Will
Welcome to another episode of We love entrepreneurship and I'm excited today. I have Stacy Brass russell with me and Stacey. Why don't you actually just start off by saying hello and tell them a little bit about your business and what you do?

Stacey
Well, hello, Hi. Well, I'm so happy to be here. Thank you for having me. Um so I'm a life and business success strategist, and what that means is I work with mostly creative and I call it soulful people who are really looking to find their voice and use their gifts and skills to create lives as well as businesses that you know, that are that are really helping them to do what they really want to be doing.

So they're using their gifts and skills. Part has to do with helping people too often create new businesses, make transitions, uh, start to do something new because they get to a point in their life where they realize that what they're doing is not lighting them up.

Will
I love that. Um, I love the work that you're you're doing now in your business. Um, I'm curious, I want to go down this road of your journey with you. Um, what were you doing prior to, you know, helping these people actually build their businesses?  What were you doing before you took on this role?

Stacey
So I've had an interesting journey. Um I started my, my career when I was 10 and I was on broadway. Yeah, come on. We had contracts, but there were no child labor laws when, when, when, when Annie opened on broadway and uh, and employed lots of little girls. So, Um, you know, that was, that was a very interesting time to be a working actor doing eight shows a week when we were 10 years old. Um they don't do that anymore.

But so yeah, so when I, from that time I never thought I'd be anything really other than a performer and I pursued my career for many years, a couple of decades. Um and I worked a lot um but a theater performer, theater performing is not like movies and tv it's not it's not as lucrative. And so um you know, even if you are working actor, when you're in theater, it's hard to get ahead and so you always have to have a money job or something lined up in between shows.

And for me, I really didn't enjoy waiting tables in it and I had the opportunity to do a yoga teacher training. I loved yoga, I was a serious practitioner and uh someone you know, the studio that I was practicing at was doing a teacher training. And and I thought well maybe teaching yoga will be more enjoyable for me in between acting jobs than waiting tables. And so when I first became a yoga teacher, it was not with the intention of it being a major career shift, but I started teaching, I loved it.

And then I think you and I have talked about this as with anything if you want to be successful and you want to make money, you have to go all in, like you can't make money at something if you're really thinking of it as like a part time or hobby, like you have to invest, you have to investors. And so I really wanted to get to the point where I was more financially independent. I wanted to have my own apartment, not have roommates. Um you know, I wanted to feel like I had a life and so I really put my all in and I became a very successful Yoga instructor.

And then about 10 years into that I had the opportunity, a student that um was in finance, that was a yoga enthusiast. He basically approached myself and another yoga teacher about opening a yoga studio. And so I took that, I took that risk and I opened a small business um and I opened the studio here in new york city and I owned that studio for a couple of years. Um and then, you know, business partnerships are not always, they don't always work out, sometimes they sometimes they start going south and so, you know, it was very challenging at the time that we opened our studio, there was a boom uh you know, a yoga studio boom in new york.

And um so many studios opened within the same year as us and the competition got really, really strong and you know, making money and and and having a spot in that market was It was really harder than we thought it was going to be. And so, you know the pressure and the stress of having to make money um with something like yoga, which is not something that you can really keep raising your prices. You know, you can't just make yoga classes $50. So um you know, it started to become more, it's not even like I don't want to work hard or kind of stress in order to have a successful business, but it wasn't, it wasn't enjoyable anymore.

And it started to feel like my um just kind of my integrity about what I really believe about yoga was starting to have to I was going to have to change what I really believe about yoga and yoga teaching in order to make more money. And so I left And I got more certifications. I became a certified health coach life coach and then I did an advanced coaching certification and I started my own business and that was literally three years ago. Well May of 2018 was really when I started my coaching business and um it's evolved, you know, I started out thinking I'm gonna be a health and life coach.

And then what was very natural was how many people were coming to me because they had seen what I had done, they had seen that I had evolved so many times and successfully tricked it and change my career is to continue to use my gifts and to follow my passion. Um and so people started coming to me for that. And all of a sudden I was a business coach, you know, because I owned a small business and I made these successful transitions and such a big part of having a successful business is really being clear on your mission and your message and knowing how to leverage your unique gifts and skills.

And so I discovered that I had a natural ability to do that for myself and now I help other people do that

Will
Man. You said a whole lot. I just want to go back and just talk about some of the things that you said. Um one of the things that you said that was that was interesting. It seems like your story is this uh story of growth and evolve in how you transition from broadway to yoga to now to your your current um coaching business that you're actually running.

One of the things that you said is that there were some challenges there with a business partner. What did you learn from that experience? And maybe you can share with some people because I would think that some people that's listening probably have business partners that they are not working out. How did you make that transition? And what advice would you give their about being in business with someone else?

