765 Sarah Greener:

Business success comes from the inside out, more often than not dictated by what we believe deep down is possible. And like my guest Sarah Greener shares today, if we can remove all the noise, all the fear embedded in our news feeds, and focus on creating value for our customers, we can prosper even in a recession.

MELINDA

Hi, I’m Melinda Wittstock and welcome to Wings of Inspired Business, where we share the inspiring entrepreneurial journeys, epiphanies, and practical advice from successful female founders … so you have everything you need at your fingertips to build the business and life of your dreams. I’m a 5-time serial entrepreneur and founder and CEO of the interactive podcast app Podopolo. Wherever you are listening to this, take a moment, download Podopolo from either app store and join us in the Wings episode comments so we can take the conversation further with your questions, perspectives, experiences, and advice for other female founders at whatever stage of the journey you’re at! Because together we’re stronger, and we soar higher when we fly together.

Today we meet an inspiring serial entrepreneur and coach who helps busy, stressed, and overworked business owners transform their businesses by reigniting their passion and refocusing their work “on” their businesses rather than “in” them. Author of The Off Switch, Sarah Greener has built successful businesses in recessions, and today shares how to navigate your way to success no matter the external conditions around you. You’ll learn why one of her success secrets is moving from a To Do List an ‘I Don’t List’.

I don’t know about you, but I know from my own experience that innovating and building a business is like an all-consuming obsession, a constant macro running in your brain. It is easy to fall into the trap of working so hard on your business that it becomes hard to find time for the other things in life that really matter, and in that trap, we shortchange both ourselves and our businesses.  It’s like a nonstop juggling act and it doesn’t have to be that way.

Sarah Greener is a serial entrepreneur turned business coach who has developed a framework, based on her own business journey, to help busy, stressed, and overworked business owners reignite their passion for business – and life – by helping them learn what to say “no” to, creating space to work on their business, rather than in their business.

Growing up in a family that ran on business and a keen entrepreneurial spirit, Sarah had a thorough grounding in the fundamentals. From there, she went on to own and run multiple businesses, in New Zealand and overseas. These ranged from retail through to e-commerce businesses, where she ran small to medium teams and dealt with the day-to-day operations. Each new business threw up different challenges as she thrived on the constant and never-ending improvement of each one.

Despite her natural business drive and knowledge, Sarah says she still made plenty of mistakes – and those mistakes she says provided the fuel for learning and growth. And like most business owners, eventually, she found herself without the passion she once felt and caught up in all the busywork and noise. She figured out how to overcome the overwhelm of that treadmill, and now helps business owners exit that cycle.

Today you’ll learn about the power of taking a “year of no”, resetting your priorities, and learning what it means in practice to work on your business instead of in it. We also talk about how to grow your business even in a recession.

Let’s put on our wings with the inspiring Sarah Greener and be sure to download the podcast app Podopolo so we can keep the conversation going after the episode.

Sarah Greener is a serial entrepreneur, coach, and author of The Off Switch. You can get a complimentary consultation at her website SarahGreener.com/wings

Be sure to download Podopolo, follow Wings of Inspired Business there, and join us in the episode comments section so we can all take the conversation further with your questions and comments.

Melinda Wittstock:

Sarah, welcome to Wings.

Sarah Greener:

Hey Melinda, awesome to be here.

Melinda Wittstock:

It’s wonderful to talk to you. You’re in New Zealand, a long way away. I’m so glad we could do this around the vast time difference. I wanted to start though with your backstory because you have been a serial entrepreneur, as am I, and you learn so much from each particular business. Talk to me about how you became an entrepreneur to begin with

Sarah Greener:

We always joke in our house that businesses in our blood, so I’m the eldest of four girls. I grew up on a big farm and from a very young age there was this really clear line between needs and wants. And if you needed something, mom and dad got it for you, which was awesome. But if you wanted something like a bike or you wanted to get into a new sport, you paid for it. And so from a very young age, we learned how to make money off our own backs. So I remember collecting pine cones and selling those down at the local, you guys would say gas station, we say petrol station. And we used to shovel the sheep poo out from underneath the woolshed because people paid really good money for that to put it on their roses because apparently it grows great roses.

