year and anything in between and above and beyond.

In-- if you are overcomplicating things, if you are trying to do too many things at once, you are without question hindering your growth, and that might be something that you're okay with, and that's fine, and I will love that for you. But you have to do it intentionally. If you are trying to do-- especially if you are very early in your business and you're trying to sell more than one offer, I think that's not a smart plan, to be totally honest, because you oftentimes are trying to talk to two different markets where you are, let's say-- Here's a really common one is if you're a web designer, you're trying to sell done-for-you web design services and you're trying to sell templates.

You are selling to two completely different people. It might not seem that way because, well, the-- it's you're just selling to someone who needs a new website, but no, the person who would pay someone a good chunk of money to just do the thing for them, especially now that AI can-- you can just vibe code your own website.

It's a totally different buyer than someone who's looking for a website template. They are two completely different things, and if you are trying to do both, you are probably hindering your own growth because you're trying to figure out how to create that market validation and/or create those consistent, predictable sales for two completely different types of people, and that's two completely different markets.

So it's just tricky. So if you are do-- if you are trying to do too many things, this is your invitation to stop. There's no reason that you can't just pick it back up where you left off. I will tell you the thing that I'm gonna stop in the next episode. I can't do it yet because I want the people who might need to hear this, I want them to hear it from me first, but I'm going to not do something that I was planning on doing, and it's a big thing.

And, um, I know that's so-sorts-- I've, I f-- what's the t-- I don't use Facebook anymore. What am I d-- I'm vaguebooking. Is that the term? I feel like I'm vaguebooking right now. Um, but I just... I can't say it for the out of respect for the people who need to hear it before this podcast epis-- I don't want them to hear it on a podcast episode, but I will tell you what it is the next time.

But it just... It's gotta, it's gotta go, and it doesn't mean that I'm not gonna do it again. Doesn't mean it's gone forever. In fact, it's not gone forever. I might wind up not ever doing this thing again, but also the door's open for me to continue to do it, and that's typically the case almost any time you wind up doing something like this is just drop it, and if you need to pick it back up later, you can, and if you don't want to, then that's fine too.

We all have too many-- you know, we're juggling too many balls in the air. It's okay to let one of them drop. And if you've never heard of sunk cost fallacy, this is a very real thing where sometimes we don't want to drop one of the balls or one of the plates we're trying to keep in the air or whatever because we've invested so much time, energy, money, effort, whatever into that thing.

That is not a good reason to keep doing it. It might seem like a good reason to keep doing it, and I understand because I have been there so many times myself, where I had invested so much into something that I was like, "I just have to try and see it through," when in reality, I just... It would've been fine to just put it down and, and walk away from that project, and it would've been fine.

So sunk cost fallacy is real. Okay, so the rest of these, I'm not gonna spend that much time on all of these things or we'll be here all day. So the next set of questions are around marketing. These are all, all of these questions have to do with, uh, there's a direct correlation to the seven pil- pillars of scaling.

So marketing, sales, mindset, team, operations, delivery, finance. So these are the marketing questions. So when I look at what I'm doing, or when I was looking at what I was doing and figuring out what do I need to do to, in order to become that seven-figure company, because I could tell that I was primed for it.

I was poised for that growth, but there was a roadblock in my way. So what was I trying to do? So I had to look at the marketing I was doing. Was it consistent enough? Was it sustainable? And did I like the way that it was happening? And for me, all of those things were completely fine. I was marketing and creating interest for what I was doing in a way that was completely consistent.

I have so much traffic that comes to my website through referral traffic and SEO and all the things. Like, I get on average of 20 to 50,000 website visitors per month, and that is with almost no effort on my end at this point, and almost 20% of that traffic comes directly from, uh, from AI-driven search, that AI, AI platforms are recommending me, which tells me I'm moving in the right direction, that we already have that volume of search traffic.

I don't wanna become complacent around AI search traffic because I think that that is unfortunately going to be a big marker for how brands are discovered through the internet, whether that's through Google Search or through searching on ChatGPT or whatever that could look like. That tells me that I'm, I'm on, on the money, at least for right now.

My SEO is strong enough the way that things are happening in terms of AEO optimization, so AI engine optimization. Like, it's all working well enough. I don't wanna become complacent in that. At some point I'm going to need to put a little bit more intentionality behind it, but for now it's all fine. It's consistent.

