Save your seat in this 2-part workshop series that turns your “I wish I could quit my job” into a specific, actionable plan to get you out of your job in 90 days or less. Get access here: https://herfirst100k.com/ffpod. https://herfirst100k.com/ffpod.
If you’re exhausted and your first thought is “I just need a better planner,” I need you to sit down.
Your business probably doesn’t need more effort. It needs fewer flavors of jam.
Today I’m sitting down with Natalie Ellis, mom, CEO, and founder of Boss Babe, and author of the New York Times bestseller The Freedom-Based Business Method. Natalie built a multimillion-dollar company and then realized she’d been running it on an aggressive growth playbook for a business she never planned to sell. We get into why burnout isn’t a badge of honor, why the median follower count in Natalie’s survey of six-figure-plus business owners will shock you, and the three boring things that actually make a business work.
Key takeaways:
Decide what “enough” is before the business decides for you
Natalie didn’t leave hustle mode because success stopped being enough. She left because she finally figured out what enough was. She’d been chasing Silicon Valley-style growth goals for a company she had zero plans to exit, and nobody ever stopped to ask “is this still what I want?” Ask yourself early: when is good good enough? You can still be ambitious. You just stop sacrificing everything else to get there.
Burnout comes from draining work, not just long hours
Natalie draws a line between energy-giving tasks (new, creative, exciting work you could do for 10 hours straight) and energy-draining tasks (the whack-a-mole team problems that aren’t your skill set). Ten-hour days on the first kind can feel great. Weeks of the second kind will burn you out. If you’re in a season of draining work, build in breaks and protect some time for the stuff that lights you up.
Your whole business is three questions
Are enough leads coming in? Do those leads convert into buyers? Do buyers have a good experience and stay? Natalie sees thousands of exhausted entrepreneurs doing everything around those three questions (posting multiple times a day, buying software, writing SOPs for systems they don’t need) because the questions themselves feel hard. The successful ones aren’t working more hours. They’re focused on different things.
You don’t need a million followers
In a survey of her community, Natalie found women making 10k-25k a month in their businesses had a median of about 6,000 followers. What they did have: a simple way to monetize and a reputation for one thing. My own viral video got millions of views and half a million new TikTok followers in a week, and the reason it mattered is that I’d set up a simple quiz and email funnel a few months before. That week we added 100,000 email subscribers, and they’re still with us. Social media is rented land. Your email list is land you own.
Too many offers is a “jam problem”
Give shoppers a few jam samples and they buy. Give them two dozen and most walk away. Your products page works the same way. Natalie’s fix: one long-form platform, one short-form platform, one entry offer, and one core offer. She’s sold the same membership for over a decade, and fewer offers means you can actually deliver them well (onboarding, follow-up, testimonials, repeat buyers).
Cut by looking at your data, then focus on offer, funnel, and traffic
Before you decide “nothing’s working,” look at conversion rates. Twenty-five buyers out of 30 people who saw an offer is a great product that just needs more eyeballs. Find the offer with the best fit, build one clear path from stranger to buyer, then pick a traffic strategy: build an audience, borrow one through collaborations, or buy one with ads. Do only that for six months.
Run every big decision through the life you actually want
Natalie recently turned down a higher-ticket offer people were begging for. Easy money, sitting right there. But it would’ve tied her to her desk, more client work, and more sales calls, and the whole reason she started the business was time with her kids. She left the money on the table on purpose. Treat your business as the vehicle, not your whole identity.
Pick your season, and make sure you keep your money power
There will be sprint seasons. Natalie launched her book while caring for a baby and told the people in her life that some things were off the table for a few months, which let her give herself grace instead of feeling like she was failing at everything. And whether you choose hustle, a soft life, staying home, or a corner office, make it a conscious choice, and don’t give away control of your own money. If you can’t leave a situation because of money, that’s the problem to solve.
Notable quotes
“I don’t care so much about performing success as a business owner as I care about what the financials actually look like.”
“I’m really happy to leave that money sitting there at the table looking at me, because what I am getting in return for leaving that there is so much richer.”
“I have met thousands of entrepreneurs and I can tell you the successful ones are not putting in more hours than the ones who are really trying but aren’t getting results. They are just having different focuses with their time.”
Episode at-a-glance
00:00 Intro
04:30 Is burnout the price of hustle? Energy-giving vs. energy-draining work
08:00 Why “more organization” isn’t the fix: the three questions your business runs on
10:30 Big decisions vs. small ones, in business and personal finance
12:00 Natalie’s Trojan horse course strategy
15:00 Tori’s viral video and the 100,000 email subscribers
18:00 Building on land you own: why email beats followers
20:00 Shiny objects: new products, new platforms
26:00 One platform, one offer, and why you can’t over-market a product
29:00 What to cut first: start with your data
31:00 Offer, funnel, traffic (build, borrow, or buy an audience)
34:00 Getting off the treadmill: executive retreats and “what do you want?”
37:00 Leaving easy money on the table
40:00 Seasons of sprint and giving yourself grace
44:00 Building for freedom when you’re just getting started
47:00 The responsibility nobody posts about
52:00 The Boss Babe name, ten-plus years later
54:00 Hustle culture, soft life, and tradwife content
62:00 What successful women entrepreneurs know
Thanks to Rocket Money for sponsoring this episode!
Thanks to BetterHelp for sponsoring this episode!
Natalie’s Links:
Bossbabe Website
Natalie Ellis Website
The Freedom-Based Business Method
Also Mentioned in this Episode:
How to Reinvent Yourself (Without Losing Yourself) with Sophia Amoruso
The Rise and Fall of the Girlboss
Save your seat in this 2-part workshop series that turns your “I wish I could quit my job” into a specific, actionable plan to get you out of your job in 90 days or less. Get access here: https://herfirst100k.com/ffpod.
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Meet Natalie
Natalie Ellis built Bossbabe into a household name — over 4 million women, a chart-topping podcast, a newsletter read by 400,000, and, by her own count, nearly $40 million in mostly-organic revenue. And then, about a month after giving birth to her first daughter, she had a breakdown on her bathroom floor and realized she’d built herself a beautiful prison. So she blew it up. She bought out her co-founder, killed her most profitable offers, deliberately shrank the company, and rebuilt it to run without her — well enough that it made $2.2 million during a maternity leave she spent completely offline. Her new book is the manual. She’s 34, British, and a mom of two.
Transcript:
Tori Dunlap:
We talk a lot on this show about making more money and creating options for yourself, but what if in doing that you realize that the version of success you want is asking more than you want to give? Natalie Ellis is a mom, CEO, and serial entrepreneur. She’s the founder of the highly successful and sometimes highly controversial brand, Boss Babe, and author of the New York Times bestseller, The Freedom Based Business Method. She built Boss Babe, a business and media platform for women entrepreneurs into a multimillion-dollar company and a community of millions. And one of the biggest things we talk about today is how to create a sustainable business that doesn’t burn you out, how to actually create a business where you are making money consistently, where you’re able to actually afford your life without feeling like you have to sacrifice absolutely everything.