And so from a really young age I was in business. And then from there I was going to be a farmer until I was 15. It didn’t really, the concept of business didn’t land for me until 15. My parents got into a business in our biggest city in Auckland. And at that point I decided I was going to be a business owner and people would go, “What sort of business?” And I’d go, “I don’t mind, I’m just going to be in business.” And so my journey started really running a family business for Mom and Dad when I was 21, selling meat to hotels and restaurants. So I did that and then headed off overseas where I met my husband. But before he was my husband, he was running a kayaking business in Thailand, so I originally helped out with that. And then we came back to New Zealand, got into tourism. So we’ve been through tourism, hospitality, retail, online eCommerce, and now I guess back into business coaching as well. So kind of lots of different businesses that we’ve been in and out of.

Melinda Wittstock:

It’s such diverse experience and over a long period of time. If you had to distill it down into a couple of lessons that you learned personally because, and I’m just going to preface this, all entrepreneurship has lots of failure involved.

Melinda Wittstock:

And so what were some of yours that you really learned from that shapes how you coach today?

Sarah Greener:

Yeah, so I think probably the number one was the business that we bought coming back into New Zealand. We bought it in December, 2007. It’s a tourism business and in March, 2008, we were really deep in the GFC here in New Zealand. And tourism’s not generally a business that does super well in recessions. And we did amazingly well. And I, out of ignorance, not out of deliberate choice, we were very focused on what we were doing. So we didn’t have enough money so we lived onboard the boat. And so we really stayed in our lane and only focused on what we were doing.

And that was the making of us in that time, because if we’d been listening to all the noise, so I look now at all the noise that’s around… There’s upcoming recessions and all these bad things that are going to happen. When you’re distracted by that, you’re not focused on the right things in your business. Whereas we were so one-eyed about staying focused on our business during that time, we paid off a quarter of the business in the first six months when people around us were going bankrupt and putting their businesses into liquidation. And it was that sole focus on what we were doing and how we were doing it that kept us in line. So that would be the first one. And that was really early on.

Melinda Wittstock:

Great businesses are built in recessions. I mean that’s [inaudible 00:04:29] opportunities. So there’s so much comes down to mindset, to stay focused on what you’re doing and delivering value to your customers because people still buy things in recessions, they’re just more choosy about what they buy. That’s the only difference. So just be better.

Sarah Greener:

Yeah, absolutely. And I think also remembering that a recession is the average of the entire economy. It’s not your business. And so when you average things out, there are things that are doing better than that. And there are things that are doing worse, lots worse in a recession, that’s why they don’t survive it. And so like you say, be better. Don’t be the average, be higher than the average. My business would survive if it contracted half a percent. And that’s all that has to happen in the economy for them to call it a recession.

Melinda Wittstock:

It’s interesting because there is all this talk of recession right now and it almost gives people a pass. It’s like, “Oh well, I didn’t make my numbers because there’s this recession.” So when you’re coaching people, how do you help with that mindset piece of how to clear out all the other distraction and not buy into something that’s going to validate, say, a subconscious fear?

Sarah Greener:

Yeah, so I think there’s a couple of things. The simplest thing that we do, is environment precedes mindset in every situation. So we do our absolute best, both my husband and I in our own lives and running our business. And we encourage our clients to do the same, is remove the noise. Don’t watch the news. No one’s life got better from watching the news. Clean up your social feed because it’s a reality in business that it’s likely you’re using social media as a tool. You’re going to have to go in there. So clean it up and make sure you’re not seeing the noise. Remove it from your environment. We don’t have a TV at home, we don’t watch the news, we don’t get the newspaper. If something really big is going on that we need to know about, someone will let us know. So, that’s the first thing.

So your environment precedes your mindset. And then secondly, it’s about that inside-out version of life rather than outside-in. So I want to decide how I’m going to show up in every situation in my business and show up that way. And then regardless of the outcome I’ve won because I’ve showed up the way I intended to. And ultimately when I’m really deliberate about how I show up to every situation in my business, I get better outcomes because I’m not letting the emotional noise, I’m not letting myself get dragged into other people’s stories and end up in that negative mindset and then make decisions from that place. It’s not the place to make decisions in your business.

