Confidence in Business: It's Overcoming Imposter Syndrome by Embracing Vulnerability -10

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Melody [: 00:00:02

Hello, business human. Are you a misfit? A person who wants to make a difference in this business world. Are you one of the unconventional? The visionaries? The quiet innovators? The heart centered leaders? The purpose driven? The community builders? The givers? Then you are my people. I used to think business was a secret formula to be discovered and followed, but now I know it isn't a set of rules. It's an exciting creative adventure, and I wanna be on that adventure with you. I am your lady of business, Melody Edwards. Welcome to the Business Misfits podcast. Hello, BizFit.

Melody [: 00:00:46

It is I, Melody, your lady of business. And today, I'm talking to me. It's the end of season 1 already. I didn't even know that podcasts had seasons, but I guess if you're having them produced, they do, and that makes sense. So at the end of season 1, I wanted to make sure that I kind of introduced myself a little bit more, talked about how I got to where I am right now, and where I hope to go with all of this. And, really, a lot of it isn't different than some of what I've talked about in the podcast, but I think I just wanna go into a little bit more detail. And I'll try to keep it short and sweet. So first of all, I'm gonna ask the question that I ask all my guests.

Melody [: 00:01:28

Are you a business misfit, Melody? Why, yes, I am. Obviously, I'm a business misfit. That's why I came into the name Business Misfits. That's how I kind of discovered my people. It's a name that resonates with a lot of people who feel like that. The story is that 2 or 3 years ago, I was being coached by somebody, Matt Clark, who was a great coach. But I was complaining about the fact that I didn't feel like I fit into the home service business world. But, like, no matter how hard I tried, I wasn't visible.

Melody [: 00:02:05

This wasn't seen. I think you'll know what I mean when I say seen. It's not about a visual of me. It's about being seen as somebody who has information or thoughts that are valuable. That was not my audience. Even though I talk a lot about home service, that's because it's where I come from in my business journey, but they're not really fully my people. I think you've heard me say that a bunch in different episodes. And it's not because I don't love home service business owners.

Melody [: 00:02:35

I really do. I've given my heart and soul to the industry, but I realized over time that the kinds of people that I really wanted to focus my energy and attention on are really business misfits. People who don't quite fit into that mold, and especially people who are givers like me. People who wanna make a difference, maybe they don't understand that when they start in business, but it means something to them, this business world. And business isn't meant to mean something. When you look at it at its surface, it's meant to make you money if you do it right. And if that's the purpose, I definitely have not done it right most of my years in business, but that's because I focused so much the people and the giving and not enough the business sometimes. The other reason is because I tend to get really bored when businesses are systemized and running smoothly.

Melody [: 00:03:29

That's exactly when I tend to sell them and move on to the next thing. I love doing the hardest part of business, but not this time. With home service VA, my commitment is to take all of that experience, everything that I've done up till now, all of the wisdom of my 48 years. But take all that wisdom and put it into this business, put it into people who are my people. It really is very personal to me. Business is personal, and therefore, it's important that I invest my energy in people that are going to see me, that are going to hear me, and that understand that I have my experiences of value. That being said, I also wanna be hearing and seeing other people, not just people who have experience. But, you know, a lot of people who are newer in business are really great at seeing things in a new way.

Melody [: 00:04:26

And I really try to be open to newer people in business and their ideas and their thoughts because they don't have all of the pain and suffering that many of us have after our 20 or 30 years in business. So for me, the purpose of business is to make a difference to help people and to be okay with helping myself and my family as well. That's something that's been harder for me to adapt to. You know, when I was a little kid, my parents always tell me the story that they wanted me to be a missionary. I really do have the heart of a missionary. I just love giving to people, giving from a place of selflessness. Even saying that though, I have this other side of me who's like, you know, that's not selfless. You love giving.

