In this episode, Darnyelle and I get real about what it takes to build a business that feels good inside, not just looks good on the outside. We talk about everything from scraping by (yes, including bankruptcy) to shifting money beliefs, setting up systems that don’t burn you out, and what success really means when you’re living it your way. If you’re creating a course, running a membership, or coaching clients—and you want both growth and heart—this one’s for you.
Key Takeaways
- Alignment of Values + Goals is Essential
Don’t build a business purely for revenue—clarity on what you really want (freedom, purpose, legacy) will drive more consistent, fulfilling decisions.
- Mindset around Money is One of the Biggest Leverage Points
Many blocks live in our beliefs about worthiness, safety, and identity. Shifting these unlocks more possibilities than just increasing efforts or marketing.
- You Can Raise Your “Money Set Point”
What you believe is possible financially becomes a ceiling unless intentionally expanded. Recognizing and shifting money beliefs (especially those rooted in childhood or culture) is powerful.
- Sustainability Needs Both Internal Work & External Systems
Working on mindset alone isn’t enough; you also need business systems—processes, finances, team, operations—that support growth without burnout.
- Redefining Success Might Mean Different Metrics for You
Success doesn’t always mean “seven figures.” It might mean freedom, alignment, making an impact, or living on your terms. It’s okay (and powerful) to define it for yourself.
- Systemic & Generational Context Matters
Women, people from marginalized backgrounds, or those with less financial inheritance often have additional layers of challenge. Recognizing this helps in compassionately dismantling barriers.
If you enjoyed this episode then please feel free to go and share it on your social media or head over to Apple podcasts or Spotify and give me a review, I would be so very grateful.
LINKS TO RESOURCES MENTIONED IN TODAY’S EPISODE
Connect with Darnyelle Jervey Harmon on Website, Facebook, X, Linkedin, Instagram
Connect with Teresa on Website, (Grow, Launch, Sell), Sign up to Teresa’s email list, Instagram, LinkedIn, or Facebook
Transcript
Darnyelle: No one goes to bed a blunder and wakes up a wonder. And so in the first iteration, it took me nine months to make any money, and by the end of nine months I was out of all of my cash. I had emptied my 401k and I was living client to client. I was trying to figure out how to make this thing work. It was not working.
So I did the unthinkable. I filed bankruptcy and I went back to work.
Teresa: Welcome to the Your Dream Business Podcast. I’m your host res Heath wearing an international bestselling author, award-winning speaker, TEDx speaker, certified coach, and the host of this number one ranked podcast. I am so excited to guide you on the journey of creating a business and life that you not only love, but one that perfectly aligns with you and the of life that.
So I’ll share with you easy, actionable, and insightful strategies to grow your online business. Plus we’ll be diving into some mindset, tools and [00:01:00] strategies that keep you focused, motivated, and are going to stop you from getting in your own way. So if you’re a course creator, membership owner, or coach, you are in the right place. Let’s get started.
Welcome back to another episode of the Your Dream Business Podcast. It’s funny as I was prepping to do the intro for today’s episode, it kind of really reminded me why it’s called the Your Dream Business Podcast, and if you’re new around here or you haven’t been listening long, or you’ve just never heard me talk about it, the reason it’s called your dream business is because I am very much an advocate of creating your dream business.
What does it look like to you? I have many kind of things I say about this, but one of the things I talk about is measuring your success by someone else’s ruler. When I first came into the online space, one of the things that came up a lot for me was other people telling me what a successful business look like.
You should charge more. You [00:02:00] should do this, you should do that. You’re not successful unless you’re having a six figure launch. You’re not, you know, you need a massive audience. You need to do your business this way, that way, whatever it was, you need to use this strategy, that strategy. And i, after many years of being in this hole and thinking and FYI, trying all these things and them not working for me or creating a business that I didn’t love, and then finally went, hang on a minute, like I’m listening to people who are not like me, who are not in my world, who do not share the same season of life that I I’m currently in.
Why am I paying attention to them and what they deem as successful? So I bought in the whole concept of your dream business. Obviously it’s not my concept, it’s just a concept and very much talked about. What does this look like for you? So some people’s dream business is seven, eight figures. Some people’s dream business is not bothering so much about how much they earn, as long as it can keep their lifestyle that they want, but making a difference.