In this episode, we’re talking about what it takes to build a successful business, and it’s not the shiny, sexy stuff that you’re thinking of like millions of followers and going viral. If you’ve been convinced that the answer to being a successful business owner is just to work harder, Natalie’s going to challenge that today. And honestly, this is something that every single business owner needs to hear. So let’s get into it. But first, a word from our sponsors.
Okay, so Natalie, you had the business women are told to want. It was successful and it was growing and yet you still wanted out. So when did you realize success, more traditional success, what that looks like on paper was no longer enough?
Natalie Ellis:
Yeah, it was actually not that it was no longer enough. I actually finally realized what was enough and that was huge for me. So when I started my business, I very much equated money to freedom. And I still believe money is freedom in that it gives you a lot of choice. But all I saw was, “Okay, money equals freedom, I can’t stop or I will lose everything. The success is a fluke.” I had so many stories running in the background. And so I was building this business almost blindly. I was just hustling, pushing so hard. Even when we’d hit these big milestones, I never really stopped to assess, “Okay, you’ve hit some milestones, do you want to reassess? Do you want to change the way you’re doing this?” I just kept pushing, pushing, pushing very unconsciously. It wasn’t a conscious decision. And I was almost running it from a Silicon Valley playbook, but I was never going to exit this business.
So it didn’t make sense when I really looked at it, but I was running this business with these aggressive growth goals as if I was going to exit it. And I realized I had more than enough. What I had built was more than good enough. I had no desire to exit. And finally acknowledging what good enough was for me was when I finally changed the way I was doing things. And I think that’s such an important question to ask at the beginning of your journey, when is good good enough? And it doesn’t mean you’re going to stop pushing. I love ambition. I’m very ambitious still, but you do it differently and not a sacrifice of everything else. So I’m still a big proponent of the hustle. We all got where we are because we were willing to put the work in and hustle and hustle is not going to be the thing that will sustain your business and sustain a life that you really enjoy living.
Tori Dunlap:
There’s a woman listening right now who thinks that burnout is just the price of hustle. And I think you and I were probably that woman at one point of just like, this is a necessary part of the game. This is just what you’ve got to do. What is that woman misunderstanding about sustainable success and what that actually requires?
Natalie Ellis:
It’s true. I think in the beginning, you probably will burn out. You will burn out and test your limits and see what you can feasibly do and what you can’t. I think in the beginning you are fueled by a very different energy though because you’re excited every single day when you wake up, you’re building, you’re really pushing. Over a long period of time, that really takes a toll on your body. It takes a huge toll on your nervous system. It takes a toll on your relationships. And if you don’t bring some awareness to that, you will end up destroying the very thing you wanted to build in the first place. So yes, burnout in the beginning might be an interesting signal. I don’t think it is a long-term game. What I think is a really interesting way to look at this though is in your business, especially for entrepreneurs, or even if you’re in corporate and you’re doing something you really like, you know the difference between energy giving tasks and energy draining tasks.
Energy giving tasks for most entrepreneurs, not everyone, but most entrepreneurs is newness. It’s the shiny thing. It’s creative. It’s something that you wake up excited to work on, you jump out of bed in the morning and you can work 10-hour days straight on that for weeks and not feel the burnout because you are fueled by a level of excitement. Whereas there is another kind of energy that drains you. Maybe you are working on team management and it is not your skillset and you’re having these whack-a-mole problems. Every single day you wake up, there’s more team problems, more SOPs to create, and you’re working 10-hour days, multiple weeks in a row. That kind of energy will burn you out. And so it’s not necessarily the hours that you put in, but it is, are you working on things that absolutely light you up? Are you excited by what you’re working on?
And if you’re in a season where you are just having to do the stuff that comes along with being an ambitious person, how can you then bring in things that regulate you along the way? How can you build in breaks? That’s an important thing to bring to this. But there is a lot to be said for making sure even in those times you are tapping into that, I call it the life force energy tasks, tapping into that stuff that really excites you because I think that is such a weapon for entrepreneurs. We have that kind of energy in droves, but often when you hit a certain point in your business and you’re more maintaining, you lose a lot of that and you’ll then notice your business feels the effects of that.
Tori Dunlap:
There’s this belief with entrepreneurs that, “Oh, if I’m exhausted, then I just need to be more organized or I just need to manage my time better.” These are not the real problems of running the sustainable business. So talk to me about why those two in particular of more organization or more time management skills, why those two are kind of bullshit for the problem we’re actually trying to solve.
Natalie Ellis:
Yeah. I really don’t believe that the entrepreneur that is “stuck” and not where they want to be is there because of lack of effort. And I talk about this a lot. We often think that if we are not getting results, we just need to put more effort in. We need better-
Tori Dunlap:
Yeah, we’re not working hard enough.
Natalie Ellis:
We need the content calendar. We need the SOP that that other founder was talking about. We need the team member. We need fill-in-the-blank that everyone seems to have that I do not have. I can tell you it is not about the effort. It is about what you’re focused on, what you are not focused on, and how clear your boundaries are on that. That will make the biggest difference more than any kind of system. I am a Capricorn. I love systems. I live in spreadsheets. And I can also tell you that is not the key to success. It keeps me organized and that feels good to my brain. It is not the key to success. With business, I always distill it. I always ask, “Are you getting enough leads in? When you get the leads in, are they actually converting into something? When they convert into something, are they having a good experience and are they staying?”
Those three simple questions is your entire business model, but the entrepreneurs that I see that are absolutely exhausted, that are feeling like they need more systems and effort are doing everything but those three things because they don’t know the answer to those three things. Those three things seem so far away and so hard to crack that they are so busy creating multiple social media posts per day, taking all of the online courses, creating SOPs for systems they don’t even need, signing up to all of the softwares, doing so many things around those three questions so that they don’t have to wake up and focus on those three questions. I have met thousands of entrepreneurs and I can tell you the successful ones are not putting in more hours than the ones who are really trying but aren’t getting results. They are just having different focuses with their time.
Tori Dunlap:
I mean, it all comes down to money. It comes down to money in your business, but also the same way I teach women their personal finances. I see so much time spent on stuff that does not matter and does not move the needle at all. And Ramit Sethi talks about five versus $50,000 decisions, and I really think it’s down to this of if you’re trying to be better with money, the default is you start looking at your budget and you start figuring out, “What are the small little things that I can cut?” And it’s like, “No, instead of spending 10 hours a week Googling what high yield savings account is best and worrying about cutting the latte from your daily budget, no, spend that time learning how to start a business where you make money, learning how to negotiate a raise at work, learning how to invest in the stock market.”
These things make such an outsized difference, but they don’t feel very comfortable. They are hard work. It is harder. And from a perspective standpoint, it will take you longer to negotiate that raise into your research or to start a business or to see compound interest work for you in the stock market. But we want the quick, shiny object. And I think you’re so right when you’re trying to start and grow a business, you look for the quick solution. You look for, “Oh, well, somebody’s on,” I don’t know, “Clubhouse.” Remember Clubhouse, Natalie?
Natalie Ellis:
Oh, yeah.
Tori Dunlap:
“Oh, I got to get over to the Clubhouse and I got to create content over there. And also I’ve got to do this and I’ve got to do this. And oh, this entrepreneur came on my Instagram feed and is talking about this.” And it’s like all of those might work, but at the end of the day, if you do not have a profitable business, if you do not know how much your business is making, if you do not know where people are falling off when they’re not having a good experience, you’re exactly right. It is not a sustainable business.
