Dana Malstaff: So he sends me this article and it’s called “The Heroine’s Journey,” and it’s hilarious. I’ll see if I can find the link and send it to you. So it basically is, hey there’s the hero’s journey, well nobody talks about the heroine’s journey.

Pat Flynn: I love this.

Dana: “The Heroine’s Journey” is literally a woman that goes, “I’m sorry, what journey are we talking about? I have to feed the kids and take them to school and cook everybody dinner and make lunches and do the laundry. I don’t know what journey you’re talking on, but no one’s got time for a hero’s journey on this end.”

So”The Heroine’s Journey” is, “I ain’t got time for a journey.”

Pat: You’re listening to Dana Malstaff, the founder of Boss Mom who is our special guest today. She leads an amazing, engaged and very large community of moms over at Boss-Mom.com, and as many of us know, moms are very busy, yet these moms are still able to build a successful business thanks to the help of Dana.

Now whether you are a mom, or a dad, or just a busy person in general, we all know that it can be tough to find time to work on our businesses. And a lot of times when we want to work on something outside of those important things in our life, like kids, we often feel bad because one seems to take away from the other. So at the end of the interview I asked Dana this question:

Pat: So I have one final question for you, it’s a tough one, but I’ve saved it for last so I could warm you up.

Dana: Why thank you.

Pat: And I’m sure this is a question that you’ve come across before, especially having a community of moms. But how can one build a successful business and be a successful parent at the same time?

Guys, we get deep today, so make sure you stick around and listen all the way through. We also talk about how to become micro-famous, which is exactly how Dana teaches all of us to start businesses: by leveraging other communities in a way that is noninvasive and still respectful to that community that we are building a micro community under and becoming micro-famous in.

So, stick around, here we go, intro, let’s do this.

Announcer: Welcome to The Smart Passive Income Podcast, where it’s all about working hard now, so you can sit back and reap the benefits later! And now your host—he’s been called The Pat of All Trades—Pat Flynn!

Pat: Welcome to Session 359 of The Smart Passive Income Podcast, thank you for joining me today. My name is Pat Flynn, here to help you make more money, save more time, and help more people too. And time is a big theme here in this conversation today. And not only there, we’re going to be talking about well, how do you get started, especially at this time of year when we have just thought about our goals, right? It’s 2019 now, we’re at the end of January, maybe you’re a little bit depressed because you haven’t even gotten started yet on what it is that you had set out to do, and you’re already feeling a little behind.

Well we’re going to discuss that, in addition to making sure you’re climbing the right ladder for you and the life that you want to build, and actually the different phases of business that you can start with, like the intern phase, the janitor phase, and other elements of what Dana has actually packaged into her new book, Climb Your Own Ladder. So we’re going to discuss all those things today. My good friend, Dana Malstaff from Boss-Mom.com. Here she is.

Dana, welcome back to The Smart Passive Income Podcast, thanks for being here.

Dana: Thank you for having me, I’m super jazzed today.

Pat: You’re jazzed.

Dana: I’m jazzed.

Pat: I love it.

So last time you were on the show, April 20, 2016, was a while back. How has business been going since then?

Dana: Well, it has been steadily growing into a glorious empire of awesomeness.

Pat: Tell me about the empire, like what’s all in this empire of yours?

Dana: Actually it’s this amazing community that has arose, beginning with my feeling that I needed a community and it’s just been spreading like wildfire ever since. So I think, gosh, if I have to think back to when I was on with you, I started Boss-Mom as a brand with the Boss Mom book in September of 2015.

Pat: Right.

Dana: So I was only six or seven months into building that, so I bet you I had a couple thousand people in the Facebook group and I’d already, you know, I started making money building courses, so I have already monetized and things like that, but was building this community. Now we have just shy of 35,000 people in the Facebook group that is organically grown, we don’t push anybody there, they just organically go there, which is amazing. I just came out with my third book, Climb Your Own Ladder, and we launched the Boss Mom Meetups, local meetups. So we have like 170 different hosts in over 100 cities internationally, which is amazing, and really growing that. And I’m starting to do more keynote talks and just yeah, all the fun stuff that’s happening.

But really the exciting part is just how many women are reaching out and recognizing the Boss Mom brand and saying that it’s the place where they found their people, found their community, and found the courage and the excitement to pursue whatever it is they want to pursue, whether that’s quitting their job or going back into starting something or just finding a creative outlet or making some vacation money. Whatever it is, they’re feeling the space where it’s accepted to do that as a mom, which is pretty darn awesome I think. So exciting things happening.

Pat: So I hold a meetup every month at the WeWork in downtown San Diego, right? And the last time I was there, we had a discussion about who we would love to meet, and I had said Elon Musk, but we kind of went around the room and one woman said, “My dream is to meet Dana Malstaff, she is amazing.”

Dana: Oh no way.

Pat: “She’s changed my life. I’m in her community.” And then we were all like, “You know she lives in San Diego here too, right?” She was like, “Oh my God are you serious?”

And like, she had forgotten about that because she didn’t know where Carlsbad was specifically and she was just blown away by what you’ve done for her virtually, and so maybe one day you will meet her ’cause she’s also living in San Diego too. And I know you’ve come—

Dana: Well I need to come to your meetup. I’ve been to the meetup before.

Pat: Yeah, yeah. But just a testament to what you’ve been able to build since the last time you were on the show, you had just built the brand back then and that episode was about how to automate your business and save time, and you had talked a little bit about the courses and how you were able to relatively quickly scale and monetize, but now you’ve built the community out and to have 35000 women, to have these meetups all around the world, I mean how have you been able to cultivate this community into a group of amazing women and raving fans?

Dana: Yeah well, and I know you love—when I hear you do your talk about raving fans, and I know that your next book is all about building the raving fan, I think that there’s a couple things that we do very similarly, and then there’s a couple things that I actually learned from helping build internal communities within organizations from a corporate standpoint that I think have worked really well. I think the people that can build good communities are the people that understand emotional intelligence, and that understand how human psychology and people work. But the big thing is, when building a community, I treat it like a community, which is if we lived in a small tiny town together, right, before all the technology happened and everybody lives in a town, you stay in the town, your family’s in town, your friends are in town. You know the plumber. All of those things. Everybody plays a role, everybody plays a role.

I think a lot of people start businesses online these days and they think, “Well I’m the person at the top and so I need to make the decision to do all the things and then I’ll just tell everybody how it works.” I think a lot of people run brick and mortar businesses that way too. And I think all the success in the communities that are really solid and loyal to each other, that they’re built on the premise that we all play a role. That everybody within there has—and they assume naturally those roles that they play. There are the natural policers, the natural motivators, all of these different roles. And so within Boss Mom, what we’ve tried really hard to do is allow the community to become a community where everybody plays a role, where there is levels of engagement that people have, where we raise people up, and it’s not about one person being at the head and trickling down decisions, but so much more of a, “How can we collectively decide the future of what we’re trying to build?”

