we are going to get started so glad that you're here um if you are here uh you're either a shipco member or a shipco member told you about this event there's a reason why they told you about this event we've just concluded about four years of research shco started four years ago and we've been researching what works what doesn't work what's different about conscious business and you guys are the first ones to see that body of research incidentally we do a about three events a month um that are free and open to the community we do them because we want to help conscious entrepreneurs whether they're members or not on July 23rd next week we'll be doing authentic selling and then we also have what we call personal fuel work which will make a lot more sense here in a minute on August 8th there's a very powerful training on uh called leap into Prosperity on August 8th so hope you can make those my background is I was a corporate executive on the growth side I became president of an internet company that did an IPO in 1999 um that was quite the experience and then the dotom bubble burst and um I started another company I sold it and then in 2009 2008 2009 I started over again I sold that business started over with this one goal I want to build a profitable portfolio of companies that made a huge impact and that's when I started our portfolio which is called share on purpose Sharon purpose does two things we invest in conscious businesses this is the first zero waste um makeup in skincare line it's completely zero waste 100% circular it's amazing that's an investment that we've made we also have a what we call the cultivator the cultivator creates companies and I have this amazing team that runs these companies for me um succeed on purpose was uh the first concept then ignite on purpose and then promote on purpose Talent on purpose and then we got off of the onp purpose names shipco is business number five so that's my background all of that led me to this um taking ownership of uh the idea that I was a conscious entrepreneur that started for me in 2010 um a very good friend of mine former client Carrie Freeman Parsons was on uh is on the board of conscious capitalism Inc and she introduced me to conscious capitalism in 10 2011 and I found my people it's the only way I could say it I was like oh my God this is amazing uh they have the same values that I do the what I was struggling with is as an entrepreneur as a Founder I needed more concrete training is the only way I can describe it I needed more blocking and tackling and so I began to build some of those things myself and with this idea that maybe conscious entrepreneurship was different than entrepreneur ship maybe conscious entrepreneurship if your business is under 5 million in revenue is different than the way that you would operate if your business is larger than five million so that hypothesis I began to play with and shifo was born um in 2020 right around the time of covid and um this idea of what could we build to support conscious Founders that really wanted to take uh principles from conscious capitalism and beab and things like that but put them into scalable businesses so they could make a bigger impact I I was kind of doing it without data um uh external data and then um a study was released from Global entrepreneurship monitor in 2022 that basically confirmed my suspicions um I had done some arbitrary research but I didn't have the body of work that Global entrepreneurship does and to make this chart as simple as possible the scale on the left is what's what's called tea the total entrepreneur activity particular country so businesses are they entrepreneurial founded 90% is the highest um zero is the lowest and they started looking for the reasons why entrepreneurs started Ventures beyond the kind that are Started With Private Equity companies and Venture Capital firms the blue line is to make a difference in the world the orange line is to build great wealth and very high income um as you'll notice United States and Canada on the far right almost 50% of us and Canadian businesses were founded to make a difference it was based on 2021 research and many other countries are seeing the same shift if you look at all the blue lines um it it was very validating to me that cont conscious entrepreneurship is real that there are people like me and more and more people like me that are choosing to start a business for the primary reason of making a difference but for the secondary reason of also building a profitable and sustainable business so I just wanted to put that data out there um and so over the last four years uh We've compiled a lot of research um on our work as well as things like Global entrepreneurship Monitor and what we're able now to Define what this psychographic is of a conscious entrepreneur and so conscious entrepreneurs care about four things equally they are driven by impact so the work is something that is bigger to them they're on a mission they know that th this is my work to bring into the world on the right side of the top they're purposeful meaning they're doing work that they really feel like they were born to do like for me I feel like I can't not do this work I am supposed to be the container for this body of work um they also on the bottom right care about personal Evolution and and I'm going to show you some statistics from shifo and why that's so important um but the a conscious entrepreneur really wants to involve they're com they're they're committed to lifelong learning but they also want to build profitable and sustainable companies and so they're not like um they're not uh playing around with the business idea that they really do want it to be a thriving Enterprise that is profitable it's not a it's not driven by profit it's driven by impact but they know that profit is a way to impact one of my favorite conscious entrepreneurs uh James ceden that I met through the Dallas chapter of conscious capitalism has a quote he says no money no mission and that's what