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She stays in motion without building momentum. She rarely stays with one approach long enough to know if it's actually working. I got to do this, then I can rest. And the rest never comes. She's just made a decision that the other two have not made. To stop chasing, stop adding. She understands it's not about doing more, adding more, being more. What you need is alignment. My guest today is a dear friend of mine. One of them goes, that one over there. She's big money and it was my guest today. Her name is Amy Porterfield. Amy Porterfield, the ever amazing, best selling author of two weeks notice. Ms. Amy Porterfield. The way your business grows comes down to one thing. Which founder you're operating as right now. Today, I'm introducing you to three different founder types. One of them is building momentum, and by the end of this episode, you'll know exactly which one you are and what to do next. These three founders are the resourceful founder, the abundant founder, and the calibrated founder. You might have been all three at different points, but the one you're operating as right now is shaping everything. Your revenue, your energy, your competence, and whether your business feels like it's working for you or against you. I've been building my business for 17 years, and I've worked with thousands of female founders. I've seen these three founders show up over and over again. I've been two of them myself, and I've learned the hard way what it takes to become the third. Before we dive in. If you're watching on YouTube, make sure you subscribe so you don't miss what's coming next. If you're listening on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, hit follow. All right, let's get into it. Before I walk you through each founder, I want you to hear this. These are patterns. They develop over time, usually because something about them was working at one point. The goal here is to see your pattern clearly so you can actually do something about it. So the first one is the resourceful founder. So the resourceful founder is a learner at her core. She's curious, growth minded, genuinely excited by what's possible. She invests in herself. She's bought the courses and the programs she's implemented, at least partially. She's shown up, she's taken notes, and she comes back for more. Here's what I love about her. She believes the answer exists. She just hasn't found it yet. But she's going to do all she can to to find it. And once she does, she believes things are just going to click. Finally. Now, here's where that gets her into some trouble. Because she's always looking outward for the answer. She stays in motion without building momentum. She tries a boot camp and then she sees someone else killing it with a quiz. So she builds a quiz and then a challenge catches her eye. So she goes in that direction and she's rewritten her welcome sequence many, many times. Her signature course, it's had a few different titles. She's just, like, moving fast. She has a folder somewhere full of swipe files and launch breakdowns and inspiration from other people's businesses. Now she studies what's working for others and starts to wonder, is that the missing piece for me? So she's constantly looking outward and. And I can't blame her. It's. It's very seductive to do. So you see what people are doing on Instagram and TikTok, and you're studying what everyone else is doing, and you start gravitating toward it, thinking, maybe I should be doing that. Can you relate? Because this happens a lot and it's very normal. So her curiosity, it is a genuine strength. However, she rarely stays with one approach long enough to know if it's actually working. When something underperforms, her first instinct is to open a new tab and start researching what to try next. So I love her tenacity, but it gets her in trouble because she's not sticking with something long enough. The resourceful founder has a stain problem. Want to know what it sounds like inside her head? So this is what it sounds like. She says something like, did you see what she just launched? Maybe that's what I'm missing. Maybe I need a challenge or a quiz. Maybe my niche is too broad. Or actually, maybe it's too narrow because hers is a little wider than mine. Mine feels very narrow. I just need to find that one thing that finally clicks. That's what it sounds like in the resourceful founder's head. It's kind of a crazy place. I get it. It's a little crazy in my head as well. But she's constantly looking outward, seeing what everyone else is doing, sometimes feeling like she's not measuring up. And that comes from her really being hard on herself. She is a hard worker. She's never going to back down. And so she sees what everyone else is doing. And for some reason, in her head, she just doesn't measure up. So she's going to try a new thing. So her hard work looks like starting something new, trying something new, experimenting, because she's not going to Give up. There's something out there that is going to make her business finally work and she is totally committed to figuring out what it is. Okay, so let's now move on to the Abundant Founder. She is a force, hardworking, driven, completely unafraid of effort. She's up early, she's creating content, she's running her program, managing her team, answering her DMs, planning her next launch. She's usually the last one to close her laptop. She believes in over delivering. Her offer has more modules than most. She adds bonuses. If something isn't converting, she just adds more. She figures it out, she doubles down, and she has more grit than almost anyone in the room. And she knows it. Now, here's where this gets her into trouble. All of that effort, it's being poured into a container that was really never designed to hold. All of that. More content doesn't fix a messaging problem. More bonuses don't fix an offer