And when you do that, everybody feels like they’re a part of the journey, they feel like they’re a part of something where their voice matters. And their voice does matter. And we cultivate that, and it also takes a lot of pressure off of me to be there everyday all the time. I can assume a role as a leader, as opposed to trying to assume a role as a community manager. And I think that has been very great, because it’s also freed up my ability to grow my business, like everybody else is trying to grow their business, but we can all leverage the community to help each other grow, both as ourselves, as families, and as business owners.

Pat: How do you facilitate that? What are the mechanisms to actually empower your community to be involved and step up as well?

Dana: Yeah, so we have ambassadors that every . . . we used to do it every six months, now we do it every quarter, because the group is so big we want to give people an opportunity, so what we do is I talk about Boss Mom as being an actual ecosystem. You can climb the ladder within Boss Mom like you would a company, so you can come in and be new to the community, but if you’re starting to engage, then one of the cool things about Facebook groups now too is they start tagging you as a conversation starter.

And then there’s all these different things, as we start to recognize within our insights that you are really engaging in this community, or we see you on other platforms that you’re really engaging with Boss Mom, then we start talking about you. We start tagging you more, so we start making you feel included and you start moving up. And then you can become an ambassador, and then at our events you can become a facilitator. And then you can become a collaborator with me and we’ll do different things together and promote each other’s businesses, and then you can come on the Boss Mom podcast. So I like to think that if you can build a community where you have a ladder that people can actually climb, like you have places where people can go so they don’t just come into your community, engage, and then go somewhere else if they need something else, they aspire to be bigger and bigger parts of your community. And our Facebook group has over 75 percent active users every single month. Like, it’s insane.

Pat: That’s pretty insane.

Dana: Cause 35,000, and 75 percent of them are active in the community every single month, like that’s—what I love about that is it’s not just, you know, we all want to say we’ve got big numbers of things ’cause it sounds cool. But we go in, and the people that are actively engaging rotate. Like it’s not like there’s always just these five people that are always in it; people are rising up within the ranks of how they’re connecting and engaging within the community. And we have women that say their entire business is from Boss Mom.

I tell people, if all we did was hire each other, we’d all have six figure businesses, you know? So find your people here, find your team here, find your collaborators here. Get on each other’s podcasts; we have systematic ways where we say, “Hey, who’s got podcasts, let’s get on them.” Every Saturday and Sunday we say, “Tell us what it is your opt-in, tell us what it is you’re selling. Hey, what do you have that’s under $100? Hey, who needs to hire somebody, post your things you need to hire here.”

So we cultivate different ways for people to engage with each other. We have collaboration Thursdays, and people are getting on each other’s podcasts and hiring each other and working with each other, and adding bonuses to each other’s courses and it’s all this wonderful ecosystem that miraculously works.

Pat: Right, yeah, I mean, what an amazing environment that you’ve created and what is seemingly like a very safe place for people to have a voice, which is often hard to find and you’ve given them that. And I think that’s amazing. Can you speak to the person who’s listening to this who is like, “Wow, that seems like a dream to have a community like that, but I’m just starting out. I have nobody yet who can engage, I have like ten people in my Facebook group and I’m just starting out. I can never get to Dana’s level.” Or, “It’s going to take me years.”

How might I, as a person just starting out, still benefit from this kind of advice about cultivating community when there’s hardly anybody there?

Dana: Yeah, well one thing is, I say before you grow your own, become micro-famous in somebody else’s. So there’s a lot of girls within our community that came into Boss Mom, and this is how I started Boss Mom, I was in somebody else’s group that I engaged in a lot, and I became—I say find your Cheers, right? Like everywhere is crowded, find your Cheers, is what I like to say.

So go to the place where you go often, it’s the same thing in your business, right? You’re like, if you focus on eighteen things, then you don’t become known for anything. But if you focus on one or two things, then those are the things you become known for and it’s much easier to seem an expert in those things if you’re known for them. Same thing with where you’re engaging in in the online space, or if you’re actually doing meetups and things like that, but I’m most prominent in online. So go into a group, or groups that you . . . And we do like this two week process where we help you search and find spaces that are like your online spaces, and then we show you how to spend two weeks engaging in them, and then you narrow it down to one or two that are really your places, so we help you actually find your online communities.

Pat: How do you do that, is that like in a course or in a training program?

Dana: Yeah, yeah, we have a free training that is like find, engage in your online space. And it shows you how to engage, how to spend those two weeks. You can know that you’re in a place that you’ll actually like. And then, so that’s what I did, I was in one particular group years ago before Boss Mom ever existed, and I engaged, and I engaged in the appropriate kind of ways. So like, I would go in and instead of just engaging on things that I wasn’t an expert in, I would actually search keywords in the group for things I was really good at. And I would only spend my thirty minutes in that group engaging in those things.

So people started to go, “Oh, if I’ve got a question about content strategy, I tag Dana.” So people started tagging me in that group, and I started to become what I call micro-famous, which is everybody started to know me, so people started to recommend me, we started tagging each other, and we created this little community. Once I’d done that and I was known enough in that community—and I did it in two different communities. So once I was known enough in those communities, then when it was time for me to say, “Hey guys, I’m launching this podcast, hey guys, I’m launching this book,” I had this community that was rallied around me even though it wasn’t my community. It was me engaging in someone else’s.

So then when I started to get that, then it was time for me to go over and start my own thing. So yeah, you don’t start out being known and building this big community that’s engaged right off the bat. Leverage other people’s communities, and I love it when people become micro-famous in Boss Mom. When someone says, “Oh I need this one thing.” And then everybody’s like, “Oh, well you need to go to so and so.” Right? And then those people become big and then they start their own podcast and they start their own courses and group coaching programs and those kinds of things and then we become collaborators.

I mean, I have a girl who, she was still in corporate when she came into the community. I remember having a conversation with her, saying she was like, “This is what I want to do. I’m so excited.” She owned a cleaning company, or she was in a cleaning company, she started her own cleaning company, and then she moved into organization, and her podcast is less than a year old and I think it just hit a million downloads.

Pat: Wow.

Dana: And it’s like, I got to know her, she joined the community before she’d ever quit her job. And that was only a couple years ago, you know? And so I say don’t try to like, go out into the desert on your own. Like, leverage what somebody else has already built and engage there, become micro-famous so you can bring people along with you.

