Carrie Green: Heck, yes, I am!

John Lee Dumas: Yes! Carrie is the author of She Means Business, a book to help anyone become a wildly successful entrepreneur. And, nshe’s the founder of the Female Entrepreneur Association – an online community with over 300,000 people involved from around the world. Carrie, take a minute, fill in some gaps from that intro and give us a little glimpse of your personal life.

Carrie Green: Things are a bit chaotic. I’m the girl that decided to sell a home, buy a home, do a move, all in the middle of a book launch. I don’t know what I was thinking. So, I’ve been a headless chicken lately. But, things are all good. I’m very excited at the moment with everything going on workwise.

John Lee Dumas: Well, I’m glad you were able to find some time for EOFire, because it’s been a while. You were episode 1240, and that was 1200 episodes ago, which is a little mind numbing. And, you still had that same amazing accent back then that you have now. But, Fire Nation, definitely go back and check that one out. You’ll hear a very different JLD behind the microphone, and a very same and awesome Carrie, of course. But, Carrie, what I want to talk about today is what do you consider your area of expertise. Like, if you had to just say, “This is what I thrive in. This is what I excel in.” What would that area bee?

Carrie Green: Definitely making people believe that they can do whatever they put their mind to, which I’ve only just realized. And that’s only been from the feedback from my book that that started off. But, that’s what I absolutely love doing. It’s what really fires me up and, just want to make everyone believe that they can just do and achieve the most incredible things.

John Lee Dumas: So, what are we doing wrong? Give us one tactic, one ninja tool or something that we just probably don’t know that you’ve found through this research, through this feedback that we probably should know as entrepreneurs.

Carrie Green: The biggest thing is that even though it feels really complicated, really overwhelming and really frustrating, it’s actually really simple. But, we just overlook that part. And when I say its’ really simple, I just mean that to me, success and creating success – whatever that means for each of us – is largely a case of keeping on going and moving past getting out of our own way and doing whatever it takes. I call it building up my bag of mindset magic tricks to help me move forward. And, the thing that’s the key is to just keep moving forward. Keep practicing getting better, and better and better, which I know sounds really simple, but I think we miss it on a day-to-day basis because we’re so caught up in the day-to-day stuff because it’s going on. We just forget. We forget to take a step back and get some perspective and realize, “Oh, I just need to keep going.”

John Lee Dumas: No, you’re right. We have heard, “Keep it simple;” we’ve definitely heard, “Keep going.” What’s something we haven’t heard? What’s something that we’re going to learn in your book that we wouldn’t know otherwise? What’s something that you’ve uncovered that you’re like, “Wow! This is something that people just don’t know or don’t do.”

Carrie Green: The big one that’s nothing to do with mindset whatsoever is that if you want to build a really successful business or really successful brand, then you have to get really good at building community. Like, for me, that’s everything. So many people miss it. They think, “Oh, I selling this product,” or, “I’m providing this service.” No. You’re building a community. And people miss that time and time again, and I think once that penny drops and you realize that’s what the focus needs to be, that’s when the brand becomes absolutely phenomenal.

John Lee Dumas: Well, I think that is critical because I get people emailing me all the time. They’re saying, “John, I have this great idea for a product, but it’s going to take a lot of time for me to create it. So, what should I do first? Should I create the product, or should I do a podcast or do a blog and build an audience?” And I ask then, “Well, who are you going to sell your product to? Who are you going to sell that thing to? Is just anybody who’s never heard of you going to buy it because you say that it’s so good? No.” You first have to build your community, build your tribe, build your audience, build into like and trust. Then, you can create that product, service, community, whatever that might be, to then offer to them at that premium level – whatever that might be. Now, Carrie, it’s been 1200 episodes. I mean, that’s right around four-ish years since we’ve talked. So, I want you to bring us to what you consider throughout this journey something that you really just have found that brought you to write this book, She Means Business. I mean, where did this book come from? Where was the genesis?

Carrie Green: The book came one night when I was falling asleep at the end of 2011. God, it’s taken me forever.

John Lee Dumas: Yeah, that’s six years! What?

