The Great Unf**king: How I Rebuilt My Coaching Business

Are you building a an empire or a lifestyle business? I got asked that once and I got offended. I think it's a stupid choice. What a dumb question. It's like somehow an empire is legit and a lifestyle business is somehow less than? Especially cuz when you think about it, every business is a lifestyle business because every business, whether it's huge or it's small, every business impacts your lifestyle. So that got me thinking, what if you could have your perfect sweet spot mix of both? I want to show it to you. I can't show it to you without being able to draw and I'm at a beach. I'm going to find a stick and some sand. I'll show you what I mean. The stick. So your business, it's either this is your empire axis, it's either big, lots of money, or little, down the bottom. You're somewhere on that spectrum right now. And as you grow your business, you're either if this is your lifestyle axis, you're either super happy, living a dope life, or you're all work and no play, not having much fun. So this is your spectrum, this is your axes. Think about your business right now, you're somewhere on here. You just go over how much money am I making compared to how much I want and maybe you're like there vertically. And how much fun am I having? Well, not as much fun, so that'll be you. All I want you to do right now is go on this stupid sand picture, where are you? And then secondly, am I okay with that? If you're exactly where you want to be, don't go changing, this is great. But if you want to make a bit more money or have a bit more fun, that's what this conversation's about. I've got clients all across this map. I've got this epic client, we had them battle it out in a cage match, you know, lifestyle versus empire. And representing team empire was Jay Wright. Epic coach, great dude, has built an empire. It's millions of dollars a month. It's a big team. It's building for sale. It's killer. And I love Jay. It's amazing. And the best thing about Jay is he's built an empire because that's what he wanted. The mistake is if that's not what you want, copying what they're doing, that's just dumb. And against him in the red corner, representing team lifestyle, was a cool cat called Rob. Coach of the accounts, one of my favorite humans in the world, lives larger than life, the most incredible like lifestyle guy I know. I'm not going to share his numbers, let's say it's more than $5 million a year, almost 90% profit. But works 13 days a quarter, and his bucket list is just getting ticked off. Playing golf at the 100 best golf courses in the world, and collecting a hat for each, and the 100 best golf courses in Australia collecting that life that he's life. So, his team lifestyle, like tiny team, big team, lots of money, no freedom, lots of freedom, frankly pretty good money. I don't want to be all lifestyle, and I don't want to be all empire. I don't like being forced to choose. I'm always like, "Well, can I do both?" So, I like figured out this perfect business for me, and that's what this video is really about. I don't want a lifestyle or an empire. I want this. I want a lifestyle empire. So, that means we're going to be deliberate about designing the business that we want. So, that you get the perfect business for you, the right amount of money, the right amount of freedom, so that as your business gets bigger, your life gets better. It's hard talking to you way over there, so I'm going to come back to the table. Let's sit down and chat about it. So, it's kind of crazy, dude. We're on this weird enigma of a business. Like eight figures very comfortably, heaps of freedom, and it's kind of ridiculous. Like with a tiny team who outperforms like best team on the planet. It's great now, and it looks like I'm living this dope life, cuz I am, but it's like honestly it started at the exact opposite end of the spectrum. Like not great, hard, not fun, tough. When um Ethan, my son, was um still in the womb, we knew something was wrong. We didn't know what it was. Um he nearly was almost stillborn, and we we heard we were going to have either a stillborn or a vegetable. Thank God it wasn't, but he's had a ton of complications. About a year and a half then, we found out that he had cerebral palsy and later autism and that put a lot hard stuff. Yeah, if you've had a kid or know someone with a kid who's got special needs, it's full on. It's like a a whole different level of hard. And uh he's nearly died uh a bunch of times. And so, when this business was like in its infancy, Ethan got rushed to hospital, and I had to spend 10 weeks beside his bed at Westmead Kids Hospital. Those guys are the real heroes. And it became pretty clear that running a traditional business just wasn't going to work for us because we just didn't have time. And I couldn't be on a schedule, available 9:00 to 5:00, and I couldn't be in a in a in one spot. I had to be able to do drop everything and go be by Ethan's side, and kind of make it work. And so, because the situation at home was so chaotic, I needed a business that was really simple and that I could do it around life. What often happens, I had like forced constraints cuz I don't have any self-control. I had to like if that's the available window that life gives me, I have to make it work in that spot. And so, in the early days, that was look after Ethan and and go to all of therapy appointments and hospitals and [ __ ] And now, he's 25, and he's really healthy. He's still got all the same challenges, but he's there's no risk, and he's living his best life. And now, we get to use the exact same freedom that we built for hospital because we built the business like