IAM1839 – Founder Educates People to Develop Themselves Beyond Their Products

Previous Episode: https://iamceo.co/2019/03/24/iam223-founder-educates-people-to-develop-themselves-beyond-their-products/

Transcription:

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Sarita Pittman Teaser 00:00

You have to understand how to really be the person that person needs you to be. And if we aren't careful, we'll lose ourselves. So, the psychology of coaching and the psychology of business and the psychology of entrepreneurship is a totally, totally different vein of just being a business owner.

Intro 00:18

Do you want to learn effective ways to build relationships, generate sales and grow your business from successful entrepreneurs, startups, and CEOs, without listening to a long, long, long interview?

If so you've come to the right place, Gresham Harkless values your time and is ready to share with you precisely the information you're in search of.

This is the I AM CEO podcast.

Gresham Harkless 00:42

Hello. Hello. Hello. This is Gresh from the I AM CEO podcast and I appreciate you listening to this episode. If you've been listening this year, you know that we've hit 1600 episodes at the beginning of this year. We're doing something a little bit different where we're repurposing our favorite episodes around certain categories, topics, or as I like to call them, business pillars that we think are going to be extremely impactful for CEOs, entrepreneurs, and business owners, just like you, what I like to call the CB nation architects who are looking to level up their organizations.

This month, we are focusing on CEO Hacks and CEO Nuggets. This is by far one of my favorite questions I asked on the show. In other words, I asked, what are the apps, books, and habits that make you more effective and efficient? Those were the CEO hacks. And then I asked for a word of wisdom or a piece of advice or something that you might tell your younger business self if you were to hop into a time machine and those were the CEO nuggets. That's what we'll focus on this month and some of the top ones that can instantly impact your business.

I love all the questions, but with every episode, I thought I would walk away with something I could look at and implement right there to save the precious resources, time and money. Or I would also learn about the advice, tips and tidbits or tools of the trade on how to level up our organization. So you'll hear some of these this month. So sit back and enjoy this special episode of the I am CEO podcast.

Hello. Hello. Hello. This is Gresh from the I AM CEO podcast, and I have a very special guest on the show today. I have Sarita Pittman of Atiras International. Sarita, it's awesome to have you on the show.

Sarita Pittman 02:17

Thank you so much for having me. What an honor.

Gresham Harkless :02:19

Definitely. I'm honored as well. I wanted to read a little bit more about Sarita so you can hear about all the awesome things that she's doing.

Sarita Pittman, is known as the Lady Wealth Builder and the founder of Atiras International. Sarita has a passion for seeing others win with what they have. Her highly energetic delivery eliminates the fear and anxiety of next leveling the mindsets and success of her audience.

Being in the health and beauty industry for nearly two decades has afforded her the opportunity to connect with high-level leaders, visionaries, and trailblazers.

Sarita, are you ready to speak to the I AM CEO community?

Sarita Pittman 02:51

I am absolutely. I'm more than ready. Thank you.

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Gresham Harkless 02:54

Awesome. Let's do it. So, just to kick everything off, I usually ask for what I call your CEO story, and just to hear a little bit more about your background and what led you to start your business.

Sarita Pittman 03:01

I became an entrepreneur in my teens and legally I became an entrepreneur officially, according to the government at the age of 18. I started off in the beauty industry at home in my parent's bathroom. Then I graduated to the kitchen and then from the kitchen to be a traveling stylist, and then from there, I went into corporate salons and started my own business.

If you will, where it was just me, my skill set, my money and the decisions to run a business like a business that really happened full pledged when I turned 20. So I'm not 20 anymore, not even a long shot, but I've been an entrepreneur for a long time. So just my passion for not being boxed in is what led me to be a CEO.

Gresham Harkless 03:41

Absolutely. That makes perfect sense. And it's funny, like anytime people have that entrepreneurial type bug, you can usually see it like when they're like 10 years old or 13 or whatever, they're always doing something, creating something. That just continues to manifest itself. Just kind of like the way they do it is different.

