On Stage at the Dallas Conference: Mentoring Through a Third Seven-Figure Year

Hiding vulnerability is not something that I do. One of my favorite moments at the Dallas Conference, which is a three-day all-inclusive event for my Path to 4% clients, is when I bring my mentor on stage for a deep dive into a reflection of the year. This was my third seven-figure year, and I've worked with my mentor for going on three years now, and we're diving into some of the biggest challenges and sticking points and obstacles that I faced this year. What I love about this panel, if you want to call it that, is I never have any idea what Will is going to ask me. So if you've ever wondered what feels hard for me, or just want to get a raw look at my scale and what I'm working on behind the scenes, this panel is going to be a perfect episode for you.

Hey y'all, I'm Taeler De Haes, a seven-figure business consultant and strategist for online fitness coaches wanting to build life-changing companies. Real talk, I wasn't an overnight success, and that would make for a pretty boring story. I was fired from my TV reporting career of a decade with just $825 to my name. In just two years, I built a seven-figure coaching business. Now I'm sharing my proven strategies with you. Oh, and we'll keep it real discussing mindset, money, and hardship to help you build the life of your dreams. So grab a cup of coffee and get cozy. Welcome to the Taeler De Haes podcast. I'm so glad you're here.

You all know what I am like working with you, but you don't know what I'm like as a client. So who knows? But seriously, there are some questions that I want to ask Will, and I know he has some questions for me. And so at the end, you guys are open to ask some questions as well, whether that is related to how Will mentors me, things that are crazy in my business, whatever. I just want this to be a really open experience, because I'm pretty vulnerable and this is not easy ever on any given day. Like, we were up until 1 o'clock in the morning doing some weird stuff for work with Mike, all hodgepodging — that's the reality of it. We're always working through problems.

And so this will be my third year next year working with you, and that's crazy. Thinking about how you were here at that first event when I was like, hey, we're going to do an event in 90 days. You cool with that? And you were like, yeah, OK, let's go. So it's a cool moment for me.

All right, so one thing we were chatting about yesterday that was brought up — I think it was multiple instances where there's just not a ton of trust in the industry right now. So with coaching, how are we navigating that moving into next year?

Yeah, I think anytime you're trying to navigate something, the first thing you should ask is: why? Why am I trying to navigate it? If I decide to go to the grocery store, it's pretty simple. I'm there to get something from the grocery store. Very easy to understand. But if I'm going to disrupt my workflow and go down this pathway of "why is the industry not trusting people and how am I going to solve it," well, first ask yourself: is it a problem for you? It might not be. Not everyone in this room is maybe experiencing that. You're still operating heavily off of word of mouth, and because of that word of mouth, you're getting the benefit of borrowed trust. But at a certain point of scale, you will face trust issues.

And you have to ask yourself, why am I facing these trust issues? There's an evaluation process that has to occur both inside your business, inside yourself, inside of the people around you. Are you in an echo chamber where people are reinforcing your ideas and you have a bias that's developed? Are you in a position of lacking self-awareness where you're saying, hey, I think everybody should trust me because I'm great? It's like, well, actually there's some weakness here, some opportunity for growth.

And so in the online space, if you were to go 10 years back — before everybody, it seems like, wanted to make money online — there was less Lambos. There was less 16-year-olds telling you they were experts at something. It doesn't mean the internet and people weren't making money online. What we're experiencing right now is the maturity of an industry. Every time there was gold out of California, the old saying was the people that really made money were selling the equipment — the mining axes. In this maturity curve of the online space, you have a lot of winners, but you also have a lot of people flocking to the opportunity that are hopeful that'll never make it.

And so the reason the trust is suffering is because we're reinforced so often to not experience trust. Have you ever read a headline of any news article anywhere? Even at the grocery store, every magazine cover, it starts off with "so-and-so has an affair." And whether or not you're consciously absorbing it, you're subconsciously absorbing it. So you see that enough, and now all of a sudden you're skeptical of your relationship. You see enough people that are 16 and drive a Lambo, and you start to doubt yourself. That stuff starts to creep in naturally.

So if the industry is shifting toward a place of not trusting anybody, you have to ask yourself: what would make me trustworthy? What would make me a positive force for change in the environment that I'm in? As maturity happens, sophistication has to follow. So you will either be differentiated as you — developing you — or you'll be the same. And if you're the same, then you'll have a really hard time competing in the market that is to come.