Some people wanna work part-time and earn good money [00:03:00] for it. Some people want to take six months of the year off. Some people wanna be the face of their business. Some people wanna hide behind something and have someone else do it. Like it’s whatever matters to you. And also that changes, like when I started my business, I was a single parent of a 4-year-old.
I’m now a married mom of a 15-year-old, like with stepchildren and dogs and you know, so what our priorities are, change massively. And as I was re-listening to today’s episode, I, it kind of really reoccurred to me that, you know, this is why I’m so passionate about this because in today’s episode I interview Dr. Darnyelle Jervey Harmon, and she, it, it’s not very often I get people to tell their story, but I get her to tell her story. She tells the very honest story of building a business, it not being right, starting again, building another business. Earning loads of money. I think she hits seven figures and basically [00:04:00] goes, Nope, this isn’t right.
And it just, like I said, really reminded me of the fact of sometimes when we think, because everyone tells us that that’s what a perfect business looks like, it actually isn’t. And it, when we get it, sometimes we need to get it to go, oh, this isn’t what I wanted. But it’s a really, really cool story. I think you’re gonna get lots from it.
She’s got lots of good advice. Without further ado, here is the very lovely Darnyelle. Welcome to the podcast, Darnyelle, how are you doing?
Darnyelle: I am so excited to be here, Teresa. I’m doing great today.
Teresa: Awesome. Well, you look great.
Darnyelle: Thank you.
Teresa: If anybody wants to see how you look, then head over to my Instagram ’cause you look wonderful.
Just brilliant. I wanna start off because I have been down a rabbit hole of looking at you and looking at what you’ve done, and although I don’t necessarily anymore. Do the whole tell us how you got to do the thing you did, which I used to do for many, many episodes. We’ve done over 400 episodes now, so.
Darnyelle: Wow.
Teresa: Yeah. Like, although you’ve done a lot as well. I was looking.
Darnyelle: Yeah. But not 400. Yeah. I think we’re at [00:05:00] like 3 35 ish.
Teresa: That’s still a huge amount.
Darnyelle: Yeah.
Teresa: So, but I think because I’ve just been down a rabbit hole of looking at who you are, I’d actually really love you to just start by introducing yourself and tell everybody what you do.
Darnyelle: Absolutely. I am Dr. Darnyelle Jervey Harmon. I am the award winning CEO of Incredible One Enterprises. We are a business transformation company and we help six figures, service-based entrepreneurs connect their soul and strategy so that they can scale to and sustain a business that generates seven or eight figures a year creating financial legacy.
Teresa: I mean, that was the most polished introduction I have ever heard. That’s amazing.
Darnyelle: Thank you.
Teresa: How did you get to do this? Like what? Just give me a brief history of like. Because you don’t wake up one day. Well, maybe you did and if you did you entire secrets.
Darnyelle: No, I didn’t. I did not wake up like this. This is definitely lots of trial and error.
So professionally, my career [00:06:00] started probably just like many of your listeners in corporate America. Mm-hmm. Or corporate, wherever they might be listening in from around the world. ’cause I know you have a global audience.
Teresa: I do.
Darnyelle: And I was 12 years in a Fortune 500 financial services company, and I literally woke up one day and said.
There’s gotta be more to life than this.
Mm-hmm.
And I’m gonna go in pursuit of it. So I was in my late twenties. And I just made a decision. I did the unthinkable. I walked into my boss’s office one day in 2004, and I quit my good job without a plan, without a safety net, without a clue about what I was going to do, but I was willing to bet on myself, and I figured that if worse came to worse, I’d be able to get another job.
Because I had an MBA at that point, I was marketable, but I would never knew because I wasn’t married, I didn’t have children. I would never knew if I know if I had what it took to be an entrepreneur unless I tried at this particular moment in [00:07:00] my life history.
And so I did. I quit my job, and while I was trying to figure out what I was going to do when I grew up, I sold Mary Kay Cosmetics. Full-time. So I had been a part-time beauty consultant. Yeah. I decided to become a full-time sales director in Mary Kay. And within five months I was picking up my first pink Cadillac.
I ended up doing Mary Kay full-time for two and a half years. And then I had a similar experience, so I called my first moment and some of the people around the world may be familiar with this artist, Keith Sweat. He’s an r and b artist who has this song called Something Just Ain’t Right.
Teresa: Okay, fantastic.
