If something interests me or if it challenges my brain, like if I find
something really hard to understand or like really challenging to execute on, I can
hyper focus on it for hours. But on the flip side, if something
bores me or it feels like it's not very challenging, I can procrastinate it
for days, weeks, even months. Sometimes. Welcome to imperfect Action.
I'm Steph Taylor. For years, I read all the books, downloaded all
the freebies, and did all the courses. But it wasn't until I started
taking imperfect action that my business had its first million dollars. Here, imperfect
action is about doing things before you're ready, prioritizing consistent action over perfect action,
and moving forward even when you're not sure you're doing it right. On
this show, you can expect mindset advice, actionable marketing tips, and strategies
to build a business that brings you more profit, more freedom, and even
more joy. Are you on the list to get my daily Businesses? Every
day, I'll send you a bite size prompt designed to help you grow your
business in a more intentional way. Sign up at Steph Taylor dot com,
forward slash DBB, or at the link in your show notes. Hey,
welcome back to Imperfect Action this episode seven hundred and seventy seven. Today,
I'm sharing a couple of things that you might not know about me and how
these things have affected my business. Now, this episode is so different to
the usual strategies and the tips that I share in my all my other episodes,
but I really wanted to share this episode as a bit more of a
personal touch because we're not our businesses. We are humans who run a business,
but we are not our businesses. And I know this can be really
challenging if you are somebody who has a personal brand like I do, where
it can be really hard to delineate where your life and your personal life ends
and your business begins. So I'm going to share a little bit more of
a personal episode to And you know, sometimes I think it's a bit fun
to learn a little more about the podcasters and the people that you follow and
listen to all day long. And I know definitely with the people that I
follow, I love to hear a little bit more of their lives outside their
business. I also am a big believer that all of the experiences that we
have make us who we are and impact how we are able to show up
and impact our clients and our audiences, you know, share our value with
them. When you're comparing yourself to a competitor who has similar expertise, maybe
similar offers, they're in the same industry as it can help sometimes to remember
that you've both had completely different life experiences and some people are going to resonate
with yours, others are going to resonate with theirs. You know, your
personalities are going to be different. There's all of those other things outside of
just your knowledge and your expertise that form what somebody is looking at when they
are choosing who to work with. Okay, so little spiel aside. What
are a couple of things that you might not know about me? Okay?
So first of all, I have lived in five cities in four different countries.
So I was born in South Africa. I was there until I was
about eight years old, grew up in New Zealand, left there about twelve
years ago and moved to Australia, and then I spent most or some of
twenty eighteen living in London. Now I think personally, I think moving has
been moving countries and moving cities has been a really useful thing. I didn't
maybe realize it at the time, but it made me very flexible, made
me adaptable. I had to learn how to make new friends. All of
that, and then growing up in New Zealand and also here in Australia,
it's really interesting because tall poppy syndrome is such a thing where everyone likes to
cut down the successful person. You know, if somebody's successful, it's like,
oh, but they must not have a social life, or oh,
you know, like they're only successful because of this or that. And it
was really interesting to then spend a bit of time living in London where suddenly
it was like, oh, I'm a little fish in a big pond and
nobody cares what I do. That was really kind of freeing, and I
think anyone who's lived in different places will be able to tell you, like,
it's such an experience too, I guess, to have that fresh start,
to be somewhere new where nobody really knows who you are, you don't
know who they are, and nobody cares and it's great. And then on
top of that, I'm also an Italian citizen and I speak Italian and I
know that one day I really would love to spend a whole year living in
Italy. I've got a business that supports it, so you know, why
not? Really? Okay. The second thing you might not know is I
started my career as an accountant. It's very different to what I do now.