this to travel. We took the kids out of school a few years ago. We nomad around the world for 3 years. We built the business to fit in a tiny box, so it doesn't take over all of life. And that's the danger. If we're not careful, this thing is a greedy, hungry monster that will take over your world. I was lucky enough to have life force some discipline and constraints on us. And now I I get to show coaches how to build some constraints around them so they can you know, have a business that does incredible things and doesn't get in the way of life. I think in some ways like the business looks weird. But like I said in the first video, way back then, I don't care about how the business looks to other people. I just care about how it looks to me. And I think the thing I'm noticing at the moment is that other coaches are starting to either because they they got the same gift that I got or because they built it the other way and hated it or burnt out, have built something that looks really impressive and realized it's not all it's cracked up to be. So all of the gurus that you look at with their awards and their strike screenshots, that's that's cool. Before you model somebody's business, look at their life and see how much of that you want. So what's the takeaway? More than anything, what I hope you get out of this whole series and frankly, hanging out with me, is that we live in this world of like infinite possibilities. There are people doing incredible things in the weirdest possible niches, in the weirdest possible ways and all of them have built something just for them. And sometimes we just need someone to give us permission. And I think a lot about the Wright brothers. You know, the two guys who flew a plane first. Guess what? They never had a pilot's license. They just decided I reckon we could have fly. Let's figure this out. And they did. So if you're looking for your pilot's license, you're not going to get one. But if you're looking for permission, granted. Build this business to suit you and your weird and your stage of life. I wish you could learn this in a book or a YouTube video or like I had some magic crystal you know, chakra dividing machine that just like said, well, this is your path. Do it like this. That's not how it worked for me. I don't have those skills. You're like no mindset skills. For me, it's just been a game of like hotter or colder, trying to get closer to balance the three things that I think you got into this business for in the first place. In no particular order, you know, most of us want more money cuz that gives us options. Most of us want more freedom so we're not tied down. And most of us do this cuz we care about the work and we care about the people and so we want to do it in a way that's meaningful to us. And I think you can like accidentally get one or two of those. Getting all three is a you know, is a game. It's deliberate. You never get it by default. It's got to be by design. So, we're going to play this game and do it by design. Let's figure out what winning looks like for you. What's your North Star? And let's set some constraints because frankly, the more constraints I've had, the more creative I've got and the closer I've got to what I want. So, if you're my client right now, I just go let's chat about this money, meaning, and freedom thing for like 30 seconds and do a quick self score. So, I just bust out a simple triangle. Money, there's a dollar sign that's pretty straightforward. Meaning, like how much do you love your work and what you're doing and who you're doing it for? And then freedom, like how does a week feel? Are you tied to your computer on Slack all the time or Zoom? Uh are you actually living life? And I just get you to score them like a traffic light. Yellow, green, red. Like green is this is great. I'm living my dream. This is perfect in terms of money. Give it a score. Green if it's green. Red if it's like horrendously bad and needs to change right now or yellow if it's like it's okay. Could use a tweak. So, just do that. You could draw the triangle or not, but just like MMF, money, meaning, freedom and give yourself a score on a traffic light. And that'll give you a sense of like am I on track or am I off? So, we can play this game of like hotter or colder together. Like what needs changing, what doesn't. The biggest mistake I see coaches make is seeing what someone else is doing and making some changes that never needed to be changed. I'm here in Manly in the harbor, the sun is setting. You don't need this, but I feel like you need to see what I get to look at. Let's flip the camera around. I'm going to show you over here cuz it's gorgeous and let's chat about All-Stars. So, we're going to play this game, we're going to make sure the game's worth playing. Look at this. Know how you win. This is a really interesting one because my clients are split. Some of them are like super money-driven. Often they were Yeah, they grew up really poor and it's really important to them to like not be poor. Some of them are like they love the numbers. You know, I want to like they track all the numbers and they're upgrading them. I can't even read a spreadsheet, dude. I'm like fundamentally unqualified to run a business this big. I don't know how it happened. It's a happy accident. I'm stoked. Don't tell anyone to come and take it away from me. I've always navigated by gut feel more than anything else. And I don't just mean like what should I do next, but like how this business feels is the driving light. It's the North Star. Like if something feels off, I listen to that and I change it. I know that's like super vague. So, let me give you some of the feelings I'm looking