It's really sustainable. I'm not having to do almost anything for it. I'm gonna need to put more... I knew that I was gonna need to put more effort into other parts of the things that I was trying to build. I knew that when I bring the podcast back, which the podcast, right, even though you're listening to a new episode of the podcast, the podcast is not actually back.

It's coming back on January 25th, which is my birthday. It's going to completely relaunch in video format. And when that happens, because I want growth, the w- I, the reason I dropped my podcast previously, because it was not sustainable for me to be able to market it for the amount of for the amount of vol- the, the volume that I was getting of listeners for it.

But right now, I'm not doing anything to market my podcast. It's just sending a random email to someone, and I'm already generating... Like, the last podcast episode that I published without even trying got a couple hundred downloads, which is almost n- it's not very much. But I know that when I put my email list behind it, when I do more on social media, when I do all the things, it's going to help make that more sustainable because it's going to increase the listenership and all the things.

So marketing for me, I knew, was not the answer I knew that I did not need to fix my marketing in order for me to grow. So that, for me, was not a strategic point of, a strategic point of thinking through how I was going to get from point A to point B. I trusted that what I'm already doing, like, I- the marketing is fine.

All of that to say, the marketing is fine. If the marketing was not fine, then I would've need to started to think about, do I need to hire a marketing strategist to s- help me figure out how to increase market share, to expand into new markets, et cetera, et cetera. But for me, I kinda, I am a marketing strategist, so also I don't really necessarily need that.

But the answer to that is no, I don't need a strategist. I need just someone... If anything, I need someone who can execute on my own marketing strategy. You know what I mean? The next set of questions are around sales. So it's almost identical to the marketing questions. Are your sales consistent enough? Is the way you're selling sustainable enough?

And do you like the way you're actually making sales? Does it feel good to you, right? 'Cause if the, if you feel ick in the way that you're selling, probably at some point it's not gonna be sustainable. It's gonna stop working. Again, for me, this was a non-issue. The sales were fine. If anything, I was having to hold back my ability to make more sales, because we could not keep up with all of the other things that were going on.

So sales was not the issue. So then becomes a mindset thing. So I'm gonna read these one at a time. Do you believe it's possible to achieve what you want? For me, this was, like, a 10 out of 10 yes. It was a 12 out of 10 yes. I knew it was possible. I just knew that there was something standing in my way. Do you trust yourself to do it?

Again, for me, I trusted myself beyond. I've built a seven-figure company before. I've helped so many other businesses that are well beyond the seven figure a year mark. For me, this is not, it, this was a non-starter. I totally trust myself to do it. It's completely fine. And does it feel safe to have? And for me, this is not a home run.

I would say that when I asked myself earlier in the year what this, what the answer to this was, it would've been, th- would've been a pretty high number. Right now, I think it's still a high number. I completely trust myself, um, and d- I tr- I trust myself and I feel safe to have the bigger company, and also there are small little niggly things in the background that go, "Yeah, but.

Yeah, but. Yeah, but." But I would still say that number is probably, like, an eight out of 10, that it feels s- it feels 8 out of 10 safe to have that. And so for me, that's fine. It tells me that there's maybe a little bit of work to do, but in the big scheme of things, I'm very happy with an 8 out of 10. The way that I encourage people to think of this, if it's an eight, nine or 10, that's, that's great.

If it's a seven or eight, you probably want to think about how to address it. If it's a I say a six or a seven. If it's a five, a four, or a three, that's, that's starting to get into, like, orange flag territory. You're gonna wanna correct that before you move on. If it's a one or a two, that's a red flag.

That's a big issue. It's gonna be very difficult for you to get to where you want to go. That's how I look at this assessment a- as a whole. So those are the, the mindset questions, and then we start getting into the team questions. So in order for me to have that seven-figure company, would I need a bigger team?

And the answer to that is good Lord, yes. There's no way I could keep doing it because the second question under the team questions are, if I have that seven-figure business, will I be doing too much work? And the answer to that is yeah, definitely. Unless I were to cut a lot of what I was doing out, which I did not want to do, unless I focused primarily on the grant program, which didn't feel right to me, I could have run a seven-figure-a-year grant program with just me.

