‘Success is messy. It’s not clean-cut.’
Loren Fogelman is a keynote speaker and top-notch business coach. She helps accounting professionals grow a profitable business that supports their lifestyle instead of compromising it. Listen to her story about finding work and life balance.
‘I realized I was the bottleneck to being able to grow my business.’
Loren’s business success story is not linear. Before she started business coaching for entrepreneurs, she ran a therapy clinic with her husband. She’s now using her knowledge in psychology to connect with and support accounting professionals in their entrepreneurial journey.
We touch on several subjects:
– Industrial psychology
– Similarities and differences of therapy and coaching
– Transitioning from in-person business model to virtual
– The importance of delegation
Reach out to Loren on these platforms:
Business Success Solution: https://www.businesssuccesssolution.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lorenfogelman/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/lorenfogelman
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/BusinessSuccessSolution/
John: Thank you for tuning in, don’t forget to subscribe and share this episode. Joining me today is a keynote speaker and top-ranked business coach Lauren Fogelman. After co-owning a therapy clinic with her husband for 12 years. Lauren transitioned from coach into coaching for a better work-life balance. Now she shows accounting professionals how to grow a profitable business that supports their lifestyle instead of compromising it. Thank you for joining me today, Lauren.
Loren: John, I am looking forward to our engaging conversation today.
John: Well, I would love to start of with sharing the audience members like what was that pivotal moment where you wanted to transition. Like you were working in that profession then wanting to help others with this more career aspiration of that bigger goal, so can you share with the audience member what triggered you and what was that.
Loren: Absolutely. First of all, I’ve always worked side by side with my husband Steve. Whether it was in our counseling agency or now he is actually working for me in our business and what I would say is in our counseling agency it was the traditional business model where I was working very long hours. Steve was the director, I was in the front line doing therapy with clients but because of the way the practice was set up a lot of times, I would work into the evening scene clients, and then on weekends I would be doing paperwork to catch up with insurance billing and back-office needs. As a result of that, I’m not just hard-working and missing out on things but I realized that my entire family was paying the price for all these hours that I was devoted to the business. I wasn’t able to go, to all my kid’s sporting events, I would have missed dinners in the evening and I eventually started to burn out that’s when I was looking for another way. I figured there had to be a better way without having to sacrifice my family time, my personal life in order to be able to not only make a living for ourselves but we also had 11 employees from that search, I became aware of business coaching, I actually didn’t know that coaching existed beyond sports at that point. It seemed to have all the missing pieces that I craved which our current agency. At once I realized that the direction I wanted to go in, it took about 18th months for us to replace my position with two employees and for me to gradually phase out from the counseling into the business coaching. But basically, I didn’t want to sacrifice and I didn’t want my family to sacrifice anymore either.
John: So, how long did it take you to replace what you were earning prior? Or was it okay to sacrifice a little bit of the earnings to have a better lifestyle? Because ultimately that’s what it revolves around, right? Living constantly with your kids spending more time so that you don’t live with regret, right? Missing out on those experiences that you only get once in a lifetime.
Loren: What I assure is I didn’t want to create cash stress because all of a sudden I said: “Oh, I’m moving in a different direction and bam I’m done and moving into something new even though I hadn’t built it up yet.” That’s why it took me 18 months to transition what I would do is build up my business coaching that I was doing and as I was started to get new clients and got busier. I would cut one day out from the counseling that I was doing in our agency together, maybe every three to six months I cut out one more day until I was really at capacity and I couldn’t work both really effectively and that’s when at 18th months we finally made the decision for me to be able to fully move in this direction of the business coaching. Instead of having any participation any longer in the agency but I will let you know John that this is something that I wanted, more than Steve wanted me to do because of the fact that we worked really well together. When I would tell Steve ahead of time I’m going to stop coming in on Fridays, he would hear me but it didn’t really sink in until I stopped coming in on Fridays and he’s like why aren’t you coming in. I’m like, “Steve, I told you a month ago.” therefore, he supported me and my direction and my need to move in another direction which I very very much appreciated. However, from his point of view it wasn’t convenient for him.
John: So, Why coaching with accounting firms and not any other industry?