Pat: And I’m thankful that you said that you totally, as the creator of this group with people who are building their own things underneath it, are comfortable with that. Because I think one thing that people might think is that, “sure, I want to leverage other communities that are there. That makes sense, but I don’t want to take advantage of or steal people away, or maybe might feel a little bad about sort of starting something that somebody else had actually started themselves under them.” And so how do you speak to that person who in their head they’re like, “I worry about putting up my own flag in somebody else’s land.”

Dana: Yeah well, I think one of the things of like, going through the process of finding your people is one, there are totally communities where they want to be the head, they want to be the person, they don’t want anybody else to be special. And that’s totally fine. That’s just a different way of running a community, you’re just not going to feel at home in those communities if that’s what you’re trying to do. And you’re not going to go into a space—like, for instance, we’re on a podcast. So if you’re somebody who produces podcasts or runs podcast courses or whatever it is, yeah you’re not going to go into a group of somebody who has that same business as you, and then try to become micro-famous in their business, because yeah, you’ll be stepping on their toes. Or that’s potentially possible.

But you’re going to find groups where that’s different, either like with Boss Mom, there are tons of business coaches and content strategists, but there are also . . . I think about it like this: Before the internet came along, there was a plumber in every city. Right? The plumber in that city didn’t go, “Wow, there’s so many plumbers in the world, it’s a saturated market, oh gosh.” Because nobody left the city to get a plumber, you got the plumber that was closest to you and that was your plumber. But in the online space we go, “Oh, the market is so saturated. There’s so many coaches, there’s so many podcasters, there’s so many website designers.”

Pat: Right. We’re all in the same city, essentially.

Dana: Yeah, we feel like we’re all in the same city.

Pat: Right.

Dana: But the fact is we’re not. We all have different characteristics, we have different fields, we have different brands, and there are different time zones and all of these different factors, and we all hang out together, so it seems like it’s a saturated market and like, “Oh, if I’m in this group, everybody is this thing.” But if you’ve got on an airplane or went into a restaurant and said, “Hey everybody, who here has a podcast?” Like, one person would stand up. The fact is, is we spend our time with all the people that do what we do so we feel like things are saturated, but every single day new people are coming online. Like every single day new people are joining and saying, “Hey I’ve decided I want to start a business,” or “I want to start a podcast,” or do whatever it is.

And we have to recognize that we think we’re stepping on everyone’s toes, but we’re not. And if somebody tells you, “I don’t like how you’re engaging in my group, get out,” well then you didn’t have the right group. And you go find a new one where someone does believe that collaboration is the better way to run a business.

Pat: Right, and I think about an example that was taught to me back in the day which is like, okay, let’s think about dry cleaners. So very similar to plumbers, I looked up how many dry cleaners there were in San Diego; there’s nearly 500. And it’s like, even if they’re in the same area, they’re all different and people resonate with different dry cleaners based on personality and who they go to and likely sometimes people go to the one that’s a little bit further away because they actually like that person and that person knows their family and all those kinds of things that you were talking about, kind of small town feels. And I think it’s really important to realize that.

The second part of this that I want to cover is just the idea of abundance and not scarcity, approaching things with an abundant mindset versus approaching things with a scarcity mindset, which is a very important concept when it comes to building businesses, especially because there is competition, there are people who are “ahead of us.” How do you teach people who come to you and go, “Uh Dana I mean, just like, there’s so much competition out there, I’m not good enough. Why would a person follow what I do when there’s so many more others that are doing it better than me?”

Dana: Yeah, well that’s definitely . . . well there’s a couple things. So one, when someone says there are other people out there doing it better than me, or I often hear “longer than me.” They’ve been around, they’ve got more clients, you know. One, I say, “Well let’s just talk about your experience in life and experience in what you’re doing.”

And I remember having a conversation with somebody who wanted to be a book editor, and she’s like, “I don’t know, I haven’t had any clients. I just don’t know if I can do it, if I’d be good at it.” And I said, “So tell me about your experience where you haven’t edited books. Like, what is your experience?”

She had two masters degrees in like English and Literature and all these different things, all this amazing background, and it was baffling to me that she was worried that she wouldn’t be able to edit a book. And so this is part of why I wrote my third book, Climb Your Own Ladder, because what people do is they create this scarcity, ’cause they feel like they have to be the CEO of their business. They have to be at the top; I own my own business, I’m starting my own freelancing or whatever it is, so I have to be the big dog. And the fact is is we all start out as interns, so if you don’t approach it like, “Wow, there’s so many people out there that are better than me,” you approach it like, “Oh my god, there’s so many people out there that have so much knowledge and experience, I’m gonna take in everything I can, learn from them, learn what they’re doing, learn how I can differentiate myself, connect with those people so that I can create a space for myself, carve out a space for myself.” You get excited about the fact that there are people that are already doing it and they’re proving that what you want to do it monetizable, then all of the sudden you get excited about being in the intern phase where it’s all about learning. Because the intern phase is all about, “Hey, I’m gonna learn from everybody and decide if what I’m doing in this current organization is what I want to actually do for the rest of my life.”

And that’s what people need to do, is instead of this scarcity idea that, “Oh, I’m not as good as other people.” You go, “Oh, I’m earlier on than other people.”

Someone looks at me and they’re like, “Wow Dana, you did all this and stuff in your business.” I’m like, “Well yeah, but I also have had Boss Mom for three years and before Boss Mom I spent two years not making a whole lot of money at all trying to figure out what Boss Mom was, you know? So I think the scarcity mindset is because people place themselves on a certain scale of how fast they’re supposed to get somewhere, and if you were an intern in an actual corporate company and then six months in you were like, “I cannot believe I don’t own this company, I feel like I’m a failure. I mean, what have I done with my life?” They’d be like, “Are you kidding? Most people live in a twenty-year trajectory in their corporate ladder climbing.”

Yes, we start our own businesses online and within six months if we’re not a millionaire we think we’ve failed. And I think people need to come back to the reality that things take times, experience builds upon itself and every single time you get a client and you do more, you become more knowledgeable and you get to charge more. And you get to do more. And you get asked to do things more. Let that happen, one at a time, and let each one of those instances help you move up your ladder instead of trying to jump up your ladder, ’cause you’re just creating a lot more risk and failure than if you allow the climb to happen naturally.

Pat: Right. I often use the ladder analogy as well when I talk about how I was let go from my architecture position and had to sort of grab onto a new ladder. It’s really hard to do, because if you think about climbing a ladder, and you’re climbing off and of course when you’re climbing you get higher. And the higher you go, the harder you will fall, you’re committed to that once you go up and it’s hard to shift over to a new one that might even be right next to you. But when you think about it, in order to grab on that other one, you have to eventually let go, both your hands and your feet, and it’s a hard sort of shift to make.

