Strategies for Sustainable Success

Man, did I love this conversation, and I think that you're really gonna love it too. Megan Huber, what a what a gem. She's a business realignment and client success strategist who helps establish $6.07, and 8 figure entrepreneurs design businesses that serve their lives, not the other way around.

She blends strategic clarity with spiritual grounding to create what she calls margin, financial, emotional, and energetic space for true freedom. God, that's speaking my language. Megan guides leaders to move from pressure driven success to peaceful, sustainable leadership.

When she's not coaching or training client success teams, you'll find her creating content for Built to Last podcast or connecting in her community inside the Structured Freedom Inc Facebook group, inspiring other leaders to build with intention.

Here is my new friend, Megan Huber. Hi. Hi, everyone, and welcome to the Power Up Your Life podcast. I'm Kelly Rezendes.

And I'm Mandy McAllister.

And we are so excited to have Megan Huber here with us, a dear friend, just to dig in and share a little bit about her background. So with that said, Megan, just go ahead and introduce yourself and a little bit of your story.

Thank you so much, ladies. I'm excited to be here. Let's see where this conversation goes. I know it's gonna be super rich for all of our listeners.

I am in the coaching and online education space, and I've been in this world since 2011. And I'm sure like most people, my business has evolved over the years, who I've served over the years has has changed. And most recently over the last four years, I really honed in on an expertise that I have been cultivating, to be honest with you, probably for the last twenty plus years because little secret, I was a high school teacher in my twenties. That was my very first career. And let me tell you, if you can run a a classroom of high school kids when you are literally three years older than they they are, you know how to run an education program with a group of adults.

So, my expertise, I really honed in on helping large scale coaching and education companies keep their clients longer, keep them happier, keep them paying, keep them staying, and optimize the lifetime value of the client. Right? Like, we spend so much time, effort, and energy, and money to get clients to acquire them. Let's put equal amount, if not more, on keeping those clients in the fold because it does not cost a lot to keep a client.

Yeah. No. Which is so important. So and I know you've been growing your business, and it's been one thing that you've been really creating a lot of clarity around. But what do you do? And what would you recommend when somebody feels really stuck? Maybe they feel overwhelmed. They have too many things going on. How do you manage it when you feel stuck and you wanna get to the next level?

Yeah. That's a really good question. And I think for so many of us, men and women that are super driven, you know, we're very purpose driven. We're also very results driven that I think it's very easy for our default to be, well, let's just go look at the business. Let's go look at what needs to change in my business. Maybe it's a tactic. Maybe maybe it's a strategy. Maybe it's a team member. Maybe it's a direction that we're going in or a business model thing or marketing or sales. And I think we're so quick to just, like, solve the problem with another business problem.

And, again, I think for women, we really have to look at, you know, we're also living a life, you know, I have a husband, so I have a partner. He also has a business, so we're under one roof twenty four hours a day. Some of us are moms or we're aunties or we're grandmas or we're godmothers. We have one daughter, so I don't know what it's like to have more than one, but one is good. We've got one who's a freshman in high school. And I also do a lot of things around the house. You know, the woman in the house, like, we're kind of the nurturers. We're the caretakers. We're the ones, like, keeping things together in the household. And for a for most of us, I'm saying most of us women, we're playing a lot of different roles and it's very dynamic.

And so I would encourage people to go back and take a look at you and your life and have another conversation with you and whoever is in your household. If you are if you have a partner, I would have this conversation with your partner and get clear on what your values are at your current stage and phase of life. Because I I actually think that they change over time. I can't say that as a 43 year old woman, that my values are the same as they were when I was 23. I'm just in a I wasn't married. I didn't have kids. I could work eighty hours a week. I was trying to prove myself. I had all the energy in the world. It's just changed.

And I think that we don't go back and have that conversation and take a look at that as we change the stage and phase of life we're in, we just keep going. We just keep grinding. We keep hustling. And I'm all about hard work. Like, I love it too, just as the as much as the next person does. But let's take a look at our values and let's realign with the values and then take a look at how do I want my life to go? What do I want my life to look like in the next few years?

And take it a step further. What is my ideal life actually going to cost me? Is it less in the future than it does now? Is it more? And what are those things? And then build the business, structure the business, the team, the business model, the structures, the departments around stage and phase of life now and the next five to ten years, and what our values are, not just mine, but my family's as well.

Oh, so good. Girlfriend.

