Becca: Hello, my friends. Welcome to episode number 80. I have a very fun episode today. So I’m sitting down with my husband today, and we are going to go over the glory days of starting our business. One of the reasons that we were provoked to do such a thing is because our anniversary is coming up.

The other day we were sitting around drinking coffee, and we were talking about things that happened in the last 10 years of our marriage that felt really stressful and scary and like emotional, but looking back now, they’re kind of funny because we have gone through it. We went through the shitstorm. We came out the other side. We’re totally fine. We realize now, later, that maybe they weren’t as big of a deal as we thought they were when we were in the muck of it.

But when we were talking about it, I said what if we did this for the business? We just got on the podcast because there’s so many things that we went through that felt terrible and stressful and scary and like we had made the worst decisions. The truth is they’re funny now because we’ve gone through it. So I’m excited to sit down with him today.

This is episode number 80. I hope you guys enjoy this. This is The Hell Yes Entrepreneur. I am your host, Becca Pike. Let’s go.

Mark: Buh, buh, buh, duh, duh, buh, dah, duh.

Becca: Dee, dee, dee, dee, dee, dee, dee, dee.

Mark: I don’t know. That’s not—I don’t remember what the song is like. Is that it? Yeah.

Becca: No, I think it’s more rock and rolly.

Mark: Yeah, yeah.

Becca: It’s like boom, chicka, chicka, whomp.

Mark: That’s a little like, that’s like 80s porn music.

Becca: It is. Yeah, that’s what I requested when they asked what kind of—

Mark: That’s true. Some that really connects.

Becca: Yeah, I was like I want it to sound like pubic hair. 80s porn.

Mark: Yeah.

Hey, guys. I’m Becca Pike and welcome to The Hell Yes Entrepreneur podcast, the number one show for entrepreneurs looking to create their first six-figure year. If you’ve got the drive and you know how to hustle but you’re not sure where to channel your energy, we’ve got the answers. Let’s dive into today’s show.

Becca: Hi, Mark Pike.

Mark: Hey, how’s it going?

Becca: Good. How are you doing?

Mark: I’m doing well, thank you.

Becca: Thanks for being here today. Thanks for being at the house with me drinking coffee.

Mark: Yeah, no problem. Well, like as you said in your intro, sitting around going over fun challenges from our past in our relationship. Things that like at the time were the worst, but looking back on, they’re kind of funny, pretty silly. We started talking about business the same way and just kind of reminding ourselves of how the best parts of business are those beginning challenges, the beginning phase where we’re kind of struggling. Once you get to a place where you’ve kind of “made it,” you look back on those challenges nostalgically.

Becca: Let’s give some context. So Mark and I have been married for 10 years, or have been together for 10 years. I guess this is our ninth wedding anniversary, but our 10th togetherness anniversary. Let’s be real, we were married the moment we met. Like we just have never left each other side. We were obsessed. But when we met each other Mark was working on a pig farm raising pigs.

Mark: I did raise pigs. It was a full blown farm. We had cattle and other things, but pigs were my main focus then.

Becca: Yeah, right. You’re the pig man. I was a server slinging cocktails and drinks that night and started going to massage school shortly after we met. to say that we didn’t have a ton of business ambition would be a pretty true statement. Right? Would you agree? We weren’t like business driven.

Mark: No, I never thought I was gonna—I think we both wanted more than what we were currently doing. But yeah, we weren’t both like oh, we’re going to start a bunch of businesses one day necessarily. I don’t think that was…

Becca: Well, if you remember, your goal was to make $50,000 a year.

Mark: I do remember that. I remember thinking I’m going to get my accounting degree. I’m going to get an accounting cool accounting job, and I am going to make $50,000 a year. I’m just gonna have the time of my life.

Becca: I wonder too, though, if success was like inevitable for us because we liked to read and learn so much. So like we weren’t business driven, but we were like nonfiction improvement book driven.

Mark: Yeah, absolutely. even if we weren’t thinking in terms of owning a bunch of businesses, we still had that like entrepreneurial spirit. I think that also goes into it.

Becca: Yeah, we just had that big dick energy.

Mark: It was definitely big dick energy.