problem. More lead magnets don't fix a lead generation problem. They just make everything heavier. So she keeps working and the results don't match. And that gap between effort and results, it starts to wear on her in ways that she doesn't always say out loud, but she feels it. So if the resourceful founder feels as though she's not doing things right and that everyone seems to be doing more than her or something better than her, the Abundant Founder feels as though she's working so freaking hard and the results aren't showing in, let's say, her revenue. And that's weighing very heavy on her. That's what she is just really frustrated about. And she's exhausted because she keeps trying to solve the wrong problem. More, more, more, more. Add, add, add. Heavier, heavier, heavier. Wrong problem. So here's what's running through her head. Let's say at 10pm at night, because she stays up late, she says things like, I just need to get through this launch, then I can breathe. If I just get through this launch, it's going to get easier. I've come this far because I've outworked everyone else, so why isn't my effort showing in my revenue? If, if I just do this one more thing, it's going to work, it's going to be easier. I'm going to start making more money. I just got to. I got to do this, then I can rest. And the rest never comes. The reason I know her so well is because I was her. I was definitely the Abundant founder for years. The only thing that's different is usually the Abundant Founder works late into the night, but I'm like the girl that would get up at 4 or 5am to work early in the morning because I'm not really a late nighter. Other than that, though, working way too many hours and feeling as though my value was tied to how much I could do and how much I could actually add, how much I could deliver. And so it was more, more, more. Now, the thing is, I thought working harder would fix my challenges in my business. And the challenges, sometimes it did. Sometimes my hard work absolutely paid off, but it was never predictable and I was always tired physically and mentally. So that's what made it really hard. So that is the Abundant Founders, you can see the Resourceful Founder, there's some great things that got her where she is, but there's some trouble there, right? The Abundant Founder, that hard work, the tenacity got her there, but there's some challenges there. Right now, the third founder is the Calibrated Founder. Now, before I describe her, I want you to hear this. The Calibrated Founder is very similar in ways to the Resourceful Founder and the Abundant Founder because she has a lot of curiosity like the Resourceful Founder. She has a lot of drive like the Abundant Founder. And those traits are in the Calibrated Founder. The thing is, she's just made a decision that the other two have not made. To stop chasing, stop adding, and to start aligning. Her messaging, her offer, her lead gen are working in the same direction, so everything she does compounds. She knows her numbers, so that takes a lot of the emotion out. She's calibrated because there's not a lot of emotion in all of her decisions. There's data. And data is not dramatic. A number is a number and she knows that. She knows what's converting and what's not. She knows where her buyers are coming from. When something underperforms, she doesn't spiral. She looks at her data and she asks, which system is off? Is my messaging, is it something with my offer or is it something with my lead gen? Usually, if you start to think about everything in your business, most of it can be put in one of these three buckets. So she wants to simplify. The Calibrated Founder, she's simplifying. So to make her life easy, when she's looking at her business and something's not working, she first asks, is it the messaging or the offer or the lead gen? And once in a while, it's something beyond that, but rarely. And then when she figures it out, she adjusts one thing at a time and tests it. She's not rewriting her welcome sequence every few weeks. She's not adding bonuses, hoping something sticks. She's not making her program for everyone because she has that desperate energy that she's not going to make enough money. That's not happening. She's not working until 10pm wondering why her effort isn't showing up in her revenue. She has breathing room. She has clarity. She knows exactly what she's working on and why. Now, I want to be clear. The calibrated founder does not have a perfect business. Nobody does. And all the things I just listed, she doesn't do them perfectly. Nobody does. But on average, on more days than not, she's looking at the data instead of giving into her emotion. Most days she's taking one thing at a time and experimenting with it. Most days she's asking the question, is my challenge messaging? Or is it offer or is it legion? Not all the time. She is not perfect, but she gets it right. More often than not, she does less than she used to because she has. She has battle scars. She's done all the things wrong. A calibrated founder comes with bumps and bruises that have now turned into scars. They're not oozy, they're not open wounds. She. She's. She's past that. But she's got the scars to prove. She knows what mistakes she's made. She. And she's not going to make them again. She's learned from them. So again, because she's learned from them, she does less now than she used to because she understands it's not about doing more, adding more, being more, but she does make more money than she ever has before. And that's what alignment looks like. That's what it gives you. Again, her business is imperfect, but it's set up to work for who she is. Because a calibrated founder, she does know who she is and what she stands for. Because it's taken her a few years to get there and she knows where she's going because she's actually taken the time to say, what do I want? And it might be as simple