247. 7 Lessons Every Entrepreneur Needs to Know (How I Turned $40 into a Multi-Million Dollar Business)

0:00I started my business with just$40. Now it is a multi-million dollar business. Here are the seven lessons every entrepreneur needs to know if they want their business to grow and succeed. And number five is a game changer. Welcome back to Financial Feminist. I'm Tori. I'm a multi-millionaire, a money expert, and I've helped over 5 million women be better with money. And today on the show, we are talking about all of the things I wish I knew when I built my business. This episode alone can save you thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars over the course of you building your business, plus so many hours in wasted time.

0:35Because there are so many mistakes I made as an entrepreneur. There are so many things that I wish I knew that somebody should have told me but didn't. And this is the episode that you need that will walk you through every single thing that I wish I knew when building a multi-seven-figure business. But first, a word from our sponsors. This episode is sponsored by Squarespace, and we've appreciated their support of the Financial Feminist Podcast since 2021, the first season of the show. And we appreciate you supporting them too, because they are my default recommended website platform. You can offer services on Squarespace.

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2:38My first lesson, trying to be everything to everybody makes you nothing to nobody. When you're first starting a business, what happens is that you need money, you need clients. And so you cast a very broad net. You're like, I'm going to appeal to people in every single city of every gender identity, of every age and every need. And what happens is that somebody goes on your website or somebody goes on your social media and they don't really know if your product or service is for them. So you don't earn their business at all because you try to be everything to everybody. It's counterintuitive, right?

3:15You think, I'm going to start this business. I want as many customers as possible. Why would I ostracize people? Why would I be clear when my product isn't for others? Well, we do this for two reasons. One is that the girls that get it, get it. And the girls that don't, don't. The people who understand and love your business are going to be all in. They're going to be total brand evangelists for you. If you follow us at HerFirst100k, you know that this company, this business is definitely not for everybody, right? If you are someone who is pissed off by the word feminist, you're probably not going to have a fun time here.

3:50That doesn't actually lead to less customers. It leads to more devoted people who are going to buy from you and support you time and time again. The second reason that trying to be everything to everybody does not work is that if you do get people who aren't in your target audience to buy your product or buy your service, they're probably not going to be happy with it. They're going to be dissatisfied customers. And so, yeah, we maybe got their sale once, but we will not be getting their sale again. And we're probably going to have to issue them a refund, right? Because the thing that we're selling is not for them.

4:25So the number one thing that I need you to understand, especially in your marketing for your business is it's okay to piss people off Don't do stupid shit. Don't be controversial just for the sake of being controversial But it's okay to have an opinion. It's okay to take a stand It's okay to say yeah, this thing isn't for everybody So that when someone comes to your social media your instagram bio your website somebody immediately knows, yes, this is for me. This can add value to my life or no, it can't. Number two, my second lesson. If I could tattoo this on every entrepreneur's forehead, I would.

5:03Done is better than perfect. 100%. The thing that you are believing is that you need to have the perfect logo and the perfect website and the perfect brand color, maybe before you even start. and you think it's you being productive. You think it's you doing the right things. You're like, I can't launch this brand until I have all of those things. But in actuality, you're putting these make-believe hoops in front of yourself as a way to feel like you're doing stuff when you're actually just letting fear get in the way. One of my favorite quotes of all time is from Elizabeth Gilbert that perfectionism is fear in stilettos.

5:42And especially for women, we are believing that but perfectionism is a badge of honor. It's something to be proud of. It's not. It is not. I need you to get rid of your perfectionism if you want to be a good entrepreneur. If you want to be successful, if you want to make money, if you want to make an impact, you have to let go of perfectionism. Because that is fear actively holding you back. That fear is, what if somebody realizes that I don't know what I'm doing? What if I fail in front of everybody? What if I post on social media and I'm cringy? What if the logo, I look back in four years and it looks terrible?

