The Three Keys To An Abundant Business - With Liz Wolfe

Tom Bailey, founder of Succeed Through Speaking, interviews Liz Wolfe.

Liz Wolfe is a skilled and energetic motivational speaker, coach and trainer. Liz got her entrepreneurial start growing up on a sheep farm in Western Pennsylvania. They had a cottage industry selling wool items, where Liz developed her public speaking and selling skills. Later she moved to NYC to get as far away from the farming life as possible. She then created a successful computer consulting business with her husband, Jon.

Eventually she transitioned out of the technology business. She now coaches entrepreneurs using her broad experience in small business to help them get unstuck so they can launch and grow an abundant business. She recently wrote a book “Your Business Vision Blueprint: Go from Getting Things Done to Doing Great Things.”

Liz says that one of her greatest accomplishments is staying married to her husband for 25 years while running a business with him. They have two wonderful children. Always eager to get in front of a crowd, Liz also plays the ukulele and is half of the singing duo Ukulicious.

Why you've got to check out Liz's episode:

- Discover how Liz helps people who want to launch or grow an abundant business. Whether people have a side hustle, small business or are scaling she will help them get unstuck so that they can move forward.

- Learn some of the biggest challenges that people face, typically the problems of being given the wrong information as business owners. And why time management, credibility and networking are useful skills but not the keys to success.

- What impact these challenges have on your business, why you end up spending more energy on the wrong things and how to change it.

- The three keys to having and running an abundant business which are: Ask powerfully, give wholeheartedly and receive graciously. Also the importance of specifics, value and vision.

- How to get access to Liz's free five part training she has created which is about vision, the three keys and also a fifth key which is a surprise.

Resources / Links

https://lizwolfecoaching.com/threekeys

Transcript

Tom Bailey: Hello and welcome to Succeed Through Speaking the place for experts and entrepreneurs who want high value ideas to boost business results.

Hello, I'm Tom Bailey. And in today's episode, I'm joined by Liz Wolfe, who is a skilled and energetic motivational speaker, coach, trainer, and author of your business, vision blueprint. So, Liz, hello, and a very warm welcome to today's episode.

Liz Wolfe:  Thank you so much. Thank you for having me on Tom. Appreciate being here.

Tom Bailey: Well, thanks for being here. And whereabouts are you in the world? Right now?

Liz Wolfe: I'm in an area of New York City called Hamilton Heights, which is a historic district there where Alexander Hamilton owned his only house. Fantastic from where I live. It's very cool.

Tom Bailey:  And now let me dive into the subject of Liz, just for everybody listening. So, Liz coaches, entrepreneurs using her broad experience in small business to help them get unstuck so they can launch and grow an abundant business. And the title for today's episode is The Three Keys To An Abundant Business and Liz, she's going to show us how to do that in just seven minutes. So, question number one today is who are your ideal clients?

Liz Wolfe: Well, my ideal clients are definitely people who want to either launch or grow and abundant business. And there are millions of people out there that have ideas in their head about something they would like to do. Maybe they already have a little side hustle. Maybe they've had a business for a while and they do feel stuck. So, I love to work with people and help you get unstuck. And get some momentum going in your business. And as they like to say, new level, new devil. So even when you've started your business and things are going, when you expand your vision, just the first thing that I worked with you on, you're going to have a new devil and you're going to come up against things. You're going to, we're going to work together and get you on stuck.

Tom Bailey: Excellent. And, and these devils, we could reframe as challenges. So, what are the typical biggest challenges that these business owners face in this space?

Liz Wolfe: Yes. So, the biggest challenges that people face is what I call, what I say is we've been given the wrong information. And what I mean by that is we think that the keys to creating an abundant business or having success with however you define that would be these three, we would say, got to work really hard and have good time, discipline time management discipline, right? That's really important. You have to have a certain amount of credibility or expertise that people will follow you and trust you. No like, and trust thing. Right? So that expertise. And so, we spent hours going to certification programs and getting our MBAs and doing all these things. And then the third one typically is people think, oh, well you got to get to know the right people. So, you go to networking events. So, you make connections or you're on LinkedIn all day or Facebook or Instagram or whatever your social media is.

