AP 1188: How Do I Overcome the Fears Around the Growth in My Business?

AP 1188: How do I Overcome the Fears Around the Growth in My Business?

Pat Flynn:
What's up, everybody? Pat Flynn here, and welcome to episode 1188 of AskPat 2.0. You're about to listen to a coaching call between myself and an entrepreneur, just like you. Today we're talking with Stephanie Taylor, who's over in the UK, and she and her sister have a business together. And you'll hear in this story, there's a little bit of a setup here, but it's very relevant because it deals with the topics of today's lesson and today's coaching coaches.

Well, now that we're here, how do we get to the next level? When you find a little bit of success online, you're going to find that you're going to come up to perhaps an even bigger challenge than the one that it took for you to get started. That challenge is well, now that you're making money, how do we make sure we don't lose it? Now that we're making money, how do we grow and scale it? Now there's all these options.

This is the fork in the road that can either lead to burnout to making the wrong decisions and feeling bad about it, and wishing you had stayed the course to where you were at to, perhaps even fearing a little bit of success and stunting your growth because you're not mentally ready to achieve that success, or you might not know what to expect. We're going to talk about a lot of things today.

One of Stephanie's businesses, you can find her at Rent2RentSuccess.com. That is essentially a way that you can rent a home and then rent out the home that you're renting out, I believe. This is in the UK it's a term. Actually, let me look it up just so we're clear. When I heard it initially, I didn't know exactly what that meant, but rent to rent properties, right?

Rent to rent is when you rent a property from a landlord, then you rent the property out again. Basically what I was saying. She and her sister teach this, and they have a course and a membership but they were just getting started at the time of this recording. She came on to ask me, "Well, what do I do next and how do I move to the next level? How do we get over the mental blockages that might happen?"

She knocked that out of the park. We uncover a lot of great things here today and some strategies to help her and perhaps you move forward. I hope you enjoyed this episode. Stephanie was just such a pleasure to speak to and such a kindhearted person you can tell. I look forward to hearing what you think about it. Let's enjoy the show. Here she is, Stephanie Taylor from Rent2RentSuccess.com. That's the number two. Rent2RentSuccess.com.

Stephanie, welcome to AskPat. Thank you so much for joining us today.

Stephanie Taylor:
Wow, it's phenomenal to be here, and I'm sure we'll get into a little bit about why when we start talking.

Pat:
I appreciate you for taking the time. I'm here to help you but I again want to thank you for having you allow us to share this to others too. Why don't we first start with Stephanie, who you are and what you do.

Stephanie:
I'm Stephanie Taylor, I'm based in the UK that you can tell. I have a business with my sister. We've been in business for the last five years before that we didn't know much about business at all apart from thinking that it was something that we would be able to do. Now we have a property management company. It's called HMO Heaven, and we specialize in house shares and transforming them from hellish to heavenly. That's where the heaven comes into it. HMO in the UK is that is a shorthand for a house share.

We started off managing other people's properties, and now we have our own portfolio of properties. We focus on buying blocks of flats and converting commercial property into beautiful, affordable homes for people.

Finally, because we have three buckets of types of business that we have and the last one is Rent 2 Rent Success. That's where we teach other people how to get started in property with little money and do it ethically. Something that Nikki and I, my sister, fell into in our forties. We're so excited to be able to share it with other people.

Pat:
That's so great. It reminds me of a friend of mine who was getting into real estate a number of years back. He saw a billboard on the side of the street to go to this giant convention that this guy, I'm not going to mention any names. He went there, and he got all this advice but then it just felt a little sleazy. It felt a little salesy. It was just unethical the way they were doing business and I... Having a lot of business experience myself, I was telling my friend about, "Okay, this is probably what's going to happen. You're going to have to pay thousands of dollars and all this kind of stuff." Lo and behold, all that stuff happened, and he didn't feel good about it.

I'm glad and I'm thankful that people like you and your sister are coming up to do it the ethically sound way. I just want to say thank you for that. Because that's an important part of it. As you know, that's something that's important to me.

Stephanie:
Definitely, and I think when you have struggled a lot financially and think that it's not an option for you to get involved, I think that's where some of the joy comes from and to say, "Actually, yes, it is." That's a really good way you can do it and feel really good about your business and everyone you work with.

