The Wedding Pro CEO Podcast: Episode 203 With Brandee Gaar and Andrea Liebross

Hey there, CEOs. Welcome to the Wedding Pro CEO podcast. I’m your host, Brandee Gaar, and my mission is to help you. The wedding industry entrepreneur to build a profitable wedding business that you’ve always dreamed of.

My guest on today’s show is Andrea Liebross she is a mindset and financial coach for female entrepreneurs and you guys know how much I LOVE talking about money on this show. Andrea and I really dug in today into the things that keep us stuck in our business. What is keeping you thinking small CEO? If you are feeling like you are in that messy middle, that you are stuck in your business, or you’re not sure what the next steps are to grow in your business. I am telling you right now that this is an episode you need to hear! It will inspire you, it will give you some practical tips, and it will help you to really rethink where you’re taking your business and what those next steps are.

I’m super excited about this conversation with Andrea Liebross and I cannot wait for you to dig in with me. As most of my listeners know I love talking about money. So anytime I get to have financial gurus money experts on the show I get all giddy.

Meet Andrea Liebross

Andrea Liebross coaches female entrepreneurs and she really focuses on helping manage both business and life. They are both so intertwined and you can’t really separate them out! How it all started was when she was working in a more corporate orientated role as a recruiter for new entrepreneurs that were in the messy middle. The excitement had kind of worn off. They were making money, but maybe they weren’t making it as fast as they wanted to, or enough of it, and their lives were being impacted. It wasn’t like their lives were falling apart, but they were, they were struggling with how to integrate it all. Andrea really loved helping them get through that messy middle, that was her sweet spot.

So when she had enough of that company after 10 years and decided, what’s next? Like now what? She started working with her first coach and she asked her why it took her so long? She didn’t love the recruiting. Certainly didn’t love the hiring. She really loved once they had been established to help them keep going, and that was the impetus for starting her business and just going out on her own.

The messy middle for entrepreneurs

When Andrea said the messy middle, I immediately was just like, yes! It’s such an interesting time of business, right? I feel like for me personally, it was by far the most difficult time in my business. It’s like you are making money, but you’re really not growing as much I think you feel lost. I feel like it’s like you got to the middle of the forest, good for you, and now you’re like there’s just too many trees. I don’t even know where to go! You start to think, is this worth it? Yes! What does success really look like? If it feels this hard, do I really wanna be doing this? What needs to change? Do I need to hire more people? Do I need to add a different service?

Andrea’s most valuable resources for business owners

She likes to say our most valuable resources are time, money, relationships, and brain power. So you start to question like, how am I using my money? Is it I using it in the right way? Am I spending too much time on my business? Am I spending too little? What or what should I be spending my time on? Relationships. Do I have the right people in the business? Sometimes, at that point people might have a couple contractors or they’ve got a VA or something like that. Are these the right people? And then overall what do I really wanna be thinking about? Do I wanna be really thinking about the emails, marketing funnel, or do I wanna be thinking bigger about, where I want this to go in the future?

I talk to wedding pros about this all the time. I love engaging with somebody in the messy middle because like you said in the beginning you’re still figuring your life out and that’s great, but I’m not the coach for you. I really like to meet you here and, and just help you to see all the possibilities! I can vividly remember my own messy middle, kind of the, the climax of it when I just sat on my porch just bawling and I just was like, it isn’t worth it anymore. But as Andrea named those four things, I think one of the pieces of that messy middle is is that you’re almost void of all four of them, right? Because it’s like you don’t really have a lot of money because it’s just, all going out and not as much as coming in because you haven’t figured really out your finances. Your time is consumed by your business, which means your relationships are hurting most of the time and you have no brain power ’cause you’re not sleeping and your brain cannot function well without sleep. So I feel like it’s this void vortex because you don’t have any of those 4 things.

And it’s at that point where you ask yourself is your overwhelm caused by confusion or is the overwhelm caused by success? So at that point, that messy middle, you’ve tasted a little bit of success, like you’re still there, and that’s really where the overwhelm is coming from.

Andrea likes to think of our businesses as like upward spirals. So kinda like a tornado, but going up in a sense. We go through cycles. So in the beginning of your business, you’ve got this belief like okay, I think I can do this. You decide that you’re gonna do it, make a plan, you put it into action and something happens and you’re like… wow!