Loren: That was part of the evolution I want to reinforce first that success is messy it’s not clean-cut, what we think is going to happen and what actually happens are two different things. I believe that my reality has a really strong sense of humor, what I think is going to work out very rarely ever works out that way. It was more of evolution I didn’t know that it was going to be pricing that I was going to specialize in or niche with accounting professionals. I knew that I liked a certain type of person, therefore, I always knew the psychographics or the characteristics and personality makeup of the clients that I enjoyed working with the ones that I didn’t enjoy that I was really clear upon it. I thought in the beginning it was going to primarily be service-based professionals, so people that offered some type of service which was a wide range could go from white-collar to blue-collar in the trades, I worked with a wide variety over the years I looked for a specialty. I actually straddled between marketers and accounting professionals because it gave me a variety of marketers are creatives, accounting professionals are more organized and systematized, it was really a great mix for me but it was still a little bit too much of a stretch trying to appeal to these two. I finally just made a decision that the accounting professionals were the ones that I wanted to really focus on and go with it. It was more that I didn’t want to be spread too thin, I will let you know John, even though it feels counterintuitive to narrow down to one particular niche or specialty. It is the best decision I ever made and that’s when things just really started to take off was when I became more clear and defined about who I serve and what I do for them.
John: No. That’s amazing because clarity is optimally what you’re after, right? Owning is becoming a niche expert and then being recognized for it, right? People will distinguish and seek you out based on your expertise so I love that. Growing up, did you ever envision yourself to be like you mentioned not a coach but doing what you passionately love at this stage of your life and how long did it take you to actually figure that out? Because you know growing up with young children running a business to then being a coach and then having a better lifestyle. There’s a lot of pillars, right? A lot of change happened so throughout that journey from going to school to them… I mean, an expert owning your business to then doing all that, how did you manage all that, and then in between having children as well?
Loren: I don’t think that what I did was necessarily fully traditional in so many ways, when I was really young and wanted to be a kindergarten teacher forever and as I grew up my mom was always interested in psychology, she had a subscription to psychology today which I enjoyed reading. Therefore, that part was always present, somehow in my life I was a good listener, I was the person that people came to when they had stuff going on too much drama in their lives, they needed a person to listen to. As a result of that, I knew that psychology was the direction that I wanted to go in, while I was in college though I became aware of industrial psychology. Industrial psychology is actually going into businesses and helping them with efficiencies and looking at how people are working in the workplace and the culture had a love for that. Therefore, a lot of my classes were primarily psychology but all my electives were business based. In the long run I ended up, not going into industrial psychology but being able to open up my own private practice with my husband, where Steve and I had two offices we had 11 employees. Therefore, the business side was always there and that was part of what I brought to our partnership in our agency but when we had kids I had the privilege of staying home for nine years with our kids in order to raise them. We decided that we wanted to be the primary influence in our kids and their values. Instead of being someone else, we made sacrifices in order for me to be able to stay home and be able to really be the primary caregiver for them. At that point, after nine years we actually moved and that was when I went back into working side by side with Steve, the kids were both in school at that point. As I was saying earlier after 12 years, I burned out looking for that next thing and decided to make the switch from therapy into coaching because they have a lot of similarities. The difference is that with therapy it’s more after the fact where you going into why something isn’t working and the history of it and trying to unravel their history whereas coaching I see more future-focused of helping them to achieve their potential. Therefore, a lot of the same dynamics John it was just mainly about going from something that was more focused on the past and problem related as to potential. And the biggest challenge was in 2009 when I made this change, it’s going from a person business where someone was in the room with me, I could pick up on their vibe, I could see their body language going to something that was more virtual. When virtual wasn’t really fully developed at that point it was by phone, everything was by phone there wasn’t any video like I had to figure out how do I pick up on someone, and really be present in the same way when I can’t see what they’re doing and watch their body language. And that’s when I actually made a very conscious decision to develop some type of intuition or sixth sense in order to pick up on what’s going on when I don’t have that visual and their silence and that was probably one of the best things that happened. As I made that transition from an in-person traditional business model into the virtual realm when there wasn’t this face-to-face going on at that time.
John: That’s amazing. I guess over the years you refined it, you created more efficiency, productivity, and just by doing allowed you to learn. Pick up on what you like, what you don’t like, and grow from there so I love that. Any of the challenges that you’ve faced, that you would like to share, since being a coach versus when you were more face to face that you can share with some of the listeners and maybe how did you overcome these challenges.