Melody [: 00:05:16

It makes you happy and it makes you feel fulfilled. Well, of course, I wouldn't do it if I didn't make me feel good too. But you know what? It doesn't always make me feel good because I give a lot, and sometimes it hurts. Sometimes it's painful. And if I wasn't such an optimist with a bad memory, I would probably build a wall of protection around me so that I don't experience that pain over and over again. And yet, I think it's okay that I have because I always learn new lessons. I always learn things that I probably I wish that I could learn easier, but it takes me a while sometimes. And it's okay.

Melody [: 00:05:53

I wouldn't change anything on my life or business journey because it's all helped me to get to this moment right now. I talk a lot about imposter syndrome. It's one of the questions I ask all of our guests because it's the thing I've struggled with the most. It took me until this very year, you know, I was doing some Ketamine therapy, which if you don't know what it is, it is a drug therapy that kind of allows you to let go of everything else. Like, you're I don't even know how to describe it, but you don't have a body. You're just a brain, and you're so open to all ideas and all thoughts. So it's it could be dangerous if it was with the wrong person. Luckily, I found a fantastic therapist.

Melody [: 00:06:37

And they don't even really guide you. They just kind of keep you in the direction of your intentions. And it was during one of those sessions that I really shifted my mindset about if I deserved to be confident essentially. I kind of had looked at confidence as if that was the way that you knew. Like, once you feel confident, that's how you know that you know enough or that you have learned enough. And that's bullshit, obviously. That's something I made up at some point in my journey. But I think it has to do with just being sold to by overconfident people for a lot of years and believing people who are confident.

Melody [: 00:07:18

I don't think it's an accident that I grew up in charismatic churches that we tend to listen to people who are very charismatic, who say things with such great belief in what they're saying and in themselves that you can't help but believe them. I'm a cynical person, but I'm also not a cynical person. I wanna believe in in confident people. And over the years, I've learned that that is not the thing that makes somebody an expert, that makes somebody good at what they do. And in fact, I think many of us have been disappointed over and over again when we're sold. Things that we thought were gonna change something in our business world, in our regular life that only have led us to disappointments because I have bought so many things where I already knew the answers. I already had all of the information. They just made it sound so good.

Melody [: 00:08:09

And so in my journey with imposter syndrome, a lot of that has had to do with figuring out, am I good enough? Am I worthy of being listened to? Like, these are really heavy things, and the answer is yes. I have lived on this planet for 48 years, and I've learned a lot in that time. I started businesses when I was about 8 years old. I consider a business anything where you're doing a job that somebody has not created for you, but you've created for them, and they pay you money. My first one, I think, was dusting for a neighbor or unloading a dishwasher for another neighbor. Anyway, it was a dollar a pop, I believe. That was big money to me back at 8 years old. And I always had that entrepreneurial mindset.

Melody [: 00:08:59

I didn't understand how to make it a money-making venture because again, I tend to give away. I give a lot. And so sometimes it's giving my services for free, you know, not valuing my time. And that started when I was really young, and it continued up until these past few years. And, you know, when I started my current company, Home Service VA, I did not feel like I had any right to start that company. I felt like I was, like, the last person who should start a virtual assistant agency, and so we didn't. We started a virtual assistant recruiting company first because I knew, like, I'm good at hiring people. We were already helping people hire.

Melody [: 00:09:45

And my mentor, Kedma, had said, start this company. You can do this. My friend, Dave Mulcahy, had told me that and Jim Proscott. There are people in my life at that time who said, do it. Now they had nothing at stake, of course, so they weren't thinking about the deeper, more complicated parts of it. But sometimes you just need permission, and they gave me permission. And so I started it, and I've learned so much. We've worked with hundreds of people over the past 4 years.

Melody [: 00:10:14

And the thing that I learned the most was that I need to trust our systems, our way of doing things. All of the things that the frameworks that I've created, all of the systems that I've created, they're all very, very okay. I'm not gonna sound under confident now, but they're brilliant in their simplicity. People can easily do them, and they're not things that are well known. Like, I invented these things in my sparkly brain because I needed them, and they didn't exist. And so I've gifted those to our clients. And sometimes when you gift something, they don't take it seriously. They don't see the importance.

