This picture has nothing really to do with this post, except for:
1. It was taken today and it’s my new favourite photo ever
2. She is my muse.

Hola gorgeous goddess,

Every so often, I write an in-depth sharing of where my business (and creative soul) is at, and where it’s heading.

I share these every so often because:

1. When spirit nudges me to speak, I do! And here I am, so spirit nudged 😉
2. I always find it really, really helpful when other business goddess and gods speak openly and honestly about their business
3. I hope it is helpful for other business goddesses, mama goddesses & creative goddesses.

Today I’m talking about:

  • money
  • where my $100 000 idea has taken me
  • how I structure my days as a mama & business goddess
  • my business challenges
  • the next vision of my business
  • what I’m going to do to make it happen!

This is a massive post. One of the longest I’ve ever written – over 4000 words. A metric bungload of content.

If this isn’t the sort of thing that’s useful for you, please feel free to skip along whistling and ignore this, dearest.

And if it is the kind of thing that’s useful, let’s dive in deep, my darlingheart!

My Business 365 Days Ago

Nearly exactly a year ago, my life (and business) needed to change.

I was cradling a newborn baby in my arms.

My love & I desperately wanted to be able to say goodbye to our public service jobs.

We wanted to leave the city and return to tropical paradise.

And we needed my beautiful goddess business to be able to do it.

I needed a $100 000 idea.

So one night, I had a dream. And my angels and guides gave me a vision. They told me about the Goddess Circle ~ about how I needed to open a permanent sacred space online for goddesses to gather. About how I needed to give them ALL of my treasures: my e-courses, my workbooks, my meditations. And that I needed to make it so affordable – $100 for a year.

And my guides told me I would be able to help 1000 women.

It was my $100 000 business.

Let’s Talk About Money

A sidetone about money:

I never, ever thought I could earn this money.

Growing up, I thought $30 000 was all I would ever earn.

I thought $40 000 and over was reserved for true professionals.

I knew I would be an artist and writer and someone who changed the world.

I thought that meant I would be poor.

I never, ever thought I would be a business person.

I never, ever thought I could be good with money.

I thought I was WAY too right-brained and hippy to be interested in such things.

But it turns out, I’m not.

When you dive deep into making miracles and living your passion in the world, you get incredibly, indelibly interested in The Sacred Art of Business.

The Sacred Art of Business is really about creating a vessel to share your work with the world.

An extra sidetone about money

I’m a Scorpio.

No topics are deemed too sensitive for me.

I’m super happy to talk about sex and money.

It’s all energy, you know.

I’m vibrant and wordy and outspoken (when I’m not being introverted) and I love to talk about ALL these things.

In the spirit of open hearts and deep, sacred honesty.

An extra extra sidenote about money

I know money stuff brings up stuff for everyone.

What you think $100 000 means probably means something different for me.

Numbers and what that strikes up in our mind: rich, poor, have, have-nots, greedy, sensible – it’s all totally changeable.

For me, $100 000 means my love & I both staying at home. It means buying a $265 000 home (the cheapest in the market of a small country town when we purchased). It also means not worrying about money.

$100 000 is way, way more than I ever expected to earn.

And yet it is perfect for where we are right now.

How My $100 000 Business Idea Went

My $100 000 business went beautifully, perfectly well.

I knew my business could do more.

But I also knew that all I needed for that time was just to survive.

The onslaught of being a new mama, moving across the countryside, post-natal depression and surviving a year of radical transformation left me with little resources to do anything but was essential.

I am incredibly grateful to my business for so many reasons:

for supporting my family so perfectly during this time
and
for helping so many goddesses who needed it.

Deciding What To Do Next

And so a year is up.

I knew once the year was up, I would be given a new spiritual assignment, a new business attunement, a new vision of where my business needs to head.

My daughter is now 15 months old. I’ve slowly made my way out of the labyrinth of deep new mamahood and caring-for-a-baby.