You want me to be spicier on this next one? Hey, so — I don't want a seven-figure business. I just want a lifestyle business.

OK. We had this conversation earlier. My answer is always, "it depends," and I hate that. I hate that it can't just be "here's one solution," but there is no one-size-fits-all. Otherwise we'd all wear the exact same size shoe. The really important thing to know with a lifestyle business is to ask yourself: what is it about the lifestyle business that you're trying to achieve? Because what you're really saying is, "oh, I don't need it to make a million dollars." OK — first step, evaluate. Is it a limiting belief that you have? Is it that you're trying to hedge against the risk of embarrassment? Are you saying it doesn't need to be a million-dollar business because, deep down, you don't believe you can make a million-dollar business? Really get critical in your thinking about what you're trying to achieve.

If you're saying, "hey, this is a temporary stage of my life where I just need to make money for the next two to three years, and then I expect something to change" — maybe an inheritance, whatever your circumstance — then "it depends" is because your circumstances are going to be different. But what I would tell you is that a million-dollar business is not a million dollars of income. Just because someone makes $3 million in revenue does not mean they personally have $3 million sitting in the bank. Are you thinking about the margin erosion that buys you the time freedom? Dan Martell talks about this concept of buying back your time — using money to get back your time.

So if you want a lifestyle business, ultimately you're going to sacrifice the margin in the business, because you're taking your labor contribution out. Which means you're going to have to either create automation and systems that overcome the labor requirement, or put labor in to replace you. And now your skill set isn't about how good you are at the labor — it's how good you are at inspiring someone else's labor. That's a massively different skill set. If you're going to build a lifestyle business, you still need to be an effective leader, an effective marketer. You still have to wear multiple hats, but you're going to need to think about it differently.

And it's totally OK if that's where you are. But I promise you, you should absolutely try to have a million-dollar business and then turn it into a lifestyle, because the amount of long-term wealth creation you can have when you get into that category can really change your life and give you the ability to make differentiated decisions. Sub-$1 million, you are always going to be reliant on whether or not that lifestyle business perpetuates. You don't have an asset — you have a vehicle. An asset is sellable. A vehicle is depreciating. And guess what? All of our human vessels are depreciating over time, right? Like my 700 milligrams of caffeine — eventually there's a repercussion to that.

So we were chatting last night about how a lot of coaches are struggling with something that's preventing them — it's getting in the way of actually figuring out what they're really good at. Say a client is struggling with a sales strategy. They're a solopreneur, but maybe in the future they're actually really great at leading a team; because they can't break through, they're not going to see that level.

So — who has traveled in a car for more than four hours? OK, everybody. Now, has anybody ever been stuck in traffic? Now, if I were to map out every single person's last four-hour journey on a graph, they were all four hours in length, because you all told me they're four hours. But what's interesting is you all hit points of friction at different points in that journey from point A to point B. You said, "I'm going to leave my house and go to the beach," and you decided to travel the four hours. But the person next to you didn't hit any traffic. They got there all four hours, no problem, no drama. Then you've got somebody that somehow flew from Australia in the same four hours.

And that person had to go to the airport, wait through security, sit on a bench while the plane pulled up. If she were in a car, that's experiencing a different set of friction. If she's in a plane and you're in a car, she's moving faster than you — but that's more expensive to move that way. So as you think about your continuum, your timeline, the trip that you're on as an entrepreneur, you have to remember that you're all leaving from different points of origin. And even if you all say "this is my destination," you're still going to have different points of bumper-to-bumper traffic that frustrate the hell out of you and make you want to quit.

If it's a sales process, well, you have to sell something to stay in business, so it happens really early on. First you have to market, then you can sell. I live in the middle of the city in Atlanta, so I could hit rush-hour traffic within the first two blocks of my house. If I'm already in traffic, I'm already frustrated, already getting the road rage. But if I hit the highway immediately and get traction and then hit a bunch of that, then I'm frustrated later. It just delays my frustration. It doesn't change the amount of frustration I have overall.

