The unseen leaks in your business
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Speaker: [00:00:00] There are leaks in your business that you don't even understand that are there. here's the realization, when I took care of the most obvious problem. I was then able to actually see the next problem that was even bigger. The reason you can't see these leaks is because a leak that seems kind of normal, is blocking the bigger, more massive leaks that are actually causing you more harm. When you run a business, you don't always see what's happening because you always are running at a certain speed.
This allowed us to slow down.
I'm gonna talk about my experience through the Nashville freeze. What I learned through trying to keep my house warm in single digit temperatures with four children, no power for six days. I'm gonna talk about what I did to my house and how it actually gave me a huge realization in my business.
I live in Brentwood. I'm just south of Nashville, and on Sunday we had snow turn into freezing [00:01:00] rain. It was so cold it attached to all the electrical wires to the trees. So we had trees cracking and falling left and right from the weight. Our power went out midday on Sunday. We were without power from Sunday all the way until Friday evening. I have four children from 16 to six years old. I'm in an older house that I bought.
We haven't done any renovations or anything yet to it, and we did not want to leave the house, we've only been here for a few months, and the reality of freezing pipes or something bursting is real.
When the power comes back on, something can spark and the house can light on fire. The house was getting very cold. The nights were really cold. We had a generator. We were able to plug in a whole room heater. But I will tell you, that whole room heater could not heat. It was like you feel it radiating. You're like, where is the heat going?
It's freezing. We had three or four layers on the first night. We could not find the key to the [00:02:00] fireplace to turn on the fireplace. We had actually sealed up the fireplaces because we were getting wasp coming into the house during the summer months.
The first night we all slept in the living room, family room, put some mattresses in there, everybody bundled up. It got as cold as 55 degrees. The next morning I woke up and I said, we have to figure something out. We cannot stay here with the four kids, in those kind of temperatures.
So the next day we said, how can we do this? What can we do? We were starting to run out of fuel. My husband was actually able to go out and get some wood out of the sheds that we had.
We opened up the fireplace. We started the fireplace. But I told my husband. This is not sustainable because we are throwing so much wood that we're gonna run outta wood in a couple hours if we don't figure something else.
So he said, okay, tomorrow we are gonna go out and we're gonna go find a key for the fireplace. We're gonna go get more gas. We can get more wood. We'll figure it out. So I started realizing that even, the fireplace [00:03:00] going, no gas, just wood burning, it was still really cold.
And I woke up the next day and I said, there's something else going on. I could feel cold coming in through the doors of the house. It was just freezing cold air, so I wrapped up a whole bunch of towels and I started shoving 'em around the doors to make sure we were not losing heat out of those doors.
This is what happens in a business that is the most logical spot. I feel cold, cold is coming in. It must be the doors or the windows. I closed all the blinds, all the curtains. I closed everything so that the home would try to stay warm. But the problem was it kept feeling cold, drafty. it couldn't get up to temperature.
It felt like I was working against something. The realization, when I took care of the most obvious problem. I was then able to actually see the next problem that was even bigger. this was interesting because when you look in a business aspect and I dig into people and I'm advising them and I'm looking at what they're [00:04:00] doing, we look at the problems that are the most obvious and we think, oh, we'll just fix that, and it fixes everything.
The problem is that the issues actually can go four or five layers deep, and until you solve the most obvious one, you're not even able to see the rest. That was the situation. I covered up the doors and I thought that was it. That's where all the cold's coming from. No, it wasn't. What actually was happening, believe it or not, was that the HVAC vents were flooding cold air into the rooms, I mean with pressure. So I go get towels over all the vents in the whole house.
We need to cover everything. This is ridiculous.
So we started putting towels over the vent. So you wanna know how powerful the air that was pushing through the vents was. It actually blew the towels off the vents. That's how powerful it was. We actually had to put towels covering the vents and then put something heavy,, whatever we could find to hold down the towels.
That's how much cold air was [00:05:00] actually leaking into our house. Now, by this time, I'm starting to realize, okay, we have a massive leakage problem. Hot air is being displaced by cold air at a rapid rate, and I started realizing it wasn't just this little bit coming through the doors. We have a massive problem.
So we started covering all the vents. Guess what? The house started warming up. By this time, my husband was able to venture out. He found a key to turn on the gas. There's a special key that fits into the gas valve. You turn it on, the gas starts up.
We're able to ignite it, have the gas actually in the fireplace, which was so much hotter than wood. Now by this realization of the vents, I was able to start getting the house up to 60 and 70 degrees consistently, which was awesome. I still was struggling a little bit with the back house, but I could get up that up to like 50 or 60 degrees.
It wasn't horrible. It wasn't 39, which was great. This is like in business right now. I just solved a really big problem where it was leaking a lot. And I can [00:06:00] now feel a little more consistent. I'm able to feel that we're making progress. But guess what? It didn't stop there. Now that I had plugged the leaks on the doors and the vents, I still felt a lot of cold air coming in.
And I'm sitting here thinking I do construction. I do renovations in my other business, and I'm thinking to myself. Where the heck is the air coming from? It is so freaking cold. Like you, now that you've done the typical ones,
you see the bigger ones. 'cause those are quite large, cover them all. And I still felt the flood of it. And I started noticing every time I went to kitchen, the kitchen was freezing. Every time I go into the bathroom's, the bathroom are freezing. Well, there's no dampers in any of the exhaust fans in the house.
