She Is A Leader - The Podcast

Yvonne Heimann [00:00:04]:
Hey. Hey. And yes, we are back on my couch, which means a nice and comfy solo episode while I'm enjoying my second coffee of the day. So if you are listening, just imagine me comfy in the corner of my couch, wrapped up in a blanket, enjoying the luxury of a homemade cappuccino. I have this, this thing where, yes, I sprinkle sugar on top of my milk foam on my cappuccino and then eat the foam first with the sugar on top of it and drink the coffee later.

Yvonne Heimann [00:00:50]:
Yes, I know I shouldn't be eating this much sugar. However, that's my little, little bit of luxury. I don't eat much sweets and chocolate anymore. That's my sweets. So while I'm enjoying my coffee here, let's come back to. Let's come back to the topic of some of the biggest lessons I've learned in running my business. Running a digital business, running a business as a feature female entrepreneur. Because let's be honest, it is not always the easiest thing to do. Yeah.

Yvonne Heimann [00:01:30]:
Before we get all hot and heavy on it, go get comfy, Go grab a drink of your choice. Mine today is coffee. And let's dive into a couple of the stories, how they have impacted my business, what you can learn from it and how it has changed how I approach business, how I run business, how I coach and hopefully give you some of those lessons without having to go through the pain. And if you're new here, welcome to my podcast. I'm Yvonne Heimann. This is the Boss Your Business podcast where we talk all the things, how we can boss our business. How can we be more productive without burning out? How can we build a business that works for us and not the other way around? My journey has been interesting for everyone that hasn't heard it. I actually started out as an electrician in Germany.

Yvonne Heimann [00:02:44]:
Went into dad's footsteps. Daddy's girl here all the way. Started out as an electrician. I was always in hospitality in some way, shape or form. Came to the States again, went back into hospitality, then helped my late husband with his business, which brought me initially into social media, then web design. And then after quite an impactful two years, things shifted again. And that's exactly where I want to dive a little bit deeper in today. I came into the States in 2017.

Yvonne Heimann [00:03:27]:
No, not 2017, 2007, even 10 years before that. I came into the States 2007 as a German immigrant whose husband, as I got to find out later, screwed up the paperwork. And I ended up being an undocumented immigrant for a while, actually my responsibility, because I gave him all of my power there. There's one problem we women often do. Giving away our power. And life happened. Got it all cleared up, got it all cleaned up. And then 2014 came around and my second husband got diagnosed with cancer.

Yvonne Heimann [00:04:15]:
Actually, he passed away in 2014. And I had already started this journey of wanting to build a bulletproof business, a business that can withstand life. However, I didn't have the time to actually do so. I didn't have any residual income to really speak of. We didn't have any life insurance. And I spent two years from 2012 to 2014 to take care of him, to take him to radiation, to take him to his oncology appointments, surgeries at Stanford, all the things. And I was pretty much a full time caretaker for two years. And that's one of the big lessons.

Yvonne Heimann [00:05:02]:
Life sometimes lifes. Sometimes life is just lifing. And we build our business. I assume if you are here and watching and listening, chances are you build your business because you saw a need, because you had a passion for solving a problem right here. Me too. And the problem with that is that we often put ourselves in a situation where we are the one. We are the ones running the business. We are the ones that have to show up 24/7 to keep the business going.

Yvonne Heimann [00:05:47]:
Because the moment we step away from it and we don't show up, the business stops making money. So that's. That's a huge mistake that I made. And fortunately, I had angels in my life that took care of me and took me in after that because I didn't have a business left, I didn't have clients left. There was no life insurance. And on a side note, the biggest gift you can give your loved ones is telling them what you need. I get you might be afraid of. Of dying.

Yvonne Heimann [00:06:20]:
I'm not ready to die yet either. But the biggest gift you can give your loved ones is telling them what you want. Just on a side note. So I learned this big major lesson of you need to be able to remove yourself from your company. You need to be able to step away and your business still needs to be able to run. Now the funny thing is, do we all. Do we always follow what we know we should follow? But we'll come to that.

Yvonne Heimann [00:06:55]:
We'll come to that. So I rebuild from there on. That's where Ask Yvi started to become what it is today. Where I wanted to really build a bulletproof business for myself and help others do the same thing. I see systems where other people see chaos. It comes easily to me. The business just shifted more into a coaching and consulting setup. Now again, life is life and right, we need to pay the bills.