I only need 1 My-energy-is-running-low-so-I’m-going-to-choose-to-sit-on-the-couch-for-a-few-hours Day a week now, instead of 5 (or 7) I’m-so-exhausted-I-can-do-nothing-else-but Days. My life doesn’t feel like it Sucks Giant Panda Balls anymore (2010, I’m looking at you.)

I’ve healed from birth and from post-natal depression. I’m starting to feel like myself again. I’ve got more energy.

We’ve healed. We are happy.

In short, life is good. It’s calmed down and we’ve found ourselves a beautiful, gentle rhythm.

My Parenting & Working & Living Routine

In the mornings, we go to the beach or go for a walk up the street or have a breakfast date somewhere. Or I take Ostara for a date while Chris studies (he’s doing Psychology through Uni – his dream come true) and we go shopping at my Magnificent Grandmother’s Op Shop.

And on Thursdays, we drive out to our cousin’s place and we have Paint Days. And we mamas (& Chris that hot papa) get to make art while our kidliwinks run around chasing puppies and each other.

Then we go home, Ostara falls asleep at midday, and I scamper off with my Mobile Office – a big tote bag with my laptop, video camera and my To Do List Book.

I go to the park and sit under the tree. (I haven’t sat up it since the Tree Up The Snake Incident – I will once I find the guts again). Or to my favourite cafe where the floor is wooden and it stocks my sister’s cupcakes. Or to the library to sit on the red leather couch and smile at everyone who passes.

Then I write my little butt off and make videos and plan out new courses and create free ebooks and do whatever this goddess business needs me to do.

Then two hours later, I go home. Ostara will be awake, and my hunky will be playing with her. Then we hang out together. We water our fledgling vegetable garden and eat beans from the stalk. We try not to step in doggy poo. We watch eagles. We cuddle on the couch and watch recordings of Conan and the Graham Norton Show and Community and Modern Family. We make art on the verandah. We play guitars and keyboards and wooden xylophones. I’ve successfully given up being The Perfect Mother and we now eat simple, ready-made meals (I AM SO HAPPY SINCE MAKING THIS DECISION). We chase dogs. We make a lot of mess. We stare at walls. We read piles of books. take Ostara for walks and buy my love chocolate to make him love me even more (seriously! It’s the best $2 investment EVER!!!)

And then I pop Ostara in a tub of water, and she splashes while I shower above her. Then Chris grabs her to dry and put in pyjamas, and I spend time in the shower alone thinking & breathing (it’s my favourite place in the world).

Also: Me & my friend Jilly have momentously decided that the Cutest Thing In The World List is:

1. Bare bottomed babies
2. Babies in pyjamas
3. Babies every other time.

THIS POST IS GOING PLACES I NEVER INTENDED IT TO.

And that’s okay. I’m pretty sure this is all Very Important anyway.

Ostara usually goes to sleep about 7pm. I breastfeed her to sleep in our bed unless I’ve reached the end of my tired-mama-rope for whatever reason. And then Chris puts her to bed.

Once she’s asleep, I do more work for a couple of hours. Night time is the only time I actually have internet access (there’s no wireless in parks! Weird!) so that’s when I publish blog posts and answer emails and attempt to regain some semblance of order Twitter/Facebook messages & DMs (FYI: my attempts thusfar suck, so please please please email me if you’ve got important questions! My lovely email fairy Marissa will make sure you are taken care of!)

I have a strict self-imposed bedtime of 9:30. I realise this is baby-clock to most of you night owls, but I’m from a farm. Early bedtimes have always ruled my life, and if I don’t do it, I am 60% less radiant. That’s math, and you can’t argue with math.

And then I curl up in our big kingdom bed (a king-size bed with a single bed against it) between my love & our daughter. And then sleep. Ostara still wakes up about 3 times a night to nuzzle for a few minutes. On super, super bad nights (13 month sleep regression, I’m LOOKING AT YOU), she will wake up 8 times a night. But for right now, it’s all good.

I’m feeling rested. And happy.

SO!

The point of this all is to say:

1. My life finally has a routine.
2. My life finally feels good and gentle and easy again after a great battle.
3. I HAVE ENERGY! I HAZ JOY! I LOVE THIS!!!
4. I love my job & my business beyond all measure. It’s been my saviour and my joy and my creative dream job. I love love ADORE it with my whole heart.
5. Sidenote: I really, really like hearing about other people’s routines.