Stacey
Wow. Yeah. So you it's it's funny. Um the the partnership began where I thought we had a shared vision and I think that vision is really, really important, whether you're working alone or working with other people.  You know, I have created uh two systems actually. Um one is called evolve, which is the system of change and that's how I help people to really change their their brain change their mindset that they can actually except making these kinds of changes because we have a lot of limiting beliefs and we have a lot of stories, there's plenty of things in our minds that keep us from thinking that we can make these big shifts and changes. And then the other system is called served. And that's my business strategy system that I created for service-based businesses.  And in both of those systems, there's a V and right evolve and serve. And the V in both of those systems stands for vision or visualize because I believe that having a vision for what you really want is so important. So when I started that business partnership, I thought that we had a shared vision. I, you know, if I were to say, what would I, what could I tell people? If I was going to give any advice, I would have probably gone more fully with that vision.

I don't think that we really looked at what ultimately we all really saw for this particular business, a yoga studio. I thought we were in alignment. And what I learned was that when, when things got challenging, um, we didn't, everyone else was willing to abandon the vision and I was, and I think that that is something that I think would be really important. If I were to ever work with someone again, I would want us for us to kind of anticipate that things are not just going to be, you know, necessarily easy.

Like you don't necessarily see tremendous growth or, or amazing revenue in your first few years of the business. The partner that I had, that was the finance guy, he approached us because we were, we were this the head teachers of a very popular studio and he thought, oh, I'm going to grab. These two teachers were going to open a studio and all their followers are going to come, but that's not what happened. We were still a new business. And when he didn't see profit in the first couple of months, he got cold feet and panic, He didn't leave.

But things shifted. The other thing I'm going to say about partnership, which is, which is really important about, you know, other than other than vision is also just how So here's another thing compare and despair. So I believe that when you look at the market, when you look at your market that you're in and I have to do this now as a coach, I mean there's tons of coaches, there are tons of business coaches. There are lots of people that do what I do at various degrees of varying degrees of success. Right?

I mean, I'm a multiple six figure business owner right now, but there are coaches that are Multiple seven figure coaches out there. Right? So when you're looking at your quote unquote competition and you're looking at at the market, you have to have the ability to look and either be inspired or get him or ask yourself how could what that person is doing? Like how, what, what, what would I like to look at and ask myself if that is how I could use them as an inspiration to grow my business and scale my business.

But what doesn't work is to look at someone else's business, get really, really upset that you're not in the same place and then start having a frantic panic approach to trying to grow too fast. And that is what happened with my partner, my one, the other teacher that I was partners with, she would look at other studios and see things that they were doing, but wouldn't know anything about who was funding them, how they got that least right that she wanted to open a second studio before we were profitable.

And I, and she was like, look at what they're doing, they've only been open a year and I would say, but you have no idea, like, you don't know, like if someone like loves them and gave them, like in the unbelievable rent on that, you don't know if they've, if they have people that are funding them, you never know what the circumstances are when you look at someone's business and what's facing forward, right? What's the front facing us? And so these are my advice. These are the things that I would say if you were going to work with someone, you want to make sure that they share similar philosophies is you about how they're going to approach the business and how they're going to approach, even like dealing with the fact that you're always going to be looking at your competitors, you're always going to be looking in the market and seeing what other people are doing.

And it's really important not to go down this road of compare and despair and try and and always be scrambling and changing your plan because you think that someone else is getting further along than you. So I think if I was going to make an essence of what I just said, it still comes back to the same thing when you set out your course, of course you may have to course correct. Of course you may have to like adjust. We always adjust. I call it micro adjusting.

But what you don't do is look at other people and then decide to throw your whole plan out the window thinking it doesn't work. So, you know, things take time, right, Success takes time. So I hope that was a hope. I hope that was a good answer to that question.

Will
Yeah, no, it was great. I think it was packed with a lot of good information because I think a lot of people do look at other people, especially social media, right? Look at people's business, social media says, hey, I want to do that. Yeah.

And we don't know what they're doing that we don't even know if it's working

Stacey
Exactly exactly. You have no idea what's going on behind the scenes and you know, I mean this is something I talked about all the time. There are so many at least in the coaching world and in the marketing world. You know I get I get hit up on LinkedIn constantly by people saying like want 10 to 15 qualified leads per week or you know like all people saying or coaches saying like I'll teach you how to have a multi six or seven-figure business working 10 hours or less, you know, and, and I tell my clients and like that's not a thing like that's not a thing, like I've never met anyone who, who has a successful business who basically talked about that their entire goal or the whole model, maybe at some point when you have a team and you have all kinds of automated things or you're the kind of person that can create your products or courses or things that sell themselves.