Natalie Ellis:
Yeah. I sell courses for a living and let me tell you something that I have seen. When I sell a social media course, it flies off the shelf, flies off the shelf. When I sell a course on how to make money by actually installing a system in your business, it is like pulling teeth trying to get people to buy it. And that drives me-
Tori Dunlap:
It’s not sexy. It’s not sexy.
Natalie Ellis:
It’s not sexy.
Tori Dunlap:
It’s not exciting.
Natalie Ellis:
But it’s the thing that works. So you know what I do? And I’m just going to lay out all my cards on the table. I Trojan horse people. I tell them they’re buying a social media course and every single time I put a module in there and I say, “By the way, all of this is so useless if you do not do this thing. Here’s how to set up a funnel with your social media so that you actually make money. And I know you are here because you think that growing on social media is going to make you money. It might a year from now. It is not going to make you money tomorrow. Here’s what will.” And it drives me nuts that I have to do it, but I’ve just learned my ideal client by now needs to see that.
I actually pulled 19,777 women in my community. I did a deep questionnaire on them and I found that women making 10 to $25,000 per month in that business, the median number of followers they have is 6,000. 6,000 to have a six or multiple six figure business.
Tori Dunlap:
I have to stop you there. The median social media following is 6,000 people to make 100K plus in your business every year.
Natalie Ellis:
Yes.
Tori Dunlap:
That is such a lie we believe. It is such a lie that we believe that A, a million followers is what we need and that B, a million plus followers will immediately solve all your business problems and make you a ton of money. Neither of those things are true. Wow.
Natalie Ellis:
They are not true, but the people that are at that revenue number, they have a way of monetizing. And when I say funnel, I don’t mean that they have these complicated backends. Maybe they’ve got ManyChats set up and it goes to a freebie and a low ticket product or a webinar, whatever it is, not complicated. I don’t need you to have complicated, but the people that are monetizing at that social media level, they are known for one thing. They talk about that one thing over and over and over again. I mean, I learned this from you when we hung out. You were like, “Look at my best performing content. It is the same content over and over and over and over again. I do not reinvent the wheel.”
And I think people might look at entrepreneurs who have those established audiences and have multiple things that they monetize in their business and think that we’re testing and doing all of this new stuff all the time. I’ve been selling the same membership for over a decade, the same membership for over a decade. While people told me membership was dead, while people told me I needed to do X, Y, Z or it wouldn’t work, I still stuck with doing it. It doesn’t need to be sexy or shiny, but you need to commit to doing it. So if you are listening and you have more than 6,000 followers, what I want to tell you is you have everything you need. You do not need to keep chasing all the shiny things. You just need to double down on what you have.
And I love social media growth. I think it’s amazing. I advocate for you to grow an audience. I think in the age of AI, owning your distribution is a moat, but it is not the number one thing, as you and I both know, that will make your business a success or not a success.
Tori Dunlap:
There was a video that I posted in 2021 that I literally recorded in 10 minutes with no makeup on. It went crazy viral. I got six, seven million views over the course of a week. I think I gained about half a million followers on TikTok. I got written up in a bunch of different press. It was crazy, Natalie. But the thing that you’re really going to love is I could have just had that virality and just been like, “Oh, that was so cool.” That didn’t translate into any money. But a couple months before, I had set up a very simple email funnel. I had set up a very simple quiz, which by the way, we’re still running. And thank God I did because in that week, in those seven days from one organic video, we gained a hundred thousand email subscribers.
Natalie Ellis:
Wow.
Tori Dunlap:
And we still have them on our list. They still sign up for a high yield savings account. They still sign up for our programs. They are still engaged. We have helped them transform their money, hopefully transform their lives. And it is so important that, yes, I had the sexy thing. The sexy thing was exciting, but it was over after about two weeks. That video had its moment. It was so cool, and it felt so validating to refresh my page and see thousands of followers come in every couple minutes. That was crazy. But that does not matter if I don’t make any fucking money off of it. It doesn’t matter if I’m not actually able to grow in my business, to be able to provide the jobs that we do, to be able to provide the impact.
And I think that that is the lie that we believe is it’s because it feels good. It feels validating. It’s like psychology. It’s like, “Ooh, somebody sees me and it looks sexy and it looks exciting.” I don’t care so much about performing success as a business owner as I care about what the financials actually look like that are able to provide for me and my family and my community and for my team. But to your point, that’s not sexy, that’s not exciting. People don’t think they want that. And if you’re listening, I need you to crave that because you will get to where you want to go so much faster.
Natalie Ellis:
Yeah. And something you’ve just said that I really want to echo, you don’t care about performing success. You actually care about having a successful business and there’s a really big difference. And I think a lot of people who are performing success, they’re not doing it from a place of, “Let me have my ego feel good.” They’re doing it from a place of, “Nothing else in my business is working, but at least if I get the likes and the views, then I’m doing something right.” And I just want to say, I get it. I get how uncomfortable it is and discouraging in the beginning when you’re putting stuff out and the only person signing up is your grandma. And if you stick with that uncomfortable side and you build that side versus chasing what feels good because it feels validating and it feels like you’re making progress, you’ll be so much happier you did.
And like you said, email lists, we all know that’s where the revenue is as a business owner. We all know that’s what’s most important. That was one of the biggest mistakes I think I made in my career. When I was growing on social media in the beginning. I mean, I didn’t even know what an email list was. I’m going to be totally honest. I had no idea. And so I wasn’t collecting emails for a really, really long time until people started to tell me, “What does your email list look like? You might get brand partnerships.” And I’m like, “Oh, great. I should go and look at that.” So I wish I’d known from the beginning because if I’d been growing my email list alongside my following, my business would be in an even different place right now.
Tori Dunlap:
For those listening who might be super beginners, this email list idea is basically building on land you own rather than trying to grow an Instagram following or a TikTok following because we both have millions of followers. It’s fun, it’s exciting. We get new followers every day, but I am actually less focused on that top funnel growth as I am on how do I get people on my email list? Because there are so many reasons you want an email versus a follow. And I think the biggest reason is that any of these social platforms could delete your account, which has happened to me. It took days to get it back. They can change their algorithms and decide you’re no longer relevant. They can flag your content. Men who hate me and hate what I do try to get our content flagged all the time and sometimes it works and we have to go under review for a period of time and that sucks.
And so I think that is a perfect example of, yes, I think both of us believe that growing on social is one of the easiest ways to grow your business, but getting them to that next step of an email list that you own is part of what we’re talking about with systems. Can you give me more examples of the shiny object versus the system? What is the thing people think they want versus what should they want to create a successful business?
Natalie Ellis:
Yeah, so many examples of that. I mean, one blatant example is creating new products when you already have a product. So what I see a lot is-
Tori Dunlap:
I’m so guilty of this.