And that’s why I love the book and Climb Your Own Ladder, y’all, check it out on Amazon, we’ll have links in the show notes and everything. What is the premise of Climb Your Own Ladder, like what can a person expect to, after reading this book, understand that they didn’t have before?

Dana: Yeah, okay. Well the first one is permission. The first one is permission to not be at the top right now, and really the fact that if you try to be at the top, if you try to act like the CEO and try to have the premium prices and everything figured out when you don’t have any of those things, that it is a painful process and it creates more failure. If you allow yourself to not only start—you know I do the intern phase, and the janitor phase, and the project manager phase, and the closer or sales stage, and all these things that we move up through naturally in our business. If you allow yourself to embrace being in that space, then you will move through your business and create more success faster.

So number one is the permission. Number two is recognizing the actual phases we have in our business, ’cause I get this all the time, and I remember Amy Porterfield, she was just on my podcast and we were talking about, she got a bunch of clients and then all of the sudden she had no time and so she’s like, “Well I can’t make any more money, ’cause I can’t take any on more clients, so what do I do? I’m burnt out.”

And time and time again I get people coming to me and that’s what they say. They say, “Well I’m starting to get some good momentum, I’m getting clients, but now I’m seeing I’m capped out. And now, so I’m gonna let some of those clients go or not bring on new clients, but then I’m gonna make a little less money for awhile so I can build up some automation to create some things that are scalable.” And they go, “Gosh, I feel like such a failure because I’m not making as much money as I did.”

And I’m like, “No, no, no, you’re literally in the exact natural spot you’re supposed to be in, where you started out, you started getting clients, now you have too many clients, now you’re taking what you’ve done with those clients and turning it into a system that becomes proprietary that you translate into evergreen content that you can scale.”

That’s a perfectly natural way to run your business, but people feel like they’re a failure because something was working and now a shift has to happen. And what it just means is you’re ready to move up to the next rung of your ladder. And the thing I think . . . I feel like you’ll appreciate this: you know in the movie Labyrinth?

Pat: Yeah. Oh wow, that’s old school.

Dana: I’m gonna totally pull Labyrinth. Do you know when she falls and there’s just a bunch of hands and they all form little faces and they ask her like, “Do you want to go up or do you want to go down?” Like, which way do you want to go.

Pat: For those of you who don’t know, this is like a really wacky like, crazy trippy movie.

Dana: It is. It is. She falls down this hole and they’re all hands and the hands like make the cool little faces with their hands, and they’re talking to her. But I think, I always think about that, I think about if you, in this book, if you build your business the way I’m talking and you allow yourself to progress the way I’m talking . . . ’cause if shows you have to move into the, not only move up into the next rung, how to notice when you need to move up so you don’t get stuck in places like the janitor phase, where you’re just putting out a bunch of fires and you never really create systems, so it really burns you out pretty quickly. It shows you how to move up, but then it also talks about like, what do you replace yourself with. Is it an automation? Is it a person?

Well if you build it right, then you’re talking about going higher on your ladder, and then if falling is pretty scary, you look down and you go, “Oh, I’ve got all these hands. I’ve got all these hands that aren’t going to let me go anywhere. They’re not going to let me fall because I put all these things in place, whether they’re automation or people that have got my back.”

And hopefully you’ve created a community and connected, whether that’s a small community of people that you’re in a mastermind with, or a big community like we have with Boss Mom that have got your back. And so the falling doesn’t happen in the same way. It doesn’t mean you won’t have setbacks, but it means you’ve got a crap ton of hands ready to catch you and make it easier. And that’s what I want people to build, is I want them to build businesses that are sustainable, that they can move through and build, maybe sell their ladder someday, or maybe start a new ladder someday, or just keep climbing their own ladder or whatever they want to do. I want people to be able to do that in a way where they feel excited and empowered but also when things don’t work, because that will happen, they feel supported.

Pat: I like that, the hands are a good thing.

Dana: The hands are a good thing.

Pat: They’re not freaky. I don’t know. Yeah, I mean that’s so true ’cause I think we often forget we’re laying a foundation as we are building our business. That when we, if we were to fall, we’re never going to fall to where we were when we started from scratch ever again. And it’s funny because when I talk to entrepreneurs sometimes, and they’re growing their business, they’re scaling, there’s more worry because what they’ve built is bigger and it’s often thought that the bigger you are the harder you will fall. But in this case as the analogy says, this is not true. And the bigger you are, the hopefully more support systems you have, and it’s like when you actually are climbing a real ladder what do you do? You often ask a friend to hold this steady for me.

That’s kind of what you’re building, especially with a community behind you and I think that’s so key. ‘Cause a lot of times I talk to entrepreneurs and even I struggle with this sometimes too, especially this past year as I started to play in bigger fields and push a little bit bigger and take bolder actions, I often think like, “Whoa, could I ruin everything that I’ve already built if this were to fail?” Almost like our house is, instead of a ladder that has structure to it, it’s almost like a house of cards where if one thing fails then everything is going to crumble, but that’s a limiting belief.

Dana: Yeah, absolutely. The other thing too that I think is really important to remember is . . . ’cause we have a chapter in the book about basically someone needing to hold your ladder, right? Like a real ladder tells you in big bold letters “somebody should hold this, ’cause it’s dangerous to climb your own ladder alone. But one of the things that I mention that I think is really important is that it’s never just going to be one person or one community, that you should never put all of your hope that one person is going to hold your ladder eternally, right?

I think we have to recognize that we naturally move through, like there are most likely somebody got on to your podcast, they listened to it, they were moved and it changed their life, right? And then they decided to do something, and then they kind of moved to another community or another show where they learned this one other thing that was life changing. And then maybe they came back to you and they learned this other thing from you, and now they decided to start a podcast. And then they’re going to go to your event, to your—what is it, is it PatCon?

Pat: FlynnCON.

Dana: FlynnCON. FlynnCON, and you know, then they’re going to be moved there. And then they’re going to meet somebody there and they’re going to start a mastermind with that person and do . . . you know, and I think what we need to realize is that we don’t always have one person for the length of our entire business holding that ladder. We have to continually look at saying, “What’s the best person, the best community, the best coach, the best course, the best whatever it is?” Just kind of like Just-In-Time Learning, it’s Just-In-Time support. Like, what kind of support do I need right now? I’m going to get that kind of support to help hold my ladder steady so that I, I know, and then I’m going to let that person have a rest when it’s time. Because I think that’s what we do is we go, “Oh I’ve been in this community for five years, and it’s just not giving me what it used to.”

It’s like, “Yeah, you were supposed to go three years ago and get this other kind of support that this community’s not giving you.” Like, naturally allow that support to come and go and give your support system a break sometimes, I think.

Pat: Thank you for that.