Maybe you get to the point where yeah, you make money in your sleep, but when you're starting a business, especially as an entrepreneur or small business, anyone who tries to make you think that they can help you go from like having no clients and not a lot of revenue to, you know, five-figure months, working 10 hours a week in, you know, in three months there, their bs ng you, you know, like that's not a thing. So, yes, what you see on social media, you have to be very careful about, you know, what you're going to believe, You've got to know, you have to know what it really takes to be successful.

Will
Yeah, so interested. And one of things that you had, you said is that people tend to think that they start with zero clients and they're gonna have 30, right working with someone.  What do you think is the biggest challenge that gets in the way with business owners, getting new clients? What's, what's the, what's happening there? What's your take on that?

Stacey
My take on that is a couple of things. First of all, I mostly focus on service-based businesses, right? I mean, that's what I know, I mean, I come from, yeah, yoga coaching.

These are businesses where you're providing a service and you know, people are people are spending money, we'll call it investing or spending money in, in something that is very experiential, right? It's not, we we can say that certain things will give people certain outcomes. But the bottom line is that we can't guarantee outcomes when we're in the service-based business. We we just can't, we can't say, I promise you that you're going to have a completely new set of beliefs. You're going to have a totally shifted mindset.

I believe in the work that I do, and it's a partnership because someone else has to be able to show up and do the work that will help them to shift their mindset. I'm not a magician. Right? And so and so the thing that I think keeps a lot of uh service-based businesses and business small businesses from getting clients is not knowing that in in a service-based business, you have to give people a way of building up their know like and trust before they're going to invest. Now. You know, if you're a yoga studio, I own the yoga studio. Yeah, if someone wants a yoga class, they're gonna look around, they're gonna look at a website, they're gonna go, this one looks good and they're going to try it and it's not a big deal investment, right? It's a couple of bucks. And if they don't like it, they'll go somewhere else. But but I think that like when you're an entrepreneur when you're someone that does what I do when you're making one client at a time, and those clients are investing, you know, money right there, investing more than $20.

Um, I think that right in these times, you actually really do have to be a content creator. You can't just advertise. You actually have to give people ways of receiving value from you. You have to be seen and heard like, here you are doing a podcast, right? You you have to find ways to offer value and be of service. And for people to find, you know, to reach you to connect with you to engage with you knowing that they, I call it your yellow brick road. That's what I call your client pathway.

You need to get people onto your yellow brick road and then you need to know that they may have to like he's on down the road before they're gonna. In fact, they need ways to stay, they need ways to connect with you there. Most people are not going to go from not having any connection to your, knowing who you are, to investing hundreds, thousands of dollars with you to be there, whatever their advisor, their coach, their consultant, their mentor, um they're not going to make that leap without having a way of being connected to you.

And so I really do think that one of the mistakes of getting that people think about getting clients is that you just have to literally hang a shingle and tell people what you do. But what you really need to be able to do is show people how you really helped them and and having that clarity, not just being able to say this is what I do, but being able to say this is how I help you. This is the problems that I solve and and being able to express that with clarity.

Um, that's what people want here. They wanted it. It's all about them and it should be, and that is one of the number one mistakes. Even when my clients, they're getting their website ready and you go to their home page and it says, hi, I'm Stacy, I'm this, I'm this, I have these certifications, I do that and I say, no one's gonna stay. They need to get to your website and it needs to say, hi, if you're having a problem creating clients in your business and if you don't really know, you know what how how to generate income, I can help you with that problem.

And then you say, when we work together, you know, this is what this is what will be happening for you. You know, I don't guarantee money outcomes, but I guarantee clarity on message and niche and, you know, and and knowing how to build up your content so that you give people a way of connecting with you. So that is those are some of the biggest mistakes I see uh service based on entrepreneurs making.

Will
Yeah, I love the yellow brickk road and and having them ease on down the road Stacy.  I love that. I might actually steal that from you Stacy. Love that.  Stacey you've you've shared so much up into this point. I guess my question for you is like, what does personal development look like to you? What are you doing to continue to evolve and grow?

Stacey
So this question, so personal development to me is is every one of us, every human being is put here to fulfill their potential. And personal growth and development is when you wake up to that, when you know that that is what you're here to do is that you're here to fulfill your potential, your greatest potential and that's something that you make a choice to do.

