I met Susan at a Coronado Chamber of Commerce event. She mentioned she'd bought an auto shop. When I found out why, I knew I had to have her on.

After sponsoring two Ukrainian families and watching how hard it was for them to stabilize here in the US, Susan didn't want to stop at temporary support. She bought an existing auto repair shop in Point Loma and created a real pathway for them to have work, dignity, and community.

In this episode:

• How Susan went from sponsoring families to buying a business she knew nothing about
• Why she negotiated seller financing instead of touching her retirement fund, and how that deal actually worked
• The difference between charity and empowerment, and why one is far more sustainable than the other
• The operational lessons of buying an existing business: customers, niche, pricing, and stepping out of day-to-day operations
• Susan's advocacy work with Voice for UA and the urgent timeline facing Ukrainian families on temporary status in the US

If you want to support Voice for UA, links to donate, advocate, or get involved directly are below.

Website: Www.voice4ua.org

Connect on Instagram: @voice4u

You Cannot Buy Your Way Out Of A Belief.

I want to confess something. I have spent a significant amount of money over the course of building my businesses on coaching programs, courses, masterminds, community memberships, and certifications. A lot of things I paid for and didn't even do.

Most of them were good. The content was solid. The frameworks made sense. This isn't about getting scammed.

It's about why I bought them.

In this episode:

• Why most of my purchases had very little to do with the program and everything to do with how I felt at the time I bought them
• The Gen X conditioning underneath the belief that stopping feels like failure and stillness feels like laziness
• Why the business that eats everything you feed it isn't hungry, it's a reflection of what's running underneath
• The question to ask before your next investment in a program, a tool, or a new hire
• Why this isn't a clean resolution and what I'm still working on myself

If you've been feeding the machine for a while and wondering why the number that stays never seems to grow, there's a free 45-minute one-on-one conversation linked below where we look at your actual numbers and trace exactly where the money is going and why.

https://elevateprofit.biz/profit-acce...

When is the last time you did nothing and let it be okay?

Not rest you scheduled. Not a Sunday blocked off so you could recover enough to work again Monday. Actually stopped, left space open, and didn't fill it.

If you're anything like me, the answer is that sounds like a trap.

The entrepreneurship space is always telling us to add more. Post more. Build the funnel. Launch the offer. Grow the list. The advice is always additive. There is always one more thing that is supposed to be the thing that finally makes it all click into place.

But nobody is talking about the cost of running 15 strategies at half capacity. Nobody's asking whether the reason it isn't converting is because you need to add something, or because everything you've already built needs more of your actual energy than you have left after spreading yourself across everything else.

That's the trap. And it's subtle because the trap looks exactly like discipline.

In this episode:

• Why effort has a quality to it and why two people can produce the same output and get completely different results
• Why busyness is sometimes avoidance and what it's actually protecting you from having to face
• The overeffort trap in its most personal form and what writing my own chapter taught me about standing in front of real things and asking if they're enough
• The effort audit, two questions to ask about everything currently active in your business
• Why the gap between expectation and reality is not evidence you're failing

Things are working. They may not look exactly the way you thought they would. What you've built needs more space, not more input.

Next week: the conditioning underneath this compulsion. The Gen X piece, the message absorbed watching parents grind, and how it's living in your business decisions right now without you realizing it.