Sarita Pittman 03:56

Absolutely.

Gresham Harkless 03:57

Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. I know I touched on a little bit in your bio. Could you tell us a little bit more about your business now and what exactly you're doing?

Sarita Pittman 04:03

Right now, my primary focus is professional development for leaders, and people that are coaches. Oftentimes we focus on our logo, our branding, our website. So we don't develop as a person. The program I have now is the Atiras International Coaching Certification Program. We bring you to the program, you graduate and you're an accredited professional coach. So you can become a coach, you can lead your team better, have better communication, understand how to lead a team, how do you hire? How do you fire? How do you meet people where they are? How do you lead with empathy?

Those things happen along the way for me because I knew how to sell services. I knew how to make money. I knew how to be a people person to have great customer service. But I had to turn into the person I needed to be to lead people that were on my team. So that's what I do now. I primarily focus on the education side and just really helping people understand that you have to develop more than your brand self. You really have to develop yourself.

Gresham Harkless 04:57

Yeah, I think that's a really strong point because I think a lot of times with being a business owner, juggling so many different things, wearing so many different hats, you have to worry about getting paid. You have to worry about sending out the invoice. You have to worry about doing the actual services.

Sometimes you forget to quote and quote put on your own oxygen mask and develop yourself so that you can be a better leader, so that you can take care of yourself so that it can manifest itself in all the success and goals you have with their business.

Sarita Pittman 05:21

Absolutely. Leadership is so important, but self-leadership is the primary foundation of being a successful entrepreneur. Like I believe, the 22 version of myself will not sustain the success that I have now. But oftentimes we don't change that part of us. We'll change our website. We'll change our logos. We'll get new rack cards. We'll create a new Facebook group. But ultimately we have to become who we need to be to sustain our success.

Gresham Harkless 05:45

Exactly. Exactly. And correct me if I'm wrong, a lot of that starts with the inner game, so to speak, when you're developing yourself, your mindset and things like that.

Sarita Pittman 05:52

Absolutely. That's why I have a professional coaching certification program because with the first session that you come through is the psychology of coaching. We teach the first client that you have is yourself. You cannot take a person, especially if you're wanting to lead anyone, lead someone to buy your service, lead a team member, lead a man, lead and management, whatever it is, you have to understand how to really be the person that that person needs you to be.

If we aren't careful, we'll lose ourselves. So, the psychology of coaching and the psychology of business and the psychology of entrepreneurship is a totally, totally different vein of just being a business owner.

Gresham Harkless 06:28

Absolutely. That makes perfect sense. I love that kind of reminder your first client that you have is yourself. So you have to make sure to take care of yourself as you would your level or double a triple a level client as well. So that makes perfect sense.

Now I wanted to ask you for what I call your secret sauce. You might have already touched on this. This could be for yourself or for your organization, but what do you feel sets you guys apart?

Sarita Pittman 06:47

What sets us apart is that it's real, relatable, real-time marketplace education. I know for myself growing up being an entrepreneur at a very young age, I would go to places and the person that would be on the other side of the desk talking to me had not achieved the level of success that I desired to achieve. So it made me question your advice. If it's really as good as you say it is, why haven't you achieved that level of success?

Me on the other hand, I hit success early on. I became a high-income earner in my 20s. I married a 2nd generation car dealer. We're listed in the top-rank companies in the world. So my success is in real time. It's not that archeology. I'm sorry, the archaic theology or anything of things that worked a long time ago is you can apply it right now and see instant results. So that's what sets us apart.

Gresham Harkless 07:38

Yeah, that makes perfect sense. It's funny that you say that a lot of times, we will listen to people that haven't been where we're trying to go or haven't done what even we are trying to do and maybe are doing at that current time.

But sometimes we listen to that advice and we take that advice when in reality that may not be necessarily what is best for us to get to where we want to be.

