You may remember Steve Carell’s performance in the film “Evan Almighty.” Evan was a man with a plan.

Sadly, it was the wrong plan, and as God is quick to point out in our own lives, His way and our way are rarely the same. Thus, Evan is set on a new mission: to build an ark. Everyone thinks he’s crazy, and at one point in the film is referred to as “The weirdo with a beard-o”.

Welcome to my world.

As a direct sales coach and trainer for the past three years, I’ve been contently building my “empire”, helping these men and women grow successful direct sales businesses. We launched Direct Sales Classroom earlier this year to provide a comprehensive learning environment for direct sellers at all levels. And the response has been tremendous. I truly believed I had my “plan” all mapped out.

Enter God.

He’s been dealing with my heart for two years now. I’ve known for quite some time that my real mission and passion in life was to reach out to entrepreneurial moms – hard working moms – to help them put balance and focus in their lives.

But I didn’t know how.

So I kept doing what I knew how to do – coaching direct sellers to success.

But God had other plans.

“Build an ark.” He says.

“Um, pardon? I already have this successful plan. What do you mean build an ark?”

And so, I’ve been on a path for the last few months that is driving my family crazy. I’ve been driven to make The Renaissance Mom Experience a successful outreach to mompreneurs, and in the process have met with so much resistance, that I have frequently wondered if this is how Noah felt when he was building the ark.

“You’re doing what?”

“Are you crazy?”

“How are you going to afford that?”

“You’ve never done anything like this before!”

And yes, my own husband is probably one of my biggest opponents in this project. Understandably so. I’ve essentially put my company on the hook for a roughly six-figure financial commitment long before we sold a single ticket.

Now, I don’t pretend to be as righteous or honorable as Noah. I’m more like Evan, I suppose. I’ve got ambitions, aspirations, and desires of my own, and often they cloud whatever vision God might have for me.

And most would call me stupid. I’m sure some people are buying tickets just to see if I will crash & burn.

But a funny thing happened on the way to the flood. Every time there’s been a need for this event, the money appears.

Need to pay a speaker deposit? A matching amount from a sponsor or vendor would appear.

Need to build a marketing plan? An affordable smart marketing consultant appeared.

Whether you believe in God or not, I do. And I hold firmly in my heart that God is working his purpose out in me through this event.

I still have family needs, too.  I visit my son in camp every other week, and tend to my toddler at home. A mom’s day is never done, you know.

So how does a mom manage to keep work, life, family and risk in balance?

It’s like building an ark. Most people think you’re nuts until they see the finished product. The finished product is often far more impressive than anyone imagined – and provides shelter for those that would need it.

How do you build an ark?

One plank at a time.

© 2010 Lisa Robbin Young

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Think Richard Branson, Oprah, Kathy Ireland, and the like.

These multi-passionate entrepreneurs have gone big time by embracing their eclecticism, and there’s a good reason for it.

It works.

Simply put, embracing all the facets of who you are means you’ll feel more satisfied in the work that you do. I’m a direct sales coach, and a mom entrepreneur. I fought hard to carve out a niche in the coaching arena and realized that it was only a fraction of who I was, and the work that I do well. In reality, I like working with all kinds of entrepreneurs, and my heart most resonates with parents – and entrepreneurial moms in particular.

So do I give up coaching direct sellers? Hardly! Not only am I good at bringing fast results for direct sales professionals, I LOVE it. Why would I give it up?

However, there are so many hours in a day. Any mom can tell you that. How do you bring all the things that you love under one roof? Here are my strategies for embracing eclecticism:

