278. If You're Not Growing, You're Dying: The Importance of Continual Evolution as an Entrepreneur with Aoife Roche

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Roche, my goodness, one of my favorite people on the planet. So great to see you. How is everything going today? Really great. Thank you.

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Thank you so much for having me. I've been so excited to get on and talk to you. You're doing amazing. You. Thank you.

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Well, you're from Ireland originally, which when I first met you in person, I was so confused because your accent doesn't really sound what you would normally expect. But I want to talk about everything that you're doing, because you really are just doing so many amazing things besides the fact that you're a two time bikini model world champion, which is so cool. What is your backstory? How did you get to where you are today? Because I remember hearing a little bit about it, but I'd love to dive into that.

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Yeah. So I started out that you took the traditional approach that everyone does and got the job and thought, you know what? I'm going to climb my way up the corporate ladder and I'll get to a certain level of success, and once I get there, then I'll be happy. All right. You know that destination that we all think that we're going to arrive at, and then we arrive at that destination and we realize that that is not what we wanted.

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So back in 2018, at that point, I was VP in Barclays for franchise lending, and I realized, actually, I want something different. There has to be a little bit more. And that's kind of when I leaned into the fitness stuff. So I went from the boardroom to the bikini, and I'm sure there's a book in there somewhere, but I literally think that LinkedIn thought I had lost my mind because I went from being like a senior executive to now being there doing bikini modeling, trying to make it at that. But luckily for me, I won, so nobody could really say anything if I had lost it, because might address it as a midlife crisis.

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But from there, after taking, I took about a year off, and I decided that I didn't want to go back into the corporate world and I was going to become an entrepreneur. So I looked at what I did in corporate, and what I did was I used to be brought in to look at large scale systems and how we could tie all the systems together and collate the data. And I realized that marketing wasn't so different to that. Marketing was all about how you managed the data and how you got all of the different social media channels to speak to each other to be able to maximize your exposure. So in 2019, I came.

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I said, I'm going to come out to the US and test it. Came out here, loved it, went home for what was supposed to be four months. And then we had the pandemic. So then I got locked in Ireland, between Ireland and the UK for two years because the US had banned the entry of international travel. So I sat in there for two years, ruminating on the vision of getting back to the United States, which once it opened in 2021, I was able to get back here and now set up the company.

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But I think into the tune of what we talk about, about happiness, especially in entrepreneurship. Right. It's never a smooth road. I think we're led into this falsehood, thinking that it's going to be easy. But the journey to get here was incredibly difficult and took a huge amount of resilience and thought process to not give up on the dream.

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And I encourage anyone listening here, it doesn't matter what adverse if you have a dream and you know innately and intuitively that that's what you want and that you just believe that you've got to go for it. And that's what I did. And now I live here and I have my life here and I have a very successful company here. But it started coming from a belief in myself and coming from a belief that if I could just get in the right rooms, I could make it happen. I love it because that is so true, because it's really who you surround yourself with.

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But let's take a step back because I love what you said about how hard it is to stick to your dream, because I know for me, I've been at this for three years, which isn't really that long of a time period. Now, I took ten years off because I've been doing this for 30 years, but I did take ten years off and now I'm back. So it's only been three years, and that's great. And I love what I'm doing. But there are days IfA, there's days where you're just like, what am I doing?

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And I know I have my own thing that I do, but what do you do to keep that? You just keep pushing forward, because that's one of the hardest parts about being an entrepreneur, is just to keep going every day. Yeah. So one thing that I've realized that I believe from the moment that you set a goal and write it down, there's a gestation period. Right.

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Because I've written down goals, and only when I've gone back 24 months later do I actually go back and see that I've achieved that goal. Right. So I think the first thing is, one, writing down about what you want to do, even though how out of reach that it actually is, but then also learning to be patient with the outcome because it's an accumulation of steps, and then we'll get so far, and then something will go wrong and then we're sent backwards again. And sometimes I think we get tested a lot. We get tested about how bad do we want it.

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How bad do you actually really want it? How committed are you to the end result? But what I try to focus on, and it's a work, and every day is a work. Even this morning I'm up, got up at like six. I've been dealing with, there's a problem every day as an entrepreneur, and the bigger you are, the more teams you have, the more problems you have.