And so, the prob there's two problems with this. So, one problem is. What, if you don't meet the right person, what are you, you know, and then just stop, right. And again, to being stuck, or what if you're not good at time management or what if that's not your way of working as to have rigid deadlines? So, I always like to say that those are all definitely skills you want to grow and develop, I would say, and they're good tools in your entrepreneurial toolbox, but they are not the keys to create and just work on hone those skills, but don't rely on them.

Tom Bailey: Got it. And, and, and if people are relying on those particular skills, what impact does that typically have on the business?

Liz Wolfe: A lot of frustration, because if you, again, if you haven't obtained that thing that you think you'll be very frustrated if you, I had a client who said I just, I just can't focus. And when. Because his brain didn't work that way. But if he had in his head, I have to focus to be successful in my business. So, what am I spending all my energy on learning how to focus. I'm not running my business. I'm learning how to focus. That's one way that that'll slow you down the other way is that you will spend a lot of energy on things. That you think are important that don't bring you as many benefits as you would like. And that can be very frustrating as well.

Tom Bailey:  So, let's say there's somebody listening to this episode and they're resonating with this message. What is one valuable piece of advice that you'd give them to really help them solve this problem?

Liz Wolfe: So here come my three keys to an abundant business, right? So, the real three keys, which I have learned through my many years of being in business myself, I've had my own business. I worked with my husband for 25 years. I grew up on a sheep farm. And so, I learned a lot about entrepreneurial-ism at that time as well. And what I learned is that the three keys to an abundant business are ask powerfully,  give wholeheartedly and receive graciously. Yeah. And I'll give you the brief rundown on each one, correct. Asking powerfully means know what you want and ask for what you want. Sales rely on asking. For money mostly, and can't have a successful business without successful sales.

You need to be able to ask people for money. You need to be able to ask them for the sale and buy powerfully. What I mean about that is to ask very specifically for what you want. We're very vague. We say, I want to make more money next year. And I say, okay. $5 is more money. Is that how much, how much more? And they go, no, no, not $5. And then they'll say something like a million dollars. I'm like how much you make last year. And they'll say $10,000. I'm like, okay. Let's so we want to get specific a helmet by when conversation. Okay. Now asking is the first key, because once you know what you want, you can ask for what you want. Now people think, oh, the second key is now I'm going to receive. What I want, but actually there's a middle step or a middle key, which is give, give wholeheartedly. A lot of people don't know where to start. This is one of the reasons people feel frustrated. They don't know where to start. So, once you get clear on your vision, and for instance, if you know, I want to create more money, I want to create more clients, but I don't know what to do.

One thing you can do is help other people to get clients. You know, everybody wants to meet the right person, help other people to meet people who can you connect with? So, giving wholeheartedly, I mean, I needed a two, two-word phrase. So, the idea about wholeheartedly is you're giving without an attachment to any kind of result. So, I have a lot of stories about how, and I wanted something when I focused on creating it by giving you're actually creating more than that. So now you're also in a reciprocal space because everybody, you know, the phrase is it's better to give than receive. Actually, that is false for this reason you cannot give, unless somebody actually received, right. Can I ever have that happen where you're trying to give somebody something a hand, a present and they're like, they don't want, they don't want to, you cannot have giving without receiving they're equal in energy and exchange. And so the third one is about getting that energy going is receiving graciously.

And the graciously is about gratitude is really what I mean by that. It's really gratitude. So now most people say, oh yeah, I want so much. I want so much. Come on, bring it to me, give it to me. But we are not very gracious receivers. Just have somebody give you a compliment or try to give you a gift and you'll find it. They will often it will get shut down. So being open to receiving is the most powerful thing you can do and they all go together and it's actually a circle, not so much steps. So, you can start anywhere with the process.

Tom Bailey: Fantastic. Thanks so much. And thinking about this second step then, which is giving wholeheartedly, is this something that you can give away for our listeners a free resource that they can really dig into this and find out more about those three keys?