6:21All of those things are true for me, by the way. I look back even like two years ago at the content I was posting or what our website looked like and I'm like, it's not good. But you have to start somewhere. And you only learn how to be a good business owner by running the business. I know that seems obvious, but so many people think, oh, I can run the entire business from my head. I can design the website. I can do all of these things. And that's how I'm going to learn. No, you're going to learn by doing. And every time I get caught up in that perfectionist mindset, I can draw a direct link from that mindset to our business, not making as much money or not making as much of an impact or us wasting so much time trying to make decisions.

7:09Just make a decision. You figure out later if it's the right one done is better than perfect my third lesson for you sometimes You have to quit the good To get to the great And let me tell you a story of what this looks like When her first hundred k was a side hustle I was running her first hundred k on the side of my nine to five in marketing. This was 2019. So not that long ago And I was trying to figure out How to quit my job? I was trying to figure out how I could quit my job to run this business full-time. So every day, I was trying to figure out, one, how to manage my time, but two, how to make strategic decisions to get me from where I was to where I wanted to go.

7:52And at that time, I was doing one-on-one money coaching. I was sitting down with people at coffee shops in Seattle and having full one-on-one conversations with them where I was doing budgeting audits and helping them navigate opening up a Roth IRA. And I realized that was a great moneymaker for me where I'm at now. But long term, it was not sustainable. I was making probably a couple thousand dollars a month doing money coaching, which was pretty decent income. But if I wanted to quit my job to go full-time on my business, I needed a lot more time to actually work on growing the business. I was too much in being my own product of taking time to do these one-on-one coaching sessions that I knew for the strategic, long-term sustainability of this business, that was not going to work out.

8:51but it was also a stupid decision. What am I going to do? Kill my best-selling product? Yeah, I did. I killed my best-selling product. And the reason I did that, the reason I stopped doing one-on-one money coaching was because I knew that the sustainability and the long-term lifespan of the business was not going to work. It was not going to actually get me to the point where I could quit my job because it was taking up too much of my time. And it was good. It was good money. It was interesting work, but it was not sustainable. So I killed my best-selling product. I stopped doing money coaching.

9:29One-on-one money coaching, no longer available. But I pivoted. I realized that 90 % of the questions I was getting asked in coaching were the same. It was about how do I create a budget and what should my financial goals be in what order. So I took all of my learnings from one-on-one coaching, which was almost like a paid beta test. And I said, okay, I'm going to make a workshop. I'm going to make a 45-minute personal finance 101 workshop with a 15-minute Q &A at the end. So I could teach a lot of people in just that one hour. And that's what happened. I would get 30, 50, sometimes 100 people signing up for that workshop.

10:09I would run it about once a month. And that way, I was able to serve a lot of people in a shorter amount of time. Guess what I did after that? The workshops were no longer sustainable. So the workshops became a passive course. It became our back to basics course that we sold. And if you're an oldie but a goodie, you remember that. It was like our signature product. It was personal finance 101. Everything that I learned from running those workshops, from doing that coaching went into the course. And guess what? After a year of doing that course, the course was the foundation of my book, Financial Feminist, which is a New York Times bestseller that has sold nearly 300 ,000 copies.

10:47So sometimes you have to quit the good to get to the great. Sometimes you have to make strategic decisions that feel really stupid in the moment, but actually benefit you and benefit the business long-term. When we come back, I'm diving into more lessons I've learned over the past nine years of running my business, including how to show up to make the biggest impact in your business. Stay tuned.

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13:20Welcome back to the show. Thank you for supporting our sponsors who allow us to do this content for you for free. Okay, number four, my fourth lesson. People don't need a buttoned up expert of all experts. What do I mean by this? Well, when you're running a education business, and I don't just mean doing something like I do, financial education or teaching, but I'm talking anytime that you are doing any sort of service in your business that positions you as a thought leader or as an expert, we believe that we need the highest certification. We need to be like a Nobel prize winning person in this field.

13:58We believe that we need to be the best to ever do it. And here's why that's wrong. The average person does not want to hear from the person who is the best in the business. I know that feels counterintuitive, But if you are a side hustler right now, yeah, Mark Cuban could give you some pretty good business advice. But Mark Cuban has not been in your shoes for decades. He doesn't know what it's like to run your particular business. And you also are probably way too nervous and intimidated by Mark Cuban to actually ask the questions or to get the kind of information that is actually going to make an impact.