Natalie Ellis:
Yeah. Someone will have a product that’s already really good and they will then want to just create multiple different products. They don’t really connect to each other. And what you find is you are so busy trying to sell all the different things, that product that was initially doing really well starts to drop and you tell yourself a story that it’s irrelevant, no one wants it anymore, it’s old, but you are actually just focusing your effort everywhere else. So one thing I really like to encourage business owners to do is when you have that one product that’s working really well, think about how you can bring on… If you want to create more products, you want to increase that customer lifetime value, which is a great thing to want to focus on, then build in products that pipeline. How do you upsell, down sell, cross-sell on the back end of your business, but on the front end, you are still focused on bringing in new customers.
Because if you continue to create multiple new products on the front end, what you’re doing is bringing in lots of the same customer over and over and over again. And when you aren’t growing your business with new customers, at some point it feels like your marketing just gets really hard and it stops working. So I really encourage, don’t just think that because something did well last month, it’s not going to do well this month. Go the distance with your product. Like I said, I’ve had a membership for over a decade and I’ve reinvented it. I’ve always kept the same name, but I’ve changed the branding, I’ve changed the price, I’ve changed the deliverables, I’ve changed the wrap out of it, but I’ve always stuck with having a main thing. I think what that’s allowed is for me to create momentum. I’m very open about my numbers in that I am very happy to say our membership pays our entire payroll plus more every single year.
And what that does for me as a business owner is create choice to hire more people, to know if I can bonus my employees, to give me budget, to work on other things. It creates a lot of predictability. And when we come back to that burnout question at the beginning, predictability is also great for your nervous system. Whereas if I was starting from scratch every single month with a new product, that introduces a lot of unknowns and it’s hard to make cash flow decisions from unknowns. So I am a big believer that the best businesses are just not sexy. They are stable, they are predictable, they are consistent, and you work at them. You work at, we have that membership, it’s great. Then we have a program that takes people to the next level and we focus on just building out our lifetime value. We focus on bringing new people in the door and we keep it really basic.
A few more examples on that shiny object is new platforms. Oh, Substack. Everyone’s on Substack. I need to get on Substack. Okay. But if you’ve been neglecting your email list for months, let’s not start writing new Substacks to a brand new audience. Let’s actually focus on increasing your email cadence, getting your open rates and click-through rates stronger before introducing a new platform. I get that the new platform is shiny, but it isn’t going to move the needle in the same way that getting your current platform actually working really well will. So I have so many examples of these. I’m the boring entrepreneur, but I really believe it works and it just feels good.
Tori Dunlap:
And one of the things that, if you are a member of my team, you have heard me say this so many times, that if you are creating a ton of different products or a ton of different offerings, one, you’re trying to be everything to everybody. And as we know, that makes you nothing to nobody. And the second thing you’re doing is you present what we call at HFK internally a jam problem. And I think I mentioned this at our mastermind, but basically they did this experiment where at a grocery store, if you offer somebody five testing flavors of jam, five little samples of jam, people will pick one basically 100% of the time. But as soon as you start increasing that number to 10 to 15 to 20 flavors of jam, they don’t pick hardly ever. They only pick, I think it’s like 18% of the time if you give them 20 options because they’re way too overwhelmed.
And it’s the same thing with you running a business. If you have every single solution to every single problem or even every single problem this one person has or this one industry has, you are trying to do way too many things and trying to be everything to everybody. But also when somebody comes on your landing page or your products page and tries to figure out what’s for me or what is available that I want to invest in, there are so many options that they just bail. They hit the bail button every time. And I’ve seen this at the beginning of my business when I was trying to serve a bunch of different things. We had career products and we had our business products and we had obviously personal finance and then in personal finance, we had a budgeting sheet and then we had a resume builder and we had a stock market school.
We had so many of these things. And we’re at the point now in the past couple years where we’ve really slimmed down our offerings because one, I want all of these offerings to be really, really good. I don’t want to half-ass a couple things and instead Ron Swanson whole-ass one thing. And also, I don’t want somebody to go on the website and have 10, 12, 16 different options because they’re just less likely to pick one.
Natalie Ellis:
I think that is such an interesting analogy. I remember when you shared it, that for me was yes, five things, five very clear different flavors is so incredibly important. I love this. And I think a lot of entrepreneurs, they would gain so much by thinking about, “Okay, what platforms am I on? Let me distill it. Let me focus on one long form platform, one short form platform.” So maybe that’s email list and Instagram. Email list, TikTok, Substack, Instagram, whatever it is. I don’t care. You pick a long form, you pick a short form. You have an entry product and a backend product. I call it your compact offer, your core offer. And you just focus, you simplify, you go all in there. And what that will force you to do is find product market fit. It will force you to really build something that actually works, that people really want.
I will often tell my team, you cannot build a business from over marketing. And what I mean by that is a lot of us are good marketers in that we know how to speak to our list. We know how to say the thing, to get the opt-ins, to get people clicking. But if you have to push and over market a product to make it work, that is like pushing something uphill. That product just isn’t working. And if you have tons of different products, you’re able to do that because you can just keep switching from thing to thing to thing. And there’s always going to be something that someone that raises their hand and says, “Yes, I want that thing.” If you focus, you have to get really clear on what kind of content really resonates and what kind of product they actually want and whether it does the job.
And again, like you said, I want really good products. We don’t often talk about the delivery on the backend, but if you want a long-term business and you want long-term success and you don’t want refund rates through the wazoo, then you need to think about the experience you’re giving your customers on the other side of it. And when you move too fast and you do too many things, you drop balls on the back end, you drop balls in delivery. It’s one of the easiest places to ignore. There’s no onboarding sequence. There’s no follow-up with clients. You’re not collecting testimonials. There’s no real flywheel that takes an existing customer, turns them into a case study, makes them a repeat buyer. You completely neglect that backend, and that’s a business that you’re going to really struggle to grow. And so again, it’s not the sexy thing, but doing fewer things allows you to do things a lot better.
Tori Dunlap:
For the woman listening who realized, “Oh, I have way too many flavors of jam, and by the way, none of them are really working,” how does she figure out what to cut first?
Natalie Ellis:
Yeah, great question. So first I would look at the data. Okay, I hear nothing’s really working, but let’s look at the data because often something is working, but you’re not really looking at the numbers. So what I mean by that is if we are looking at conversion of everyone that landed on your checkout page, how many people bought or of everyone that watched the webinar, how many people bought? And you can go on ChatGPT to ask good conversion rates, but take a look at all of the different products you have and take a look at the conversion rates there because maybe only 25 people bought, but it was 25 of 30 people that saw it. That to me is a really good signal. So while you might feel like it’s not working because you’re not bringing in many buyers, I would say, well, if we just drove more leads, we drove more traffic, you’d have a really successful product there.
So first do a deep dive in all your data. And again, you can use AI to do this. It doesn’t need to be complicated, but start to identify the thing in your business that has the best product market fit. And then think about, if you think about that’s the bullseye, that’s the one thing in the middle, that’s the target, then I want you to have one clear strategy from turning a stranger into a buyer. That is a funnel and it doesn’t need to be complicated. It’s not a million things. It’s just from someone that doesn’t know you, how do you build that know, like, and trust factor and tell them about your product in a way that makes them want to buy? Maybe it’s a really great checkout page, maybe it’s a webinar, maybe it’s a challenge, maybe it’s an email sequence. It all depends on the price point of your product, but you want to have one clear way that they can buy the thing.
