Episode One: The Excavator Rule

You have been working hard your whole career. Doing everything right. Showing up early, staying late, giving everything you have. But the business revenue still will not move.

This episode introduces the one idea that is going to change the way you think about your business permanently. It is called the Excavator Rule. And once you hear it, you will never be able to unsee it.

I am sharing the real story behind building my $4.8M company the hard way — working sixty-hour weeks, raising three kids, and having a panic attack in a Trader Joe's parking lot that finally made me stop. And I am sharing what I discovered on the other side that nobody had told me in ten years of building a business.

The plateau is not a discipline problem. It is not a strategy problem. It is not a you problem.

It is a tool problem. And the right tool has been parked outside your business this whole time.

Press play. You will not be the same woman when this episode ends.

Transcript

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SPEAKER_00 0:24

So I want to start by telling you something a little embarrassing. For 10 years, I ran my multi-million dollar company and I genuinely believed, like in my bones believed, that the harder I worked, the more I deserved what I was building. There was this equation that was running in the back of my head that I was not even aware of. I thought that suffering plus discipline equals success. I didn't choose that belief. I didn't sit down one day and decide it was true. It was just how things worked, I thought. And so I built my life around it. I was answering emails at 10:30 at night. I was thinking about the business before my feet hit the floor in the morning. I drove my kids to school every single morning, even though there was a perfectly good bus, because I wanted to be the mom who did that. I joined the PTA and then I became the PTA president. And when that wasn't enough, I became the school board president. I was trying to earn an A in every single category of my life at the exact same time. I wanted to be a perfect CEO, perfect mother, perfect wife, perfect everything. And the to-do list never, ever stopped. And here's the part I'm most embarrassed to tell you. I was actually proud of this because exhaustion meant I was serious. It meant I was committed. It meant I deserved what I was building. Nobody told me any of that explicitly. I just absorbed it somewhere along the way. And then I spent 10 years living it out like it was gospel. Until one day I was driving down the highway going to visit a friend, and something happened that had never happened to me before. I could not breathe. My heart started pounding. My hands went tight on the wheel. I didn't know what was happening to my body, but I knew I could not keep driving. So I pulled off and I ended up in a random Trader Joe's parking lot. And I sat in that car and I had a full-blown panic attack. And it's important to tell you, I sat there for a long time because some very quiet part of me knew that when I started that car and drove home and walked back into my regular life, nothing was going to be different unless I made it different. Now I have told that story before, and every single time I tell it, there is a woman, sometimes a room full of women who get very quiet. And I can see it on their faces. They are not doing the math on my story. They're actually doing the math on their own. Not the same highway, maybe, not the same parking lot, but the same feeling. The same running as fast as you can and somehow getting nowhere feeling. The same exhaustion that a full night of sleep stopped fixing a really long time ago. The same nagging sense that you are doing everything right and something is still wrong and you cannot figure out what it is. If that is you right now, if you felt something just shift a little when I said that, then you are exactly who this is for. Here's what I know now that I did not know then. My body was not breaking down. My body was finally telling me the truth after years of me overriding every single signal it sent me. The tension, the short temper, the exhaustion that never quite went away. It finally sent me a message loud enough that I could not ignore it anymore. So I pulled off the highway, I parked outside a grocery store, and it made me stop. And what it was saying was this the tool you are using is not working anymore, and you have been refusing to put it down. That is what I want to talk to you about today. The tool. Because here's what nobody told me in 10 years of building a company. And what I'm guessing, nobody has told you either. And it is the single thing that has made more difference in my revenue, my freedom, and my actual life than anything else I have ever learned. There is a difference between a shovel and an excavator. And most of us were handed a shovel, told to dig faster, and never once shown that the excavator was sitting right there the whole time. Let me tell you exactly what I mean. I want you to imagine two women. It's the same Tuesday morning. They have the same job to do. They both need to dig a hole. Same size, same deadline, same everything. The only difference is what they show up with. The first woman picks up a shovel and starts digging. And I want you to really see her because she is not someone you would feel sorry for. She is remarkable. She is completely focused. She does not complain. She does not scroll her phone. She does not stop for lunch. She gives that hole absolutely everything she has. By the time the sun goes down, her hands are blistered. She can barely lift her arms to drive herself home. And the hole is about a third of the way done. The second woman shows up to the same site at the same time. She looks at the hole and then she takes out her phone and makes one call. Twenty minutes later, an excavator pulls up. A professional operator