Darnyelle: So I called my first moment the Keith Sweat moment. Yeah. And then I called my second moment when I realized that I still was technically sitting behind someone else’s desk. I called that my Britney Spears moment. My, oops. I did it again. Right. And so I, I literally was like, Darnyelle, you’ve merely traded one desk for another.
You are not [00:08:00] operating in your God-given gifts and talents and really impacting the world the way that you were uniquely born to impact the world. So I ended up sending my pink Cadillac back to Mary Kay Cosmetics and I made the decision to start the first iteration of what is today incredible one Enterprises.
First iteration because listen, again, I did not wake up like this. No one goes to bed a blunder and wakes up a wonder. And so in the first iteration, it took me nine months to make any money, and by the end of nine months, I was out of all of my cash. I had emptied my 401k and I was living client to client.
I was trying to figure out how to make this thing work. It was not working, so I did the unthinkable. I filed bankruptcy and I went back to work.
Teresa: Wow. And that, yeah, I was not expecting that by the way. I was expecting month nine, something clicked and suddenly all the money came right in it.
Darnyelle: No, no. Now ’cause, and here’s the thing, Teresa, like how are we going to [00:09:00] change anyone’s life if we only tell the upside of the story?
Teresa: A hundred percent. I am with you completely.
Darnyelle: Right?
Teresa: We need to know that. It’s not as easy as it looks on paper.
Darnyelle: It’s not as easy as it looks. And I went back to work for two years. I figured it out in this business on nights and weekends, and I tell anybody, listen a job if you have to work for someone else, use it as your primary fundraising opportunity.
I had to do what I had to do ’cause I didn’t wanna live in my car and I wanted to make sure that my basic needs could be met. So I took my butt back to work because the business wasn’t working. But while I was in the job for two years, ’cause I signed a two year contract. I was fully committed to learning what I couldn’t figure out on my own initially, because at the end of the two years, I declared myself unemployable and I was never gonna work for anyone else again.
So on January 1st, 2011, I came back into my business full-time and we have not looked by 2014. I had a seven figure [00:10:00] business before you get too excited and, and celebrate me. It was short-lived by 2016. Or early, late 2016, early 2017, I was back into a mid six figure business. You might be wondering why.
Teresa: Yeah.
Darnyelle: Because I hated my seven figure business.
Teresa: Okay.
Darnyelle: It was a monster, a circus. It was not sustainable. I hustled my way to seven figures.
Teresa: Right?
Darnyelle: And I could not keep all the balls in the air, and I burnt out. I got sick and I said, you know what? You can have this business. I’ll go back happily to a mid six figure business if it allows me to keep my sanity and have some semblance of a life.
And so I went back and I was totally fine with it. I didn’t feel embarrassed or anything, but I started to get this little gnawing I used to, it started as like a, a really faint, distant whisper.
Teresa: Mm-hmm.
Darnyelle: And then it [00:11:00] started to get a little bit louder and a little bit louder, and then eventually it was a shout.
Not only was I supposed to be operating a company that did seven figures a year, but I was supposed to be teaching other people how to do the same thing. And so I had to figure out how was I gonna go back into a seven figure business? ’cause I didn’t want it to be like it was the last one. Mm-hmm. And that is where the Move to Millions Method came from.
I figured out how to build a business sustainably with Grace and E instead of hustle and grind, putting the right systems and infrastructure in place. We got back to seven figures in late 2018. We worked, well. 2018, we were at like 9 63, 963,000. And honestly, if I really pushed, I could have done the other 47,000, but I was like, you know what, this was great.
By 2019 we had done $2 million in the business, so, and we had done it in this foreman. So right around that time, I [00:12:00] had started really praying to God and asking God, okay, I think I got myself together. What is it that you would have me do? Mm-hmm. And that is when he gave me move to millions as my movement.
So we started going through a rebrand, and as a result of the rebrand, I started working with clients directly on the auspices of helping them to get to seven figures. And since late 2021, we have helped 77 entrepreneurs cross their first or next seven figures, and the majority of them have sustained it over time.
Teresa: Right. So there’s so much, so much in there that I want to cover. Okay. The first thing I wanna touch on is how awesome it is that you talked about hitting seven figures, which for so many business owners, whether it’s seven figures, six figures, eight figures, whatever the number is, there’s like a number in our head.
Yep. That goes, if I hit that, life will be amazing. Yeah. And you hit it and you [00:13:00] did not like it, right?
