I'm in launch mode!  Which means there are countless lessons learned.

In this episode I talk about what really goes behind the scenes of being a business 'great'.  I also talk about how owning a business reminds me of my desire to be like Magic Johnson (yep, as in the basketball player).

Ready to get those business fundamentals mastered?  Sign up below for some free training:

[embed_popupally_pro popup_id="6"]

Meredith Hill has an incredible story of starting from a successful career on Wall Street.  She found herself as an analyst on Wall Street making really good money.  When a baby came in Meredith's life, she thought a lot about what she wanted while she was on maternity leave.  What she realized was that she loved working, but she just didn't love what she was doing.

A year after that leave Meredith made the decision that she was going to follow her passion.  A year later, she decided she was going start her own travel business, and specifically travel to Africa.

She started by working at a travel agency basically, just to learn and watch how the experts were doing it.  It did take a while to find success.  She made some mistakes and took about five to six years of not making any money.

Meredith gave some great tips on how to avoid the mistakes she made and helped turn her business around:

1. Get really clear on your numbers.  You won't always know...

Starting and building a business can be very time-consuming, and so many times the first thing that gets put on the back burner is our health. Adria DeCorte of AdriaDecorte.com, along with the Feed Your Hustle Podcast shared some great tips on small things you can do to make sure your energy is optimized!

Adria worked for the government for several years as a Plant Scientist. Before that, she had been gaining weight slowly, and hit a point where she stepped on the scale and realized she was the same weight as her husband. It was at that point, where she no longer wanted to concentrate on the limitations, but she concentrated on what she could do.

This led her to have more energy, and started thriving in her government job. However, she found herself focusing too much on being perfect. So she pulled back a little bit to find balance.  It was at that moment, where she learned to listen to her body, was when she realized that what she really wanted was to do something on her...

This probably wasn't the only reason, but I can reasonably say I lost my first marriage to entrepreneurship.  It was awesome to build my business and make money.  Even though I saw my relationship crumbling, I figured it would make it through the hard times.  However, when that sale was complete, I found myself staring at a complete stranger.

I was so happy to have Susie Miller on the podcast because I believe this is the side of the entrepreneur journey that no one likes to talk about.  Lives get consumed, people feel left out, and relationships fall apart on the road to success.  It's so important that you understand how to make sure you're maintaining the most important thing in your life, your relationships with your loved ones, as you build your business.

Susie gives us some incredible tips on how exactly to do that!

Susie tells us that when you've agreed you're in start-up, your relationship needs to be on the same page.  Understand it's like a...

Claudia Harvey has an incredible story.  This is a true entrepreneur's journey going from wanting something more out of her corporate life to starting a business based on an idea with a friend over drinks.  Then she soon found herself on Dragon's Den, Canada's version of Shark Tank, and landing Mr. Wonderful, (aka Kevin O'Leary) as a partner.  She talks about how she got started, what has made them so successful, and how she's found more in her life by taking a pretty big chance!

Tell us how you went from corporate America to creating a product. With a strong corporate career for 20 years she was in the corporate arena in the sales, marketing and operations. At the pinnacle of her career she was the Vice President of Citibank, she loved her job and she was traveling at least fifteen days a month but with it came a lot of stress. Due to the amount of travel she was away from her family quite frequently and she felt that she was not doing anything very well. Not only...

When it comes to being an entrepreneur I know a lot of you are wondering if you have it in you and do I know how to do this. I am here to tell you that it is not that hard you just have to have a few important qualities and willingness and you can seriously do whatever you set your mind to.

The first one is a really strong WHY and mission. This is one of the things that I learned in my third business, because entrepreneurship is hard. I wish I could tell you that it is super easy; that you get this idea and move with it and everything falls into place and you never have to worry another day in your life. There are some great days and there are some hard days. And setting a WHY is going to get you through those hard days. The WHY is something bigger than you it’s a passion. It is a combination of a passion and what makes you tick, what makes you come alive and what is really important to you in life. How are you going to measure your life? And the WHY is driven around the...

Starting out a career in the engineering field is where Joanie's life and journey started.  However, she used her knowledge talents and passion to figure out what the journey became. Passion has driven  Joanie to all that she has accomplished in the last ten years of being a consultant but loving what she does is who she really is.

Can you share with us a little bit about yourself and what made you decide once you got the PhD in Psychology to start your own business. The path did not start out with the intention of being an entrepreneur in fact Joanie started her career as an electrical engineer and was much more interested in the people interaction than the electrical ones. She went back to graduate school to make a huge shift in her career and getting the education was the way to not make herself an engineer anymore. During graduate school she incorporated her two interests of her past interest in engineering and her present interest in psychology. One of the things...

I was so excited about this one, as you hear advice from entrepreneur experts all the time, like 'hire before you're ready', or 'just build it, and they will come.'  However, after promising her husband that she wouldn't go into debt, building her business, over 10 years later, Shannon Cherry has kept that promise.  Now she teaches others how to do the same thing.  Shannon gives some great advice on how you can remain debt free, tips and tricks for getting creative in growing your business, and how she's managed to stay out of the red all of these years.

When starting a business should you take out an initial investment?  It's really going to depend on the business, but it's really about sitting down and figuring out what you really need to get started.  Also Shannon suggests making sure you're never spending outside of your means.  She's proud to say she doesn't have any kind of debt for her business.

When it comes to marketing, how do you...

When creativity and entrepreneurship meet you are able to get out of the stereotype of “the starving artist” and really understand what and how to express yourself while perusing a passion. The passion of creative and the desire to help others understand the importance of business is what has driven the passion to create Launching Creative.

Tell us how the whole idea came to be and how the whole Launching Creative business started. The whole idea started right out of college, after studying graphic design with all the latest and greatest ideas and software. But what he did not learn was the business side of how to market. So he set off in the journey of life and picked up and moved from Arkansas to New York City. When he arrived he was lost he had no idea of how to meet clients, price his services when he was offered a freelance job and he struggled with the whole business side. During this whole time he had a lot of anxiety and realized that there were not a lot of...

As an impromptu topic I am calling out everyone because I am sadden at the state of humans for what we allow to be okay and what we think we should be tolerating when we shouldn’t be.

As Eminem once said, we have one shot, one shot at life.

What are you going to do with it? Are you going to be scared or a victim of the circumstances of what happened? Or are you going to do something. No matter what you believe, no one really knows what happens to us after we die. What are you going to do with the time that you have here?

A little story…. I grew up with a crazy grandma as in crazy horrible grandma. She is still alive but I have nothing to do with her. She was very mean in the fact that she did not like my siblings, my mother or myself; she is my dad’s mom. She made it her mission to make my siblings; my mother and I feel like crap while bringing in the rest of the family to do the same. So growing up it affected me and I was forced to be with this family all the...