That would not have felt in integrity, though, um, for a lot of different reasons that I'm not gonna get into, but it, it also, like, sounds really boring to me. I, I don't really want to have a business like that. I mean, I w- I would love to have a business that, like, gives all the money in terms of grants and all the things, but I don't want to do just that.

That sounds really boring. So anyway, um, yeah, I would definitely be doing too much work. And then if you have a team, I don't... Do you have the right team to get you to where you want to be? And I did have someone on my team that I did wind up, um, not moving forward with. The team that I have now feels like a, a great fit for the most part, and, um, they're quite new, but do you have the right team is a question.

So for me, these q- the first two anyway, I would need a bigger team, and I would be doing too much work, those are b- those were like 10 out of 10 for me of yes, I would need a bigger team, yes, I would be doing way too much. So that, to me, tells me I need to start to revisit what I'm looking at in terms of building a team to get to where I want to go.

Then the operations questions are, everything feels like it's breaking. To get, to get to seven figures would be kind of a difficult thing because everything already s- feels like it's starting to break. Um, for me, this was not... This was really not the case. I think a lot of times when you have team stuff going on where you're like, "Yeah, I would need more people," a lot of time it does feel like it's starting to break.

For me, this was not really the case. It does, it didn't feel like it was starting to break. It felt like overall, the business in general was starting to break because it just was hitting capacity, but there was no one part of the business specifically that felt like it was starting to break. So yes and no, but for the most part, no, which tells me that what I had built foundationally in terms of the operational foundation was pretty strong, that I had a lot of good things in place.

Did I have the SOPs that I needed in order to bring on the team that I needed? No. I had a lot of those things, but I didn't have enough of them. There was a lot of good things already happening though, and I am an operations consultant. I understand enough about operations that- Things were pretty well staying together.

Once I brought that team on and I had to start training them and my attention focused away from keeping things on the day-to-day running into helping them understand what their roles were, that's when things broke for me. That's when things felt like everything started to crumble, which is... That's a normal growing pain.

But anyway, um, the next question around operations is, do you already feel like everything is disorganized, and it's all sort of duct-taped together? And for me, I would say, w- I did say to this, like, yes, but that's also because I hold things to a very high standard. It felt very, very disorganized to me because I want to have a well-oiled machine, and it was not a perfectly well-oiled machine.

It was a machine that was being manually oiled. Like, it was fine. It was still... The gears were still turning, but it still needed a little bit of, you know... It's like the Tin Man i-if you've seen Wizard of Oz. If you haven't seen The Wizard of Oz, what i- were you doing with your life? But the Tin Man where, like, y- when he starts to wind down, and he starts to get creaky, it was like that.

It was... Like, it was fine. It wasn't completely disorganized, but it was... I could tell I was gonna have to add some oil to those, those creaks every now and then. But for the most part, most people would look at what I had and say, like, "This is pretty decently organized. Like, things are in pretty decent shape here."

But for me, I was like, "This is a dumpster fire," because I'm so used to everything being so buttoned up, and everything is all perfectly in a row and all the things. So that needed to be solved, but that goes back to that SOP thing, really. And if you're not familiar with the term SOP, it means standard operating procedures, and so it's essentially, like, the roadmap to how to do any given task that needs to be done.

So that... We'll leave that there. I don't wanna get into a whole lesson on team building and SOPs, but that, for me, was a flag. So I knew that I needed team, but I also knew that I needed to get myself into a better situation to be able to communicate the way that I wanted the tasks done through SOPs. If you've ever thought, like, "I wish my team could just read my mind," or if you've joked about it, like, "It would just be so much easier if you could read my mind," there is, in fact, a way for your team to re-read your mind, and that is for you to create an SOP.

That's how they learn to read your mind, okay? So if you want your team to know exactly what you're thinking about how you want the thing done, document it in the form of an SOP. This is very simple. You can just record yourself doing the task, give the thing to ChatGPT or to Claude or whomever, and... Ugh, whomever, like it's an, uh, an actual sentient living being.

Um, you can give it to whichever is what I meant to say. Uh, that was a weird slip. And it will just make the SOP for you, so that's fine. So anyway, um, and then Is it gonna be difficult to do the seven-figure business because I don't, I don't think I'm gonna have enough time? And for me, this was like, I don't have kids.

