652 Sarah Dawn:

We’ve all been there. In the 24/7 hustle and grind of business; that feeling that your work is never done, and you’re drowning in a to-do list….and putting yourself last on that list.  My guest today – Sarah Dawn – shares how she paid a terrible price – diagnosed with Bell’s Palsy in her mid 30s. It made her change everything about the way she does business.

MELINDA

Hi, welcome to Wings of Inspired Business. I’m Melinda Wittstock, 5-time serial entrepreneur and founder-CEO of the social podcast app Podopolo, and here on Wings 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.

Today we reimagine the way we can grow our businesses in bliss, that is, without the burnout and stress that comes when we think we have to do it all, and do it all perfectly, all of the time. It’s a pattern many women founders fall into – and it’s not good for our health or our businesses.

Sarah Dawn is a business growth expert working with entrepreneurs looking to grow their businesses to 7 figures without the hustle and grind she lived 24/7 in her first business until she got desperately sick. We’re going to talk about Sarah’s three pillars for success – how to simplify, systemize and scale.

Sarah will be here in a moment, and first:

Have you downloaded Podopolo yet? If you’re listening to this podcast right now then I know you love podcasts as much as me – and that’s why it’s time to explore the app that makes listening social and curates the ideal podcasts for you from our library of more than 4 million. Find out what everyone is talking about – join us on Podopolo today – free to download in either app store.

Sarah Dawn grew up thinking success was all about hard work. Growing up in poverty, where her family couldn’t always afford food and utilities, she was hell-bent on creating a better life. As soon as Sarah was old enough to get a job, she got several, and then worked her way through school to earn psychology and law degrees, checking all the boxes professionally, as she went on to grow her law firm. It was 24/7 grind, and she kept the pace despite the overwhelm, burnout, increasing pain, the pain medications.

Sarah was the “face” of her company, and one day her face literally stopped working. She’d been diagnosed with Bell’s Palsy – and everything had to change.

Today Sarah shares her journey back to health and how she forged a path to a blissful blend of record-breaking business growth and personal fulfillment. It started by looking deep within and focusing her work to her zone of genius and delegating or eliminating what didn’t serve her.

These days Sarah helps entrepreneurs and professionals create valuable businesses that are in alignment with a healthy and happy lifestyle. Simplify, systemize, and scale are the three pillars Sarah uses from to transform her clients into successful, well-balanced leaders and business owners.

Listen on to learn how to rid yourself of overwhelm and perfectionism, why you need to hire your weaknesses, and much more.

Let’s put on our wings with the inspiring Sarah Dawn.

Melinda Wittstock:

Sarah, welcome to Wings.

Sarah Dawn:

Thanks so much for having me on.

Melinda Wittstock:

Well, you have such a powerful story of being in that hustle culture that we hear about, hustle and grind, if you work hard you succeed. Sadly, so many entrepreneurs buy into that at a tremendous personal cost. What was the moment when you were like, okay, enough of this? You got sick, right?

Sarah Dawn:

I did. I jokingly say I was a slow learner. It would be great if there was that one moment, as soon as my health started to suffer, I was like, oh man, I need to shift this, but I don’t think any of us do that. It’s gradual, things happen over and over. I spent a couple years having multiple cases of pneumonia and just my body not functioning the way a mid-30s woman’s body should function. But there’s always that kind of two by four that knocks you where you need to be in a pretty rough way and for me, it was a sudden onset of Bell’s palsy.

Melinda Wittstock:

It seems like we get the warning signs and if we ignore them, the warning signs get louder. It’s kind of like the universe saying, I don’t think you heard me, so I’m just going to have to be a little more forceful.

Sarah Dawn:

Yeah. A little more forceful, a little more forceful and it’ll hit you, it’ll knock you down. I feel like those of us that can get knocked down and at whatever point, it doesn’t have to be immediate. I don’t think that’s fair to ourselves, but whatever point reflect and think, how might I have needed that and how do I do better in the future? The day that Bell’s palsy set in, it wasn’t a particularly rough day.

