Embracing Imperfection and Trusting Your Team – Episode 7: Mari Wuellner

Introduction to Go Beyond Busy

[00:00:00] Bernard: Welcome to Go Beyond Busy, the podcast where real business owners share the lessons they’ve learned on the way to building a business they love.

In this episode, Christine chats with the owner of The Crew, a coaching collective for women, and an insurance agency she built to run without her. You’ll hear how she learned to step back from perfection, trust her team, and grow a business that supports her life, not the other way around.

Meet Mari Wuellner: Entrepreneur and Coach

[00:00:28] Christine Abela: Good morning. I’m Christine Abela from Go Beyond Busy. I’m in New Zealand, but I’m here today with Mari Wuellner who is in Seattle in the USA, she runs a business called The Crew.

Hello, how are you today?

[00:00:41] Mari Wuellner: I am good, Christine. Thanks for having me.

Embracing Imperfection in Business

[00:00:44] Christine Abela: Very good. And so can you tell me what’s something that you’ve learned about running a business that you wish you’d known earlier?

[00:00:50] Mari Wuellner: Oh my gosh. I should back up and say I have two businesses, so the first business that I own is a insurance agency, and I’ve had that since 2008. And the other business I’ve had since 2017 called The Crew, which is a life coaching collective. And what I wish I would’ve known back then is different than what I wish I knew today.

Let’s cut that out.

[00:01:18] Christine Abela: What was it? What happened,

[00:01:20] Mari Wuellner: It was my ring light. It was my ring light went down.

Let me get it. Oh my gosh, this never happens. Okay. This is fun. I got the day roll. Oh my God. This is so awesome.

[00:01:32] Christine Abela: Sometimes I leave bloopers in, by the way.

[00:01:34] Mari Wuellner: I was gonna say, you know what, I’m gonna say something totally different. What I wish I would’ve known and embraced is accidents are gonna happen. You are going to mess up. You are gonna get it wrong. Your ring light is gonna fall over and scare you. You’re gonna say names wrong, you’re gonna get dates wrong, and I wish someone would’ve told me it’s okay.

It’s all good. I think bringing humanity back to business the real back to business, the authentic, the vulnerable. I think is beautiful right now, especially in this era of social media and Pinterest perfect. And everybody just is airbrushed and gorgeous. Just the reminder that it’s messy, it’s vulnerable and hard and we’re gonna get it wrong.

The Crew: A Supportive Coaching Collective

[00:02:26] Christine Abela: So how, with The Crew, how do you help people to manage those sort of things?

[00:02:31] Mari Wuellner: Yeah. Inside the crew is a coaching collective for women. And one of the things that I think helps other women, and this is my opinion, is seeing other women fail and struggle and get real about what’s worked for them in the past. So it is a community where we show up and support each other using the community’s lived experiences.

And so I think what helps women and what helps us through that is seeing other people. I remember being on a podcast and it was one of the coaches in The Crew, in the faculty. She was on a Zoom presentation and it was a big one, hundreds of people on this Zoom and she couldn’t get her slides to work.

And it was live. And I’m watching her “fail”. I’m putting that in air quotes in real time. And she just handled it. As someone would. There was some stress. You could tell there was anxiety. It was a fumbly bumbly, and she got through it and it was this big permission slip to that’s gonna happen and it’s okay.

I think watching other women and talking with other people through those things is going to be the biggest help versus pretending everything’s perfect and normal.

[00:03:46] Christine Abela: How does that translate to a business setting? How can we learn to just cope and to just do things as ourselves in a business setting.

[00:03:57] Mari Wuellner: Yeah, I would say slow down. And I would also say stop the comparison. Owning a business is hard and it’s one of the hardest things we could do my opinions, besides parenting, is owning a business. And slowing down and not comparing is gonna be a huge. Comparing yourself to who you were yesterday versus someone who’s maybe been at it for 10 more years or has a different, better connection than you do.

That’s gonna be really helpful.

Running an Insurance Business

[00:04:33] Christine Abela: Yeah. So what about your insurance business?

It’s probably quite a different thing to run an insurance business to running a coaching business.

[00:04:42] Mari Wuellner: Yeah, so I started my agency in 2008, and very quickly I realized selling insurance wasn’t my passion, and there’s nothing wrong with that. So I hired the best people, the best team I could possibly find. And I started coaching them to become the best salespeople and the best service people in the industry.