Sarita Pittman 07:55

Absolutely. Then we wonder, why we aren't succeeding. Number one, it's a different recipe. Totally different recipe.

Gresham Harkless 08:02

Exactly. Exactly. You have to make sure that you pay attention to that and make sure that you know you're going on the right path that you want to go to get to where you want to be. So that makes perfect sense.

I wanted to switch gears a little bit and ask you for what I call a CEO hack. This might be an app, a book or a habit that you have, but it's something that makes you more effective and efficient.

Sarita Pittman 08:20

I do 90-day audits. I audit my processes, how well did I implement a new strategy? What was the feedback because I believe in what I call Kaizen education. Incremental changes. Oftentimes we upload and just tear up the foundation so much that we can never truly benefit the things that we've implemented or we don't change anything and then we want to have greater success and we want to extend our reach, but we've got nothing different.

So I just believe in implementing small changes every 90 days, tightening up the screws and filling the holes, if you will.

Gresham Harkless 08:52

Yeah, I love that kind of reminder because a lot of times, and let me know if you find this when you work with clients and people you've been working with is that sometimes we think success means we need to make wholesale changes. But often sometimes it's just a small hack here and there that can actually lead us to exponential changes and success.

Sarita Pittman 09:10

Absolutely. I remember one time I had a client and they just wanted to throw away their entire marketing campaign and I said, your marketing campaign is amazing. Take your face off of it and put someone else's face on. What? It's a personal brand. I said, but they're not buying you. They're buying the service.

Show a person using the service instant turnaround in their business. They didn't have to throw away their marketing campaign. They didn't waste anything. They simply removed their image and replaced it with someone else.

Gresham Harkless 09:35

Awesome. No, that's a really great example. Let me ask you this I guess as an entrepreneur and business owner, is there some way to measure if you knew you need to make wholesale changes and maybe make a pivot and versus just making those small little hacks that might make a difference?

Is there a way to measure that?

Sarita Pittman 09:51

I would say it is, but it depends on your industry. For perfect example, if you are selling an actual product in the service, not just necessarily a service, but a tangible product and it's not moving off the shelf, it's not coming off your website. How are you drawing traffic to your website? Are you not drawing traffic? What are those things that you need to do?

Ultimately, this is going into business, not just the personal development, but you have to really see what your goals are. If you are not achieving your goal, it's probably because you haven't said what's needed to achieve this goal. So I would just say reverse engineer, go back and say, I did not put this out there as my goal. But if you have put it out there as your goal, and you've done things honestly, you may need to pivot and not have that as your goal at all because you don't have the infrastructure to hit that goal.

Gresham Harkless 10:37

It sounds like what I understand and what the way I hear it is that a lot of times you have to be like you said, making that audit and do a realistic audit to some degree, because sometimes we can see things that are maybe not as great as they should be. We maybe need to develop ourselves or develop our industry, our infrastructure a little bit more so that we can reach those goals.

Sarita Pittman 10:55

Absolutely. And make sure whatever you're implementing that you actually have some stats that you can go back and look. So you would say, Hey, I did this in March. I did this in April. I did this in May. So you go back and you look at those numbers and you break it down and say, hey, this is what I did consistently this 90 days.

This is what I did the fire 90 days and compare. Okay. This works, this works. I changed this. This didn't increase it. So, maybe I just need to stabilize and not make any changes and this is what I need to do next quarter. So I just believe in truly be real with yourself and facing your numbers. I tell people all the time, especially in sales numbers don't lie, people do.

Gresham Harkless 11:30

Exactly. Exactly. Now, I wanted to ask you for what I call A CEO nugget. You might've already touched on some of these, but this is something that is a word of wisdom or piece of advice, or if you can hop into a time machine, what would you tell your younger business self?

Sarita Pittman 11:43

My younger business self, I would tell myself, copy anyone else's experience and think that if I do it their way, I'm going to win. I'm not them. I don't have their personality. I don't have the budget. I don't have any of those things.