Pat:
Tell me about what's on your mind. Where can we help you from here?

Stephanie:
I got lots of advice. I first came across you and I binge listened because the United Kingdom is quite a little island. I was going on what feels to us like a very big journey, which was from Wales, where I live now to Scotland where I used to live. It's about six to eight hours. I had a lot of time, and I was listening AskPat back to back, but that's where I came across Jacques Hopkins on episode, it was AskPat episode, I wrote a note: 1032.

Then you had him back on 1048, and I was blown away because I didn't really know a lot about online courses. He find out about the thing that he does not from your podcast as well, but that's another story. He quotes the episodes where he learned what he learned, which I learned from him and we both learned it from you.

We created the course and an evergreen funnel with Jacques and that funnel as soon as it was into operation, I had so much resistance about the funnel and the creating it and the technology and all of the things but with the help of a mentor, I was able to get it all up and running in eight weeks which just... It blows my mind how much that one thing really changed our lives so much because we set up the funnel and started it off and the very first month that it was up. There was over 10,000 pounds of sales. I put it in American as well, it's $13,700.

Pat:
That's a good chunk of change right there for a first month, especially.

Stephanie:
It just felt unbelievable. My mom came to stay with me in Wales, and it was a sunny day, and we'd gone across and we'd had lunch with her and just enjoying her company and then walked back across the bridge, came home and there'd been a sale. That was the very first sale that was automated through people get us, but they get it in emails and we're not there. It was just very surreal, but it just went on from there and into a six-figure business. It still blows my mind when I think about it because for decades, I really struggled financially. Now our monthly income is more than what I used to earn in a whole year.

Pat:
Yes, it's mind blowing. Once you see that it's possible, it almost becomes like this whole new world opens up and you start now seeing other opportunities that were always there for you. It starts with that first sale though. I remember my first sale, I went on a walk, I came back and I was like, where did this come from?

It really opens up your mind in that confidence, which then allows you to lean into it even more and realize it. That is really awesome so I'm proud of you for that. How are you before I have you help me help you? I'm just curious, how did you get so many people through the program? What was your top of funnel situation to get people in before you sold them your program.

Stephanie:
I feel like I was just learning it as I was doing it. I didn't know either. I thought, how does this work? It just seems a bit mystical. I was told that you to create something that explained what people wanted to know, who would buy your program. In our case, they wanted to know how to set up their rent 2 rent. Rent 2 rent is a shorthand for this property strategy where you don't need to own the properties to be able to make money from the cash flow. I created a document, the six step system to get started in rent event. It was an overview of what you need to know.

Pat:
This is your lead magnet. This is how you brought people in and then you had emails go out, I'm assuming. Then you pitch them the product and now you're a six-figure business. That's incredible.

Stephanie:
Yeah and we love that business. Like yourself, you get the joy of working with people, seeing them have all the light bulb moments and pushing them through all of the mind drama that happens when you try to do something new. I had a lot of my drama, so I feel like I'm an expert. The last year, this was only in 2019. It's all happened or it feels like it's happened really quickly.

Last year I did your Power-Up Podcasting course. I really loved it, and quite a few people said to me, "Well, you don't need the course. You just do this, this and this." I said, "Okay." But I just felt like I just wanted to know all of it and just make sure that I wouldn't miss anything out, but just see everything that was recommended and then just do what I wanted to do.

I found it really amazing, and I got my whole thing done in a long weekend. There was a bank holiday weekend, and I'd put off to my podcast for such a long time because I had this confusion in my mind that it was so complicated. When I had the course, it really broke it down and I was able to record all my episodes, get my art done. Everything in just a few days and start putting it out. Do you know what? The podcast... I am getting out of the question, but I'm just giving you a background... But the podcast blew up our SEO.

Pat:
Did it? Your website started to rank because people were finding your podcast?