Becca: Okay, so let’s talk about…So Mark and I were really ready for growth, but we weren’t necessarily business owning. Fast forward to today, and I had become a massage therapist. So we turned that into a full blown massage therapy company. We now have to locations. We built out two brand new spots here in Lexington. We have a coaching company as well.

The coaching company is kind of funny to me because I coach a lot of coaches. Most coaches decide that they want to be a coach. then they spend a few weeks, months learning how to do that. then they go out and they try to find clients that they can help and serve.

My coaching company was born a little bit differently in the sense that we had grown Massage Strong, our massage studio, we had grown it so well and so fast that people came to me before I knew what a coach was. they were asking me for business advice. I told Mark I wish I could charge for this. Like I am giving so much free advice all the time. I wish that I could just like make this its own income. Mark was like yeah, that’s called business coaching. I was like that’s not real. I don’t know what that is.

So the business coaching world for us was born in 2019. it started off with me just one on one coaching some folks, and it has turned into now courses and masterminds and one on one coaching. We also now have an Amazon Fulfillment business that we are poking around with.

Mark: It’s a little baby, but yeah, it’s there.

Becca: So for the sake of context, we now have four kids, three businesses. Two of them are service based, one of them is product based. I think for lack of better words, I would say that they have been a success. But they haven’t always been that way. We have had a lot of trials and tribulations, and we’re going to spend a few minutes just telling you guys about some really stressful times that turns later hilarious. Are you ready?

Mark: Yeah.

Becca: Okay, do you have one?

Mark: Well, like it depends. If we go all the way back to the beginning, one of the things that that definitely comes to my mind whenever we first started that seems a million miles away is once we started to get a couple massage therapists, basically, you got booked out for yourself. So you brought on someone else.

even just the stress of you hiring your very first person was so stressful and so challenging. now looking back on that, it’s laughable because we know how easy it is to hire a person. But in that first phase, it was so challenging. You were really stressed. You were basically like no one’s good. I don’t even feel like anyone can do the job.

Becca: No one will love it as much as I do. No one will know my clients as much as I do.

Mark: Right. Exactly. So it’s the quintessential classic thought process that we always had. But then you did it. then you started hiring your next person, which was then like your friend. You start to hire your friends whenever you’re in that beginning phase. it was really funny because we would wash all the sheets ourself in the beginning. So in the beginning of the business, you do as much as you can yourself, right? That’s always the inclination. You don’t think about hiring stuff out. we would wash sheets every night of our lives.

Becca: Yeah, because in the massage industry, you have to change sheets for each person, right? So if I saw seven people that day, I had seven sets of sheets. 14 sheets and seven pillowcases, right? And blankets. Remember in the winter I had blankets?

Mark: Yeah. We had blankets. Yeah. so once we had four, five, six staff, it really started adding up that we were just washing sheets for hours every single night to the point where we even considered opening our own sheet washing business.

Becca: We did. We did because we would have been our own customers.

Mark: Well, yeah. We were like we’re washing enough sheets that we needed industrial sheet dryer, whatever it takes to do that. It’s just funny looking back on that now because it’s so silly. It doesn’t cost much at all to have sheets washed for you and just hire out that service. it literally saved us hours a day.

Becca: Yeah, we were spending, who knows? Three, four hours? I mean just the washing and drying cycle alone on that many loads was several hours, but then we would stand in that little house of ours.

Mark: At the kitchen tables where you would fold, or on the counter.

Becca: The kitchen counter. We would stand there and drink wine and talk about our day and after our kids went to bed and just fold and fold and fold. We would have these massive stacks like to the ceiling. Then I would have to lug them in. I remember just a years of lugging around duffel bags of sheets.

Mark: That’s right. That was one part too is that we had this giant sacks like a Santa Claus on steroids.

Becca: Yes. They were blue. They were blue.

Mark: As heavy. They were pink and blue. We would load them up so much that they would rip.

Becca: I would be carrying—I would be like pregnant.

Mark: Yeah.

Becca: Or I would have a breast pump bag with all my breast pump supplies and my cooler and my big Santa bags and like my gym clothes. It was like I was moving out every day to go to work.

Mark: Yeah. it was literally a 70 pound to 100 pound sack.