Darnyelle: No. And I thought if I hit, I thought many things. I thought if I hit it all of a sudden I would be worthy, I would be deserving. And, and you know, that’s an issue that’s unrelated to the money, but it absolutely impacts the money.
Yeah. I thought if I hit it, all of a sudden the heavens would open, the seeds would part, and they’d ride in on a donkey and my life would be forever changed. Yeah. And it wasn’t, you know, having all the money and having no one to share it with. I was single. I was. Living out of a suitcase. I was always on a plane going somewhere to talk to somebody about something.
I did not have any love in my life. The only person I had to call when something amazing happened was my mama. Yeah. I needed more to life than that. Right? Yeah. And so I think that money by itself, it’s, it’s a tool. It’s not a measuring stick. It’s not an identity marker. For me at that point, it was an identity marker.
Yeah. I thought it made me who I [00:14:00] was, and so I really had to dismantle the blocks and the beliefs so that I could build myself back up into a woman who knew, just like she knows her name, that she is worthy and deserving of making money at that level. Yeah, and that took a lot of inner work. And so I had to work on my inner game at three times the rate that I worked on my outer game.
The strategy wasn’t the problem, and I think a lot of entrepreneurs and small business owners that are in what I call the millions, messy middle, and this is when you are anywhere between three and $400,000 a year. You are, you have, if your business is doing three to 400 k, you have a seven figure business.
You’re just not packaged price and position correctly, and you’re not operating like a CEO, and that’s the only issue. That’s why we’ve been able to get so many people over seven figures in such a short period of time, because they already have the foundations of a seven figure business at that point.
Yeah. But in addition to what’s happening [00:15:00] inside of your business, the strategy, you already have a strategy. If you’re making 400K a year, it’s the sole work.
It’s the belief that you are worthy of it. It’s challenging whatever money was to you as you were raised. ’cause I think that our parents did the best that they could with what they had.
Yeah. But often their best was not the best, and so they raised us as financially illiterate adults. Yeah. And us financial illiterate adults try to become entrepreneurs and business owners, and we don’t understand money. We don’t understand the psychology, the spirituality, or the practical application of money, and so we don’t charge right.
Yeah. And so we’re giving our clients everything plus the kitchen sink. For a fraction of what we should be charging based on the value and expertise we bring to the market to solve that problem that they’ve been unsuccessful at solving on their own. Mm-hmm. And so we’ve gotta do the work to get our money mindset and our money consciousness to line up with our [00:16:00] strategy so that together we can ascend to seven figures and that becomes our new normal.
And that’s the work that I do.
Teresa: And I think as well, like when i, I mean, I don’t know how old you are. I’m 46. I have to think then how old I’m.
Darnyelle: I’m 49.
Teresa: Okay. So when we were younger, 1,000,00 7 figures felt like, well, it was. Beyond insane. Yeah. That was a huge amount of money. But in reality today it’s, it actually is not.
And I don’t wanna, like, I’m trying, you know, to say this, I don’t want anybody to listen to this thinking, all right, money bags. I can assure you I’m not a seven figure business. But like, it actually, when you think about the things that we want to live and buy in, that sort of thing,
Darnyelle: right.
Teresa: It’s not what it was.
And I think we still maybe have the, the mindset or the thought process that goes. Seven figures is a ridiculous amount of money. And only, you know, if I listened to what my parents would’ve said, my mom would’ve said, it would been like, you know, they’re not nice people. Yeah. Like, so let’s talk about [00:17:00] having to, and, and also, especially in the online industry, there is a lot of talk around earning six and seven figures and doing all this thing.
And that can sometimes feel like you are not successful unless you do. Yeah. And like that’s the only measure, like. So again, I feel, and I think I’ve probably done this, where I’ve gone subconsciously, I can’t earn that because then I will be one of those people like.
Darnyelle: Yeah, absolutely.
Teresa: How do we sort that in our own head to go, it’s okay.
We are okay to earn that.
Darnyelle: Yeah. So I, I think you bring up such a great question. It’s one I answer all the time, not just on podcast interviews, but just amongst clients, because the, the filter that we have for money is the one that we inherited, right? We came into the earth realm with a subconscious mind.
Only in our conscious mind is formed from everything that we are taught and everything that we caught as we were being raised. And many of the things that we were taught and caught are actually not true. They’re [00:18:00] perceptions, and we’ve all heard the phrase perception is reality, right? And so the reality for your parents and mine similar, you know, same generation, is that rich people are evil.