I studied accounting and finance at university. I worked in tax for a
while, then I worked in insolvency for a while. I got halfway through
completing my chartered Accounting qualification, like the postgraduate thing, it's kind of similar
to like a CPA, and then I quit in twenty sixteen. So there
were a couple of different factors. So I'd been side hustling as a social
media manager for a while. I had started my first business, which I'll
tell you a little bit more about in a minute. But i'd started that
business, I was also side hustling, and I was working, and I
was studying, and I was pretty burnt out. And one day I woke
up and I had really bad back pain, which actually was kidney pain,
and then I went to hospital that night. Seven days later, I got
out of hospital. I was on sick leave for another week, and basically
I returned back to the office and it was like, well, here's a
pile of work that you weren't able to do while you're on leave, so
do it. And you're expected to stay back late to get it done.
And why aren't you staying back late to get it done? That was kind
of the That was kind of the environment and the culture that I worked in.
So I ended up leaving well before my first business was profitable enough to
actually sustain my life. And I mean I did end up running out of
money and getting another part time job. And there's a whole story there,
like that's a whole episode on its own, But the real impetus to quit
was, you know, I just had to get out of that job.
And at the time it was horrible. Now in hindsight, I'm really glad
that it happened, because I think it's what gave me that push to leave.
And if I had not had that push, then I potentially would never
have had the confidence to go to make that leap from you know, the
fortnightly pay getting that paycheck and my bank account to the instability and the income
fluctuations of running my own business. And I think having that background in accounting,
in tax in insolvency, I mean, certainly in the first few years
of my business. It was great because I didn't have to pay an accountant.
I did all my own taxes. I saved so much money. But
it's also helped in the ways that I can serve my students and my clients,
especially in Freedom fast Track, which is a bit more of a holistic
program. It's not so much focused on sales and marketing. It's more focused
around your business model, looks at things like your operations, your expenses,
all of that. I have the ability to pass on the things that I
learned working with clients in my accounting career and help my students with that in
Freedom fast Track. Also fun fact, I have most of a master's degree
in strategic advertising. That was my career pivot post accounting was, Oh,
I want to go and do advertising. But I didn't finish the degree because
the very last subject in the last semester was a group assignment subject, So
like the entire semester was a group assignment project, and I was living in
London at the time, and the sort of trying to do a group project
remotely was absolutely no There was no way that was gonna happen. So I
never actually finished that degree. Unfortunately, I like to think that I basically
have that degree because I did all of the coursework. I just didn't do
that one final group assignment. All right. Fun fact number three about me
is I have ADHD. Like many other entrepreneurs do. I know. To
anyone who knows me personally, that is probably going to come to you as
zero surprise. To those of you who watched my business from the outside,
it might seem a little bit surprising because I am pretty consistent with this podcast.
Actually, no, I'm very consistent with this podcast, and my business
is pretty structured. To be honest, this podcast is the thing that I
have been most consistent with in my entire life. I can't think of anything
else that I have done three times a week for the last six years,
like even fitness, I mean pilates. It's only been the last couple of
years that I've out of getting into a routine where it's like I go multiple
times a week. But everything else I've been so inconsistent. When I feel
like doing things, I do it. When I don't feel inspired to do
them, I don't do them. But I've had to put so much structure
in place to stay consistent and to not you know, miss episodes when I
don't want to record them, and not burn my business to the ground when
I get bored and want to try something different. It's been a real work
in progress putting that structure in place. I now I have the accountability to
my team, I have the accountability to my listeners of this show. I
have the accountability to the students in my programs. So I can't just be
like, oh no, I don't feel like doing this anymore, which is
great. It's great to have that accountability. It's been such a challenge throughout
the like I don't know, seven eight years. I don't even know how
many years I've been in business now, like eight years. It's been such
a challenge resisting that ADHD urge to pivot every time that I feel bored,
and I get bored a lot, and I do think that it's part of
the reason why I like to always start new things, do new things,
try things out, experiment. I need that novelty in my business. I
think that's part of the reason why there are so many people with ADHD who
run businesses, because we need that novelty and we can't necessarily get that novelty
working for somebody else Whereas in a business, we have the creative freedom.