Melody [: 00:10:53

And also, sometimes you don't market it the right way. So it's really important how you label things. And when I say you, I really mean me. And that's been a struggle that I've had is how do I get people to understand this thing that's very valuable that we've created, get them to take it seriously. So it took me many years to build up the confidence to just say, hey. This is the system. You have to follow it. Here's why.

Melody [: 00:11:18

If you can't follow it, you can't work with us. I wish I had had the confidence upfront to talk like that, but the truth is I wouldn't have. Lot of the systems were streamlined and made better over the past 4 years. And so even though I had used some of these before, I've really, over the past 4 years, hundreds of clients, that's where I've really learned how to make it work for everybody. And, again, it goes back to the part where I don't regret any part of my business journey. I feel like every moment of this journey has had a purpose. And, man, some of it's been painful. Sometimes I've thought that people were friends.

Melody [: 00:12:00

I'm really quick to call people friends, and I mean it, only to find out that we weren't friends in business. That's one of the hardest things I think I've learned over and over again, and I don't like that lesson. There's just a lot of things that I've learned that I'm gonna try to get through because I'm trying to answer the questions, I ask people. But and I want you to understand why I'm doing all of these things, how I got to this place. People look at me now, I think, and they see a person who is very competent and seems to understand a lot of things about business. And I have to tell you, in a way, yes. Because I seek information, because I put myself in rooms with people who have a lot more knowledge than I do, and because I've had enough experience learning that there are best practices in business that don't actually align with my brain or how I should be doing business. And that's again comes back to that misfit idea.

Melody [: 00:13:04

When you hear people talking about, you have to do it this way, and then you try to do it that way and it doesn't work, you end up feeling like a failure. Really, we were never meant to do it that way. It's good to understand how people do things, but business is creative. It's fun. It's problem solving, and I wish there was a best practice for everything. But the truth is, best practices are in a way lazy. That's how I view it. They've been done over and over again.

Melody [: 00:13:35

And yes, they've been, like, made better technically, but I think about it like this. If we follow the recruiting methods that every other agency follows, we would basically be following what other people learned at other agencies and brought to their next agency and continue to kind of push into other agencies until everybody does it as a best practice when really, maybe it wasn't the best practice at all to begin with. I don't know. I tend to look at things a little differently. Part of that is because of my ADHD sparkly brain journey that I talk about a lot because I think it's important. I've been talking about it since I was 30. Oh, so that's what's 18 years now because I was diagnosed right at the end of 29, I think, age 29. And it really changed my life.

Melody [: 00:14:25

It just changed how I viewed myself. There's something about people who maybe are neurodivergent as millennials and all younger people say, there's something about our brains. Like we were made for creative thinking and for big thinking and for entrepreneurship and all sorts of things that are really not what we're focused on when we go to school. And so for some of us, it can be a real struggle, and it was for me being in school. I never felt good enough. I tried really, really hard, but I felt like I wasn't trying hard enough or else my grades would show it. Right? Because if you just work harder, then you'll be rewarded with success. And guess what, guys? That's not true.

Melody [: 00:15:10

Working hard does not equal success. It just means exhaustion, and your brain doesn't work as well. I think that, you know, they say work smarter, not harder. What they mean is that, like, we should be working in the place in our brain where the energy lives. So for me, it's creativity. It's problem solving. I can solve any problem in 2 seconds. People tend not to like that because, you know, most people have, like, a problem solving, like I don't know how to say it, but I'm imagining they have a linear way of problem solving.

Melody [: 00:15:47

So, you know, step 1, you do this, do that, etcetera. And I think of my brain and other people who have ADHD sparkly brain as having like, you know, your brain is a circle and we're coming out with ideas 360 degrees all at once. And it's overwhelming most of the time, but also it creates a lot of ideas. And then I think that the normal work world is not made for that. I'll talk about my first job that I ever had, a real job, corporate job. My only corporate job lasted 3 months. I was hired to be a gift coordinator, which is not a real job, I feel like, but they were trying it out. It was for a a skincare company, and their idea was that I would put together gifts for famous people and then help other departments basically.

