The Human Design for Marketing podcastâ„¢, with Yvette Mayer

The Reality of Building to a 7 Figure Human Design Business #200 🎉

• Yvette Mayer • Season 3 • Episode 200

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What does it really take to build a million-dollar business? 

Spoiler alert: it's rarely the overnight success story we see plastered across social media. In this milestone 200th episode, I'm pulling back the curtain on my nearly six-year entrepreneurial journey that's brought me to the precipice of crossing that coveted seven-figure threshold.

After walking away from a $400,000 corporate career following a breast cancer diagnosis, I began with $70,000 in savings and a simple dream of doing meaningful work. Despite my three decades of marketing experience, building my own business proved far more challenging than anticipated.

From generating $70,000 in my first year as a health coach to tripling my revenue to $216,000 during the COVID boom of year two, my path seemed promising. Then came the unexpected downturn – revenue sliding to $180,000 in year three before plummeting to just $100,000 in year four while battling COVID myself.

That rock-bottom moment became my turning point. I realised I'd inextricably linked my worth to my income, creating a toxic relationship with money that was suffocating my business. The solution wasn't working harder or launching more frequently – it was rebuilding, with human design as my compass rather than using revenue as validation. By identifying what truly energised me and structuring my business to match my natural energy patterns, I discovered my calling in human design for marketing.

Today, my business generates $50,000 monthly without the feast-and-famine cycle of traditional launches. Through low-ticket offers within strategic funnels, I welcome aligned clients who genuinely resonate with my work. This sustainable approach has accelerated my growth while honouring my energetic boundaries, proving that success comes not from the hustle but from alignment.

Whatever stage you're at in your business journey, remember that setbacks aren't failures – they're redirections toward your most aligned path. Your frequency truly is everything, and the inner work you do on your beliefs, behaviours, and identity directly impacts your power of attraction. 

Subscribe for more insights on building a business that honours who you truly are.


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Speaker 1:

Hi, hi, welcome to the Human Design for Marketing podcast. I'm your host, yvette Mayer, and this show's for you if you're done with cookie cutter marketing and ready to build your personal brand in alignment with who you really are. I'm a marketing expert, human design nerd and intuitive business coach who's helped hundreds of women just like you to elevate their frequency and activate their most magnetic personal brand. Each week, we'll dive into practical tips, interviews, conversations and more to help you create an aligned business, a positive contribution and, of course, an abundant life. Let's dive in. Hello and welcome back to the podcast, and this is a very, very exciting episode. It is episode 200. So I want to take a moment to say thank you so much for listening. I'm incredibly grateful that you take the time out to plug me into your ears. Whether you're new around here or you're a long-term listener, it all adds up and inspires and lights me up to wanting to come on here and share with you all the magic of human design for marketing and insights from my own experience and the journey towards more growth, and on that topic, I thought that a really incredibly uplifting and abundant episode was in order, and so today I am going to share with you behind the scenes of my journey to a million dollar business. Now, fun fact, I have been in business for almost six years and I'm not talking about a million dollars a year. I am talking about having built a million dollars in revenue over that almost six years. Now let's be honest and clear that most people, when they talk about having a seven-figure business or a multiple seven-figure business, they are referring to the lifetime of the business, but it is communicated in such a way that you may be forgiven for believing that means that they earn that amount per year, and I wanted to share this really transparently with you because, yes, I know that when the moment comes that I cross over to a million dollars which I am literally weeks away from that it will become part of my story.

Speaker 1:

I will talk about having a million dollar business because it is incredibly attractive to others, as a business coach myself, for you to know that I have the lived experience of growing this scale of business and whether I did it over two years or six years, the experience of growing to a million dollar business. Well, it's not that it's the same road to get there, but it is still the experience of growing a million dollar business, and so there's a few things to unpack in here. Firstly, that wherever you are right now, it's absolutely perfect that you can have a bad year and still go on to build a very prosperous life and business. And so, as I go through this journey of mine, I will share with you how I've had. I had one year in particular where my business struggled. It went completely backwards, and it's actually because of that that we're here together today, and so everything that happens is in some way taking you towards what you want. So this is in no way an overnight success story in no way, and I expect that your business is not going to be an overnight success story either.