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And that is absolutely for sure, which you've got to stay concretized in the vision for what you want. And if you say, okay, this is what's happening right now, but what is it that I actually want? And then even right now in my own business, right, I built a very successful marketing agency. I have a bunch of people working for me. But now I'm looking at it and I'm going, I actually think I went one degree off somewhere along the line, another totally thrown me off path because what I actually wanted to do was more speaking and education.

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So that's what I'm trying to move now into that. But I had to get here and go through all of that process to realize, okay, I need to course correct. Course correct. But if you don't put in the reps, it's like going to the gym, right? You can't go to the gym once or twice or three, you got to go every day and you got to show up every day and you got to put in the reps.

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And eventually one day you look in the mirror and then you go, oh, look at what I've achieved. But knowing that is very important. And then, like, you leaned into this, having the right people around you is critical. Yes. Because if you don't have the right people around you and things are going wrong, you can go wrong with it.

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If you have people who are going, oh, is this not a bit hard? Would it not be easier if you just got a job? Because we do get that feedback, especially when you're highly qualified and you're a lot of skills, you're like, you could go out and earn a couple of hundred thousand, but a job, why do you need to have a business? And I'm like, yeah, but with a job, I don't have the freedom. That's right.

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I don't have the freedom to do the things that I want to do. And I think that's one of the secrets of being an entrepreneur. Two secret. First, you have to do something that you love doing because you're going to spend an extraordinary amount of time not getting paid your worth in the beginning. And that is the truth.

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And then the second thing is that you must realize that it cannot be about the money. That's right. The money is the byproduct of the work that you put in when no one's watching. If you think it's just about the money, you're going to go down the wrong path and you're going to burn out super quick. So it's find what you're passionate about, find what you actually, and then connect to that every time that you're having a bad day.

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And realize as an entrepreneur, you're probably going to have more bad days than good days. But the good days will be great days. The bad days might be super dark days, but as long as you can stay connected to the good days, that's what's going to make the difference. Yeah, for sure. Oh my gosh, you had so many golden nuggets in there.

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But one thing I do want to focus on because I think it's so important, because we all get so set on the money, the money aspect of it. And what I've learned is that if that's all you're thinking about, you are in a sense coming from a lack mentality. And it's that lack mentality that you're going to be actually pushing it away.

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Has to flow. And when we grapple with it or we try to hold on to it, it's elusive, it'll get away from you even more. But it's when you can actually let go. And look, we all need money at the end of the day, the bills have to be paid, the rent has to be paid, the salaries have to be paid, but the money is not the be all and end all. And so I had a really good course correction from someone.

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I said, we have an event coming up. And I was like, I really got to practice my pitch, make sure that I'm able to close. And he said, no, it's not about how many people you close, it's about how many people you can serve. And I thought that was a really good course. Correct.

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Because when you're thinking about how many people you can close, you're actually selling and the focus is then on the money. But when I'm thinking about how many people I can serve, I know, and the same way with you, with the podcast, I know I can help people get their results. If they do the work and work with me, I can help them to get the results and then everyone will generate more money. But if I'm focused on, I just want to close the deal. So I can get the money into the bank account.

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I'm disconnected from the end result, which is actually helping people to grow and scale their businesses. So sometimes we just got to sock it up and sit with the tension of looking at the bank balance and going, oh, that's not where I thought it was going to be. But know that if you keep putting in the reps, eventually, maybe not immediately, but eventually, you will get the results. Yes. That is so awesome.

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Okay, so let's talk about at the core of what you do with your clients and how do you serve them to grow their business. Yeah. And it's an evolution. That's first and foremost, right? I even look back this year alone, we had two kind of startups that pretty much failed, right?

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So people think, oh, they look at my social media and they're like, oh, she has everything and everything works for her. I'm like, no, that's social media. That's a highlight reel. That's not the truth. We launched a medspa agency that didn't exactly go according to plan.

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We're just rebuilding that. I launched an events agency that didn't go according to plan either. So you have to be willing, when you're starting something, to understand that you are going to make mistakes. And mistakes is how you learn. Where I found, and this is true, a lot of trial and error where I found the areas that I'm super good at.

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So LinkedIn is one of my key platforms with helping people to grow and scale on LinkedIn, because we talk about personal branding, your social media presence is no longer discretionary. It's mandatory. It's a natural extension of your business. So when you go out into any group, any networking, I promise you, when people meet you, the first thing that they're going to do is they're going to go and look you up on social media to see who you are. So your social media becomes your digital business card.