I love everything about that. That's starting with values. Like, I'm a newly blended family. Last year, I got remarried, and now we're a family of five. And we we talked about what are our values, this newly formed group.

And I I think it's such an interesting straight line that we hear across so many, like, week to week these podcast interviews, is it starts with the decisions you make about your life if you want to scale a business in a really incredible way.

So, you know, one thing that you would talk about that I love the idea of this concept of creating margin. You know, define what you personally define margin to be, And then what's, like, the first actionable step that somebody might, take in order to create it? Margin in business or life or all the above? All of the things. Yeah. So

and I and look. I, I talk about, I usually talk about business so much, but lately the last few years, like really having this like life business conversation, I think is so important, especially for us women. And something that I have noticed about myself, this is something I've really had to work on.

So one of the things I think about when I think about margin is what am I what am I leaving available to my family at the end of the workday? And what I mean by that is, am I using up all my bandwidth, all my brain power, all of my capacity, all of my patience, all of my compassion, all of my nurturing in my Workday, social media, the team, getting things done, delivering to clients, to what degree is it all being used up in that space? Such that when I enter into when I walk through the doors of my office and I shut the door and the laptop stays in the office, I am turning into mom mode. I'm turning into wife mode because I will tell you, I have tried to wear the pants in the family. I have tried to be the boss of the family because I've I kind of am, like, wired that way.

I think for a lot of us women in business, like, we tend to be in our masculine a little bit more than we're in our feminine. Right? Like, we just let's just be honest. We are. And that doesn't work very well with your husband. It doesn't work very well with your kids. And there's a time and a place for it.

And what I noticed for so many years is I was frustrated with my husband or nitpicky with my husband or lashing out at my daughter or not really giving her what she needed because I had tapped everything out for the business. And it was like business first, social media first, family, you're like last on the list. And it's very easy to make ourselves think in our mind that while making money and producing and creating in the business and all those things, it actually trumps what's going on in my own household.

And so I think a big part of margin is, yes, it's time, but I actually think it's a little bit more important than time. I think it's like bandwidth and it's capacity and it's patience. Do I have margin in that category? And, and look, it's not just for the family. I think we've gotta have that in the business as well.

So what are all the things that I'm saying yes to? Because, you know, we all know, like we're all founders. We've all worked with a lot of founders and CEOs. So many of them, like, they're so successful, but they're still saying yes to so many things. And it's like, you don't even have the bandwidth or the capacity or the patience or the resources, quite frankly, to be saying yes to the 14 things you just said yes to that you know?

So I I like to think of margin less about, like, how much time do I have available and more about patience, compassion, bandwidth capacity, creativity, imagination. Like, am I tapping that out? Am I squelching it? Or am I creating margin for those things?

Wow. That's so good. I feel like you're talking to me right now. It's like literally right now.

So, you know, one of the things that you do brilliantly is really go into communities and then and help them improve retention when which makes all the difference in the world. Like, you shared, you know, we spend a lot of time on on attracting in new people.

What is the process that you really go through in order to help, you know, somebody with retention of the existing clients, of the existing community that they already have?

Yeah. So let's I kinda wanna sit on onboarding, for this conversation because there's so many there are a lot of things that go into retention. And then what I want anybody listening to this who is paying attention to retention is retention is something that's it's not like this really sexy thing where me or another retention specialist can come in and make you a million dollars overnight. Like, I'm not pressing a Facebook ads button. I'm not turning on some sort of funnel where you're going to get like 10,000 new leads onto your list overnight. Like, it's just not like the sexiest conversation that people are having about their business. So it is a bit more of a longer play.

I mean, you can make money fast because look, I know every founder, every CEO, every business owner is like, we want to make more money. We want to save more money and we want to spend less time. I understand that. There are ways that you can put some mechanisms in place so that within the first thirty, sixty, ninety days, yeah. Like you're gonna send people, you can upsell people, you could cross sell people and you could get your, you know, rally around and do referrals. We can do all that.

But where I always start with people in terms of what are we going to do first? What's the first place we need to look at when it comes to retention? Because retention, again, it's like a longer term play. And depending on how big your company is, sometimes the bigger the company is, the longer it takes to turn the ship around, the smaller the company is, we can probably turn the ship around just a little bit faster. So it just depends.

