Today, I’m sharing 4 shifts to help you scale your business to normalize multiple-six figures to a million in sales.
You’ll learn how to think about your business at each level and the mindset that will get you to your next level.
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Transcript:
My name is Catalina Del Carmen and I am a wife, mother of two, daughter of immigrants, and a rule-breaking business coach for women of color, coaches, creatives, and service professionals. I spent years trying to figure out the online business game, creating fashion blogs, YouTube channels, Instagram pages, email lists—all the things—with little or nothing to show for it. Now, I run a growing multiple six-figure coaching business, keeping things radically simple so I can spend more time with my babies than my business. Inside my programs, Show Up Real and Show Up and Lead Mastermind, I teach my clients how to build an online community using authentic, revenue-generating content—content that doesn’t require them to be everywhere. Whether it’s your first four figures in business or six figures in my mastermind, less is more when you are committed to growing your impact and revenue at the same time. In this show, I tell the whole mother effing truth about what it takes to build and scale an online business. I don’t gatekeep. I don’t tell you half the truth. I keep it real and will challenge you to do the same.
What is up, y’all? Welcome back to Show Up Real Podcast. I hope you are having a good day. I hope you had a good weekend. I am so excited about today’s episode. This is an episode I’ve been—I kind of just wrote some notes on it for a very long time and kept adding to it little by little, but now I’m ready to go through this.
So, I’m talking all about identity shifts—new identities that you will adopt and grow into as you grow your business. And what I’ve seen, especially from what I know about business—I love studying business, I am a business major, I did study business, and I have a business, I’m growing one—there are just phases of growth that I wanted to explain from a place of identity and really wanted to give you a heads up about what lies ahead in terms of your identity. And I think this will also help you realize like, “What areas of my current growth, my current identity that I’m evolving into, am I neglecting? What areas am I trying not to look at that maybe need my attention?” So that’s what I’m going to go through. I created this in kind of four phases, technically five, but more like four phases. And when I was creating the outline, I realized that this is almost like a cycle because I really do believe that the cycle begins again when you decide to pivot, take on a different niche, or when something big happens. Like when we actually hit the top of our game and we become the person we want to be, create the results we want to create—what happens then? And typically, what happens then is a bigger vision. And sometimes that looks like doubling down on what you’ve created, and sometimes it looks like a pivot. It just depends on you, on what you want for your life.
So, let’s get into it, okay? Let’s get into it. All right. So, I’m going to talk about the four identities that you’ll progress into. But before I start with that, I just want to do a little disclaimer for the people who are listening who have no experience in business, but they want and desire a business. There’s this first identity that I’m calling the “Newbie.” And the Newbie is the person who’s just deep diving into understanding business and growth. I’ll probably do a whole episode on that one at some point. But for now, I’m really talking to folks who have coaching businesses, service-based businesses, who sell online or in other ways, and they want to grow their business, they want to scale their business. I want to talk about the phases from your first 15k in business all the way up to multiple, multiple six figures.
Okay. Let’s go into the four identities. The first identity I’m calling the “Tester.” Now, the Tester has big aspirations and small experience. They want a lot—they want the 100k year, 200k year, they want a million dollars. Their aspirations are huge at this level. The Tester is just excited to be taking action, and the goal seems attainable, but they have these blinders on that are very oblivious to how much work it actually takes to create the results. The Tester is focused on looking professional. They’re very focused on branding things, prioritizing branding over selling, prioritizing their website, and other things that make them look good, look professional. They tie a lot of who they want to be to how they should be looking now.
They actually are taking a lot of action. It’s not that they’re not taking action, but the actions they’re taking are very much tied to the results, right? So it’s like, “If I’m marketing here and I don’t see a result immediately, I’m saying, ‘Why isn’t this working? I’m not getting clients.’” I hear this a lot with my clients when they tell me things like, “Oh, I tried XYZ, but I didn’t get clients from it, so I stopped.” And maybe they just tried it once or twice. When I hear that, what I hear is that you’re in this identity—you’re so tied to the results. And there’s also this oblivion that you just don’t know how much work it takes to get to a level.
I also see at this level that there’s this scattered consistency. It’s not that they’re not taking action—they’re actually taking lots of action, but they’re having a hard time being consistent with one thing. They might be selling random offers, trying to create random offers out of nowhere. And I see this a lot with podcasts. I started as a podcaster, I understand podcasting. I see this a lot with people who have a podcast but aren’t super consistent—they have seasons of consistency. For example, podcasts could have seasons, right? Like, you put out all the episodes, then you take a break, then it’s season two, season three, right? But this is not an organized chaos—it’s like, “I’m just going to post a podcast whenever I want.”