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Right? And that's a shift in mindset, because social media used to be discretionary. We may or may not do, it's not discretionary anymore, especially with the evolution of TikTok. People want to know who they're doing business with. They want to know if they can trust you.

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So what I do is I help people to get more exposure by helping them get over their fear of doing videos. We create avatars, which is a little bit of a hack, but it's working very well. So we create lifelike avatars of them so that they can create content at scale. And then we put systems in place to help them generate leads to get on the conversations with people so that they can convert them into their business. And that is one of the things, the LinkedIn and the AI stuff, even though we do do a lot of other website building and we run ads for people and all of that kind of stuff, building the personal brand for me and using the AI technology is what I'm enjoying the most.

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And that's where, like I said, it's the course. Correct. But I had to build a multi six figure ad agency to realize I didn't want to have a multi six figure ad agency. And I think that's the joy of entrepreneurship, right? That you go, okay, I've done that and I've built it.

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Now I realize it's not what I want, but if you never try and if you never follow through, then you're never going to know that that's what you want or don't want. And the last thing that I want to do, I would rather have tried and failed 100 times than not to try at all. And then when I do fail, I have a very good mindset. It might be a bit delusional sometimes, but I can reframe it very well in my mind. So it's not a failure, it's a lesson.

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So what do you say to yourself when you experience a failure? Is there a mantra that you say? What does that sound like? Every time we have something that fails, which is running an ad agency, like an ad can be working one week and it fails the next week, but knowing that it's just a step in the process. Right.

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You cannot have success without failure. It's a polar. So you have to have that balancing act. And every time you experience a failure, it's like, okay, that didn't work this time, but what did I learn, right? What did I learn along the process?

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What did I do wrong? Right. Even though it's not wrong per se, so then I know not to do that again. And that can be hiring the wrong people. It can be doing the wrong marketing.

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Could we do the wrong? There's so many different variables into actually building out a successful business. But the thing is, if you don't get tangled up in your failures, I can absolutely assure you you are bypassing about 90% of the people, because most people will try something, it doesn't work, and then they quit. That's right. So just by overcoming the failure and overcoming, and getting the narrative out of your mind that it's a failure, you're already getting into the top 10% just by that one sole act.

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And then if you can keep showing up and putting more effort into learning from what happened, what went wrong, and a lot of times what's happened in my experience, is I've given my power away to other people, thinking that other people could do it better than me, and then that hasn't materialized. So that's my own inner work, is why do I so quickly. Now, I do believe in delegation, but why do I give my power away to other people? Why am I not assured enough to know that I can do this on my own? And I think that's a mindset as well, is to be so concretized in your own self belief that, yes, people can help you, but you don't need to give your power away to people either.

00:18:22
Does that make sense? Oh, yeah. 1000% everything you just said. And that's why I love, because I talk to life coaches, doctors, phds, business owners such as yourself. And the thing is, every conversation we have, everything you just said, you can apply it to almost anything in life, right?

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So even if you're just trying to improve your romantic relationships, I mean, everything you just said, right? Because even when I did the fitness modeling and I had a lot of success in that, right? Because I did two years of it and I won a lot of things, but I also lost. Now, I didn't publicize the losses as much as I publicized the wins, but that's the world we operate in. But I learned more from the losses than I did from the wins.

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And that's like you say in your relationship, if something's not working, you've got to sit down and evaluate what's my role in this? What's the other person's role in this. One thing that I've started to do recently is instead of saying you make me feel, if we talk about relationships, I've course corrected that to be the feeling I'm having is yes. And then I'm asking myself, okay, is that feeling coming from this situation, or am I carrying some baggage with me from a previous experience that I've had? Am I overlaying that on this situation?

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And when you can look at it like that, you sort of become a little bit more emotionally intelligent to me and a lot of self responsibility. No one makes us feel anyway. Now people can do shady stuff all the time. I'm not saying people don't do shady things, but they do. But your reaction to that is what determines whether you're going to be successful or failure or failure.

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And it's the exact same in business, you've got to go. Instead of going around blaming everyone that said work, say, okay, what was my role in this? Like I said, my role, and I honestly believe my role in the two kind of failures that we would say that we had this year is that I give my power away to other people and I took my eye off the ball and I allowed them to make decisions that potentially I should have been more involved in. So now I'm not going to do that again, I've learned. So I think that that's super important.

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Go ahead. What you just said is so powerful because you realize you evaluated it, you owned it, and when you take ownership and take that responsibility. Oh, I'm getting chills just by saying this. It is the most powerful thing you can do. The most powerful thing you can do.