I don't have a partner or a spouse. My dog is pretty important to me, like I spend a lot of time with my dog, but that is not the same, not at all the same. And so my time is pretty much my own. And so if I need to work longer hours in the meantime, I'm fine with that. I'm completely fine with that, and I know it's not gonna be forever, and in fact, I really like working.

And so for me, this was n- this was a non-issue. Like, that's fine. If I have to increase my workload, I'm good with that, and in fact, I'm probably gonna enjoy it, to be honest. So... And that's exactly where I'm at right now. I've worked a lot the last month in terms of getting ready for Visionary, and like, I've loved it.

Love it. So those are all fine. And then delivery. We're getting toward the end of these. The delivery questions are around would I need a lot more clients or customers, and there's no way that I would be able to do that with what's available to me now. And for me, the answer to this was no. I would... I mean, I would.

I would need more. I actually would need more sponsorship revenue. I think that's probably the biggest thing for me in terms of growth, is starting to look at sponsorship for my events and, um, getting more into the media company side of things, which the part three we're gonna talk about where I'm actually going, um, give you the sort of behind-the-scenes of all the different things I have planned.

Spoiler alert on that is that I'm-- I want to shift more into the media side of things. Visionaries, the parent co- the company's name is literally Visionaries Media. It was always the plan for Visionaries to be a media company or a media and events company, and the community is just, like, the thing that holds everything up.

Those are our three pillars, community, media ... Community, media, and funding are our three pillars, and I consider events to be under the community umbrella. So for me, I was like, "No, we would be able to bring a lot more people on, and it would be completely fine." Like, we don't need to fix those delivery systems necessarily.

There are things that would need to get tweaked, but it wouldn't, it wouldn't fall apart. Like, this is... Right now what I have is scalable, completely scalable for at least the next ... I think to get to a million, it's gonna be fine. I don't think I'm gonna need to figure out... Maybe that's, maybe that's not entirely true I'm probably g- but it's more the sales process that needs to get tweaked, not so much the delivery process.

The delivery process I've been very intentional about, so I don't think this is an issue for me. But this is interesting for a lot of people to think through, especially if you are a service-based business. So if you are selling services or information, so coaching or consulting, something like that, is at some point if you say to yourself, like, if I 10X'd the m- the number of, of businesses that I was servicing in any given, or clients, in any given month, there's a really good chance that it would break your business.

And so if the answer to that is, you know, it ... there's no way that I would be able to do that without everything sort of starting to crumble, you are gonna want to start thinking about tightening your delivery systems as you start to grow, grow or scale. Um, and then the last delivery question is, is the work too custom for each buyer?

And this is really for service providers more than anything. For me, this was a non-starter. This was totally fine. So again, the big things that are screaming at me are team I need people. I need help from human beings. And then the last set of questions are all around finance, and this is where I flip things from, is it going to be a problem, to would this finally be so great?

So when I finally get to seven figures, is it gonna be amazing because I'm gonna get to pay myself properly? For me, I was already paying myself fairly, fairly well. I think I'll get to pay myself better, um, so that's fine. It's not an urgent thing. I think it was fine. Um, I'll finally be able to keep more of the revenue I make.

Yeah, my profit margins are not great. I'm reinvesting so much back into the business, but I'm not worried about this because I'm very highly aware of what this looks like. I feel like right now I am in the middle of getting my PhD in business finance, even though that's not actually... I'm not getting an actual degree, but, like, that's what I'm educating myself around, and I feel very comfortable that I'm gonna solve this problem, and it's been very intentional that I have continued to reinvest back into the business.

It's more important for me to give more grant money, to invest in team, to pay my team well from the beginning, all of those things, so I'm not really worried about that. For others, if you are like, "My profit margins are low"... And to be clear, your profit margins do not include what you're already paying yourself.

That is an, that is an operational expense. What you pay yourself, that's, that's not your profit margin. After you pay yourself, after you pay your team, after you pay all of your expenses, what you have left over, that's your profit margin. So for a lot of business owners, I call this goldfish finance syndrome.

