19. The Fires, the Framework, and Finding My Voice
We ended 2024 on the right track. Though a wild year and transformative year it was. It became more important than ever to keep up with Marketing, as I'd taken a couple of years off of social media, it was time to catch up to what everybody else knew. I realized sales and marketing was nothing more than building habits for your business.
How many times you post per day or week is a habit. How many outreach messages you send is a habit, how many sales calls you have per week is a habit. In business, they're called KPIs (Key Performance Indicators), but when you boil it down, it what it really is is what habits are you doing in your business? How often are you doing each action? And then it becomes how effective is each action you're doing. In terms of feedback from the market in your content, and on sales calls, how many of those calls can you convert into paid clients? To see how healthy a business is, you look at what story these habits or KPIs is telling us from the numbers.
And just as we were just about to hit a steady groove, all of a sudden massive fires erupt all over Los Angeles, right around us in the Pacific Palisades, Malibu and neighboring parts of Topanga Canyon closer to the Ocean.
I was finishing up facilitating a Ketamine session when I got texts from concerned friends and Clifton about fires breaking out around us that they could see all the way from Venice Beach. I thought it was far enough from us, and I'd gotten accustomed to fires springing up around us over the 5 years I'd been living in LA at that point, and had even evacuated once before.
But this was different. It was high speed winds and it was spreading fast. At this point an entire neighborhood in the Palisades had completely burnt down. I drove home and Clifton and I quickly hiked up our usual hike and were able to see the flames coming over the ridge by the waterfront. It was getting closer and with the high speed winds, we were getting the feeling that we'd have to evacuate too.
We were going to stay put unless the power and internet went out. And surely it did to prevent further electrical fires with the power lines. Luckily we had some kind friends reach out to us and offer places to stay. We packed up our essentials and everything we could fit in 1 car and grabbed our recently spayed kittens, still wearing their cones, and made the drive to Venice.
The local Topanga WhatsApp groups flooded with messages firing, about 300 messages per minute, with fire updates and concerned locals asking about their homes, loved ones, pets, and those who stayed back spotting ember fires and putting them out or notifying the fire department. It was easy for urgent messages to get lost in this chaos. It was easy to get sucked in reading all of the messages of panic, and of course there was the personal curiosity of has it spread to my zone?
And I had friends and family messaging me, checking in from all over the world because the small town of Topanga had made international headlines even.
By the second day, our zone was still safe, so Clifton and I made a second trip sneaking in through the back routes of the canyon to get some additional belongings and check on our house.
By the end of the 2nd day, Clifton had done what he does best, he started organizing a spreadsheet that was being circulated around the WhatsApp group for mutual aid. I saw him getting to work being of Service and I knew I had a choice to step in and get involved or otherwise just focus on scrolling news, headlines and the Watch Duty Fire App and get lost in the fight or flight. I chose to help.
He posted a question in one of the WhatsApp groups to see if anyone was working on a solution to compile and verify firespotting activity. Several people in the thread chimed in and before you know it, a focus group was formed. This group had various backgrounds from tech, to communications, to nonprofit operations to emergency response to acute care leadership (me).
Before I knew it I was leading twice a day standup meetings with this group to organize and build a solution. We landed on something simple, a WhatsApp Community, where you can migrate other existing WhatsApp groups (many new ones were spinning off every couple of minutes in response to the emergency) into it and create separate groups within it to organize the conversation threads. And so TopangaSAFE — Safety Awareness for Everyone — was born.
The groups we created were Zone chats based on the community's evacuation zones, 1-way threads for urgent announcements and fire updates, and 2-way communications for non-urgent announcements, pet and livestock evacuation, propane safety for turning off propane tanks, and then propane delivery and resource delivery to the residents who had decided to stay back and volunteer with putting out ember fires, alongside the brigades and fire department.
And we were liasoning with a group that had formed a headquarters at the local Starbucks just outside the canyon for resource and donation drop off and deliveries.
I was recruiting and offering brief training to people becoming admins in their local zone chats, and between that and running our daily standup meetings, it reminded me of my nursing days when I was charge nurse and also precepting new nurses.
We had become a much needed solution during a time of crises, offering some sanity and certainty. At the time of writing this, the Topanga community still uses this WhatsApp Community and it has become a trusted source of relaying real time updates from verified sources like TCEP, CalFire, SCE about safety threats like fires, floods, road closure, power outages, missing pets.
The missing pets piece was the solution I wish I had when I spent months of 2024 looking for Mica, and had trouble reaching neighbors en mass. At that time I thought why aren't there location based WhatsApp groups around me to post my flyers and connect with neighbors?
After being evacuated for about 10 days, we made our way back to the canyon. About 30 homes had been lost by the waterfront. Our area, luckily, was safe. I had been so involved in working on TopangaSAFE, that I'd forgotten to handle my own essential needs and I was eligible for both FEMA assistance and Allstate Renter's insurance for the associated costs of evacuation, and any damage from fire/smoke/high winds so I started handling that.
It was a blessing that we had a fiscal sponsorship already set up with the Foundation for Human Potential and we were able to receive donations to support various organizations helping during the fire because thriving communities is a part of the mission statement.
Our community was supported by donations in kind and food delivery through World Central Kitchen and TopangaREACH, a boots on the ground donations in kind group that had popped up that our foundation supported through its formalization into its own non-profit.
I saw the kindness of community once again, with support neighbors helping one another out, donations supporting our community, friends willing to offer us their places or to store some stuff with them, local restaurants offering free meals to evacuees and even free chiropractic adjustments.