Yvonne Heimann [00:07:27]:
Just kind of falling into this whole scene of ClickUp and delivering ClickUp help and doing all the things became easy. And over the years of building up a business again and doing all the things, I fell into the same trap again where the business was reliant on me. Not fully, have a little team that takes care of things, that supports me. But again, now suddenly I was a ClickUp implementer, business efficiency consultant, again. If I wasn't working, no real income came in. But the income came in. So much so that when I left my, my ex boyfriend, I made my way to San Diego, grew the business, turned it into a six figure business. Everything was great.

Yvonne Heimann [00:08:28]:
And then 2024 rolled around. I was as you know from my content, if you've been around. I did ClickUp implementation, I did ClickUp consulting, built the membership, all the things, and then had grown the business. I, oh my God. Everything was going how I wanted it to go. And then beginning of Q2, between, between Q1 and Q2, one client, one major big client, their contract ended. Another one said, hey, you trained us so well, we are all good. A couple other branding contracts were done and the residual income that I had built was not really paying the bills.

Yvonne Heimann [00:09:20]:
It was a nice, it was a nice, what we call fuck it money. So it was a nice little trickle on top. But my residual income wasn't able to pay the bills. Now suddenly I was in a similar situation that I was back in 2014 when my husband passed away. I went from 25k months to barely any income. And I probably should have, should have pulled the plug on a few things earlier, but my entrepreneurial mindset was like, oh, we can pull out that, we can pull out of this, we can do this, we can do this. So I draged cutting costs way longer than I should have and now suddenly I'm there and I'm like, how did I get here? How did I get here? Even though I thought I had learned the lesson that I need to remove myself from my business and the business needs to be able to function without me. Yet here I am again.

Yvonne Heimann [00:10:38]:
Who's been there? Who's been there? Lessons come around till we finally learn them. And interestingly enough, looking back at the last six to nine months, working through this, I got exactly what I actually asked the universe for. I wanted to clean up my credit card debt. This whole situation forced me to clean up my credit card debt. It has also finally put things more on higher priority that can generate income without me. For example, ClickUp templates. We've always had ClickUp templates. I never really built a sales funnel around it.

Yvonne Heimann [00:11:30]:
I know how to do the things. It's not a problem. It takes some time and it takes the commitment to make it a priority. And I think one of the big things for us entrepreneurs is to not stay in the comfortable working with my clients one on one, working on those brand contracts. That was comfortable. It was what I knew us in my business, we hadn't built and polished and automated sales funnels. We've done it for everybody else. I've coached everybody else on it.

Yvonne Heimann [00:12:12]:
How was that plumber with the bad pipes? Guilty here. And I am determined to make that 2024 lesson of nearly losing any everything again. It was bad. It was really bad to finally trust my gut, trust my intuition that has been telling me what I want AskYvi to become. And it's probably been a year ago where I shared that vision, that mission for the first time. And it has taken some time for me to get comfortable with that. And I think that's one of the things why we sometimes do things over and over again even though we know better. I knew better.

Yvonne Heimann [00:13:10]:
I knew I should be working on creating residual income and income that's generated without me being a major part of making it happen. I think those lessons in our business come around because entrepreneurship and running your own business is so closely connected to our own growth, to our own personal growth, to our own lessons. And I was always one that went a lot with logic. And 2024 has taught me to bring more of my intuition in, to trust my gut. And I actually did it. Did a YouTube video on that where it's like, don't necessarily trust your gut because your gut will also show up for fear. Learn what's your intuition and what's your gut. But I'm not going to dive deeper into this.

Yvonne Heimann [00:14:05]:
Not in this episode. You can watch the YouTube video where I make the differentiation between that I have made it a practice to really go more quiet, shut out the outside. I've listened to everybody telling me what the hell I'm supposed to be doing. Guess what? None of them actually had the answer because none of them ask the right questions. Did a YouTube video on that one too. None of my coaches, not none, some did. And I'm still working with those. Many of my coaches that I believed could help me elevate my business.