Speaker 1:

My observation is this there are 1% less 0.5% of humans out there who get into business, and they have that special something, that wonderful combination of skills and magnetism and know-how that propels them to this scale of business quickly. I don't think I've ever seen anybody reach a million dollars in a year, but within a couple of years, yes, and what tends to happen is they make that the thing that stands them apart, which you would as a marketer, and they talk very loudly and they get more and more clients into their vortex and that explodes. And so that's how they become, you know, many million dollars or even eight figure business owners, and they speak the most loudly. And so, as we go on the journey ourselves and we're a little bit green and we're earlier into this whole process of what does it mean to have a personal brand online? How do I do it? And, oh my goodness, I love the freedom. I love doing this passion-based work making a positive impact.

Speaker 1:

But there's a lot of unrealistic expectations. At the beginning, I know that I thought it would be so much easier than it has been to get to where I am today, and I'm not alone. I'm not alone. So if you've been in business for multiple years and you're still a long way off, you're very normal. It's not the norm to make seven figures in a couple of years. It's just not, and we're conditioned by the marketing of the few rather than the truth of the many. So I want to normalize that for you, whilst also acknowledging that it is a huge deal for me that, as a business owner, I've generated this much revenue.

Speaker 1:

I feel very excited and we're not quite there yet. I'm at $979,000. I did the math before this episode so that I would be able to share that number $979,000. And in the last couple of months, my business has generated $50,000 a month. So, as I said, we're literally weeks away from crossing over to being a seven-figure business. It's not all about the money, but I do feel very proud and honored and grateful. It's not all about the money, but I do feel very proud and honored and grateful. All of these things. It's a moment in time for me to say, wow, the dream that I had is possible and things are really accelerating now. So I'm going to share more on that as well. But I have to tell you that, gosh, there's been some difficulty along the way. Gosh, there's been some difficulty along the way and in fact, I mentioned that there was a time when my business went backwards. But I want to go even further back than that.

Speaker 1:

When I got into business for myself, I did have a lot of advantage in that I had already run a business, a huge business, like a 300-person office style of business. So I came into this business of my own with a lot of business experience and I'd also been in marketing for 30 years. So this marketing world that we live and operate in as business owners this is very familiar to me as business owners. This is very familiar to me. However, I'd never worked for myself before and I had no idea how to build a magnetic personal brand or create my own offers. I had all of the learning curve that you've experienced. Perhaps I was able to move more quickly. No, let's be honest. I was able to move more quickly because it was familiar. The business and the marketing side was very familiar, and I didn't even start out. I left corporate like truth. I left corporate thinking. I want nothing to do with business and marketing ever again.

Speaker 1:

I was so burnt out from it and my story is that I'd had breast cancer and really took me a long time to get the bravery and courage to leave my corporate career where I was earning okay, I'm just going to go there. I was earning around $400,000 a year a lot of money, and that came with a huge lifestyle that I appreciated. That came with a lot of overseas travel, flying business class. I drove a fancy car. I had a million dollar mortgage. I had all of the things, but on the inside I was not fulfilled and it really took breast cancer for me to recognize that I needed to change. And then, like I said, I didn't do it quickly. It took me seven years after that diagnosis to finally get to the point where I'm like. I'm so done. I put a lot of money away. I think I had $70,000 in my savings account to buffer me while I went off into the great unknown and built an empire, and I had a lot of inspiration coming at me once I got myself onto the let's call it the Instagram feed and saw all of these incredible humans making huge amounts of money and I had a feeling that I could do that too and I could do it quickly. Now the reality is Now. The reality is oh gosh.

Speaker 1:

I joined a mastermind very early on. So six months into me launching myself as a coach, I joined a mastermind and I'll never forget walking into our in-person retreat and being surrounded by other business owners who were already at six and above figures where I wasn't there yet and I felt so small and insignificant. All of that profile, all of that faux cred whatever it was that made me feel enough in that moment evaporated in this environment, and it was really hard on my ego to have had that kind of level of success and profile and then be in an environment where I was nothing. Well, I felt like nothing. It's not to say I was nothing, but I really felt small in that environment and that was one of my early wake-up calls about this not being so easy. That being said, that mastermind was a game changer for me in that it came with a lot of how-tos like how to do all of the things, how to understand your audience, how to build different types of offers, like all of that, and so it was a very good investment and I ended up staying in that mastermind for a couple of years. I also began hiring private coaches because, like I said, I had the cashflow behind me and I pretty quickly started to turn my experience into profit. It's probably the wrong word, but I did start to build revenue quite quickly.

