17. You Can’t Outsource What You Haven’t Owned

Hawaii was the first time Clifton and I had a proper vacation since 2019. It was summertime in 2023 and we'd just completed our work with several of our clients. And I got to experience what happens when you take a break from offering your Service. To be honest, I did not have capacity to handle clients as we were handling our own move and all the uncertainty. And it was a nice moment to exhale, reset, recalibrate my state and our relationship. The last few weeks had been a whirlwind of fight or flight figuring out all of our moving logistics.

We spent about a month in Hawaii and I got to experience what happens when you go into vacation mode. The word literally means, "vacating". What are people vacating when they go on vacation? Sometimes their job or real world responsibilities. Sometimes their family duties. If you are running your own business, you can stall and fall back into Self, too much relating or consumption mode if you are not creating. I see this pattern with a lot of our clients whose work depends on their presence, when they take time off, they are not moving the energy forward in their business, and it creates a start/stop energy.

For those looking to gain traction in their business, but traveling frequently and hitting snooze on their business, I would not recommend it. Or find a way to incorporate it into your lifestyle anywhere you go — as just an innate part of your beingness, creating and posting content, taking client calls or sales calls — until you have the proper systems that run without you being there all the time aka evergreen funnels or ads.

It was a much needed reset though. We spent time on some of the most gorgeous beaches I've been in my life, ate the most delicious poké and explored the adventurous terrain of the Big Island.

When we got back to California, I was excited to pick up my life and business and get back to work. Setting up our new space and making it conducive for us both working from home, arranging our furniture and unpacking and getting it ready to bring our cat, Mica, here.

I got back to my nursing work, facilitating IV Ketamine sessions 1 day a week, and Clifton was still working with the tax, legal, accounting firm. And we were consolidating our vision, which we do in Q3 every year around August/September.

We were getting reps in of recording our podcast and interviewing guests. And then doing the editing on our own. Adding video editing to the mix greatly increased the complexity, but it was the most multi-purpose, and with today's AI tools it was doable.

At this time, we got introduced by Clifton's tax, legal, accounting firm to an upcoming conference about future of work tech conference about how AI, tech, web3, blockchain will be influencing all industries.

We agreed to be a vendor and to set up an immersive wellness experience for the conference participants — a la what we had created at our conscious playshop events in Brooklyn and what we had been offering our clients when they came to us for our in-person in-home Wellness Studio nervous system reset experience.

This was certainly a quantum leap though. We got a 20' x 20' booth right at the front by the stage and we were like what are we going to do with all of this space? We started doing outreach to our recent and former clients to see who wanted to come be a vendor as part of our booth to showcase their projects. It was a good moment to showcase our venture studio, of mostly wellness projects.

Clifton had put together a whole ecosystem thesis for the projects we'd worked with as part of Faces of the Future. And it was great to have our clients and network of friends become a part of it and enjoy this conference together in Vegas. What we had invested in becoming a part of the conference had returned with a >10x ROI.

That fall and winter we launched a new program called the Quantum Executive and we began closing client after client after client. They were high performing leaders who ran companies that were doing about ~$1M a year and had teams of up to 40 people who worked for them. We were helping busy executives tap into their quantum potential and experience more states of joy, clarity and higher performance in all areas of their life, not just their business — to be the CEO of their Total Life of Joy.

The results here were again mixed. For those who were solid in their State, personal and business habits, when we did a "Self" upgrade that rippled into their business, and they had the proper systems to support it, they made quantum leaps! On the professional side landing major TV interviews, documentaries, book deals or scaling from $100K/month to $1M/month. And on the personal having breakthroughs on the family/legacy side with marriage and children.

And between our business and my nursing work, I was finally able to replace my previous nursing work income in New York. Most people are not willing to leave the safety and comfort of their job and put in a couple of years of work in to get to this point. I get it, it's not guaranteed, and is tied directly to your inputs and efforts.

Clifton left his role at the tax, legal, accounting firm and had taken on some projects in our venture studio to do capital readiness closer to his business school roots, to get the businesses and founders investment ready. And I'd joined for the founder performance coaching.

These experiences taught us, the same thing we learned in the other societal level projects we'd worked on prior. That in order to receive a sizable investment to become an industry leader with your quantum wellness tech:

• you must have the nervous system capacity to hold that vision: State

• you must step into the identity of a leader and CEO and executor, not just the visionary founder: Self

• you must have a product that is selling, Service, and your messaging must resonate with a specific avatar. You must choose a lane for your service, otherwise quantum wellness tech becomes too broad and abstract because it can help anyone and everyone

• you must have the proper Systems set up to have timely fulfillment, satisfied customers and more leads coming through in your pipeline and a team generating Sales;

• you must be a wise Steward of your time, energy, attention, money and team resource management within the business.

If you cannot and do not take responsibility and build the capacity for those things as a founder, then you will be capped at your current revenue and growth ceiling. It becomes extra nuanced with Quantum tech especially.

There is a piece I haven't spoken about yet, which is the 7th S, which is "Secret". It exists beyond Society, and it has to do with creating the proper intellectual property protection and boundaries around that which you are channeling and bringing forth into this dimension, and it must be done in the "Private Space". More on this soon.

Meanwhile, Clifton and I had began focusing on creating collaborator agreements because we received guidance about how to properly set up collaborations within the ecosystem we were building and what co-creating IP could look like. We created several energy exchange agreements to get that clarity and receive the necessary codes we needed. Because we knew what we were building would be a tokenized economy.

One of the energy exchanges we did was with a marketer who was going through a conscious awakening. The current state of our marketing was few and far between, other than posting little clips from our podcast every couple of weeks. We needed the marketing. He needed the coaching because he was rapidly shifting, was in a dysregulated State, trying to establish a new identity, Self, and his current Service, was begging for an upgrade. And we had set up a foundation, the Foundation for Human Potential to help fund scholarships for these types of cases.

He was doing DFY social media content. Through working with us, he embraced his Beingness Based Business and became a motivational speaker and coach around consciousness. He filmed us and helped us get more confident sharing our truth, filming us and posting it on our behalf. And he was trying to find a way to make our message more digestible and accessible to more people.

At that time, this was challenging for me. I had a hard time dipping into my old stories of pain and meeting people where they were at in their Point A. I didn't want to speak to their pain, I wanted to speak to their desired transformation in Point B. I couldn't find that relatability within me then, because I still felt like I knew and had experienced more than most had and forgot how to tie it back to where I had started from. This writing process and our 6S methodology has certainly been helping me.

I also didn't know if I was speaking to high performers who were already influential at the levels of Stewardship and Society and were going for a State and Self upgrade, or someone earlier on their journey going through a State and Self upgrade as a conscious awakening and is not fully anchored in their Service and Systems.

At this moment though I did not want to take responsibility or full ownership of our marketing and getting more leads in our pipeline and wanted to outsource whatever I could in the marketing department, whether it was our podcast editing or creating and posting content on behalf of us.

I wanted to create a system for content and outsource it before I even had complete clarity or ownership over the message. Or before I had basic requisite knowledge or literacy in this skillset. I just wanted someone to figure it out for me. A mindset I see many founders fall into, especially once they have the resources to hire someone, which we now did.

We tried to outsource marketing before we fully understood it, owned it, and could execute it ourselves — and when things broke, we had no foundation to fall back on.

Which is why one of my core beliefs now is you cannot outsource or delegate that which you have not taken responsibility for.

When an unfortunate chain of events happened, and we were not fortified on the acquisition side with sales and marketing systems, we crumbled and had to start all over. Because we built momentum without securing the system that sustained it: generating continuous demand.