And so that’s your offer, that’s your funnel, and then we think about traffic. What is a consistent way you can bring leads, traffic, buyers in the door, whether that’s organic… There’s only ever three ways to drive leads. You can build your own audience, you can borrow an audience, or you can buy an audience. So you can build your own social media following and drive people in. If that’s your strategy, I’m going to encourage you to look at how to actually put together posts that go viral, which doesn’t mean you get on the morning news. It simply means, say you have a thousand people following you, 2,000 people see this. It’s being shown to people that don’t follow you because it is relevant, interesting content. And so you’re giving yourself a chance to get those opt-ins to go into your funnel. So if that’s your strategy, let’s focus on content like that, not followers.
If borrowing is a strategy, maybe you go look at 10 people that have an audience of your ideal clients and you collaborate with them. You offer them a kickback when they put people into your funnel, or you can buy an audience. You can put some paid ad spend behind your funnel if you know it converts and you can drive in revenue that way. That is it. That is business in a nutshell, those three things. It’s your offer, your funnel, and your traffic. If all you did is focus on that for the next six months, I am telling you your life and business would look very different six months from now if you didn’t get distracted from that.
Tori Dunlap:
Well, and the first thing you said is you need to know your data. And I think most people don’t even know their data. You need to look at the data to make the decisions. And so if your body just flooded in sweat and you’re like, “I don’t know what my conversion rates are. I don’t really know how many people we’re sending to that page,” then that’s a great place to start. We can’t actually make any decisions. And to your point, if you’re saying none of them are really working, but you don’t know if that’s the case, if the data hasn’t absolutely proven that to you, then we need better data because we need to see what’s actually happening.
Natalie Ellis:
Yeah. And even if no one’s bought your product, okay, how many people have seen it? No one. Okay. So we don’t know if it’s a good product because nobody’s buying it. Data. Data tells stories. Data will show you where to look. Data is everything in your business.
Tori Dunlap:
And again, it’s not sexy, just the same way that setting up systems to automate your savings and automate your investing. It’s not very sexy, but it’s the stuff that actually makes a difference. So one of the things that I see with so many entrepreneurs, and I know you do too, is the treadmill entrepreneur. And I call them this because they are just on the treadmill running as fast as they possibly can. And they have not ever, potentially, stopped the treadmill, left it and went, “Do I want to keep running? And if so, is this the direction I want to keep running? I’m too close to my business to clearly see what needs to change.”
So one of my solutions for that is no matter how big your business is, when I was a team of one, every single year I would take myself to a hotel, and by the way, that’s a business expense, and I would go on an executive retreat where I would literally spend a couple days looking at what was working in the business, what wasn’t, journaling about what felt good to me, where did I want to go in the next year?
And we still do this at HFK now that I have a leadership team. We all go for a week to a nice hotel and we have all these conversations and we’re not checking Slack and we’re not putting out fires and it’s purposefully to get a high level overview of the business. Talk to me about how we can separate and get off the treadmill so that you can actually figure out what’s working.
Natalie Ellis:
Well, firstly, I would recommend everyone buy my book because that is exactly what it’s about. It’s called The Freedom-Based Business Method, and it is exactly a roadmap for that. So what I would recommend if you are in that place, the first thing, yes, pause. It’s really, really important to be able to pull back. And I always start any kind of exercise like that with what do you want? What do you want in your life in your business? And that question should determine everything else because a lifestyle business, which I’m going to guess most of us listening to this are building, a lifestyle business is one that you don’t really plan on exiting. A lifestyle business is one that is a vehicle to help you live the life you want to live. It is a vehicle to help you make the impact in your life you want to make.
It is a vehicle and we need to see it as that. It is not your entire life. It is not your entire identity. It is not your self-worth. It is a vehicle. So we start with what do you want? And if you’re listening, maybe you start to ask yourself that question right now, “How do I want my life to feel? How do I want my days to look? How do I want to spend my time? What kind of money do I want to make? What choice do I want to be able to make that I don’t feel like I freely can right now?” And you start with that and then you think about the business as a vehicle to help you get there. So for me, when I thought about that, for me personally, I know that I want to spend a lot of time with my girls.
I have a four-year-old and an 11-month-old. I really want to spend a lot of time with my kids. That feels really important to me. I want to be able to focus on my health. I want to live a really great lifestyle in Southern California. I want to be able to support family members. I want to have a really positive impact on the world. So I start with all of these things that I want and I say it completely unapologetically. And so you have to start there. And then for me, my business is a vehicle to that. So I run a lot of my business decisions through what I personally want. I just made a decision recently. We’ve been getting a lot of demand for a higher ticket product that’s not a mastermind that anyone at any kind of income level can join and gets a lot more support with us.
And we were getting so much demand from that. It felt like people were asking this every single day. Now this is easy money on the table and we all have this as entrepreneurs. There’s easy money on the table. It’s sitting there, you know I can turn this thing on. I can say yes to that product, this is great money for the business. But when I looked at it from the lens of does this support the life I want, the answer was no, because I would be tied to my desk a lot more. I would be tied to a lot more client deliverables. I would be tied to a lot more team management. I would be tied to more of a sales call rhythm. So I thought through all the different things that it would take and I realized I’m really happy to leave that money sitting there at the table looking at me because what I am getting in return for leaving that there is so much richer.
I’m getting time with my kids and that’s why I started this business in the first place. And it comes back to when you asked me at the beginning what that choice point looked like for me. It was when I actually realized I had enough. If we don’t ever set that enough point, we will never know when we have what we wanted. So if your goal when starting your business is to be able to stay home with your kids twice a week, but all of a sudden your business really takes off and you’re scaling it and you’ve got these growth goals and you were at three days a week, but now you’re at five days a week because your business “needs more from you”, I just want you to stop and ask, is this really what I’m intentionally choosing? Because if you said you wanted to be home two days a week and now you’re not, maybe things have changed and maybe that is for you or maybe you’re doing what you think you should be doing.
And I have an exercise in the book called Shed the Shoulds. I do not think we should, should our way through life. And often we do that because we just get so caught up in what everyone else is doing, the next milestone, the next thing, the invitation, being relevant, the followers, the status game that a lot of us are playing. And so it always comes back to what is enough for you and how can your business be a vehicle to help you live that in your life?
Tori Dunlap:
And I will also say that there are seasons of sprint. We’ve talked about this on the show with other entrepreneurs before. I mean, you know what’s going on in my business. We’re launching two big things next year and I am doing a bit of cocooning this year because I know that I am going to be very present, pushing harder than normal next year. And I am willing to do that. I’m excited, in fact, to do that because I understand that it’s not a all of the time thing. It’s not my normal Tuesday. It’s like, “Nope, for this period of time we are going to sprint very, very hard.” And then you best believe that when that sprint period is over, you’re going to hear a lot less from me for a period of time or you’re going to hear more from my team and less from me.
And so I love that you just have to make an active choice, I think is what you’re saying, rather than just letting it dictate what you are choosing, rather than letting the situation dictate what you want, instead being like, “No, I either didn’t plan for this and I got it now and it actually feels really good. Great, I’m going to keep doing it.” Or deciding, “Nah, this is not serving who I want to be in the business I want to run.” And you actually mentioned replacing a to-do list with a to-be list. Is that what we’re talking about here?
