From Fear to Financial Freedom: The Business Shift That Changed Everything | 001

Hey, profit connectors, you're on board for episode number one. I'm Sharon Galluzzo, your host. How would you like to learn to increase your sales 30% per quarter, quarter after quarter after quarter. That's exactly how I built my multiple six figure award winning business that did just that I am the president and CEO of profit connections and your profit growth strategist. I help entrepreneurs and franchise owners create rock solid businesses with consistent sales through my position for profit programs. And more importantly than what I do is why I do it. I believe in unleashing the full potential of entrepreneurs to create resilient, successful businesses that, in turn, make a massive positive impact in our world.

I thought I would take this episode to let you know a little bit more about me and why you should care what I have to say and why you'll want access to my guests and our combined expertise to grow your business. I have a pretty great life. I have to say that I'm blessed. I've been married to my college sweetheart for the last 31 years. His name is Peter. You'll hear a lot about Peter, because he's not just my partner in life. He's my partner in business and just about everything. And one of our partnerships created two amazing daughters, and our daughters are grown and recently married, and I lovingly refer to their husbands, not as my sons in law, but as my sons in love. I heard that one time, and I just I just loved it. So that's what I call them. They are as much a part of my family as my daughters. We are very, very lucky. We also have a sassy a little puppy, and her name is Bella. And yes, I will upload a picture of Bella to the clubhouse site so that you can check her out. I know that that's what you're really, really interested in.

My husband and I, Peter, we live in a small town here in North Carolina. We have a place at the beach. We go back and forth, and we really have a lot of fun traveling and doing all of those things together for fun. I do community theater. I have been on stage for decades, and I will tell you one of my favorite roles was getting to play the Wicked Witch of the West in the Wizard of Oz. It's my favorite movie. So what a dream role for me to play. I really, really enjoyed it. Oh, and, you know, just for fun, I eat fire also, I'm an Amazon Best Selling Author of my own book, and I've also been co author in six other books, some of them are international best sellers, and one of them is in the Library of Congress. Along with my husband, we ran a multiple six figure, award winning business for almost 11 years, and then we sold it for a profit. Today, I get to help entrepreneurs create their dream of their success. I get to help them have resilient, successful businesses, to create a whole Dream Theater of what it is that they want. I really love working with entrepreneurs who are passionate about what they do, and I can see the fire in their eyes. I can see the difference that they want to make, and yet somehow they don't quite get there.

So I love that I get to step in and figure out what's missing, what's going on? How can we put some pieces in place so that you actually can have that dream business that you love, but it wasn't always this way. Once upon a time, I just love saying that sorry. My husband and I and our two small children were living a pretty wonderful little life, if I'm honest, I would have to say that at that point, I thought, we've arrived. We have everything that we want in our lives. And I thought, here we go. We've got it all. And then one day, my husband, who came home from his very secure, wonderful, good paying job, and said to me, I want to start a business. I want to be my own boss. And I have to say that I was not entirely enthusiastic about that decision. I thought, Why? Why would we Why would we do this? Why would we like up evil our entire lives. Why would we pull everything out to go do something that was risky, that we didn't know if it would work? Why would we do all of this when we had what I thought was exactly what we wanted? And honestly, it took me a little bit of time to come around the bend and figure out that i. Going to join him on this adventure. And so we took a couple of years. We researched what kind of business that we wanted to be in. We got out of debt. We did paid off all of our debt so that we could go into this business without having that hanging over our heads. And now I will say we do, still had the mortgage and a car payment, but all of the other ancillary miscellaneous bills were all paid for student loans, all of that, and we decided that we were going to move forward.

But honestly, I'll tell you, my feet were still a little bit cold. I kind of still was nervous about it, and I just didn't know what to do. It was clear that this is something that he really wanted, and I just didn't know. And so I didn't, when I don't know what to do, I kind of look out for higher authority, right? So I took it to, you know, the big guy upstairs. So one day I was sitting in my room, and I started to pray. And I was, you know, did all of my regular prayers for everything that needed to be prayed for. And then at the end, I tacked on a little and hey, by the way, if you could just let Peter know that this is not a good time to start a business. I would appreciate it. Thanks Amen. Just like that. And then the next thing that I did was I reached over to my bedside table and I picked up a devotional. And a devotional, if you don't know, is divided into days. It has like a scripture and inspirational saying in it, and sort of sets you up for the day with a good thought. And I read these exact words, these exact words, are you thinking about starting a business? It's hard to find success halfway up someone else's ladder. Are you kidding me? Are you kidding me? All the times I ask for a sign, when I ask for a sign, I get nothing. I say, Hey, if you could just let Peter know. So, I mean, what could you do, right?