So comparing your journey to someone else's is just silly. It doesn't get you anywhere. It doesn't change the rush hour you're experiencing. It just distracts you from the road ahead. And too much distraction, and you're in an accident. Now look at how much derailment you had — instead of that four-hour trip, now it's a 24-hour trip. Now your car's busted and you have a new expense. So that journey is probably the easiest way I can explain that everyone learns at different speeds. Everyone has different aptitudes and skill sets. That's why the comparison, that's why getting frustrated at the stage you're at — I want you to sprint to that point of frustration so that you can afford to dwell in it long enough to make it through and grow. Because otherwise, you're going to take the easy button and go around it. You're going to detour, or skip over it. As soon as it gets tough, you're like, "I'm getting out of the car and walking." That's not going to help you. That's actually setting you back. You have to push through that burden.

How do you measure ROI — whether it's a mentor, an investment, anything outside of just monetary gains? I ask because a lot of the decisions I'm making with you, I'm taking a risk. And we know it's a great decision, but we don't always see immediate results.

I think ROI is interesting. Industry maturity has a lot to do with it. What I would say is: winners win in every market. Whether the market is down or up, it doesn't matter — they create a winning outcome for themselves. How much effort they put in is of course less when the market's good and more when it's bad. But if we think about it from that perspective, it's more about how do we turn someone into a winning person, a winning leader. Whether that's athletics or entrepreneurship or sales, you're trying to force development in someone. And when you're talking about a soft-service business like this, where you're trying to change someone's physique, or I'm trying to help you change the business, the pace is only what the pace can be. So an ROI directly on a balance sheet is a silly way of looking at it. It's a short-term way of looking, because what you're really saying is, "I don't believe in this investment," and now you start to challenge all the reasons why it can't work.

Ask yourself really simple questions. What was my life like before this? What is my life like now? How long has my life been like this? And is there a clear path for where my life is going? That's one of the reasons a mentor is so valuable. If they can get me unstuck in one of those moments, it could save me millions of dollars of income over time. So I don't really care how much it costs in the short term, because the big picture is still the big picture. I'm not on a four-hour journey — I'm on a 40-year journey. My perspective is way different.

Now, it would be one thing if it's egregious. If somebody's like, "it's going to be one hour for half a million dollars," well, that feels pretty egregious — how much value can I even squeeze out of that one hour? So there is a limitation. But for the most part, it's all contingent on the size and the vision you have for your life. If your life's goal is to help 10 million people, you can't sweat a million-dollar mistake, because 10 million people say otherwise. That's going to really challenge you. But if you're going to overcome that stuff, you can't be measuring in days and seconds and hours.

All right, so I kind of feel like we talked yesterday, but you're a curveball — I don't know what you're going to ask me. Over the last year, over 2024 to date, what do you think was the most surprising lesson you learned? It could be a positive surprise or a negative surprise.

I don't know if it was a surprise. We started out at the end of last year with a quarter-four intensive, and I knew this year was the year to just get really scrappy and push with paid traffic — to move a lot faster, to create a lead magnet start to finish, all automations in 72 hours, like you said. But more importantly, the team element was the biggest lesson that I'm still learning. For me to get to that next level, it really requires me to be a different leader. My leadership has been challenged a lot this year. Really making sure that when I delegate something, I'm letting my team do that — I'm not jumping in and doing it quickly. I'm giving my team a chance to shine.

And I'll say to Quantel and Mike who are in this room, love you both for being with me through learning those lessons, because it's a really cool moment to see that both of you are here. That's been a big shift. It's been so much less about revenue and so much more like, I've got really great people in my business, and my retention is high with team members. It's not just scale for the sake of scaling — that hasn't been it since I started working with you. But it's like, man, I can see myself really paying multiple team members six-figure salaries. That's now the mission. And it's all on me. Everything is your fault — you've always said that, and I know that too. Really changing my delivery and the way I position my team members to feel empowered so their vision comes to life with my vision simultaneously.

Do you remember the first vision you told me? I looked at that two months ago and laughed. Remember when I told you I would only risk 40% to go all in? I always do a risk evaluation with everybody I work with. I like to understand how much I can push somebody. We do this evaluation of how much time risk, financial risk, physical risk, emotional risk, and really plot that out. It's a hard exercise, because most of us don't take inventory of those things in a meaningful enough way to be able to push. And Taeler led with, "I have this financial destination," and that was it. Full stop. "I want to make this much money." Done.

