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Unknown
Today I want to share something with you. Where my wife and I felt like we were building an online business. Based on what all of the gurus said up until that point. And one specific day, we realized that
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Unknown
there was something wrong there, something and there was no aligned with.
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Unknown
We didn't even know what it was like. We didn't feel happy anymore.
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Unknown
We have been, up until that point, hustling and grinding for years, and we've reached a reasonable amount of success. We generate a multiple six figure a year, but the specific moment that I want to talk to you about completely changed.
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Unknown
Everything changed our dreams, changed our goals, changed our lives as well. And if you are feeling that you lack focus, conviction, drive, you don't know what to concentrate to really gaining and maintaining momentum. Maybe my story can inspire you to have a look at your business and maybe change a few things.
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Unknown
Hi friend. This is Iacopo and Alessia.
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Unknown
And
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Unknown
Now let's start from the beginning. Imagine 2020 January 2020 I give my resignation at work. I used to work in visual effects, super high stress career and this is before the pandemic. We've been building our business now for for a few years. We are ready. We are generating enough money for me to quit, can quit and go full on on this online business with my wife,
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Unknown
give my resignation.
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Unknown
I quit my job and immediately lockdown. We are in the Covid era
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Unknown
now. Everybody's struggled because nobody's seen a pandemic before like our generation hasn't.
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Unknown
frankly, for us was
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Unknown
a brilliant moment. Yes, we were stuck in the house
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Unknown
Yes, we had to deal with all the problems that came with it, which were not easy to deal with.
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Unknown
But in terms of work, in terms of growing our online business, it was incredible because
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Unknown
all of the people in the world were stuck at home watching YouTube videos, and we've grown a YouTube channel for the past three, four years.
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Unknown
Yes. And
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Unknown
all of a sudden we had this huge spike of views. People were subscribing and consuming our content
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Unknown
and becoming members of our membership, which we had online already built, already ready to go.
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Unknown
for the whole 2020 we've been busy building, serving our audience, bro ING, generating revenue, making people happy, transforming lives, making it,
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Unknown
easier for people to live through Covid as well. We've received so many messages from adult dancers that they discovered ballet for the first time because they got stuck at home. So that period for me and my wife was incredibly enlightening.
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Unknown
Like it legitimized what we were doing for us and for all of our family, friends and everybody as well. They wanted to pursue a career like that,
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Unknown
in the online space.
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Unknown
after the initial spike of 2020, we kept on going like crazy. We started hiring people. We've, we had rotational promotions that had to go on every single month. We created complicated funnels, more products.
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Unknown
We didn't really think about what we were doing.
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Unknown
We were just following the trends. We were gaining more views on the channel. We directed people on our new offers, and people would buy in by again. And
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Unknown
It was incredibly rewarding to see people buying our stuff and going frenzy on, on, on promotions. But at the same time, a lesson. I did not realize that we were stuck in our desk in our home every day, even when, after the Covid was released, even after the lockdown was released, we would still need to maintain that kind of volume to allow this momentum to keep going.
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Unknown
And I remember still reading lots of books, listening to podcasts, audiobooks, and even signing up for mastermind. It's
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Unknown
the best investments I've made in my life. Was signing up for Gram Cochrane's Mastermind,
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Unknown
because I felt like I was, you know, implementing all of the tricks in the book, all of the tactics, the marketing, the copywriting.
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Unknown
I've learned it all spent years learning about how to do marketing, how to sell stuff online. And I felt like I knew almost everything. And, you know, when you when you know a lot, you start wondering is, is that all? So I decided I need to be in a room with other people doing better than me. And what better place than a mastermind to do that?
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Unknown
And boy, that was a great decision because when we joined Grahams Cochrane Mastermind, we were in the same room with another other 11 people doing 6 to 7 figure a year in different industries with a similar business model. So, organically on social media and then, digital products selling digital products.
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Unknown
We stayed in the mastermind for about a year and year, and something.
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Unknown
And I remember learning a few things here and there, different tweaks on our offers,
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Unknown
different marketing tactics that we could use. And we did use and implemented and and everything
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Unknown
worked. Everything really helped to some extent.
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Unknown
people showing their support and what we were doing and really loved being in the same room together. But there was that feeling of, yeah, but how do I turn this thing? Like, how do I even double it?
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Unknown
Right? And then I remember the last hot seat that we had.
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Unknown
I presented all of our numbers. I presented all of the things that we've done, and everybody were kind of impressed, to be frank.
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Unknown
And my question to the group was, what are we missing? What am I missing?
