[00:00:18] Emma: I got a call from my mum and I knew I had to go. I was young, I had my license, and she was in trouble.
[00:00:26] If you've listened to any of the episodes before this episode, you will know that my mum had severe mental health issues. You'll also know my origin story, but if you haven't listened to that, go back to that podcast and have a listen.
[00:00:39] It'll put it all into place for you. My mum was married to a, hmm, how can I say this politely knob. And he hurt her and it was a, a tale of domestic violence. And so I went and got mum. I drove to her place while he was out. We packed a bag. I've never felt my heart racing so quickly about getting caught in his house while she was packing a bag.
[00:01:06] We grabbed her dog. Because that meant the world to her. We got in the car and we drove, and we drove, and we drove, and we stopped to get a cup of tea and a coffee and just for her to catch her breath and stop the shaking that was happening for her.
[00:01:23] We crafted a plan. The only plan I could think of because I was living with another family was that she go and spend a couple of days in
[00:01:33] a safe house for women
[00:01:35] it was meant to be secure. there was people that could help her through all the bits and pieces. They would take her dog and her, and she would be safe, and so we popped her in the safe house.
[00:01:47] If you've ever experienced or had any experience of domestic violence, IT'S AWFUL. You live in fear the entire time while you're trying to work through what the heck to do next. So I dropped her there and [00:02:00] left and she started in their program. A couple of days later, she messaged me and she said to me, Emma, he wants to come and see me.
[00:02:09] And I'm like. No, the answer is no. It's a full sentence. And she said, I'm gonna meet him at this local park. I'm like, okay. I said, would you like me to come? And she's like, yes, I'd like you to come and just be watching what's happening just to keep me safe. I'm like, okay, cool. So I arrived at the park.
[00:02:36] She was already there on the park bench. She saw where I was. And then outta my periphery, I saw him and he didn't look remorseful, sorry, any of those things. He just looked angry and on a mission, and I thought, holy shiz, we are in trouble here. So I got out of my car and I moved around the other side of the park so that I was behind them on the park bench so that if something happened, I could grab mum.
[00:03:07] He pulled out a shotgun and I had to dive in between them to get mom out of there. I've never been more terrified in my entire life and I realized at that moment that, oh, I'm the parent here and this sucks. We got her back to the safe house. We actually had to change safe houses 'cause he'd worked out where she was.
[00:03:35] And within three months he was in jail, not for domestic violence, but because he actually turned out to be a pedophile so he was safely in jail and she was safely free. and then she went on to live a very interesting life, hooking up with all the wrong people at all the wrong times and some, now I can laugh at because she came [00:04:00] out for her third or fourth wedding in a blue taffeta gown and some at another wedding where they passed around marijuana cookies.
[00:04:09] I can laugh about all that now because this story doesn't come from a place of trauma.
[00:04:15] This story comes from a place of healing
[00:04:17] but it's still got emotion to it. I learned very quickly and a very young age that there is only one person that I could rely on and that was me. Fast forward a couple of months, once all of this circus had died down a little bit, and I thought.
[00:04:37] Once I finished school and I repeated grade 10, la, la, la, la, la But once I re, once I finished school, that my life's ambition was to be a secretary. That is what everyone thought. I was capable of being a secretary. Lovely. So I thought actually, if I'm gonna be a secretary, secretaries know how to type. I think so I found a school 20 minutes away from me.
[00:05:01] Now at this point in time, I was driving to school and I drove there twice a week to learn how to touch type. On a typewriter. Yes, I'm that old. And how you learn is actually you put your fingers on the keys. I'm doing this on YouTube. If you wanna have a look at it, put your fingers on the keys and then you cover it with like a tea towel or something.
[00:05:22] So you can't actually see the keys. Anyway. I am so thankful for that because I'm like 80 words a minute now. It's awesome. Right? But I thought I wanted to be a secretary 'cause that's what people thought. I could do. Isn't that sad, ladies? Isn't that sad that someone thought I could be a secretary?
[00:05:42] Therefore, I was the beliefs that can shape you and the narratives that people give you, and they think it's a gift when actually all it does is hold us back. And so. I went through life, not as a secretary, but as a HR professional. I took [00:06:00] myself off to uni. I did full-time uni, full-time job, and, got a, a degree in, in commerce and majoring in hr, and I loved that job.