14:41And so you think, I need to be the best person at this job. I need to be the person with all the certifications and the degrees and all of the credibility in the world. When in actuality, you just need to be the person who is one to two steps ahead of the person you're trying to teach. Why? Well, one, they see themselves in you. You're not at Mark Cuban level where you're this God type figure talking to the masses, right? You're someone who is just slightly ahead. It means that they can do it too, because they see themselves in you. They're more likely to be vulnerable. They're more likely to actually want to work with you because they can see how you did it.

15:26They can go, oh, that's inspiring. They were just where I was a year or two ago. And that helps them open up. That helps them want to invest more in your product or service. The second reason people don't need the expert of all experts is because a lot of the things that you just take for granted, that you just feel like everybody knows, very few people know. And you start to understand this as you teach. This is what happened to me time and time again with marketing. I'm a very good marketer. I think it's one of the things I do best. I know that a CTA, a call to action, needs to be on screen for every social media post I do.

16:06That's not an obvious thing for everybody. Not everybody knows that. When I'm teaching business boot camp with my friend Mal, which we're about to do live, there's so many times where we're like, oh, there's so much we're teaching here that is based on how many years of expertise we have that somebody joining might not know. They might not know exactly how to create a marketing plan that doesn't make them want to die, right? They might not know how to strategically think about making enough money while not burning themselves out. They might not know that you have to set aside 30 % of your income for taxes as a business owner.

16:47That's a fun fact that you figure out over time, right? And this is what we're doing in Business Bootcamp is teaching you all of the things that we had to find out the hard way and that a lot of people just take for granted. it. So people don't need the expert of all experts. They also don't need you to be 100 % buttoned up. I think one of the reasons that you consume my content most likely is because I'm a real person. There's a lot of times where I show up in no bra and no makeup. There's a lot of times where I fuck up my words and we gotta just keep trucking, okay? And people value authenticity.

17:23They value seeing you as a real person, as someone who makes mistakes, as someone who keeps going through those mistakes. And we know from so many studies that people are more likely to buy from and support entrepreneurs who are not perfect and who are willing to say they're not perfect and they're not all buttoned up and they're not the absolute pristine version of what we think an entrepreneur looks like. So my fourth lesson, people don't need the expert of all experts and they definitely don't need somebody who's 100 % buttoned up 100 % of the time. All right, my fifth lesson for you. You're taking advice from people who have never been where you want to go.

18:02And it's the reason you are failing. We want to please everybody. We want to please everybody, especially as women. When I first started my business, so many people in my life were supportive because it was a side hustle. It wasn't a risk. It didn't feel scary. It was this fun, cute little blog, right? It was like a cute little hobby that Tori had. And then when the business started becoming more successful, it was on CNBC, I had posts going viral. I went on Good Morning America for the first time. That's when I started getting advice from all sorts of people. And yeah, some of it was good advice.

18:45Some of it was from people who were doing the kind of things I wanted to do and who were running the kind of businesses I wanted to run. And then I was also getting advice from people who had no interest in being business owners, who had never run a business, but had a million opinions about what I should do with my life, how I should run my business. And the loudest voice was my parents. I love my parents very much. I think they've given me great advice in my life. But one of the most harmful pieces of advice they ever gave me was that when I was on the precipice of quitting my job to run her first 100K full-time, I had just been on Good Morning America.

19:29I had just saved$100 ,000 at age 25. I had momentum in my business. The business was making good money. they told me that I needed to do everything and anything I had to do to keep my corporate job. Because their primary goal as my parent is my own safety. That's it. That is their primary goal as my parents. Even though I was in my 20s, their motivation is always to keep me safe. And they're right. The safer option would have been the steady paycheck and the lunch office lunch on Fridays and the health insurance, right? That would have been the safer option. But it was the worst option. It was the lesser option of the two.

