Your choice of color might be hurting your business. This episode, and the sister episode on Flipping 50©, will be a big eye opener for you. 

What benefit could dressing in your eye color or using your hair color for accents have for you? 

If your choice of color sends the wrong message how much could you benefit from a change? 

Feel a lack of confidence going on video or getting your pictures taken ? 

It could be color. 

I've loved and been drawn to specific colors all my life. I've also hated certain ones. And in a standoff with my then new stepfather at age 7 I wasn't shy about what I liked and didn't and what I'd wear and wouldn't. I won. But, years later I know now that brown may in fact have been my better choice. Every time you dress, you create an image, you design or tweak your website or someone creates images for you, imagine if you could improve your relationship with your customers or would-be customers. What would that do for your business? If just doing the same thing, but you improved your results by 10 or 20%, would that be okay? 

Heck, yes! 

And know it or not consciously, you feel better in certain hues and tones and more selfconscious in others. Why not eliminate the random choices right now ? 

Questions we answer in this short episode: 

How important is color to relationship building in a business? 

What are some ways to implement color into more than just wardrobe choice? 

I’d love to know, have you experienced the influence of right vs wrong choice of color? What happened? 

Connect: 

https://membership.jenniferbutlercolor.com/

Schedule A call: 323-931-26266 Leslie

JENNIFER on Social Media:

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jenniferbutlercolor/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/JenniferButlerColor

Complimentary masterclass with Jennifer! Don’t miss it!

https://www.eventbrite.com/o/jennifer-butler-color-30053486018

promo code FIRSTTIME to attend for free.

Whether you’re overworking because it’s still a side-hustle for you and you can’t let go of that “real job” with real benefits or you’re overdoing all the social media posting and getting no traction anyway, or… you’re making money and seeing profit margin grow but still working constantly .. this is for you. It’s a wake up call. 

Overworking and underearning feel a little too like you? I get it. 

The excuse that you love what you do isn’t enough. Not if,you have to pay the bills, or you really had to prove to someone this isn’t a hobby and you could actually sustain your living doing what you love. 

There are dozens if not hundreds of fitness presenters that you know like and trust, that can’t make a living doing what they’re presenting on. They are telling you how to create group training programs and often have never solely earned a living doing it. They’ve coppled together half a dozen jobs, teaching at multiple sites, teaching at universities, and still aren’t earning the kind of revenue they want, need or deserve. 

So, how do you? How do you break this cycle and stop seeing what appears superficially to be such a cool position to be in, and really create a life where you have free time, a family or travel and leisure ways you spend time? 

Feeling like you have to do more…

True confessions, I’m not proud of this one. And it still plagues me to this day. 

Even though I have 6-figure months. If you’re trying to make your first $1000 month or $10k month, I get it. I have been there. One month at a time, one sale at a time, is the only way any of us gets there. And.. not only have I done it, I’ve done it with high stakes. At 49, 11 years divorced, with a son starting college, I started over. When others were thinking about a corner office and a convertible, I committed to the dining room table and to driving my Lexus until the wheels fell off. (I pretty much accomplished that) AND, I said, if I’m not where I need to be in a year, I’ll sell the house. As it turned out I had to. 

Pro or Con?

Fortunately, I had no debt before I started all of this. 

Unfortunately, I had no debt before all of this… because I didn’t understand calculated risk. I didn’t understand the feeling of creating a responsible debt in order to create something scalable. Well, I learned. You know, present the problem and the teacher shows up? All that. 

I have always worked a lot when I had a responsibility, a goal, a deadline. It wasn’t only the urgency of staring at 50 living in a bedroom - with my dog - of my niece while paying college tuition that drove me. So, I share this with you in case you too are driven to do well. 