Natalie Ellis:
Yeah, definitely part of it. We often will make a list of all the things that need to get done, but we don’t make a list of how we want to show up and how we actually want to be in the world. And what you said as well on seasons is really important. And what I think I do want to share on that is it’s really important to give yourself grace in seasons like that. So I had one too, this first half of the year. I launched a book and I really wanted to hit the New York Times list. That felt really important to me. I wanted to give it the best shot I had and I started book launching with a six-month-old baby. I’m breastfeeding around the clock.
I made a conscious effort and decision that my two focuses this first half of the year would be motherhood and my book, which meant having a real conversation with my husband to say, “Date nights are off the table for a few months and we are traveling together as a family and there are some sacrifices we will make because we are in agreement that these two things feel more important,” and now I’m in a different season and I’m choosing different. But if I didn’t make that decision to have those two goals, I would’ve constantly felt like a failure. I would’ve felt like I’m not showing up for my friends, I’m not showing up for marriage, I’m not showing up for my team, fill in the blank. And that would’ve been a really crappy place to be living. Whereas making that decision and communicating with the people around me that are important to me, it allowed me to give myself grace in that season and know it’s a season that’s going to end.
And then when that season did end, we hit the New York Times list. Okay, we’ve done that. It doesn’t mean I’m forgetting about the book, but it means I’m going to pull back. I’m going to go on a vacation with my family. We’re going to think about our vision again. We’re going to think about what the goals and priorities are and we’re going to do something different.
And I really think we have to give ourselves grace, especially as women, especially as the hyper independent, overly competent, strong women that we are. It is very easy to take on doing everything for everyone. And I really want you to hear that it’s physically impossible and coming back to what we talked about at the beginning, it is a guaranteed way to burn out and feel like crap. And so really think about every season, what it requires from you and just do that without the guilt.
Tori Dunlap:
I think you’ve really proven and shown that you can run a business with being more focused on stepping away and creating those systems, but you also have, like myself, a more established business. We both have established companies, established teams. What does building for freedom actually look like for someone who’s just getting started and maybe also has a day job and maybe also has kids? Where does she start in building that business that’s focused on systems and freedom when she is a newbie entrepreneur?
Natalie Ellis:
I don’t think we build for freedom in the beginning. I think in the beginning we build for stability. We build for feasibility. We build to actually get something off the ground that works. I think it’s very challenging if you’re a startup entrepreneur to go into something with very strong boundaries and say, “I’m building for freedom,” because I think it is going to cap you to actually do the work to get it off the ground. But I think going in with intention of when good is good enough will actually show you when you can start to pivot towards more freedom. And what I mean by that, let’s say you really want to start a course business, but you don’t have the experience actually working with clients to know what is going to resonate in a course. Some people, if you’re building for freedom might think, “Well, I’m not going to work one-on-one with people because a course is the thing that will stop me trading time for money.”
Firstly, you’re going to trade time for money in your business no matter what you’re doing. If you’re delivering a course, you’re going to be trading time for marketing. If you’re working one-on-one with people, you’re going to be trading time for that consulting time. In the beginning, I would advocate, do the thing that doesn’t scale, actually work one-on-one with those clients, record those sessions, get those testimonials, get those curriculums and frameworks that actually work. And then at some point you can actually pivot. But I don’t think you can start a business and think, “I’m only going to work two days a week. I’m not going to do X, Y, Z. I’ve got all these boundaries. It’s not going to work for me.”
I don’t think your business will work from that place personally. I think you want to get it to a place where the business actually works, the business actually functions, you’ve got product market fit, you’ve got a way of bringing in leads, turning them into customers on a consistent basis, then we think about systems and then we think about freedom.
Tori Dunlap:
It’s just the same way that you can’t walk into a gym for the first time in years and be like, “I’m going to run a half-marathon today.” You can’t do it. You haven’t put the reps in. You don’t know how to actually get on the treadmill and run and sustain that running for that period of time. Same way as like, “Okay,” I don’t know why I’m linking everything back to fitness, but it feels like the really obvious metaphor. It’s like, “Yeah, I’m going to train to run a marathon, but I’m only going to train two days a week.” No, no. If you say you want this, and you can decide again at any time, “No, I don’t actually want this.” And I think that’s the lie too, is it’s like there are so many women I talk to, we’ve actually pulled them. We know that, I think it’s 56% of our audience wants to be an entrepreneur at some point.
So over half of them want to be an entrepreneur. And then when I show them what it takes, very few people want it anymore. You have to decide, “Do I actually want this thing? Do I actually want to write a book?” That’s the other one you hear all the time. “I want to write a book.” I think it’s like 90% of people polled want to write a book. I think it’s 40% actually start. It’s something like 5% actually finish. So you can say you want something all you want, but unless you actually start putting in the reps, it’s really, really difficult. And I think that there is this lie that we’ve been told of, yes, businesses offer freedom and everything. That is true. You and I are living proof of that, but I wasn’t flouncing around barely on my laptop for a very long time.
And still now, I am very present in the business within reason and during certain seasons. So I do think that there is just this commitment you’re going to have to make if you say that this is something you want. And you can decide as long as it’s a conscious decision, “Yes, I do not want this anymore,” or, “I’m not willing to put this kind of work in.” Okay, that’s totally fine, but we can’t just say we want things without understanding the amount of work it’s going to take too.
Natalie Ellis:
I could talk about this all day long.
Tori Dunlap:
I know.
Natalie Ellis:
Because it’s a mindset thing that is relevant in everything.
Even if you want the big pay raise, you want that promotion and the big pay raise, but you don’t want to put in the extra work to get there. You don’t want to work weekends, you want to have really strong boundaries. Okay, well maybe you actually don’t want the pay increase. Maybe you actually don’t want the responsibility increase.
Tori Dunlap:
Maybe the flexibility in the job is actually more important than making 30K more.
Natalie Ellis:
Exactly. But that’s it. You can always decide it’s not what you want, but at the end of the day, not one of us who’ve actually built something real will sit here and tell you we had freedom from day one. And even still, yes, we both have a certain level of freedom and we both have a certain level of commitment and responsibility-
Tori Dunlap:
I was just going to say the responsibility.
Natalie Ellis:
… to actually sustain.
Tori Dunlap:
Yeah.
Natalie Ellis:
We have that. And when you see the highlight reel of, I make a million dollars and I work five hours a month, that’s an exaggeration, but we all know those kinds of reels. We know that kind of narrative online. I think it then puts an idea in people’s mind of, “Okay, if I start a business and I want to consult, I’m going to charge… Charge your worth. I’m going to charge $50,000 for this thing.” And it drives me nuts-
Tori Dunlap:
Me too.
Natalie Ellis:
… because you will find that it doesn’t work and then feel like a failure. But actually you just never set yourself up for success. I could talk about this all day long.