as I want to pick my kids up from school at 3 o'. Clock. Or it might be I want to make a lot of freaking money. Or it might be both. I actually love when it's both. She doesn't care what you think about what she wants. She only cares what she thinks about what she wants. She has learned to shut out the noise and this has taken her a long time. I think the Hardest thing for the calibrated founder was to stop listening to everybody else and to stop caring if everyone liked her or wanted to work with her. And because she's done the work over time, now she doesn't care. If you don't want to work with her, fine, unsubscribe, unfollow. She knows she's not for everyone. She knows how to attract, but she also knows how to repel. She's calibrated the word calibrated. If you think about it, it's that even kill. And she has worked very hard to get there. So this is the founder that I want you to work toward becoming. And let me tell you a little secret. You're probably closer than you think because you're ambitious and you're open to change. And now those traits are going to help you to move into more alignment. But you've got to do the work first. You've got to say, I want to be a calibrated founder, I want to be her. And then I want you to start looking at where are you in terms of how close you are to her and what are you doing? That is taking you very far from her. But actually, before you do that, let me back up a little bit. If you think about the resourceful founder, the abundant founder and the calibrated founder, which one do you most relate to? Actually, here's a quick way to figure it out. Think about the last time something in your business underperformed. I'm going to walk you through three scenarios and I want you to pay attention to your gut reaction. Like, oh yeah, that's, that's similar to what I would do. So something underperformed a launch, you didn't hit a goal, or you, you got on stage and you sold something and it didn't work very well, or you had a goal of getting 10 one on one clients in quarter one and you only got five. Whatever it might be, think about the last thing that just did not work well for you. So what would be your first move? Like which response actually sounds most like you? That's what I want you to ask yourself because that first instinct, it kind of tells everything. Okay, so actually, let me give you some scenarios. Okay. You launch your signature offer and the results totally disappoint. If you're the resourceful founder, you immediately start researching what went wrong by looking at other people's launch breakdowns. So you look at what they've done and maybe their price point is different than yours, or maybe they launched in a different way, Maybe they have, you know, a more narrow niche or whatever. But you start looking around and before you have data about this launch, you're already starting to plan your next one differently. Not totally bad, there's not there. These aren't all bad or all good. But you can see where that's a challenge, right? You're looking outward, well, what did she do? What did he do? What are they doing? And then before you like have all your launch details and pour into what did you do? You, you're already thinking, next time I'm doing it differently or I saw that she did a bootcamp, I did a challenge, I'm doing a bootcamp. Next time, before you really understand what happened in that launch and before you make your own gut decisions on what you could have done differently, you're already planning. So that's the resourceful founder. If you're the abundant founder, you decide you right, like right away, you decide you didn't promote enough. You are going to add three more emails to your next launch and you consider a bonus to the offer because maybe just the value wasn't there. You start to think, so you just already start thinking, I'm going to add this, I'm going to add that. Or you think, okay, that didn't work. So I'm just going to add another launch in three weeks. I'm going to do this other one off promo like in three weeks because I gotta make money and I'm just gonna add more to my plate because the more I add, eventually it's gotta work out. This is, this is how we think as abundant founders. I've been there, so, so I know you, you work harder on your next launch. Even though you haven't really identified the real problem. It's not that you need to work harder, you just haven't taken the time to be in the discomfort and ask yourself what is off here? Because instead of being in the discomfort, you're just ready to do more, do more. And you know what happens when you're constantly in motion, right? It's an excuse not to feel some of the things that come when we don't hit our goals, when things aren't going as planned. Now it's if you're the calibrated founder, you look at your data before you do anything else. Where did people drop off? What was the click through rate on the sales page? What did people say on the sales calls? You identify one system at a time and you look at it. What happened here with messaging? Okay, you, you research that, how about offer what Might have been off with the offer. And you do one system at a time and messaging offer lead gen. Maybe your messaging attracted the wrong audience. Maybe your webinar pitch didn't connect to what your lead magnet promised. You have to adjust one thing at a time and research one thing at a time and test slowly. So out of those three scenarios, which one did you relate to most? Okay, you answer that. I'm going to give you another scenario. Your email list has been stuck at the same number for six months. If you're the resourceful founder, you see someone you follow blow up on Instagram with a really specific viral reel and you think, that's what I need. So you reverse engineer everything that they've done. You put their reel into clawd and you figure out, like, why did this work? What's going on here? And you are