And you know where that came from, came from church and misquoting the Bible, right? And as a result of that, we anchor in and internalize a belief. Having that much money, it makes us less holy, further away from God, and therefore, why would we ever want it? Yeah. I’ve even heard people say, Teresa, that we should wanna struggle like Jesus, which I think is the craziest thing in the world because the whole point of Jesus was so that we don’t have to struggle.
Right?
Teresa: Yeah.
Darnyelle: So anyway, we’re contending with all of these blocks and these beliefs. And our reality is struggling to make sense of what it is that we honestly have an innate desire for. Mm-hmm. It’s innate because abundance, wealth, [00:19:00] seven figures, eight figures, nine figures. They’re our birthright. We were designed to experience abundance.
So there’s this natural friction that happens because we eventually start to rise up. Into a feeling, into an unction, into a thought that we deserve more. Mm-hmm. But all of the evidence that we are tracking says that we don’t because of the way that we are raise and it is contentious. Yeah. And we cannot make sense of it.
And so we don’t go to seven figures. We stay in a mid six figure low to mid six figure business because that feels safer. Mm-hmm. That feels like our families will still love us. Mm-hmm.
It feels like we won’t have extra responsibilities, and so we stay in a place that we’ve outgrown for fear that we won’t be safe, or we won’t be loved, or will be abandoned, which is our three [00:20:00] primary highest needs.
Yeah. According to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Mm-hmm. And so we stifle this desire that is innate in us to have access to more because we wanna be loved, we wanna be safe, we wanna be seen, we wanna be heard. And so what we have to learn how to do is to regulate our nervous system running down the center of our body.
Our seven chakras mm-hmm. Is our CPU. It is our filter for safety. And if our nervous system can be regulated around money, if we can feel safe and good with money. We can actually expand our capacity for more money to flow into our life experience. Mm-hmm. Through our businesses. Because here’s what I want everybody to know.
I’ve never met an entrepreneur who was selfish, who was greedy and just wanted money to have money. You know what they want money for so that they can change the world.
Yeah.
So that they can create a financial legacy for their children and their [00:21:00] children’s children. So that they can give to the causes that are important to them.
And here’s what I know, Teresa. It is hard to be the change when you don’t have any.
Teresa: Yeah, a hundred percent. Like, and, and it, I’ve read some stats in the past about women who have money, invest it and give back more. And like, although inherently we, you know, were brought up in a world where. And again, I did a lot of research a while back about, you know, back in the eighties, women still couldn’t have a mortgage on their own.
Darnyelle: Yeah, absolutely.
Teresa: It was wild. Absolutely wild. So not only have we got our own family’s internal conversations, but you know, systemic kind of history. Like, we don’t have money. Women aren’t good with money. Right. Women spend too much money, like Right. All these things. And I hear like everything you’re saying, and I agree with it wholeheartedly.
And also, I, I almost know, I feel the, [00:22:00] the thing of like, so my business has turned very similar amounts of money for many years, right? Mm-hmm. And I know, okay, and, and maybe someone else is listening to this thinking they feel the same, they’re, they’re feeling pretty stuck where they are. Mm-hmm. What can we do like, ’cause I think even though we can go.
Somewhere something is, is basically going, don’t earn more money. Mm-hmm. How do we address that and go, no, it’s safe and I can do this. What kind of practical things can we do?
Darnyelle: Yeah. So a couple of things pop into my head right away and, and I just want to just say and underscore, I love this question ’cause it is one that I get often and when you are finding yourself repeating the same money milestone over and over again, it’s because that’s your money set point.
Or your money thermometer. It’s where you feel safe with money. And so we’re willing to go up to the point of our safety. So we’ve gotta expand our capacity for more safety. So the best way to do that, that is to trace the path of your money [00:23:00] beliefs.
Teresa: Okay.
Darnyelle: So what does this look like? So you can take a sheet of paper, turn it horizontally, number at one to seven, eight to 14, 15 to 21, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, up until your current age.
Seven year increments. So, and let me give you the history as to why we do this. When we are born, we come into the earth as a vessel of light and abundance. That’s how we came here. Mm-hmm. And then immediately, you know, the doctor smacks our butt we start crying and we’re handed to our parents, and immediately our abundance starts to chip away based on the filter and perspective that our families are in.