Tori Dunlap:
Yeah. Well, and the example that is so real of I run a multimillion-dollar business and I only work two hours a week. Let’s say hypothetically that that is true because I think there are some people doing that. One, you’re not seeing the work that had to go into creating those systems. But also two, I think the thing that non-entrepreneurs or even entrepreneurs who are not at a certain level that they don’t understand is if shit hits the fan, it is my responsibility. And I take that responsibility very seriously every night before I go to bed and every time something doesn’t work out. There is so much flexibility that your business can offer you.
And at the same time, I want to be clear that that is not all sunshine and roses. And in fact, it is sometimes being the bad guy. It is sometimes taking heat online. It is sometimes firing people. It is making hard decisions that I at times I’m like, “I would actually rather go back to my nine to five, please.” I have had so many moments of that in my business where I’m like, there’s certain parts of the financial freedom and the time freedom that I absolutely love. And then when shit gets really hard, it is so easy to be like, “Oh, this is actually really, really difficult and I would really love for somebody else to be the bad guy or make the hard decision.”
Natalie Ellis:
A hundred percent. When shit hits the fan, it is you that cleans up the mess every single time. And that’s why it’s high reward. That’s why you get to pay yourself the most. That’s why you get all that equity. That is why you have the freedom that you have, but it doesn’t come for free. And yes, I literally own the trademark for Freedom-Based Business, and I am the first person to tell you that you don’t get there without putting the work in. You don’t get there from having those strong boundaries from day one. You don’t get there from saying, “I refuse to burn out ever.” You get there through actually building something that works. But I can tell you on the other side of it’s really worth it. If that is something you really crave and desire, it is really, really worth it.
I was at dinner last night with a couple of friends who are moms and they’ve been running their businesses for quite a few years now, and we were just having that moment of realizing, “Wait, we don’t have to drop our kids off at daycare because we made this choice.” And that was very conscious for us. And we were all talking about how we see dads in the industry crushing in ways that we potentially aren’t because we are making certain decisions and what a gift that is that we are making those decisions. A lot of people will say, “Oh, does motherhood help you be a better or worse entrepreneur?” I’m like, “Clearly worse. There is so much I could do. If you knew how I’d function on great sleep and full-time hours, you would keel over.”
But that is something that comes on the other side of that choice for freedom. And so if you have that desire, that why, and I talk about motherhood because that’s my why, but for everyone, it’s very different. It comes down to choice for most people. They want choice. Whatever your choice is, it is worth it. It is worth it.
Like you talk about to actually be smart with your money. It is worth it. We were also talking last night about the financial sacrifices a lot of us made over the last few years of building the business to not have lifestyle creep, to not buy into all of the ego status games, to have the shiny things, to actually invest the money, to do the smart, boring thing, because on the other side of all of that is choice. So I’m the first person to tell you that is so incredibly worth it if you want it.
Tori Dunlap:
I have been really curious about your relationship to the name of your company now because it has gone through so many iterations in just the way we think about a Bossbabe or a girlboss, especially tied to women’s ambition, to women’s power or lack thereof. How has the meaning of the name changed for you over time?
Natalie Ellis:
It’s a tough one because I feel like people have tried to cancel the name Bossbabe for many, many, many years now. And I think a lot of people have a love-hate relationship with it. There are some people that love it. They really resonate with it. There are some people that absolutely hate it. They think it is not feminist. They think it’s network marketing, which no offense if you’re in network marketing, this is just what I get. They think it is so many things. They think it’s pyramid schemes and scams and all of this. So it’s really, really interesting. And there have been many times I’ve thought about changing the name.
For me, what I come back to is I’m really proud of what I’ve built. I am proud of building a brand that is so controversial, which is so funny because the brand itself is not actually controversial. We’re just here to help women make more money and get more freedom. But the name itself, I’m proud to have built something that has become a household name that people do have such strong conversations over. And to have built a brand where I can walk into an eyelash salon, like a lot of my women are in beauty and someone knows the brand Bossbabe. They might not know me, but they know the brand. And I think that’s really cool to build something that lives beyond you, but I have a hard time with it sometimes.
I often do go into a spiral thinking, “Do I have longevity in this brand name? Do I need to pivot the brand? Do I need to change it?” So I don’t know. It’s just really interesting. I think we’ve disrupted with it. I think we haven’t had as much hate as the girlboss movement. I think because babe is probably less offensive than girl. I don’t know. I don’t know. What do you think?
Tori Dunlap:
I mean, I could talk to you about this for three hours, but my girls over at Diabolical Lies did a great episode about the reckoning of the girlboss and also Lean In and all of these movements. And I think we believe that… They were super popular when they came out. They were ripped a new one. They got awful press from traditional media. And I do think that we’ve had Sophia Amoruso on the show. I think that when I’m looking at the pros and cons or the controversy of a name like Girlboss or even Bossbabe, I always ask myself, “Was this a net positive or a net negative?” And I think for the vast majority of that movement, that was a net positive. Could there have been more inclusion? Abso-fucking-lutely. Did sometimes the systemic barriers and the systemic issues not get acknowledged? Absolutely.
And I also think that we’re seeing a almost response to the girlboss movement with the tradwife movement right now. It does swing. It was like girlboss was very focused on hustle and on really working your ass off and being ambitious. And then we’ve slowly crept over, probably in the middle we had the hustle culture’s bad, we want to have a softer life. And then we went all the way from hustle culture is bad, soft life to tradwife. And I think that either end of this fear does not work. Nonstop hustle culture does not work. tradwifery does not work. So I think what we do have to understand as women, again, is that there will be seasons of hustle. I think that one of the worst things I think that we have responded to with the girlboss movement is being like, “Ah, but work is so hard and I don’t want to do that and I don’t want to grind.” And it’s like, “Okay, but if you have certain dreams and goals, you will have to.”
And you can say again at any time those dreams and goals no longer serve you, but that has to be a conscious choice. And at the same time, yes, we want at times to not have to work and to take care of ourselves because capitalism is difficult. But on the flip side, we cannot say we are going to hand over our power to somebody else. We are going to give the power and the financial freedom and the choice over to somebody else because that puts us back so far too. So I do think that it’s trying to find the seasons and the balance of both of those things, which is how do I show up as the version of a woman that I want to be while also understanding that society will hate any version that you decide, it just will. So you have to be okay with it.
Natalie Ellis:
Yeah, I think that’s exactly how I feel that last point you made, but I think that’s where we have trouble, I’ll be honest, because I think the girlboss, boss babe, hustle culture movement and the soft life tradwife glorifying stay-at-home motherhood movement, which by the way, every single one of these paths is great and every single one of these paths is amazing if it is for you. But when we glamorize on all of these sides and we have these highlight reels of people showing a highlight reel version of that, we lose ourselves in what we actually want. And I write a lot about this kind of thing on Substack, but I’ll be honest, for me, when I was really burned out, I would look at a lot of these slow living, soft life, tread wife reels and think, “You know what? My life would be so much easier if I bought a farm, got a ton of chickens and jacked in my laptop.”
Tori Dunlap:
It’s a utopia. I totally get why people actually respond to the tradwife movement. And we’ve talked about it many times on this show.