And pretty soon, they started asking for coaching on personal things. And so my coaching practice started very organically through coaching my team. And how it’s different is they run it, they run my agency now. I am definitely hands on with the team, but hands off when it comes to the day-to-day with the clients.

And so it’s quite different. And it’s a totally different model. But there’s room for both of them. There’s beauty in both of those models.

[00:05:38] Christine Abela: That’s something that I try to teach my clients as a business consultant to get to the point where you can have that hands off and go and do something else, which is your passion. Did you feel guilty about doing that? Did you feel stress about doing that? How did you feel about this idea of leaving them to their own?

[00:05:57] Mari Wuellner: I think everybody wants autonomy, right? And so I don’t think that my team appreciated it when I was helicopter and hands in everything kind of mucking things up, and showing my team that I completely trust them. Yeah. If a mistake is made as we started. Huh, please. As I started with a big old mistake here, that will happen and we will work through it.

We will coach through it. As long as they are coachable and willing to fix mistakes and errors, then I completely trust that they’re gonna do a great job. Guilty? No, and I don’t think. Yeah, I think, not at all. This is what, why I started a business. I started a business to provide a lifestyle for myself and to help other people.

And I hire amazing people to work for me and I pay them well. Guilt? Not one bit. Cause my clients are, everybody’s taken care of and everybody’s happy.

[00:07:00] Christine Abela: So there’s quite a few ways to promote a business these days, and one of the biggest is social media. Can you talk about that? What do you do with social media? What’s your take?

Stepping Away from Social Media

[00:07:10] Mari Wuellner: Yeah, this is a passion of mine right now because when I started my coaching practice in 2017, growing my business organically online through Facebook and Instagram was easy. The algorithm wasn’t that big of a deal, and the interactions and engagement was really high. Over the years, that has completely shifted as everyone knows and changed.

And as, I don’t know, a sensitive person, I started equating my worth with the visibility I was getting on social media. And it became really apparent to me that it was time for me to step back and step away from social media just for a personal reason. And I did that for three months over the summer. I completely stopped all social media and folks would have asked, and they did.

They said, first of all, how did you do it? I wanna do that. And secondly, what happened with the business? And I have to tell you, Christine, I did something radical. I just started calling people. I just started talking about my business in real life. I just started inviting folks to coffee and going to meetings and networking here in my town versus promoting it on social media.

And my business grew and I was able to radically pivot it in a way that is really taking off right now because of the new model. That would’ve never happened had I not stepped away from social media, got into the weeds of the business a little bit and reimagined it.

[00:08:51] Christine Abela: Which is a little ironic because most of the people who find this episode of this podcast are probably going to find it through social media. So what sort of people are you looking at working with now? Who would you like to approach you?

Invitation to Connect and Final Thoughts

[00:09:06] Mari Wuellner: I would love to work with any women who likes community and is looking for support, accountability, and coaching in a collective model. And what I mean by that is I have five expert coaches on faculty. And these expert coaches charge thousands of dollars every month, but for crew members, they get access to everything for $97 a month.

So I’m looking for women who are looking for a change in a community and expert coaching and guidance at an accessible rate.

If anybody is curious about, taking a break or looking at social media, I do have a free five day social media sabbatical challenge. All these women and people that I’m talking to are so curious. How did you do it? How did you step away from social media?

What happened, what changed? And my invitation would be to experiment and play around with it for yourself. See what happens with your health, your mindset, and your relationships when you put your phone down for a minute. You don’t have to put it down forever. I am not telling you to throw the baby out with the bath water, but it’s a great opportunity, especially right now we’re on the holidays. To look at the relationship and ask questions, get curious. And honestly, when it comes to business, if you think you’re too busy, if you don’t have time, I can find you hours in your day by putting down social media and focusing on your life in your business.

[00:10:41] Christine Abela: Very cool. So thank you very much for joining me today. If anybody is interested in contacting Mari, then I will put a link to her website underneath wherever it is that you are watching this. And if you want to contact me, you can go to GoBeyondBusy.com. Thank you very much.

[00:10:56] Mari Wuellner: Thank you.

[00:10:58] Bernard: Thanks for tuning in to Go Beyond Busy. If you’d like help growing your business, visit GoBeyondBusy.com.

See you next time.