convinced if you do what they did, boom, it's going to work for you. Because you, you didn't slow down to say, okay, let me look at my list. Let me do a survey to understand my list. Let me figure out what's going on here before I decide to do anything out there. Right away, we're looking at what others are doing and thinking, I could do that. So maybe you start to think, you know what? I'm fully changing my lead magnet. Even though the lead magnet you have, you've only been running it for a while, you haven't made it a priority, you don't even know what it's converting at, but you think you need a new one. That's the resourceful founder, and we all have traits like this. So please, no judgment, Just be honest here. If you're the abundant founder, you decide to create more content. Your email list has been stuck at six months. We need more content. So maybe you post more frequently on social media, maybe you send more emails, maybe you are pitching to more podcasts. You work harder at promoting without examining what even worked in the first place. You're ready to do the work. Like, wait a second, I haven't. My email list hasn't grown for six months. I need to work harder. I need to show up more, I need to post more, I need to do more. And so you just work harder and you're doing all the things, it's just not working because you never took the time to say, what is the real problem here? Why am I not growing my email list and really examining it? Instead, you're just pushing through with more. Now, if you're the calibrated founder, you ask the right question first. Is my list not growing because I have a traffic problem or because I have a conversion problem? If traffic is coming but people aren't opting in, the lead magnet needs some work. If people are opting in but immediately going cold, the nurture sequence is likely. The leverage. One diagnosis, one adjustment at a time. So which one sounds familiar? The resourceful founder, the Abundant Founder, or the calibrated founder? Final scenario. It's quarter three and you realize you're not going to hit your annual revenue goal unless something changes. If you're the resourceful founder, you panic and you start researching flash sale strategies, quick cash injections, many offer ideas and what other founders are doing for quarter four. So you rush to build something new. That's the thing about the resourceful founder. You're really good at getting new stuff up really quickly. It's just that you haven't given time to optimize the old stuff. That's where you get yourself into trouble. But your specialty is moving fast and getting new things going. So if I need something new to hit my yearly goal, you can bet I'm going to whip it up quickly. Now, there's nothing wrong with adding something new, but only when you fully have optimized what you already have and you've done the data research to understand what will truly move the needle. And that's where the resourceful founder usually skips over that part. Now, if you're the Abundant Founder, you decide to hustle harder through quarter four. Oh, have I always done this? For years, until I figured out it's not working. So more content, a bigger launch, longer hours. If I just push through these last few months, if I just push through, I'll figure out the systems I need in January. Work hard now. I'll figure it out in January. I'll do the SOPs in January. I'll do the. The new processes I need. I'll hire someone. I really will. I'm going to do that in the new year. But right now I just need to put my head down and work harder. And then when January hits, you are just continue to work harder and you're not doing those things you said that you would do in order to get you out of the hustle and the work harder mentality. So January comes along, you don't put the systems in and you feel very misaligned. It's hard, right? But I just love the Abundant founder. Maybe because I was her, but also she's such a hard worker. I really have respect for hard workers. Like, you're not going to back down. And. And I just respect that. So if you're the calibrated founder, you pause before you act. This is something as a leader I have had to learn. Let's take a beat before I speak. I'm not always great at that. Before I speak, before I act, take a beat. You look at the first half of the year, which offers actually converted, which lead sources brought in buyers. You double down on the thing that already worked. You make a realistic revenue plan for quarter four based on what your current audience and offer can actually do. See, the thing about the calibrated founder is she's always turning inward. And if you've noticed, she's always asking herself important questions. When I work for Tony Robbins, one of the things that I really walked away with was, I don't remember the saying, but something about the quality of your business is reflected in the quality of your questions. I fully butchered that. But that's the sentiment, like, ask better questions, get better answers. And you always have to be asking questions. So before you do, as the resourceful founder or, or the abundant founder, before you get into motion, slow down, ask yourself some important questions. Turn inward to yourself and to your business before you go outward. And that makes such a huge difference. So here's the truth. In all three of these scenarios, the calibrated founder does less. She doesn't panic. She doesn't make decisions on emotion. She doesn't keep adding. She doesn't start from scratch. She looks at what's already there, figures out what's off, and she adjusts. That's the difference. And that's what most founders at your stage are missing. It's very normal. So I just wanted to say, like, I get it. I've so been there. You have the curiosity, you have the drive, you have the work ethic. What you need is alignment. When your messaging, your offer, and your lead generation are all working in