So just to give you that lens: to see her now articulating "I want my vision to be so big that others can be in it and be inspired by it" — there's no money mention. That was my goal three years ago, to help Taeler get to a place where she realized that the money is only a byproduct of excellence. In your particular case, you've always been an executor. You've always been really talented, worked hard, been fast-paced. Those were never things I had to coach you on. It was always saying, hey, I promise if you let yourself be vulnerable enough to have a team, to trust a team, then beautiful things can happen — and they can open you up to way cooler things than you could imagine when you're just looking at the money side of it.

At no one's fault other than my own, back in 2021 I was very lost in a lot of different areas. That was the year of weight loss resistance, the year my business was really growing — my fitness coaching company hit over half a million that year, and I started business coaching. But I didn't feel like me. I was just chasing dollars, and the mentors I was around, that's all they were pushing, because that's how they're measured. So I hit the mark, and I was like, this sucks. I knew I had more in me. But I remember thinking, "he's not going to work with me if I'm not making money, I'm the baby client." So, money, let's go.

We should pull up that contract you made me sign. Where, if I have a hard day, I have to go back and look at it — the fake contract. We had the charity contract too, where if Taeler didn't do what she was supposed to do, she had to donate to charity. There's a lot of accountability there. Those exercises change the relationship. And that goes all the way back to the trust conversation. One of the reasons trust is an issue is because a lot of times there isn't heart-centered mentorship — because heart-centered mentorship isn't always profitable. Or we say that. Of course we use the buzzwords because it's appealing. But there's a lot of online coaches who are just like, "I learned one trick, and it works right now." It's the flavor of the month, and I'm going to sell it to as many people until that flavor's stale. And I think that's OK — to have a one trick, as long as you're being authentic and saying, "I only have this one trick, you should come learn it from me." But you don't need six years of revenue for one trick. That's part of the reason the trust is damaged.

OK, well, my next thing is — what does fear mean to you?

The more simplistic the word, the more complex the meaning. Too much context traps the word into a specific meaning. In the case of fear, I've had the fortune to see you go headfirst into some fear. But the reason I ask what fear really means to you is because there are different decision points — personally, professionally — that you might be afraid of. So how do you acknowledge whether it's fear or whether it's just uncertainty? How do you navigate those emotions before you make the decision itself?

Based on how my body responds, I can typically tell fear versus uncertainty. Fear happens to me when I reach a point — and it's usually around decisions. Even though I still make them, it's, "am I making the right one?" Because there isn't just one way up. You and I might say, "here's the path, let's run it," no guarantees. But there are certain decisions I've made going into 2025 that may not be the most profitable, which is scary. But they're decisions I want to make because they're important to me. I'm at a level in my business now where I'm OK if the revenue plateaus, because I want to follow my gut that tells me that's really important right now.

So fear is just that moment where you're once again challenged with leadership. Any time fear has crept up this year, it's always been around that leadership point where I have to come back and say, OK, what do I need to do? What is real? What is fake? I have to figure out what I'm making a bigger deal of than it actually is, because everything is a big deal to me. I don't know if there's ever really uncertainty — it's typically just, OK, I know I want to do this, I need to trust myself. Fear to me is that level where I'm kind of like, this is new territory. And I'm going to trust myself to take that leap, because every time I've done that, I've won.

What's an example of that this year? Sales team expansion — putting more responsibility in Mike's hands. I was terrified to add one more coach to FCA for fear of the quality suffering, let alone a second one a month ago. I am very hands-on with my clients. Building something like FCA, I don't want to be one of those coaches where somebody says, "oh yeah, I joined, and I never talked to Taeler." That was a fear. So making sure that was the right decision — I didn't know, but I was like, I'm going to test it out. And then, at the beginning of this year, kind of blindly trusting you with ad spend. I was like, "I'm sorry, how much a day? You want to do what with what?" This has been the scariest year in business ever. Ten out of ten would recommend. It's like a roller coaster that's the tallest one ever, and you're like, "let's do it again. Oh, no. Let's do it again. Oh, no." That's been every week this year.

I don't know how I got this reputation for the deadlines. So over the last year, expanding your team — what do you think you're doing to set your team up for success that helps you be less fearful of making a hiring decision? Is there an interview process, an SOP, something that makes you feel more comfortable moving forward to protect the performance?