really separates a conscious business from a nonprofit is conscious businesses really understand the importance of profitable growth and it's not an either or equation now these four things that we've found in our research are the drivers of this um psychographic this um individual that is a conscious entrepreneur um it's hard to do this work and I'm walking proof of that I've been a successful executive I've been in startups helped them go all the way to NASDAQ IPO I started my own business and sold it and although it was hard conscious entrepreneurship is harder or it feels harder and I don't think that that's your imagination um I have experienced the last 14 years of my journey as a conscious entrepreneur have been some of the toughest um and so that if it feels hard to you a you're not alone and B there's some reasons from our research why that is um and one of them is when you're balancing values purpose and Mission with the need to earn money uh it's that's challenging um I've had situations where I was in a negative cash flow but I had a client that was treating my employees poorly and I needed to make a decision was I going to put my values first or was I going to put cash flow first what did I do I LED my salary fired the client made sure I continued to pay my employees and that was a consequence that was hard to make so this idea that you know it's Kum by it's not these these money and the need to earn money and the the desire to put purpose and Mission first we are faced with conflict about that on a regular basis at least that's been my experience the second thing that our research has demonstrated is that who we become is really what drives the business forward and I have a quote that says your business our business grows as we evolve that's been my experience whereas in my in my last um Venture which was not a conscious business it was it was built to sell it was built for profit and I sold it in early 2008 which was great timing um I I certainly became a better CEO but I didn't become a better person and the last 14 years in this journey I became a better person and of course a better CEO so what we what we found is that you can't leave the personal development out because it's our Evolution that really drives things forward so what I'm going to be sharing with you today is what our Research indicates and what we're calling the conscious entrepreneur road map we're testing the name by the way so we're going to be rolling it out with a couple of different names intentional entrepreneur differen maker but what what we're really talking about is how do we go from where we are today to increasing our impact not necessarily being about growth for growth sake but increasing our impact and the two steps between where you are today and increasing your impact are one where do you need to focus and so today I'm going to give you the what we call the formula and it's four areas that you can identify for yourself where you feel like you need to focus and then second from our research from having studied our members and having studied what works with our members we're going to talk about what do you need to learn in order to increase your impact so that's the journey that we're going to go on and um what our research has um shown you and I'll show you our results in a minute um is the most important driver is a commitment to personal Evolution um and then after that there are three also very important things purpose and I'm going to be talking differently about purpose today than maybe you've heard in the past value and understanding what that means and then growth so it's four things commitment to personal Evolution purpose and a way to put your purpose for in the Forefront understanding value the value equation and then growth and that combination is what increases impact so and it's the com combination that I think makes this journey of conscious entrepreneurship very different in my past life as a I would say non-conscious entrepreneur when I built a very successful growth strategy firm and sold it in early 2008 it was value and growth who I became in the process was not that important um the purpose of the company it was designed to be sold um you know and exited you know I built it to exit um and and experience that um that is very different than this journey as a conscious entrepreneur so these four things I'm going to be talking about how these four things fit together for how do you go from where you are to increasing your impact we'll start first with the purpose of um the a different way to look at purpose so we all know about purpose um we've all read I'm sure um uh you know the whole concept of the power of why but we did something very different um when we started shipco we our purpose was very clear to us um and we knew what the purpose was which was to basically help businesses like yours increase their impact but what we've learned is that purpose is a verb it's not a noun and too often we use the statement uh for whatever our purpose statement is as well that's our purpose but we really forget the action that we need to take behind it um and well if we were born to fulfill this purpose and purpose is something we can't do our why is really clear the challenge though is staying on purpose and then secondly staying in action in action in a purposeful way and what I found is that purposeful work increases our resiliency and dedication it is fulfilling no matter what but the difference that we make doesn't happen unless we measure it and that was the big breakthrough um about 18 months into uh founding shift C we already had our purpose statement we were already thinking about it we we had our values but we weren't measuring our impact we weren't measuring purpose and whether or not we were living our purpose and what we found is when we measure our purpose and respond according inly meaning we change our actions that's when we increase our value to our customers this was a big big breakthrough I'm going to show you the statistics