Melinda Wittstock:

So Sarah, was this deliberate, so going back to the travel business, 2008, the big recession and you guys are just really focused on building your business. Was this something kind of you learned or was it a very deliberate… Did you have that knowledge?

Sarah Greener:

Oh, absolutely not. I was 25. I thought I had all that knowledge. I did not.

Melinda Wittstock:

[inaudible 00:08:42].

Sarah Greener:

We think we know everything.

Melinda Wittstock:

Yeah, totally. Totally.

Sarah Greener:

I definitely was that girl. I, no, it wasn’t deliberate. And it wasn’t by design, it was just we had no money, we just put all our money into this business, we’d borrowed the money to buy this business. So back then it was at 13 and a half percent. So those of you freaking out about interest rates, we’ve been there and done this before and we came out of it okay. So it was not by design at all, it was just circumstance. We couldn’t afford a house, we couldn’t afford to rent a place. So we lived onboard the boat that we were running. And there’s no power on a boat, there’s no tv, we couldn’t get a newspaper delivered and social media was very, very new. So we didn’t have that layer of noise in our world back then. And so it was just basically by accident. But looking back in hindsight, you can see that very deliberate environment that we were living in allowed us to be focused and not be distracted by what was going on externally.

Melinda Wittstock:

I think a lot of the best entrepreneurs are sort of obsessives anyway, this is my fifth that I’m on now with Podopolo, the interactive podcasting app. And it is just my obsession. It’s like my night and day. It’s like everything goes into it because If I’m going to swing for the fences in a business, I’m not going to handicap myself in any way. I want it to work. I’m increasing valuation for my investors. I’m focusing on it. And so I guess it gets easier. What were some of the other things? In any of your businesses, was there a mistake or something that came out of left field that you had to deal with that provided you with a profound learning?

Sarah Greener:

A more recent one’s got to be COVID, you can’t ignore it when… Our business was tourism, it still is, we’ve survived it, thankfully. But international tourism and so I don’t know if you know the story about New Zealand, but we closed our borders back in March, 2020 and they only recently opened in August, 2022. So we had more than two years of our entire market that we used to serve being taken away from us.

So our business went from a seven figure, it was about to have its first seven figure year in terms of turnover, to zero overnight. And you can’t ignore that in terms of experiences and go, well everyone was going through that. It was still this, oh this is interesting. And at the time it was terrifying because it was like I’ve never been to zero before in my business. We had planned for so many risk factors and never had I planned for a government decision to take all of my customers away.

And so we’ve had to build that back with a domestic base, which we’ve managed to do, which has been awesome and it’s made it a better business. It’s simplified the business. And so what happens when you go back to zero is that you can look at your business and build it from scratch, which we never had the opportunity to do in this particular business because we bought an existing one. And it makes you look at things so differently. And I think for me as a coach now, I’m like, when we’re asking the question about, “What are you going to do next?” When people get stuck sometimes it’s like, all right, let’s burn it to the ground and what would you do if you could start again? Because when you start again, you build it differently.

Smart people make things complicated. And that’s what we’d done in our tourism business.I was like, “Wow, there is so much in here we don’t need.” This is coming into our busiest time of the year right now, and I was talking to one of our team Marlene and I was like, “Man, I almost feel worried because we are so organized, everything’s going so well.” And she said, “No, we are simple now. We’ve made it simple. We stripped all the extras out that we didn’t need.” And that’s been a massive shift for me that COVID taught us, was that when you go back to zero, what would you do if you could build it all again? And that made so many changes to that business.

Melinda Wittstock:

That is such a profound insight because I think any business, no matter how successful, the founders, the team members, the executives, everybody is learning and the situation is constantly changing around us. So it’s almost like we need to be constantly evaluating. And what a great question, just ask yourself every month or every quarter, what would I do differently if I was doing it from now? And there are always things because the learning is constant.

Sarah Greener:

Yeah. I’m not the same person I was when we started the business or even six months ago or even a month ago. And so the way that I look at things and the learning and the experience I bring to it is completely different. And that’s happening for all of us. And I think the learning journey in entrepreneurship is very fast. And so you learn so much every day about yourself and about your team and about the way your business operates that you need to adjust for that as you’re going forward. It allows you to make the business better.