But retention, what I want everybody to understand is that you kind of make or break your retention during the onboarding period. And if if you're not gonna look at anything else in your company when it comes to retention, look at onboarding. And part of that is a psychological play. So your your customer or your client in their head, they're not necessarily telling you this, in their head psychologically, whether your program is three months, six months, twelve months, it doesn't matter. Whatever they sign a contract for. Like, just forget that for a second. They're making up their mind if they're going to stay or go anywhere between day zero and day 90 of being in your ecosystem. So some are making that decision as fast as, like, day one or day two. Like, first impressions are everything.

And what I want people to think differently about onboarding is onboarding is not just a single moment in time. It's not just an automated email. It's not just a, let's have a group onboarding call. It's not just a singular one time one on one onboarding call to make sure you understand how the program runs. You wanna look at onboarding like it is a whole entire event that has a beginning, it has a middle, and it has an end. And our role, whether it's you, the founder, has to do this or hopefully you have someone on your team who's doing this, we wanna get your your customers and your clients through a certain phase where we're acclimating them to your way of doing things, your system. Like, what do they need to know? What are the skills we need to equip them with? What are those initial quick wins in the first seven, fourteen, thirty, forty five, sixty days? Like, what are those quick wins?

Because if I'm here to work with you for a while, that big old transformation, that big old result, it might actually it might not happen until twelve months in. Like, look, if you've got a if you're teaching people how to, acquire storage facilities or if one of my clients teaches people how to acquire assisted living facilities, so either acquire them or you build one from scratch, You're that's typically I mean, unless you are like a rare bird and you find, like, a golden egg hidden somewhere, which is possible, you could do it in ninety days. But one or two of your students are actually gonna do that in ninety days. You are looking at twelve to eighteen months. So a student may not get the end result you're promising until twelve to eighteen months in.

So think about that for a minute. They're not gonna get the transformation to twelve to eighteen months. So what are we gonna do in the first thirty days? What are we doing in the first sixty to ninety days so that they don't drift, they don't fall off the face of the earth, they don't stop coming to calls, they don't stop participating. That's like, that's onboarding. Like we gotta get people to those first few quick wins and that they're not really done with onboarding until that's happened.

So how do we get them results? How do we help them build relationships? How do we help them get acclimated and involved with a community? Because you will see your customers and clients start to literally fall off the wagon. Like you don't even know where they are. And it can happen in in an organization within the first thirty days. And you're like, where did this person go? Everything they needed was right here. Like my treasure trove of stuff, it's all here. But I'm telling you, like, we all have like a PhD level at what we're leading people through. They are in kindergarten. When you think about it being related to like our expertise and we're trying to transmit that expertise over to them so they get the result, but they don't even know the first thing to do.

So it's really thinking through like, how do I get people on board and acclimated to the process, the system, like the habits, the behaviors, the community, so that they are getting quick wins, they feel seen and heard, they feel like they belong, they're engaging, they're participating because that client, even if it takes them twelve months to get the end result, guess what? They're gonna go sing your praises. They're gonna bring other people into the fold. They're gonna end up being your best student. They're gonna buy other things from you.

So onboarding is truly make or break because what we don't wanna do is make our team, when it's contracts are coming up for renewal, this is what a lot of business owners do. They turn certain team members into having to be Superman and be a hero and be a savior and swoop in and, like, convince people to buy again or buy something else. And to be honest with you, like, it's too it's way too late and you don't you shouldn't be putting that kind of pressure on your team in the first place. That the decision has already been made in a big way.

Oh, yeah. You know, the a couple things that you said are underlined by a couple of books. There's a there's a book called Sticky Churches.

Have you read this? It's a guy who built a megachurch not gonna get it. It's so good. A guy who built a megachurch had this idea that if I just shut the back door so that people aren't leaving, it doesn't matter how slow the trickle in because my congregation will grow if I just close the door on people leaving us. Right? And and small groups was a big piece of that.

And, you know, the idea of onboarding, you know, I'm a behavioral economist. And these guys, Chip and Dan Heath, have a book called, Thinking in Moments. People remember in in experiences the beginning, the end, and the peak. You know? So if you're screwing up the beginning, they're not gonna care. You know? You you gotta know that they're gonna remember the beginning.

Gosh. I love all of that, and I have so many notes written down, Megan. Thank you. I'm I'm curious, you know, because you work with all of these people and the nature of being an entrepreneur, we're out here kind of groping into the darkness. Right? And when things feel unclear and you don't know what to do next, you personally or any of your clients that you work with. What's something that you personally do or coach people to do when they don't feel clarity and they need to get to it?