because purpose can be measured so shif Go's purpose is to support the development of conscious entrepreneurs in building socially and environmentally friendly businesses that's our stated purpose in our incorporation papers it's on our website it's something we talked about but when we measured our success um just a tad bit over year in we we had found that only 53.4% of our members we call this the member success ratio had doubled had increased their revenue about 18 months in so we were like okay we're only living our Purpose with half of our members that's not okay and that's the verb part we took that purpose statement and we said whatat do we need to do differently what needs to change and we made some changes and in a year later that number was 77% so clearly those Chang worked and then as of right now we're almost at our fouryear anniversary we're at right about 85% of our members have doubled now I'm proud of those statistics but I'm what I'm more proud of is that we used purpose as a verb we used this measurement of purpose to change our actions we used it to determine what resource members need to grow their business we look at the members that don't double their business that 15% we look at them and we ask ourselves tough questions about them what do they need what are where are we falling short which part of the program isn't working for them um and we evaluate the quality of all programs quarterly because we measure our purpose so what we found in our research is purpose is a verb and it's not just a y statement it's not something it certainly is a beam of light for me but when you measure it and you take action accordingly that's when purpose translates into value which of course is the next part of this formula that we found from our research is when when you combine your personal Evolution with purpose that is measured and you're actually able to make changes in in the business um and and and by the way for me that has been a challenge because I would rather I'm a grow girl right I'm like grow it you know boom pedal of the metal and I wanted to speed up the growth and our board is saying we got to slow down the growth because we're not fulfilling our mission we're not fulfilling our purpose only 54% uh right right on 50% of our members are increasing the size of their business increas in their impact we got to slow down and so it was challenges like that that really helped me understand how important it is to measure purpose but what I realized in the process of doing that my own personal Evolution that growth is not the only thing that matters and purpose matters when it's measured and you can act on it is the value our contribution has gone up we are estimating we've helped our members generate over $30 million of increased Revenue over the last four years that's an incredible value so this idea that when we when we choose to evolve and we prioritize that when we place emphasis on purpose and see it as a verb that we act on and we measure to know where to act the value equation goes up so let's talk about that um I want you to think for a second what value is um the technical def definition is value is benefits divided by cost and When Buyers buy from us they are evaluating on the front end of the sale what are the perceived benefits and what am I going to pay for those benefits and they're making this value equation all the time well buyers make this decision this value equation three times they make it before they buy they make it right after they buy and then they typically make it a period after three months six months 12 months what we saw is our members were making the determination between six and 12 months did I get value on my membership so one of the things I would encourage you to do is to to look at your business are you measuring your purpose are you acting on it and if you are how can you begin to really understand the value equation for your the customers you serve um some things you might want to think about is who and where is your target market what is their problem you know we thought um our members the problem was one thing it ended up being something else so that was important to learn third is what are the benefits that that Target Market wants and will pay for and a high value equation and this is a very important piece to the the growth side of it when there is a high value equation it ensures that your business grows organically and customers stay stay and or buy again so what we ultimately want to do by personal Evolution and purpose is increase the overall value equation um and that aspect of the value equation matters more in conscious business than it does in any kind of business let me give you an example of that I can tell very quickly when I'm going to make a purchase whether or not I'm dealing with a conscious business and a conscious founder I can tell by the way they Market I can tell by the way they sell I can tell whether or not they lock me into some long-term thing I can tell um from how they treat me after I've signed the contract so this idea that this value equation it doesn't stop on the marketing side and in my old life the value equation stopped on the marketing side in a conscious business it continues so we want to use our business as a Force for good we're driven to use our business to make the world better we want the be business to be a vehicle to solve important problems if that's the case what we have to really understand is what is our buyer value equation what are the benefits that they're looking for for the cost and what I've learned about this is none of the reasons that I started shift C none of them are the reason that causes somebody to buy and the same is true for your business that doing that customer Centric research and understanding what your buyer's value equation is what are the benefits they're looking for what are the problems that they're looking for you to solve and what are how are they measuring what you're charging them when you know that value equation it