[00:06:09] And then when it was time for me to start my own thing, I always had this entrepreneurial itch, right, that I needed to scratch. I was nine years old selling icy poles. On the driveway, you know, like creating pieces of art and selling them around the neighborhood, looking for ways to always have kind of some a side hustle.
[00:06:29] So I knew that I had to scratch this thing. I also knew I had a great reputation as a HR person, through multiple organizations. And when I started talking about going out on my own. So many people said to me, and I bet this has happened to you ladies. So many people said to me, oh yeah, we'll give you work.
[00:06:49] Oh, there's plenty of work here. We need people like you. And you know what happened next? Ladies? Crickets, nothing. Nada, and I mean, I can be a slow learner, probably should have realized that I needed to only rely on myself. But this is another moment in time that thing that happens for you, not to you.
[00:07:11] The realization that, holy crap, if it's meant to be, it's up to me and so I have to get off and go and build this business. I had also been told by a lovely man named Greg. Who was a managing director of one of my firms, his words, Emma, you're terrible at sales. And I thought, yes, I am. I'm terrible at sales.
[00:07:36] So not only am I starting my own business, I've got this narrative in my head. I'm terrible at sales. So I was like, how do I get rid of that narrative? What do I do with this? I finished up at my job on the 30th of November. And my husband said to me, are you just gonna take the month off because it's Christmas and you know the kids, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
[00:07:58] I said, Nope. Pounding the [00:08:00] pavement for the next three weeks. And he's like, excuse me. I mean, partly he's not surprised. You can hear that I'm a very strong-willed individual and at some point I always have a plan in my back pocket, but I pounded the pavement three weeks, three to four coffees a day in real life.
[00:08:17] Pounding the pavement, making sure people knew me as Emma McQueen, P-T-Y-L-T-D, out there, one offer, selling it over and over and over again. So I got rid of the narrative. I got rid of the narrative that I couldn't sell. Do you know what happened next? Greg called me. I kid you not, and told me that the reason that I am so successful is because of his mentoring. So typical, isn't it, of a man to try and claim the credit of someone else's book. And yes, I did tell him that. I also used some choice words, which I can't repeat here because you know, we're a clean podcast and all that kind of stuff, but very early on, If it's meant to be, it's up to me.
[00:09:02] And now that I have been in business for almost nine years now, I watch my clients and I say to them, here's what you need to do. Here is A, B, C, and D. Here are the things that you'd need to do to make sure that you are generating enough revenue to keep your business afloat. I wanna tell you about one of my clients.
[00:09:23] She came to me and she had worked with three different coaches. Now immediately, that's red flags everyone. If you have someone that comes to you and they've been through a few coaches, you're like, what's going on? Will you follow instruction? Will you learn? Do you have a growth mindset? All the things.
[00:09:38] But she assured me, assured me that it was just wrong fit. and my gut kind of said, yeah, I feel like that's right. and when you come to work with me, you get a Google spreadsheet. We have session after session, we get a, you have a questionnaire. I'm there in between sessions so that if you get stuck, you can keep moving.
[00:09:56] And yes, I am a business coach, but I also have done this [00:10:00] before. So. It's part coaching, part mentoring, right? And she wasn't able to get the traction that I needed her to get. And in our fourth session, so people normally sign up for a year and then stay for five, but in our fourth session I said to her, Hey, this is not working.
[00:10:16] You are actually not doing the work that I need you to be doing. And if you do the work, then you'll reap the results. And if you don't do the work, we probably can't work together anymore because you are just gonna feel frustrated. And I can tell you, I'm gonna be frustrated. Now, I just wanna share a little piece of one of the things that we did to turn her situation around, which is not mindset, although we did have a difficult conversation.
[00:10:41] It was. Very, very practical. And ladies, I know at the moment the way we've done business in the past, the things that have worked in the past aren't necessarily working now. So don't try and hammer it, change, pivot, do something different. And she had run some amazing masterclasses. Amazing masterclasses.
[00:10:59] She had good numbers on the masterclass, and then nothing crickets. And so I said to her, right, let's grab the masterclass. Let's grab all the people that were on the masterclass. I want you to send them a text message the very next day to say that you are going to call them. She's like. Don't like where this is going.
[00:11:19] I'm like, I know. the reason for that, ladies, very practically, if you send someone a text message to say, I'm going to call you one. They know the phone number because no one answers random phone calls anymore. Two, if you've got an iPhone, your photo flashes up. So it says maybe Emma McQueen.