Stephanie:
Yeah, I'll tell you what happened. In 2019, the very first year we had the website and the online course business, we had 6,000 page views. Then in 2020, this is the year we did put up the podcast in May, the end of May. Let's call it the 1st of June, 2020. In that year we had 60,000 page view the whole year, 2020. Then so far in 2021, the first four months up until April, we've had 91,000 page views more than the whole of last year and the first four months. It just seems to be going up and up and up. I tell you, one of the biggest drivers of that is that 10% of people who listen to the podcast, listen to it on our website.

Pat:
Yeah, especially when people are searching on the internet for answers and then your podcast episode has the answers. It's very easy just to click on that button and go from there. This is why my team and I, we built a tool called Fusebox to help on the website side of things, because most people miss that. That's really great, that's really amazing. That's helping you in that regard. That I'm assuming is helping business grow even more and so what's the problem. It sounds like everything is going really well.

Stephanie:
Honestly, it's going really well, but is a problem as well because my brain can't take it. We had been at the same level of revenue for quite a long time. Then we were just trying to be kicked up to the next landmark, but suddenly April, last month, it's more than doubled the income. I don't know whether that's going to continue but that is freaking me out. The good thing is, I don't know. I just feel it's a bit out of control or it's too much or it's-

Pat:
Well, okay. What does that money represent? That money represents more customers. So there's more people and each and every one of those customers is a human being, a life that you and your sister are helping to change. You're unlocking something for them that they didn't have before. That should... I know how you feel by the way, because I've gone through the exact same emotional roller coaster that you're going through right now. You should be proud of that. I know you're grateful for it, I know you're proud of it but at the same time, it's so new to us that it just doesn't feel real. Here's the big question for you? Do you feel like you deserve it?

Stephanie:
I think I've got lot of mind work to do about the money. On a logical sense, I can understand that anyone who wants to, can create money. I didn't use to understand that. To do it, you have to go through a lot of mind work and coaching yourself. It sounds like it will be easy when you, "Oh, my revenue's doubled. Now I'm freaked out."

Pat:
We always hear about the fear of failure, but we also hear the other side of the coin, which is fear of success. I think that a lot of people, whether consciously or subconsciously begin to believe that when they are successful, there are new problems that might arise. I know that some people who become successful are afraid of having that much money because they're afraid of losing it all. The more money you make, the more money you could lose and that becomes a scary thing.

Many people would rather not have that money to lose, which is a weird thing. It's like you'd rather have less upfront than have more and then leave it. Again, it's our money story that we're telling yourself. I know for me, in particular, it was the way I was brought up the way I was taught about money, how we were... I came from a low- to middle-income family where money wasn't very plentiful and we had to watch every dollar, watch every penny.

Now that it's all coming in, I'm tying those two things together, even though it's a different story, that can be very difficult. A lot of times people are afraid of having more money in different cultures, because that means that maybe now more attention will be put on them. Some people especially don't want that, but I always try at least personally, try to believe that the money is just a by-product of how well I'm serving my audience.

With the additional money that comes in. Not only am I now able to have financial security for myself and my family, which was the ultimate goal initially, now I can actually reinvest some of that money to help even more people or to hire a team, to do a lot of this stuff that I used to do on the daily. I can hire assistants or team members to help manage things so that I can actually do more of what I like to do.

A big issue that a lot of people have when they grow as fast as you is they start working just as fast as you're growing, working more. You double the revenue that means you're doing double the work, and you can only do that so much to a point where you're going to burn out. We don't want that to happen either. There's some really interesting things that you have to talk to yourself and your sister about as far as growth and what do you want to do to reinvest.

If you do want to reinvest, what are your new goals that you might have on the personal side? What do you do with this cash injection? Where might you invest it? Or how might you put it away for retirement or whatever you choose to do with it? It opens up a lot of new things. Every time we do something new, it becomes scary because we've just never done it before. Now that you have some money coming in, there's new opportunities. That can be... because we haven't done it before, pretty scary because it's like new decisions that we never had to make before.

Stephanie:
Yeah, definitely. I had a question for you. It's as much about the mind thing, I'll ask it and then you can see what you think is the best thing to answer. Things are going well for us. We're blown away by what's happened. We wrote a book about Rent 2 Rent as well, last year in the lockdown that was useful for us and we did the podcast. We started the podcast in the lockdown as well.