1. Focus on one project at a time. This is a challenge for entrepreneurs, but in order to find success in anything, you’ve got to focus on SOMETHING – even if it’s only for a short time. I completed my book and developed my coaching client base so that I had enough income to pursue other interests. The more money you have to throw at a project, the easier it is to keep multiple plates spinning at once.
2. Develop a reputation for excellence. If you sell crap, people will talk. If you deliver the goods, consistently, reliably, and with quality, people will also talk – and they’ll trust you when you branch out into other categories or markets. They’ll refer others to you based on their history with you – even if they’ve not sampled your new venture. When I launched The Renaissance Mom this year, I was able to introduce my existing clients rapidly to my new venture. I just launched the first product for the new company, The PEACE System, and I had more than 80% attendance on the live preview call (I’ve NEVER had that kind of turnout, and I’ve been told that 30% is more typical.) Some clients embraced it immediately, others sent me referrals because they knew my reputation for delivering a quality program. A reputation for excellence begets clients more rapidly.
3. Diversify slowly. Don’t throw 15 irons in the fire. Give your new project enough focus to have a fighting chance for success. Oprah incubates projects under her care. Branson has an entire panel of people considering new venture investments. When you decide on something, take action to make it successful, but take your time when adding to your business “portfolio”.
4. Grow your support team. Whether it’s support staff (VA’s, employees, etc.),  an emotional support team or a mastermind group, you can’t grow beyond yourself by yourself. A solid support team makes exponential growth easier, and more possible.
5. Enjoy your success. It doesn’t mean a hill of beans if you have an incredible team of people and a highly profitable business if you can’t take time off to enjoy the fruits of your labor. Find ways (even small ones) to reward yourself and celebrate your accomplishments. It’s a form of self-care that shouldn’t be ignored.
6. Rinse and repeat.

What about all those ideas you want to work on? Start with the low hanging fruit first – do what comes easiest, and add projects as time and money allow. I keep a mental lock-box of ideas for later use, and incorporate them into my PEACE System process each day. It’s fun to be able to pull them out (and dust them off sometimes), and figure out where they fit in the grand scheme of  ”my business empire.”

Don’t panic if you have a ton of ideas. Sequester them, assess them, and decide where to move first. Then you can come back later and add the others to your arsenal. You, too, can become the multi-faceted, multi-passionate entrepreneur you’ve always dreamed you’d become.

I am jealous – a little.

Okay, a lot. But it will pass soon enough.

My pal @elizabethpw remodeled her website. I’m sharing some of the pertinent insights to my audience on my direct sales blog, but today, I wanted to share the discoveries that are pertinent to you.

See I created that site eons ago, when I was just a fledgling online person. I shunned WordPress (not one of my better decisions, I’ll admit). I was creating pages by hand (still do sometimes). I thought I was doing well.

Then the other day, I got an email from Liz Pabon, where she wrote this:

Our inner knowing is like an attic filled with great treasures made up of our knowledge, experiences and wisdom.  And sometimes those treasures are blocked or hidden by the cobwebs of self-neglect.

And I got to thinking about all the “stuff” that’s crammed into that site. 2 years of teleclasses (yes, 2 freakin’ years worth). Classes, courses, downloads and handouts. All of it muddled, mixed around, and hard to navigate.

I was making it difficult for people to buy from me.

Now don’t get me wrong, I like earning my keep. I enjoy getting paid for the contribution I make. I think I do a pretty good job of sharing what works, and it’s important to my family that I’m compensated appropriately for my “genius work” as my coach calls it.

But buried within layers of links, pages and other subterfuge, it wasn’t easy to do business with me. And the irony is, I tell people time and again to make it easy for customers to do business with you.

I’m accessible. I’m probably too accessible. If someone sends an email, a tweet or a facebook post, I usually respond – and pretty quickly when I’m able. And I answer questions, provide tons of advice and strategies to help my clients and strangers who may never be my clients.

But on more than one occasion, I’ve had people say the very same thing that I read at the top of Elizabeth’s blog post (except that my name’s Lisa and not Elizabeth).

But in my own head, I thought I was being really clear. I was following all the “rules” about building an opt-in list, creating info products, doing launches, and sharing “free content” with my followers (you know, “the what” but not “the how” stuff we’ve been fed).

So I’m blowing it up – for fun AND profit.

I’ve had this vision for an entire training program much like a college curricula for direct sales pros that want to run their business like a real business. But it’s built around small group coaching – classroom style – and that violates “the rules” of online marketing.

See, according to “the rules”, I’m supposed to create content once, get paid to do it, and then re-package it into an info-product I can sell over and over. It’s a great way to produce “passive” income, but if you follow “the rules”, the bulk of that revenue comes during the product launch, and then trickles in over the lifetime of the product. The more affiliates you have promoting the launch, the more money you stand to make when it launches. Which is why you hear a LOT about people that have multi-million dollar launches, but then you never hear how the product does on the back end.

Things that make me go hmmm…

I’ve been doing this “info marketing thang” for a couple of years now, and when I was green, I was following “the rules” religiously. Step-by-step, cranking out teleclasses, setting up continuity programs, etc. And in the last three weeks it hit me that I wasn’t being authentic in my business.