We can do what we want, but the challenge can be sticking with something
for long enough, persisting with something long enough, not burning it to the
ground the minute that we get bored. If something interests me or if it
challenges my brain, like if I find something really hard to understand or like
really challenging to execute on, I can hyper focus on it for hours.
But on the flip side, if something bores me or it feels like it's
not very challenging, I can procrastinate it for days, weeks, even months.
Sometimes same with little routine things like this podcast. Even though I really
enjoy podcasting, I've been doing it for nearly six years, so the novelty
and the excitement isn't there anymore, and now it's more reliant on like the
routine, the habit, the accountability that I have to my listeners for me
to keep showing up and doing it. Okay, Number three, I am
a massive Actually no, this is number four. Fun fact number four.
Number three was adhd. Fun Fact number four is I'm a massive nerd and
I'm always trying to learn new things. So maybe this goes along with the
ADHD brain. But I'm constantly going down rabbit holes trying to learn new things,
and it has I think it's really benefited my business because if there's something,
if if I find that there's a knowledge gap somewhere, then I'm like
cool, I need to learn everything that I can about this thing, and
then that means that I can help my students better as well. I do
a lot of online courses. I do a lot of trainings. Some of
them are related to business, some of them have nothing to do with business.
Last year I did my NLP Master Practitioner training, so I can you
know, I use that to coach my clients a little bit better. I'm
learning to code in Python because maybe one day I might want to create an
app, or I might want to create some kind of tool or software that
I can share with my students to help them get better results. And fun
fact, I started this year, like literally a few weeks ago, like
a week ago, started doing a master's in neuroscience because I want to understand
my brain better. I want to understand the brains of my students. I
want to understand how I can help my students and my audience to take imperfect
action, to learn better in my programs, to be more productive in their
businesses, to overcome the mindset stuff like procrastination and perfectionism, all of those
things. And it has been I mean, I'm a week in and it's
so challenging, but it's also been so interesting and so relevant, and I'm
quite excited as to how I'm going to apply the things that I'm learning into
the programs that I have, into the content that I share. And you
know, whether I start adding more of that into these kinds of episodes,
I don't know, Like it's still early days, but we'll see. I
love life un used to Okay, fun fact number five, this isn't my
first business. So, like I said, I was an accountant originally,
and while I was an accountant, I side hustled as a social media manager
for some local cafes. Like I was. I started a blog back in
twenty thirteen maybe, and I got really good at social media, and then
I started reaching out to cafes and I was like, hey, like I
this is an example of the work that I've done. Your social media presence
kind of sucks. This was like also in the heyday of Instagram, so
if you were a cafe and you weren't on Instagram, it was like what
are you doing? So it was really easy to pick up a bunch of
clients and I started doing that and then I realized, like, I'm really
good at social media. I could probably start my own business and market it
for free on Instagram. So I started my first business, which was called
the Sugar Free Box. It was a subscription box with sugar free snacks and
I ran it for about a year before I closed it down. The reasons
I closed it down were well, firstly, the business model wasn't viable so
shipping in Australia. Shipping parcels in Australia is very expensive, and especially if
you have customers in regional areas where you can't just send like a courier.
You have to send it by Australia Post and they charge you more for certain
areas. So I was making like two dollars of profit per order, and
I was still having to pack and ship all of the orders myself because I
didn't have enough volume to outsource that part of it. So I had to
be in Australia all the time to pack and ship orders. Even though I
quit my job to have the freedom to travel a little bit more So,
I kind of I realized like, oh, this is not viable, this
isn't working. It's not serving the vision that I want. I want the
freedom to travel. I don't want to be tied to one location, and
I can't you know, I can't get somebody else to pack and ship the
orders because well I can't afford it because I'm making two dollars profit per order.
