In this videocast I chat to Amber Ludwig, founder of the multi-six-figure business No Guts No Glory Enterprises about being yourself in business, it’s not just more enjoyable, it’s actually good for your bottom line!
This is Mara Roberts. Today we are speaking about being yourself as a business owner and I think it is so important to enjoy business and be ourselves and let a little bit of personality in. I think being yourself in business is about so much more than enjoying what you do it is also about offering value to your customers, digging deep and offering them something real.
Today I’m delighted to introduce to you Amber Ludwig form No Guts No Glory Enterprises. Amber founded her business in 2007 to help authors, writers and speakers build their online presence.
I have been connected to Amber for a few months now and I absolutely love the personality that she shows in her emails and I just think that she displays her personality so well in business. Thank you so much for joining us Amber, would you like to take a moment to introduce yourself?
Amber: Thank you so much Mara. I really appreciate the offer, I love what you are up to and just for your support. You know, when we build our business online we want to know that we are making an impact and so like you mentioned I started my business back in 2007, it’s been wonderful. I started by offering website development and now we have built over 250 websites for clients around the world. My passion really started to grow as I was growing my own business online and I was really just interested in figuring out the trends and how social media should work and how email marketing should work and when I should launch my first product, it was this steep learning curve that every new business owner faces. And I just got excited by the challenge so I taught myself what I know – largely. As soon as I figured out how to get results with something that’s when I would teach it to my clients so my service list kept on expanding, now I have a team of nine people that work with me and my clients and we offer everything from copy writing to social media to product launches and number one bestseller campaigns on Amazon for books.
It’s exciting to me and that’s probably where my personality comes through because I just love what I do, I love the clients that we get to work with and my team is like my family so it’s just really been wonderful.
Mara: Wow, that’s just such an amazing journey, that’s incredible. As business owners some of us may have started our business to really change an industry or do what we love and we may have gotten to a point where we are really struggling to show our personality in our business and maybe we are not making decisions based on our values anymore. How do we check ourselves – that we are on track and how do we get back on track?
Amber: Well that’s a really good question. I would say that especially when you are building your business online there is a lot of temptation out there and there is a lot of comparison happening and when we are comparing ourselves to others that are more successful or more popular or whatever it is all of a sudden we shift our values like you mentioned or we start to focus on one thing instead of another. So there are a few things that I do to really stay on track with that.
Number one, I have a strong focus on personal development, really growing myself though a variety of different ways whether it be reading or writing, exercising, mediating and through that process what I am doing is really just tapping into who Amber really is and what I want for my life, what I am happy with and what I want to change in my life. And so by doing that I can always kind of come back to centre.
Another thing that I always do, I always look at my why. Why do I want to spend 40 hours a week or 80 hours a week or a million hours a week building my business online, what do I really want to get out of it? And the reason I am doing what I am doing is not to be the next Marie Forleo or Brendan Burchard or whomever the celebrity is at the time that we are tempted to compare ourselves with . It’s not even to make millions of dollars online. Why I do this is because I really want to help those that have a voice, those that have a message that they want to share with the world, I want to help them get that out because there is no greater feeling than having an impact on another person’s life and so if I ever find that I’m not fully myself of that I’m getting off track a little that I remember why I am doing this and that sort of roots me back in that reasoning and everything gets much easier at that point.
Mara: I can fully agree with that. And do you find that you are really adding value to what you are doing because you are being yourself and you are bringing your personality into it? Do you find that your customers can relate to you and build relationship with you?
Amber: Oh, absolutely. Let me put it this way, I don’t think that people can fully connect with you or fully want to buy with you or be loyal to you if you don’t have that authenticity. And that’s what I am all about; you have to authentically be fully you. If that means that you are crazy and hyper then be crazy and hyper and if that means that you are silly and corny then be silly and corny and if that means that you swear on all your videos then swear on all your videos because you are going to attract the exact clientele to you that matches that personality, that matches your wavelength I think. And so you almost have a responsibility to be authentic.