You may be putting off taking the leap. I did. For two years I’d been thinking about leaving my job and doing something with a bigger reach. Then during a trip to Cozumel during Thanksgiving week - it’s easy to dream and plan out of your environment, I sketched out all my ideas. At the end of the year, I intended to give notice. I didn’t. January 15th I intended to. I didn’t. On January 16th I finally did it at lunch with the boss. I formally turned in my resignation letter the next day. 

Leaving is Hard

Leaving that job was hard. I had the flexibility and freedom to work in a way that got the job done, hit and surpassed my numbers every month, cared more than anyone else about the numbers, and wanted to do better and better. But I was beginning to see I had done with the people there and the systems there I was reaching an upper limit. I wanted to take the systems I’d created and share them. It’s what I used as framework for Flipping 50, and it’s what I use to coach trainers and health coaches in our mastermind (DIY and Live coaching) how to do it too. 

I still work hard, but I love it. I love the freedom to take off for 10 days and be in Colorado, working in the morning and later in the day, and spending the day hiking, and strolling Pearl St in Colorado. I love the flexibility of blocking out days when I may be shooting videos for a program, or… I may be on a trail in Moab creatively allowing ideas for a business plan to take on a life. 

And yet, that entire 6 weeks when I was still locked into a regular paycheck and benefits, it was hard to face the reality that it would all be up to me. 

So, I still work hard. It’s become a habit. 

I am better. And it takes discipline to stay better. 

I meditate on this. I use discipline and accountability with friends. Because I still need it. 

When I began Flipping 50, in 2013.. There was a lot of research, a lot of work and testing, and very little revenue. 

That gave me anxiety. 

I had been in a very comfortable mid-six figure earning range for several years, with no debt, owned my own house, drove a Lexus, belonged to the country club and the women’s sorority and all the things. 

And then 11 months later, I’d withdrawn from my job putting me in front of audiences regularly, on the radio regularly, leading teams and without an income that covered expenses, beginning to make me very uncomfortable. 

So I worked. I worked from rise to bedtime sometimes and I vividly remember not getting out of my pajamas some days. I remember starting at my dining room table at 6am and finishing not before 10pm. 

And there was online learning, coaching sessions, developing copy, creating offers, learning tech, and online commerce, and Facebook ads. 

I hadn’t been afraid of hard work before that. In fact, I joked before and during my resignation that I was going to spend my flexible 60+ hour work week on my own business and thought I could be at least as successful as I was running a program and have a bigger reach in an area that needed it.

[I was targeting trainers. Some of you may be here because of the Profitable Programming for Personal Trainers program that was my first offer and coaching that was a part of that for those that chose it. [And the Planned, Profitable Promotions masterclass is launching soon. This model has evolved but still works today to plan every month, quarter, and year.]

And I was right. 

For a few years it was scary AF. And I wasn’t even making enough to cover my rent, utilities, grocery needs, let alone the cost of investing in my business skill development. 

But I did. 

I invested 100k in programs and masterminds because I needed a guide who had done it, and a community who didn’t look at me like I had 3 heads (to this day my relatives don’t really know what I do). 

And.. instead of making 5-7k a month (with no debt/mortgage/car payment) as I had when I left safety and security in January 2013, I hit 6-figures in more and more months every year. 

AND, I don’t need to work as much.

I don’t need to work as hard.

BUT I do sometimes. 

So what is that about? 

That’s really what this episode is about. 

If you’re just starting and this feels like, there is no way I can relate to you. I can. 

I promise. 

My rent was $3000 a month in the mountains after I’d sold my house because I needed the money. My bank account was so low I got a $13k loan from a relative. 

I know exactly where I was sitting that night talking to him on the phone accepting his offer for a loan. I know I was in tears and felt like a loser and so helpless. 

And the tears I believe looking back were less about hopelessness than they were pride and inability to ask for help. 

Once I sold my house, about 5 dicey months later while living in the basement bedroom of my niece’s home, I invested $20k of it into a mastermind 2 months later. 

And it made me feel both vulnerable and supported all at the same time. I knew I had found someone who had been there. And who could help me accelerate what I needed to do, eliminate what I didn’t need to do, and get out of my own way. 