But you don’t even probably pause to say, wow. Then you get into the next cycle, right? And you have another belief like, this can keep going, or I can offer something else, or I can charge more! So when people think when am I finally gonna arrive? There is no sort of final arriving. Or they’ll say “when I get some more clients and I feel legit, then I can raise my prices”. But what does that really mean?

Mindset matters: Think BIG!!

As women we often don’t think big but we need to! If you think small, you will stay small because you don’t believe it’s possible. We often don’t think big for a couple reasons. One is that we’re really in the action mode. Like we all wanna know what do I need to do but we don’t take a strategic pause. We don’t pause long enough to actually think about what’s happening and why it’s happening because our thoughts really trigger how we feel and our feelings are really what’s triggering our actions. If we feel confident, we’re gonna do one thing. If we’re not feeling so confident we’re gonna do another.

Make sure you are building a business that represents your version of success

What I had built and gotten to that messy middle part was the complete opposite of why I even
started my business in the first place. And it looked successful to everyone else. I guess by someone’s definition it was successful, but by mine, which was that I wanted the freedom to be with my girls, anytime that they needed me, that’s not what I had built. I had built, this machine that basically ran my life and I was like, yeah, this is actually like my version of hell. It was absolutely not the success that I wanted. And so really having to almost reevaluate and say I have to build my version of success, which for me was a business that allowed me the freedom to be anywhere that I wanted to be. So I think that a lot of times we get into that place where we’ve built something and we don’t even recognize anymore.

CEO: How do you take time to make decisions?

A lot of what Andrea does with her clients is help them make decisions. She helps you step into the next best version of yourself. It’s very hard because when you built your business to get out of that hustle mode. You don’t wanna miss a opportunity and all these things, right? So to get to that next place in your thinking, which requires bigger thinking, you need some permission. Sometimes I think it’s almost, when you get to the CEO stage, you’ve been so used to having a full calendar. All the time. You don’t even know what to do with the white space. Sometimes it’s a matter of What am I supposed to be doing? And, and the whole point is, where do you think the best, what activities do you need to do to recharge?Because in that CEO stage so much of what you’re doing is goal setting, planning, dreaming, thinking of the next revenue stream, right? And you just haven’t had the capacity to do that for so long that it almost feels foreign and you don’t know how to do it.

Businesses that have structured planning have 30% faster growth

Sometimes, as small business owners, we think about business planning and it’s like something we think about and we know we should do it. And it sounds really good, and we might have listened to
a podcast or two on it, right? But sitting down to actually create a plan is a whole other story, it feels heavy. So Andrea walks her clients through a process where they do a two part thing. They create a vision and that’s got components to it. What do you want this to look like in 10 years, in five years, in three years? What’s your focus? We go into some of your ideal client kind of stuff. That’s the vision.

Then the second part is really the action. What are you gonna do this year to help fuel those future goals? And what are you gonna do in the next 90 days? Which looking at it a quarter by quarter helps fuel those one year goals that are gonna fuel the three year goals. Andrea calls it a working document, and just by having that working document, it gives you freedom because you get clarity on what you want to be working on!

You want to keep the goal but the strategy might change along the way as you kind of test things out. It’s like a science experiment. Did this work, did this not work? But the goals can remain the same. That’s the freedom piece right there. And businesses that don’t have that get stuck in kind of the overwhelm and chaos. And they don’t know, they wake up, business owners wake up every day, what should I be doing? There’s a hundred things you could be doing. But if you’ve got this plan, you have a map to figure it out. And it has the two components, the vision, and then what are the actions that we’re gonna take to fuel the vision? And that’s a really powerful process to go through that. It’s your guide to get to that extraordinary place that you wanna go.

Making goals will restrict me?

I hear some of my students say “I know Brandee, I should have this vision. I should have this goal, but I don’t like to set them because I feel like it restricts me”. So what if we took away the word goal? And what if we just said they’re just your priorities? Things that are priorities. How does that feel? That feels way better. So that’s freeing in and of itself right there, eliminate the word goals and just go with priorities. Now, when it comes down to, “Hey, what if this opportunity comes my way?” If you’ve really done that vision component well and decided what your business, what your core focus is of the business, that core focus should really serve as a filtering mechanism for you to decide, is this an opportunity that aligns with what I’m focusing on or not? If it aligns with what your focus is, then sure.

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