Speaker 1:

So, as I take you on the journey of my years in business, I can share with you kind of what was happening financially for me and at which points did I quantum leap, or indeed go backwards, because it was filled with rollercoaster activity, honestly, these last six years so year one in my business I was coaching wellbeing and health, primarily because, like I said, did not want to coach on business and marketing. It wasn't even in my line of sight. I had qualified as a health coach and a yoga teacher and I was selling essential oils with doTERRA, so to me that felt like the right fit. Funny thing happened I pretty quickly started to attract clients. Now it wasn't at a high ticket at all and so, even though I was working with a lot of clients, I was still not earning huge amounts of money, although year one I brought in $70,000. So not to be sneezed at for a brand new business owner.

Speaker 1:

In that process I also started to get a lot of people asking me you've done this so quickly, how did you do it? And that's when I started thinking about what I'd done and got excited about helping others with their businesses. And I didn't switch immediately into business coaching. I expanded what I was doing, so I was health coaching, leadership coaching, corporate exec coaching. I was doing all the coaching and I was using LinkedIn as my primary platform at that point, because that's where my personal brand was strongest from my corporate background.

Speaker 1:

And by the end of year one, it did become clear to me that the kind of work that I did that I enjoyed the most was surprise, surprise business coaching. And that was an amazing moment and it was actually in a private coaching container with my human design mentor that the light bulb went on and she reflected back at me that when I talked about my clients, it was the business coaching that really gave me energy and the other coaching. I was less confident and I shrunk. My energy shrunk and that is how I had the well. We together had the realization and the epiphany for me, and the next step was line in the sand. I made a huge decision at the end of that first year to do nothing but business coaching.

Speaker 1:

So year two in business for me was very, very different. Now, bear in mind that, whilst I'd had coaching and I'd already been studying human design, a lot that wasn't integrated into my business at all and in fact, I was in the hustle of learning how to run an online business. I was in a mastermind. After working with my human design mentor, I hired a high-ticket business coach, so I was reinvesting into the business constantly. In fact, I know for sure that I have spent well over $200,000, which is, yes, 20% of what I've made on coaching in the last six years. Told you I'd be honest.

Speaker 1:

Okay, the second year in business was so epically abundant. It was COVID. There were just boatloads of people figuring out that they could potentially work for themselves studying, learning, gaining skills and I was off and running. So the second year in my business, I tripled my revenue. I brought in $216,000 in my second year. So I did have a multiple six-figure business fast. And, yes, as I said, there's many reasons for that and the big one is that I came with a lot of business and marketing experience and I actually really, really enjoy marketing. You probably felt that from me Now that I'm doing it for myself and mentoring others who have heart-led businesses that are making a positive impact in the world, it's the most fun thing that I do. In fact, nerd out here. I lose time when I'm working on marketing. When I'm creating content, I lose time because I'm so absorbed in it and enjoying it so much and I often have the thought I need to hurry up and finish this and do some work, which is crazy, because I'm doing the most important work when I'm doing the marketing piece. In my expert opinion my expert opinion Okay. So that was the second year in business very abundant. Things were working. I launched a mastermind. I was attracting incredibly aligned clients. Life was good.

Speaker 1:

Year three rolls around. Well, by this stage I had started to bring human design into the back end of my business because I realized that with the number of clients that I was working with that there really were differences in energy based on their human design. Because obviously I was already very into it and so I was doing their charts. But I decided to study I think it was the end of that second year to become a reader, and so at that point I was qualified to read human design charts and so I was in the back end coaching based on design, not saying to them this is the way you build your business based on your design so much, but more how I worked and supported people. That really shifted and that was a big upgrade for me as a coach. And then I started to really lean into being an expert in building digital products, which I had all the credibility in having done for myself, because that's how I built my business so quickly and I love building offers. I love the marketing side of it. I am very competent and confident and capable and powerful in the digital product space.