Our clients were also really kind to us and understanding about our circumstances. One of them even gifted me a complementary total hair makeover with balayage, haircut and blowout (it was much needed!) We barely moved a single session during our challenging moments and were able to hold space and capacity for them and their transformations, as well as our own hardship and challenges at the same time. My capacity had greatly expanded from where it was the previous year when I lost Mica and crumbled.
I was expecting all of our clients to leave again, but to my surprise they all stayed, and we even signed a few more! Some of them actually had experienced financial hardship because they offer in-person services and some of their clientele had lost their homes or had to cancel their appointments while LA was covered in smoke, so our clients were committed to building new pathways for their business in the online space.
_____
As we returned home and settled back into day-to-day life and work, we began building out our ecosystem of offers. Clifton had set up our Business in a Box software solution that we got for us, and then started using it with all of our clients as we helped them build out their online offers, landing pages, load their CRM into it, set up bookings and payments, email sequences.
And Clifton started documenting all of our work into different stages as we were running various clients through each part of our process, from the TLOJ Activator (which was as if the Quantumpreneur Incubator Program, Quantum Executive and Foundry Fundamentals had a baby) to Quantum Profit (Financial Stewardship and leadership).
We began running additional masterclasses for our 2:1 SMI clients, first around Sales and our Sales methodology called the BRIDGE Process, and then Marketing with our new PREPARE Method.
They all found the additional calls very helpful and insightful, so between the Sales & Marketing call and the Tech Call for using and building out the tech, we'd laid the infrastructure to back into a group tier of our program.
We began stepping up into taking more ownership over Marketing, as more marketing aligned opportunities arrived, from running paid ads to doing full website builds and rebrands to launching low ticket digital products. I was like are we a marketing agency now??
I was having major identity whiplash from where I started in my Marketing journey. I just started studying it obsessively and from my desire to be of Service to my clients and that alone made me much better at Marketing and much better at sales.
And now with the software solution and a group option. We created a dial for client continuity where clients could ramp up all the way from 2:1 done for you buildouts, to 2:1 done with you, to 2:1 lighter touch accountability, to group tier to just the software and tech support.
By the summer/fall we'd been so focused on building other people's businesses that we'd neglected to spend time to continue to build out our own. We still had our old super quantum, elevated language on our website, with outdated designs we made 3 years ago. And it was a maze with too many CTAs. Now through my upleveled marketing experience, I could see it for what it was.
First, we hired Clifton's former brand and creative director who did the Faces of the Future magazine back when it was an international publication. And we elevated our brand and made it look more high end.
From there, I built out our new funnel for SMI. This whole time the program didn't even have a proper landing page and we were running it for over a year!
From there, we did a full on website rebuild as we were building out our client's new robust website.
From there, we migrated all of our courses and clients from Mighty Networks into our Faces of the Future software to have it all under one roof.
From there, Clifton started going through all of our 10,000s of hours of transcripts from all of our sessions, internal and client facing material, our course materials and started using AI to synthesize everything we do. He coded a custom bot trained on our materials to help us with our client session recaps, with our brand and content and our sales. It was trained on all of our methodologies!
We then asked the bot to identify the blindspots in our work and help us put together the throughline of the complete user journey. It said the language in the Activator was at one end of the spectrum, softer, elevated, feminine embodiment, and the language in the Self Made Incubator was very grounded, practical, and very masculine, and we needed to find a consistent voice through it all and unify it into a single User Journey working with us.
And that's how we arrived at the 6S Methodology:
State -> Self -> Service -> Systems -> Stewardship -> Society.
The TLOJ Initiator -> State
The TLOJ Activator -> Self
The Self Made Incubator 1 & 2 -> Self to Service & Service to Systems
Quantum Profit -> Stewardship
From there, with that awareness of SMI needing more embodiment and feminine energy, I brought the nervous system work back into it.
From there, we created an intro strategy session that is an assessment of where they are on the 6S journey and what they need to focus on next to get to the next level of their life and business.
In the process, we'd grown our revenue by 61% over the course of 2025.
From there, in 2026 Clifton started coding the Habit App based on client feedback and requests to make all of our materials more interactive and experiential to support the user journey.
And incorporating client feedback about wanting to track everything from their morning & evening routines, to their female cycles and energy levels, to the astrological forecast for the month ahead (we'd be sprinkling this piece into our monthly Community Drop In calls), to their nutrition, rock blocks, daily stand up meetings, meditations, tapping sequences for specific intentions.
From there, Clifton sat down and re-activated his old blog, writing about his journey from 2018 since leaving Human Garage until present day. Published both of his albums, that were songs he wrote with AI — one based on his journey over those years — one based on our work with clients.
From there, he trained a bot to uncover your Core Codes for your brand — to differentiate his voice, his brand and his role from my voice, brand and role — and fed his blog articles into this bot to help him synthesize, make new meaning and create a base for his methodology and content. That's how he became the Capacity Architect.
From there, I pressure tested my story with the Core Codes bot and created the Responsibility Architect. And from my desire to have it know my voice and pull from my databank of stories and methodology to create content and an infinite client acquisition engine for me, I sat here writing all these articles.
Maybe they'll end up on a blog, maybe a book. I know that's been part of the vision. But most importantly, they capture the life lived and breathed into these frameworks and our core methodology and credibility with which we co-created for Faces of the Future.