That's a really good one. I mean, part of me think that part of me thinks that it kind of depends on the nature of the individual and really understanding because I mean, I'd be fascinated to hear, like, do the three of us get to a place of clarity in the exact same way? Or did the three of us even, like, get to clarity in a slightly different way? Like, that would actually be kinda cool.

I mean, I think for me, one of the ways that I'll tell you what I default to, and maybe this will help other people. So and I think a lot of women tend to do this where we default to, I've gotta go get validation by asking a whole lot of people, and I have a whole lot of people in my ear. And I see clients doing that, especially clients that have a lot of people around them. So clients of mine that have larger teams, one of their faults, I mean, I think it's a fault, is they bring too many people into the same conversation and they're getting too many people's opinions. And they're not necessarily getting the right people's opinions for what they're looking for.

And I have a tendency to you know, if I if I feel like I'm not clear about something, I almost have this default where it's like, I just wanna go find somebody who knows. I I don't wanna tell them my situation, and I just want them to tell me what to do. Like, I just want you to tell me so I don't have to, like, figure it out. And I think sometimes that comes from this place of, I don't wanna get it wrong, or am I doing it right?

And I think the first thing that I would tell people is remove that statement that you're telling yourself. Am I making the wrong decision, Or what is the right decision? Like, if we just say race, you can't make a wrong decision. And you also, like, let's just say, like, there's no right decision.

And I know for me personally, and I see that with a lot of people and I'm sure you ladies have probably experienced that. The the dominant thought sometimes for me is I'm afraid of making the wrong decision. What if I do this and it's not what God had planned for me? What if I do this and it's actually not in alignment? What if I do this and I'm not good at it? I think that's a big fear too for a lot of high achievers is what if I do it and I'm not the best at it like overnight? What are people gonna think about me?

So if the dominant kind of thought structure is around, am I making the right decision or the wrong decision? I think that's actually the first place for us to uncover. Is that running the show? And if so, we need to give you permission. There's no right answer. There's no wrong answer. Like you can't make a right or wrong decision. You just need to like decide from, you know, are you connecting with the Holy Spirit? Are you connecting with the universe? Are you journaling it out? Are you having a conversation with your spouse? I don't know. I think it's a little different for everybody. Like, can you hear from the Lord? Like, I don't hear him verbally, but like maybe I journal about it and I get clear. So I think we all kind of navigate that in different ways, but I would start with, you can't make a wrong or right decision. We've, that's a cloud. That's like a big dark cloud that's gonna Mhmm. Almost prevent you from being able to get clear and make a decision.

Yeah. That is so true. I don't know if that makes sense. Yeah. We all we all have so much inside of us. And when we really do just get still and listen instead of going out and and having other people make that decision for us, just I I think that's totally spot on. So what's something unconventional that you've done on your path to success that you could share with our listeners?