Becca: With all this being said, when we finally, finally hired someone to wash our sheets, it was so fucking cheap. then we would just like show up at the office, and there would be clean sheets there. it was just one of those like revolutionary moments. Such a game changer. We got our life back. We didn’t have to carry our shit around anymore. it was like one of the big kickoffs to delegation, I think. Like we were already delegating. We already had other massage therapists, but like this was one of those really big just aha moments.

before we go further, I want to go back to me being scared when I hired. Interestingly enough, I just wrote an email today. I will probably send it out later today about like not feeling ready to hire, not feeling ready to invest in your business. Like, I just wrote this whole email about the feeling of readiness. what if we started looking at readiness as a circumstance, like a circumstance that we choose, instead of a feeling that we’re going after all of the time?

So I never felt ready when I hired my first person. Like you said, I was tore up about it. I was sick over it. I didn’t like it. I cried several times. But I chose to believe that we were ready to hire regardless of the feeling inside my stomach. so I coach so many people that are like I just don’t feel ready. I don’t know. Maybe a maybe a different coach would tell you like how to navigate those feelings. I just would say do it anyway because you’re never gonna feel ready.

Mark: Yeah, it’s kind of like getting to a cold pool or something. Sometimes you just gotta jump right in. I think of it like a Mario Kart game where you could get these boosts and they would boost you. You had to get the cubes. You had to kind of drive out of your way to get that cube that could become a boost, but it would be worth that time.

that’s what it’s like hiring someone, whether it be a new staff member or even just contracting out a piece of labor or a piece of design, whatever the case may be. There’s a little bit of work involved. There’s certainly some fear involved. But if you just go ahead and take that leap, it ends up propelling you faster in the long run. It forces you to get over whatever fears that you have that are standing in the way.

Becca: In my email yesterday, I made a Mario Kart analogy about slipping on a banana peel.

Mark: No way.

Becca: Yeah, I know.

Mark: Wow.

Becca: I know we’re tapped into the same cloud right now.

Mark: That’s hilarious. Yeah. That was pretty funny.

Becca: I know. Okay, what’s another one? So this is a funny one. I’m going to skip a few years. we have already decided that we need a new facility for Massage Strong, and we wanted it to be bigger. after this one, I think we should go back and talk about us signing the lease and what happened with that. But let me skip past that for a second. we had already signed a lease stating that we were going to build a building that had seven rooms in it, seven massage rooms. Is that right? Seven?

Mark: Yeah, I think we wanted—You know, I may have wanted 10. Because are you talking about the build out? Or is this the–

Becca: Yeah, I don’t think it really matters, but we wanted a bunch of massage rooms, right?

Mark: Yes.

Becca: We wanted seven to 10 massage rooms. we had signed the lease that said that we were going to do a build out. We had hired a contractor. the contractor was like what size rooms do you want? Mark and I were like well, shit, I don’t know. Because the rooms that we were in, we could have just measured the rooms we were already using, but that wasn’t the size we wanted. We wanted to have—

Mark: They were weird shaped.

Because Yeah, we wanted to have the most efficient rooms. We wanted them to be just big enough to give a comfortable massage but no bigger because we wanted to fit as many as we could in our new build out. so we were like well, what size is a massage room? So we started googling. That did not help at all. Everyone had different answers, right?

Mark: I even went to different massage places, got massaged, and then at the end I would whip out my tape measure and measure their rooms.

Becca: Yeah, he would sneak a tape measure into their rooms. I did the same thing. We went to different places. He would sneak his tape measure in. When they would leave for him to get undressed, he would measure the room real quick and then get under the sheets.

Mark: They were all different.

Becca: They were all different.

Mark: Yeah, so it didn’t help.

Becca: So this is what we ended up doing as any professional would do. I have a very strong memory of us going out to our current Massage Strong parking lot and setting up lawn chairs. I think Meggie was with us. Is that right?

Mark: Yeah. We actually had—Meggie would have been with us. then we had different staff come in.