Right. So what we first have to realize is that from birth to the age of seven, who you are going to be as an adult is being formed. By the time you’re seven year years old, you now have a conscious mind to go with your subconscious mind. Your subconscious mind takes everything you present to it as if it’s the truth, even if it’s not.
Mm-hmm. [00:24:00]
So whatever the things you were told subconsciously that then become your conscious thoughts. Like we, we do. I, when I’m speaking on stage, I often will use this story and so I’m gonna sidebar for just a quick sec. Second to demonstrate my point. So, a little girl is watching her mom in the kitchen make a ham.
Mom take the ham out of the container, cleans the ham, cuts the butt off the ham, puts the ham in the pan. Puts the pan in the oven. Little girl says, Hey, mom. I’m gonna wanna make a ham for my children one day. Tell me why you’re doing what you’re doing. Why’d you just cut the butt off the ham? Mom says, you know, I don’t know why this is the way your grandma did it.
Call your grandma and see what she says. Little girl gets on the phone, she, Hey grandma, I’m in the kitchen with my mom’s making a ham. She just cleaned the ham, cut the butt off the ham, put the ham in the pan, put it in the oven. Why’d she cut the butt off the ham? Grandma says. You know, little darling, I’m not quite sure why your mom cut the butt off the [00:25:00] ham, but I cut the butt off the ham because my pan was too small to fit the whole ham.
Right?
How many times
Teresa: that is why
Darnyelle: have you put yourself doing something that you remember your parents doing?
Teresa: Yeah. That is so funny.
Darnyelle: And so it is with money.
Teresa: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Darnyelle: But we’ve gotta trace it. So where is the first time in your life? Ideally between birth and the age of seven that you realize that there was a thing called money and how did it make you feel?
So for me, I was six years old. I was in the grocery store with my mom and I found something that I wanted to have. She’s getting things and she’s putting them in the cart to take up to the front and pay for. So I found something and I wanted, so what I’m being, my mom pick it up and I bring it to the cart. Put it on the table when she gets up there.
Well, my mom doesn’t like it very much, so she backhand slaps me and says, and I [00:26:00] quote, we don’t have money for that. Money is only for what we need. So what do I do? My 6-year-old self anchor in that money is only for what you need, right? Mm-hmm. I don’t need an expensive car. I don’t need name brand clothes.
I need a sort, a way to get to point A to P from point A to point B. Yeah, I need for my body to be covered ’cause I can’t go outside to be naked and, and I could keep going on and on, but that’s the first belief that I had about a thing around money. And when I expressed what I saw happening with money, I was hit and no longer safe.
Mm.
So that tells my nervous system that money is not a good thing. I’m not safe with money. So I grow into a little girl and a young adult who has problems with money because she doesn’t feel safe around money. So I first have to track all those patterns. I have to,
okay, [00:27:00]
so I go one through seven, six is when it happened.
Okay? Now, what happened between eight and 14? Well, guess what? When I was 13 years old, I was in the seventh grade. And me and my little girlfriends at the time, we were going on a school field trip and we all wanted to get the same little outfit. That’s what we did in the eighties and nineties. Mm-hmm.
Right. We wore the same clothes. It was a thing. I’ll go to my father asking my father for $20 so I can get the airbrush T-shirt and the acid wash shorts. Yeah. I mean, can you remember when you could get a whole outfit for $20?
Teresa: Literally, you can’t even buy like food now.
Darnyelle: Right? I can’t get anything for $20.
McDonald’s is probably $20. What? Anyway, I go to my father and I’m like, I need $20. You know what he says? He says, oh, go to any tree outback and pull it off. Money doesn’t grow in a tree out back. We don’t have money for that. So what does that do? That anchors in another belief. He said, every dime that I’m bringing this house I have to work hard for.
Teresa: Yeah.
Darnyelle: New belief. You gotta work hard for money.
Teresa: The [00:28:00] only way to get it.
Darnyelle: So I’m not safe with money at six now at 13, I gotta work hard for money and I keep finding these patterns every six years in a seven year pattern when I file bankruptcy. It was my sixth year. I was 34 years old and my pattern up was gonna end at 35.
That seven years.
Teresa: That’s crazy.