Now if you are not being authentic and you are not being fully you because you are afraid of it or because you are insecure or whatever it is, there are a million things that come up, I mean I think that that can really throw things off track because your message starts to get generalised and when you’re talking to everybody it doesn’t sink it, it doesn’t get to the heart of your target client. So I think you have to open up and be yourself if you are going to be in it long term, at least with this type of crowd!
Mara : I definitely find that when I am getting busy my bottom line is just to stop and remember why I and doing what I am doing and just to enjoy it and be yourself. I find it so refreshing and energising and comforting as a business owner.
Some business owners really think that they have to be professional and being professional is not showing off your personality or quirks and they try to give a professional image that they know everything and they know exactly what is going on all the time but how have you though your experience seen that being yourself and letting your personality through has actually benefitted your bottom line and grown your business?
Amber. That’s such a good question. As a leader the thing is that you have this natural tendency to be afraid of exposing the truth, of exposing yourself. It’s not necessarily that you are lying it’s just that you are not talking about it right? Because if you are vulnerable you may think that you are being weak and who wants to follow a weak leader? And I have to be honest, I’m telling you this from my own experience because there were absolutely times when something crazy would happen and I would feel like a fraud or an imposter and I wouldn’t want to talk about it because then I would feel like my audience would lose confidence in me.
But it’s actually not what happens and I have actually been testing this more and more over the past year where I fully opened up to my audience about some things that I was really uncomfortable about. For example, I am going to get specific with you here. I ran this summit called the Authentic Business Success Summit and I put all of my time and energy into it, I mean I put everything part of my soul into this summit but at the end of the day I had a loss and it really affected me, it was a financial loss, now the members got tonnes of value out of it, everyone said that it was the best thing since sliced bread packed practically, the problem was that I didn’t have enough marketing support and so I just couldn’t get the word out fast enough about it and so what that meant was that I was going to have about a $10, 000 to $15,000 financial loss on the project and that was really hard for me because it was maybe the first time in my business that I felt like I had failed or that I was defeated.
And I had a choice there I could have just kept that to myself but what ended up happening is that I told the world about it on podcast interviews, to my clients, inner circle coaching programs and it wasn’t like a poor me thing because actually what happened out of that I came up with a strategy to make that money back in a week. The next seven days after that happened I came up with a strategy to get myself out of it. So it became a lesson in mindset in strength and trusting yourself and your value and expertise and it’s a great story. So the point of that long answer there is that I think when you open up and are honest about things, I think yes, you do get vulnerable but people appreciate that because that’s when you can really make an impact, that’s when you can truly offer true help because we all have challenges, we all screw up we all make mistakes and we need to learn to overcome those so I think it’s important for a leader to do that.
Mara: Yeah that is so true I think especially when building trust with customers. I think they can see through things a lot easier that what we think so I think that really builds trust. It’s not often I think that people will come up with their faults up front and I think people really admire that in a business.
Amber: And it’s intuitive too right? We can just intuit that something is not right and we may not have another thought beyond that but we’ll just unsubscribe from that person’s list or not buy y their product because we do not feel that deep trust and connection.
So I love what you are doing here and what you are exposing about authenticity and how just being yourself can really just boost a business. I think more people need to hear this message so I am really glad that we are doing this today.
Mara: Amber, where can people find out more about you and what you are doing?
Amber: My primary website is amberludwig.com or you can just Google me, I am all over the first page. If you click on the about page you will see a list of all of my different websites and projects that I am working on just to get to know me. But I am very approachable so any time you want to say hi or ask a question I am here for you.
Mara: Well thank you so much for your time and for taking a few moments to talk about this topic. I really admire what you do and I have been connected to you now for a few months and I absorb every single word that you publish so thank you so much!
Amber: Thank Mara, I really appreciate it.