And it's something that you do every single day that your life is, is a sum of all of the little choices that you make it every single day, what you do, what you think and what you put out into the world is becoming the big, the big picture outcome of of your life and so what do I do? I have a very, very um disciplined, I don't like the word discipline because that's what makes it sound austere and not fun, but I have a morning routine and I have actually talked about this.

I wrote a chapter in a book that was a collective, a collective written by coaches and my chapter is called How to Have a Great Day and it's all about the importance of what you do in the morning. And if you, you know, look at any successful, major successful person in any area, not just financial but the most successful people they will tell you that how they start their day is what they attribute their success to. And so for me, every single day I wake up and I check my mindset.   Your brain is,  our brains are so complex and may have a tendency to skew toward the negative and what's not going well.  And if we don't immediately capture our brains when we first wake up, we there's a chance that they're going to go off into dark thoughts or that they're going to start going into compare and despair, or they're going to go into thinking that we're not good enough, all the things that our brains do, why they, why they do that. I don't know, maybe it's so that we have to wake up every day and ask ourselves, how am I going to, how am I going to step into my potential today?

And so that's what I do. And every single morning I do, I take some time for silence or meditation. I sometimes I I journal a little bit um where I write down affirmations that are coming to me or I exercise or I, you know, I breathe, but I do things every single morning. Um, I am also very aware that I look, I don't have kids and I Uh, and I make my own schedule. And so therefore I don't, I don't even schedule clients before, usually the earliest is 10:30 or 11, so that I can have my morning to do what I want to do.  And then sit down and focus and be creative because I, I make a lot of content and that that requires my ability to kind of, you know, be in that mode. Um but but I start my day, I literally wake up every day and I and I open my eyes and I and I take a moment and I go, how am I today? How am I feeling? And then I take it from there and I have a toolbox of practices um and that's how I believe I'm and I am growing right now, I'm scaling my business, I'm expanding, I'm growing as a person and as an entrepreneur and as a coach and I believe it's because of that.

Will

I love, I love that, I love what you said, one of the things I'm going to try to draw out of you for my listeners, that's here. Something that you just said, it's really interesting and a lot of entrepreneurs struggle with it. Um, but you said, hey, your content, your building content right now, what is your strategy or how do you focus there to build content? Are entrepreneurs are all the time? Hey, I don't know how to build content. What are you doing there, Stacey?

Stacey
Yeah. So remember I mentioned earlier my two systems evolve and serve.

Will
Yes. Yeah.

Stacey

So I strongly, I mean, this is what I teach my clients. This is what I help them do. I think that as entrepreneurs, we must know what our framework is. We must know if someone were to say to you like, what's your system or what's your signature system like or what, how do you do your work? Like when someone, when someone is going to come work with you, how do you tell them, like what's going to happen? Right? And so I think that we all need to develop for ourselves that sort of knowing how we do the work you do.

That's when you bring your unique perspective, that's how you really look. Coaching is coaching, right? I didn't I didn't invent coaching. I didn't like, you know, business is business, service-based, businesses, service-based business, how to get clients organically without paying for ads. I didn't make that up. But as as entrepreneurs, what matters is the lens that we are sharing that work through, like our clients work with us because they relate to us. They find they resonate with us, they chose us because they feel a connection.

So how you Do the work is through your unique lens and that's your framework. So everyone's got to know their secret sauce. Everyone's got to know what are the like the 3-5-7 things that make up, like your signature work? What are the things you always talk about? What are the things are most important? Your content should come from there. It should not be a mystery for creating content, right? So if I'm going to make a social media post and I wanted to be for my business, I'm gonna go back to my framework and I'm going to go, which one of these pillars is this content related to?

So that I always know that I can say to someone, you know that I can put in my post or put in my whatever content and doing that I know how this relates back to how I help people and and how I provide value. Now, in addition to that, I'm gonna tell you, I have chosen to build my business on content creation and so I'll give you an example of what I'm doing right now. I have a live event on Saturday, I have a six-day challenge coming up two weeks after that, and then I have a 30 day paid course in July.

Now that's all content and that's all based in my work and I have to have time to to to develop those things. I have to write sales pages, I have to write opt-in pages, I have to write descriptions, I have to write the content itself, have to decide how it's going to be delivered. Um but that's what kind of business I have. I know that not entrepreneurs are selling courses, you know, or running training, something like that. Um but I do think your content if you have clarity on that framework, right?

All of your content should, it should then be easy for you to go instead of racking your brain. I don't know what to post on social media, you should be able to look at your own framework and go, oh, you know what, I'll pick this pillar of the work I do and I'll just pull a nugget from that and I'll develop something, I'll write a post about that around, I'll create some sort of short video, but you know, I'll do a Facebook live or an Instagram life on that one topic.

