Moving on into the real world

Well 3 and half years of my life changed me forever! Being in an environment where so much about yourself is being questioned, analysed, realised and formed, there was really only one way to go - to find myself again. It is possible to lose yourself and who you are in a business, a relationship or even a combination of both in my case! I love what I did however I paid a heavy price for it as only afterwards do you realise why it felt so wrong at times. Being employed was definitely a challenge for me as having run my own businesses before it was a real change for me to now be employed and managed. Even though I was very much left on my own and in fact had very little support, I still could not make the decisions I believed were right for the the business in the market space. Having your ideas and beliefs not listened too or constantly challenged was just too hard after 3 years. What kept us all going through these challenges were the great people we met and the fantastic atmosphere of the events. But ultimately it was going to self impload! Which it did so it was time to get real! I had one last course of my Fast Track to do which was Billionaire Bootcamp. I knew it was going to be a big one for me for all kinds of reasons so I braced myself and took the time off to go to Portugal! I also allowed myself some down time too as pretty much by this time I was exhausted beyond comprehension. I had pretty much made up my mind what I was going to do and just needed space to think and be. It turned out to be the best decision I could have made.

After BB I decided to make a dash for my life and step back into the real world and I have to say, I was thrilled to be doing so. Taking your own power back is so important but most of us do not realise we have lost it until something like this happens and you think - wow how did I ever allow that to occur? It's called life and the choices we make! I wanted to make the progression as easy for all however not everything is as it seems or so I found out. But I was taught by a talented speaker that never put good money after bad so I walked away being owed a huge amount and just wrote a line under it all as this was the only way I could move on and get my life back. I also believe that when thinks like that happen it is life that makes the balance and that proved to be more true than even I could expect. It was the end of a very big and life changing part of my life and the industry as a whole, but it was time for change.

Since then I have never looked back as the support I got not only from my close friends but those I worked with and promoted which meant the world. Now I just had one last thing to sort out - my relationship - wow and was that going to teach me even more about what is meaningful and what is not!

Now we move into the nittie grittie!

So getting my hands dirty was pretty much an immediate thing. Had to let some people go, hire some new ones, figure out what the hell was going and work with the past GM who was still there. Not all very comfortable to say the least. And that was just for starters.....we had a huge system change over at the same time where anything and everything that could go wrong did! This is what happens when people do not understand the implications of testing a system before you switch to the new one.

So my first 6 months were comprised of hiring and firing, learning the business politics, meeting the speakers as I had not been officially introduced to them as you would expect, get my head around what was going on with the events and deal with the bloody new system that didn't work. Then a brilliant plan was hatched! NOT! It was decided (out of my hands) we needed an business investor to help take over the running of the business and invest some money.

Now this could be a very long story but for my own sanity I am going to cut it VERY short. It was not the best experience I have ever had and certainly wasn't to be my last, however having to beef up security at the events and our offices, defend our personal reputation and deal with all this crap which trying to run the business and put on more events than we had ever done before. Well all I can say is we survived and the investor didn't! You can't be an investor if you don't even invest any money - key rule this. Didn't know people like this existed an this was my first and not last experience of those who have the gift of the gab. With his cronies he wheeled and dealed and under estimated my loyalty to the product. Funny how the personal development industry itself knows how to take care of itself and throws out those that are not real, authentic or care about people. So for the sake of £1 our little skirmish with the con man was over. Whew!

It taught me some very big lessons and unfortunately made me very sceptical of the whole set up as so much was wrong, we didn't know where to start. Now during all of this we were making great changes at the events, crew were agreeing to work with us again and the standard of the events really improved. So did the moral of the whole company and finally after a year we were motoring along nicely. Well as nicely as we could be! Another lesson learnt, very difficult to have any control of a business or know how well you are doing when you don't have a system that can tell! Don't develop your own systems - there are many that work that you can buy off the shelf. We were and events business without an event management system but everything else except the fact it never worked.

By this stage all the last year of blah had not improved business relations between the two parties and so it all got very tricky.  We were stuck in the middle as I agreed and disagreed with both sides. But we had a business to run, so that is what we focused on. One thing that really stood out as our regular saying - behavioural flexibility! Goodness did we take it heart as without it we could not have survived.

Now I speak about "we" as every business is about people and nothing else! I had an incredible team who started off really challenged but worked their way through developing their skills and adjusting to the madness. However over time and after a rather large amount of crap, we started to fade in our commitment and really the only thing that kept us going was the energy of the events! So many changes, so many bad decisions, so much mess! Then even those started to be affected.

When a new CEO was brought in to help and gave his very grave response about the business model and state of play and where things needed to change in the land of OZ, he got fired. And then just when I didn't think it could get any worse, our star product was making his own life changes. I knew it was time for a new adventure...and to get the hell out so I could remain just a little sane but also make time for me to take care of myself!

At the same time I decided to change something else in my life - my husband and that turned out to be an even bigger nightmare. Also a long story that is very boring and not worth the energy - safe as to say, it ended really badly when I decided it couldn't go on and it took another year of pure shyt! to finally remove the bad energy! So two pretty life changing experiences in 12 months - well if you are going to change your life you might as well do it properly.....

The start of a life changing experience

Working in a industry where much is expected had all kinds of interesting challenges to it. The first challenge initially was to get my head around what worked and what didn't in the way the product and concept was being promoted and received. The many answer I came up with was that is was an industry based on people and if we started there we would pretty much change whatever needed to change. Little did I know that the complexity of business relationships and personalities would play such a huge part in everything we did. For me this was an issue as is was one of the main reasons I had left employment and preferred to work on my own without all the politics. So here I was right back in the thick of it. It is only an issue really when things are not going well. My first lesson was to appreciate the dynamics between a promoter and speaker. Most of my previous background was working with huge conferences, seminars, events and meetings that were very much about the organisers and the "committee" and very little to do with the speakers. This was going to be a whole new area of skill set I didn't yet have. So here is the thing......the promoter is only truly in control of the costs of the events, production of the trainings and all the support services that go with it. The speaker and their business is entirely responsible for the sales element. It was the first time I was ever in a situation where your income is based on an external influence of which you have very little control. The next interesting factor was we only had one product. All our eggs were in one basic, the same can be said for the speaker. Now anyone knows in business this is very high risk strategy especially when you expand to other countries and your business gets bigger. Additionally going back to the whole people side of things, there were a number of changes that had to happen to make this venture work more pro-actively and progressively. It was always interesting for me to meet people who were not happy in their jobs but were unwilling to change it or do something about it, as they just didn't understand that is was about them changing and not expecting the change to be external. Never more so in a personal development environment. This meant there had to be a change of personnel which is never easy when you are just starting with a brand new team! One thing I knew though is the team had to grow and we had to focus on customer service, delivery and the events. We were nothing without our team, our speakers/trainer or our crew!