Melody [: 00:16:44

But what I learned in that job is that you should not ask for more work all the time. You shouldn't say, hey, I'm done with this thing. What else do you got? Because that's how you get laid off from a job. So things like that, like my brain was not made to work maybe in a regular job because sometimes there's a lot of work and sometimes there's a little work. But as an entrepreneur, there's always a lot of work. There's always a lot of problems to be solved. It's like part of the joy of being an entrepreneur is you get to kind of create more problems and solve them. I think it's what drives my team most crazy about me is I'm always coming up with new ideas, new solutions, new problems to be solved, but I never want it to be my business to be reliant on me.

Melody [: 00:17:34

So I'm really careful to be only, at this point, the visionary, the person who comes up with ideas for my company. And then I have my vision strainer, Denise, who helps make sure that I don't overwhelm my company with all of my ideas because it's not fair to people and it overwhelms them, and it causes a lot of confusion is what we've learned. So anyway, back to kind of my story. I started with imposter syndrome, and I've gone off on a tangent. This is the sparkly brain, you guys. Let me talk about my strongest and weakest areas of business. So my strongest areas of business are anything to do with the operation of the business. The thing that we are doing, I always say, we're really bad at talking about the thing we do, but we're really good at doing the thing we do.

Melody [: 00:18:27

And a lot of companies are the opposite. They're really great at talking about the thing they do and really not great at what they do. And so what that has meant for my companies is that we grow very slowly. Because I've kind of been stuck in the mindset of like, oh, we just need to fix this one thing or make this part better. I'm a problem solver. And to really grow a company, you need to be all in on sales and marketing. And I just recently learned and implemented this into our company that there was somebody who's talked about his salespeople and his client customer service people. He keeps them separated.

Melody [: 00:19:08

They're in, like, separate silos, and their communication channels, in the information that they're getting from each other, He wants his salespeople to only be hearing all the good stuff. And I was like, oh, it's my problem. I've been hearing all of the things, you know, not that I do everything. I'm not a micromanager or a delegate. But naturally people tell me what's going on. And so when there's a problem, they might look for my input or something. Well, at this point, my team has got it. If they don't have it, like, it has to be a pretty big problem to come into my side of things.

Melody [: 00:19:44

But what I realized is I can't know that stuff anymore because I am in charge of sales and getting people to work with our company, and I have such great resistance to that part of it. That's why I'm kinda doing like, what I realized over the past 3 years of traveling a lot for business, going to trade shows, going to business events, and masterminds, and being around people who are growth minded. I've never had a problem being vulnerable in those groups, but it's also made people think maybe that I'm not as good at business as I am. Because I tend to talk about the pain points for me and not focus on all the good things. And I noticed over time that there's people who are when I'm in these groups, these masterminds, I'm hearing, like, all the problems that people have. But they don't talk about that out in the world, and it was the first time that I was like, oh. So people aren't always honest, I guess, in the same way. Like, I know it sounds dumb.

Melody [: 00:20:40

I honestly didn't understand the back end of how high-level businesspeople think, what they're actually producing, because the things they're talking about make it sound that, like, things are great all the time or that their problems are in the past. I used to do it this way, but then I learned this trick, and now we're 10xing our growth or whatever. That kind of language is what I tend to hear in sales. And again, remember, I tend to believe people when they speak confidently. And so having gone through the experience the past 3 years of learning some really high-level business ideas, understanding I don't know, meeting mentors, people that have literally changed my life by just hearing them speak or getting 5 minutes with them sometimes. It has changed my life, changed the way I view things sometimes. And also, a lot of times, I've just needed permission. I know people will say, don't wait for permission from other people.

Melody [: 00:21:43

Great. Yeah. But I need that validation, and I need that permission sometimes because those confident people confuse me. They make me think that I have to do it their way because I'm all or nothing. And to have them say to me, these are, like, the best practices for people who don't really understand business. Like, they just wanna do it the easy way. This is for them. Like, you have to have your own journey.