for. Like if something feels heavy, it needs to change. Like my mojo is like a couple of years ago I'd lost it and a friend of mine, Pete, said, "Taki, your mojo is the number one asset in this business. Anything that gives you mojo is an instant yes. Anything that takes away mojo, that's an instant no." So, mojo's one of the things I navigate by. Pride is another. Okay, if I do something I'm not proud of it, I need to stop that immediately and do something I'm proud of. So, years ago when I first got interested in business, my uncle Brian sent me this crate, like this big chest full of like all of the books and cassette tapes and manuals from all the seminars he'd attended over his business career. Remember one day I was in the car and I listened to something so profound I had to pull over, rewind it, like cassette tape, and listen to it again and again and again. It was a simple story by Michael Gerber who wrote The E-Myth. And he was talking about how the best businesses in the world are obsessed. And this is the line that like hit me. He said, "I've seen all sorts of businesses, like big businesses and small. I said, "I've seen I've seen churches that are run like gas stations. You know, like something that should be revered run like something dirty and it doesn't matter." And then he goes, "But I've seen gas stations that are run like churches." And that sparked something in me. Like I just run a coaching business. It's not It's not going to change the world. But I get to run this like simple normal business just like you do with a sense of like reverence and awe and holiness. Like we care about this stuff. And so we do stuff because we care about it. That matters to me a lot. So I don't know what your North Star is, but I never get by pride. If I run a workshop and at the end of the workshop and hundreds of people paid for a ticket and I'm not proud of it, I refunded the 332 people's money because I think that only people should only pay for something that I'm proud to give them. What's the lesson in all this for you? I think it's permission again. You can run your life by the numbers. You can have a money goal. You can never get by pride or by whatever feeling sparks something in you. I think that's totally okay. It's worked out okay for me. So this super weird thing happened a month ago. I got a message from Tony on my team saying, "Hey, by the way, we did $2 million last month." And I was like, "Huh, that's cool." It wasn't a goal. I wasn't striving for it. It's a big milestone and so like we took a moment and it was like, "That's pretty dope." And then we just got back on to working on cool projects with people I love to help people who really care about. I like the idea of this infinite game. Like I can't win pride or self-expression or or gas stations and churches. Like it's This is the game I could play forever until I'm dead. And I think that's the reason I've been able to play this game for so long and it's ended up great. The only time money was a goal was when I didn't have enough. And if that's where you're at, dude, I 100% get that. Set yourself a goal and get out of the hole so that you you play a a bigger game. And then find the the magic metric for you. And for me it's it's expression and it's pride and it's doing something with a level of crafting care just because we can cuz that that fascinates me. The most important thing is you find a game that you want to win. And the best game is the one that you can't win but you just keep leveling up at. So we just talked about playing an infinite game again that has no end. But I still want to set it up so that you feel like you're winning along the way. And there's been plenty of times where I've got off track and I've missed one or two key elements and it's it's made business grow slower, it's made it feel harder, it's made it feel heavier and I've I've lost a bit of money. Let's not do that. Let me show you how to get this right so you can play a game that you are uniquely built to excel at. Here's the crazy thing. Not only is there not just one way to grow a a lifestyle empire, there's not even one best way for you forever. There's a a best way for you for right now and that's allowed to change. So any my greatest moments have been when I've been playing to my strengths in the right role for the right season. I want to chat about that with you right now. I don't know about you, there's probably some things you're great at and some things that you're kind of suck at. I'm the same. The worst advice I ever got was to work on my weaknesses. If I take something that I'm like a four out of 10 at and I work really hard, maybe I get it to like a five and a half or a six. No one's going to pay me top dollar to be a six, dude. Same with you. There's some things that you are already great at. Some things which come naturally. You've been doing it since you were a kid. They're easy, people notice, and frankly the business wants you to do more of them. Whether it's creating content or sharing a message, do more video or whatever that thing is. There's something that only you do. You're never going to build a business around something you're weak at. I've tried. My first role model was this dude called Dan Kennedy who wrote newsletters to people so I thought I need to write newsletters to people. And I I was crap at it. It was miserable. It was hard work and I was always late. And I hated my business until one day I realized talks, you're a great talker. Why are you trying to write instead of talking to people? And I just started from that day on, you know what? I'm going to build a talk business. And it's been epic ever since. There's something you're great