the same direction, everything starts to change. Your effort starts to compound, your revenue becomes predictable, and you stop feeling like you're starting over every single month. So let me ask you one more time. Which founder are you right now? Be honest. Are you more like the resourceful founder, always searching for the next strategy, the next tactic, the next thing that might finally click? Do you say to yourself, I just need this, this one thing. I got to figure out this one thing, and then it's all going to feel easier? That's kind of a normal thing to think as the resourceful founder, or are you the abundant founder? You're working harder than anyone else you know. But you're still wondering, why the heck are your results not matching all of your effort? Do you often say, I just need to get through this one launch and then I'll figure it out. I just need to get through this and then I'll slow down and put together the systems? That's usually pretty common for an Abundant Founder. Or are you already operating like the calibrated founder, which would be rare for most. Most people that are listening to my podcast. You're likely the Abundant Founder or the resourceful Founder, or what I find a lot is you're a little bit of both because of where you're at. If you're making about 150k, I feel like that's like a really important place in your business. You're making about 150k annually up to about 500k annually. You're usually some version of those two or both. That's very normal. Even beyond 500k, she'll still show up. And here's the thing, I want to give you a little reprieve. Sometimes I find myself slipping back to the Abundant Founder, but I'm well aware of how she doesn't serve me and how, yes, the reason why I can pull myself back to her or like, gravitate toward her really quickly is because she served me well for a long time. Her strengths got me to my first million and beyond. But when I wanted to really scale. Usually the resourceful founder and the Abundant Founder will not help you scale. And the quicker you can get to the calibrated founder, even if you're at 150k, if you can get to the calibrated founder faster than I did, please do. You can. You can be her now. Wherever you are in your business, you can be her now. It first starts with making a decision that you want to make some changes, and then it's. It's discipline and it's doing the reps, and it's correcting yourself every time you see yourself, you know, gravitating toward your old patterns. Remember I said at the beginning, these are patterns. And because they work, sometimes we gravitate toward them more regularly than we should. So if you recognize yourself as the resourceful founder, here's what I want you to do. Before you open another tab, before you research another strategy, commit to staying with what you already have for the next 60 days. And during that time, look at your numbers. How many people are landing on your opt in page, or how many people are signing up for your webinar. Whatever it is you're doing? How many people are opening up your emails? What's that open rate? How many are clicking through to your offer? Whatever it is you're doing, can you stick with that for 30 to 60 days and really dive into the numbers? And when you do, you're finding the place where people might be dropping off. You're going to see your weakness and then you can fix it. That one thing, not five things, one thing you can fix at a time. If you recognize yourself as the abundant founder, here's what I want you to do. Before you add anything else to your offer or your launch or your content calendar, ask yourself, what's one thing I could remove? What's weighing this down that isn't actually moving the needle? And if you recognize yourself as the calibrated founder, good for you. You've done the hardest part. Now it's about refining. Keep looking at the data, keep asking which system needs attention the most. I think that's amazing if you're there, but likely you found yourself in the other two, which is very normal. So those are your first steps. Here's what comes next. Knowing which founder you are is the starting point. The real shift happens when you understand why your business is stuck and which system, messaging, offers or lead gen is causing it to stay stuck. That's what I cover in my free training. It's called the revenue consistency formula. And I'm going to walk you through the three marketing systems that drive 90% of your growth. Your messaging, your offer, your lead gen. But I'm going to have you look at it in a different way, because if you're making 150k or more, you already have these things in place. So this, this training is not for someone that's just beginning, who doesn't have an offer, who doesn't have an audience yet. It's for you who you already have these things but you feel stuck or your revenue is not showing the effort that you're actually putting it in. Like, again, they're not matching. I'm going to help you identify exactly which one of your marketing systems is out of alignment, because one of them or all three of them are. But once you know, you know exactly where to focus. So you stop guessing and you stop adding and you start building with it. Intention. This is how you become the calibrated founder. So this free training, it's coming up. It's at amyporterfield.com forward slash training. Amyporterfield.com forward slash Training. You now know which founder you are. Resourceful, abundant, or calibrated, or maybe a little mix of all of them. And if you want to take this further, the free training is waiting for you@amiporterfield.com forward slash training. And if you haven't subscribed to the podcast yet, do that now. Every week I share strategies to help you grow your business with more clarity and less chaos. If you're on YouTube, hit Subscribe. And if you're on Apple podcasts or Spotify, hit follow. I can't wait to see you next week.