Admittedly, I've taken different approaches for each. FCA I've kept in-house intentionally, because there's just high trust there. In terms of sales, we were winging it in the beginning and are developing that. I remember it was the last day of November, and you said, "hire two people in 30 days." And I said, "but it's December, Christmas is a thing." We did it, but it was chaotic. Every person I've hired that didn't work out — like the setters we were testing in the beginning of the year — we were just able to develop better SOPs, better training. It's never been a loss. If I don't make mistakes, I don't get better.

But there's something you're not really saying: every single hire, you're improving all your processes, all your hiring techniques. How much time are you spending on that in order to get better hires every time? Most people, when they're winging it, it doesn't mean "here's a bunch of SOPs and a 90-day start guide." Winging it, in a normal environment, would be: I need a setter, so I'm going to post a story on my Instagram and hope for the best. And then the compensation, I'm going to make it up. And then they're going to be in the business, and they're not going to work, and I'm going to be frustrated. That's the normal path. So talk about what you do do.

With sales, it's definitely a team effort. There's always an interview process that strictly is like — video sent to us first. I want to see if they pass a simple video test. Most recently, I personally added a skill-set test, which was scary. I did it in my actual Instagram with the first hire. And then I was like, hey, Taeler, maybe don't give your Instagram password to a random person for a test. So that was the winging it. But I started doing more critical thinking with setters, because one struggle I found — which is why I started training and placing setters for clients — was a lack of critical thinking, which is across the board. I developed a framework where I'll pick a few office hours of mine and/or podcast episodes, and then ask certain questions they have to answer as if they were me. Can they use the podcast to get me the right answers? Between the three rounds of interviews, Quantel is doing onboarding, so I'm removed from that. This year was about, can I remove myself from part of that too?

For the benefit of the room — why do you think I'm giving you all these deadlines? The way I'm communicating these tight deadlines — 72 hours, 30 days — do you think I'm making those up? Why do you think those are the deadlines? Because you know I can do it, and we're trying to increase momentum. When I asked her for 72 hours, it used to be that lead magnets would come once a quarter. And it's really hard to test the market once every quarter. So if you give her two weeks, she'll take two weeks. But if you say 72, she'll say OK.

Most of the time, we set our own constraints. We pick the amount of time it's supposed to take based on our own personal experience, our own skill and judgment. So — who in here bakes? How long does it take to bake a carrot cake, and at what temperature? A lot of no ideas. A lot of the bakers were like, "I have no clue." What's interesting is you have bakers with a lot of experience, and they have no idea. And then somebody was like, "you know what, I'm just going to shoot for it," and she picked pretty much the most average duration with the most average temperature. Chicken nuggets are good there. Pizza's good there. But I applaud you, because you picked. You were decisive. Whereas everybody else was kind of just sitting there, stuck.

And listen — would that cake have been as good if you winged it? You basically hedged and said, "it won't kill me," and now you can bake it. But while everyone else is still figuring out if they're going to bake a cake, you already know the temperature and how to create forward momentum. So by creating these time-pressure scenarios for Taeler — she's already a super hard worker, super fast — what I was doing was simulating an environment where she had to delegate. She could not do the work herself because she's too busy. If I cram it down to 72 hours, then she can't do it herself anymore, because she has a tendency to want to jump in.

Anybody else like that? Any control freaks in here? So I'm speaking to y'all through Taeler: if you're a control freak, you have to learn the skill of being able to share the workload and let that person get that lesson, even if they're not as good at it as you. The goal is that you're such a good leader that they become better than you at that thing. They don't start that way — otherwise you're going to pay them a ton of money, and it's not going to make sense for you. So it's better to not pay them a ton of money and mentor them up. And then they can be paid a ton of money, because you're also making a multiple return on that.

Any questions? [Audience] When you bring somebody in, you mentor them up, they're growing with you — but you start struggling with a team member. You have end-of-day reports in place, and they're doing things in a timely manner, but little things keep popping up. What are the self-leadership checks and self-awareness questions? Because I'm personally struggling with this, but I know everybody else will probably struggle with it at some point of: are they the problem, or am I the problem, or are we both the problem? What did I miss along the way? Because I'm not going to assume that I'm not the problem. I'm going to assume I'm the problem.