Melinda Wittstock:

Yeah, continually. And when there are those setbacks, they provide a pause. I think COVID was really interesting for a lot of people. I mean whether they were in corporate jobs and thinking, “Actually, oh you know what? I don’t really like this. I was just living a life of should’s. This isn’t actually me.” It was a chance to look in depth and figure out that, “No, actually I want more control over my life.” It birthed a lot of new entrepreneurs or people who were running businesses that had the situation you did. I knew a lot of people in the event space for instance, had to completely pivot their businesses super, super quickly. Or just other things, like seeing restaurants that suddenly had to become delivery businesses. So many different things. And I think it led to a tremendous amount of innovation.

Sarah Greener:

Yeah, I agree with that. And I think the thing is that we often get hung up on the fact that we don’t have enough resources, when the true answer is it’s never a lack of resources, it’s a lack of resourcefulness. And what happened in COVID is a lot of our normal resources disappeared. And so we had to be resourceful. You had to think about how could you do this differently? “If I’m limited to just this, what could I do differently?” And so shifting away from, “I just need more resources to how can I get really resourceful with what I have?” really helps people to think differently. And like you say, all that innovation starts to come out of it.

Melinda Wittstock:

So what was the aha moment that made you say, “Okay, I’ve got all these businesses, I’m doing all this, but I also want to coach entrepreneurs”?

Sarah Greener:

It was an accident. Complete and utter accident. And the way that it happened was I went from having a small team. So we went from having a team of about nine in one business and three in another. And overnight with the family, we invested in the hospitality business in a restaurant and doubled the size of the venue by adding another 200 seats outside. So I went from having nine to having 90. 9-0 people on my team and I went, “Oh my goodness, this is my weak spot. My weakness is how do I lead people? How do I communicate them? How do I get them to do what I want? How do I get them to come on board with the way that we’re doing this business?” And I had no idea. And so actually came out to the States, attended a software conference that was full of amazing speakers and coaches and people that could hold a room of 4,000 entrepreneurs and keep their attention and get them doing what they wanted.

And I was like, “Man, if someone can do that, those skills and tools are the ones I need.” And so went and did a coach training program, I spent 12 months doing it, some immersion training and then I had to do some free coaching. And so I was like, “Well, if I’m going to coach, it would be women in small business.” And so did that pro bono for six months for six people and at the end of the six months most of them, I think four out of the six of them, were like, “How do we continue?” And I was like, “Oh well, I guess you could pay me this much and we could carry on.”

And so within six months I had a six-figure side hustle on top of our other businesses and then figured out that I really, really loved it. And it really filled that need in me for constant ideas and shifting around and doing things. And the ability to help other people, like the ripple effect of helping one woman in business and the impact that has on her family and then her team and her team’s families and their community that they’re in, was just like, “Wow, now this I can really make an impact on the world right here.”

Melinda Wittstock:

How wonderful. I mean that is really a wonderful impetus for being an entrepreneur to begin with. I think a lot of entrepreneurs, particularly women, are really mission-focused. How can we use business to really make a change or transform people’s lives? And here you are doing that.

Sarah Greener:

Love it.

Melinda Wittstock:

I just want to pick up though on that going from nine to 90, that’s a journey that’s very, very difficult for most people because who you’re being as a startup founder or CEO is very different from the scaling CEO. It’s almost like you have these different roles at different revenue milestones of your business, like who you’re being at a hundred thousand, who you’re being at a million, who you’re being at 3 million, who you’re being at, I don’t know, 12 million, is completely different.

Sarah Greener:

So the biggest business I’ve run is kind of at that 3 million mark, so I don’t have any experience with the 12, but I can absolutely say that who I was at 200,000 and starting up new businesses where it’s just a hundred thousand through to that multiple millions is drastically different in lots of ways and has alignment as well. So the fundamental foundations that you have, you need to keep building on them.

So the skills I had around people and around systems and processes and communication and numbers were still useful. I just needed a whole other level and I needed a whole other level of mindset because the way that you show up when you have a small team and you can be in contact with them all every day versus… I can’t be in contact with 90 people every day, otherwise that would be all that I would do. And so shifting and getting to a place where you’re leading to create leaders rather than just be the leader is probably the biggest shift I had to make there.