It was actually a pretty casual December day in my business that was kind of slow season. Me and my law partner were having a casual day goofing around and he had said something obnoxious, which was just par for the course and I went to shoot him a look and half of my face didn’t respond.

Melinda Wittstock:

Oh my goodness.

Sarah Dawn:

I thought I was having a stroke. Not immediately, not that week, not the next week, but once I got into the reflection time of what am I doing to my body, what is this hustle and grind doing to my health, I was like, that’s not normal for a 30-year old woman to think, oh, that’s likely I could be having a stroke. That makes sense.

Melinda Wittstock:

Describe for me what your work life was like leading up to that. What was your average day like looking back? What were you doing? How many hours were you working? What was the stress level like? Just go back there in time.

Sarah Dawn:

The stress level came in waves and I’m not going to act like it was never fun. We were super intentional to have a fun work environment that people enjoyed being there, that we enjoyed being there overall, but I never turned it off. Our grand marketing scheme was that as an attorney, myself and my partner, but I won’t put it on him it was definitely my own action. I made sure it was me, but our marketing message was we’re available 24/7 for client questions.

I truly made myself available 24/7. Then had resentment towards our client base for taking advantage of exactly what we told them to do. We had a really awesome, competent, capable team that I just couldn’t get my hands out of the work they did. It was also imposed by every stretch of the imagination, but it wasn’t so much that I was… It was definitely working long hours, but it wasn’t hustling and grinding during every one of those hours.

It was a matter of business was my entire life. I never shut it off and any need from anybody, whether it was a client or a vendor or my team, any need from anybody was a all hands on deck emergency for me. It was my blood pressure rise immediately. I had to jump on it and the fact that they even had to ask me something means that I was failing in some way for not being on top of ahead of time. That’s what I was doing to myself for years.

Melinda Wittstock:

So many women do that and I’ve been thinking for a long time because it comes up on this podcast and certainly in my own journey as a serial entrepreneur, where you constantly on one level have that macro going on your mind the whole time because you’re always thinking about it. Even when you think you’re not, it’s always there. This is true I think for all entrepreneurs, but it comes up over and over again that women in particular, we think we have to do it all for some reason.

I’m trying to get the root of what that is. Why do we think we have to do it all? Because men come into business and yeah, sure all the stuff has to get done but not by them. They’re really good at asking other people to do things. They’re better I think at shutting it off.

Sarah Dawn:

They’re rewarded for shutting it off. I think it’s part self-imposed, in part societally imposed. Then I think we all have our different stories and in pondering this, I’ve narrowed down a handful of different personality types. Especially like you’re mentioning, us as women the way we respond to these personality types in ourselves results in this nonstop hustle. I think some of us are just control freaks and not us being women, I mean, people, entrepreneurs are just control freaks.

We tell ourselves, if I don’t do it, it’s not going to get done right. Some of us tend to be, especially us serial entrepreneurs, just kind of scattered. We are doing it all because we haven’t taken the time to put systems in place to really let a team thrive and kind of disconnect, unplug that umbilical cord between us as the leader and our team.

Melinda Wittstock:

This is the thing that actually prevents a lot of female-owned and founded businesses from really growing fast because if you’re the bottleneck, it’s pretty difficult to scale your business and beyond that, a team does not want to be micromanaged.

Sarah Dawn:

They don’t feel fulfilled in their role. I think those first two, the control freak and the kind of scattered brain, in my client work I’ve seen that equally among men and women. But for sure your team does not feel fulfilled and you will have constant turnover, which is insanely expensive if you don’t let them thrive in their work. Now, those were not me. The personality type that I know is me and I do think hits women harder societally is the martyr or the self-worth part.

I grew up very poor. I did not have people with success and wealth in my peripheral or in my life. Even though I created it for myself, I didn’t feel… This is reflecting. It’s not like I sat at home at night being like, I’m not worthy of this. I felt awesome and my behavior said something different. My behavior said that I still felt like I needed to earn my place at that table. That every trust fund person and every male was just naturally there.

Of course, he’s going to be successful. Of course, she’s going to be successful, she was raised by successful entrepreneurs. But who am I and what do I need to do to prove my worth in my own organization? That’s where my burnout came from. That’s the belief system I held onto that caused me to never turn it off. That it would all come crashing down because I hadn’t earned it yet. It had to hurt more for me to deserve the success I had built.