Liz Wolfe: Yeah. So, I've given you such a short tidbit about this asking, giving and receiving. And so, I have a five-part training that I have created the three keys to an abundant business. And it is about vision asking powerfully giving wholeheartedly, receiving graciously. And of course, The fifth one, which has a surprise. So, I'm not going to tell you that one. And so normally this training is $197, but I have it for your listeners that they can go to my website, Liz Wolfe, coaching.com forward slash three keys. And you can have access to that training and it goes into much more details and it gives you specific actions and exercises that you can do. To develop these skills. So thank you.

Tom Bailey: Thank you so much for that. And, and that's Liz Wolfe coaching.com has three keys. I'll put that link into the show notes below this episode. So, click that and you'll get access to that free training from Liz. So just to slightly go off topic just a second. And my next question is what would you say is your greatest failure that you've ever made either in life or business and what did you learn from it?

Liz Wolfe: Okay. I love this question. When I, as I mentioned, I grew up on a sheep farm and yes, my last name is Wolfe and I did grow up on a sheep farm. Just want to make sure everybody gets the joke, but it's Wolfe with an E though. And what we did was we sold products made from the wool and the sheep. We, we did you're from the UK. So, I'm sure we have lots of familiarity with sheep. So, we, what, the first thing I did out of college was I opened a store. In Connecticut to sell these wool products and my heart wasn't in it. I did it to save the farm. It was really my mother's business. I was 22 and I had all this responsibility and within nine months it had just all failed.

And then I was, you know, I had no money. It was just a real, just kind of, not a good situation. I let my mother down the whole thing. So, what I learned from that is when you don't want to do something. Or if you're doing something to help someone else and it's not authentic for you. Yeah. It will not work. Yeah. It will not work. And I, the other thing that I learned about that, which is a little quick side note, so I was a photography major in college and I never, for one day in my life ever even tried to get a job as a photographer. So, what I did was I. Gave up on something that I really cared about to go do this, because I thought basically I was avoiding, I was avoiding being a success. Yeah. And I noticed a pattern. I noticed a pattern. Yeah. Link things to avoid. And until I finally got to start my own successful business with my husband and technology that's another longer story. So don't avoid and do what's authentic. Those were the lessons.

Tom Bailey: Great. And I'm just going to ask one more question on the back of that, because I've talked about this avoidance quite a lot and with a few guests recently, and why is it? You think people avoid what they really know they should be doing? What, why do you think that might be?

Liz Wolfe: Yeah, that is a really, really great question. And I think the answer is in a word that you said, which is. We think we should be doing it. And I do this with, I do some group coaching as well. And it's a really interesting conversation in a group coaching world to ask the question there's so many, so many people that have this feeling of obligation. Like I really should be doing something right. That I'm not doing. Yeah. And it's not inspiring to do something you have to do, and people don't do what they don't want to do. So. I always, whenever I'm procrastinating or avoiding a resisting, I I asked myself the question, what am I resisting right now? That is play to get yourself. Unstuck is to really help identify what you're resisting right now. If you can figure that out, you'll clear the space.

Tom Bailey: Thankyou so much for that. And the final question from me today is what is one question that I should have asked you that will also give great value to our audience today?

Liz Wolfe: What is one question you should have asked me? Maybe you should have asked me, is it really true that if you work really, really hard, you have to be an entrepreneur and work 80 hours a week because I hear that from people all the time, they say I'm not cut out to be an entrepreneur because I don't want to work 80 hours a week. And I'll tell you this. The main thing, reason that I love having my own business. Yeah. What everybody wants, which is money, freedom, and time freedom. But time, freedom doesn't necessarily mean that I'm not working 80 hours a week. What it means is I'm choosing how I'm spending my 80 hours a week and doing that is the big difference.

Tom Bailey: Amazing. I love that. And that's a great final point to end on. So, Liz, thank you so much again for your time today and for sharing such incredible value with our audience in such a short period of time.

Liz Wolfe: Yeah. Thank you. Awesome. Love being here. Thanks so much.