Speaker 1:

Move into year three Now. Year three is when it starts to get interesting. In year three my business went a little soft, so I probably dropped back by about 15 to 20% of revenue. Not a train wreck I was still around $180,000, but what was a train wreck was how that affected my confidence and my belief in my business, because I'd had some easy runs and wins and so I'd started to expect that that was going to continue, not not even close like. Let's be very real, business is not predictable. It's not consistent. If there's one thing that you can rely on in business is that it will go up and down, and I needed to learn that lesson.

Speaker 1:

So in year three I was doing all the things. I was trying, trying, trying, trying so hard to keep growing, and it just didn't happen. So I started to lose a bit of confidence. Sadly, it wasn't through lack of effort. My generator, bunny energy, was going a million miles an hour. Which brings me to year four.

Speaker 1:

Year four was the train wreck. Year four was when I felt like my world came crashing down. Nothing worked, nothing worked and my business was suffering. And that was the year when I hired extra coaches. Oh, my goodness, that was the year I spent the most I've ever spent on mentoring. I also sold my house because I couldn't afford my million dollar mortgage if my income wasn't in growth. That was a good thing. That was actually a really good decision. Such a good decision because I'm a single woman, as you can imagine the kind of pressure that that was putting on me.

Speaker 1:

In addition to the business growth in and of itself, it was too much for my nervous system. Plus, my confidence was knocked. It was all the things at once, but the selling of the house gave me the runway to keep pushing and to keep going, at least financially. It didn't instantly heal my wound, and my wound had come about because I was equating my worthiness as a business coach to the amount of money I made. I think a lot of business coaches do this and if you're a business coach and you're listening to this, these things are not related. My frequency and my energy and my confidence were affecting my ability to earn at the level that I desired, but my skills were still as valuable as ever. My coaching was as powerful as ever.

Speaker 1:

I have still retained my longest term client is running into her sixth year. She would not hire me every year over and over again if she wasn't growing in that experience, so I know for sure that my skillset, my competence as a coach, kept improving, but my ability to attract clients and keep my nervous system in a place where I was magnetic was suffering. So that year my income dropped back to nearly $100,000. And you might be listening thinking, oh, boo-hoo, that's still a lot of money, but you can imagine how that felt to have gone from 70 to 215, 180, and then back to 100. Like it was a disaster.

Speaker 1:

And in the middle of that year I got COVID and this was the pivot, like that was the moment when I felt like quitting. I was so sick. I was like literally got the full whammy of COVID and it was in the height of COVID and there was this head in hands moment that I'll never forget, where I thought do I need to go back and get a job? But there was this other side of me going I can't. I literally can't go back. I can't do that. And I did have the abundance really and the prosperity to keep going. It was more about can I, can I motivate myself and show up and heal myself of these wounds that I'm experiencing effectively?

Speaker 1:

And yeah, I had this moment where I sat there and I thought with crystal clarity I have attached my worth to money. Now I left my corporate career thinking I don't care if I never make more than six, not seven. I don't care if I never make more than six figures per year again, as long as I'm happy. I'd rather be a yoga teacher. I don't need all this money. It's not fulfilling me. I'd rather be a yoga teacher. I don't need all this money, it's not fulfilling me. I can have all the money. I've proven that I can go back and get a job and have that kind of money. It's not what I desire. And yet money is such an evil not evil, but like such a tricky energy to work with, depending on who you are.

Speaker 1:

But for me it was very tricky to uncouple my money stories from my worthiness and my capacity to serve at the level that I can as a coach. So I had the moment of like crystal clarity, the download of there is absolutely no freaking way you're going back to get a job. No way. Not happening, not happening. You love what you do, and this is like circling the third person, but my voice is saying to me you love this stuff, you love what you do, you love your clients. You're making such an incredible impact on so many humans, and they would be devastated to know that this is what's coming up for you. No, this is not happening. What's important now is that you build a business that you love, that makes you feel alive, and stop focusing on how much money comes in every month as a measure of your success.

Speaker 1:

This is the conversation I needed to have with myself, and that was when I decided that I would use human design as my business compass. Instead of looking externally at money for validation, I would, block by block, in alignment, checking in with my human design strategy, checking in with my authority at each and every step, build my business differently. And so that happened two and a half years back. Is it two and a half A bit more now, coming up to three years ago? So that was the turning point. That was the turning point.