What happens during the Tester phase is that the beauty of it is that you are getting a lot of experience because you are taking action. But where you’re missing the mark is when you stay in this identity of the Tester, and why I call it the Tester is because you’re testing things and looking for results, then you’re testing things again. It’s all about testing. Okay, fine, there’s room for that in business. But when you stay in this identity, you don’t build trust. You don’t build trust with your audience, with the community you sell to. You’re not building a cohesive personal brand or the brand of your business because you’re scattered, and people are unsure of what you can help them with. You might be talking about one thing one day, and the next day you’re talking about something else. I also see at this level that people with group programs are planning launches just a couple weeks ahead of time. They’re like, “Oh, I’m going to launch this in two weeks and market it really hard for two weeks, then launch it, then market it for two more weeks while I’m launching.” They stay in this cycle of “Let me test this out and see what happens.” Again, there’s room for this in business, but staying in this cycle means you won’t build a business that brings in predictable money. You’re not focusing on creating… and here’s one thing I’ll also say… the focus is so much on testing and seeing what you can get from it versus testing, learning, seeing what worked, seeing what didn’t, and then stop doing what doesn’t work.
That’s where you need to focus on: creating some systems and predictability in your business. If you’re just throwing spaghetti at the wall all the time, that will only last so long, and your results will show for it. If you want to get to the next identity, you have to get really good at auditing. You have to tell yourself, “I want to get good at selling this offer. I want to get good at getting consistent with this.” Like, really committing to being predictable for your audience so they can build trust in you, having an offer that isn’t changing all the time, right? That is the work—trusting your offer, trusting whatever offer you have, trusting that you can get it to the next level. Trust that you can test things out, but don’t overtly over-promise or create random offers out of nowhere. There is a time and place for that. And there is some room in this identity to do that, but eventually, if you want to create more stability in your business, if you want to really be known as an expert at what you do, you have to get consistent with the delivery, with content, with value. You have to get consistent with selling an offer, building a brand, and understanding where you’re going, understanding where your work is. So, identity—The Tester—is like, if you find yourself having big aspirations and feeling like, “Oh, I could totally do that,” even though you’ve never done it, I just want you to have that conversation with yourself: “Okay, let me really be serious about what I want for my business and what I have to learn and grow through to do that.” Like, look at the areas, like, “Am I consistent with my podcast? Am I consistent with this?” And then look at your offers: “What offers do I sell right now? Can I focus on one for six months? Can I focus on one for a year, just to get good and great at it?”
At this level, they aren’t really focused on client results. They
’re more focused on getting clients. And because of that, there’s a lot of turnover, right? Like, clients are in and out, and they’re not seeing the results because they’re just looking for clients. You have to shift that focus a little bit and really create space to focus on client results, focus on your systems, focus on being consistent. So, that’s the Tester. I could talk about this identity for a long time, but I have three other identities, so I want to be careful here.
Now, the second identity is the Worker Bee. I feel like I spent a lot of time here. I would say that this is a huge jump from the Tester, where you start really taking action, like real action. So the Worker Bee—here’s the difference between the Tester and the Worker Bee—the Worker Bee is consistent, right? You’ve found one thing you’re good at. You’re getting consistent clients from it, maybe not at the level you want, but you’re getting some predictability in your business. Maybe it’s not six figures, maybe it’s a little less, but you’re like, “Oh, I’ve done it before, I can do it again.” You’re past the 20k, 50k mark, and you’re like, “Oh, I’ve created some results for myself. I can do that again.” You’re consistent. The Worker Bee is also consistent in her work ethic, right? She’s consistent with the work. It’s not hard for her to go and get it done. The Worker Bee really is like, “I’m willing to do the work. I know I’ve gotten clients before. I’m just going to keep going, going, going.” And because of this, because of that consistency, there’s a lot of mastery that’s going on at this level.
Here’s what the Worker Bee does—there’s a lot of shame and guilt attached to this level, though. And here’s why: because the Worker Bee is still attached to this idea that she’s still just a little bit of a tester. She doesn’t really realize that she’s no longer the Tester anymore. She still thinks that her next level requires her to be like a Tester and that she needs to work harder to become better at whatever she’s doing. The Worker Bee is mastering things at this level. She’s getting better at marketing, better at selling, better at creating her offers. She’s getting better, but she’s still convinced that she has to do more, right? So at this level, because of that, she’s working really, really hard, and that’s why I call it the Worker Bee. She’s also at this level starting to overwork a little bit, starting to burn out because she’s convinced that she needs to be at the next level. She thinks, “I’ve been here too long, I’m not growing, I’m not scaling,” and she’s starting to burn out a little bit.