You, by the way can simultaneously be coaching someone to do something you know already and be reaching out to someone to coach you to do something you don’t know yet. 

If you are a good coach, you are coachable. 

Once you establish habits, even if they aren’t serving you or you aren’t getting results, habits are hard to break. 

Cigarettes for instance, are making it hard for the smoker to walk upstairs, to catch her breath, but it’s such an addictive habit that it’s hard to break. 

If you’ve always received praise for hard work, (and it’s pretty likely if you’re in midlife or older you did), then that is really embedded in your fiber. 

It might be weird for you to hear this, but you have to unlearn the “hard work pays off” mantra. 

If you’re overworking and underearning, you’re at least partially to blame. 

You have to start considering, what if it was easy? 

Even sayings like, don’t make it easy, make me stronger, can backfire on you. Because, think about it, what are you telling the universe? Give you something hard to do. 

And if you pray or hope for patience, what’s going to happen? You might get stuck in traffic or delay success. Because you asked for these lessons. 

What do I do to avoid overworking and underearning ?

Let me clarify that overworking at first may give you traction. Like it did me. This is IF you are doing the right things. However, at a point, you will find you hit a place where your ROI has hit a threshold. It will be true that working more rewards you less and less. Not only in money. But many of us though we need and want to make a living and have a lifestyle, we want something more than money. We want quality of life, freedom, flexibility, and we want to make a difference. We want a legacy. 

That’s in part both egoistic and altruistic. Both parts exist in all of us. 

So depending on where you are… 

Overworking and underearning because you just got started and want to get there faster (like I did) …

overworking and underearning because you’re not doing the right things….

Or you’re overworking and underearning because while you’re making many times over what you did once, you’re continuing to pour into it out of habit, and the idea that YOU must. 

Here’s how I’m working on this:

I start my day very differently than I have before (different choices produce different results)

I tap into my most creative time of day to do work. 

I know when to pull away because I lose my attention and focus. 

And I tell a friend who won’t let me off the hook for it and keeps on me. 

I feed my brain and soul with the right books, podcasts - like this one, exposure to friends and coaches doing the same but maybe in different ways so I can explore ideas for my customers.

At bedtime, I mentally practice again what I did in the morning. Just for a few minutes before I sleep. 

Every day. Not sometimes. Every day I do these things. 

Every month I break out of routine for 3 days. Some months that is a mastermind event I attend, others that I host. And sometimes is a staycay and others a go-away stay. 

Then, I take a trip every quarter for a week. These last two trips have been to Colorado. These are trips where I do what I want to do when I want to do it. There isn’t an agenda. There may be family, there may be friends. If for instance there’s a retreat(I’m hosting or attending) or I’m flying in for a private half day with a few clients, I add time before or after it. The work time is not my break.  

Too many fitness professionals are overworking and underearning. Too many health coaches are doing the same. 

Whether you’re overworking because it’s still a side-hustle for you and you can’t let go of that “real job” with real benefits or you’re overdoing all the social media posting and getting no traction anyway, or… you’re making money and seeing profit margin grow but still working constantly .. this was for you. It’s a wake up call. 

ATTEND FREE: 

My Masterclass to help you PLAN and increase profit and make it predictable - in terms of time demands and revenue.. https://www.fitnessmarketingmastery.com/planpromos

She Means Fitness Business Episodes You’ll Love: 

For an episode that relates and will help you realize 5 Key areas to growth: 

https://www.fitnessmarketingmastery.com/business-scorecard 

To earn more you have to have a sense of your value, your distinct difference (sometimes called brand), and you have to believe the transformation you offer is worth it. 

Have you cried in a meeting? Have you broken into tears asking for help? Have you been in  tears about your current job situation and yet not known what to do about it? 