The Necessity Of Retreat Time For Your Business

So, it’s been a year.

And now?

Now it’s time to know where my business wants to go next. It’s my job to listen.

I knew I would find out once we were married.

The week before the wedding, we went to the beach early on our own.

We stayed in a sweet, one room villa down the road from the sea. It overlooked a beautiful wetlands, and was cosy between huge eucalypts and white gums. At night the sea breeze whistled through all the leaves.

My love and I would be wedged either side of Ostara (Three people! One queen size bed! Hurrah! We did it! It was cozy, but doable!) And we’d wake up in the wee hours of the morning, and the moon would be glowing through the window. And our hands would move across the bed to find each other’s and link fingers together. And we’d listen to the wind together in the space between time.

There was no tv. No internet. Only a tiny bit of phone reception if you stood on one edge of the verandah.

There was just space. A great loveliness. Expanse. Emptiness. We’d eat tubs of bococcini cheese on the verandah and I read piles of nonsensical books and we talked and just looked out over the wetlands.

And in all that space, I felt a great need to create even more space in my business.

(OMG! I just had one of my first fan sightings!!!!!!! WOTTTTTT!!!!!! I’m a CELEBRITY!!!!!!!!!! A giant hullloooooooo to Maria who works on the same street as our wee cottage! How cute is that? Answer: 100% adorbes!)

ANYWAYS.

Where was I?

Oh yes! So, in that lovely expanse of time, I was sitting back and rethinking and refeeling my business.

My sweet goddess business has been getting busier and busier. A few weeks before the wedding, I’d sat down on a Monday and wrote my To Do List for the week. And I wrote down a full page of my weekly tasks to do and I hadn’t even gotten to actually doing any Important Work (aka creating & actually dreaming & strategising for my business.)

So I emailed my darling support goddess Marissa in tears (not the first time) and said “Pretty pretty please can you take over all these things for me. I need more space.”

And being the support goddess she is, she did.

So on our wedding holidays, I knew the business was being taken care of beautifully.

So Marissa was taking care of all my emails & circles for me.

And all of a sudden, I had this space. Space to just sit, eat cheese, spot cows, make smoky eyes at hunky husband-to-be, play with babe & actually work out what was working, and what wasn’t.

What Works & What Doesn’t

My list looked like this:

What was working:

  • My business. I love it with every cell in me. It’s what I’m meant to be doing.
  • It growing easily & strongly.
  • Customer service/business systems. In six years of this business, and over 3000 clients, I’ve only had 2 complaints (that were fairly easily sorted). That’s completely *extraordinary* for a business my size. I totally believe this is because I take incredible care of my goddesses. And if I’m not doing it personally, I hire someone extraordinary to do it for me. I don’t outsource my customer service/email answering/circle support to the cheapest labour available. I go with people like Marissa and Sara who really, really CARE for my business and will happily travel the extra mile to care and tend to my goddesses.

What wasn’t working:

  • Feeling utterly swamped by the amount of work I needed to do on a daily basis.
  • Working IN my business doing the usual email processing/sales help/statistics instead of CREATING and STRATEGY and PLANNING the big vision.
  • No regular breaks (i.e. working every dang day of the week)

When you are so utterly deep in the trenches of your business, you forget to look out over the vision of your business and where you need to head.

It’s the Beaver issue: you work away, head down at the dam, instead of soaring overhead like the Eagle.

I knew that’s what I needed to build into my business: more Eagle time.

How to make Eagle Time

My pre-honeymoon was the perfect retreat time. It washed the slate and cleansed my eyes.

And I came back, knowing that I needed to use this clean slate to write something new, and dream the next vision for my business.

So I stayed on holiday.

My support team stayed firmly in place. Everyday, instead of diving deep into my to-do list, I would walk to the park, sit beneath the statue of Goddess Persephone (I LOVE LIVING IN A TOWN NAMED AFTER A GODDESS!!! SERIOUSLY!!! HOW PERFECT COULD IT BE!). And I would kick off my thongs, eat momentous Thai salads, and write whatever needed to come through.