Speaker 1:

Now, that doesn't mean that I rapidly regained and flew into the distance, although there is a bit of that in this story. What actually happened was I slowed right down and I realized that, even though I love digital products, the thing that I am most passionate about is energetics and frequency, and so I released my first program in that space. Now, it didn't have anything to do with human design. But as I was building it, I came up with this inspired idea to add a human design reading into the bonuses, which was just a 15-minute video me speaking to camera, one way download on how human design could help each of my students with their marketing. I had no idea when I came up with this idea that this was going to lead to the work that I do today.

Speaker 1:

At that time I was still hosting my mastermind and I still had these awesome women who, many of whom were with me for years in my capacity as a business coach, which is still what I do essentially. But I had this high level mastermind with anything between five and 10 women in the mastermind for years, and in that mastermind I was doing what I do, which is sharing transparently my journey and speaking to them about how human design and the readings that I did in this short program had been met with so much like oh my goodness, this is mind blowing. Yvette, tell me more. And then they asked me to talk more about human design in the mastermind. Then I did my first ever masterclass on human design and marketing for my mastermind. They went crazy for it. It was the most engaged I'd ever seen them. Every single one of them was on to the end.

Speaker 1:

We ran over massively and I got off from that call and I began to see that this was actually a calling for me. I was still in denial that it was something of a niche, but I had a feeling that I was being called into this work and around that time, as we came up to it was coming up to Christmas in 2022, I then thought you know what? I had started to do readings for my very high level clients, the top end. There's only a couple of them that I would do complete human design chart unpacks for, because I found it very highly detailed and laborious to do it at the level line one here that I was proud of, and so I had a resistance to doing readings.

Speaker 1:

But at this point, with all this buoyancy and all this lit up energy, I thought you know what? I'm just going to do a few readings and I'm going to get better at sticking to the key aspects that I believe are important for marketing, and I'm also going to start building assets so that I can repurpose them for each reading, and so I did a series of readings at a very low price, just to see Now they sold out. That was the first thing that I'd ever offered, that had sold out in my whole business, and that was another universe giving me clues, moment of okay, I'm listening, I'm listening and doing those readings. I absolutely loved it, like I loved it so much. And then I thought, wow, I'm going to have to integrate this human design and marketing thing into my business somehow. And I still wasn't in the fully owning it space and if you've been around a while, you know this.

Speaker 1:

It took a moment on the beach about a month after that, where I was surrounded by butterflies and bees and I was looking up the significance and I realized that this was trying to come through me at a much bigger level, and that is when I repositioned my entire business as human design for marketing. So that year that year I just described that was my worst year in business, because that was the year that I had the meltdown and then I started to rebuild and I stopped focusing on money as my measure of success, and so with that came my income going backwards. And I also had to get honest with myself that for me to do this properly, I'd learned enough by now that to know that I needed to build a huge profile and almost fame or I would say fame for human design and marketing for this to take my business to the next level, that I had this deep desire and also inner knowing was going to be possible. But I was very much my own coach at that point. In fact, I also took a year off having a coach because I wanted to prove the efficacy of human design for marketing by living and breathing it, by running everything as a business owner and a marketer through this lens. So for 12 months in 2023, that's what I did. I built the body of work, I showed up consistently, I built my profile, I hired people to support me, I did it strategically, intentionally and ultimately I built my business back up to just short of $200,000 that year. So this is when it turns around and this is when it starts to get good.

Speaker 1:

Now I was still going through the same things, though, like I was still having hugely high abundant months and then months when my income was very low and then my energy would be off and my frequency would drop, and I'm still dealing with all the same demons. And as we moved into 2024, I just kept, kept, kept, kept, aligning, aligning, aligning. Am I responding? Is this on strategy? Is this aligned for me? And that's when I realized that the feast and famine style of live launches that I had grown up on, bread and butter of my business for years, was really screwing with my lit up energy, because I would have these huge fluctuations from month to month in income and energy, like the amount of energy that goes into a live launch. I recognized I needed to separate myself from that and build my business way that suited me and my own energy better. And so last year, that was a year where I did the thing, like I actually did the thing, of recalibrating my business to match my energy, and so it wasn't well.