Now a theme that has come up a few times in several of your answers is time. And I know that you’re brand, Boss Mom, and the community of moms that you’ve built, moms have hardly . . . there’s less time in the mom’s life than many other people’s lives because of the fact that you’ve got little ones to take care of, and I know this first hand because I see my wife everyday, and she’s taking care of the two kids as well.

So how does one, whether you are a mom or a dad or just somebody who has a lot of things going on, many things to take care of, a lot of other priorities in life, how does one find the time around any of that stuff, to actually build a successful business too?

Dana: Yeah. It’s so funny, my dad loves to text me articles that he finds and then texts me.

Pat: Oh really, my dad cuts out—because he lives close by, he cuts out newspaper articles and like, every time we see him he’s like, “Here’s a new set of newspaper articles you could read that relate to—”

Dana: Oh I love it.

Pat: Yeah, so very similar.

Dana: So he sends me this article and it’s called “The Heroine’s Journey,” and it’s hilarious. I’ll see if I can find the link and send it to you. So it basically is, “Hey there’s the hero’s journey, well nobody talks about the heroine’s journey.”

Pat: I love this.

Dana: And “The Heroine’s Journey” is literally a woman that goes, “I’m sorry, what journey are we talking about? I have to feed the kids and take them to school and cook everybody dinner and make lunches and do the laundry. I don’t know what journey you’re talking on, but no one’s got time for a hero’s journey on this end.”

So “The Heroine’s Journey” is, “I ain’t got time for a journey.”

And it’s this funny thing, but they also say that, you know, a mom or even a parent, like anybody who’s watching kids and understands that you have ten minutes where maybe you don’t know, are they going to nap that long?

Pat: Well bathroom time is alone time, essentially.

Dana: Are they going to be happy? Yeah, and what you think about is they become hyper focused and really are able to be productive in short periods of time because they know the value of time. So I actually think being a parent gives us this super power that we don’t recognize, which is understanding the value of tiny bits of time is number one. Number two, I think we start to recognize that life is an emotional rollercoaster and that doesn’t mean you’re not a good entrepreneur or not a good parent, it just means we’re just like kids, where we’re happy, sad, excited, frustrated, and lonely and fulfilled all in the same day. And those are totally, totally normal to move through all of those emotions. And it doesn’t mean that you can’t be productive and can’t be great.

So those two kind of skills for parents, we have those and we don’t always leverage them. So what I tell women who are trying to start a business or something and they go, “Oh well, I listen to so and so on this podcast and they said all I have to go is batch these days and then I’ll be successful.” And they’re like, “I don’t have days to batch.” And I said, “Well don’t try to run your life and your business based on somebody who doesn’t live their life the way you do. Find people—”that’s why people that are moms love Boss Mom, someone who lives their life the way you do, and then it’s something that makes sense to you.”

So we break everything down into ten minute increments. So if you have a project when you wake up in the morning, or at night when I look at all my stuff at night for the next day and I say, “Okay, how can I break this up into things that are ten minutes?” If I can’t do it within ten minutes, then I need to break it down even further. Because if I know when I have the kids home I only have those little pockets of time, if I have longer then I can back-to-back some ten minute things. But then so I break it down into time, so that you can tackle things. And you’d be amazed at just like, exercise right? If you just did five minutes of exercise ten times a day, during when you go up to get your coffee, then you would have a full workout. But if you wait for enough time to have your full workout, then all of a sudden you haven’t worked out for a month. It’s the same thing.

And then I break them up by the mental acuity that I need. So if I’m going to write a chapter in a book, or something like that, I’m not going to do that in a ten minute increment. I need space, so I save those things for the time when I know I’m alone, right? So all it is is—I think the biggest thing is we totally have enough time to do things if we recognize that we need to be focused in the space that we have. If you don’t know what you should be working on, then hire somebody to help you figure it out, right? Like don’t just sit around spinning your wheels by yourself. If you then know what you want to work on, don’t try and ignore the way your life is, leverage the way your life is. Because if you try to live your life, again, to the way somebody else is who doesn’t live at all like you, then you’re just going to feel like it doesn’t work and you’re failing.

If you leverage the way your life is run, then that works. Like, I have a client who drives all the time to take her son to ice skating lessons, ’cause he’s a amateur ice skating professional, I’m not sure what you call it. And so when she’s brainstorming, it’s like, “Hey, don’t be mad that you don’t have a bunch of times in front of a computer where you’re not in a car, ’cause you can’t type while you’re driving. Start speaking out loud and then transcribing those things, and those become your blog posts.”

And all of the sudden she’s like, “Oh my gosh, I got five blog posts done, ’cause we had to drive up to Canada and I just talked out what I wanted, we transcribed it, and then when I got to the hotel I was able to edit what they had.” She’s like, “Oh my gosh.”

So stop fighting against the way your life is and leverage the way your life is.

Pat: That’s really smart. I mean my . . . I was about to ask you what would you say to the person who hears this and goes, “Okay, but Dana, like I literally don’t have any time.” And they give you their whole schedule during the day, and prove to you with their schedule that there is no time for any extra stuff. But you’ve already given me one example of how I can make time with things that I’m already doing for this business that I’m building.

Do you have any other examples like that? That was really cool.

Dana: Oh okay, yeah so, gosh. If you really . . . We do, I have like a little exercise that’s a time mapping, and when someone says that to me I go, “Go take the time mapping. Let’s just track for the next three days, not even like wild and crazy, just for the next three days, where you’re spending your time.”

And you would be amazed how many times somebody will come back, and then within two days I have sent them a notepad and a pencil for their shower, and I’m like, “Hey, the thirty minutes in your shower where you say you have good ideas, we’re going to start writing ideas down there, and then you’re going to take a picture of it and then you’re going to send it over here to get this thing made.”

Because half the time they’re like, “I would love to hire somebody but I don’t have time to get the ideas to that person.” Right? Or they’ll say, they’re like sitting in line to pick up their kids from school, but there’s thirty minutes that they’ve got there, right? And then, or, like you’d be amazed that 30 to 40 percent of our time is wasted time. And what we do is we just assume I have to be sitting in front of a computer to be productive, right? And that’s just not the case.

So when we think about what are the things I could do if I’m in a car? What are the things I could do if I’m watching my kid do something where I don’t have to be present, necessarily, right? ‘Cause not in all instances do we have to be present when we’re with our children. If they’re in swim lesson and you go every single Monday, like there’s a few minutes in there where I go, “This is great, they’re also not doing anything that’s very exciting, I’m going to contact somebody on my team to make sure they can do what they’re doing.”