So, I had to learn how to win on my level. What can I do right now with what I have not based on what I don't have, but what can I do right now with what I have and never place myself behind an 8 ball. That's what I would tell my younger self, honestly. That's what I teach now and I always tell people, allow my mistakes to be your lessons.

Gresham Harkless 12:16

That's definitely powerful. It's a great reminder too because you look again having that realistic audit at yourself to see what things you have at your disposal. Because we all seem to have things that we can do that we can leverage, that we can use to reach that next step or that next level.

It may not be from A to Z. It might be from A to B and then B to C and we might have to step it up time by time in that way. But a lot of times we can't reach Z as long as we are dedicated to it and we stay consistent with it.

Sarita Pittman 12:42

Absolutely be okay that if J comes right before Z a lot of times we wanted just to come out in alphabetical order and it never comes that way. It just never does.

Gresham Harkless 12:51

Exactly. Exactly. That makes perfect sense. Now I wanted to ask you my absolute favorite question, which is the definition of what it means to be a CEO. We're hoping to have different quote and quote CEOs on the show.

So Sarita, I want to ask you what does being a CEO mean to you?

Sarita Pittman 13:04

Being the CEO means that the buck stops with me. That I have to be okay with taking the blame, taking the fall for everything that goes wrong as well as everything that goes right. But I must be able to put people in positions to win that it's not all about me. At the same time, I have to be okay with if it messes up, it's all on me. But at the same time, I have to help people in position that they can grow, that they could be seen as a genius that put people in the place of their genius.

So it's a dichotomy. I tell people all the time. If you don't have that ability, don't do it. Be on someone else's team. My sister-in-law tells me all the time, I want to be the auntie of a vision, not the mama. So sometimes it's best to be the auntie or an uncle of a vision versus being the father or the mother, because you have to be able to be bold enough to say at the end of the day, everything that's wrong is on me.

But at the end of the day, everything that's right is not because I did it all.

Gresham Harkless 13:55

Exactly. Exactly. It takes a lot of humility to be able to say that this is the team that we've been able to put in place to make that happen. But at the same time, if things do go wrong, you have to be able to say, okay, this is on my shoulders and sometimes take that brunt of the positive or negative things that happen.

Sarita Pittman 14:11

Absolutely.

Gresham Harkless 14:12

Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. Well, Sarita, I truly appreciate you for taking some time out. What I want to do is pass you the mic, so to speak, just to see if there's anything additional you want to let our readers and listeners know, how they can get a hold of you and find out about all the awesome things that you're doing.

Sarita Pittman 14:27

Definitely. Again, thank you to even welcome me to your platform. I'm honored and humbled, but if you want to connect with me, you can go to getcoachedup.com. Go to getcoachedupsociety.com.

The Get Coach Up Society is real-time real marketplace education that you can apply instantly to see exponential growth in your business, help you really understand how to scale your business up, how to have scalable success, sustainable success, and most importantly, sellable success if you're ready to launch your professional coaching career or improve their level of communication.

Become a coach, go through our leadership development program, and that's at getcoachedup.com. So both of those getcoachedup.com and getcoachedupsociety.com is how you can get in touch.

Gresham Harkless 15:07

Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. We'll make sure to have those links in the show notes just so that anybody can follow up with you and take everything to the next level.

I truly appreciate you for read for all the awesome things that you're doing, and I hope you have a phenomenal rest of the day.

Sarita Pittman 15:20

Thank you. Same here. Much respect. Bye-bye.

Outro 15:22

Thank you for listening to the I AM CEO podcast powered by Blue 16 Media. Tune in next time and visit us at iamceo.co. I AM CEO is not just a phrase, it's a community.

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Grab CEO gear at www.ceogear.co. This has been the I AM CEO podcast with Gresham Harkless. Thank you for listening.

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