Recently we've updated everything within our program because we have been teaching it for two years, sorry, not even two years, but we've been teaching. We've redone all the videos and everything like that. Make it really, really good. Now my brain is worrying about what should I do next? Because should we just focus on this one offer. It's a three month flagship program and there's a membership on the backend that you can only go into if you've been through the program or I have lots of ideas.

If we do focus on that, I wonder about what's the best thing to take it to the next level, which I'm also a little bit scared of the next level. The other thing that I had, and the idea was more of a passion project and the podcast last in the lockdown. I also did a series of videos called property game changes where I was speaking to people who've really changed the game in property, but have done it in a way that really serves other people in different ways and shown how you can go from nothing to something and also really care for others as you do it. I would like to put this now as a podcast and Facebook page at Insta or YouTube and LinkedIn and all of that.

Pat:
I understand because I too have millions of ideas and millions of projects that I want to work on. I am working on some of them, but the big question is how do we make sure that if we are to say yes to this thing, that we are also still managing the things that we need to manage and parts of our life are still there that we want to have there. This is where reinvesting some of that money into a team to help to buy time back, essentially. To put into another passion project, if you will.

That's one way to think about it. Let's start with the first question more specifically about, okay, if I were to focus on what you have, that's working, which you should. You should definitely do that. This isn't common but it happens. You'll reach success and then you fall complacent. You go, "Okay, we did it. Yay." Then you don't put in any more effort to continue to make that great or things change and then you're just like, "Oh, whatever."

You feel like you reached the end line or the finish line already and that could be detrimental. Especially if you have members who are paying monthly and people that you want to help support. You should continue to focus on what you are doing for sure. As far as upleveling, that I would always do it in a way that serves those who are already there. Meaning you can survey or have conversations with your current customers and students to ask them, "Okay, now that you've gotten this, what else are you struggling with? What might better help you or serve you in a different way that maybe you weren't able to get here?"

This could become, you have the membership program, you have the course, maybe it's a mastermind. That's a little bit higher end for a smaller group of people. It's very common to do, or a group coaching program where you take people. It's not like a DIY situation, but it's more of a done with you situation.

You can build an agency type of thing on top of this to do a lot of the work that they need to do for them. There's a lot of ways to continually upserve, right? Upserve allows you to upsell. That allows you to make even more money to then reinvest if you want to. This is much better to serve the existing audience that you have, because they're going to tell you what they want. They already know that you can deliver for them as opposed to just guessing and hoping or finding new people.

That's where you can focus to help guide you on what else you might be able to do if anything. If you are to choose to work on something else, which you can, I would only pick one other thing. It seems like you have that passion project in mind. The way that I do it is I like to do this thing called the 20% itch rule. You have that itch to do something new and you want to scratch it, but I only allow myself to scratch the new thing, 20% of the time. I say yes to the 80%, the things I know I need to do anything that I can hand off, I will hand off, but things that I need to do, I'm going to do it. I already said yes to it. I don't want to leave it but I'm now opening up room to say yes to one other thing.

If you were to consider the days of the week, 80% would be maybe Monday to Thursday and then Friday is going to be my passion project day. I call that my experimental day or my itch day where I can just do the thing that literally, if that fails, that's okay. It's not going to spill over into everything else. It is time and energy that I'm allocating for experimental purposes and because I have this passion and because I'm excited about it.

It's contained. That's the thing, many people, when they start something new, that new thing begins to take over the old thing when you haven't even optimized the old thing yet and it starts to blend into each other. I try to do it where Monday, Thursday, I'm focused on the things that I know I need to do and then Friday's my play day.

Right now, it's a new YouTube channel in the Pokémon collectible space. Two years ago, it was an invention to help videographers. That was all done in 20% of my time. Then the other 50 projects I want to do, they're there when either one of those things opens up more time or fails, or I hand off to somebody else and then I get more time back. I almost use those new ideas as a reward for when I complete these things. The follow through is really important but it sounds like there might be room, especially with more income coming in. You might be able to invest that in buying some time to potentially, if you don't have it already, work on this passion project of yours.

That's the cool thing you get now two things to get excited about. During the week you're working on what you need to work on, knowing that on the tail end of the week, you get to work on your fun project. Even though the other stuff is still fun. This is like your new, fun, exciting thing. Then the next week you go back knowing that, okay, at the end of the week, you get that again and you make progress on it slowly but surely.