Becca: Yeah. Okay, so this is what we did. So we put a massage table in the parking lot. then we put a massage therapist stool in next to it. then we put a couple of side tables near it. then like where we thought we could do it. Then we pretended that there was a room there. we taped off pretend measurements of where the walls would be. then I would walk around and fake massage someone on the table. I would stretch their legs and see if it would go over the tape line.

then we would have other massage therapists come down and try it out. We were like what do you think? Who the fuck knows what they thought of us? They were probably like what is happening? These crazy people have taped out a plot in the parking lot where I’m stretching people, massaging, walking around at every angle, sitting in the stool, rolling around the table trying to decide if I had enough room.

Like when I say we were completely fucking making everything up, I am not exaggerating, guys. When people come to me and they’re like I just don’t know how to do a build out. I don’t know how to start my business. These are the times that I just think back to us taping out parking lots and hauling sheets because we didn’t know how to hire a service for it.

Mark: A sheet company. Yeah, I mean just to hire someone to do our sheets was obstacle to be overcome. But yeah, that was really funny taping off the room area. even going into the build out once we thought we had the right measurements, I was still not sure. I did the room measurements, and then the walls got put up. I thought that I had done them wrong. I thought it was gonna throw up because I thought we would have to tear down all the walls and redo it again.

Becca: Yeah. For a while you felt that way for like two weeks that we had put up the wrong size rooms.

Mark: Done. Yeah, exactly.

Becca: But we hadn’t.

Mark: No, they were just right. I had really honed it in and got the room sizes really done well for that space. so anyway, it’s funny. Even after you figure it out once, the next time you do it, you can still have that feeling of what the fuck am I doing?

Becca: All right, let’s talk about the big daddy mistake we made.

Mark: Okay.

Becca: The big, big daddy. This one felt like the end of it. This one felt like suffocation.

Mark: Yeah.

Becca: Do you want me to tell it?

Mark: Oh, it doesn’t matter. I can.

Becca: Okay, can you tell it with passion? Can you pause at the right moments?

Mark: No, you should go for it.

Becca: Can you deliver it like a king?

Mark: I think I could.

Becca: Okay, do it.

Mark: We really wanted to build out a larger massage office. We had this goal in mind of how much revenue we wanted to make. instead of opening a second smaller location, we really thought that building in one central location with 10 rooms is what I believe was the goal to get us to that revenue goal. so I finally found this location where we could build our own space.

So we would have a big blank box, and we would get to design it exactly the way that we wanted. It was in this really cool area in the distillery district, which was not, is still not, a normal place to put a massage office, but that’s part of what I wanted. We wanted to show that massage could be done differently and in a different way. so this was the perfect spot.

We get there. We meet with the landlord, and he tells us what the price would be for the lease. It’s way more than what we’re paying right now. Probably four times.

Becca: We were paying $700 a month for where we were.

Mark: Yeah. The new rent was gonna be around $2,500.

Becca: Yeah, I thought $3,000, but maybe I’m wrong.

Mark: Well, it’s like $3,000 now. So yeah.

Becca: Gotcha.

Mark: With utilities and everything, $3,000.

Becca: Guys this was at a time that we didn’t have money floating around. This was like a big dream. we were taking a huge risk to take our $3,000 a month rent. Yeah, exactly.

Mark: Right. We knew where we wanted to go. We were like if we have a bigger space, we’ll fill it out. We’ll make it work.

Becca: We’re like we can do it $3,000 a month. Like we’re gonna make it happen.

Mark: So anyway, we signed a lease for this space not having any idea of how much it actually cost to build out a space because we were really afraid to lose it. We were like we’ve got to pounce on this before someone else takes.

Becca: this was a three year lease.

Mark: I decided to sign a three year because we had never done it before. I didn’t want to lock us in for five or 10 years if it was horrible.

Becca: Right.

Mark: so, in our brains, though, we thought we’ll build this building out $5,000, maybe $10,000.

Becca: I specifically remember us saying I mean, it’s just some drywall. Right? Like, they’re just gonna frame up 10 rooms and put some drywall in it.

Mark: Yeah. I thought I could just do it myself too.

Becca: Seriously. We weren’t taking into account HVAC, electricity, water piping, flooring, framing, permitting, drywall.

Mark: Architecture.

Becca: Architecture fees, ceiling, decorating. Like.

Mark: Like just the furniture alone to furnish the place because it was so much bigger than what we had was a challenge.