Darnyelle: So that is when I realized that there was a problem and there was a trend, and I had to start asking myself some really hard questions and I had to start being willing to contend with my blocks and my beliefs to find the actual truth. That was the reality because I learned that it wasn’t the truth, and once I realized that there was a possibility that the truth could be something else, I could begin to turn those beliefs into an opportunity to do things differently.
Now, I did this work with my therapist. Mm-hmm. You can do it [00:29:00] with the coach, but you want to figure out if you are a person who, for whom, if you say. You say, I wanna have seven figures, and you feel tension in your body. Mm-hmm. That means that there is still lack trapped in your body, that you have got to break down and release in order to create the space for the money to actually flow in.
This is the primary work that I do with my entrepreneurial clients.
Teresa: Mm-hmm.
Darnyelle: Yes. We will help them with their strategy. We’ll make sure that their marketing and their messaging and their sales infrastructure and they’ve got the right systems and they’re building the right team. We will do that too.
Teresa: Yeah.
Darnyelle: But we spend an inordinate amount of time on what I call their success mindset. Their soul leadership and their self-care.
Teresa: Yeah. Yeah.
Darnyelle: Because only what you do on the inside gets reflected on the outside. And when there is a disconnect internally versus externally, you will not produce the external result that you want unless you work on the internal.[00:30:00]
Mm-hmm.
Teresa: And I think, I mean. Again, all that you just said was, was really great. And I think that most people, when they think about their business, they will come down to very practical, strategic reasons as to why they have not made more money. Yeah. And not many of them will go, is this because in my head, right, like, ’cause one thing I heard you say earlier and I was, and I wanted to make a point of it was like.
You hit seven figures, you brought it back down to mid six and you took it straight back up to seven. Like I know that there is someone listening to this going, well, you made that sound like it was the easiest thing in the world. Like, and I know that they’re sat here and even I’m sat here going, how, how did you do that?
What was it that you did practically to go, I’m ready to turn the tap and make more happen? Yeah, like was it just the internal stuff or was there some external stuff as well?
Darnyelle: So the, the strategy side of it, [00:31:00] what, I already knew that, ’cause I had made seven figures. The reason why I took my business back is because I was hustling and grinding and it wasn’t sustainable.
Yeah. So what I had to do practically is I had to put some systems in place. I had to, you know, take the time and develop SOPs. I had to look for automation opportunities. I wasn’t doing a lot of starting and stopping from scratch. I was hiring team members and not developing them.
Yeah.
So it was creating more work for me because if you have a team but your team doesn’t know what they need to be doing mm-hmm.
Then you’re actually paying them for work that you end up having to do. ’cause you haven’t taught them how to do the work. Right. So I had to get the foundation of the business right in order to go back to making the money. Now, the reason I could go. Almost immediately back to seven figures is ’cause I’d already done the internal work to expand my capacity for seven figures.
So, so seven figures was no longer this big, arduous number. Yeah, it was normal for me. I had normalized it. I had already done that work in my body. Yeah. So [00:32:00] because I had already done the work, I already had a container that was large enough to hold it. Mm-hmm. But what I needed was the right infrastructure so that as I held the money, I didn’t crumple in the process.
I didn’t burn out, I didn’t go crazy. Any of those things that are possible when you are overworked and overstressed didn’t happen because I put a foundation in place. So practically I checked my strategy. Yeah. I made sure that I was clear on my ideal client and the programs that I wanted to offer to them and how I was gonna position those programs and all those, those elements or 10 elements of strategy.
Mm-hmm. And then I made sure that I could sell to these clients. I did. I wanted to stop having to have one-on-one conversation. So I learned how to sell through live events and webinars so that I could bring on 10 or 20 or 50 clients at one time. Mm-hmm. Instead of one client at a time. Yeah. I put all of the systematic plate things in place, and when I say systems, I’m talking about your standard operating procedures.
I’m talking about the software that you [00:33:00] utilize, right? Like, so the both of those things are systems. So we put all of those things in looking for opportunities to take the SOP and automate it so that we could literally just click a button. A task could be done and no one actually had to show up to do that task.
Mm-hmm.
That allowed us to streamline our team so that we could work smarter and not have a really big team and huge overhead that would impact our profitability, because profit is how we keep scoring business, right? Yeah. So all of the elements work together, but the piece often that is missing Teresa, in my experience, is the internal work.