Now, this is the identity level where we start to see people who create a lot of client results, like they’re focusing on client results, they’re focusing on client work, but they’re so convinced they need to do more and more and more that it’s starting to take a toll on their health, on their mental well-being, on all the things. And the shame that comes with that is they’re thinking, “Oh, I’m not where I want to be. I’m working so hard. I should be farther along by now.” And here’s the difference: the Worker Bee, instead of recognizing, “Oh, I’m good, I’m creating results, I’m getting consistent clients,” they’re comparing themselves to other people, maybe comparing themselves to somebody who’s making a million dollars, to someone who’s making six figures, and they’re like, “I should be there, but I’m not.” And instead of saying, “Oh, I need to do something different,” they keep working hard. They’re like, “I need to do more. I need to work harder, I need to work more,” which is the wrong move. But that’s what’s happening at this level.
It’s really difficult to see this happening in your business until you’re, like, really honest with yourself. And one of the reasons it’s hard to see this is because the money is coming in. You’re getting consistent clients, the money is coming in, but your work-life balance is off, and there’s a little bit of burn happening. Now, I’ll say this—I feel like I stayed in the Worker Bee stage for a really long time because I was convinced that my results required hard work. I was convinced that the way to create more results was to work harder and longer. I didn’t realize that at some point I needed to do less, and I just needed to work on myself, that I needed to work on the way I was thinking about my business, my belief in myself. And I think that’s what is different in the next identity, which is the Dabbler.
The Worker Bee—because they’re so good at working and they’ve learned how to get results, they’ve learned how to sell, they’ve learned how to do all the things, they know that their work will produce results—they know that when they work, they can get clients, but they start to realize that they have to do something different, right? They start to realize that they can’t keep up this work and that they have to shift. Now, it’s hard for a Worker Bee to see this, but at some point, they’re going to shift into what I’m calling the Dabbler.
And the Dabbler is the person who’s starting to get out of the grind. They’re starting to recognize that the results they want don’t require more work, but rather less work. They’re starting to trust themselves more, and they’re starting to recognize that their business isn’t just about hard work, but about where they need to put their energy and their focus. And they’re starting to dabble into things like self-care, into things like working on their mindset, into things like getting a coach, or starting to shift their identity from a Worker Bee to someone who can actually manage their time better, who can manage their energy better, who can focus on the right things. And they start to dabble into things like, “What if I created a membership? What if I started scaling my business differently? What if I started hiring people?”
So, the Dabbler is starting to see that they can create different results with less work, but they’re dabbling into it. They’re not fully committed to it yet. They’re just dabbling—they’re testing it out, trying to see what works. They might start working with a coach to get them to the next level, or they might start creating offers that don’t require as much of their time. They might start doing group programs or something like that. They’re dabbling into different things that they think will scale their business, but they’re not fully committed yet. They’re still a little bit tied to the Worker Bee identity, but they’re starting to see that they don’t have to be a Worker Bee to get the results they want.
And then the last identity is what I’m calling the Leader. The Leader is the person who has fully stepped into the role of the CEO. They’ve fully stepped into the role of someone who knows that their results don’t require more work, but require them to be a better leader. They’re starting to trust themselves fully, they’re starting to recognize that they can create results without burning out, without overworking, without doing all the things. They’re starting to delegate, they’re starting to build a team, they’re starting to focus on their vision, they’re starting to focus on the bigger picture. They’re not so tied to the day-to-day anymore. They’re more focused on the long-term vision, on where they’re going, on where they’re leading their team, on where they’re leading their clients. They’re focused on the bigger picture.
So, those are the four identities: The Tester, the Worker Bee, the Dabbler, and the Leader. I hope this helps you see where you might be in your business and where you might need to shift to get to the next level. If you find yourself stuck in one of these identities, I want you to ask yourself, “What do I need to do to shift out of this? What do I need to do to get to the next level? What do I need to focus on to grow into the next identity?” To learn more about my signature program, Show Up & Lead Mastermind, click here to join the waitlist. I hope this was helpful, and I’ll talk to you next week.
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