Melody [: 00:22:09

This is right for you. For instance, I'm in a mastermind right now, and they talk about niching down. That's something that a lot of marketing agencies and other businesses, they wanna niche down so that they're seen as the expert in one industry, whether it be so it's not home service. It would be like pool cleaners or outdoor restoration specialists. I don't know. And I've really struggled with that idea because I know home service very well. I've lived in it for 30 years, and those are not my people in general. I would say, like, 95% of home service, whatever the industry, are not my people.

Melody [: 00:22:49

My people are what I talk about at the beginning of every episode. You know, the purpose driven, the community builders, just like people who are trying to make a difference in this world through business and not just giving away, but, like, being able to have a business that you you're thinking about the ethics of what you do and that it's aligned with your values. That's not the norm for business. That's why I call it Business Misfits. So, yeah, most people are looking at niches. I was talking to somebody the other day, a coach that I had the pleasure of speaking with Ben. And he said, oh, Melody, you're niching by psychographic. Meaning, it's not about the industry, it's about the qualities.

Melody [: 00:23:36

Right? By him just saying that one word, psychographic, I know what that means, and it means it's a type of person. And I know that I've been searching for a type of person, but it kinda gives legitimacy to the idea that I will serve any person in any industry, but they have to have certain qualities. I wanna serve the givers of this world. I want to elevate their messages to make their lives easier because I understand what it means to be somebody who carries the weight of everything on your shoulders, who doesn't know how to ask for help, doesn't know how to delegate because we're givers. We give. We don't take. We don't get. I'm definitely generalizing here, of course.

Melody [: 00:24:24

But so, yeah, that's my weakest area of business. I was talking about being weak in sales and marketing, stronger in operations, in office, all systems, all that kind of stuff. But my goal for 2025 is to get really strong in sales and marketing. It's not that I don't know how organically, naturally I'm good at marketing and sales, but if it's aligned with my values, if it's not, if I feel like it's outside of that, I don't feel like I'm being authentic, and I don't ever wanna be one of those overly confident people. I wanna be overly confident because I know that I know. I wanna be overly confident because I've earned it, because I'm an expert at the thing that I do, which I am, and not just because I am faking it till I'm making it. So what do I wish I had known at the beginning of my business journey is a question I ask many people, and I really wish that I had understood about the overconfident thing. I wish I had understood that because of my background, because of who I am as a person, because of my tendency to give, I wish I'd understood the whole idea of givers, takers, and matchers back then.

Melody [: 00:25:45

That's an idea that Adam Grant came up with. I believe he's an organizational psychologist, and basically, he says there's 3 types of people. There are givers, they will just give away everything. They don't need anything in return. The giving is what makes them feel good. Those people are very rare. There are takers. They will do whatever it takes to get what they want, and they will take from whoever they can because it's easy for them.

Melody [: 00:26:13

And they burn a lot of bridges, but they're also tend to be charismatic, so they find new bridges to burn. And then there's the matchers. The matchers are the people who want an equitable relationship between giving and taking. So if you give them something, they'll expect to give in return. Or if you take something, they're gonna expect something in return. It's kind of like they want the justice of it. Like and so I'm definitely a giver. That's where I came up with the language when I first started talking about this.

Melody [: 00:26:47

I've talked about it a lot. I think home service is an industry of takers, and I have a reason behind that. I've talked about it on the podcast, but I think that a lot of people who come into home service come into it from a place of brokenness. Not saying that every other industry isn't similar, but we are people who have struggled in school, in life. Maybe we were told we were stupid, maybe we had abuse growing up. There's something in us that was broken, and maybe we aren't on the journey towards college. You know, some of us do go to college, but most people who ended up in home service up until more recently when it became more of a business venture for people, they came into it because they started as technicians. They started as somebody who maybe said nobody's gonna boss me around.