Natalie Ellis:
Yeah, but it’s the same with hustle culture because you are the one, maybe you are staying home with the kids and it is really challenging and you are putting in all of these hours to work a double full-time job, yet you aren’t getting paid financially for it. You look at some of the women that are going into the office and you romanticize it. But the problem, so I went and looked at land. I went and thought about chickens. I had this conversation with my husband and I realized I have been pulled in by a highlight reel, by something, some idea that is not mine. And what we all need to be doing as women, because by the way, this movement doesn’t fucking affect men. My husband is not questioning whether he’s working too much or he needs chickens. He is not having this conversation with his friends.
Tori Dunlap:
Yep. Great point.
Natalie Ellis:
We as women don’t trust ourselves often to make the decision for ourselves. We do not trust that, “Actually, I love to go to my corporate job. I love to put a suit on every single day. I like to drop my kids off at school and I like to work hard.” We do not trust that that is okay to own because we think that makes us a bad insert the blank. Or we don’t trust that being a stay-at-home mom and sacrificing our careers for a decade is actually really meaningful and worthwhile because we’ve been sold something else. I think the most powerful thing we can do, and it comes away from any of the labels, the most powerful thing we can do is actually ask ourselves, what do I want? If I wasn’t following Natalie and Tori and Ballerina Farm and all of these other people online, if I turn my phone off for a month, what would I want?
And can I actually trust myself to believe that this is the right path for myself? Most women will say no. And so I think that’s what’s more important. And I think the label is a bit of a scapegoat for saying this convinced us of this or this era is over or whatever. There’s always going to be an audience for boss babe or for girlboss or for tradwife or for fill in the blank, but I really hope that it is an authentic one and we’re making that choice. Like you said, reserve the right to change your mind at any time, but actually change your mind. If you want to change your mind, change your mind.
Tori Dunlap:
I completely agree. And the addendum, the only addendum I would add is make sure you have control over your own money no matter what you’re choosing, because that is the most harmful thing about any of these “eras” or “titles” is if you have given away your true freedom of can you leave a situation? Can you decide this is no longer serving me? If you cannot leave because of money, we have not made the correct choice. Beyond that, I don’t care what you choose. Truly. I want you to be happy. I want you to be a conscious decision maker, but do not give away your financial power. You just can’t.
Natalie Ellis:
Yeah. I mean, that’s the entire reason I got into business in the first place. I grew up watching my mom stay in an incredibly abusive relationship for many, many years because she could not afford to leave. And I said to myself, “I will never be in that situation.” And I laugh about it now because it’s profitable trauma. I was so traumatized from watching that, that I worked so hard to have anything but that. And at some point I had to reckon with that and I had to do the inner work and I had to integrate what that looks like, but I still do maintain that. You have to know what’s going on with your finances and you have to have, even if you’re a stay-at-home mom and you’re not the one “earning”, you are just as entitled to the money that your family earns and you should know where that money is and you should know what you’re entitled to and you should have some sort of financial freedom there.
I think it is so incredibly important. And also I won’t get on my bandwagon about this because I could, I think this is a huge problem with the whole masculine feminine movement on social media. There are so many reels and books and though pieces on women that are hustling too hard aren’t in their feminine. Firstly, I’m going to disagree I think the act of creation is inherently feminine, but I won’t get started on that. There’s this whole movement of, “Women, you must be more in your feminine to have your man respect and stay with you and love you and cherish you,” and fill in the blank. And that often means letting him handle things, letting him take control of things, letting him lead. I’m sorry, I do not subscribe. Me and my husband are a team. I know just as much about our investments as he does.
We make decisions together as a team. That makes me a man. If that makes me masculine, so be it. But I do not believe that I need to be a damsel in distress for my husband to find me attractive.
Tori Dunlap:
I could talk about this for so long. If you are sacrificing your own freedom and power to please somebody else, that’s exactly what patriarchy wants. Patriarchy’s won. Congratulations, you did it. And there is so much work that I’m excited to do, especially next year around this, around all of the narratives that we are told and that are placed on us as women that we think are serving us and are absolutely not. They’re absolutely just contributing to what we all say we are fucking trying to topple.
Okay. My last question for you, because I could talk to you for another 17 hours. What do successful women entrepreneurs know that the average entrepreneur does not?
Natalie Ellis:
They know how to focus. They know how to focus on the things that really move the needle and they are able and willing to say no to the things that aren’t that.
Tori Dunlap:
I think that’s great advice. Your book is a New York Times bestseller. Plug away, my friend. I’m so excited for people to read it.
Natalie Ellis:
Thank you. Yeah, I’m really proud of it. It’s called the Freedom Based Business Method. You can get it anywhere you get books. It is beautiful and pink and it looks so girly, but the information inside that book can and will change your life and business if you let it. I’m really, really proud of it. It’s very tactical. It’s very specific. There are multiple frameworks and as part of the book, you actually get an AI coach to walk you through it. So go grab it. It’s a really, really good book.
Tori Dunlap:
Amazing. Thanks for being here.
Natalie Ellis:
Thanks for having me.
Tori Dunlap:
Thank you for listening to Financial Feminists, produced by Her First $100K. If you love the show and want to keep supporting feminist media, please subscribe or follow us on your preferred podcasting platform or on YouTube. Your support helps us continue to bring this content to you for free. If you’re looking for resources, tools, and education, including all of the resources mentioned in this episode, head to herfirst100k.com/ffpod.
Tori Dunlap:
Thank you for listening to Financial Feminists, produced by Her First $100K. If you love the show and want to keep supporting feminist media, please subscribe or follow us on your preferred podcasting platform or on YouTube. Your support helps us continue to bring this content to you for free. If you’re looking for resources, tools, and education, including all of the resources mentioned in this episode, head to http://herfirst100k.com/ffpod.
Financial Feminist is hosted by me, Tori Dunlap. Produced by Ellice Ellis and Tamisha Grant. Audio and video engineering by Jonathan Kirk. Marketing and Operations by Karina Patel and Amanda Leffew. Special thanks to our team at Her First $100K, Masha Bakhmetyeva, Rae Wong, Daryl Ann Ingman, Meghan Walker, Marciella Baietto, Demi Ganim, Taylor Toll, Zoe Rezek and Stormy McBride. Promotional graphics by Mary Stratton, photography by Sarah Wolfe, and theme music by Jonah Cohen Sound. A huge thanks to the entire Her First 100K community for supporting our show.
Tori Dunlap
Tori Dunlap is an internationally-recognized money and career expert. After saving $100,000 at age 25, Tori quit her corporate job in marketing and founded Her First $100K to fight financial inequality by giving women actionable resources to better their money. She has helped over five million women negotiate salaries, pay off debt, build savings, and invest.
Tori’s work has been featured on Good Morning America, the New York Times, BBC, TIME, PEOPLE, CNN, New York Magazine, Forbes, CNBC, BuzzFeed, and more.
With a dedicated following of over 2.1 million on Instagram and 2.4 million on TikTok —and multiple instances of her story going viral—Tori’s unique take on financial advice has made her the go-to voice for ambitious millennial women. CNBC called Tori “the voice of financial confidence for women.”
An honors graduate of the University of Portland, Tori currently lives in Seattle, where she enjoys eating fried chicken, going to barre classes, and attempting to naturally work John Mulaney bits into conversation.