So recognizing where you’re spending your time, the pockets of time where you’re really not using any mental power or needing to be attentive in a certain place, and saying, how can I fill that time in a way that’s really productive? And then that also gives you space to go, “Wow this time, like when my kids get home from school in this hour and a half where we do puzzles and we play, that’s my time.” And that time nothing else happens and that’s really important, and you start to recognize what’s important and what’s not important. And I think you’d be amazed at the amount of time people realize they have when they realize what their priorities are.

And if someone says, “Yeah Dana, but I’ve done it and I just don’t have time,” then I say, “Well maybe right now is not a time to start a business. If you really feel like there isn’t a single thing you do during your day that you’re willing to give up to start a business, then you don’t care enough about starting a business to give it the attention and the love that it needs. So just wait. Keep listening to podcasts, keep reading business books, and when the passion and the fire is big enough, we will find time. We will make it happen.”

Pat: Thank you for that. That’s huge, I want to clip that and put it on YouTube for everybody and share it everywhere; thank you for that.

Dana: Oh my YouTube channel is coming out on Valentine’s Day, so I’ll be on YouTube.

Pat: Oh nice. Where could we—is it Boss Mom or?

Dana: That’s a great question.

Pat: This is why it’s coming out in a few months, not right now.

Dana: I’m pretty sure it’s my name. I think it’s Dana Malstaff, Boss Mom.

Pat: Got it. Okay, thank you.

Dana: I’ll tell you for the show notes.

Pat: Yeah, yeah we’ll have all the links to the show notes.

Right now the episode comes out—this episode is going to come out at the end of January and that is a time when many people have just sort of thought about in the previous month what their big goals are for this year. And at this time is when we start to consider okay, well how far have I come along on those goals? And often times we see that we haven’t even yet started on those big plans that we have for the year.

How do you encourage somebody to just get started and finally start working towards those goals?

Dana: Yeah, so I think one of the things we have to think about is successes and habits, right? When we create habits, then we start doing something systematically, and then we free up mental space to have more creativity, right? So what I think we do in our businesses, I see this all the time and I do it sometimes too and have to stop myself, is I think planning sounds really fun and we have to plan. Like we need to have plans so that we know what we’re going towards; if you don’t know where you’re going, any road will take you there. You want to be focused and that kind of thing.

But once we’ve set the plan, a lot of times what we do is we just look at it, right? So we’ll look at our goals, and then we’ll go, “Okay, well I’ve got all these goals, this is great.” And then we go, “But how do I get started? How do I get started?”

So the thing is is, okay, prioritize the things that you want. If you’re like, “I want to start a podcast and write a book and do all these things,” pick the one that you’re going to focus on and do what everybody hates doing, and if you don’t like doing this then hire somebody to do it, which is break it down into a project plan. And if you—here’s the thing that I tell people. If you have something on your checklist and you keep moving it to tomorrow, then it’s too big. Break it down. If you keep it on your checklist and you keep moving it til tomorrow, it’s too big. Break it down, right? Even to the point of, if it says call this person to follow up on a prospect, or ask to be on this podcast, or something like that, and you keep moving it to tomorrow, it’s too big.

So you think, “Well Dana, I’m just asking to be on a podcast. How is that too big?”

Well, you haven’t written an email yet. You haven’t thought about what you’re going to say or what you’re going to ask, maybe you haven’t done the research to listen to one of their podcast episodes. There are totally things that you can break down into those ten minute increments, right, where you do it. So if you have goals or things on your checklist that you keep moving til tomorrow, you have not broken it down enough to the point where you feel comfortable. And part of it is that limiting belief, right? Or, “oh, they’re not going to let me on the show. Pat’s gonna say no. Pat would never let me on his show—” whatever that is.

And so we just don’t do it. But if you break it down and break it down and break it down, you get to the one task that you do feel confident you can do. And success is built on habits, on milestones that we go, “Oh yeah okay, that works. Okay well, I did that. Okay well, I did that. Okay well, I did that,” and it builds up your confidence, right? And so we start to have more confidence and we’ll reach more goals. I mean, people don’t reach their goal by waking up and going, “I’m gonna write a book,” and then tomorrow the book is written, right? You write like you did: You write every single day. You create a habit of what you want for the tiny things that you know you can get done in that day. You do one outreach every day. You write one chapter every day. You write one blog post or even one paragraph of a blog post every day. You do one social media post, one Pinterest image. And if you create that habit every single day of the tiny things, you will reach your goals. So stop thinking about them as big goals, just break ’em down until you’re willing to do the task and keep doing the task.

Pat: We talk about habits quite a bit here on the show. We’ve had James Clear, the author of Atomic Habits on recently, which is a very popular episode [Session 340]. I’m currently going through Michael Hyatt’s Best Year Ever course, which has an entire chapter on creating the habits that support your goals, and it’s exactly what you’re saying. What are those small things that you can continually do without you even having to think about it? You set yourself up to automatically do those things so that you can chip away and actually start to see the sculpture of a business of yours. [Full Disclosure: As an affiliate, I receive compensation if you purchase through this link.]

And sort of a good example of this that I remember sort of James talking about—even Steve Kamb when he was on the show a while back was like, for example if you want to get better at guitar this year, well don’t put the guitar way in your closet in the case where you’re never going to see it. Part of the habit is allowing yourself to be reminded everyday that this is important to you, so have the guitar out on a stand in the hallway or close to it so that every time you walk by you are reminded about that thing that you really want to do.

And then the second part of this is, and this was even taught to me by my guitar coach, Lee Anderson at Play Guitar Podcast, he said like, “Okay if you really want to do this, if you really want to get good at guitar”—’cause I’m taking guitar lessons right now Dana and that is actually 6:30 a.m. every Wednesday on Skype with Lee who’s in another state in the US, we do it over Skype, it’s really cool. He’s like, “Okay if you really want to do this, invest in a really nice guitar that when you see it you just want to pick it up every time.”

And I was like, “Okay this is great.” And this is—I took the same approach when it came to writing my book in November. I wrote every single day and I still continue to write as I finish off the first draft. Every night before I went to bed, I opened up the Google Doc or the next chapter that I was going to write, so that the moment I walked into my office it was already there for me to remind me and I didn’t have to do anything but just start writing, versus opening up Google Docs and finding the right folder and all the things that would potentially stop me.

Dana: Yeah, I love it. And I remember back in the day when I met Hal, Hal Elrod—

Pat: Miracle Morning.

Dana: And he mentioned, yeah he mentioned he designed the cover long before he ever wrote the book. And with my latest book, I had a ton going on and so I yeah, I had the cover designed and I just kept that cover on my desk at my desktop.

Pat: I love that.

Dana: So every day when I woke up I was like, “Oh I want to write that book.”