My Startling Business Vision

What came through was this:

The next evolution of my business is for it to grow to a $1 million a year business.

I want to help a million women a year.

I want to do something extraordinary for the world, and for charities.

I want to be HUGE. Massive. I want to spread the message of remembering the goddess inside us as strongly and loudly and widely as it needs to go.

I need to stop playing small.

I want to be a true worldwide teacher, in the field of Louise Hay & Doreen Virtue. (I honour these women so deeply for the work they do in the world.)

I want to play MOTHERFARKING HUGE.

I want to turn up and say: HERE ARE MY GIFTS. THIS IS WHAT I OFFER.

And I want for every single woman who is looking for and longing for and needing this work to be able to find it. Easily and dreamily.

The vision left me gobsmacked.

Impossibly possible.

All I needed to do was turn up.

The Business Attunement

What happened next was what I call my:

Business attunement.

Whenever you learn a healing art (like Reiki), you are given what is called an “attunement.”

It’s like an intense surge of evolution/healing/transformation/growth all at once.

An attunement can leave you feeling light/weary/blown out/exhausted/with your life turned upside down/shifted/a massive influx of new knowledge all at once.

It’s an amazing thang – one that’s kinda hard to explain unless you’ve experienced it yourself (if you have, you’ll be nodding along with me going “uh HUH sista! I HEAR ya!”)

And this business attunement?

It feels like exactly the same thing.

The new vision of my business gets implanted in me, and my energy feels utterly expanded and a little shaky for a while as it adjusts to the new vision.

I voraciously ate up new business information, and wrote pages and pages of what I needed to do with my business.

And each night, I’d go to bed feeling dizzy and giddy and joyful all at once.

“I feel like my brain is expanding, honey” I’d say to my love. “It feels good and overwhelming all at once. Like what do I DO with all this energy and this massive vision! It’s nutty!”

And his eyes would crinkle with a smile.

“Well that’s a good thing,” he’d say.

(P.S. He’s very hot. But you already knew I would say that! Tee hee!)

How Long The Attunement Lasted

The business attunement lasted 10 days. 10 days of visioning, planning, dreaming, fitting into the new size of my business vision. I utterly ignored my To Do list. I worried that I would be so plannery-dreaming that I’d never get back to actually doing.

But all I heard was:

“Ride this wave while it’s here. Doing will come soon enough.”

And so I did.

When the Attunement Was Over

And then one day, I woke up, and the attunement was over, the dreaming was finished.

All I had left was long pages of my vision and what I needed to do.

And then I thought:

“OMG! I’ll never dream again! What if I get too do-ery again instead of plan-ery?”

And all I heard was:

“Ride this wave while it is here. All you need to do is what’s right in front of you.”

So! How things are changing!

What I’m doing now:

  • Downloading a new phase of business education

I ordered a crapload of business books from Bookdepository (currently reading Problogger & Book Yourself Solid. And I’ve started doing what the hippy artist dreamer in me thought would NEVER happen: I’ve been buying and reading magazines like BRW & Fast Company. I even bought the BRW Rich 200 List. Three years ago, I would have rolled my eyes at it. And yet, I find it so incredible inspiring to find out how business people play. And even more so: the amazing things they then do with their money to help others. They are doing a huge amount of good with their money including setting up foundations, trying to fix the health gap between indigenous and white Australians, supporting Australian artists and galleries (many of which I’ve been blessed to walk through and be inspired by). I want to do something absolutely incredible. (Did you know that Bill Gates is no longer the richest man in the world because he’s given away 30 BILLION dollars???)

  • Soaking in Millionaire Essence

I’ve been looking at what other goddesses who are playing the million dollar game. It’s like soaking in homeopathic essence remedy of Millionaire Woman!

  • Delegate

I’ve been continuing to delegate to my support team so I can concentrate more on creating and strategy. With having a support team – it costs more money to run your business. A lot more. And yet I feel like it’s a really essential investment so I can grow my business to the next level.