Melinda Wittstock:

That’s a massive one for a lot of women who get used to doing it all and struggle to delegate. Did you have that kind of issue just letting go? Overcoming the fear of letting go of all the control?

Sarah Greener:

Yeah, so hard. I try to say I’m a reformed people pleaser and my husband always laughs at me and goes, “Let’s try with the word reforming rather than [inaudible 00:20:07] the whole way.” So yeah, I totally did and I had this leader mindset of, “I won’t ask anyone to do something that I wouldn’t do.” And that keeps you really stuck as you’re starting to grow because it means that anytime you perceive something as challenging or hard that you’re going to ask your team to be, you have to show up and do it too. So for me it was like, “Ah, if I’m asking them to work Christmas Day, I have to be there on Christmas Day. If I’ve asked them, if we’re really under the pump and I need someone to jump in and do dishes in the kitchen, I’m going to jump in and do dishes.” And I’m doing that on top of leading the company and doing all the things that a CEO would do, that’s just exhausting. And I was working at that stage 80 plus hours a week. It’s not sustainable.

Melinda Wittstock:

That’s not sustainable for anybody but especially for women. Women burn out because not only are we trying to do everything, but there’s this layer of perfectionism that we all have to recover from as well. Not only are we going to do everything, we’re going to do everything perfectly. Did you have that? Did you have to go to the AA for perfectionists?

Sarah Greener:

Yeah, I did. I totally had to go to AA for perfectionists and it’s such a tough shift to make until you almost don’t have a choice. And it comes, I don’t know if this is a female thing, I think it might be, it was an emotional one for me. So my daughter was five and I was at work on Christmas Day and I had five staff not show up. And so I did what I always do. I called the people that I love and that love me and said, “Can you come and help?”

And so I called my husband and he’d come down and help until Scarlet got left with a babysitter on Christmas Day, the night after we’d done Christmas lunch and things earlier in the day and at 7:30 we got this call from the babysitter and it was like Scarlet is always good at going to bed and she would not go to bed. And the babysitter said, “She wants to talk to one of you.” And so Johnny took the call because I was busy out the front with people and she said, “Dad, on Christmas Day next time can you tell me if you have to work because it’s Christmas Day and you should be here reading me a story, not at work.”

And it was like a shot to the heart and Johnny left and went home and I was like, “I can’t, I’ve got to keep all these people happy. It’s their Christmas Day, they need to have a special day.” And I got home at one o’clock in the morning and I went into her room and I kissed her forehead and I said, “Never again darling. Never again.” And from that point onwards we started making the changes drastically that meant that I could still be a mom and a wife in the way that I wanted to be, and be a great businesswoman. And it turns out it wasn’t just me, I was influencing all of my team. So my team were working crazy hours like that because they saw me doing it. And so even though I’d say, “Just 40 hours, I want you to have your two days off and rest,” they’d see what I was doing, catch it and do it themselves. Way more is caught than is taught in your businesses. And so if you’re being unsustainable, you are setting the expectation of your entire team as well.

Melinda Wittstock:

It’s who we’re being, not just what we’re saying. There’s a real parallel here to how we raise children, right? Because they look at what we do, not what we say.

Sarah Greener:

So exactly the same. There are so many parenting and business lessons that have aligned up for me. Scarlet’s only 10 now and I’m sure there’ll be so, so many more as we get into those teenage years and older.

Melinda Wittstock:

I think being a mom made me a better entrepreneur and being an entrepreneur made me a better mom. And I had had to figure out this not do everything, but be a hundred percent present in whatever I was doing and create those boundaries. And this gets into really the focus of what can only you do, right? What’s your unique zone of genius that as the CEO or the business owner, you’ve got to double down on because nobody else can do it. And chances are there’s a whole bunch of things you do that someone else can do just as well, but likely better. You know, you find yourself doing things that does not make your heart sing. But there’s somebody else who loves being in the Excel spreadsheet, you know what I mean? And maybe you don’t.

Sarah Greener:

So true.

Melinda Wittstock:

There’s a lot of soul-searching in terms of, “Okay, what is my unique genius?” And double down there. Did you go through that process?