Becca: So just to reiterate, here we are. We have signed a three year lease for a number of dollars that we already don’t know if we can do. we have genuinely thought that it was gonna take maybe a $10,000 loan to build out a 10 room facility in the distillery district. we had contractor after contractor after contractor come to try to find a contractor that could do this for the cheapest. the quotes we were getting ranged anywhere from $120,000.

Mark: Yeah, I had one for $150,000.

Becca: $150,000.

Mark: what happened was I started calling places because I had to figure out how do you even do this? How do you even build out?

Becca: We had no trust with the bank. We didn’t have any credit. We had never taken a business loan. We had none of that. Like now, right now in this moment, we have so much trust with the bank, we could call up and ask for $150,000. Like, they would just give us the loan because business. At the time, we barely had a business bank account separate from our personal bank account. We were young, and we were broke. we did not have access to $120,000 for a build out.

Mark: It ended up just being like one of those stories that you hear about where you just go to a thousand places and keep asking and keep asking and keep asking. so that’s what we did with the architect. Because the architects were like $25,000/$30,000 just for them to give you a drawing and basically guide this building process.

so I kept asking and kept calling and eventually found someone that was willing to give me the bare minimum. I was what’s the absolute minimum we need to actually start building this. I found a guy, I think he did it for $4,000, minimum drawing. same thing with contractors. We call many different contractors until we eventually found one that would do it for I think it was probably somewhere around $80,000. then that was like okay, we’ve got it down to $80,000. How are we going to pay for that?

Becca: I know. Well, and let’s talk about what it felt like when we realized. I was like we just skipped right over that. I mean, here we are. We’re thinking it’s gonna be $3,000 rent a month plus a loan that we can pay off over time for $10,000. We get the initial first quote from the very first contractor.

Mark: Yeah.

Becca: He quotes you something like $120,000/$150,000.

Mark: Yeah.

Becca: Are you just thinking, well, that’s not my guy? Like you hadn’t even considered that this is a big problem yet?

Mark: No, I think after the first one, I knew uh-oh.

Becca: Oh gosh.

Mark: Uh-oh, something’s wrong. then I got another quote, and it was similar. Then it was an uh-oh, I’m in big trouble type of a situation.

Becca: Then we spent weeks sick. Sick because here was our options. We were like we’re either gonna just try to break this contract for rent, which—

Mark: Even that was crazy to us because we had already put, you have to pay first month’s rent, and you have to put a security deposit. So we already had $6,000/$7,000 into this thing. to us, that was a crazy amount of money.

Becca: Yeah because we would sit around what maybe $1,000 in our bank account? Like this was seven times what we were used to having.

Mark: Well, we definitely had some money in there. So we were able to pay for things like that. But yeah, we didn’t have just tens of thousands of dollars sitting around. So it was a big deal.

Becca: So our options were break the lease and lose the $7,000, keep the blank building and just pay rent on it until we could afford to build out. So $3,000 a month just going out the window. Or move forward and trust. we look back now, and we kind of joke that we’re almost thankful that it happened.

Because I don’t know that we would have actually chosen to build out such a big, beautiful facility if we had ever known in the first place. It was almost like the universe was working for us by keeping us dumb or something. But like, we would have never pulled the trigger on that. We almost had to have pulled the trigger first and then found out the details in order for us to be owners of Massage Strong today.

Mark: Yeah, absolutely. I think that that’s very true and that is reminiscent for most business owners that have been in business for many years. If you ask them did they know it was going to be as hard as it was? I think most of them would say no. It always ends up being more challenging than what you thought. But you can get to a point where through these experiences, through these challenges, you begin to enjoy them because you always know that they’re going to have some sort of a positive ending.

So I look back on times like that where I really felt sick to my stomach. I remember feeling maybe some worry or anxiety that I was letting down my team or my family, certainly letting down you. I was able to push through that through just determination and resourcefulness. so now, it adds to my confidence in the future that if I run into a crazy scenario, it’s like well remember this other time when I broke through? Remember this other time when I push past that challenge. now it becomes one of the fun memories that we have, things that we can look back and laugh on.

so it’s really important for us to cultivate that type of a meaning around challenging events. It might be hard in the moment to have a positive meaning, but certainly after they’re over it’s our jobs to flip them to something that’s positive, something that we can use to propel us the next time. Because what we’re doing right now is really easy compared to that.

