Suzanne Evans’ Rags to Riches Feature

Every big turning point in your life starts with that “why” moment. My journey from secretary to a 7-figure business owner started off with a life-changing “why” moment.

Here it is, I was working a day job on Broadway. One night I was looking over my credit card statements and decided to fill out a budget sheet to see how long it would take to pay off my debts. I almost cried when I saw it would take 21 years!

Right then and there I knew I had to take my financial future into my own hands and it wasn’t going to happen sitting behind a desk.

Necessity sprung me to action, and I started looking at the signs all around me pointing to coaching and consulting.  

I felt like I had created a HUGE mess, I was embarrassed and I realized that I had a choice to make, I could give up searching, go back to just being a secretary and living a small life like everyone else I knew or I could make the decision to do whatever it took to master my thoughts, master business and create the BIG life I wanted.

I won’t bore you with the long evolution of my business, but let’s just say at some point in the process of figuring it all out I realized I had to get clients in order for any of this to work.  WHERE do you find clients? It’s not like there is a store full of clients that you can just go in and grab what you need. OR was there? I got a nutty idea: If I didn’t know how to get clients I certainly knew where my potential clients were.   

Next step was Whole Foods (and not just for lunch).

I knew that if I was going to succeed I’d have to do things differently.  I opened up shop inside Whole Foods Market. Literally. (between the bananas and tomatoes). Somehow I convinced the manager of the Whole Food in Edgewater, NJ to let me set up a booth in the store and hand out life assessment surveys.   The best part? I got clients from it.  

From there it became incredibly clear that for me to succeed, I’d have to master marketing and sales, and also be ok with being embarrassed. I also realized that I needed to find a way to turn my own “mess” into a serious business to help other people.

I made that DECISION, and I worked like hell. I spent hours learning everything I could about building a business AND how to get clients. I read books and attended events & teleclasses… everything I could find on networking, speaking and sales.

I started to apply what I learned to my own business and it grew from something I did at nights and on the weekends to a million dollar business is less than 3 years.

Then something funny happened: Other entrepreneurs wanted to know how I did it. And they wanted to pay me to have me teach them. It’s why in 2008 I started my company Driven Inc.

Turning my “mess into my message” helped me quickly build a multi-six-figure business. After all my work, late nights, weekends, conferences and connections it was all coming together. I made myself the expert and was now leading the way. If I did it, so can you!