So what's happening? If you're not aware of what a damper is, a damper is inside of the pipes that help the air be pushed through. When you turn the fan on, there's a little piece of usually metal, and it's gonna flip up, flip down, flip up, flip down. So you turn it [00:07:00] on, it goes up so the air can go out and then it closes so air can't come back in.
Well, they didn't have 'em on the exhaust fan in the kitchen or the exhaust fans in the bathrooms. Cold air was flooding in, so my husband got up there shoved in towels in there to stop that air. For the kitchen, what we did, because we have to cook on the stove, instead of just sealing it all off, during the day, we actually turned on the stove. Let the stove run just the heat of the gas stove so that the pressure against it was able to push the cold air from coming in. Then at night, we actually got plastic and taped it completely off. You just saw a dome of cold air pushing on that plastic, but luckily it, it kept it.
By the time our power came on, I was able to keep the house at 84 degrees. And here's what I want you to understand.
This is what's happening with your business. If you feel like you're working really, really hard and you can't figure out why you're not gaining any traction, or you're not moving ahead, or you just feel like you're spinning your wheels, [00:08:00] you have massive leaks that you cannot see. We need to get to the very obvious ones to discover the really, really, really unobvious ones, the ones that are almost invisible,
but are letting the biggest leaks out. This experience of the Nashville freeze showed me that one, having resourcefulness, being able to really think about the situation strategically, being efficient, right? I'm an efficiency queen. I am all about making it easier, making it better, fix the leaks, find the problems.
This was huge. I was able to keep my family warm. I was able to keep them safe. For six days with no electricity in really cold temperatures. This is being creative. I had talked to so many of my other neighbors who were staying in the house at 45 degrees 'cause they couldn't heat the house 'cause the heat was leaking and they didn't have enough knowledge to go find the leaks and plug the leaks.
On your business if you are having a problem and you can't see the leaks, come [00:09:00] to an expert like me who understands the leaks.
I have my live event in Nashville. If you wanna learn how to really implement this in your business, like immediately, come to my event in Nashville, we run 'em every three months.
I will show you through case studies on how to do this to your business, because when you find the leaks, you don't just plug them, you know there here now. Now I know if anything happens again in minutes, I could have my house up to 70, 80 degrees. Without a problem because I know every single leak. In your business you could do two things. You can know the leaks that you have and you can fix 'em. A lot of 'em are very fixable. Some of 'em unfortunately are leaks that happen when you're launching or when you run a certain kind of event or something.
You always kinda have a leak to it. There's some problem if we're aware this is going to happen when you have this event, 'cause it. Always happens, then we can actually create a plug to make sure that leak doesn't happen. It's like we can't really fix the backend 'cause all these kind of things [00:10:00] have to happen and there's always this misstep somewhere, but I know that happens.
So I'm gonna make sure when I create this event, I'm gonna do this. I'm gonna set up one more special thing at the end to capture any leaking that we might have. This can be people falling off your email list. This can be people who register and don't get emails. It could be just someone going through checking stuff.
There's so many different ways we can do it, but I want you to understand that leaks in your business are there if you see 'em or not. I didn't know my house leak like this until I experienced it. You don't know your business is leaking, but it is. Everybody does. Big companies, small companies, solopreneurs, there are massive leaks, but you can't see them.
You're not aware of them until you fix the most basic one First. So I encourage you at least give it thought. Now I have my different framework. I give all my stuff away for free. I have my framework, which is the Empire Framework where we talk about income jumping.
Building ecosystems that breathe and ecosystem stacking, that all build an [00:11:00] ultimate empire that leads to what we all wanna become. Time billionaires. So I'm all about being a time billionaire, living in it, feeling it, enjoying it, traveling, right? Having my businesses work for me. So if you're interested in any of that you can message me on Instagram.
You can message me inside of YouTube. You can reach out to me, my emails all over. You can go to my website, and you can message me there as well, but get in touch with me. If you're interested in the House of Cortessa and you wanna be a time billionaire, we'll have a conversation.
See if the society is for you. It's by invitation only, but if you want a real lift in your business right now and you're sitting there going, I have leaks. I don't know how to fix them, but I know I have something, or I don't know, I have 'em, but I'm sure I have them because I'm having these problems. You wanna get a seat at the experience Live in Nashville.
Get your seat. Come. This is where I'm gonna show you how to do it in real life situations, case studies where you're working with other women. Who are learning the same thing. This is [00:12:00] gonna be tailored to the people in the room.
So no events ever the same. You can come again and again and again and keep learning and keep growing. , If you have any questions about that, feel free to let me know. I'm happy to help at the end of the day. I want you to understand the path forward doesn't have to be so complicated. You don't have to launch all the time.
You don't have to have multiple offers. You don't have to have a thousand freebies. The path forward can be different if you have your consistent sales. And you want to go the next level, let's effortless income jump. I'll actually link the video to this video where I talk about my whole empire framework.
So you can learn it. This is what it's all about. I will teach you what you need to do, how to do it. I'm giving it all away, so make sure you subscribe to the channel. Find me on Instagram, on LinkedIn with a lot of different articles, so find me where you are.
Let's have a conversation, and let's get your leaks plugged and your business moving forward. That's what it's about at the end of the day. Thank you for watching this video. I'll see you in the next video right [00:13:00] now.