Becca: Yeah, I think finding evidence for your resourcefulness is a skill that you have to sharpen, right? Like, I think we all have evidence that we’re resourceful, or we all have evidence that we’re courageous, or maybe you guys don’t have stories necessarily like this one or whatever. But everybody has proof that they have been through hard times and came out of it.

it’s like such the human thing to do to just forget about those when we’re going through another hard time. we’re like this is the end. Like it doesn’t get any worse than this. Instead of being like, wait a minute. I’ve done this before. I’ve been in worse places. I am resourceful. I always pull through. In a year from now, this will feel like nothing.

Mark: Well, said.

Becca: then we built that facility. We got everything. it was running. it was running really well for a couple years before we decided to build a second location. This one went a lot smoother, except literally on the week that we opened the second location, the pandemic shut us down.

Mark: Yeah, so we signed the lease. the next day the governor came on and said all the businesses close. We had a couple of options, which was one, we could definitely back out of the lease. That one would have been easy, no brainer. I don’t even think we would have had penalties because of the scenario.

But based on our previous experiences, we just felt confident that we would be able to weather the storm, push through. In times of challenge, economic challenge, instead of just backing down or stepping back, we felt like the right thing was to push harder because then when it was over, we would come out stronger than our competition.

Becca: Yeah.

Mark: it really worked out well in that regard. There were certainly times where I questioned our decision and thought what the hell did we do? But showed that it was the right choice. We made the right choice to not back down like to really push through.

Becca: Yeah, I think that there’s a pattern here, which is like when we have been put into scenarios that are really hard and we have choices, we push through and like stick to what we had originally wanted, even when the circumstances are harder.

Mark: Yep, I agree. You know, since we’re talking about challenges in the business and reminiscing on the beginning days, I think it would be fun to talk a little bit about your coaching and what that was like in the beginning for you. Because yeah, you really went from… I remember your first client. you basically talking to me like what do I even charge this person? What does coaching cost in this scenario? Do I do it over Zoom? Do I do it over the phone? Do I do it in person? There was just so much little struggle along the way that was really fun and really interesting to watch.

Becca: Yeah. I mean, the whole fucking lifetime of my coaching has been a struggle and interesting to watch.

Mark: Well, of course, that’s the truth. Business and life, it doesn’t just get solved and all of a sudden, you don’t have problems anymore. You just get a greater capacity to handle the problems easier.

Becca: Yeah, the problems get bigger.

Mark: The problems get bigger.

Becca: It’s no longer how much do I charge? Now it’s like…

Mark: How do I handle this with a specific challenging scenario with a client?

Becca: Yeah, much more challenging.

Mark: Or how do I put on a larger—

Becca: How do I put on a seminar in another country?

Mark: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.

Becca: Yeah. No it was crazy.

Mark: What were some of like, can you remember back to your first few months of coaching, and some of the challenges that you faced or some challenge that now looking back, it’s just totally laughable?

Becca: Yeah. Well, at the time, at the very beginning, I didn’t have a coach. I remember trying to get a coach really quickly because I was like oh, I’ve been put into this position where someone wants me to coach them and mentor them in business. I better fucking hire a coach so that I can at least—

Forget what the coach is going to tell me. I want to see what the coach does. I just want to watch the coach. I want to see like do they do it on phone? Do they do it on Zoom? What do they charge? Is there a contract? Is there a cancellation policy? Like, I just want to watch this person perform. I didn’t even care what she was gonna tell me. She ended up being a good coach and worked out great. Yeah, I didn’t know anything. So learning how to charge. then like, you know.

Mark: I remember when you tried to figure out how to bill.

Becca: How do I bill them? How do I take their credit card if it’s not in my hand?

Mark: Yeah.

Becca: Yeah. do I bill them before the service or after the service? In massage, you bill them after the service. It’s very weird that in coaching, you bill them before they get the service. You know? Is there a late fee? What happens if they show up 20 minutes late? Is that part of their coaching? Like just all of it. Very different than the massage world.

But I think honestly, for me, the biggest struggle was, I found it really simple and easy to have a few one on one clients. It was like I spoke to them. I talked to them. I could tell them this is the contract you’re gonna get, this is the billing cycle. This is what it looks like.