Carrie Green: I know! Stowing up for dreams is sometimes hard. So, I was literally falling asleep, and I’d been running FEA for a few months. And, as I was falling to sleep, I started thinking about how crazy it was and what a roller coaster it had been. And, I just grabbed a pen and a piece of paper from the side of the bed, and I just started scribbling everything that I was thinking. And at the end of it, I was like, “Oh, my goodness. I just have to write a book and share this!” Because, I feel like so often, we just see people’s front of stages and business looking perfect and it looking perfect, and then, looking like they’ve got figured out when the truth is, it’s often not the case. And so, I knew I wanted to write a book, but clearly, it took me a long time. Literally, the next day, I got so excited to start working on it. I went downstairs, opened my laptop, got a document open, and then nothing happened. And, I was like, “What? Where did my inspiration go?” And then, it has been, like, six years trying to actually get to this point and to just work on moving out of my own way to make it happen. So, yeah; it’s been an adventure. That’s for sure.

John Lee Dumas: Well, there’s a couple of things I want to pull out of this, because, Fire Nation, first and foremost, just start. I mean, if you’re like Carrie and you’re laying in bed and you have this moment of inspiration, don’t say, “Oh, I’ll wake up tomorrow morning and do it.” Grab that pen, grab that piece of paper, flip open that laptop and just start pounding away, because you don’t know what’s going to happen. But then, it took six years, and that’s really sad because there’s so many people that could have been impacted and inspired by these words so much sooner. But, it took you six years. So, let’s kind of unpack that a little bit. There’s actually a great book, by the way, by Steven Pressfield called The War of Art, and he also wrote another one called Do the Work. These are two very similar themes, very similar veins, but, man, I’m telling you. If you’re a writer and you think that you’re getting into “writer’s block,” you need to read these two books.

And by the way, keep rereading them every time you find yourself slowing down because there’s this thing called the resistance that just lives within us all. And it just destroyed Carrie for six year. I mean, not destroyed her in a physical sense, but just her production. I mean, six years for a book. I mean, I wrote my first book literally in 72 hours and there’s been over 20,000 sales of this book. So, it doesn’t have to be this crazy thing. So, Carrie. What happened? Unpack this for us.

Carrie Green: Well, you know, I don’t think it’s a bad thing. I think it’s a good thing that it took me that time because if I had have just bashed out the book right then and there, it would never have been what it has become now because I wasn’t in the same place, and because the book was about a journey and I was on that journey. So, I think I just trust the timing of things. I trust the process of things. And sometimes, if there’s a lot of resistance to get out of my own way, I think, “What are the lessons I need to learn from it?” And I put those lessons into the actual book. Oh, gosh! Going back to the beginning, I was struggling, obviously, like you said, to get out of your own way. I think when you come up with an idea or you have a big goal, like, for example, writing a book, I think the first thing is that all the resistance comes up. Like, “I can’t do this. Who am I to do this?” All that natural stuff. So, that all kind of came about.

And then, as the years went on, I was writing, I was dabbling, I knew I wanted to get published with Hay House. So, that was all on my vision board. And, I then began to go networking at Hay House events to try and meet some of the people who work for Hay House to start building up my connections there. I did that, I ended up interviewing Gabrielle Bernstein. Gabrielle Bernstein’s book agent in New York then contacted me in 2013 to say, “I really love what you’re doing. Would you be interested in doing a book?” I was like, “Yes! I’d be interested in doing a book. As it happens, I already started writing one.” And I sent her over what I’d created, and she was like, “This is great! Just expand on three chapters.” I just couldn’t do it. I just felt like what I had written was the biggest pile of crap ever. And, I just put so much pressure on myself to try and get it right because I knew it wasn’t right.

And I remember emailing. Actually, we had a call and I was like, “Michelle, I just don’t know what I’m doing. I can’t do it.” And, she was like, “Take your time.” I was like, “No, give me a deadline. I need a deadline.” And I just found it really difficult to get out of my own way. And months went by and I hadn’t messaged her back. I hadn’t expanded these chapters and I was so embarrassed. And so, I thought, “Well, that was a missed opportunity.” And more time went by and I was really frustrating myself and I kept up with staying in touch with Hay House and supporting all their authors. And then, in 2015, Hay House actually emailed. Amy from Hay House – she’s a commissioning editor – she emailed me to say, “Would you be interested in doing a book with us?” And I was like, “Oh, my God!” I’ve got Hay House now coming to me saying, “Do you want to do a book?” I have to move out of my own way and give this some time and focus.