Well, I tend to be a little bit of a rule follower, probably to a fault. Okay. But I'll tell you something that I did unconventional. And I don't know that I was super aware of this at the time, but now I think it's a it was it was a brilliant decision for me that a lot of people don't do. So backing up, I started my coaching business in 2011. Honestly, out of you know, I was a high school teacher before. I thought I was gonna be on track to be a principal and then a superintendent. My principal was grooming me to go to a principal fellowship program to then become a principal, and then I natural progression would have been to be a superintendent. And when we had our daughter fifteen years ago, I didn't go back to the classroom. And so I'm home not being innovative or creative or leading anything except keeping a baby alive. And although I love being a mom, and to be honest, I love being a mom probably more now, I feel like I'm more of a natural older kid kind of mom than a younger kid kind of mom. It's why I taught high school. I started my first coaching business back then for those reasons. And, you know, I got to a certain place by 2013, and it was still, like, super early stage. I didn't know what I was doing. I'd never run a business before, and you're just out, like, trying to make it and trying to figure all this out. I had a mentor at the time that I actually stumbled upon her before she was a mentor of mine, and I applied to be an apprentice underneath her and basically support her in building out her next level of her company, which was essentially taking her entire body of work and turning it into a certification program and a business coaching training program. So I had no idea who she was when I applied for it, and I got it. I I got it. Like, a 150 people applied. Fast forward, I helped her do all that as an apprentice. There's no money exchange. We have a launch, two twelve people. This was back in 2013. 212 people joined the program. It was like a $10,000, $15,000 program. And she goes, I can't do this by myself. Megan, will you come work for me? And I started working for her part time, and then six months later, she kinda convinced me to work for her full time. And so I left my business, like, stopped doing it at all, 100% employee, right hand, ran everything, developed all the programs, ran everything, and built that company up to in three years, we went from low 7 figures to about 10,000,000 a year. What I think was so unconventional about that is I think one of the best things to do to learn how to build the type of business you wanna build is go work for somebody who's done it. Because when it's still in like its younger phase, right, which we were making, you know, high 7 figures, that's still like not super large. I mean, that's not that large, but you had to play every single role in the company. The only thing I didn't do was run Facebook ads and I was never like the finance person. But other than that, my hand touched everything. And I got to literally there was a period of time, this particular woman traveled a lot around the world. So six months out of the year, she was like traveling all over Europe and it was just the thing that she did. And there was then she'd come back and she'd be in the office. And I actually moved to California and I was in the office with her for about a year and a half. There was a period of time about four months and I'll never forget it where she had let go of her executive assistant And I was not the executive assistant, but I ended up literally working beside her in her office every single day for four months, eight hours a day. And to get into the mind of someone who grows that fast and believes anything is possible, never uttered a word of doubt to be in every hiring conversation, firing conversation, marketing conversation. I figured out what it took from a personal and a business and a team and a financial perspective to build a multi $7.08 figure coaching company online. And, again, like, in the back of it wasn't ever really in the back of my mind that that's what I was doing. But when I hindsight's twenty twenty, it's like, wow. If more people would just kinda let go of their ego and, you know, it's not like I've I mean, I was making she was paying me basically just as much as I was making in my business, plus I got to make extra money because I was coaching. At that time in my life and at that time in my business, it was the smartest, most brilliant move I could have made for myself because when I exited at the 2016, I knew what I was doing and I had confidence, and I wasn't, like, starting over. So I think a lot of people who kind of sit on the struggle bus for a really long time, like, what if you just went and worked for somebody and held a higher position and learned everything about what it means to run that type of company?

I love that. I I mean, I think too. There's there's so much wisdom in that, you know, and the stakes are lower. If you're working alongside someone taking that job rather than acquiring a business to learn, from scratch, which I might have done with a car wash and a motel a couple years ago, but that's that's beyond the scope of this conversation.

So many things have hit me, and I've I've taken notes, Megan. I love this idea of starting with your values and that you've gotta revisit them because they change over time. And I I I also love thinking through, like, what am I showing? What am I leaving? What am I leaving available? So thinking in bandwidth. Kelly, what was your favorite takeaway?

Yeah. I think for anybody growing a business, like, your onboarding is everything. And if you aren't making raving fans out of the gates, it's gonna be that much harder in the long run to get referrals and really just grow additional, you know, I would say just revenue alongside that client.

That was magic. And then, also, I think that that idea that sometimes you do have to give up your ego, take a step back, become an apprentice, work for free for a little while, and trust that, you know, every part of our journey is just learning and growing, and now you've been able to apply it.

So, Megan, one of the things that we always do in GoBundance Women is we wanna make sure that we support you. So what's one resource connection? Like, who's the avatar for your business? How can we support you?

Oh, that's that's awesome. What a offer. My avatar is 7 typically 7 and 8 figure, you know, mid 7 figures, mid 7 figures, so multi 8 figure coaching and online education companies that are, I'd say like a mid tier to high tier price point, who want to increase their retention and they want to keep their clients longer.

They want to spend less on their marketing and client acquisition costs. That is certainly the ideal client. So,

yeah, I mean Well, how do people get ahold of you?

The it's kinda funny. I sorta live on Facebook. And to be honest with you, like, I'm gonna respond faster on Facebook than anything. So I'm Megan j Huber on Facebook. I literally have my Facebook tab open every single day, on my computer at all times.

If you shoot me a message, like, come friend me, send me a message. Like, I'm pretty Johnny on the spot over there. I'm an introvert. So if you text me or call me, I'm screening you.

That's great. No. You have been an amazing guest today on the Power of Your Life podcast, and just so blessed to have you in my life and in my circle. So thank you so much for everyone listening in. Make sure you check out Megan j Hubert on Facebook. And if you have a community that needs to improve their retention and revenue, make sure that you check out her business as well.

So thank you so much, Megan, and we look forward to seeing you on the next Power Up Your Life podcast. Check out Power Up Your Life now for all of our resources that are gonna help you scale and grow your business. Thanks so much.

See you next time.