Loren: The biggest challenge is that I tend to be a control freak, as a result of that I was doing a lot for much too long which contributed to part of the burnout from me. And I carried it over into the beginning of my coaching to the point where I was doing my own newsletters, weekly email newsletters to my clients the first year because I didn’t have the cash flow to hire someone but at the time it would take me about eight hours and Steve would have to get the kids out of the house, get them far away to give me quiet. Because as I was trying to do this I would get frustrated now, writing the letter was not a problem it was formatting the letter. This was back like I said in 2009 where I would format it on AWeber that was the mail server, email service I was using, it would look good and then I would test it and it wasn’t aligning it, didn’t look as pretty as I wanted to as far as my planning goes, it was so frustrating to take an entire day to get out one simple newsletter. At that point I realized a couple of things when I brought up my next clients, I found the next client I vowed, I was going to highest, I want to do what I struggled with and I realized that I was the bottleneck to really being able to grow my business and by struggling with things, I wasn’t really very efficient at it, it was really holding me back in other ways. What I saw was once I hired that first virtual assistant she was able to do it in one hour what took me eight hours, it was because I needed certain software that I didn’t even realize that I needed and that was what keeping me from being able to do it so efficiently. Therefore, I recognize “Oh my gosh, if I’m the bottleneck in one way, I must be the bottleneck in other ways too.” I had to be able to learn how to work with people more effectively and be able to delegate things, to get things off my plate and really go for sometimes good enough. Instead of perfection in order to grow and not end up having that burnout again. Therefore, once again there were things I was holding on to that were out of my zone of genius they actually felt like punishment, and if the whole family once again suffered I didn’t want that any longer, and the other thing is sometimes I’m the bottleneck to my own success, I need to recognize that but I believe that’s true for most business owners.
John: Yeah, like being in control is definitely why you went into business, right? But then let go and then understand where your gaps are because as a business owner you feel you can do everything better than anyone else.
Loren: No longer, John.
John: No longer. So for me, that’s exactly the same way trying to acknowledge the gaps, understanding there are better people out there doing something that they love, own, and will do it way faster less expensive, and less stressful, right? And it took years to figure out as well, so I’m glad that you shared that. And then did you have to pivot because sounded like you moved to this coaching. You mentioned marketing and also accounting, like when did you decide to just fully commit to the accounting and how long did it take you to ramp up? To say “Look I’m going to be the specialist for this niche”.
Loren: It took longer than I would have liked, when I was in our counseling practice I actually had a specialty there. My specialty was working with high-level professionals who had a combination of addictions and post-traumatic stress disorder. Therefore, I knew the benefits of a specialty in coaching it took many years and I believe it was more of a process of peeling away the layers of an onion, where I realized who I didn’t want to work with or which professions weren’t a good fit for me. I think It’s one of the things that really important is sometimes we don’t just jump into a niche or a specialty, it’s more that we do it by process of elimination and realize who we don’t want to work with or who’s not a great fit for our services. But the specialty which I have is how to price your services that were actually there, all this time. Because I love helping entrepreneurs be able to make more money than what they think it’s possible, showing them how to get comfortable with it, how some of the price strategies that are out there are actually unfair to them as well as their clients. Once the pricing piece was actually consistently over there I just didn’t realize it until I got really tuned in to how do I separate myself from other coaches. The part with the niche where I was choosing a particular profession was more gradual, it took probably about seven years or so where I straddled between the marketers and the accounting professionals for several years, then it was one of my coaches who happens to be very specialized with communication. She knew I was straddling, she was like just make an effing decision and it was from there that I said “Okay, I need to really commit to the other one or that’s when I looked at both the pros and the cons and moved in the direction of accounting professionals.” even though I made that decision, John. It probably took me another 18 months or before I changed everything on my website to accounting professionals, it was still very generic saying “Entrepreneurs, Entrepreneurs, Entrepreneurs everywhere.” and then I would say within the last year anything where it says Entrepreneurs, I reframed and I rewrote so it was very specific to the accounting profession and once again it was just a relief, it was the best thing I ever could have done. Because now I have people seeking me out, because of the fact that I have this niche with accounting professionals, because I specialize in the pricing piece and it made things easier instead of harder.