Speaker 1:

When I'm talking about years, by the way, I have confused you a little bit, because when I'm referring to income, I'm talking about the Australian financial year, so it's July to June. So when I talked about the year that my business built back, it was actually July 2023 to June 2024, that it built back up to $180,000. I just want to make that clear because it's in this year, which is my second year full financial year, that I am now escalating and experiencing what I experienced right back in 2020, which is like the quantum. Back in 2020, which is like the quantum. So back to the journey, though.

Speaker 1:

Last year and I'm talking calendar now was when I reset my model and really coming into this financial year this 2024-25, is when I stopped live launching and I started using low ticket offers in my funnels to bring in highly qualified new prospects I don't want to call you a prospect, but that's kind of how it works People that love my work that come in with a small bite and then upgrade and stay and end up in my signature program or in private coaching. So the Frequency Project is my signature project. That's where I, at this point, I have somebody join that program every week, every week, without live launching, whereas I used to have five to 10 people come in every few months with all this energy and effort, and now I am so grateful that I kept listening to my design and then I've added ads to the mix in December of last year, and that to have a system that was working. So I started doing low ticket more than a year ago, but then to move into this place where I have ads amplifying the low ticket strategy that I built. That's taken me to the next step, where now $50,000 a month have started to become my normal. I think I'm on my third one in a row right now, and that's what has made this quantum shift happen, because in the last 12 months we're only at April, so we're not at the 12 months I've already had my biggest year, revenue-wise, already already by a considerable amount, and if things keep unfolding which I believe they will in this rate or even accelerate, well, I'm going to be on track for a half a million dollar business within the next 12 months. So things have really shifted and it is a lot to celebrate.

Speaker 1:

But I wanted to share with you this journey as a celebration of 200 episodes, as an opportunity to get vulnerable and real about what it really takes to have a business of this scale, at least for and look, I'm not saying that anybody else's journey is like mine, but I want to at least share a different journey than the ones that you hear more regularly on social media, because this is what is going on behind the scenes for a lot of people that we don't see. It doesn't matter how many followers you have, you can still have a poor or not profitable business model. So that's where we are now. I'm very excited. I thought it would be worth sharing with you what has really made the difference Like what are the things that I now look back and say joining the dots? What made the difference and I've mentioned the first one is I genuinely believe that you need to be famous for something.

Speaker 1:

For me, becoming synonymous and ubiquitous with human design for marketing was the thing that has transformed my ability to scale 100%. You can find me anywhere now. It was all strategic and all intentional, but it's taken me time. It's taken me two and a half years to get where I am now in human design for marketing, and it's taken me six years to get to this point.

Speaker 1:

Okay, number two the universe will leave clues, like at every step. You can hear from me how things didn't work. They didn't work on purpose. The universe was sending me clues to redirect my energy until I came to this place where I am now fully aligned. Well, look, there's always opportunities to optimize and improve, but much more aligned, and my business really meets my lifestyle and matches my energy more than it ever ever has.

Speaker 1:

The third fundamental is your frequency is everything? Your power of attraction is directly aligned to your frequency, and I'm talking about your beliefs, I'm talking about your behaviors, I'm talking about your identity. If you don't do the hygiene to look after those things, then you won't be a match for what you want and you have to keep doing the work, the deep inner work. You have to keep investing in your personal growth. There's no way of getting around it and you will not reach your potential if you don't take this seriously. That's it. That's it. That was a lot to share.

Speaker 1:

I really again want to say thank you for being here. What a ride. I trust there's been been something in this episode that has been a bit of an aha moment that's helped you appreciate that there's more to our journeys than what you see on social media, that no matter where you are, you can go backwards and forwards five times before you get to where you want to be, and it's all perfectly aligned and right for you as a human and the journey and the purpose of your life. Love you lots. Thank you again for being here. Bye for now. Thanks for tuning in to the Human Design for Marketing podcast. Make sure you hit that subscribe button, tell your friends and extra brownie points Go. Leave me a review. I would so appreciate it. There are heaps more resources in the show notes. I can't wait to be back in your ears again soon. Bye for now.