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Because when you have to own it and so many people don't. Right. My favorite first therapist, I'll never forget, he goes, when you're pointing the finger at someone else, there's three more pointing right back at you. And so just own it. And I love that you were able to do that because it's not easy because our egos get in the way, right?

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I said to someone last week, and they were like, oh, my God, that's so powerful. They came and something had happened. I was like, yeah, but you created the problem. And they were like, what? And I was like, but now that you created the problem, you also know you have the power to create the solution.

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That's right. And they were like, I've never looked at it like that. And I'm like, yeah, exactly. You created the problem, but you also have the part to create solution because we create it all. We all want to celebrate when we're winning and we're like, oh, I did this and I did that.

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But equally, when we're not winning and things are not going, we create it all. Everything that exists in our reality is a reflection of our own thought process. So if something is not working, you've got to take stock and be like, okay, everything in my reality is a projection of my thought process or a narrative that I'm running with myself. And it's just know, I don't want to get too woo. But it's true.

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It's just reflecting back at know where my thought process at. And Brad Lee said it, I was at an event and it literally hit me like a train. He said, your net worth will never increase greater than your self worth. And I thought, so if we're not earning what we perceive is our net worth, and I want millions of dollars. It's high.

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The barriers are quite high. But if that's not happening so effortlessly and fluid, I'm like, well, what's happening in me that I'm not vibing at that level because I go to that level and then I lose it. And then I go, and then I lose it. It's like what's happening that I'm not able to hold that on a continuous basis. And I think when you're doing that reflection and that probing and that inner work, then that is really what changes the game.

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And most people just don't do it because we're afraid to look at ourselves. Yeah, well, in order to grow, you have to be comfortable being uncomfortable, and it's very uncomfortable when you're having to take a hard look at that. It's not easy because you got to own the failures, more success. Oh, my gosh. Owning the failures is more important than owning the success.

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Yes. Ifa we're almost out of time, and I want to respect that because I know you only had a certain amount of time today. Is there anything else that you'd like to share with the audience that we haven't talked about before we finish up? Yeah, I think, and this is what I love, what you're doing with the podcasting, and you and I are going to work together going forward. And I'm excited to have you as my mentor, first of all, because I already know what a rock star you are and how amazing you are.

00:24:06
But how important it is for us to step into our own power of building a personal brand, never was it more important than what it is right now and going forward for you to focus on building a personal brand. And you're going to build a personal brand in two ways. One with your visual, by letting people see who you are, and the other is by letting people hear who you are. And the podcasting is such an important part of that. What is your voice?

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What is your message? And then how are you showing up to articulate that message? And anyone who's listening, who's kind of holding back to go, oh, I wish I could do that, or, oh, I'm afraid to go on video, or, I'm not good on camera. I don't like how I sound. I want to absolve everyone of none of us like how we sound or how we look in general.

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We look at it. I don't even look. If I take pictures or videos, I tend not to look at them for 24 hours because I already know the narrative. I just don't look at it. So to invest in that in 2024, invest in finding your voice, invest in getting more confident on video, and invest in showing up.

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And I think if people do that, we'll be so alarmed at how easy it is to grow and scale our business when we actually start showing up as ourselves. Well, that was incredible. What's the best place for people to find you and learn more about your services? Yeah, so a lot of people on LinkedIn is just my name. That's ifa, that's Aoife, and it's Roach.

00:25:44
R-O-C-H-E. Instagram is ifa first name jroach. And then my company is called attentiongrabbersusa.com. And then the whole thesis is on that is that we help people grab attention. That's what we do.

00:25:58
So ww attentiongrabbersusa.com awesome. Such a privilege and an honor to be sharing this space with you today. And all the best. I'm looking forward to seeing you next week in Vegas. We're about to rock it.

00:26:13
Yes, we are. All right. Thank you so much. I really appreciate you. Thank you so much for having me.

00:26:20
All right. And thank you, everyone, for listening today.

00:26:33
What a great conversation. And thank you again for listening today. If you're enjoying the content, please subscribe, like and review. And if you're eager for more content, go to glow FM Slash happinesssolved and join our exclusive membership portal. I also invite you to follow me on Instagram and Facebook at coach Sandee Sgarlata.

00:26:53
Again, I am so grateful for you, and I hope that you and your family are healthy and safe and that your lives are filled with peace, joy and happiness. Take care, everyone.