But, while it was incredibly frustrating, I think that I am in the perfect position now to make this book the biggest success I can make it. So, I am actually incredibly glad, like I said before, that I didn’t figure it out sooner.

John Lee Dumas: Well, I’m glad that you think that your six years of book creation was a great thing. We don’t have to agree on everything. And here, we’re going to have to agree to disagree because for me, I look at it from a different perspective. It’s like, you could have written six books – a book a year, every single year. And guess what? The first couple would not have been good. The third and fourth would have been okay. But maybe by the fifth and sixth time, you’re actually getting to a point where now, you’ve had work out there; you know what it means to launch a book. Even if it’s self-published, you know how to grow and promote. And the biggest thing that I’m hearing – again, this is just me as a podcaster, is, why were you waiting for permission? Why did you have to wait for Hay House to tell you that you could write this book? And why did you have to go through the traditional means?

And again, this is you. This is your vision board, and I think that’s important, Fire Nation, that you’re listening. But, you know what you know what you want your vision to be. But, in my perspective, it’s just different. I want to go past the gatekeepers. I want to just go past them and laugh at them while I’m waving and say, “We don’t need you anymore! Ha, ha, ha!” But, what I am curious about, Carrie, is throughout that time, you weren’t just sitting at a desk with a piece of paper that was blank and a pen. I mean, you did some pretty cool things. How have you built an online membership site with over 4,000 members? I mean, that, to me, is amazing, number one. And number two, it’s going to be a huge benefit to this launch.

Carrie Green: Yeah, exactly. So, while I wasn’t writing the book and I was getting stuck on that, I was focused on building my community, on building my audience. And that was my number one focus. And I think a big lesson I’ve learned is, you don’t make stuff happen until you really focus on it. And I, at the time – well, throughout the past few years, I have been focused on building FEA, building my audience, building my subscribers, building the member’s club and getting 4,000 members. It wasn’t until the beginning of 2016 where I thought to myself, “You have to give this book your absolute focus and attention if you want to turn this into reality.” And at the moment I decided to sit down and do that, that’s the moment I ended up being able to write the book.

So, I think that’s the big lesson. What we create is a product of what we’re focusing on, which is so obvious, but again, when people set themselves all these different goals and wonder why they’re not happening, it’s probably because they’re not really focusing on it. So, for me, community has been everything. And building it up, obviously now, it’s given me a massive platform on which to launch the book. With the member’s club, a lot of that started in 2013 and the first year was, like, figuring out I didn’t know what the heck I was doing. It was open all the time, so people could enroll whenever they wanted. I would be trying to create content, I’d be trying to market it every month, and I just couldn’t keep up with it. By the end of the first year, we had 1,000 members and I thought, “If I’m going to scale this, I really need to figure out how the heck to do it.”

So, I really wanted to be mentored by Michael Hyatt because I thought, “He’s got Platform University. Maybe he can teach me how he’s got so many thousands of members.” And so, I reached out to them and I asked if he had anything available, and they came back and said he didn’t. And I was talking to a friend of mine, Jill Stanton, and she was telling me all about this guy, Stu McLaren, and I was like, “Who the heck is he?” And she was like, “Oh, he’s Michael’s strategic business partner and he’s just actually sold out of WishList Member and he’s taking on consulting clients.” I was like, “Oh, my gosh! This is amazing.” So, I literally looked Stu up online, went to his website, got his email and started emailing him. And, he was in the middle of a launch with Michael Hyatt, so it took him a while to get back to me. So, I just kept emailing him, and then, ended up flying to Canada for one day, worked one day fashion with Stu, which was, I think, at the time, the most I’d ever invested in working with someone one-on-one. And I was really blown away by the stuff he shared and knew I could learn a lot from him.

