← The Spiritual Hustler
The Spiritual Hustler
What It Takes to Run a Business vs. “A Thing That Makes Money” To Create More Wealth, Freedom and Peace
00:16:41
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- [00:02]
A
Welcome to the Spiritual Hustler Podcast. I'm your host, Jessica Zweig, multi seven figure serial entrepreneur, best selling author and branding and business coach. And this is a show where we are redefining the word hustle, reclaiming our true feminine nature of magnetism and putting down the self judgments and shame around loving to work and making a lot of money at it. On this show, you're going to learn how to stop hustling and start spiritually hustling. By pressing play, you are now part of a new movement of women who don't hustle for money. We hustle for meaning. We don't hustle from lack. We hustle for love. We don't hustle from survival. We hustle for humanity's thriving. We hustle toward healing the ancestral programming of fear and step into a new understanding of safety in the body to receive this shift isn't going to only.
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Heal your life, it's going to make.
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You a whole lot richer too. This is the Spiritual Hustler Podcast.
- [01:07]
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Well, hello and welcome back to the Spiritual Hustler podcast. My beautiful friends, I am so excited to be here with you today. You're getting a big dose of business today. We're going to talk really a lot about the opportunity, the greatest gift that we have on a personal, spiritual and financial level when we really step into a CEO identity. I have been talking a lot about identity on social media and I've actually created a brand new experience for you, the five stages of the CEO Feminine Flow experience. It includes a one hour live training with me and a handful of downloads and PDFs, worksheets, my personal frameworks that I use to manage my time, set my boundaries, or how I like to call them, my sacred lines, so that I can maximize my time to help me make more money. It's free and I'm gonna leave a link in the show notes for you to go download it right now because it's something I really poured my soul into so that you truly not only see yourself differently and upgrade your embodiment of your feminine power, but truly to never burn out again. This show, the Spiritual Hustler, was created based on my response to my own burnout. And I just want us as women to be healthy and thriving and rested and inspired and filled up with our own cups so that we can pour out. And that is really what this whole 3D paradigm matrix game has conditioned us to believe is a luxury and an indulgent and is not a priority. And we're just not playing that game anymore. Here in 2025, we are reclaiming our feminine essence and I'm so excited for you to go grab that free experience. And the link is in the show notes. Before I get into what I cannot wait to talk about with you guys today, I want you to take a minute if you haven't yet and go leave a review on Apple Podcasts. This is a platform that most of our downloads come from. We really have seen such a tremendous expansion in the show and that is so much due to all of you. And it literally takes five seconds to leave five stars, a couple sentences and I'm going to give you a gift when you do that. No, for real, if you're new to my platform, welcome. If you've been here, you know I love to give away things and shower you with all sorts of goodies and presents from not only me, but a lot of my friends. But all that to say I'm giving away a series of my incredible light worker trucker hats that are this gorgeous taupe color. They go with everything they say. Lightworker and white stitching, embroidery on the front. People are freaking out about these hats when you wear them. People are like, I know you, I see you, you're a light worker too. They're such an amazing badge of honor to rock in the world. I have a limited collection. I'm going to be launching a shop this year and selling them but for the purposes of right now, I'm just giving them away and I'll going to give away a few every single month. Cuz I actually have a limited supply and that's a fact. So all you got to do is leave 5 stars on Apple screenshot that review, couple sentences, why you love the show, send it to me in a dm. I'm me on Instagram at Jessica Zweig. That's not my team in there, that is me. I love being super high touch with my community and if you win, I'll just write you back and ask for your address and we'll send you a hat. It's as simple as that. All right, let's talk about what we're here to talk about today, which is building a business. The difference between building a business and a thing that makes you money. Because there is a big difference. And that difference wasn't really revealed to me in until recently, frankly, because the truth is like if you would have come to me, I don't know, 10 years ago and said, Jessica, you're about to go scale a multimillion dollar business and sell it and then Go off and launch another business and know how to make seven figures in revenue easily and lead a team and create a culture and build a brand and sell thousands of books across the world and have a podcast. Like, I probably would have thought I was on mushrooms or something. Or like, I would have punched you in your face because I would have felt you would be fucking with me. Or I'd cry because that would just feel so overwhelming as a reality, because I never really saw myself as that. And I say this all the time. You've been listening to the show. You've probably heard me say this. Like, your career and your business will only grow to the extent of which you grow as a person. I really, truly believe that. But you have to really learn how to lean in and grow as a business person as well. And I have a member on my team who joined me last year, and she's been in the space of online entrepreneurs for a while. And she was actually in Nashville. We were here in town for an off site and we did this whole big long day planning out the whole 2025 calendar year. We did this in like September. And we were at lunch the next day and she just kind of looked at me and she said, you know, Jessica, there's. There's a real difference between what you do and what a lot of other people do. And I was like, okay, say more. She's like, there's a lot of coaches and people out there that build a thing and make a lot of money at it, but you're running a business and it's very different. And I want to talk to you about what those differences are today because I obviously had to reflect on that. And not only what those differences are, but why those differences are actually necessary to build not only a great amount of financial abundance, yes, but really the life that you want to live. Because when we're in a sort of container of selling transaction, building the one off things versus building a true operation and a true culture and a true team and a vision and a brand and a strategy across products, marketing, and scale. While that sounds like maybe a lot, what it really does is it buys you your freedom as a founder. And I want to give you my playbook. I want to give you the codes. And, you know, a lot of this I teach at length in my feminine frequency business school. But I wanted to give it to you in snippets today so that you could really take some notes and take a page. So I'm going to take you back to my first hard knocks, real Life Business mba, which was my first company, Cheeky Chicago was an amazing chapter of my life. For those of you that are new, maybe you've heard of this before if you're not new. I started a business when I was 26 years old and it was called