Yeah you gotta, I mean just like with your business, if you’re not excited—I heard this recently, you’ve gotta be excited about the problem you solve. Not the product you sell, but the problem you solve. So if you’re excited about the problem you solve, then you’re gonna have a business that can be successful. If you’re excited about the thing you’re learning, right—I play piano. I can play “Blackbird” on guitar, and that’s it. And I keep trying to pick up guitar ’cause my dad plays classical guitar and I’m just terrible at it. But I play piano, and that’s the thing, I always start when I sit down by playing one song that I know really well, so I feel good about the fact that I can play piano, that I can do something. And then I jump into the hard thing, because I’ve given myself a little cushion of confidence to be like, “Oh that sounded nice, Dana. Okay, let’s sound terrible for a minute while we’re about to learn this thing I don’t know.”

And so yeah, you find the thing that you get excited about, like work should be exciting. That’s part of what Boss Mom is all about. Work is not a negative word, work is about getting better at something so we can enjoy life more, we can experience things more, we can impact people more, we can have better memories, we can do all those things. Work is not some negative thing that happens. Work is us building something that’s important. The people that don’t ever do anything in life and sit around and stare at a wall, which I hope is a very small part of the population . . . yeah, it may feel like they’re not doing anything hard, but they’re also not doing anything important, right? And learning new skills and doing the work is important, we all learn through the work. Like all the people that are billionaires that never got a college education, and Good Will Hunting and all those kinds of things, they did the work. They do the work whether somebody told them they had to or were giving them a grade or not. Because when we’re passionate about solving a problem or learning a skill or being good at something or experiencing something, we do the work. Find the ways to motivate yourself to get excited about it.

Pat: Preach, Dana.

Dana: Yeah, amen.

Pat: So I have one final question for you, it’s a tough one, but I’ve saved it for last so I could warm you up.

Dana: Why thank you.

Pat: And I’m sure this is a question that you’ve come across before, especially having a community of moms. But how can one build a successful business and be a successful parent at the same time?

Dana: It’s called conscious integration. I have an answer for this; I’m super pumped.

Pat: I knew you would.

Dana: I call it conscious integration, so it’s when we think about work, a lot of times, and things that we’re doing, we think about when do I have free time? When are my kids gonna be gone, right? When they go to school, then I can workout. They go to school, and then I can sit in front of the computer. I think our kids want to be just like us, right? I want them to see all the things I’m excited about, so my kids work out with me. Jo, my daughter, does yoga with me. And I teach them things and teach them the names of the moves I’m doing, and those kinds of things.

And I want them to experience it, I want to integrate them into things I’m passionate about, not find times when I’m not around them. There are obviously things where I need to do it by myself, ’cause I need the brain power. But I want to integrate them. So if I’m going to sit down to do something, Jo has a little—it’s a keyboard that doesn’t work anymore. And if I need to sit down and do something I’ll go, “Hey Mom needs to sit down and do this thing. I’m going to write a couple emails, how about you write some emails?” And she goes, “Great, I’m gonna write some emails,” or “I’m gonna write a letter to somebody,” and then she sits down next to me, and she’s typing. And I go, “Well who are you going to email?” And she goes, “I’m going to email my teacher, Faith.” And I’m like, “Great, what are we going to tell her about?”

I tell them, Jake goes, “Hey Mom, I’m gonna go over here and play.” And I’m like, “Well, why don’t you tell me, why don’t we have a job? What’s your job, if you were selling something and you had to pay for your trip to Disneyland, what would that be?” And he’ll come back and be like, “I’m gonna sell hotdogs,” and I was like, “That’s a great plan, what does that look like?” And so we start talking about, what is he going to sell? And what is he going to do? And when I say, “Hey I’m going to do videos.” And they say, “We want to do videos.” And we sit down and we talk about the structure of a video. Integrate your family and your kids into what you do, because if you feel like you have to have two separate lives where you’re a business owner and you’re a parent, then you’re always going to feel like one takes away from the other.

If you integrate them and allow your kids to be curious, like they naturally are, about who you are and what you care about, then you caring about your business stops feeling like you’re taking love away from your children, and you start to feel like you’re building a life where your children get to see what you care about, and that’s great parenting. Because our kids look up to us and you get to decide what they look up to. Either they look up to somebody who’s secretive about what they care about and it feels bad that they care about other things, or they’re going to look up to somebody who is excited about living in this world and doing really cool things that empowers and excites us and makes us feel fulfilled, and they’re going to want to live in that world too. And that’s the kind of parenting and business owning I think we should all strive for.

Pat: Thank you. Thank you, Dana. And you know, when you talk about that, I realize that I have been doing a lot of conscious integration just sort of naturally based on the kind of parent that I want to be as well.

Dana: Yeah.

Pat: Keoni has been very involved, he’s come on stage with me at Podcast Movement in front of 2,000 people, and I think about the skills that they learn that can then help them in their life with whatever they choose to do. One of my big things is I don’t try to, for Keoni or Kai, my son and daughter, to become entrepreneurs. If that’s their choice, awesome, they’re going to have the tools to succeed hopefully through my example. If they want to be employees, awesome. They’re going to succeed and again, have the tools they need to succeed through my example. Not being an entrepreneur but solving problems, dealing with people, understanding how to present something, learning from mistakes, those are all skills that are useful no matter if you’re an entrepreneur or not, which is why many of you know that my big passion in life now, and where I want the rest of my biography to be about, is about being an agent of change in the world of education, and teaching kids entrepreneurship.

And so to hear you talk about that, it’s just really exciting and I hope, I think a lot of us who are parents who are listening to this can definitely relate to that. And even if you’re not a parent, it’s just that set of words, conscious integration, it’s like, why do they have to be separate? Can they not be sort of integrated, so that you can sort of be fulfilled and have both?

Dana: Yeah, and the one final thing I will say too is that we beat ourselves up about how present we are with our kids, about when do I work. Especially for people who work at home, we have weird hours. And social media isn’t a 9-5, right? Sometimes if you’re in the middle of something, you’re doing something at night, or whenever that timing is. I think something that we should remember about conscious integration, is tell your kids what’s happening.

Pat: Yes, absolutely.

Dana: Say, “Hey, Mom’s got this launch going on. How could you be helpful?” And my son will come in and he’ll be like, “Oh how about I get you some money if you have to get on this thing?” I’m like, “That would be great.” Or Jo will be like, “How about I draw a picture for your client.” And I’m like, “That would be awesome.” And so I ask them, how can we help each other? And when they want to do things, I say, “Well what would you want to launch?” And Jo will say, “I want to bake cookies for the world,” and I’ll be like, “That’s great. Okay, so how can I help?” And she’s like, “Oh, you could get some Play-Doh and I could make cookies.” And I’m like, “That’s a great idea.”