John: I think the big thing is learning, that once your niche down the systems and processes in the back end is streamlined, right? You have everything in the works, right? You don’t have to customize anymore, you already have a standardized system you can personalize but it’s a lot easier to do that. I love the way you structured it, like it took you some time but eventually, you realize how important it is because ultimately it’s the customer. It’s all the users are typing in accountant pricing, right? Not so much entrepreneur pricing because they relate to being an accountant themselves, so understanding that whole gap is pivotal.
Loren: There’s one other thing I want to add to that I noticed over the last year as well as when people are reaching out to me is now part of what they say. It’s because you work with accounting professionals and the fact that I specialize, I know their specific pain points as well as how to be able to fix those things is very very kind attractive.
John: Because they know the person, the performance of the accountants are usually trustworthy, authentic and someone that actually gets numbers, right? So, I love that. Were there any mistakes that you made that you would like to share, that you would have or could have, or if you could have reversed you would have done differently?
Loren: Okay, well I don’t know if I would have done it differently because I believe that success has so many insights and I want to be able to learn from them in order to be able to get it right. the next time. Therefore, first of all the way that I look at mistakes is different than most people once it gives me insights. I prefer to say either I hit the mark or I miss the mark similar to when you have archery and you have the target with the bullseye in the middle and then concentric rings. When I miss the mark I might be off by a couple of rings so I might have totally not even hit the whole target at all or and when I hit the mark I got that bullseye and when I’m off the mark, it allows me then make some adjustments in order to be able to get closer to really getting it right, next time I just wanted to reframe that because that’s something that I saw. One of the challenges that came up as I was going into the business coaching, is that I started a second business again, I started doing sports psychology as well as business coaching. Well, I had two businesses the sports psychology was the sexy one because I was working with athletes. So, they’re highly motivated and they always want to be able to do the best that they possibly can. They’re very very coachable because they get started as p ways being coach but I was doing the business coaching also and I found myself once again stretched too thin. I didn’t want to be able to work that many hours and after five years of doing both of them, I decided to once again put sport psychology on the back burner and that’s the one I thought was going to be the one but I ended up doing a launch to my email list. That was more athletes related and I had crickets, I had no response to that particular launch that’s when Steve came to me and had this really caring heart-to-heart conversation with me about the reality of what’s going on. Even though they’re sexy, it’s fun, I think that I felt like the one to me I was really getting most of my clients and the results with the business coaching, I decided to put sports psychology on the back burner. I took three months to really once again revamp and rebrand myself and had a specific date that “Okay, by September 1st I’m going to be ready to really focus and come out with the business coaching.” And I went quiet for those three months, I restructured everything and on that date September 1st I relaunched and rebranded. Some of the responses I got from people on my email list was that I was just waiting for you to do that and really appointing me for that decision. Therefore, what I thought and as I said my reality has a sense of humor and what actually happened were two different things.
John: I think that applies to a lot of entrepreneurs, right? You always come in with an executive summary or a kind of business proposal. In reality, it comes to fruition you have to decide with decisiveness and choice and go with what your customers want to see you. It’s like you want to serve an audience but maybe they don’t want to serve you or they’re not your type of company, right? So, you just have to pivot and figure it out so I love that.
Loren: One of the things that did happen during that time when I was rebranding, is I really looked at what I was doing with sports psychology and the mindset of high-performing athletes, and I was able to bring that into what I did with the business coaching. Therefore, maybe the branding went away but how I work with people was something that I bought in and I actually think that it enhanced the service that I offered.
John: Amazing. I wanted to ask you about the email that you were sending out, was it based on the clients that you already done business with? Or was it more of an outreach? Because you already have a relationship with people and then you’re pivoting away to that new coach.
Loren: It was messy, it was like a mutt that you would get from the pound because when I first went from a counseling agency into coaching I started out business coaching and I started to develop an email list of business coaching clients. After a couple of years, I moved in the direction of sports psychology, and then I had all these sports psychology on people in my email list. Once I put that on the back burner and went back into the business coaching, I still have athletes on my email list from when I first started doing this. So, I believe that my email list is kind of a mess and I continue to clean it up but it has some people from when I first started doing business coaching back in 2009, that had followed me through the sports piece and then back into business coaching it had some athletes still on it and then it has actually the majority is my current focus with the accounting professionals and I’m continuing to clean it up in order for it to be really specific and geared to the people that I work closest with now.