Melinda Wittstock:

Because it always comes down to some very, very deep subconscious thing. Like how much do we value ourselves? How much do we value our time? How much do we value our health? So when we’re overworking or over-delivering or underpricing or all the different things, or surviving in that kind of perfectionist thing, there needs to be an AA for a perfectionists because it doesn’t work in business.

Sarah Dawn:

It doesn’t. You have to be able to have things not work. Another word is failure, but we really overuse that word. Things have to not work, to discover what works really well and to discover the things and be innovative and create the things nobody’s ever created before. Nobody sits back and says, oh, this contraption works really awesome. It does everything I needed it to do, I should create something different that does the same thing.

No, we need things to not work to recreate. But when you’re in it in the moment, that feels so scary because you identify with it. It’s not just the thing or the process or the product or service that didn’t work. It was me that didn’t work.

Melinda Wittstock:

Sarah, there you are with Bell’s Palsy and as you’re getting well, what are the lessons? How does this start to piece together for you to recover and be where you are now helping women and others avoid falling into the traps that you did?

Sarah Dawn:

Back to the slow learner part. I was very activity driven, that shouldn’t surprise anybody or anybody that’s been in that spot. They’re like, what did you do? How did you fix this? I dove because everybody from the ER doctor to my acupuncturist, who I saw the very next day to my life coach, who I had already been seeing, everybody was like, here’s your sign, you’ve got to slow down. You have got to start working differently. So I did lots of research to show that they actually don’t know what causes Bell’s palsy and it definitely was not stress induced.

But I kept just hearing it from too many people. When I mentioned my life coach, I didn’t think I was hiring a life coach, I thought I was hiring a business coach and that relationship morphed into exactly what I needed it to be. I had a really amazing support system around me to guide me and encourage me to see, okay, you’ve built this professional success, but what do you want? What makes you happy? I hadn’t dared ever think of that. I hadn’t dared dove into that because I didn’t deserve that yet.

I hadn’t earned that yet or paid my dues enough. I just had enough people to say, what if you did this? My husband, who had never stepped foot in a yoga class had said, “Look, I found this place that’s an Ashram for a weekend yoga retreat, go do that.” He booked me up for a weekend and I had enough people just really encourage me to start on that self-care journey and I couldn’t get enough of it. I still approached it very intellectually and very learned based. I started taking classes and getting certifications.

Sarah Dawn:

I couldn’t help but to be taking care of myself in that space and realizing how good that felt and how amazing that was for me and allowing the things that I enjoyed into my life, allowing myself to do a vision board. Through my legal career, I had been a part of multiple masterminds, women business success groups, and every one of them when it was vision board time, I quit. I refused to do a vision board because that felt too vulnerable and required me to break open a little bit more than I was willing to.

But then when I got into yoga or evaded the self-care space, and I actually did my first vision board, I was like, whoa, this feels really cool and if those aren’t the things I end up doing, it doesn’t make me a failure. If some of these things on here aren’t exactly business related, that’s okay too. That just makes me a well-rounded person. Discovering and accepting those truths, just turned my world upside down in the best possible way.

Melinda Wittstock:

What was the time horizon from the Bell’s Palsy diagnosis to where you felt that you had really, I don’t know, come to feel it in your bones, this new way of living? How long did that take you, that process of changing things around?

Sarah Dawn:

About a year.

Melinda Wittstock:

That’s pretty fast. When you look back, that’s pretty quick. One of the things that I’ve noticed though, is that it’s always an evolving process. I look back in my life, I’m on business number five and as you’d expect all kinds of ups and downs, particularly as a woman in technology. There’s always challenges. There’s always things outside of your control. There’s an element of surrender involved in figuring this out for myself, yoga played a big role, meditation played a big role, all sorts of different things. But every now and again, the universe comes back around and challenges you again and says, are you sure? So you get echos. Do you ever feel yourself falling in too?

Sarah Dawn:

I love that word, “The echos.”