changes the way you can Market to them it changes the way you serve them right after they purchase and more importantly it changes the way you serve them and the ongoing relationship that you have with them and when that changes what starts to happen is your referrals go way up um your repeat engagement rate goes way up um and that perspective of value allows you to fulfill your mission and and live your impact which brings me to the last part and that is growth my grandfather was my first entrepreneurial member uh mentor and um he was an amazing man and he taught me many many things about profit you know profit is the tip your customers give you when you serve them well but he also taught me when he shut his business down um he said Terry businesses of all types even mine that's a community he had a community based business it was a juice bar in Sarasota Florida and he loved this juice bar and he said businesses are in the process of growing or dying and so if your business isn't growing it is going to die and I watched this man who I adored shut the doors and lock the doors on this little tiny juice bar on Main Street in Sarasota Florida because his business wasn't growing and it wasn't growing because my grandmother had um cancer and he was taken care of her I get very choked up when I think about this and he knew he needed to make a choice and the choice was he was going to care for her he was going to find another way to pay the bills so this idea that if your business isn't growing your business is dying has been with me from the beginning the challenge when I became a conscious entrepreneur is somehow part of me thought n that doesn't really apply you know I can grow slower and I can kind of slide back but I tell you that is not true um I'm going to show you another body of research here in a minute about the different phases businesses go through and why growth matters not for the sake of growth but for the sake of health health in the business so what what we found is that businesses must grow to increase impact period it must increase their revenue to increase impact that doesn't mean it's you know know has to grow to grow but the the business has to increase its Revenue if we want to increase our impact more importantly we need to improve the scalability of the business anytime I've had a business slide back it affected the scalability of the business and third is I don't know about you but I want to find ways to reduce the time that I'm working in the business so that I can enjoy it more so those are the three reasons why the business must grow but what I found from our research is that there's distinct ways that your business will grow and where you will struggle with grow as you scale your impact the analogy is thinking about a rock climber so when a when a rock climber is scaling a rock or a mountain they don't just go straight up they do this shimmy right left right left and that when something feels hard so when a rock climber is like ah this is right what what they do is they they usually will go down a step and they'll look back and they'll say okay I was I I was looking I was going the hard way maybe there's an easier way to do this so they take a step back take a step down and they look for a more simple step and building a business always feels hard even when it's purposeful as I talked about but we can simplify it and that's what this research will um will show you so this idea of business simple how do we make it more simple is we boil a business down to its two important ingredients supply and demand in between supply and demand is that little purple bar and that purple bar is called the fulcrum that's what we've named it and it's the fulum is like the center of a seesaw that balances the pressure and the fulum is the pressure point between two opposing forces supply and demand in your business so demand is revenue how much revenue do you have coming in and Supply is how are you servicing that Revenue through inventory or service capacity so what we found in our research is there's very different ways that a business grows based on the size of the business so if your business is under 10k a month it's going to look more like this purple line um and it's like a giant roller coaster of ups and downs get the work do the work get the work do the work and we get stuck in this get the work do the work get the work do the work and the business really needs to move Beyond 10K a month in order to get out of that U treadmill feeling that a business has a business under 10k a month can feel a bit like a treadmill it can wear us out so under 10k a month we need to scale the business in such a way that we're increasing this balance between the fulcrum supply and demand um the second uh level is 10 to 30k and we call this phas shape this is a very difficult phase um it has repeated ups and downs that are frustrating but also very evolutionary and so the business growth looks like this it looks like these Loops um I have two businesses in this phase right now not very fun at all and um it will feel very much like Groundhog Day and so what what you've got to do is you have to figure out where where do I need to focus and shape the business to get it through that so that it's not experien ing those ups and downs so that's the ne uh the second phase the third phase is on your way to um a million and that's 30k a month um what our research has found is that conscious entrepreneurs can stop here um it is really hard if they stop uh below 10K a month um it's really hard to have the business continue to increase its impact but you can stop here um if you don't want to scale the business to the next phase and you can slowly increase the impact once you get through these little Loops here or you can move to the next phase and uh what we call build and build it feels more like climbing stairs there's dips but they end up being minor and short-lived unless you make big changes in the business so our research has indicated that you scale businesses