Melody [: 00:27:35

I can do this myself. I can do it better. And then they just kind of started a business from a technician's mindset. They built a job for themselves. I know that certainly is what happened for me. I started cleaning windows to make money for traveling through Europe, and then I just kept doing it for a decade, and then eventually I bought that company. But when I say company, that's a very generous word because it was really thousands of paper receipts, some paper calendars, and a van. So it was not a company.

Melody [: 00:28:06

But we had, you know, a book of work, and I was terrified. But But I knew how to clean windows, so I figured how hard could it be. But it took me a decade to figure out how systems work, how to manage employees, how to hire people properly. I had the old business, and the model was an albatross around my neck. So I had to figure things out the hardest way possible. I wish at the beginning of my journey, I had had a mindset that was not a technician's mindset. I wish I had just come in as a businessperson, but I didn't have the confidence to I kind of thought about business at that point still is like, well, you go to college to learn business. You don't just magically figure it out, or you started a service business.

Melody [: 00:28:53

And that's why a lot of people, especially women, will start cleaning companies because we know how to clean. And it's basically we're a technician, and then eventually, we run out of hours to be able to clean, and we have to hire somebody else to help, and that's a painful process. And for those who are really growth minded, it takes a lot of personal development and personal growth. And I mean, like, the emotional intelligence kind. It's not just learning business skills to continue on the journey until to become a better leader, to become a better business owner, to be better at people, to be better at systems, it stems from us internal stuff. And going back to the reason why I think a lot of home service businesses owners are broken, we take on these roles, and then people get stuck. They focus on the money. They focus on, am I making money? And they really focus on themselves a lot of times in business.

Melody [: 00:29:56

And, of course, that's where I focused at first. I needed to survive. I was a single mom at the time. But eventually, I realized this isn't filling me up, and it doesn't make me happy. And that's when I started created a community fund for my company. I did a lot of things to make it meaningful and purposeful for my clients, for my team, for me. And that was, like, probably about a decade ago that I really started diving into that. Most home service business owners and maybe most business owners in general, they don't get that far.

Melody [: 00:30:29

They get stuck in what they know, which is they understand how to do the thing. They don't always grow past that. And I'm actually really proud of myself because the statistics would be that I wouldn't have grown past that. There's no reason for me to have gone on the journey that I did in business, except that I think it's emotional intelligence. That I I don't mind saying. I have that, and I work on that, and I'm not perfect. You know, I don't have all of the skills, but it's like thinking about how I affect other people, why people act certain ways, and what they might be affected by. And there's a lot of things that go into that.

Melody [: 00:31:10

But just really, that's the thing that gets you to bigger places in business. In home service, the other thing is it's all men. The industries are led by guys. And if you look at my journey versus their journey, I'm definitely a misfit because I didn't get to, like, have a wife at home who was running the household while I did the work and said I'm doing this for the family. Man, do I know so many people with broken marriages because they kept saying I'm doing it for my family. The family never asked them to do it for them. And really, they're doing it because they're addicted to work. That's really what I think a lot of home service business owners have in common also is we might not be addicted to drugs and alcohol.

Melody [: 00:31:58

We're addicted to work. We will do anything to not think about our lives, all sorts of things. Yes. I'm generalizing, but I've had enough experience with enough people at this point, probably 1,000 over the last decades to understand the norms of the people in this industry. The exception, the weird exception is the cleaning industry, who I only started getting introduced to the past 2 years, which is very female dominated. And there's a lot of my people in that industry, so not surprisingly. Did I ever answer the question of what do I wish I had known? Yeah. I did.

Melody [: 00:32:39

It's to not listen to the overconfident, to understand that I'm a seeker. I wanna know all the things. And I always assume that at some point, I would stand on the hill of wisdom and have all the knowledge in my head and be able to say, and now I am wise. And that doesn't happen. And so I have all the knowledge that I need to know right now. I can't possibly learn anything else right now above what I've already learned because I need certain things for this part of my journey. And anything else, I can know it or I can learn it right now, but it's not gonna help me to grow because it's not the right time in my journey. So if you're in business and if you're a misfit, which hopefully, you would be listening because you are a misfit, I just wanna encourage you that there are a lot of misfits around you.