John: That’s really good and it takes time, right? To not just harvest a good email list but put attributes, start making sure that you define it and clean it up to scrub it so that it’s active people that you actually want to serve or someone that knows you so I love that.
Loren: Well, I do want to say I don’t like seeing when people unsubscribe. I put a rule in my email that “If somebody unsubscribes it just immediately goes into my delete file and I never ever see that.”
John: Which is great, right? Because if they don’t want you, why should you be out there giving them information, right? It applies and then of course, it’s like creating good enough content that they will stick open read and then hopefully land on that page, so that whole sequence is important. Looking back at your life now, was there anything you would have done differently first off? And then secondly, are you satisfied with where you’re at today?
Loren: I’m very very happy. Let’s start with where I’m at today is really beautiful, I feel like I have a dream life that I always aspire to have. However, it took a lot of hard work, effort and it still takes a lot of work and effort but one of the things that I believe and I learned from sports psychology is you don’t want to aim for complacency. Because when you aim for complacency there’s someone else who’s hungrier than you are, they eventually are going to be able to move you out or you end up like blockbusters and border stores where you think that you have it made, you’re top of it and you don’t see the signs and eventually, you’re not able to keep up and it’s like the downhill slide for you. I’m always looking to improve what I’m doing and I seek mastery where I realize that I want to be a student first, I always want to be in learning mode in order to continue to excel at what I’m doing. I believe that’s part of the sports psychology that comes over into how my business is set up now, also I’ve made a lot of mistakes along the way and I believe that it’s all about a learning process. The way that I approached it was first of all I tend to be fiercely independent, and asking for help is very very difficult but when I move from being a therapist into business coaching the very first thing I did was hire a very high-level business coach. I didn’t even have a business I was just ready to move into the transition into it but I wanted to fast track my results by working with someone who already achieved what I wanted for myself and with that intention, I made an $18,000 investment into someone who lived at the other side of the country and I had to travel several times a year because I was so committed to doing this. With that, I found that not only was I fiercely independent, asking for help was difficult but I saw the benefits of it. The other thing that I found that was I believe a process for me is with psychology, I was always trained to really be a blank slate to my clients and not let them know about me. Therefore, my private life was very very private. I brought that into the coaching in the beginning because that’s how I had been trained is to focus on the other client not on me and I needed to learn how to be transparent and being transparent was very very difficult. When I came from being so private it was counterintuitive and the most difficult part was I had to get rid of that look good that I had all the time. Let people know that, yes I do make mistakes, I do get in my own way, it is messier than what you think it is sometimes just like I’m willing to share with you now John, this would have been so difficult to talk about at the beginning of 2009, but the other thing that I realized is that when I first got into social media I had to figure out what my comfort level was and that was probably the hardest part was figuring out social media in 2009 when it was still in its beginning stages also that’s when I came up with the idea that there’s a difference between private and personal. If I don’t want something on the ticker tape of the New York times square headlines then it’s private and I don’t want to share that, but something that’s personal might actually benefit somebody else and I’m okay with doing that. Therefore, making some of those mistakes especially with the social media part of it, about how much transparency is within my comfort level, and coming up with the difference between the private and the personal really has been very helpful.
John: Yeah and especially when you’re the face and you’re starting something new, you have to show a little bit more vulnerability, show a little bit about yourself because that will paint a good picture or not based on the perception of what people think of you, and if you’re starting new like as a coach or a mentor it’s all about you know, why should they choose you so they’re gonna dig a little bit deeper about your story before they make a decision, that’s great that you acknowledge that.
Loren: I think that’s part of what you’re saying because I think it’s so important to highlight this, I wanted people to be vulnerable with me but I didn’t want to be vulnerable with them and that probably is the essence of what I had to learn.
John: Yeah, but it takes time, right? Especially if you haven’t been this habit of yours then trained for so many decades not even years, right?
Loren: I’m not that old, come on.
John: But it’s true, it’s happening and that you haven’t just had to be broken for better habits. So question back on the coach and mentors that you had previously, you mentioned you spent quite a bit you traveled to this person, did they make you more comfortable, more vulnerable? Like what added value did they bring to the table that you didn’t acknowledge yourself, was it more about a different perspective? Was it more about being account-held more accountable? Because someone’s watching, because I always talk to coaches and mentors and I have some myself and I feel it’s a lot of commitment but it’s all about action right, what are you gonna do after you have this coach and mentor that you’re not doing today to hold yourself accountable?