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Unknown
What can I do to double this, to triple this, to quadruple this, and the answer was kind of dumb and obvious.
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Unknown
we just needed to triple our obtains in order to double the revenue.
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Unknown
And that's just an estimate.
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Unknown
And when we when we heard that, Graham told us, guys, if you're having this amount of options, you need to triple it
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Unknown
in order to have all the other numbers work out. I felt like my heart sunk.
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Unknown
I felt like
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Unknown
I was already 150% of being working at 150% to create new content.
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Unknown
Craft thumbnails that were clickable.
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Unknown
Right. Descriptions that were enticing. Manage the team to give their best, create funnels to actually make profit and they had all of the tricks in the books up, sell down, sell, cross, sell
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Unknown
whatever. We had it.
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Unknown
Now are you asking me to triple my effort
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Unknown
and
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Unknown
and I looked at my wife, look at the lesson.
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Unknown
And I was smiling because I didn't want to disappoint the group.
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Unknown
But inside I was dying like I could not. I could not do it.
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Unknown
When we closed the call,
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Unknown
I remember remaining silent and Alessi and I, we looked at each other. When we stood up and we hugged. We hugged for
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Unknown
a very long time.
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Unknown
I didn't close my eyes.
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Unknown
I looked at the blank wall thinking, how are we going to do this?
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Unknown
Now that important moment for me was to realize
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Unknown
my dreams were crushed.
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Unknown
My dreams were crushed,
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Unknown
but the universe had something better
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Unknown
for us. I didn't know at the time, but that was the outcome of it.
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Unknown
And I
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Unknown
For many months, if not for the entire year after that call.
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Unknown
Alexi and I started arguing about many things, almost anything. A lot
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Unknown
unless I wanted to get out of creating videos because of what's the point? Like if we need to triple what we are doing and we already stressed out, that's not a way to go right?
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Unknown
What's the point when me creating more videos? What's the point of us creating another promotion and another funnel and another product
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Unknown
if nothing is going to help us grow?
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Unknown
So I don't want to kill myself to just coast and see my business plateau.
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Unknown
At the beginning, I got angry at all of this arguments. We we knew how to create money from nothing. We knew how to create offers and products and how to make people happy. Just continue. Let's continue to do this right. And unless I couldn't take it, thankfully, thankfully a lesser could not take it well, especially because she was in the spotlight.
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Unknown
She had to dance on video, be cheerful with all the live classes. She really was involved and on the spotlight. So she she got the majority of the work in terms of energy coming out of soul. I was just behind the scene and doing all of the technical things and managing the team as well.
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Unknown
But thankfully, she said, you know, this is I cannot go on like this forever.
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Unknown
Actually, I don't want to go on with this at all. And
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Unknown
and I remember me not being ready to take that
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Unknown
pivot because that's, that's what I did. So it was the end of the cycle. I did not realize that. And.
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Unknown
But thankfully, I needed to change if I wanted to change my relationship with Alicia, if I wanted to improve
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Unknown
the level of fulfillment in my life, for wanting to improve the way I lived my life, because I cannot have a house that looks like a freaking studio all the time.
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Unknown
yes, I'm. I work from home, but I'm never free because I'm doing I'm working on this new funnel and it needs to get done immediately. Like
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Unknown
that wasn't a way to go anymore. And once I accepted that fully, we started putting boundaries on our business,
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Unknown
which means we started deciding how our life was supposed to look like, because now we know all of the tricks and books.
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Unknown
Why can't we design a business that is around our life instead of our life being around our business
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Unknown
all the big problems to solve was let's not make any more new videos anymore. Let's not make any more new products anymore.
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Unknown
Let's fire the team. Because I don't want to manage a team. I don't want to hire agencies. Is it should be as easy as running the business with just me? Unless you
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Unknown
and I don't want to do complicated funnels anymore.
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Unknown
I want things to feel and be simple to manage. I want to get rid of all the software. I just want to keep the essential. And I want everything to be streamlined. I want to have lots of free time for myself. I don't want to do a lot of things that I don't want to do. So basically, I want my life to feel in flow.
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Unknown
How do we do that?
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Unknown
And I tell you, for the past year or so, we've been in the process of trying to accomplish all of this. And I think we we are getting there. So first of all, we looked at our business and we looked at all of the offers that we had. We had so many low ticket products that had to
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Unknown
we didn't know how to market them properly because there were so many.
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Unknown
And our marketing effort, our energy was spread across multiple things.
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Unknown
So after a lot of debate about all of these multiple products we created in the past, we decided to killed almost every every product that we created and keep one core product that became our North Star. And we decided that everything else could have been sold on a back end via email automation or whatever way we wanted at the time.