It could... like a lot of the stuff that I've done in that time could take a life of its own too. Then finally, the overarching thing here is just to consider how much do you need to grow? There's a lot of... at least in the US I know and it's likely all around the world, especially with us entrepreneurs. It's like, we just want to grow as big as we can, as fast as we can.

The question is, why? Do we need to? You might be in a place where if things were to just stay the way they are now, you could be perfectly happy. You could be perfectly stable, everything would be great. There's no real reason to want to have to 2X from here or 10X from here. I think a lot of people get into that hustle mindset of go as big as you can, because the bigger you are, the more successful you are and that's not true. Always consider what makes you happy, what is a good balance for you, no matter what you choose to work on.

Stephanie:
Wow, it's so powerful when I hear you say it to me because I've heard you say things before very similar, but it's just feels different because I was so confused. It doesn't sound like something one ought to be so confused about. What's the next step to growing? Should I do the property game changes? Should I not? Should I focus and all this but that just is such a great way to think about it as Monday to Thursday, it's one and Friday is the other, or whatever-

Pat:
However you want to do it.

Stephanie:
... because that feels really freeing and it just feels full of opportunity. I have these other ideas as well, you mentioned about investing the money. We're good at investing because we're also in property, real estate. We're buying properties, we're developing them where they're going off in value and I'm starting but at what the... Another exciting thing that we're starting is that we're starting to invest in stocks and shares as well.

I wanted to have another thing to talk about my experience with investing in stocks and shares. That would be called Steph Invests. Just a private thing, not within our business. I could have that later. After I've finished property game changes all up and running and people are doing it and our teams knows how to do it. That was causing confusion as well. Oh, now I've got property game changers and I've got Steph Invests and what should I do and I've got, obviously our existing business, which I, as you said, I still do fine. That very exciting and rewarding and I love to be in the businesses. I also have other things that I want to do.

Pat:
Yeah, I mean, you're climbing, you're walking up these steps and we want to take it one step at a time just to be safe. Sometimes when we're kids, I know when we're trying to go up the steps, we try to go five steps at a time and then it's just too much and we might fall and tumble and hurt ourselves. We don't want to do that and use these other ideas as rewards for unlocking more time in the things that you have now. I really like the stock idea too. I'm into that stuff as well.

There's even other ways to do this where maybe it's not a podcast, Facebook group, LinkedIn, Instagram, all that stuff. Maybe it's just a private email newsletter that people just pay to get access to. Once a week, when you decide to make decisions on your own stocks, you just share your picks and why you feel that way.

People pay, you know, 10, 20, 30, however many dollars a month to just have access to this email newsletter of yours and you can simplify it. Then maybe it builds out from there, maybe it doesn't, but that gives you maybe a small outlet. There's a lot of ways where you can still do these things but do them small but using the tools that we have still be able to turn them into something.

Paid newsletters are getting very popular. ConvertKit has the opportunity for you to create paid newsletters now. There's other tools like sub stack and things that are making that popular. That's just an option. It's interesting how you had mentioned it feels so freeing. What made you feel free? Creating these boundaries? By creating a fence around what to do, you actually are now more open, which is like the opposite thing.

That's what I found when I got laid off. It was like, "Oh, well at least I don't have a nine to five anymore tying me down. I'm just going to do whatever in my business and as a result of that, I was doing everything, I was out of control, I was working in hours I shouldn't have, I was blending family and business. Whereas once I had those boundaries, here's where I do business, here's where I don't. This is the time that I do, this is the time that I don't. It opened up more and it just... you make more progress. It's such a weird thing.

Stephanie:
That has been so helpful. I just wonder if there's a thing, when you had this, I don’t know, brain craziness with earning a lot more money than you used to. Is there anything you would recommend to help with that?

Pat:
Yeah, for me, what helped was actually more of an accounting thing where any money more than beyond what I needed to live was put aside and I never even saw it. Meaning it was put aside in retirement or investments where I didn't see this huge chunk of change in my checking account. First of all, just if you're an investor, you just shouldn't have it sitting there. It's a vehicle for something you should have it somewhere.