As entrepreneurs, we are always the problem. And that's not a shame scenario — that's just the reality of, we chose to hire these people. So if they're making mistakes, that was our hire. Now, in the particular case you're talking about, direct feedback with new leaders becomes an emotional experience quickly. As a new leader, the first thing I would say is there's a book called Crucial Conversations. That book helps you identify when you're entering into a crucial conversation. Everyone has different sensitivities — environmental factors, geographical factors. As you're getting to know someone, they will have different crucial conversations that trigger them emotionally and shut them down from being able to logically think. As a leader, our job is to evaluate that environment and set the conversation up for success by making sure we're not creating a defensive environment, because then they can't learn.

What role are we talking about? [Audience] My administrative assistant — she does a little bit of everything. Where is she from? That's important for context. [Audience] She's in the Philippines. She works on my time zone. Do you think that's a sacrifice or not, that they work on your time zone? For her, it's definitely a sacrifice. How much do you know about Filipino culture? [Audience] A little bit, but not a ton. I know her family is very important to her, so we talk a lot about her family. There've been scenarios where they have an event and she communicates with me, "hey, can I flex my hours these days?" And I'm like, absolutely — if there's work you need to do and you don't need my eyes on it, get it done in the window that suits you so you can be present for your family.

I'm going to create a cultural generalization for the purposes of education, not judgment. If I say "Filipinos" and put in a blank, it's going to be wrong. But what I'm trying to illustrate is that in the Philippines, it is a fairly normal thing to be paid 13 months instead of 12. At the end of the year, they get a bonus month for all the hard work, based on the average salary over that 12-month period. That's a cultural nuance that's important to know if you're hiring people in the Philippines. They won't expect it, because you're American, and they expect Americans — I'll do a generalization — to not give a damn about their culture. We want everyone to speak English because it's convenient for us. We want them to work in our time zone because it's convenient for us. Well — what if we inconvenienced ourselves? Would that be a better leadership trait?

So the first thing I would say is get to know the culture a little deeper. That will allow you to connect and disarm some of the emotional context. The next piece is: always update the process before the person. In my particular case, with my assistant, I have a 120-page document that documents what side of the airplane I like to sit on, what row I prefer, that I don't check bags, that I do direct flights only — all of those nitty-gritty details. The reason I do that is so we don't make mistakes. But if a mistake is made, it's not their fault unless it's literally documented in the guide and they still didn't execute against it. And if I notice a variance that starts to happen over time, I'm going to first update the guide, update the SOP, update the communication around that, before I even go to the person.

So let's give this person a name — Jackie. In Jackie's case, you could say, "Hey Jackie, I've noticed a couple of things that varied from the normal process. I went back to read the process, and I think it's a little unclear, so I decided to update it. Would you give me some feedback and make sure we're on the same page about how this is supposed to be executed in the future?" You see how much better that communication is? It's very clear as to what you're trying to achieve. It's respecting the person. It's taking accountability as a leader — "hey, this was on me, let me update this" — instead of, "hey, you messed that up." Nobody likes that. And if that doesn't work, then you could have a bias where you think it's detailed but it isn't actually that detailed, because there's a language barrier. So you go back and say, "hey, what's your interpretation of this? Could I just watch over your shoulder as you do this? I don't want to micromanage you, but I think we're missing each other somewhere, and I want to update the documentation to help you."

So step one, learn the culture. Step two, update your documentation. Step three, if performance doesn't change, then it might be the definition of the role and/or the compensation of the role — and finally, the person. I try to go through those things as fast as I can, because I want to fire that person quick. Not because of any malice, but I want to get through those things and make sure — because there've been so many instances in my career where I've had great talent and mismanaged them. That's a huge part of the learning curve. It's OK to keep talent while you're learning. But once you get really good at it, you don't want to keep talent that's not performing for very long.

[Audience — Meg] A lot of the women I've spoken with here have talked about how they want to host an event, and I just hosted my event. I was wondering if you could share and sum up some of your big key pointers to hosting a really epic event.

Let me get clarity. This was your fifth one, but this one was the biggest? How many were there this year? [Meg] We had over 50 winners. So first, it was figuring out what kind of environment I wanted to give them — what unique experience I wanted you all to leave with. It does nothing for me to just bring you in a room, say we did it, take photos, and get out.