Melinda Wittstock:

It’s kind of like, are you sure? Are you sure you want to change?

Sarah Dawn:

Yeah, for sure. That’s why I say about a year. A year is when I started… The point in question was when I started feeling it in my bones. I wouldn’t accuse myself. Here we are about six years later since Bell’s palsy. I wouldn’t accuse myself of being done with that path and you better check yourself the moment you think you’ve arrived because…

Melinda Wittstock:

That’s exactly the moment. The minute you say, oh yeah, I’ve got this.

Sarah Dawn:

Yeah. That’s when echo comes. The echo of that too comes around. I have to say this year was an echo because I had really curated my legal career and the business I had built over those years. I had really just upended, uprooted and replanted that career in a way that I was really happy with it. I had tons of personal time. I moved across the country in an adventure that I never thought would even be possible. I did all these things.

In that year, that first year, all of these possibilities started flooding in that were even in my realm, peripheral of reality and saying yes to those things just kept expanding and expanding. But, five years later, the beginning of this year, I had gotten really excited. I had curated this part of my work life and I had gotten really excited with business coaching and I had taken a little bit more clients than I wanted in my schedule, but it was fun.

I was creating a program to be able to scale that work. I really dove head first into that program. I put all self-care on the back burner telling myself a story that I was doing that very intentionally. I know that I’m doing it and it’s intentional and it’s going to come back but I’m just going to hustle through this one part, because it’s not a real story to suggest you’re going to go through entrepreneurship and never have hustle again. That’s not a fair…

Melinda Wittstock:

I see it in cycles because there are moments where you are in a sprint, but the sprint has to have an endpoint because you can’t sprint long distance.

Sarah Dawn:

The word I use is surge, but same. For your listeners, I don’t want to dare try to give this Pollyanna story that if you’re doing entrepreneurship right and self-care you’re never going to have that sprint because that’s not fair and that’s not realistic. So I did, I was in a sprint and I could have still incorporated self-care, I was choosing not to. It was okay because I had my end date and I finished my program and I had the most amazing people in it. I kicked back and I looked at how I wanted the future of it to be, and I didn’t want any of it.

I was like, oh, well, that’s weird. I thought we were daydreaming about how big this was going to grow. But I heard that echo. I saw the writing on the wall that I had found a way within this work to give myself permission, to put myself last. I knew I had not arrived, I knew in growing this thing that I had created, I would definitely do that again and the sprints would become more common and less time in between.

I was not willing to spend another eight years figuring out what that looked like. So I pulled the plug, I refunded everybody’s money and I took five months and just kicked back and breathed. Breath, breath, how do you say breathe?

Melinda Wittstock:

Took a long breath. Took a long breath. But sometimes we have to do that and that really takes courage. So really hats off to you for doing that. We have to figure out how to put ourselves first in a business. If you’re the founder of the business and the CEO of the business, it’s not going to work without you and without you being at your best, without you being the lighthouse that inspires others. If you put yourself last, you’re actually short changing the team. But I think women have a fear of appearing selfish.

Sarah Dawn:

Yeah, and that’s such a BS word “Selfish” because other than actively screwing somebody else over, which, that has its own word to it, any example you can give me of selfish, I’m going to say is awesome. Selfishness gets a really bad rap, but when you’re taking care of yourself, like you just said, that is the only way to have the best possible impact for everyone and everything else in your life, is to fill your cup first. That’s not a bad thing.

Filling your cup first is not something that disservices other people in your life. I think we’re getting there culturally in business, but we have a way to go, especially women in business to stop doing that to ourselves and stop telling ourselves that story that we’re doing wrong by others, by making sure we are at our best.

Melinda Wittstock:

Very true. Sarah, you help a lot of people deal with all of this and walk through this because you have yourself before. You have a three pillars of simplify, systemize and scale. Take me through those pillars and how you help people establish that in their own lives and businesses.

Sarah Dawn:

In simplifying, the purpose there is just catch yourself, call yourself out, really honestly, brutally honestly observe yourself on how are you just making stuff harder on yourself. This is the spirit work. This is the digging it out at a soul level on what do I believe about myself? As we talked at the beginning of the show about, some of us believe we’re the only ones that can do things right. Some of us are just a little scattered and we don’t believe we can get things organized enough to delegate.