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Unknown
But this way would be simpler for us to just promote one thing and let the automation do the rest.
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Unknown
Then we decided, let's not do more videos anymore. Let's curate all the videos we've done, just record a few bits and pieces to connect them all together. And there will be. It will still deliver value to our audience. You will still be found and discovered by new people, but without having to reinvent the wheel every single week.
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Unknown
Also, we didn't want to create more funnels. So the landing pages, we stopped doing the landing pages. It would be just the same one with one optin and one landing page for the one product that we had.
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Unknown
We went through iterations over iterations of these types of tweaks on our business, and now
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Unknown
when we talk about what fires us up, what gets us in the morning excited about what we're doing is not it's not anymore what we used to back in 2020. It's not that we decided that this cycle of life was closed. We were keeping the dancing business alive.
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Unknown
But because I have a passion for helping people navigate this changes and make them achieve the love they won by simplifying their business.
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Unknown
When I get to coach people on how to have an honest look at their business,
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Unknown
design the life they wanted, and then tweak their business so that it can fuel their life, that's, I think, what is my purpose?
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Unknown
And since we've done it for ourself and now
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Unknown
we feel like we are finally finding the right flow
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Unknown
because we realized we don't grow from pain, we grow from excitement and energy. Right? And this has been so difficult to understand from the past years, because we were too busy trying to figure out the how and the what without thinking about our life.
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Unknown
The whole us.
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Unknown
We matter. And if you put enough boundaries to your business, if you grow and you decide what type of life you want to live,
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Unknown
magical things happen because your brain is just a manifestation machine.
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Unknown
We need to tell it what we want first, not later.
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Unknown
Then you'll find ways to get you there. Assuming you have the tools, the cutter trades the skills
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Unknown
and we've had the skills and the counter trades and all of that because we've been working on this for years.
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Unknown
It was just a matter of changing our beliefs on what was possible and how.
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Unknown
any if you feel like you're not in alignment anymore. Like, I can relate to that feeling because we've been there. And if you are still stuck in the grinding and hustling, in the hope that one day everything will double, triple, quadruple,
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Unknown
Maybe one day you will relax. Unfortunately, I don't think is ever going to happen. I think if you keep on going against the current,
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Unknown
the universe is going to increase the volume of a current until you understand that something's got to change. This is being for us, an incredible wake up call.
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Unknown
We spend so much money in coaching and, you know, 15 grand a year for being part of a mastermind.
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Unknown
And the biggest takeaway was that we were in the wrong vehicle,
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Unknown
and it was totally worth the money. Because when you when you understand that you
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Unknown
can invest in yourself and you're not going to get a direct ROI, you're going to have insights and breakthroughs.
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Unknown
That's where the value is. And for us, the value was understanding. We come first.
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Unknown
Our audience is important. Our product, our mission is important, but we come first. And we need to design a life that we will be able to sustain long term. But it's also going to be rewarding, extremely profitable. So you don't have to renounce to anything. You just have to define what kind of life do you want to live, right?
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Unknown
This is this is being like the most stupid thing that nobody told us. Well, do you actually know what you want?
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Unknown
Everybody's speaking about goals. But when you said, when was the last time you set your goals? Now don't even set goals anymore. I'm like, these are my standards.
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Unknown
You are never there. I reached my goals that I set back in 2020.
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Unknown
Now I just want standards. I want to feel a certain way every day. I want to be able to feel fulfilled every day. I want to charge as much as I feel is right for me to be able to serve at the highest level. Now, when you start thinking this way,
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Unknown
your life changes. You got to be brave enough to embrace that feeling.
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Unknown
And but the first step is realizing that maybe you're stuck in the wrong model. Maybe you're stuck in the wrong vehicle and something's got to change.
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Unknown
I really hope you're going to look at your business and your life as it is right now, because what you want is probably not going to be achieved by doing the same thing over and over again until you break,
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Unknown
let's create something that is sustainable, fulfilling, enjoyable, and fun right now so that you can keep doing what you're doing in the future and come from a place of love, energy and radiance rather than
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Unknown
struggle, pain and frustration and fear.
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Unknown
And it feels good to say all of this because this was literally us for the past two years, and it's feeling so much more refreshing to now speak about business in this terms, because I'm sure we're not the only ones in this situation. And, I really hope this will inspire you today to really have a hard look in the mirror and see what you're building and what you want to build for yourself, your family, your friends, your whole life in the future.
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Unknown
And I