Sarah Greener:

Yeah, so it really came into, I think first and foremost I had to let go. So I had a whole leadership team there and me holding on to everything meant that they had the label but they didn’t actually have the role. So what would happen was they couldn’t do anything without asking me because that was what I taught them. I taught total learned helplessness. If a decision needed to be made, it had to come through me. All that key information was stored in my head. So everything had to come through me.

And so it was this process of going, “Man, I’m the bottleneck on everything.” And so getting to a place where the team could go, “We’ve got some really clear filters we make decisions through and when we make decisions through those filters, then we are making the right decision for the business. We’re getting closer to the vision, we’re in alignment with the values and we’re following any processes or systems that have been set down. If we do those three things, then the outcome that we’re getting is always the right outcome.”

And so that was kind of the first place and once we started doing that, then I could step back from it and go, “Okay, well what is the bit that gives me great joy?” Well, it gives me great joy to come up with ideas and systemize and lead people and coach them to get to that place for themselves. And so I stepped back further and further and as we did that, the team, oh it was amazing. They just stepped up more and more and more. And we had the most amazing couple of summers after that process where they did such a great job of leading because I allowed them to.

Melinda Wittstock:

This is so powerful. So this gets into transforming your ‘to-do’ list into an ‘I don’t’ list. How did you arrive at that? Was this something that you went through yourself? Because I know you coach other people in this area, what do you not do, and getting clear on that?

Sarah Greener:

Yeah, your success is so much more driven by what you don’t do than by what you do do. And so you said earlier you’re obsessed. You’re totally obsessed with making this business a success and you can’t be obsessed with too many things at once. And so for me it was like, “What actually really matters to me?” It was like, “This business, my marriage and my daughter,” and being me, looking after my health and everything else didn’t really matter in the grand scheme of things. And then I had to do the same inside the business and go, “What really matters here?” And when it came down to it, it wasn’t a big long list. And we get so hung up in telling everyone how we do everything and we keep all these balls in the air and we are superwoman. And people always used to say to me, “Oh you’re amazing. You do so much, you get everything done.”

Which actually, while it was a compliment, it wasn’t a compliment because I was perpetuating this myth that women can do everything. You can’t. You have to go, “What matters most?” And just do that. And so I stopped talking about all the things I was doing and started talking about all the things I don’t do, which is surprisingly triggering for people. And I don’t do everything. I don’t cook every meal, I don’t do every pickup, I don’t… And in my business I don’t do all the marketing and I don’t do all the accounts and I don’t do the building of all the systems. There’s so much I don’t do, yet we never talk about all the list of things we don’t do. And that for me and for my clients was really empowering. And it came out of, someone wrote an article and it was brilliant and it talked about her ‘I don’t’ list and she wrote all the things she didn’t do as a woman.

And I was like, “Oh I need one of these for my life and for my business. What’s going on that I don’t list? Where are the things where I like the outcome but I don’t like doing the work? Where can I get someone else to do the work so I still get the outcome?” And for me it really started at home because I was overwhelmed by my entire life, not just my business.

We keep pointing the finger at my business because everyone goes, “Running a business is really stressful,” but I’m not solely the business owner. I am a human, I have a home life as well. And I had to really get rid of a lot of that load at home that I was doing, out of society’s expectations as a woman I would do and as a mom I would do. And once I started getting rid of that, I was just felt freer and the time I did have at home, I was more present, like you talked about. And it was more fun and it was more playful and that started to show up in work as well.

Melinda Wittstock:

[inaudible 00:29:16] because when you do go through that, you mentioned triggering. So when you go through the, “I don’t,” do you think a lot of women are afraid of the judgment from their peers in a way, or there’s some sort of shame around not doing all of it that we have to overcome?

Sarah Greener:

Yes. And I think the guilt piece is easier than the shame piece. So the shame is that, “I’m a failure.” I am a bad mom. It’s an identity piece that you have to shift past. And the guilt is, “I’m not living up to other people’s expectations of what I should do.” It’s action based. And so figuring out what great looks like for you and fundamentally being a mom, if we take that example, who matters most in that conversation? Just my child. Just the child I’m parenting. So what happens when we ask them what a great mom looks like? If I’m being a great mom, Scarlet, what does that look like for you? Well the list was awfully short and none of it said cook and clean and bake a fancy cake that looks like Instagram perfection for my birthday or Pinterest perfection. It was a much different list than the list that I had written and it was a much different list than society wrote for us.