Some of us like me, didn’t believe that we were worthy of the success we had built for ourselves. Sometimes the belief system is this very traditionalist belief system that the way it’s always been done is the right way and that’s how it needs to continue to be done. So in simplifying, is really just uprooting all of that and very intentionally picking what do I want to keep and what isn’t for me? What do I not actually believe, or I don’t want to believe that that’s true for me? When you’ve done that work, you’re now in a place to put systems in place.

This is the nerdy business part of what will let my business run like a machine. Can I take a day off and my team feels confident and empowered to be successful in their roles? Like you had mentioned, having those systems in place is how you’re going to keep your team happy and it’s how you’re going to keep value in your business, actual dollar equity value. If your business needs you every moment, it’s not worth anything. As an attorney, we would say that’s just a business on paper because, if it can’t make a dollar the second year out the door, that doesn’t actually have any value to it.

Melinda Wittstock:

Yeah. You can’t sell that business.

Sarah Dawn:

You can’t and if you could, you’re going to have, well, I’ll say the opposite way. By having systems in place that a business does not rely on you as a human every single day, you’re going to three to five times increase the dollar value of your business on the market. Then you’re ready to scale. Sorry, go ahead.

Melinda Wittstock:

So signature systems, technology, a whole bunch of thought and getting out of the way. This is an interesting thing even with companies that have branded themselves entirely around the founder. Because even if you do have those systems in place, there’s this feel about it that you are necessary. It will all fall down without you. It’s a delicate dance, even from a branding perspective.

Sarah Dawn:

If you love that about your brand, okay. Just know if you ever get a hint in your mind of, I wonder if I could sell this business, you need to have a three-year plan of unbranding yourself out of it.

Melinda Wittstock:

Absolutely.

Sarah Dawn:

You’re going to need three years of un-branding that. That’s not a rule of thumb that is like a hard and fast rule.

Melinda Wittstock:

This issue about the valuation of your business is a really interesting one that a lot of founders miss, men and women alike, it’s not just the revenue you’re bringing in or your cashflow or whatever. Really, you’re looking at the assets of the business and how to grow the asset value of that business. So obviously the systems, all these things are vital to that. But I think often say even when women hire often will look at hiring as an expense, rather than an investment and an asset that’s actually going to grow the value of your business.

It’s going to make your life better. All these sorts of things and learning how to surrender and let people smarter than you in different areas, hire your weaknesses and let people who are smarter than you just take things off your hands. They can do it better than you. If you try and do it all yourself, it’s going to reduce the value of the business and going to make you unhappy and ill.

Sarah Dawn:

Yeah, and ill. When you talk about who you hire, the thorn in my side that I hear every founder say, especially for their first hire is I just need to clone myself.

Melinda Wittstock:

No, you don’t.

Sarah Dawn:

No, you don’t. The last thing your business needs is another you, you’re the innovator, you’re the creator.

Melinda Wittstock:

You need to double down on what it is that only you can do and hire the rest period.

Sarah Dawn:

There is definitely stuff you suck at, the people that are amazing at those things is who you need to hire. You do not need a clone of yourself. Please don’t go look for a clone of yourself because you’ll both be frustrated and you won’t actually increase. Then it will be an expense not an investment.

Melinda Wittstock:

Absolutely true. Sarah, I want to make sure that people know how to find you and work with you. I know that this is such a big issue for so many women in business, wherever they are in terms of the growth or type of business they have. What’s the best way?

Sarah Dawn:

My website is my hub for everything and it is www.sarahdawnconsulting.com. At the time we’re recording this, I am still in this breathing phase that I am not taking new client work, but I have a podcast called “Nothing’s Serious.” I keep content constantly going out to my email list and my Instagram followers. So there’s still lots of gold to be had there, even though I won’t take your money yet.

Melinda Wittstock:

Fantastic. Well, thank you so much. It’s always delightful to talk to another podcaster. Thank you so much for putting on your wings and flying with us today.

Sarah Dawn:

Yeah, thank you.