That helped me because I still was living the same way I was living. I still saw the same amount of money that I saw. I just happened to have a much larger retirement account and money put away for my kids' college and all these other things so that I wasn't making dumb decisions so that I wasn't getting in my own head of like, "Oh, look, I'm a rich boy now." Or whatever, I'd never changed the way I lived. I just had access to more things that's all.

That was helpful and having other people, other mentors, other friends and colleagues who were also up and comers in the business space who are also earning to just share openly and on technically honestly, just how we were all feeling with each other. I would see somebody make maybe not so smart decision and he'd tell us why and that would help me avoid that.

Having a group of people and you're lucky that you have your sister, who's a partner and you're probably around each other a lot. You can feed off of each other and help each other out and see something that the other person didn't, because they're so close into it. Having that's really, really key. It's all up here. It's all mindset stuff and that's what separates those who are successful and those who fail. It's really the mind because all this stuff is available to anybody. It's how we choose to use it and how we choose to tell ourselves a story about it.

Stephanie:
That is so true and I just encourage people if you're listening and thinking, because I would have listened to that though, that's absolutely rubbish. It's not available to me. I'm not part of this club.

Pat:
That's the story that person is telling themselves.

Stephanie:
It really is at the buy-ins because I'm still exactly the same person. It was just at the age of 45 that we originally started in business. Within five years in the UK, it's only a very small percentage of people who actually go above a tax thresholds, which is only 86,000 pounds a year. 95% of businesses in the UK are governed by that, I was flabbergasted at that. We're in a very small percentage of businesses and it's just phenomenal. I just want to thank you again for the time. It's been amazing to be on your show.

Pat:
Thank you so much, Stephanie. I appreciate you for your time and the hard work that you put in. A lot of people may hear this and go, "Oh, well, she was lucky." There is some luck involved. You have to be sometimes in the right place at the right time. The truth is you could be at the right place at the right time and still get nowhere because it's you taking a hold of these opportunities, you breaking through those mindset barriers and those limiting beliefs and you and your sister did it and I'm proud of you. Thank you for sharing this here to hopefully encourage others. Where can people go to follow your journey even more, all the websites and just share it off.

Stephanie:
Yeah, thanks Pat. Our main website is at Rent2RentSuccess.com with rent, and then number two, Rent2RentSuccess.com. That's the main place and you can see our property business and our before-and-afters at HMOHeaven.co.uk. I'm on Instagram, if anybody wants to get in touch, I've started to really like Instagram now. I'm @StephanieTProperty on Instagram.

Pat:
Very nice. Thank you, Stephanie. We appreciate you. All right. I hope you enjoyed that conversation with Stephanie. Again, you can find her at Rent2RentSuccess.com that two being the number to rent2rentsuccess.com. I want to wish you all the best, Stephanie. You and your sister are doing some amazing things, and keep up the good work.

I'm looking at the website now. It even looks different than what I remember. It looks like you're making changes. You're adding new things. You have a clubhouse area, your podcast of course is going. You have the Rent 2 Rent Success book. You're crushing it, keep up the great work, so proud of you. I'm looking forward to connecting with you again soon to see how things progress from here. If you're listening to this, I hope you enjoyed it, I hope you took away something from it. I look forward to seeing what I might be able to do to help you, whether that's in future episodes, so make sure you hit subscribe.

Our "Where are they now?" episodes, where we bring people back on at the end of the month and the end of the year to see and check on everybody. Then finally, I might be able to coach you as well. If you go to AskPat.com, you can check out the application button there and you can leave me a little voicemail on what's going on. I might reach back out to you in the future and help you out in the same way I helped Stephanie out today.

That's that. Thanks for listening. I appreciate you and again, hit that subscribe button if you haven't already. Thanks again. Peace out. I'll see you in the next episode. Cheers.

Thanks for listening to AskPat at AskPat.com. I'm your host, Pat Flynn. Our senior producer is Sara Jane Hess. Our series producer is David Grabowski, and our executive producer is Matt Gartland. Sound editing by Duncan Brown. AskPat is a production of SPI Media. I'll catch you in the next session.