Goldfish have this very interesting biological phenomenon that they grow to the size of their environment that you put them in, and my... The reason I know this is because my music teacher growing up, Tracy, bought a little feeder fish from a pet store when I was probably 14 or 15, and his name was Finny.

We think hi- We think he. We think Finny was a he. Um, my guess is Finny probably doesn't care if we're misgendering him or her, and... But eventua- I digress. Finny grew. Tracy kept buying Finny bigger bowls, and then put Finny in a tank, and then put Finny in a bigger tank, and then put Finny in a bigger, bigger tank, and you'd have thought this thing was like- a d- a giant tropical fish.

Like Vinny was huge at the end of it, and it was a tiner- tiny little goldfish, feeder fish. This happens with business finances, is the more money that you bring in, oftentimes you start spending as much as you make, and you just continue to spend as much as you make as you go on. That's goldfish finance syndrome.

Anyhow, talk more about that in the next episode. And then, um, I would finally be able to pay my team better. This is an ons- at, at the time I was doing this exercise, I didn't really have enough of a team to be able to assess this around me. Today, I feel like I'm paying my team pretty well. Um, and then I could finally make the money work better for me.

This is pretty specific in terms of how you're looking at reallocating your business assets into personal assets or being able to reinvest in terms of business growth or being able to invest in terms of, like, the stock market or things like that. So this for me was, yes I do, but that's more of a next year thing for me.

So after going through the entire assessment, what I can say without, without question is that my entire operational bottleneck was around team The whole thing, start f- s- hook, line, and sinker, start, start, middle, and end, the whole thing was around team. I needed people. And so we have gone... The other problem was I was like, "We don't have enough money yet to be doing this," and so I had to wait.

I was not able to hire as fast as I wanted to so that I could get myself to a specific point to be able to actually hire the way that I needed to, and that's done now. I currently have three full-time employees in addition to me. I'm extremely proud of this. It, it was my intention all along to not have contractors in my business, but rather to have an in-house team.

That is a very intentional decision based on the company that I am trying to grow. I will get into that more next time, because the way you hire, whether you're hiring contractors or employees, is very specific to... Well, first of all, it's specific in terms of what you are and are not allowed to do, which is a different conversation for a different day.

You cannot just hire someone as a contractor and treat them like an employee. That is, in fact, not legal in all 50 states and s- and in b- I think most countries. I can't speak to anything outside of the United States. In fact, this is not... I am not an attorney, and I am not an HR professional, so this is not legal advice.

I would encourage you to figure that out on your own, but, like, I've been around the block enough to know that you can't treat contractors like you would employees. The government is gonna take issue with that. And so anyway, partially because I knew that I wanted to interact with my employees in the way that you would interact with an employee, not a contractor, I do want to have some say over their hours, even though we have basically a make your own work schedule at Visionaries.

I wanted to be able to train them on certain things. You are not allowed to train contractors for the most part. Again, consult with someone who knows more about this stuff than I do, but, you know, in general, like, there were just things that I knew, but also based on the company that I'm building in the long term, we need an in-house company for.

It does not make sense for me to bring on a contractor, maybe for a couple of very specialized things. So that is how I essentially solved my, my bottleneck. We experienced growth so, so, so fast, and there had to be a way to solve it, and the, the solution for it was to bring on more people. And that wound up...

That has set me up for a lot of really great things in terms of growth. Um, I wanted to do a quarterly breakdown of how everything went, and I d- this has already gone on so long, like, I'm only gonna be able to do a brief recap of this. Maybe I'll get more into it in the beginning of part three in terms...

It has just continued to grow and grow and grow and grow and grow, and, um, I can tell you that it's, I don't think it's gonna slow down anytime soon. So I'm really excited to talk about what the future of Visionaries holds, what I am doing to strategically set us up for scale in the future. I knew that I was ready for growth, but how am I starting to look at setting us up for scale?

So how I'm setting myself up for that, what the future of Visionaries looks, looks like, what those three pillars of our business, of Visionaries actually, what they're going to look like in the future in terms of media, in terms of community, and in terms of funding, what does that look like? Where are we going?

That is going to be in part three. I hope this was helpful for you. I will include those list of questions in the show notes if you would like to do this assessment for yourself and sort of see what your high numbers are that you want to solve for are, and I will catch you in the next one