And so, following implementing his advice in particular, making it a closed membership site where I only do two launches a year, which I was a bit reluctant to do, but when I did it, I had more people sign up in a week than I had in the whole of the previous year. So, I was like, “Bloody hell! This works!”

John Lee Dumas: Well, let’s see. You’ve been talking more specifically right now about how you got people interested in the first place. Why were they coming to you and saying, “Carrie, this looks interesting. I want to learn more!” How did you build up that interest?

Carrie Green: Because I was just nurturing my audience. For me, it’s about going above and beyond to serve, and to wow and to delight your audience.

John Lee Dumas: Well, let’s define “nurturing your audience.” What does that mean? What did you do to nurture?

Carrie Green: Like, on social media, for me, I focus on Facebook. I feel like when you come to social media, if you want to be all over the place, it’s going to be quite difficult to keep up. So, I think if you zone in and decide, “I’m going to choose to become amazing on Instagram,” or Facebook or whatever it is, but you can actually have great views a lot faster. So, for me, I was posting up a lot on Facebook, like, inspirational quotes or questions or blog posts. Every single week, I was making a video that I was sharing. So, I was putting all this content out there and I think the video works really well much like a podcast because with a video, people can see you and hear you. And I think when people actually get to see and hear you, they feel like they know you and they relate to you. So, I was building up all this relatability and I was sharing my own experiences. I was interviewing other experts, which was elevating me as an expert or a figure of authority because I was connected with these other influences.

And so, I was kind of really laying the foundation, which is what I had been doing right from the beginning of FEA. That’s all I was focusing on – building up this audience by adding value through the content that I was creating, the message that I was sharing, and making sure that I was always listening to my audience, and their needs and what they really wanted so that I could make sure that my message was going to resonate with them in the biggest and most impactful way. And so, that’s what I was doing.

John Lee Dumas: One thing that I want to zero in on is that you talked about how becoming an expert is so key, like, in Instagram or Snapchat. There’s so many people, Carrie, that come to me and say, “But, John, I missed the boat. I should have done it a year ago. I should have been podcasting four years ago. I should have done this.” And there’s all of these should have, should have, should haves. And my whole thing is, like, “My friends, have patience. Keep your eyes open.” By the way, if you missed Snapchat, whatever that means, you can always start to build your audience any time you want to on any platform. But, if you feel like you want to get in early on something, that next thing’s always coming. Just have patience, and just look for it and wait for it. And when you find that next platform that resonates with you, jump on it.

You know, one of the more recent things, as you and I are talking, is Facebook Live. I mean, Facebook Live eight months ago wasn’t even around. And now, everybody can just jump on it and do it quickly, and people that have waiting around for that right thing, some people took that leap and now they’re crushing, and they’re doing great things. So, that next thing is always coming. Just keep your eyes open. Now, Carrie, I’m just curious because again, I’m a non-traditionalist in every sense of the word. What do you think the benefits of going traditional is and going with a Hay House? Where’s the benefit there?

Carrie Green: Well, to me, it was just a goal. It was, like, a goal I’d had for such a long time. I grew up reading Hay House books. So, for me, it was that emotional connection to the publishing house.

John Lee Dumas: So, was there a little ego there? You could just kind of say, “Hey, I’m with Hay House.” Was that part of it?

Carrie Green: 100 percent, yeah. I had envisioned my name on a book that said Hay House on it. And so, that was just a –

John Lee Dumas: Yeah. Like, I’ve always wanted Entrepreneur on Fire. I’ve interviewed Tony Robbins. That was an ego thing. So, when I got to finally do that, it’s the first thing that I say. “Oh, yeah! You’ve heard of Tony Robbins? I’ve interviewed him.”

Carrie Green: But I think those are the key things that drive us to want to do something. I think other reasons were I knew it would help me to connect with some really big influences. So, being able to connect Reid Tracy, being able to connect with Gabrielle Bernstein. Obviously, you can connect with those people anyway, but I think –

John Lee Dumas: No, but coming to them and saying, “Hey, I’m publishing a book through Hay House, and I would like you to be in that book,” is a lot different than saying, “I’m going to sit down and write a self-published book over the weekend and I’ll include your name in there.” I definitely get that. That’s elevated. That’s next level.