Let me ask you this. What was the original vision for your event, and what is the vision for it as it's growing? [Meg] My first event, I just wanted to get anyone and everyone there, so I opened it up to the public. But this last event, I wanted to narrow it down — make sure it's the right people. I wanted everyone to leave blessed with that positive energy, bringing culture together.

If you had to explain your culture, what is it? Explain it to me. [Meg] It would definitely be positive energy. I would say really dive deeper into a mindset — a lot about social beliefs and fear and doubts, and being able to overcome the obstacles we're facing, knowing they have everything in them, they don't need anything externally.

Can I challenge you a little bit? If I didn't know you, I wouldn't know if you were talking about a retreat in Bali. Are we sitting on bean bags? Is this life coaching, fitness? That's what I want to get clear on. I know your ideal client, but what is the outcome of this event? What is the point A and point B? [Meg] I think a lot of it is community awareness. Are you wanting to eventually grow that into a public event? [Meg] I think definitely growing it, being presenters, opening up to the public.

Two questions, and I'll have Will chime in. How big do you want to take this with just your client community? And what was something that was missing — because you're asking, how do I make the event better? What does better mean? [Meg] I don't necessarily think anything is missing. I just think there's always room to grow. But I guess also knowing if I want to pivot to more of a private space — maybe more profitable, more engagement, and not so big a money challenge.

Give me the name of the event and what I, as maybe not your ideal person, would be experiencing if I attend, in a concise way. [Meg] We call it our Positive Fit event. I do it every year, and it's all about growing community for the women searching for diversity, or local women that are really interested in our community. So the people who fly in — we had 14 girls fly in this year. I coordinated Airbnb, and we had activities for the weekend. But the main event is just one day, about three hours. It was definitely very mental-health focused. I had one of my coaches do a meditation, we did mini vision boards, self-development chats. It's very much an empowerment-style event day. And what does it cost to be there? [Meg] Per client, the event itself was $40.

Would you spend a whole day there? Emotions aside — not attacking anybody — it might be a detriment. So that is the piece. The lesson is: when you're thinking about an event, you already have an active, engaged audience that's going to these events. So if you're making the decision, do I go public or stay private — if you stay private, you're good to go. You've got it figured out, and now you just need to figure out, do I want to take this same private audience and make it more profitable, more intimate. Those are decisions you'll make along the way.

If you decide to make it public, you need to convince her that she needs to go to your event. And she was not convinced that the flight would be worth it, which means the communication around it isn't good enough yet to appeal to those people. That's not an attack — it's very direct feedback. If you're going to privatize it, all good. Capture testimonials during the event; that's helpful. When you're explaining something like that, create that elevator pitch for your event. Because if I asked anyone in this room, "what happened at your event," they'd be like, "I don't really know what the purpose is." I hear community and fluffy words, but I don't know how I'm supposed to feel or what I'm going to learn. The more excited you are, the more excited I'm going to get. And your clients are going to go — you said we're having a sleepover in a tent? Yeah, I'm in.

When you're doing these intimate events, you should be marketing them on your platform to create FOMO. I would stay private right now before I took it public. Because if you take an event public, it really consumes the whole year — trying to plan it and market it. It's really expensive, and it's going to distract you from what I know you want to do next. So now it's, how do I create FOMO where I'm not just waiting until a month before to have a countdown timer, but talking about that event every month throughout the year? When you're part of this community, you're coming here — this is what we do, this is different.

When we're budgeting public events, we typically budget $1,000 a person for a public event — and that's cost. So a 500-person event, the cost starts to taper. But last year, we had a quarter-million-dollar event. That's speaker fees, venue, food, hotel blocking — it adds up fast. That's why I always challenge really hard on people that are like, "should I take this event public?" It is a beast of a workload, because to create a really good experience, it's a lot of work — way more work. And to do it privately, there's even a little more grace for things that might happen that you didn't plan. Like me flying off and going off on a tangent. That's on brand.

I want to give you a virtual high five for finishing another episode of the Taeler De Haes podcast. Love the episode? Share it and tag me on Instagram. Have a question? My DMs are always open. Until next time — bye y'all.