So I think the other thing too is there’s the conscious integration, there’s the telling them what you’re doing so they can understand and learn from it, and then ask each other how you can help. How can I help you do what you want to do? And let them start to be creative about the answers they give, and teach them to ask you how they can be helpful so that they can tell you . . . I remember my dad owned an auto-body shop, and he and I would go in the summers, and everybody else got to go to camp, and I am so glad that I got to go to my dad’s, ’cause he asked me what I wanted to do, and I was like, “Well I want to be on the phone, and I want to greet all the people that come in and help you organize.”

So he airbrushed a desk that had my name on it, and he put it in the office in the summers and I was his office manager. And I would have my clip and when he was out doing estimates I would hold it and do estimates behind him and that kind of thing; I would mimic what he was doing.

Pat: That’s so cool.

Dana: And he allowed me to be part of it, and some people would go, “Oh gosh, you had to work in your dad’s shop in the summer?” And I’m gonna get choked up ’cause my dad passed away this year, but it is some of the best memories I will ever have, is being able to work with him. Not just play with him, but I got to be a part of how he made the world better and how he made it possible for us to have a house, and have food, and all of those things. He taught me real life, and we got to do that together and that’s really powerful. So don’t just play with your kids, allow your kids to be part of the parts of your life that they’re gonna have to be adulting later.

Pat: Thank you for that, Dana. And the final question to kind of tail off of that, is for those in the audience listening who have literally like a six month old, how might one integrate with a person who is the very tiny one who poops all the time?

Dana: Okay well, first off if you have a six month old, you are golden, because they’re gonna sleep a ton and you’re gonna get a ton of work done and it’s great. It’s when they hit like a year to two years, it’s insanity.

Pat: That’s right, this is true.

Dana: And life gets a lot harder. I would say that your kids totally hear and they know your excitement. If you’re frustrated and your kid’s crying more and you notice that . . . so one, I’d say read out loud to them, listen to podcasts out loud to them. Tell you kid, even though you feel like they don’t hear or can’t speak English, tell them about things you’re excited about. Speak out loud what your goals are and your aspirations are. Talk to them as if they are somebody that knows, because you’re going to pour into them the passion and excitement that you have. You have somebody who’s listening intently. They’re holding onto you with dear life because you’re the only thing they know. And you have this opportunity to get excited about something that they’re going to feel that excitement for you.

So even then I think use them as a little cuddly silent sounding board for the things that you care about, and it becomes this experience you have. You wake up everyday and maybe while you’re breastfeeding or you’re rubbing their tummy or things like that, read out loud to them and tell them what you want and recite your affirmations and talk about what your limiting beliefs are and how you’re going to get over them. And those little smiles that they have, or the funny things that they do actually become trigger memories for you that help solidify the excitement you have for things, because you’re going to remember, “Oh, remember when I said that thing that I wanted and he made that little tiny smile for the very first time? And I always am going to remember that goal that I had that made my son smile for the first time.”

Let those things still be ways to integrate.

Pat: I love that. I remember reading . . . so we used to read when Keoni was literally just a few months old, Harry Potter, obviously knowing that he wouldn’t understand what we were talking about. But it was just really cool to kind of get him into the idea of listening to us talk, which was always good obviously for language development and those kinds of things. And then I actually switched for a little bit to business books to be able to sort of do double duty there, meaning like, have him hear my voice and learn languages and just be with me, but also I get business stuff done and I get to learn. And I remember reading How to Win Friends and Influence People, and reading the chapter about like, it’s important to use people’s names and I would just like, kept saying his name, and then he would respond and look, and I don’t know. It was just really cute, and I think that’s a great strategy for at that crazy time in life when you are a parent and you have a little one who’s like that. Thank you for that. I think that’s very reassuring.

Dana: Yeah. Oh, you know what? One other thing too. If you have a little kid I always think you should be practicing. So if you have a presentation you want to give or if you’re trying to do sales pitches, record yourself practicing. Your babies love to hear your voice, so record yourself practicing and then play that back to your baby so they get to hear you talking, you get to have a little rest time, but you can also hear yourself. Because I always tell people, record things and listen back. You’ll be able to hear very keenly the places where you’re not confident about what you said, so that you can practice on those things. Kids don’t say the alphabet once and know the alphabet, they go every single day and they practice. You should be doing that in your business. When you have little kids, they love nothing more than to watch videos of you and hear your talk, right? And they are a captive audience most of the time, so leverage that to practice in your business.

Pat: And if they end up crying, it might not be because of you, it might be because they’re hungry or have to go to the bathroom or something.

Dana: That’s true.

Pat: Just wanted to add that little asterisk for you just in case, but Dana this has been an amazing conversation, thank you so much, especially for a lot of the deep answers that I think a lot of people needed to hear, especially at this time of year and perhaps in this time of their life. Where can people, and where should they go to find more info from you?

Dana: Yeah, yeah, go to Boss-Mom.com. We actually, once this episode is out, we will have a whole new website we’ve been working on for the last three months I’m so excited about.

Pat: Amazing. Boss-Mom.

Dana: Yeah so Boss-Mom.com, and we’ll have all the great, great resources. It’s all completely redone to create a journey for you, depending on where you are in your life and your business. And I’m really, really excited about it. So that’s the best place to go.

Pat: Thank you Dana. Amazing conversation, I appreciate you, and good luck on everything.

Dana: Oh thanks, and thanks for having me.

Pat: All right I hope you enjoyed that interview with Dana, again you can find her at Boss-Mom.com. She has some other great things coming out, that have come out since this interview, coming out soon like her YouTube channel, so for all the links and all the great things, just come to the show notes page and click all the things there. All you have to do is go to SmartPassiveIncome.com/session359.

Dana has been so amazing to get to know over the past years, and again recommend listening to Episode 210 which is the first time she appeared on the show, just after she just started the brand Boss Mom actually. We had a great discussion about how she even came up with that idea, and she was even a special guest at one of me and Chris Ducker’s live events, a mastermind event, called 1-Day Business Breakthrough, where we brought her on stage to actually dissect what she should do next. And it’s just been so amazing to see her take that advice, run with it, create her own thing, and build this amazingly engaged and large community that has been so helpful and is creating new success stories every single day.

So congrats Dana, so proud of you. Again, Boss-Mom.com. For all the show notes, SmartPassiveIncome.com/session359.

Team Flynn you’re amazing. Thank you so much for being here. If you haven’t yet subscribed to the show, make sure you hit subscribe now. And kudos to any of you who spend just one minute to leave an amazingly honest review for the show, I appreciate you so much. And until next time, just keep crushing it guys. I love you, take care, Team Flynn for the win.

Announcer: Thanks for listening to The Smart Passive Income Podcast at www.SmartPassiveIncome.com!