at. Find that and just lean into it. There's so many ways to be right in this business. The people if you notice everyone who you follow, everyone who you look up to like, I wish I could be more like that. Doesn't matter what their skill is, they're doing something they are gifted to do. Find the thing that's most you naturally and lean into that. Second, your role. I've got none of the hat that you wear. During COVID, the business grew a lot cuz everyone needed to figure out how to you know how to do this online thing. And cuz I'm not management material, we threw people at the problems. Is it getting like systematized and auto organized like you're supposed to? So pretty soon I found myself scaled out of all of the things that you're supposed to. And the only thing left was meetings and admin. Ugh. It's like I grew this business and I looked at what my week looked like. I loved the business and I loved the clients, but I looked at my week and it was awful. So now I built this business around my strengths. You know, the role that I'm gifted to play. The stuff that's fun for me. I create and I communicate and that's it. There's nothing in my calendar right now that sucks. Find the role that you're best at. And like when it's early days, yeah, you play a little bit of this and a little bit of that. But it's also okay just to say, yeah, we don't do that. I'm not on LinkedIn. I probably should be. Business would probably be great if I did. I don't feel like I belong on LinkedIn. I don't wear a tie. I don't have like Slack messages or corporate stuff. I just don't feel like I belong. So play in the things that I'm good at and that's completely fine for you. It's worked great for me. It'll be great for you, too. As I said just before, it's not like this is the perfect model for you forever. It maps to your stage and season of life in a business. Like when we got started, my business looked a certain way cuz I had to be in hospital. And now there's things that I can do because the business is bigger, my kids are more stable and more secure that never would have mapped to where I was back then. If you're a stay-at-home mom and you got young kids, like choosing a business that needs you to be locked into sales calls 24/7 is a terrible idea cuz what do you do if the baby needs you? Like I'm here shooting this videos this video for you right now. I just got a call from my son Ethan saying he needs meds. Well, guess what? I got to wrap this video up cuz I want to make him meds on time. Think about the season you're in as well and build up for the season you're in, not the season you hope to one day be. If you build a business around your strengths, you're going to be great at something. If you build it around the sweet spot rule, you'll be in your genius zone. And if you build a business around the season you're in, you're honoring where you're at so you can get to where you want. When it comes to seasons, I think big picture there's two seasons you go through. There's a season of yes where you're just like, "Oh crap, there's money or there's an opportunity. I'll take it. Yes." That's good to get you started, all right. I've been there. I get it. Then you got to get to a season of no. Because all of the things we've been talking about here today are about constraints. There's a couple of constraints that I think we want to add to make sure your business grows. Cuz if you don't, you'll hit a ceiling of complexity and you'll never deliberately grow into pain. I'm going to keep it real. If you're not careful, this business is going to get complicated really [ __ ] fast. As it grows, you're going to be tempted to add more people, more funnels, more technology, this other software, an extra call, more bonuses. Adding more is really easy, but like living with them all, that's really freaking hard. To the point where it gets heavy and weighs you down and starts to feel like the even the idea of growing equals pain. The counterintuitive thing that I've found is that in order to multiply, first you got to simplify. If you think about what most people do, in order to get bigger and bigger and bigger, they add complexity until the thing becomes really unwieldy and hard to turn. Think about like a uh cruise ship. It's big and it's slow. There's cruise ship people. I'm not one of them if you are. You do you. I'm more of a jet ski guy. I like nimble. And the reason the business has been able to grow so fast is because we've deliberately put some constraints in to make it simple. While on the topic of boats, when I'm not here in Manly, I live in Noosa on the other side of a river in a national park with like a dirt track and eight neighbors and they're all weird like me. One of them is this British billionaire called Richard. It's not Branson, it's a different Richard. When he moved into the Noosa North Shore, he saw what the rest of us had, which was the Sealegs, this weird amphibious boat. It's kind of dope. I'll show you one day. Imagine a speedboat with wheels. Like it drives out of my shed, down the dirt track, into the water, and then we press a button, and just like James Bond, the wheels fold away, and we speedboat across the other side, get to the other side where the coffee shops are, wheels down, drive out, park it, go get coffee or pizza or whatever, and it's awesome. But Richard's a billionaire, so he's not just going to buy any amphibious boat. He's going to buy the mac daddy. So he bought this like $857,000 9-m beast, and it's awesome, it's beautiful. It's also really complicated, and it breaks down all the time, and when it's low tide, it's too big and bulky to get across, so he has to like be the idiot who like gets in the water, drives 