Carrie Green: But, it gives me access to amazing information. So, even meeting up with all the people in London or the Hay House team in New York, or tomorrow, I have a call with Reid Tracy where we’re going to be chatting about amazing strategies for selling lots, and lots and lots of books. That kind of stuff I wouldn’t have ever had by myself. And to be honest, building the Female Entrepreneur Association, I’ve done it all by myself. And so, I was ready to want to work in a different capacity, work with people who knew that world rather than doing it all myself. I just didn’t want that. I’ve got so much going on with FEA. Being an author is not my full-time thing. Building my membership site, building FEA are my full-time thing. And so, I was just aware of what I was giving my focus to. And I felt like instead of going down the route of figuring out how to self-publish, and how I’m going to get these books produced and how we’re going to ship, distribute them… I’m sure it’s really not that difficult, but I just felt, for me, I wanted to go down the traditional route. Which, I’m sure you definitely do make more money if you self-publish; don’t get me wrong.

John Lee Dumas: Well, hey. I mean, if you self-publish and sell 1,000 books, you’re not going to make as much money as if you publish and crush it with a traditional company and sell a million books. So, it’s all relative. It’s all about how successful or non-successful you are. So, I’m going to give it to you, Carrie. I think you brought up some really valid points, and let’s just leave it at that. So, Fire Nation, we’re about to enter the lightning round, but let’s take a quick minute to thank our sponsors.

Carrie, are you ready to rock the lightning round?

Carrie Green: Yes, I am.

John Lee Dumas: What was holding you back from becoming and entrepreneur?

Carrie Green: I don’t think this will be a surprise to anyone, but it was myself.

John Lee Dumas: What’s the best advice you’ve ever received?

Carrie Green: Successful people hang on when everyone else lets go.

John Lee Dumas: What’s a personal habit that contributes to your success?

Carrie Green: Visualization, all the way.

John Lee Dumas: Share an internet resource like Evernotes with Fire Nation.

Carrie Green: Slack. I absolutely love it. It’s been amazing for working with my team.

John Lee Dumas: If you could recommend one book to, of course, join, Fire Nation, She Means Business on our bookshelves, what would it be, Carrie, and why?

Carrie Green: So, the book I’m listening to at the moment is called E-Cubed by Pam Grout, and it is all about nine experiments for, basically, manifesting stuff into your life. I just like that stuff. It kind of seems a bit magical, a bit woo-woo, but I feel like we all need some magic in our lives, especially when we’re trying to reach the massive goals.

John Lee Dumas: Carrie, let’s end today on fire with a parting piece of guidance from you, the best way that we can connect with you and then, we’ll say goodbye.

Carrie Green: Parting piece of guidance, I just feel like anyone can do anything they set their mind to, even if it takes them ages, even if it takes them years. I don’t think it matters how long it takes because everything is an adventure and we’re all on it on our own. So, just go for it and keep going for it. And best way to connect, over at the femaleentrepreneurassociation.com is the best place, or Instagram, iamcarriegreen.

John Lee Dumas: Now, just take maybe a couple of sentences, 30 seconds, maybe a minute and just kind of share with us who is this book for that you’ve created. What is She Means Business all about?

Carrie Green: It’s for anyone who wants some inspiration to help them to really go for it – turn their ideas into a wildly successful reality, and to kind of get the fire going inside of them. So, it’s for anyone who’s got those ideas they want to make happen.

John Lee Dumas: And where can we learn more about that book?

Carrie Green: You can find it over at shemeansbusinessbook.com, or it’s on Amazon.

John Lee Dumas: Fire Nation, you’re the average of the five people you spend the most time with, and you’ve been hanging out with CG and JLD today. So, keep up the heat and head over to eofire.com. Type “Carrie” in the search bar and hear show notes page will pop up as well as episode 440, which was an epic one as well. These are the best show notes in the biz – timestamps, links galore. And of course, check out She Means Business for all the reasons chatted about today. And, Carrie, thank you for sharing your journey with Fire Nation today. For that, we salute you and we’ll catch you on the flip side.

Carrie Green: Thank you.