Loren: When I first signed on with this my very first business coach she asked me why I wanted to work with her I told her that “I knew that I could achieve what I wanted on my own, I had complete confidence in that.” But the fact that she had achieved it already would help me to fast track my results that was why I started with her. Also, I was going from a traditional brick and mortar service-based profession into business coaching which was more virtual and had a little bit of a different business model to me. I didn’t understand it, I really needed someone to help me understand how that process worked when I never had done it before myself plus I wanted to be able to start to define why I was the person that someone would choose instead of somebody else and the main thing that I have invested for my coaches is, let me back up what I found is there are certain gaps in my learning and my education that I needed to be able to get better or get insights as to how to do, in order to be able to have a profitable business that was going to work for me. The three things that I realized I needed to be able to understand was how to price and deliver my services especially when it was virtual. So, I didn’t really understand the marketing piece I am and I needed to understand the marketing piece how to be able to sell my clients when I didn’t really like to be salesy, and the third one was how to be able to network and speak when that when I tend to be more of an introvert than an extrovert and I would say that’s what I have invested, most of my coaching is really the marketing, the sales, and the speaking or presentation part because the school gave me all the skills that I needed to do really really well. However, they also trained me to be employed by somebody else as opposed to employing other people and I needed to understand what it took to be a successful business owner and doing it virtually as opposed to brick and mortar. I knew what I always know, what gaps I have to be able to continue to move forward and evolve and I look for a coach that specializes in that particular thing, in order for me to gain the insights and the skills I need to be able to continue progressing and being on my own journey.
John: That’s amazing and I think acknowledging those gaps is as important because you’re blinded when you’re so deeply involved in your business, it’s very hard to acknowledge and so reaching out, uncovering, and understanding what other skills that you’re lacking is important. Have you noticed that you’re now doing everything digitally and online there’s no borders, there’s a lot of people searching online, there’s a lot of more competition. However, that you’re competing with it’s not just a localized, you know bricks and mortar what other barriers are you encompassed with, now that there’s no borders there’s a lot of people competing. Have you noticed there’s a big huge more competition I would say, into your kind of profession and your career choice now?
Loren: Competition is a mindset and what I believe is that there’s absolutely no competition because even if somebody’s doing something similar they’re probably doing it in a different way, based on their life experiences and how they perceive things or their personality. Someone’s going to be choosing one person or the other based on personality fits and many other factors. Actually, what appealed to me with going in this direction in 2009 was the fact that there was geography was not an issue any longer and it allowed to gave me so much freedom John, it allowed me to test it where I have worked with clients from all over the world that I never ever would have worked with if I would have remained regional and local but the other part is that Steve and I absolutely love to travel and our kids live all over. We’ve tested running my business from all different parts of the world and it gave us freedom as opposed to feeling more constrictive.
John: That’s amazing and that’s the best part about this digital world, in this online space you can do meetings anywhere, you can connect to the internet, and with technology advancing so quickly. You know, you could be on a cruise ship or on an airplane doing the work so I love it. Early days and I know you’ve done the bricks and mortar and then you scaled, did you liquidate? Did you sell your business? Did you eventually dissolve it? Like, what was your exit before starting it again, did you buy or did you start from scratch again? Knowing how to run a business at the beginning.
Loren: Actually with our very first business the counseling agency we bought that, and that’s when we learned never again do we want to buy somebody else’s business. It was an expensive warning mistake. However we grew and we gained so much out of it, how to pivot, how to be able to go from what was known as someone else’s brand into our branding with going from the therapy into the coaching. As I said It took 18th months Steve continued to own and operate the counseling agency we had for another four years and he grew because I stepped up, he grew because he took on so much that I had left behind and I still there to talk with him and consult with him but I just wasn’t a part of that business any longer. After four years we actually successfully sold our counseling agency to somebody else, Steve retired for a year trying to figure out what it is that he wanted to do. We always loved working together, that was really something that was a sweet spot about our entire career is that we’ve worked together for so many years then we started figuring out where does Steve fits in my business. That had the good, the bad, and the ugly because in the beginning I would give Steve things that I didn’t want to do, he’s a very very sweet loving man he would say yes and then he would do them for a while and you could see that he didn’t really enjoy them and then he would just gradually not do them as much to where he wasn’t doing them at all that created some tension between us because couples in business together have some additional complexities that other businesses don’t have and we grew so much from us having a role reversal because our counseling agency Steve was the director and I was the front line with the business coaching. It was my business and Steve is an employee in my business and we have different styles as being the head of a business I found that with Steve I tend to abdicate, I just think that he knows how to do it because he’s worked so closely with me all these years and I just throw something in his lap, instead of really training him and working with him. We had to figure that part out also but over the years of doing this, we finally found what is the sweet spot for Steve, with helping and supporting me it works really really well and I absolutely feel so blessed that we’ve been able to figure out how to continue working together in a way that I believe expands our relationship instead of creating tension on it.