And it's coming from the very essence of how you help people.

Will
Uh love, love that Stacy. Um love, love what you just said there, you keep talking about these programs, right? Um, and you said there's one coming up any program that you want to kind of share with the community, of something that they should actually connect with you on?

Stacey
Yes. Well, the one on Saturday, I don't know if our, if our podcast will release won't be released. Yeah, Yeah, Yeah, so that, so that is, that's I do live one-day events where I bring in others, so this one, you know, like I love to do that, I call them summits, but they're just one-day events where I usually bring in 6 to 8 guest experts and we and we talk about things that I know that that that my audience will want to hear about.

So the one coming up this week is on mindset, My summer is based on mindset, Um you know, so I have a challenge again, I'm not sure of our dates of the release of this, but there's a challenge starting to 14th, which is high vibe your life 60-Day challenge and you asked me about my personal growth, that's what that challenge is about. It's about six days to, to, to morning, a morning routine of practices that are going to completely help you to high vibe yourself in the morning so that the rest of your day unfolds a certain way.

So that's what that challenges. And then in July a 30-day course on same topic, how to basically elevate and upgrade the way that you're functioning so that you can take better action so that you can make change. One of the things that I talk about all the time is is how often I hear people say, I don't know how or they're very aware of that they want to make a change or they want to do something where they want to take a chance and create something new, but they get stuck behind that.

I don't know how wall or behind all of the thoughts that we have like but I'm not good enough or imposter syndrome or you know not, there's so many things that keep people from taking action on big things, putting themselves out there launching their podcast, reading their book, creating a course, you know, even just being more visible um or having to really manage when, when, when things happen that aren't so great things happen. People, people lose jobs, people have breakups, people die. Like people get, people have unexpected illnesses, like things happen.

But as human beings, we have to be resilient, we have to know how to get to a place after we process where we go. You know what, I still have my life to live. And so this is the focus of my work is helping people to to have minds that can allow them to see possibility and choice. So that's coming up in July so if this launches by then, um, and all of my information obviously is always very visible on my website and things like that, and then, um, in the fall, any entrepreneur that wants to work, you know, well any entrepreneur that wants to work on their business can contact me for one on one any time, but I also have a group program for service-based business is a five-month program and the next one of those is gonna start in the fall, so, you know, it's always good to, to be in my sphere, I call it so that you can find out anything that I have going on.

I do a lot of content and I do a lot of it for free so that I can get uh connected and build relationships with people before I ever asked them to spend a dime.

Will
That's great Stacey. Where can they actually actually find your website? Where can they go to?

Stacye
So, W W W dot StacyBrassRussell dot com. Thats Stacey with an S T A C E Y Brass B R A S S Russell, R U S S E L L all one word dot com.

Will
Love that Stacy.

I've kind of took you all over the place based on what you are saying. But is there anything else or any advice, any nugget you want to share with the community that you have on your heart to share?

Stacey
Um, I will just say that, you know, I really do believe that everyone has an opportunity to evolve and we are not here. You are not here. I'm speaking to your community, you are not here to feel like you're, you're living at half, you know, half volume. You're not here to just tolerate, you're not here to feel that things are mediocre.

You get to decide what you want and how to be successful and it is possible. And so, you know, if there's a burning inside of you to make a change, if there's if you know that you're meant to be doing something, if you're not using your gifts and your skills and your passion, it is an important thing to look at. And I do think that everyone should take whatever steps they need to take in order to feel that you're that you're living out your purpose.

And I just think we all get to do that and as hard as it may be, or sometimes it doesn't seem possible. I'm here to say, I know that it's possible and I and I and I know that everyone should take whatever the steps they need to take in order to do that

Will
Stacy. I absolutely love that, I'm gonna leave you. What one final question the name of the podcast is, We Love Entrepreneurship. Tell the audience why you love entrepreneurship?

Stacey
Oh my goodness! I well look, I'm not, I don't like to make everything about money, but one reason I love entrepreneurship is because I am making more money now than I ever have made.

Like entrepreneurship, meeting solopreneurs ship. I am making more money now than I have ever made in my life. I'm 52 years old, I changed to this business when I was 50 and it is possible, you know to do and so I love entrepreneurship for that and I love entrepreneurship because I am, I am free, I am free. Uh you know, I am free, I work hard and I have to put a lot into my business, but at the end of the day it's my business and I am free and I can do what I want.

And that is probably the number one reason why I love entrepreneurship

Will
Stacy. Thanks so much for being a guest. I appreciate everything that you have shared. I look forward to staying connected with you.

Stacey
Me too. Thank you so much for having me.

Will
Absolutely! Thanks, Stacy.