And also none of them will none of the third part, the pack
and shipping companies would even talk to me because my volume wasn't enough. I
wasn't selling enough orders. Whilst I didn't know what problem I was really solving,
I didn't really know what my selling point was. And ultimately, the
total addressable market wasn't big enough to scale. So the total market of people
in Australia who were interested in sugar free snacks on a subscription basis wasn't really
big enough to scale. So I realized after a year, like, oh,
this business model is not the right business model. And I mean,
I'm glad I realized it. I'm glad I closed it down because I could
have kept persisting with what was a broken business model, and eventually it probably
would have burned out and given up and maybe gone back to a job altogether,
never gone into business again. But then I was working part time as
the head of marketing and content for a startup and I started then my second
business, where I was essentially a market being consultant, and I started to
think about, well, how can I scale this? And obviously the most
logical way to scale when you're a one on one marketing consultant is to start
to build it into a marketing agency. I was doing clients strategy. I
was doing a lot of like marketing management, so Facebook ads management, social
media management, all of that, and I started hiring people to help me
manage that for my clients. At the same time, though, I also
launched my first course, which was about Facebook ads, because I had a
lot of people inquiring with me about, you know, can you run my
Facebook ads for me? My budgets one hundred dollars a month, and it
was like, well, if you've got one hundred dollars to spend on Facebook
ads, there's no point paying me. I think I was charging like,
I don't know, seven hundred, like I was very cheap. I was
charging like seven hundred dollars a month or something. It was like, there's
no point paying me seven hundred dollars to spend your one hundred dollars of Facebook
ads. You'd be much better off learning how to run them yourself. So
that was where the idea for my very first course came from. I also
then launched a membership and I realized that I way preferred the course and the
membership side than running an agency. I didn't really want to scale it up
to be a huge, big agency, so I slowly started letting go of
clients as I was replacing the income that from that client income with courses and
membership income. All right, fun fact number five. I don't have kids
or a partner, and I get asked this a lot. So that's why
I'm telling you this. I get asked this a lot because I don't share
much of my personal life online or on Instagram. Unlike many other people in
similar businesses who show everything, I don't really show much other than when I'm
traveling you might see a little bit behind the scenes. And honestly, like
I've spent most of the time since I started out in business single, and
I do worry that one day, I might regret prioritizing work over relationships and
family and all of that. But the plus side is that I have been
able to make my business my priority over the last seven years, I've been
able to focus on it. I've had the freedom to be able to travel
to conferences and events. I've had the freedom to be able to travel for
fun as well. But yeah, there is always that like, oh,
might I regret this one day? And I also look, you know,
even though I've had a lot more time in my day than my friends who
have kids, I do look at some of my friends with kids and they're
so productive because they've only got a few hours in the day while their kids
are at school. And I look at them, I'm like wow, Like,
maybe if I had that kind of limitation all my time, I would
actually be able to get a lot more done rather than my days at the
moment feel kind of almost endless, and that can lead to me being a
lot less efficient than perhaps if I had a limited time frame. Right,
Like, I have friends who can get so much done in three hours in
a day, and I look at them and I'm like, wow, I'm
impressed. All Right. The next fun fact I've lost count. I think
we're up to number seven. This is actually eight instead of seven. Like
I said in the episode number seven. I'm a massive travel and adventure junkie,
and that has been a huge part of my business. Why the reason
why I started in business. So when I was in my corporate job,
I realized pretty quickly like, oh, I'm not going to be able to
do all the travel that I want to do with the limited amount of leave
that I get. So for me, having that freedom to travel is a
huge part of why I started my business. I love long hikes. I
last no year before last, twenty twenty two, I hiked a trail here
called the Larapinta Trail, which is two hundred and thirty kilometers, so like,
I don't know, one hundred and something miles. It took me just
under two weeks, and it was so much fun. It was two weeks
offline. I was by myself, sleeping in a tent, cooking my meals
on a little gas stove of every night dehydrated meals. It was pretty miserable
by the time you've eaten dehydrated meals for twelve days straight. And yeah,
like it was just for me that is to me, that's like my kind
of happiness. Right the left foot, right foot, left foot, right
foot. For twelve days straight. That was the most quiet my brain has
ever been. The first few days, yes, I was overthinking in my
head, thinking for all my thoughts. By about day four there was nothing
left to think about and my brain was silent, and it was magical.