John: That’s amazing, I love hearing these stories. One last question Lauren that I would like to ask, aside from business we talked about your pivot new role as a coach, I know you mainly talk about the lifestyle choices and the sacrifice that you made. What has molded you to become who you are today? Like, I know family is very important, your husband, kids and you’re able to travel. What about a lot of people talk about impact community? You know a lot about health contributions. What are some of the other major factors besides family for you?
Loren: There’s actually two primary things I wanna share on, the very first one is a concept it’s a Hebrew word talk called “Tikkun Olam” I’ll go ahead and spell it T-I-K-K-U-N O-L-A-M. Tikkun Olam literally means repairing the world, even as a therapist I realized that was my purpose to be able to help people to heal themselves, to be able to move forward and get out of their own way by doing that and as they are able to continue to better themselves and their own lives they are having a positive effect on other people also. So, it’s a wave effect if I can help someone I know that they’re taking someone, they’re helping someone else and it goes on and on and on. As I go up the ladder I take other people up the ladder with me, they take other people up the ladder with them. Tikkun Olam has been there throughout my entire professional career and journey that’s the very first thing, the second thing especially with what I’ve seen over this past year regarding accounting professionals I believe that they are unsung heroes, and many many business owners and entrepreneurs are unsung heroes but I want to specifically go with accounting professionals. When covert first happened and all these businesses shut down I watched a county professionals go ahead and help their clients with having insights regarding their businesses, helping them make strategic decisions regarding the financials to be able to remain afloat, helping them with applications for loans, to be able to get outside money and having to learn something new on what these loans meant, how to apply for them, what would be the consequences of doing it one way versus the other way, they devoted countless hours now that they never got paid for. To be able to help their clients, I saw them actually as first responders just like all the healthcare, just like the police and the firefighters. I saw them as first responders also in a different way it really gave me a renewed respect for them but I realized that they are unsung heroes and it really reaffirmed my decision for wanting to work with them because they were part of the solution when everything changed and pivoted in a moment’s. Notice for other business owners and small business owners are the backbone of the first world economy, we are the ones small business owners there’s more of them than anybody else, we are the ones that are really sustaining our economies whether locally or virtually, and accounting professionals really were part of that solution when everything shut down and they were able to be there without question for their clients and as a result, I think that we all did so much better than we could have.
John: That’s amazing to hear, I love that. I still truly believe SMB’s we local business owners, I truly support them and this is the reason I do what I do, to help the small-medium, small guys. We are the 95 percent of the population in the first world countries so I love supporting them. Well, thanks a lot I really appreciate your time Lauren. Is there anything you would like to add or would you mind sharing how people can reach you and your website and message you directly?
Loren: If somebody is interested in what I’ve been talking about regarding the pricing wanting to get more insights as to how to be able to rise about above the congress, the competition and be that go-to expert. I actually have a free resource called get paid what you’re worth it is something that shows you how to define yourself, how to get out of your own way, how to be able to start to price your services or value instead of charging for your time. Being able to really talk about what your clients most care about, instead of what you think they care about and you can go ahead and get paid what you’re worth book at https://www.businesssuccesssolution.com/ forward/worth that is the best way to actually start out and connect with me. Go ahead and grab that ebook and then if you wanted to have a further conversation with me it gives you the resources on how to do that as well.
John: Amazing. Lauren, I’m gonna have that in the show notes. I really appreciate your time and you’ve been doing a great job pivoting and I love that you’re helping support the SMB especially accountants, which are first like responders during this pandemic so I love that. Thanks a lot, Lauren.