Melinda Wittstock:

I found myself doing that with my children as well. Whenever I had any sort of guilt. Like you, I was a kind of kid entrepreneur, but my first serious adult business, as I raised the funds for it, I got pregnant and it launched when Sydney was just six weeks old. So this was not planned, but it forced me to really figure these things out and she’s now 19 and my son’s 16. And as I check in with them, I found that same thing to be true, because what they really value is quality time with you. At least for my kids, it’s just that you’re actually present, you’re with me in this moment and it didn’t need to be a lot of time, but the time needed to be quality time.

Sarah Greener:

And there’s studies done about both of them that would reinforce the quality versus the quantity and then others that reinforce the quantity over the quality. I think it’s really about having a conversation with your children. So Scarlet’s the same as your two in that she wants this quality present time and so she chooses activities that are very her and I together, no distractions around. She doesn’t go, “Oh, let’s go and watch a movie together, Mom.” She wants time where she can communicate with me and we can do things together without other noise around us. I’m sure there are other children that might ask for a quantity of time and I think it’s really important that we check in with our children and go, “What looks like great for them?” Rather than the other way round, just letting everybody tell us what it might be. But yeah, absolutely the quality, for us and our world anyway, it’s definitely quality over quantity.

Melinda Wittstock:

So when you work with your clients, talk to me about the process they go through when they’re trying to figure out what they don’t want to do. How hard is that and how long does it take them to really get clarity about it?

Sarah Greener:

So we start with the life piece first. And I think what I found being a woman in business is that there is a whole list of rules around how life works and there’s a whole list of rules around how business works and the rules for life, doing life by society’s rules as a woman and the rules for how you need to be in business don’t align. I don’t know if you’ve ever noticed, but networking and meetings and all that sort of stuff seems to happen at really awkward times if you also want to show up as a wife and a mom. And so we go back to life first and I go, “The whole point of coming into business was to create freedom, is the magic word everybody uses. I’m going to go out to get out from underneath the man to run my business and my life my way,” but they’ve never stopped to think about what life their way looks like. And so that’s where we start.

We go, “What would success look like in your life 10 years from now, if it could be exactly the way you wanted it to be? What are the areas of your life that are important and what should they look like 10 years from now?” And then from there we build a business that serves that because not everybody wants a multimillion dollar business with their name up in lights. For some people it really is about enough to give the life that their family, they want their family to live or to help or to serve in their community. And that doesn’t need a team of a hundred, it might only need a team of five. And so we build a business that serves the life they want rather than just a business that conforms to the rules that somebody else told them that it needs to conform to.

Melinda Wittstock:

And so often when people go into entrepreneurship, they go into it because they do something that they love doing and they make a business around something they love to do. It’s really easy to create a job for yourself that’s less well paid than working for someone else and you’ve got the thing that you love to do and then you’ve got all the other things and without really the skills in all the other areas of business. And so people can sometimes end up hating the thing they originally loved and they built the business around. How do you work with people to make sure that they are really in alignment? They come into it knowing all the different pieces and what they need at each stage of their business to have this sort of life we’re talking about, where you’re doing only the things that you really want to do. But there’s a lot of cross currents in that and different times in your business where you have to sometimes do things you don’t really want to do. So how do you find that balance?

Sarah Greener:

And so it is a journey. I think that’s the thing that people really have to understand when they get out into business. You’re not going to pop up into business and it’s going to be an instant success and you’re only going to do the bits that you love and you’re going to have team doing all the bits that you hate and you’re going to clock in at 9:30 and leave at 2:30 or whatever your dream hours are. It doesn’t start like that. That’s not my experience, anyway, of business. It’s not a magical wave a wand and I jump out into business and all the things that were crappy about working for someone else are going away. The difference being is now that you are the boss and the person doing the work. And so people forget that what they see and what the reality is of business is two really different things.