Yvonne Heimann [00:14:45]:
Where I wanted to elevate it to actually did me a disservice because they didn't took the time to figure out what are my core values, what am I going for, where is what, what is my goals, what are the things that I don't know, I don't know. How does all of this align with my personality? Because my business is passion based. If there is no passion, if it is not aligned with my subconscious core values, I will burn it all down consciously or subconsciously. And all of this together was this learning the lesson of if your coach doesn't dig into your core values and into your passion and how that aligns with your business, run for the hills. All of the processes, all of the systems that are being taught out there work, but they need to be aligned with you or you're going to burn the living hell out of it. Your business needs to be able to run without you. Do I want to still work with one on one clients? Yes. There's some amazing contracts and some amazing people out there that I want however, shifting to really owning my vision and my mission for Ask Yvi where I want to support female entrepreneurs and turn their passion into a profit.

Yvonne Heimann [00:16:10]:
Helping them with the lessons I learned so they don't have to, guiding them in building a business that fuels their passion and works for them, not the other way around. And implementing all of that into my own business. Why, why haven't we focused on selling the ClickUp templates? Those are the best ClickUp templates out there. Because you are not just learning, you're not just getting a template thrown at you and here eat or die. No, I teach you the process behind it which now enables you to adjust and build the process how you want it. With the automations, with the thinking, with the mindset of you not being required to reach out to me to make any adjustments. You learn how to run the process and optimize it. I.

Yvonne Heimann [00:17:13]:
I teach you, even my ClickUp templates teach you how to fish. And I did me and you a disservice not even marketing them. So with that it's been oh, my God. Has it been a year? 10 years? No. 20 years later? 2014? No, 10 years. I can't even do math right now. 2014 is when Pete passed away, when this passion and this vision showed up for the first time. And it took me 10 years to get this lesson shown to me again.

Yvonne Heimann [00:18:05]:
Hey, Yvi, you've been talking about this, but haven't done it, and being guided to really own that vision again, own that mission again, and not just create another job, which I had done in the past with Ask Yvi, but really build our community, support other women. And I really want this support system for us. And it can be really, really difficult and really, really frightening to own a vision and mission like that. I want tech. If you haven't heard it yet, here it comes. I want Ask Yvi to become an educational company for women entrepreneurs. I want to support born and chosen women to turn their passion into a profit. How do I run a business? How do I do the bookkeeping? All, all of the things.

Yvonne Heimann [00:19:19]:
All of the things that it takes to run a successful business and have that educational piece, but I also want to have that nonprofit piece to it. I want to have physical locations where we have an educational and working space on the bottom and where we have living spaces on top where women can come and in a communal setup, live. If they are in a physical or mental space and they feel like they are forced to be there, abusive relationship, been there, done that, and they feel like they can't get out. I want us to be the resource, the resource to teach women how to run their business, but also support them in their private life so they can focus on that. Having communal kitchen, having child care, having other local resources. If that physical situation you are in is at a point where we need restraining orders or other things, I want to become. I want our community to become that resource, that haven for women to take their power back. And I think 2024 in the States really has been the year where we as women and minorities have been shown that we need to speak up because everybody else spoke for us and against us.

Yvonne Heimann [00:21:00]:
It is time for us to speak up and take our power back. And that pretty much has been that common thread throughout all of these lessons of taking your power back, asking for what you want, fighting for what's right, and build a business that supports you. I hate the phrase of money doesn't make you happy, but money gives you a lot of freedom, a lot of freedom of choice and a lot of safety. Having money in our account, putting money into the hands of women more and more women, is going to change history. And that's my goal. So with that, I invite you to learn the lessons from me and hopefully in an easier way without any heartbreak and loss, without burning your business down, to finally learn the lesson of you need to step out of your business. You need to become a CEO and stop being a founder. And it is possible I am reliving it again.

Yvonne Heimann [00:22:22]:
We are restructuring. Ask Yvi immensely and I want to invite you to the journey. Come join our VI Power Alliance where I connect visionaries and implementers to build businesses that are bulletproof, to build businesses that are lifeproof and put money into women's hands so we can build a world how it should be supportive, encouraging and loving. And with that, I say cheers to a 2025. Don't forget to hit that subscribe button so you get notified when I showcase and bring you other episodes. Again, some like these where you just get to join me on the couch and I just chat with you. Some where I bring on guests. 2025 is going to be a little bit different than last year has and I can't wait to take this journey with you.
Bye everybody.