So here we were. We were in this thing. And so we finally decided what business that we wanted to start. It was a media business. And then we realized, you know, gosh, we don't know what we're doing. My husband had been in it his whole career. I had been in non profit and retail and education, public relations. I didn't really know how to run a business, and so we decided we need to figure it out. So we got mentors and coaches and training and support around everything that we needed to do. And one of the things that we learned is that, of course, we know that, you know what, 50% of businesses fail in the first five years. So we knew that going in was a bit of risk, which is kind of what gave me the cold feet, right? And then we also learned that we needed to that the reason that most businesses were failing was a lack of cash flow. So we got a really nice, solid cash reserve in place. I mean, we were like, I'm like, this is going to get us through five years. We are. This is so beautiful. We got it all set up perfectly. So we did everything right. And so we started our business, and then the other thing that we needed, that we knew, is that we needed to let everyone know that we were starting our business. Now this I got I got this. I knew how to do public relations, so I was telling people on the street. I was thinking, if you were standing in front of me in the grocery line, I'd be like, Oh, hey, we're starting a new business. Here's my here's my card, and turn around to the back person, hey, we're starting a new business. Here's my card, you know, come to think of it, this is probably why self checkout has become so successful.

And then the other thing that I did, in addition to telling people and putting up signs and putting signage on our car, is there were two magazines, or actually one magazine in two different towns that came every month. It was a monthly magazine and it was a coupon magazine. But this was different. It was beautiful. It was in color. It had big pictures and it had it was a very kind of classy magazine. And I was like, you know, this is what we need to do. So I took out ads in both magazines, not just once, but for the first six months of our business. Now, I heard that it takes an adult seven times to hear information before they retain it, so I was like, six months. That's great. When we get this six months of getting this in people's hands, they're totally going to know what we do, and they're going to want to come do business with us. At first business was, you know, like any other business, we had our good days. We had our bad days. We had weeks where we made money. We had weeks where we didn't make any sales at all. And in general, you know, it was a good experience. We were enjoying what we were doing. We were learning as we went. And then one day, you know, just on a random Thursday, I went over to the computer, and I typed in our computer, our banking account information, and my heart absolutely dropped. I don't think that I breathed for five minutes. I was holding my breath in absolute, abject terror, because on the screen, I saw a number in the balance of our checking account that was distressingly low. This was four months into our business. We had the cash reserves. They were almost gone.

Now, remember I told you that I had those expensive ads. This is before Facebook, when you could do targeted ads and pay as you go. This is before Google AdWords. We actually had to sign a contract, and that money was due every month, whether we made any sales or not, plus we had additional expenses for the business, and I just thought, this is the death now, this is it. We've had it, and I felt so guilty. I felt like this was all my fault because of those expensive ads. So Peter actually wasn't home, and I had to wait for him to get home to tell him to break the news that this was the situation that we were in. So when he came home, I told him, there was crying. We I was I was just beside myself. He kept saying, How could this happen? And I felt guilty, and it just was as bad as you think that it was. It was terrible. And for quite a while, we went around and around trying to figure out what, what, what we were going to do. How was this possible? How did this happen? And all the emotions. And then finally, we calmed down little bit, and we realized that we were at a crossroads. We had to either decide that this was a really expensive mistake, or we were going to commit to this business no matter what that was it. Those were the two choices. So after much deliberation, we decided not to try. We decided that we were going to make this business work no matter what.

And this is the kind of experience I want you to have in your businesses. I want you to be able to commit to what it is you're doing. And I have a gift for you that I think will really, really help with this. It is. An amazing training that I went through that I have borrowed from a wonderful, wonderful trainer. His name's Ron sekenick. He is, unfortunately, no longer with us, but he taught us this, and this has been a touchstone for me in everything that I've done. It's called the five levels of commitment. It is a guide that will absolutely be a game changer for you and your business. It actually helps you figure out where you are now what's going on that's that's that's showing up and keeping you stuck the hidden traps that are holding you back when you're hoping and praying and trying, and what does it mean to be all in and how can you get to that level of determination that you are going to make this business work no matter what? So that is my gift to you. It is going to be in the profitconnectors.club section. That's profit connectors. Dot c, l, u, b, that is where we put all of our downloads for our podcast, all of our gifts from our guests, tools and things that I think are going to be wonderful resources for you are going to show up in that profit connectors dot club portal. It's really easy to join. All you need to do is go there, the contact, the link will be in the show notes, and you can go there and download the five levels of commitment guide. It's really a wonderful tool, and I think that you will find it as amazing as I did. And I thank you for being here and listening to my story.

Now, I didn't have enough time in this podcast to talk about how I work with my clients, and some people are asking, so I want to make sure that I give you that information. So that's going to be in episode number two, we're going to talk about how we do what we do, and again, thanks for joining us for Episode Number one, I cannot express to you what kind of joy this creating this podcast, has made in my life. I I really, really do love it, and I'm glad that you're here, and I can't wait to see you again. And check out profit connectors dot club to get all your gifts.