We’ve got the right strategy. We know how to market it. We know how to do a challenge or host a webinar or, or do a live event or whatever strategy we’re using. We know how to write an an RFP or a proposal. We know it’s to hold a sales conversation. We know how to do all the things, but we’re we have a capacity limit.
Yeah, because if you believe that seven figures or whatever the number [00:34:00] is, whatever your money set point is, whatever you are currently feeling comfortable with money. If you think that that’s a lot of money. Well, what I’ll need you to understand is that money flows away from them. Those who feel that there’s a shortage of it and you putting a cap on money means that you think it might run out.
Mm-hmm.
And that it’s not a superfluous resource that’s always available. Yeah. Money is here right now, there’s no shortage of money.
Teresa: No.
Darnyelle: Right. We just had the NFL draft and some of those amounts that those people are gonna be earning.
Teresa: Is a lot of money.
Darnyelle: For somebody, right?
Teresa: Yes.
Darnyelle: Or it’s just the realization that money is everywhere and money is available to all of us.
Mm-hmm.
And once you change that and you internalize that and you focus on getting safe around larger amounts of money, which means you have to challenge all of the beliefs that you have. Like, you know, when I think about religion, Christianity, it is based on Catholicism. And Catholicism says you are more holy if you are poor.[00:35:00]
Teresa: Yeah.
Darnyelle: So we have to contend with all of those blocks and beliefs to go with the strategy so that they can ascend together. Because if you try to increase your strategy without increasing your soul work,
mm-hmm.
Yeah. You’re only getting so far. And so maybe instead of doing three, 300,000, you might do 328,000.
Teresa: Yeah, yeah. Yes.
Darnyelle: But you’re not going from 300,000 to 1.3 million unless you do this too. And no one wants, or often they don’t wanna do the soul work ’cause they don’t wanna cry and they don’t wanna relive the, the nasty part of their life and all of that. But it is absolutely mandatory in addition to the practical strategy if you wanna get there.
Teresa: And, and I love that. You are looking at both sides of this because I think what’s interesting and something definitely that I’ve been guilty of is in my head, and I think lots of us start like this when we start our own business, we don’t view ourselves as a real business and we don’t view ourselves as a CEO [00:36:00] And even bringing on my team, you know, it’s interesting ’cause as we are recording this, there’s a few things with the team that aren’t quite sitting right.
And I immediately went, where am I to blame for that? Yeah. Because I am to blame for that. Like I have not set their expectations. I have not onboarded them properly. I am not acting like the CEO to go, this is what I need or expect or we want. Or like I’m not giving them the same vision that I’ve got.
Like whatever it might be. But I think it has to be both. I think because sometimes as well, like, and I am all about. The abundance and there is money everywhere and we aren’t, you know, the world is not short of money, but also people I think get very like, oh, well it’s easy to say when you’ve got money.
And it’s like, yeah, I get that. I get that. People who have money, that feels easy for someone to say. But I also get that we need both sides of this. Like, you know, the two sides of the cards, like we need to believe it. ’cause if we don’t, we’re getting [00:37:00] nowhere. But also we need to understand that to run a business that brings in a hundred grand versus a million, we need to make sure that the business is capable of that and can move to that.
Darnyelle: Absolutely.
Teresa: And it’s interesting, some of the work that I need to do at the moment. Is, and I had this conversation literally this morning with my husband mm-hmm. Where I talked to him about the money level I wanna reach and what that would mean for us. Mm-hmm. And what could do for our life if I could hit that amount.
Mm-hmm. And I said to him, there are things that I need to tweak in the business, but there are definitely things that actually can grow with the business. Like I know we, with certain things, it doesn’t matter whether we’re doing the amount we’re doing now or whether we’re doing seven figures. Like it still is fine, but there are definitely things that aren’t.
There are definitely things that if we grow, it won’t cope or it will break and we need to go with those foundations. And like you said, you can get there by hustling and working your backside off, but how long you can stay [00:38:00] there is a whole nother matter.
Darnyelle: It’s a whole nother matter. Yeah.
Teresa: Love it, love it, love it, love it.
Yeah. Danielle, thank you so much. It’s been so interesting and it’s so funny when I read your bio, there was something in it that said, which totally stands up, that like, what did it say? It said, from the moment she opens her mouth, brace yourself for transformation to overcome you. Like. And it didn’t disappoint.
So thank you so much. It’s been a pleasure having you on the podcast.
Darnyelle: Thank you so much for having me, Teresa.