20:17And if I would have listened to them, well-intentioned advice, I would be living a very different life and a life that was not lighting me up and a life that I didn't have as much money and didn't have as much purpose and didn't have as much freedom and choices and options. My parents had never been where I wanted to go. Neither of my parents were business owners. They didn't really understand what an online business was. I don't think my parents still fully understand what I do. And I've been at this for nine years. If you're taking advice from people that you want to please, who have never been where you want to be, that's the reason you're failing, is you care about what everybody else wants and care about making everybody else happy before you're making yourself happy.

21:06And again, these are well-intentioned people. These could be your family members, your spouse, maybe hopefully kind people on the internet, but it could also be from people who don't want to see you succeed. And if you're believing that narrative that they're trying to feed you, your business is not going to succeed because they don't want to see it succeed. need. Your success is a threat to their lack of initiative. Don't let yourself get caught up in it. Stop taking advice from people who have never been where you want to go. My sixth tip for you, you need to be the squeaky wheel that gets the grease.

21:40My friend Mallory and I just put together our Business Bootcamp Live program. We refreshed it. We've redone it. I'm so excited. It teaches you everything you need to know about growing an online business. Whether you have an idea, whether you don't, whether you already have a side hustle, whether you don't, it's going to get you from idea to income in 90 days or less. And one of the things we kept coming back to for the reasons we're successful, she has built multiple companies to six figures before 30 years old. Her first 100K is a multi seven-figure business that turned me into a multimillionaire before I turned 30.

22:12And one of the things that we realized is that we were always a little annoying. We were always a little annoying about what we wanted. And so many women, because again, we're taught that opportunities should just come to us and we can't be loud and we can't talk about our accomplishments. That is not going to allow this business to grow. And when we wanted something, whether it was me trying to get on Good Morning America or a feature in the New York Times or for her being a Lululemon ambassador, we were the squeaky wheel that got the grace. because no one cares about your business as much as you do.

22:53And you have to bug people. I call it like polite badgering internally with her first 100K when I talk to my team. You need to politely ask them until you get what you want. Now, I'm not saying go to their office and stalk them every day. I'm not saying email them every day. I'm just saying, if you want something, you have to go get it. It will not come to you. And you have to be a little loud about it. So I'll give you an example. When my book was coming out, when Financial Feminist was coming out in 2022, I, even before that, but definitely during that time, I really wanted to be on We Can Do Hard Things, which is the incredible podcast that Glennon and Amanda Doyle and Abby Wambach host.

23:40I started dropping seeds. I reached out to them on Instagram. They didn't see it. they didn't care. I was pitching them on my Instagram stories and tagging them. I was trying to email them. I was reaching out to anybody that I knew Glennon had blurbed her book that I might have a connection with so that maybe I could, like, I was trying everything. And I did not get on We Can Do Hard Things in 2022. I did get on their producer's podcast. Now, I don't think she'd mind me saying this. This podcast is way smaller. It is a way smaller show than Glennon, Abby, and Amanda's. But I thought, this is my audition tape for We Can Do Hard Things.

24:24If I can show up at this episode and kill it and give really good advice and be absolutely phenomenal, then maybe this can happen. That was 2022. I did that episode. I stayed in their producer's orbit. I would reach out every once in a while. I would have Kristen, our podcast producer, reach out every once in a while. We were sowing seeds. So the first time they wanted to talk about money on We Can Do Hard Things, it was a full three years later in 2025. I don't even know, actually if my episode of We Can Do Hard Things will be out by the time we release this episode. But I was top of mind. When they wanted to do an episode talking about money, talking about what I would call financial feminism, they knew about me.

25:18I had reached out in a non-annoying way and was very clear about what I wanted. I wanted to be on We Can Do Hard Things. I wanted to be in that orbit. I wanted to show up and provide so much value for the listeners. so that when the opportunity presented itself, even years later, I was the person they thought of. That's what we're talking about here. When we come back, we're wrapping up this episode with my last tip for business owners. And this is the one that changed my business in a way that almost no other tip has. Stay tuned.