20 m, puts the wheels down, hovers over the sand bank. It's clunky. Finally exasperated, Richard's like, "This is way more hassle than it's worth." So he jumped on Facebook Marketplace, and he bought a $2,000 tinny second hand off some fisher you know, fisherman. And now when he wants to get across the river, he just jumps in. Hangs across. It's simple, and it's easy, and it gets him where he wants to go. And I think often, I've been the dude who buys the the stupid fancy thing or the course that he doesn't need or adds the team member or the this or the that, and I end up like carrying too much. So the shift that I'm seeing both in me and my clients and across the industry is this return to simple because simple scales where complex files. So, right now here I'd say I'm a pretty good role model, a poster boy of like lifestyle empiring. But a year ago, a year and a half ago, I wasn't. Business got big and complex and as it got complex it got slower and harder and I basically took my jet ski and strapped 182 anchors to it and it got hard and slow and not very fun. So, exactly a year ago this week I was at my at my house with Tony on my team and Kerwin Rae my wife and we started a secret project called the great unfucking where we just got back to well, what do we actually want from this business? And what are the boundaries and constraints we need to put in place? And that touched like every area of my business. It started with team. I'm not management material and I didn't want a big team. There was nothing wrong with them. It just didn't fit me. So, we went from a team of 36 to a now a team of like eight or nine. We went from a sales team who had to like pounce on every lead, slide into every DM to like no sales team. Now it's just like here's the offer, read it. If we've sent it to you, it means we think you're a good fit. Read it. If you want to join us, click the buy button below and join us and it's simple. And we went from like trying to be on all the platforms to Instagram and YouTube. And that's kind of it. Really easy to talk about now. At the time it was it was terrifying and it was nauseating and I put it off for like a year or a year and a half of like in my bones knowing that I didn't want what I had and having a an idea about what I did want. But it was scary like letting go of team members who I'd work with for some of them a decade, who were like dear friends who I thought I'd work with forever. Dude, it was awful in the lead up. And then when I admitted to myself what I didn't want and what I did, like that was the moment I said it out loud about I don't want this anymore, then the dominoes started to fall. And when I had with the conversation with the team, I don't think anyone was surprised cuz they knew that I was like unhappy and out of my sweet spot and everything was not fun for them, too. So I obviously we made sure everyone was looked after. Some of the stuff was like was scary. Like could we really sell a a premium coaching program without sales calls? Well, I didn't know, but I needed to test. So we ran an experiment. All I can say is it probably feels scary to you as well. And on the other side of it is this business that you never knew was possible for you. So is it hard? Yep. Is it scary? Yep. You're probably a couple of awkward conversations away from the thing that you want. And the first uncomfortable conversation is the one you have with yourself in the mirror about admitting to yourself what you want and what you don't. And that's the conversation I encourage you to have. All I know for sure is that simple scales and it's fun and I'm way more me and I'm way more happy. And the weird thing is not only am I way happier but the business is like five times bigger. With less people and all of these weird constraints, I'm more attractive to my to my potential clients and I'm living the dream. So if you get anything from the from this just understand that the shift from the business that I think I should have or that looks good to others and if you got like a business big business that people who aspire to the fear of like letting go of that to go into something that actually feels great to you that's the ultimate role model you can be. This has been kind of fun to share. Well, it's time for us to land the plane. So uh I'm going to do like this seagull here and stand up. So my friend, if we had more time in this series, we'd go super deep and super nerdy into all the different ways we can build a lifestyle in frame. We can attract leads with with brand width and we could sell sales list and we could deliver in a in a more streamlined way with deliveries. We looked at everyone in black belt and everyone in boardroom. What I love about it, I think I'm most proud of is we haven't built a cookie cutter follow this one plan thing because then everyone of you will be building, you know, my business my way. But I want you to build your business your way. There are literally hundreds of ways to grow and scale a coaching business. And the most important thing is that you find yours. My deepest hope is that this has been a source of inspiration. There you go. You know what? I'm going to find my way. Every great video series should have a CTA. So all here's what I'm going to say is if any of this has resonated and you want to do some work together, you'll figure out how. I don't know what's on this page or where you're watching this. Go for a hunk if it's useful or don't. Go build a a lifestyle empire. You're put on this planet to to make a meaningful difference. To have more money, more meaning, more freedom. And it's there for the taking. Just don't follow somebody else's plan. Forge your own path.