[00:11:37] Sorry if you've had that. So we sent the text message, which kept her on the hook for accountability for making the call. the next day she made the call from 30 text messages and calls. She booked in seven. I think it was seven to 10 discovery calls. [00:12:00] From the seven to 10 discovery calls she brought on four new clients.
[00:12:06] That's the way the numbers wash out every single time. And people often say to me, it has to be more magical than that. You know what, it's actually, there's no magic to it. This is just a boring numbers game. So let me tell you this. If you are listening to this and you're thinking, what does that mean for me?
[00:12:24] I want you to think about if you need one sale. That goes at the bottom of your piece of paper. One sale. If you need one sale, you need to have two proposals out. If you have two proposals out, you need to speak to four people. And if you're speaking to four people, you need to have eight at the top of your funnel.
[00:12:43] That's how the numbers wash out every single time. And that's if you're not very good at sales. If you're really good at sales, those numbers wash out a bit easier. But anyway, so she all of a sudden went, whoa. This works. This is just a process. Emma actually can't pick up the phone for me, although I would've loved to have, but Emma can't pick up the phone for me.
[00:13:07] But Emma can guide me in a way to make sure that my business is stable, my business is rocking, my business is delivering the revenue that we need, that I am delivering to my clients, that I'm doing all the right things.
[00:13:22] She had the transformation not because of what I did,
[00:13:26] but because of the momentum that she started,
[00:13:29] the actions that she took,
[00:13:31] the processes that she followed,
[00:13:33] and the thing at the end of the day, and this was the two week experiment, four new clients in two weeks, the numbers don't lie.
[00:13:44] If she kept doing that for the next 90 days, her books would be full. In the latest round of the BD sprint, we had 60 women all faced in the same direction. were working on business development an [00:14:00] hour a day. The results from that business development sprint was $230,000 worth of sales in 10 days.
[00:14:10] It was like Thousands of new LinkedIn connections. It was
[00:14:15] 71 proposals out 10 days pointed in the same direction. Getting a tip from Emma McQueen and having a community bolster you up. And the funny thing, barely any phone calls. The phone calls, they're so underrated and yet they are the thing. One of the things I did on the latest BD sprint is I played along on my own game, which was so random. we had an event coming up and we had 20 tickets left to sell, and I thought to myself. I need to make sure that this BD thing works. I need to make sure that all the things that I'm telling people are still relevant, still up to date, still work, et cetera, et cetera.
[00:14:58] So my commitment to the group was, I'm gonna sell these 20 tickets in the next two weeks. How did I do that? I spent hours on the phone to people. I was texting people, I was emailing people, personalize, personalize, personalize. And within the first seven days, I'd sold all those tickets. The numbers don't lie, I love that.
[00:15:21] I can tell that story because do you know what? I'm in the trenches with every single woman that I work with. I'm cheerleading them on. I am giving them tough love, and I am getting them to get themselves out of their own way. Because we've got so much potential that we can tap into businesses growing in Australia, women in businesses growing in Australia.
[00:15:42] We just need to tap into our own potential, get out of our own way, step into the uncomfortableness of picking up the phone or putting ourselves out there. All the things to generate revenue. But the only person that can do that is [00:16:00] you. You go into business for your own freedom,
[00:16:02] for your own choice,
[00:16:03] for your own sanity,
[00:16:04] for your own revenue, you do all that.
[00:16:08] So if you sit there and say, I don't wanna do the work, you need to decide what you do next. Wow, this really sounds like tough love today. And I'm sorry, I did not mean it to go that way, but I want you to know you gotta rely on yourself. Yes, it's great to have a community. Yes, it's great to have support, but you gotta do the work If you need someone to help you, you know where I am.
[00:16:31] I love doing this work. I love helping women get out of their own way and tap into their own potential and create a business that they love.
[00:16:40] And I'm so thankful. I mean, it sounds weird, right? Because the experience with my mom, I wasn't thankful at the time, let me tell you that. But now, now I can see that that. Moment in time helped me realize that actually, yeah, I need to rely on myself. And that's helped me in business because the lesson is still there.
[00:17:01] It's, I'm still learning it today. You still got to rely on yourself, and I'm super thankful for that. I'm not thankful it happened and it was a scary time in our lives, but I am immensely grateful that I learned the lesson and that the universe continues to teach me the lesson. Let's be honest.