In this short episode, I ask Dr Sharon Melnick about two key scenarios I’ve seen over and over in the fitness industry. Whether it’s happened to you, or almost, or you can empathize because maybe you so get it but wouldn’t allow yourself to be in that situation… this is for you. 

The episode describing Dr. Melnick’s new book is available at flippingfifty.com/in-your-power for you to listen to after this. 

My Guest: 

Sharon Melnick, PhD is an executive coach for women leaders who shows them how to be heard, stop second guessing, and use their power to create change.

Her approaches are informed by 10 years of Psychology research at Harvard Medical School. She's coached/ trained 40,000 professionals at over 50 Fortune 500 companies and numerous start-ups and women-led companies, and presented at conferences worldwide (including at the White House, West Point, and the United Nations).

Her new book about how women can use their power to advance their career and end disrespect is titled In Your Power: React Less, Regain Control, Raise Others, available now for pre-order. She is also the best-selling author of Success under Stress: Powerful Tools to Stay Calm, Confident, and Productive when the Pressure’s On. Dr Melnick enjoys hosting the Power Shift podcast.

Questions Dr. Melnick answers in this episode: 

• Female fitness professionals notoriously struggle to charge enough to make enough - what advice would you offer? 
• Women in fitness working for small, mid, and large size fitness centers tend to bring emotions with them to meetings. The saying, there’s no crying in business comes to mind. But I’ve seen tears way too often in meetings with upper management. 

That’s it. Helpful? You can earn more by stepping into your own power. 

Get the Book! And GIFTS!

 www.inyourpowerbook.com

Connect with Sharon:

https://www.Instagram.com/drsharonmelnick

https://www.linkedin.com/in/sharonmelnick/

As a health entrepreneur there can be a roller-coaster of emotions. If it attracts you, it excites you. You love everything about health, wellness, fitness and you like reading it, watching it, doing it. You’re drawn to new books of all kinds - cookbooks, detox books, and you’re following influencers and educators learning as much as you can. 

Then there’s the resistance. As you look around you, not all in your immediate environment are seeking the same kind of growth or knowledge. They resist change and enjoy their lifestyle even if not their results. To them, you’re the oddball, the obsessed, and constantly thinking and talking about health. 

So from one health entrepreneur to another, I bring you this episode with Jon Carder. Each of us gets to our own tolerance level. Whether it’s our health or our illness tolerance, or it’s the resistance from others. 

Unless you surround yourself with enough people who do believe, who get you, and who are like you, it’s all too easy to wonder, is it you? Are you the one going in the wrong direction? 

Are you a lone health entrepreneur? 

For me, this happened in 1982-86. I was shifting into a world I’d never been exposed to before. One that was wide open with other ways to choose how to live and care for yourself. And I loved it and was thriving thanks to it. But constant comments and swimming upstream in a world not tuned into health, wellness, and fitness as more than a “craze” was hard. 

As it turns out, I was ahead of my time. But without a community who felt the same. So this is for you if you’re in need of community and a reminder this will always happen if you’re starting something. 

Questions we answer in this episode: 

You described yourself as a hotdog salesman shut down at an early age… and that was the beginning. What was the attraction for you? It really wasn’t a love for hotdogs… why do you think you didn’t just want to be shooting hoops or hanging at the pool? 

From hotdogs to making health more accessible to more people, that’s a pivot. Describe your business entrepreneurial pivots due to failures…  

You quit college to do your own business, what kind of resistance did you experience? Did your parents love the fact you quit college? 

Connect with Jon:

Website: FREE TRIAL 

On Social:

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/wearevessel

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/vesselhq

Twitter: https://twitter.com/wearevessel

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/vesselhealth/

Other Episodes You May Like: 

Female Entrepreneur Playbook: https://www.fitnessmarketingmastery.com/female-entrepreneur-playbook/

New Female Fitness Entrepreneur Podcast: https://www.fitnessmarketingmastery.com/female-fitness-entrepreneurs/

Are you growing your business fast enough?