cheekychicago.com and it was this online magazine for the women of the city of Chicago. And I had no idea what I was doing. And we ended up basically becoming the biggest online platform for the women of the Midwest for seven years. But I remember, you know, writing out a business plan and I had like the cute colors and I knew the logo and I had like the sections of the website designed and I could kind of like paint who I was reaching, like even my target audience. And I remember having a conversation with my dad actually, who's a financial advisor and cpa and he was like, what you've got here, Jessica, is a really great idea, but it's not a business. A business needs to make money and you need a business plan. And I was like, what's a business plan? So I googled business plan and I basically filled out a template and that didn't work. And I had to really apply my brain to like understand the aspects of what goes into a business. And while that business was really painful because at the end of the day, I didn't know how to be a leader. I didn't know how to be a great communicator, I didn't know how to truly manage a budget. All of those things I had to learn on the job. I'm so grateful for that early part of my career where I sat down to write a business plan and work on all the different aspects of what a business required. Whether I was good at that yet or not, or fully understood it yet or not, because I feel like we can only fully understand it by experience. It opened up my mindset of the machinery that goes into building a true business. And Cheeky was a great brand. It was a beautiful, beautiful brand. And we had smart marketing and we had built a really cool community and we had great partnerships with brands. We were advertising and sponsorship model for 360 campaigns. We did social media content plus email marketing plus activations and events. And we would bundle them all together and pitch these concepts to brands like Bloomingdale's and Lululemon and Heineken and Miller Coors and Coca Cola. It was an amazing chapter of my career and I learned really to sit at the table with major brand marketers and how to convert audience into buyers. With the power of great copywriting, marketing, messaging, graphic design, compelling branding and marketing. And so all of that was there. But I didn't have systems, I didn't have operations, I didn't have process. And I certainly, certainly didn't know how to be a true leader of people. And so I took all of those lessons because that business, I was gonna say sadly, but I wouldn't even say sadly. It was divinely oriented. That business ended up basically stopping. It failed financially, it was critically successful and I loved that chapter of my life. I learned so much at the time. It was, you know, painful. But I transitioned out of that magazine to go off and launch my one woman consultancy as a, you know, way to go make some money and pay off some debt and, you know, follow kind of my soul, my quiet rumblings in my gut like I need to go do something else. And I'm going to call it Simply Be, which is inspired by this little tattoo right here on my wrist. And I had no idea what it was going to be. And I named it Simply Be Agency. This is a true story, you guys, because I thought it sounded cute. Simply Be Agency having no idea that an agency is a beast of a business model, is a whole industry of client services and you know, white glove, high touch, high attrition in the industry when it comes to employees. Highly competitive, just high demand, lots of hours, not the greatest margins on profitability industry. And you know, I took my little idea. Simply Be Agency leveraged my personal brand from building that magazine, Cheeky, got clients right away and I was a pretty successful solopreneur and I had done about $300,000 in revenue in my first year of business as a one woman shop essentially. And then I started getting more clients and I needed more support. And then I had to hire contractors and those contractors became full time employees and wrote a book and my business exploded. And I then needed to hire more people and with more people I needed better managers and eventually an executive team. And I put together a board of advisors to really push me as the CEO I was somewhat accidentally becoming. And yet I realized very early on in Simply Be that I was sort of born for it. Like I was made to be a leader, an entrepreneur and to build an organization which is different than building a team even. It's different than building a one woman shop. Very, very different. And it was in that experience that I really truly learned one of my favorite quotes. That it was actually Dan Martell said this recently, but it stayed with me that millionaires build systems and process and billionaires build people. And while Simply Be was beautiful, painful blood, sweat and tears, ride of my life created something I never thought I'd ever create in seven years. Left it all on the floor. Like, not to compare myself to Michael Jordan, but I was a Chicago Bulls fan and grew up on the Bulls. And I've been to many championship and playoff games. And I remember that one game that he came back from after his father had died. They had won like a three peat and then he took a break and then he came back and they did it again. And it was that first championship game back, like game one of that second three peat where they win the last shot. The buzzer buzzes. He grabbed the ball and collapsed on the court and broke down crying. And the whole stadium erupts and around him. But he was like, I fucking did it. I left it all on the floor. And that's kind of how I felt at the end of the Simply Be chapter, right when I sold the company. And I wouldn't take anything back because it shaped me as a leader more than anything of people. You don't get to do it successfully alone. You don't get to grow and scale and make an impact and spread your message and live your life without your people. I have built my third business in total alignment with how I want my life to feel. And I have this team around me that is supporting my life. And we're growing the business. And there is really no scarcity or hustle or dysfunction in my culture. We have systems and structure and strategies and roadmaps and blueprints and clear branding and marketing and messaging across every single aspect of the business. And we've done it in such a short amount of time. I mean, we've literally done this in like, less than six months, essentially, for real. And I'm so clear that I. I could not be here in this beautiful soul alignment in my business had I not learned fully how to build a business, truly build a business from the ground up. And my work here, for all of you in my community, is to give you the shortcuts now, to give you the codes to let you know exactly how to get from point A to Z without stumbling, falling and breaking like I did. Because I want us all to be women in our power. I want us all to be women in our wealth. I want us all to crush and succeed like that is a core desire of my soul for you. So thank you for being here, part of my community, as we talk about everything on the podcast from the Pleiadians and the goddesses of Egypt like how you structure your day, how you delegate your time, how you fully step into being supported, how you shift your focus, that you can not just do a thing that makes you money, but to build a business that makes you a lot of money and ultimately creates the space for you to live your ultimate birthright. And that is joy and freedom and peace and light. That's the world that I'm co creating with each and every one of you. So thank you for being here, as always, and I will see you on the next episode of the Spiritual Household podcast. Bye, guys.