very differently depending on where your Revenue level is and you have to focus on different things but you can simplify it by simply finding ways to balance supply and demand and that's what we call business simple so business simple is really the fulcrum is the pressure point so if you're feeling that fulcrum if you're in one of those three fulcrums that's why it feels so hard you're not alone um as many times as I've been doing it I still have two businesses in that second folr I've got a third business in the third Fulk room it feels hard it is pressure just like that full on a seesaw balancing very tricky demand is the business revenue and Supply is how you service that Revenue through inventory and or service capacity okay so how do you do that um hopefully by now you've been thinking about um the formula that we talked about and where you need to focus if you're here p uh personal evolution is something I'm sure you're already committed to maybe it's figuring out how to measure your purpose maybe it's really understanding that value equation from your buyer's perspective or it could be growth um and let's start with the supply side of growth and then we'll do the demand side of growth there's five ways that you fix the supply side of growth one is you can simplify your product offering two is ADD people in resources three is evaluate pricing and profits what I find in most conscious businesses is they're underpriced and that's why the business isn't scaling for four is process and five is developing Partnerships and so when you're I when you're identifying how to scale the business you want to identify the different ways that you can scale the operations and supply side and then when you get time back you want to put that time into demand gen and that will be the last part of the growth and then I'm going to wrap up and we'll take a few questions so there's four steps to increase demand in your business awareness interest desire and act um we treat those as relationships um rather than click funnels and Lead magnets and all that kind of stuff we treat everything as relational marketing relational demand generation and so what um what I have found is that 70% of your time really needs to be spent in Awareness building and that is um that can be very frustrating um because it just feels like oh I'm doing the awareness and it's not going anywhere there's a big drop off between aware and interest and so that's why you need to do so much awareness building and then 25% needs to be spent on working with the people that are interested um because buyers don't buy they're not transactional buyers in Con in the conscious space they really want a relationship with you so 25% of your time should be spent really working with and the followers connecting with them and then 5% is is closing and building you know building relationships on an ongoing goinging basis but that 70% and 25% is where the tricky part is is when I want to grow my business I want more clients but what you really have to be doing is you have to increase you need probably three to five times more awareness than you have today um to double your business and and doubling your business isn't the only way but it's just a statistic that we now know for sure you need about three to five uh 3 to 5x more awareness if you want to double your business in 12 months so 70% of your time really needs to be spent there and then the beautiful thing is if the value is high customers will return and they will refer new business to you and that's what makes the whole equation easier when you're scaling your business the last tip for you is um came from I was on a board um of an organiz ation that taught professional athletes how to build businesses and they did a lot of research that I got to see it was amazing and I coined some of their research the athletes Advantage um athletes are three times more successful as entrepreneurs than non-athletes interestingly enough and um I was really curious why that was and started consuming the research and really it's because athletes have trained their mind mind their body their emotion to make moves rather than be in motion so a move an athlete makes moves I'm dribbling the ball down the court I'm passing the ball I know where I'm going um football's coming up here pretty soon so I know where the lines on the field are and so athletes have conditioned their mind their body and their heart to make moves so they don't waste time and energy and nonathletes tend to be in motion they're acting they're doing stuff but it's not productive um and so this idea to train yourself to make moves um is very important and what our research has found is if you can break those awareness building activities into small moves and dedicate each time each day I have an hour a day for each of the businesses that I'm growing an hour a day dedicated and during that hour sometimes two I make three good moves per day three good moves per day it's not the Big Woo you know something is working it's just the discipline day in and day out of making three good moves um per day first meeting on my calendar is um is what are my three good moves today first meeting I have with myself and then I look at my calendar and I schedule those moves in um around the other activities that I have and when that time block comes up I put my phone up I turn my email off and I'm focused on moving the demand side of the business and moving my business forward so I'll just tie it all together if you want to scale your impact it's purpose plus Value Plus growth equals impact and your personal Evolution our research has shown that our business as conscious entrepreneurs grow as we evolve that's the power um please let us know how we can support you in increasing your impact I hope that you'll join us for authentic selling and and or leave into Prosperity um so glad you're here for the beginning of the research that we'll be sharing um and I'm going to stop the recording um and see if there are any questions and or