For as much as I enjoy “passive” income. I had become a slave to “the rules” – and they really didn’t fit me or the way I wanted to do business.

Here’s the truth I’ve learned in the past two years in my online business:

• People will buy info products, but they’ll pay more to work directly with you.
• Info products by themselves are mostly worthless. They sit on shelves and collect dust. I think it was Dan Kennedy that said 20% of your customers will never even open the product. And to get USED to that. Um, sorry. That does not compute for me.
• My business is seeing a shift towards hands-on help that guides people through the info products. And that’s because…
• People get better results with hands-on help.
• Small groups rock. The synergy, the energy and the masterminding that goes on is exponentially better than self-study, and bridges the gap between info products and live events.
• The biggest payday happens at product launch. BUT…
• Big launches leave big gaps in your cash flow.

There’s nothing wrong with helping people and getting paid to do it, folks. That’s what teachers and mentors have been doing for centuries. The catch is to price yourself accordingly for the services you perform. There’s always someone who thinks you’re too expensive, and someone that sees you as the bargain basement extra meal deal. The key is to find your own value in that mix and be fair with your pricing. There’s NO disputing the fact that hands-on help is worth more than info-products all day long.

That’s why you’re seeing a surge in live events, big ticket “masterminds” and ultra pricey one-on-one coaching programs – complete with swarming, affiliate-driven promotional launches.

But you can’t feasibly launch a big ticket item every month to keep cash flow consistent.

Even the “guru’s” are filling those gaps with smaller ticket product launches, generally joint ventures in a teleclass (small group) format. They can launch them every couple of months, and both partners benefit. In fact, one multi-million dollar guru has already launched 6 products in the first 3 months of the year. Talk about bombarding their audience!

But between affiliate and JV promotions, the cash flow keeps coming in.

Take a look at who’s doing what this year. You’ll see most of them moving away from continuity-based models (especially in light of the new California legislation), and towards more mid-price ($300-500), “one-time-only” tele-series and product launches. It serves the same purpose, but at a higher price point, and with fewer customer service issues.

My own business is taking a similar stance – albeit at a much lower price point in most instances. We’re blowing up HomePartySolution.com – and the entire online community that goes with it – to create a more streamlined user interface, and a more lucrative business platform for the direct sales portion of our coaching business.

In short, I’m going to make it so easy for people to do business with me that my clients will wonder what happened.

It’s not an easy process, by any means, and we’re considering documenting the process to help YOU shorten the learning curve if you ever want to do this in your own business. I estimate the entire site will be down about a month to test everything and make it all operational again – with all the new content we’re adding to boot.

The only thing that will still be live on that site is the home page opt-in for new ezine subscribers. I still plan on sending out the weekly ezine, and generating content behind the scenes. But we won’t be selling anything for about a month over there.

So how am I going to keep the employees paid and the family fed?

With a GI-NORMOUS product launch over here.

Tickets for The Renaissance Mom Experience are slated to go on sale April 15. You can sign up for the advance notification list on that page. You have been warned.

The cool thing is that I’m able to continue to do what I love in a way that I truly enjoy. I am able to connect with the very people I enjoy helping and they are seeing better results because of it. I’m able to leverage myself as well (more on that in another post), and continue to grow both segments of my business (both here and on the direct sales side of things). I can’t wait for you all to see what new things we have in store this quarter.

What about you? I’d love your thoughts and feedback on this. Share your comments below, or send me a note on twitter.

Never permit a dichotomy to rule your life, a dichotomy in which you hate what you do so you can have pleasure in your spare time. Look for a situation in which your work will give you as much happiness as your spare time.  - Pablo Picasso

Don’t misunderstand. I LOVE my work. I love the clients I coach, the flexibility I have to be with my family. There’s very little I don’t like…

…except having to choose between different projects. There’s only so much time in the day, and if I want to honor my family, and my client community, I have to be at least a little picky about projects I promote.

Many of you know I lead a sort of “double life”. I began my online career coaching direct sales professionals. Last year, I launched the Direct Sales Super Summit as a tool to help those clients (and others) achieve greater levels of success in their business. We had so much positive feedback, that we had to change the name to better reflect the audience. We now have about a 50/50 mix of direct sellers and small business owners. Changing the name was a tough call, but it enabled me to get folks like Jimmy Vee and Travis Miller to participate.