Melody [: 00:33:31

So why am I doing this podcast? What is my purpose of doing this, and where am I trying to go with all of this? Well, I've been waiting for somebody to do something for these misfits, and nobody was doing it, at least as far as I could tell in my world. And so enough people said, you just have to do it. So I I did it. I've done the first part, which is I've started the podcast. The second part is my Business Misfits group, which I will be starting up at the end of this year, beginning of next year. I don't wanna start anything until I'm sure of what I'm doing, and that's why. Imperfect action because otherwise, there will be no action taken. But I don't wanna start anything for that until I know that I can be consistent because it's really important to me that it's a good group, that it's a meaningful group, and that there's engagement.

Melody [: 00:34:27

Otherwise, what's the point? And my real goal is to gather as many misfits as I can so that we can take over the business world, so we can be the norm. Because regular business has had its time, and I'm so over it. And I think most of us are. It's our time to shine. And this is what the world actually needs. It needs people who care about people. It needs people who care about the ethics of business, about being inclusive, about building community. Like, these are all things that are important.

Melody [: 00:35:01

And so I wanna bring everybody on that journey with me. I love starting things. I do not like being the front leader on all of these things, but I wanna start something that is gonna be meaningful and create meaningful change in this world. And guess what? I'm very afraid of failing. I'm still doing it because I I know that this is what I've needed for a long time, and I I have so many friends who need something like this too. The second part of this is obviously, part of this is for my business. I have traveled for the past 3 years, and what I learned is that traveling to these events, I'm handpicking people that are my people. Right? I want people to come to me.

Melody [: 00:35:49

I don't wanna go to them anymore because it's a guessing game. I never know who my people are, and I want to just be in a place where it's natural that people would wanna do business with me. And the same for other misfits. Like, I wanna be in a group of like minded people that I can work with that I know are going to be giving it their best all the time. I don't want to do the churn and burn with I don't know if anybody's heard of that, but where people are very confident and then they get a lot of clients and then those clients leave and then they burn out. We don't want that here. The third thing that I'm working on that I will say out loud is I'm writing a book, and it's really about how to easily delegate and to work with your sparkly brain. And this is really for my people who have sparkly brains, which is probably most of my misfits because most entrepreneurs have that.

Melody [: 00:36:49

I don't expect that to be out in the next 1st 6 months of the year because there's a lot of work to be done on that, but I'm really excited to be writing it. And so those are the things that I am working towards in the year of 2025. That's the overview right now of what the Business Misfits is all about. A little bit about me, a lot about a lot of other people, and just building community and connection and no surface level connections. I want those deep diving connections as much as possible. Well, biz fit, I have to go watch my son wrestle, and this is a good stopping point. I hope that you learned a bit about me, about why I'm doing this, about the journey moving forward, about the misfit community that I wanna build. And if you are a misfit who wants to help me build that community, please reach out.

Melody [: 00:37:45

I need people to help me do this. I can't do this myself. I hope that you have a wonderful rest of your day. And go out in this world and do great things this week, and I will see you next week on the Business Misfits. Listen, Bisfit. If you believe in the mission of this podcast, I need you to like and subscribe right now. Pause this. Go find the podcast you might already be there, which is easy.

Melody [: 00:38:13

Just go like and subscribe. And if you really, really believe in it, and you want Bizfits to unite and change the whole business world, please rate it. Rating is the best way to get the word out to attract more like-minded misfits like you and me so that we can overthrow the takers of this world who currently dominate the business universe. Now I know I sound like I'm some courageous lady of business. I am not. I can't do this alone and I don't want to. I need you and we need a coalition of fellow Bisfits. So do it now.

Melody [: 00:38:44

The quicker we take action, the quicker we can change our business world. Now let's go do great things and I will see you next week.