I do one day dream of hiking the t Araro Trail in New Zealand.
So that is a very long trail. It's about six months long from the
top of the North Island of New Zealand to the bottom of the South Island.
It's about the same length as the Pacific Crest Trail in the US,
which I think I'd also like to do that one one day, but let's
just do the first six month one at a time. I also love skiing.
That's one of my huge, big, you know, one of my
big travel things. I spend a month skiing in January this year in France,
and I think it's I'm going to do every January going forward. So
now I know in December it becomes how can I set my business up to
have that month off in January every year? And when I talk about intentionally
designing your business around the kind of life that you want. This is what
I mean. It's identifying like, oh, great, I want to spend
every January skiing. What do I need to do to make that happen.
It's not necessarily like, oh, somebody online said that they built a business
where they only work ten hours a week, Maybe I should do that.
It's instead, it's working backwards. It's reverse engineering the kind of business that
you want and then putting in place the systems, the structure, the frameworks,
the business model that enables you to have that. And you know,
for me, sometimes when I travel, it's offline completely. So in early
twenty twenty one, I took an entire month offline to travel down the coast
of Australia in a van. When I did that long hike, I was
completely offline the entire time. There was no way I'm carrying my laptop for
a fourteen day hike. Sometimes, though, when I travel, I do
work a little bit, but it really depends on the kind of trip and
what my intention is for the trip. But usually when I'm in a different
location, I find that really useful for getting out of the day to day
routine and to work on the business a little more than the usual kind of
working in it, and a little hack like if you can't go away anywhere,
it might be really helpful, even just booking a little staycation for a
couple of days, like a weekend or something in a little hotel nearby or
an airbnb, just to be in a new location. Because when you're working
from home, I know most of you work from home in your little home
office, and you get up in the morning, you sit down at your
desk, it's very easy to just run on autopilot. But when you're in
a different location, it's much easier to switch from the being in the business
to looking at the business as a whole, seeing the forest for the trees.
All right, final fun fact, I think this is number eight.
I am an introvert, and I know this is a bit of a surprise.
I get this a lot like I get my audience saying like Steff,
I can't speak on stage, I can't start a podcast, or I can't
show up online because I'm an introvert, And yeah, so am I.
I've just learned to switch on my energy or dial up my energy when I'm
doing these things. But they do drain me. Even just recording podcast episodes
drains my energy, and I can't record more than three in one day without
needing a very long nap. Last year, I went to a conference in
America, and American conferences are huge, Like were thousands of people in the
room, and my energy was so drained by being around so many people.
So I would just pop up to my hotel room for a little nap and
then go back to the conference and then go for a little nap and back.
Because there's only so long that I can sustain that extroverted, that kind
of outgoing energy before I need to recharge. I've had to figure out in
my business. I've had to figure out the balance in my days and my
weeks. So if I'm teaching a workshop in the morning, or I'm doing
a Q and a session, or if i have a one on one call
on Zoom, I know that I'm going to struggle then to get some deep
strategy or deep thinking work done. Afterwards, I need a little rest first,
or I need to go for a walk like something to kind of recharge
my brain after the extroverted part of showing up online. Same with things like
webinars and anywhere where I'm having to shop for an audience online is really draining.
Also, like I can't, I can't tell you how great having naps
in the middle of the day are. So if that's if that's something you
need to do to be able to show up more than do it, you
have my permission, all right. So there you have it, a couple
of random, random things. This is a fun episode to record, very
different to our usual ones, but I hope that it's been interesting for you.
And yeah, if there's anything that I haven't covered in here that you
would love to know, feel free to reach out on Instagram. I'm there
at steph Taylor dot com. Send me a DM. I always love to
hear from podcast listeners, and if you have learned anything from this show so
far, please take thirty seconds to leave a quick rating and a review in
Apple Podcasts. I read every single one of them and it does mean a
lot to me when you do, so thank you so much for listening.
Catch you next time.