  • Building da goddess tribe, baybee

I have no idea what new products/services/courses I’ll be offering. Or what my business will be selling. And when I ask about that my guides say

“That will come in time. For right now, focus on aligning your website to your new energy, and then draw huge crowds to you. More people need to know about your work, and you need to share your story openly and clearly and with an open heart. Don’t worry about the products, just do what is in front of you right now.”

My amazing friend Ankesh wrote a book called “Two Word Strategy.” In it, he talks about the two important & essential factors of business: 1. Crowds (people knowing about you and your work) and 2. Backends (what products you offer & how you tell people about them.)

Right now, I’ll be focussing on building the crowds element – helping more goddesses know about what I do and how I can help. Yay!

  • Rewriting website/photos/videos

Just like my guides say, I need to cleanse & clear my website and align it again with where I am right now. So that’s what I’m in the process of doing. I’ve been needing new profile photos and a new video… the old ones were taken pre-Ostara, and I feel like my face has changed with mamahood. I loved my old ones, but I wanted new photos & videos that truly sung of my spirit now.

And I’ve been searching for someone here in Proserpine to do them, but hadn’t found anyone yet. I just trusted they would come to me.

Then, one night, I dreamed of Trish McNeill, the lovely owner of my favourite cafe the Grub. I thought “that’s funny! I wonder why I dreamed of her! I wonder if I will see her today!” And I did. And what do you know? She was holding a huge camera in her hands. So the next day, we climbed our favourite tree (yup – she suggested that we climb her favourite fig tree… which was of course my favourite blogging tree too!)

And we took photos of each other (she’s launching her photography business of course!) {photos above of the two of us!} and she created my new beautiful welcome video which appears in the sidebar here.

Gawd I love how Great Spirit & synchronicity works!!!

  • New camera

I have no idea why this one’s important, but it is. I really, really want to create more high-quality artistic, delicious videos for you to nom on. So I convinced hunky love that I needed to buy a new model digital SLR with video capability. (Canon 500D body, for those camera-heads playing at home. I’m pairing it with my Canon 50mm 1.8 lens for a milky, dreamy effect.)

It’s the backbone of my business right now, and I know that it provides a huuuuge amount of value for the goddesses in it. I’ve been brainstorming with my support goddesses to see if there’s any more ways we can make it even more beautiful and easy-flowing and inspiring for the goddess circle sisters (there’s nearly 1000 goddess sisters now! A truly incredible sisterhood that circles the globe in every continent! Wow. Just sitting with that for a moment. That’s huge, ya know?)

  • Pareto’s Rule

In Tim Ferris’ “Four Hour Work Week” book (one of my favourite inspiring business books), he talks about Pareto’s Rule:
20% of your work will create 80% of your profit.

And you’ll spend the rest of your time chasing the other 80% of stuff & fluff which only creates 20% of the profit.

I can see where I do this a LOT: I’ll very happily PILE things on to my do list because they are there! I can do them! instead of looking at them strategically and saying: Do you fit within my vision? Is this really the best use of my time?

And I’ve also been looking at:

What’s the 20% of work that I do that yields Maximum Impact?
How can I do MORE of that?

  • My New Frigging Huge Thing

Speaking of Maximum Impact, it’s my new mantra.
SO! Get ready peoples, because my next Frigging Huge Thing is in the process of being born.
I had an idea. And then I doubled it. And then I doubled it again.

It’s going to be HUGE. And FREE. And FULLY AGLOW.

I’ll let you know as much as I can about it as soon as I can.

Stay tuned my love!!!

SO!

That’s my Great Big Giant Huge Wonderful Sneak Peek (but longer! more like a Gander! Or a Lover’s Gaze!) into the soul of my business.

I’m so so so excited where it is going, and where it will take us all.

Our businesses have souls and visions all of their own. And all we need do is listen to them, turn up, and share their light as best we can.

All my love,

P.S. Found this helpful? If you feel called to share it along to find the people it can help, I would be sososososoooo heart-soaked-grateful!