And so you’ve experienced as an employee, you’ve only experienced a really small part generally of what goes on as in a business because the business owner takes care of all that other stuff so you don’t have to. That’s the risk that they take. That’s the choice that they make. And so when you go from being an employee to being an employer, you shift having to do all of that stuff which you’ve never seen before. So there’s this invisible load that for most people they don’t understand or they don’t know. And that’s why we say the entrepreneur’s journey or the business owner’s journey is quite lonely because there’s so many people that will never understand it. Then the other thing is there’s an assumption everyone can do business and I don’t believe that it’s right for everyone. I think that it gets glamorized in times of it being good. And we’ve seen that leading up to 2020. We’ve had a massive growth curve for a long, long, long, long time. And for the first time, for a lot of people in business, this is the first time they’re seeing a contraction in trading circumstances.

And so you have to be prepared to run your business through both. And so what we do to work on that is we start with the foundations. You’ve got to start with how are you spending your time, focus, and energy because that’s the bit you’ll never get back. Going back to, we talked about being resourceful, if you’ve got time, focus and energy spent on the right things, you can be really resourceful with a really small amount of everything else. And so we build the time piece first and then we go to systems. And as you go through those different levels of business that we talked about before, a few hundred thousand and then a million and then multimillion, and then getting up into those eight and nine figures, at every level you will break your business and systems will fix it.

Your ability to take what you’re seeing inside your head with you or out of your leadership’s team’s head and getting it into a system that someone else can follow, that they can meet those expectations, they can be held accountable to. And you can see whether it’s being done or not, regardless of whether you are physically in the business, is super, super key.

And then lastly, it’s building a team. And those are the tools that we don’t get taught. We just pick them up, we catch them along the way, like we talked about in parenting, more is caught than is taught. We catch how we lead people along the way. So my boss when I was 15 and my boss when I was 18, and then this person I worked with and I catch all their ways of leading and we’re never deliberately taught what are the base skills of being a great leader. And so that’s the last piece that we put in for their foundations, is how do you lead your team?

Melinda Wittstock:

The team is so important and this is why it’s so important to know what your zone of genius is because going through that process yourself helps you understand who you need and what order you need to hire them in.

What are some of the mistakes that people make in hiring a team? Because there’s the hiring, it’s like the finding the right people, but then there’s driving the results that you want from those people. Making sure that those people have all the resources they need, the motivation they need, that they’re in the right seat. I mean it’s complicated.

Sarah Greener:

Yeah, it is. I think the fundamental thing that I see with the women that I work with is that they hire people that they like. Or worse, they hire family members or friends to come and work for them without going through a proper recruitment process. Don’t hire people you like. Hire people that are aligned with the values you’ve created for your business. And if you don’t have values for your business, you need to get some because you’re just going to keep hiring people that you like or that are really good at something in your job and they’re not going to be a culture fit. And I can teach someone skills and tools way faster than I can ever get them to become a culture fit inside my business.

Melinda Wittstock:

So very important. So Sarah, how many clients do you have now in your business and how does that work and who are the ideal people to work with you?

Sarah Greener:

So at the moment I’ve got about 35, I guess, current coaching clients inside my program. And so the best way is to find out a bit more about me, like coaches, some coaches are really great at marketing and you need to make sure that who they say they are is what they actually are in real life, if that makes sense. So what I would love to invite people to do is, to find out a bit more about me is one, they can grab a free copy of my ebook and read about that.

Two, come and join us in our community. We’ve got a great community online called Business Freedom for Female Business Owners, where we are sharing loads of free resources and also building a community, so that we can get some support because this can be a super lonely journey.

And lastly, if you’re a massive action taker, you can just jump on a quick call with me and we can build out your Freedom Gameplan. 15 minutes, you get to know me a little better, I get to know you a little better and we can see if we’re a good fit.

Melinda Wittstock:

So important. Well, I just want to say that every entrepreneur who’s ever really succeeded has had coaches and mentors. And different coaches for different things at different times. We all need that help and we all need the community. So it’s great that you’re doing that community with all the resources as well because I think we all learn from each other.

Sarah Greener:

All of us is always far, far smarter than one of us. So the community piece is really important.

Melinda Wittstock:

Well, that’s wonderful. So all the details for that, for your book, your community, and how to jump on a call with you, that’s all in the show notes. And Sarah, I just want to thank you so much for putting on your Wings and flying with us today.

Sarah Greener:

Oh, I have super enjoyed it. It’s been lovely to connect.