In that name change, though, was all kinds of anxiety for me. It meant stepping back from my direct sales focus and embracing the audience I now call home: business minded women and entrepreneurial moms.

The bulk of my clients are still direct sellers, but I’ve noticed that where other direct sales coaches and trainers often complain about how flaky their customers are, I have NEVER had that problem – okay, I had one customer that was a dork, but she flew the coop eons ago. My customers are loyal, honest, and willing to invest in themselves to grow a real business through their direct sales company.

Perhaps that’s the most important distinction: my clients see themselves as business owners. And yet, so much of the world still lumps all direct sellers into the “is this a pyramid scheme?” category.

So I’ve been torn between trying to be the champion of what I call “direct sales professionals” and working with entrepreneurs. The funny thing is, they are one and the same.

And I didn’t figure that out until just now.

I knew it internally. In my heart. I say it all the time – you are the business owner of “You, Inc.” and you need to run your direct sales business like a business and not an expensive hobby. But I also realize that message applies across the board to other entrepreneurs trying to get established in their industry: health coaches, theater owners, web designers, videographers, actors, author – you name it. You have to run a business with a focus on profit, otherwise, it’s an expensive hobby.

I’ve coached direct sellers, and I love it. I’ve also coached all the other clients I mentioned above. There doesn’t seem to be much correlation between them, does there?

Except for that “expensive hobby” concept.

So as I sit here writing this, it becomes even more apparent to me that I don’t need to decide between working with direct sales pros and entrepreneurs. In serving one, I am serving both.

Sure direct sales has a bit of lingo that goes along with it: bookings, recruits, shows, etc. But the principles are the same: create a sustainable business that will help my client achieve their goals, including flexibility of time, increased income, and the ability to live life on their terms.

That’s pretty much the same set of goals that most entrepreneurs have.

All this time, I’ve been told that I needed to choose. I couldn’t serve two masters. Managing two newsletters would be a challenge. As a result, I haven’t launched my newsletter for The Renaissance Mom community yet. I’ve been focusing on creating a separation between the two brands so that I could better ‘segment my market’ – whatever that’s supposed to mean.

The irony is that most of the direct sellers that read “PartyOn!” each week have also signed up to hear more about the Renaissance Mom – without much prompting on my part. And many of the people I expect to attend my live event this August are direct sales pros that are moms, who need to find balance in their lives, just like any other entrepreneurial mom.

Funny how that works.

So I’m all through with arm wrestling with myself – at least about this issue. There’s a box on the page where you can sign up for the new Renaissance Mom Newsletter (I’ve got to give it a name, though, I suppose). You can visit HomePartySolution.com to register for the newsletter for Direct Sales Pros, “PartyOn!”. Yep, that means I’m putting out two newsletters now. God help us all. I hope my assistant can handle all the spell checking.

It also means I’ll be launching new programs – maybe even at the same time. I have an entire system to help busy moms manage their lives and their business. I’ve been wanting to share it for almost a year now, and haven’t been able to find “the right time” to do it.  Here’s a glimpse at the projects sitting on my desk that are ready, and just waiting for me to get them launched:

• Direct Sales 102: Sell More to Earn More
• The PEACE System: Do less, achieve more in 10-20 minutes a day
• Direct Sales 201: Core skills for Direct Sales Leaders
• The Renaissance Mom LIVE Event (okay, that’s happening in August, but we haven’t started selling tickets yet!)

These projects are pretty much in the can. But I’ve been grappling with timing things, sharing too much info, and overloading my readers with too many promos.

Ugh. Maybe I’m expecting too much from my list, but I think you’re smart enough to know what will work for you and what won’t. If I’m sending you too much email, you’ll let me know – (I try to keep it to 1 or 2 messages a week if you’re not in a current program). If you’re on multiple lists, I trust you know what you’re doing. If I’m totally up in the night, I’m going to trust that you’ll call me on it.

And if I’m wrong, I’ll get a flood of unsubscribes, and I’ll have to start from scratch.

Does that sound reasonable? Am I just a goofball for actually putting faith in my list of loyal subscribers? I’d love your feedback. Post a comment below and let me know what you think about the projects I’m planning. Sound good? Sound stupid? Your feedback matters.