I have been in business for myself for ten years now.
There we go, I’ve said it out loud. I’ve written it down. It seems impossible and yet I know it’s true. And it’s been quite the journey with break ups, awards, speaking at the ExCel in London, traveling the world.
THANK YOU for being there with me, some of you since the very beginning. I really appreciate the love and support you constantly give me. It means the world to me and I love working with you all whether you’re in my programs or whether you’ve yet to invest.
It all started back in 2010 when we were in a deep recession and I was made redundant from my Editor’s job at Capital FM East Midlands.It was one of those pivotal moments in life. I knew my world was never going to be the same again but I didn’t know which was it was going to go. I just had this idea and a faith deep inside that I could make it work. Looking back on that decision now. It made no logical sense. I was about to start a bootcamp business with a guy I’d only been dating for six months.
Two tears in and we were going strong. We had eight sites and loved living and working together. We made an awesome team. But I was missing my old life. My media life. Yes I was doing all the marketing for the business and getting great media attention locally and nationally but I never imagined I’d be running a fitness business. I had another idea! Other bootcamp owners started asking me how we’d grown so fast and so big when they were struggling to fill one camp. And so I created a new company called Yvonne Radley Media to teach other bootcamp owners how to attract attention and a new audience.
Eventually more and more people wanted to learn with me and I created more and more products for them. One of them was a webinar called Big Me Up Media and I liked it so much I renamed my company. A lot of people had websites that you could never show to a journalist as they didn’t look professional and so I started teaching them how to have a decent website that would attract an audience too and then I taught more and more of my business knowledge and then I started taking on 121 Coaching Clients.
I found myself having the same conversations with my clients, they all needed to know the same information and so I took that information and packaged it up into a membership site and started teaching it to groups of people. I called it the Dream Life Academy because what I was teaching them was literally helping them to build a business around their life. We looked at all aspects of what they wanted, was money more important or was time? Did they want to work online or offline or maybe both? Who did they want to work with? What did they want to be? Many of them were trapped doing jobs and classes they didn’t really like with people they didn’t really like. I helped them get the clarity on what they wanted and then pivot just as I had done.
And it doesn’t stop. You pivot and change all the time in business. We’ve all seen that with recent events. And we realise that a curveball can come at any time so we have to get good at swerving.
I’ve been pivoting again recently. I love the holistic approach I have to business where we create this world to fit what it is we dream of. I love helping people explore that and uncover what that looks like and then helping them through the change.
It’s why I created Life Pie. This new course is the 90 day training I do inside the Dream Life Academy but on a much bigger and more intense scale. I run two day events around it and currently they’re happening online because of the current situation but as soon as it’s safe to do so we’re doing them in person in different locations around the world.
I’m also following my instincts and taking that leap of faith again and I’m writing a book. It’s actually called Life Pie and is all about a group of women on a Spanish Mountain retreat.
It is my Passion Project, and I have that same feeling I had about my boot camp. I think I’m onto something and I’m going to pursue it hard. I’ve been working on it since March 2019 which probably sounds like a long time. But recently I’ve met authors who’ve worked on their books for ten years, five years, three years before they finally got published.
I’m in it for the long haul. I won’t give in, even though recently I was challenged to the point where I almost did. I was selected to join a writing course with 14 other people for one of the UK’s largest Literary Agents. It’s a big deal even to get picked as people try year after year to get on and I did it first time. My tutor immediately got me to delete the first six chapters. That was hard. I had to re-write my beginning starting much further in the book. Then we deleted one of my main characters. That was hard. Then we changed the shape and the arc of the book and deleted another 40,000 words. It was like standing in a room and having all four walls collapse to rubble. I was lost for a while and didn’t know if I could rebuild. But I just did a little bit every day and now half my walls are back up and I have a plan. I just need to keep laying the bricks one by one and I will finish again and it is a much better book. I have hired a mentor to help me and I have my top agent waiting for me to finish so she can re-read it and see if she wants to represent me.
I have these things I do religiously with whatever I am creating.
And so I thought I would share them with you. You may already do them all but there may be something new that you’ve not encountered before. At first I had to learn these but now they’re so ingrained I do them naturally and it’s these ten things that have helped me stay in business for an entire decade and celebrate today with you.
10 ways to help your business grow
1: Every time you give it comes back 100 – fold. People often tell me I give away too much for free and I tell them it’s not possible. Everything I have is because I gave away my training in the very early days. I mentored a small group of fit pros for free and helped them get into the media and they gave me some awesome testimonials and I picked up a lot of work from it.
2: Email marketing is the most powerful tool in your toolkit. I have a beautiful website that I’ve spent thousands on over the years building memberships sites into it and changing it up every year. But I don’t sell anything from my website. That’s a myth. I sell using email marketing and have done for the past decade.Yes they push the buy now button on my sales page on my website but only because I’ve been talking to them via email.
3: Community is everything. Look after those you already have rather than always chasing new leads. It’s an easy trap to fall into chasing new clients all of the time and neglecting those who have already joined you. But what would happen if you changed that around? What if you give most of your attention to those clients you have already and occasionally asked for new clients. Something wonderful will happen. You’ll have clients for life.
4: Check in with yourself and your business every 90 days to see if you’re still on course to his those targets you set. It’s so easy to get knocked off course. Life happens. All of the time. The trick is to stay in the race. Don’t get side-tracked, don’t stop, and don’t let others block you.
5: Do Magic Hour every day – this is something to get or keep customers, something to move your business forward. It can be as simple as sending a message to a client who is doing really well or celebrating a birthday, it can be as big as creating a new sales funnel, but you always need to working on keeping and getting clients otherwise you’ll wake up one day with no business. It’s THE most important thing and most people don’t do anything about it every day.
6: Focus on just one goal for the year and make it something measurable. We’re really good at creating To-Do Lists and dreaming up big goals. I love a list. But simplicity is key when driving a business forward. Most people have too many goals and then that train runs away with them, they can’t keep up. Give yourself just one goal and reverse engineer that. You’ll still end up with a To-Do List every quarter, every month, every week and every day but you will reach your goal at the end of the year, maybe even before the year is out because you are laser focused.
7: Do 3 tasks every week that will take you closer to your goal. By the end of the year you would have consistently shown up for your business without burnout and have done 156 things to move your business forward. This one links to the message above, keep your To-Do Lists simple too.
8: When you need to make a tough decision do it in 24 hours, draw a line in the sand and move on. We can drive ourselves crazy when this happens, we know what we have to do we just don’t want to do it half the time. But learn how to make decisions fast it’ll save you so much time and money and pain in the long run.
9: Lead by example – you have to do what it is you teach. If you’re asking people to show up consistently, you have to show up consistently. If you’re asking them to challenge themselves you have to show them how. These ten things I’ve shared with you today are the tools I teach inside the Dream Life Academy, they are the techniques I’ve learnt and practiced myself every day.
10: Always listen to your instinct. It is always right. This is probably the most important one of all. We always know, we just need to learn to listen to ourselves. Sometimes our inner voice will show up and encourage you, you’ll get a feeling and you know you’re onto something. Sometimes it shows up as doubt or anxiety and we need to learn to listen to that voice too. It’s trying to protect us and show us the flaws in our plan. Heed the words and make your plan. And if it feels right do it.