The biggest challenge in the entire coaching industry for me has been the mindset shift from a few one on one clients to how do I accommodate and bring in and serve multiple, multiple people? Like when I started building a course, when I started building a mastermind, it was so different than anything I’d ever done in the massage world. It was very, you talk to a person. You speak with to them with your mouth. You tell them what to expect. You coach their objections. then you bill them, right? They get the service, and you bill them.

when I started transitioning to courses and stuff like that, it became very much like there’s a lot of people that buy my courses and buy my classes that I never speak to. They need to be able to go through the automatic emails, and they need to go through everything that just lines them up to have their contract, to know exactly what to expect, to know exactly how it’s going to go down, to have the resources they need without talking to me.

You know, that’s a really interesting side of it too. I’ll have someone by Three More who I’ve never met before. They go through all the classes, I still don’t talk to them. it’s like did they love it? Just being able to remove yourself from the very minute tiny day to day things that you’re used to doing with one on one that’s been the biggest challenge in the coaching world?

Mark: Sure. Absolutely. Yes, certainly a big shift from your roots of coaching switching over to that different modality, if you will.

Becca: But yeah, I mean the truth is everything in coaching felt new and stuff. Building an email list. I didn’t feel confident doing that in the beginning. I definitely didn’t feel confident doing a podcast in the beginning. Definitely didn’t feel comfortable like pulling people together in a group setting and speaking. I remember just like shaking the whole time I did it. The first time I ever created a group, I made space for 20 people and two people signed up. You remember that?

Mark: Oh, yeah, absolutely. That was back when—Just super quick. Our house was filled with little kids that weren’t old enough to go to school yet. it wasn’t big enough for me to have an office or even anywhere that I could go that I could get some peace and quiet. So I would be doing these coaching calls. I would go out to my car, and I’m talking like I would have like five or six a day. I would just sit in my car and do these coaching calls for hours and hours and hours, guys.

then I had this idea that felt like the best idea of all time. I had a girlfriend that lived about 11 houses down from me. she went to work all day. She was a school teacher, shout out to Sam. She went to work all day. I texted her one night, and I was like listen, what if I paid you rent to come work from your house? My house is full of kids. I can’t think straight. I’m so tired of sitting in my car.

she was like absolutely. So I paid her $200 a month, and I would walk with my lunchbox and my backpack, all my stuff. I would walk 11 houses down. I would use her house as a place to work all to myself. Guys, it was the most beautiful, amazing thing that ever happened. Like looking back now, so funny, but so resourceful. I needed a house. She had an empty house. So resourceful.

Mark: Yeah. that’s really the moral of what we’re talking about here, which is that looking back on these memories, at the time, they seemed like big challenges. looking back on them now, they’re funny, they’re silly, and there’s so much joy that comes from them thinking about them and thinking about how he overcame those challenges.

so, really I like to take what we’re talking about right now and think about it for myself. as I’m facing challenges throughout the week, throughout the day, I’ve got to remind myself that hey, I’m going to look back on this day right now and this challenge. it’s going to be some of the best memories that I have.

so what if I didn’t wait five years to feel good about this time now? What if I decided today to appreciate and enjoy this challenge? What if I decided today to appreciate and enjoy this time that I have working on this business? Because it is a choice. It’s something I choose to do. It’s something that I get to do. it’s not something that I have to do.

Becca: Yep, I completely agree. I think that for me, it’s like I’ve been through enough challenges. I have come out okay from enough challenges that when I go into them, my body doesn’t go into fight or flight now. I mean, I’m not saying I don’t have emotions about my challenges. I definitely do, but I have a deep belief and understanding that it will be okay, and that I get through all of them. that’s that.

Mark: Yeah, I definitely still have horrible experiences. But the difference is how quickly does that last? Just reframing things to a more positive meaning helps get me out of them faster.

Becca: Awesome. All right. Thank you guys for listening. I hope you guys enjoyed this little riff on our past. Happy anniversary babe.

Mark: Oh, thank you. Happy anniversary.

Becca: All right guys have a great Wednesday. As always, love you guys. Can’t wait to see you next week. Bye.

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