climbs in, fires up the machine, and by noon, noon, the hole is three times the size it was supposed to be. That second woman drives home in the early afternoon. She picks up her kids from school. She goes to her son's baseball game that evening and she sits in those bleachers with a hot dog and watches every single pitch. Her phone is in her bag, her eyes are on the field, and she is fully present. And she's not even tired. Now I want you to sit with something before we keep going. Which woman do you respect more? I know. I know the poll because I felt it too for 10 years. We were raised on the first woman. We were taught that she is the one who deserves it. She showed up early, she worked the hardest, she never quit. She gave everything she had, she did everything right. And the whole is still not done. But here's the truth the blueprint left out. The difference between those two women was never motivation. It was never discipline. It was never talent or drive or how badly they wanted it. It was not that one of them was more committed or more serious or more worthy. The only difference between those women was the tool. And here's where I need you to bring this home because I did not tell you that story to be inspiring. I hope it was inspiring, but I told it because I think it's your story, not the shovel specifically, but the belief underneath it that if you just work hard enough, if you are just disciplined enough, if you just push a little more, the breakthrough is coming. And maybe it's been a year, maybe longer, and it still has not come yet. What I want you to consider, and I mean really sit with this, is that the plateau you are on right now is not a strategy problem. It is not a mindset problem. It is not a you problem. It is a tool problem. The women I have watched break through to their next level of revenue and freedom are almost never the ones who worked harder. They are the ones who found their excavator. I'm talking about the specific tools, systems, and decisions that let their business grow without them being the engine of it every single day. Your business making money while you are asleep, while you are at the game, while you are on vacation, and your phone has been in the hotel safe since Tuesday, and somehow, impossibly, miraculously, nothing has fallen apart. That is not a fantasy. That is what happens when you stop digging with a shovel. I want to make sure you understand something before we go further because I do not want you to finish this audio and think the excavator is one magic thing, one hire you have been avoiding, one system you have been putting off, or one decision that is going to fix everything. It is not. The excavator lives in every single area of your life and your business. There is a practical layer, the systems, the delegation, the decisions that free your time and multiply your revenue without you adding a single hour to your week. There is also a physical layer, your body, your energy, your actual capacity to receive what you are trying to build, because that is more connected to your revenue than most people want to admit. And there is a much deeper layer, the one that works on intuition and trust and the kind of knowing that arrives before your brain has caught up that most business coaches are honestly too afraid to talk about. Well, I'm not, and we're gonna go there. We are gonna walk through all three of those layers in this series with real examples, real numbers, real stories from my business and from the women I work with, because you have heard enough content that sounds good while you are listening and is completely gone by the time you get to work. But first, I want you to do something, and I'm asking you to actually do it, not just nod while you listen. I want you to think about your actual yesterday, not the work you planned to do, what you actually did with your hours. Did you answer a customer service email, one that a virtual assistant with a template could have handled in 60 seconds because it was faster to just do it yourself? Did you jump in to fix something the moment it went sideways because explaining it to someone else would have taken longer than fixing it yourself? Here's what I want you to know about that moment. Every time you do that, your team quietly learns that if they wait long enough, you will handle it. So they wait and you handle it. And you wonder why nothing runs without you. Did you build something in your tech, something in your funnel or your email platform or even your website because you are capable of figuring it out? And somewhere along the way, being capable became the same as being responsible for it. Here is the thing all of those moments have in common. Every single one of them is shovel work. And every hour you spent with that shovel in your hands was an hour you did not spend on the thing that only you can do. And that thing, the work that is specifically, uniquely, irreplaceably yours, that is where your next level is hiding. That is where the revenue jump lives. That is where the version of you who sat in those bleachers and actually watched the whole game is waiting. The excavator has been parked outside your business this whole time. Nobody showed you it was there. So before you press play at audio two, here's what I want you to do. Just one thing, and it takes two minutes. Name one place, just one, where you are still the most expensive person in your business doing the cheapest work. Say it out loud. Type it in your notes, tell it to the steering wheel on your drive home. Because you cannot trade in a tool you have not noticed you are holding. Audio two is where we get into the practical layer the real decisions, the real business systems, the real moves that have freed the most time and generated the most revenue with actual numbers and actual stories, not concepts or inspiration, things you can actually do. I will see you there.