[00:00:06] Viktoriia Miracle: Hello. Hello and welcome to happy time happy money podcast with Viktoriia Miracle. And today we have Caroline Vencil. Caroline is a full time blogger, mom of 4, wife and multitasking pro. She build a six figure blog in less than three years while being an full-time mom and wife. And most recently retired her husband before 30 from her work on her business. Her passion is to teach other women how to make money from their passion through blocking and focusing on the right task. We all get to use that right task focusing. Hello Caroline and welcome.

[00:00:53] Caroline Vencil: Thank you so much for having me.

[00:00:56] Viktoriia Miracle: Yes. Well, pleasure to have you here with us. I would love to know more about your story on how you went from broke to six figures and what inspired you to do what you do right now?

[00:01:09] Caroline Vencil: Sure. So, okay. We have to go a little bit back to the beginning here. I grew up with kind of the anybody can be anything mentality is what my parents always taught us. And so from a very young age, I was like, I want to be a CEO. I'm this little five-year-old girl with my pink blazer. My dad's old briefcase walking around the house like I'm going to be a CEO. And I went to school for business and everything I had. Plan ahead of me that I was going to be valedictorian and be the youngest CEO of a fortune 500 company. And then in my freshmen year of college met my amazing husband and promptly got pregnant, very much not part of the plan at all. and so all of my hopes and dreams changed at that point in time, everything went from I'm going to be this amazing thing to I felt like a failure. And I was like, you know, if I can't go on and do the business that I wanted, I'm going to be the greatest mom ever to this little person. What I did not realize at the time was that that meant living off of my husband's one income.

[00:02:17] And at that point in time, this wasn't that long ago, but, it was $10 an hour, a whole $10 an hour was what we were living off of as a family of three. My entire world was like upside down. I had no idea how we were going to pay for things. We were running into second notices, last notices, eviction notices, all of those things that just kind of felt super overwhelming and eventually we got our money situation in order for. After we kind of managed our finances. I realized that for me, there was something that was missing. There was part of me that I wasn't tapping into that I wasn't using that I wanted to use. But obviously when you have little kids, all of us who are moms, like we put ourselves and our hopes and our dreams on the back burner, because we're like in full mom mode.

[00:03:12] And that's great except when we realized that there is part of us that we wish was doing something different. And that was where I kind of had my epiphany moment where I was like, okay, that's it. I gotta do something else. And after the birth of my third son, I had this moment where I was like, you know what, I have to do something.

[00:03:32] So I went on Pinterest and I found this pin that was like how I earned $20,000 in my first month of my blog. We've all seen those pins on Pinterest and I was just the sucker who was like, if you can do it, I can do it. And so I started my blog and I kept hitting refresh on that page, looking for like the millions of dollars from the internet to come to me and it never happened. Obviously like now we all know that business requires work and, and putting in effort. I didn't, I thought it was this get rich quick thing and I'm like, you can do it, I can do it. And. It took a lot of time and energy to learn the right things to be focusing on and how to grow and how to scale and where to focus my time and energy when I have four kids at home. When there are limited hours in the day and now it has become an entire business. It's no longer just a blog. It's this business and I retired my husband from a dangerous third shift steel job and moved my whole family from an area that we didn't like into our dream house. And it all happened because I decided to listen to that little nudge that was like, you can do more in your life.

[00:04:46] You can be a mom and you can be a woman and you can be a wife and you can be a bad-ass business owner. That was what it came back to. So that's, that's the long and short story there as I read.

[00:05:02] Viktoriia Miracle: That was a great, like long but short but long but short. So I will ask you, what is the number one mistake you've done?

[00:05:11] What would you say? Of course, we don't have regrets to pick what is there like I was, I've done it differently or whatever.

[00:05:22] Caroline Vencil: Okay. So I had to boil it down to just one. Oh my gosh. There's so many. Okay. So I think that, honestly, the one thing that I would have done earlier would have been making my own products. So in blogging, it was kind of like a back when I started cause I'm an internet dinosaur.

[00:05:39] I started my blog in 2015 and like the things that worked then definitely don't work now, because so much has happened, but one of the things. In blogging, like no traffic is the only thing that you need to focus on. Pinterest is the only thing you need to focus on. And I was like, I'm never going to sell anything ever for any reason, because selling is so icky, like who would do that?

[00:06:02] And so obviously I kept putting it off and no matter what people kept telling me, like, Make a product your people want to buy things from you. I'm like, no, no they don't. What are you talking about?

[00:06:14] So, yeah, it would definitely be making a product because, I had my first three day flash sale. In 2017, I think and it was for a $7 product and over three days I made $1,200 with my first product.

[00:06:30] Viktoriia Miracle: So what would you say changed right? In terms of money, you say you didn't do well and then you started to do well. What, what is it there that has changed?

[00:06:41] Caroline Vencil: With my money mindset or like in finances for business?

[00:06:45] Viktoriia Miracle: That as a mindset, or do you think that was a hard work?

[00:06:48] Caroline Vencil: You know, I think it was a little bit of both. If we're being completely honest, I think that I had to come to terms with the fact that I was allowed to make money from my business. That it wasn't icky or shameful or bad to be making money from my business for selling my ideas, my systems, my structures, my templates, all of those things.

[00:07:10] It wasn't a bad thing. It didn't make me a bad person. In fact, I'm helping people by giving them my content by giving them my services like that shift to me was the biggest game changer. There aren't really, even words to put into. It was like realizing that it's not bothersome to sell something to somebody it's helpful.

[00:07:35] Viktoriia Miracle: So what would be your number one advice to everybody who is struggling with money that started business and then just can get it off the ground?

[00:07:45] Caroline Vencil: I think really once you figure out what it is that you're super passionate about, and that sounds like such a cop out, but I really mean it. Like, if there's that one thing that you can't stop talking about, if there's that one thing that like, everything that you write about, like, whether you do your marketing on Instagram or Facebook or email or a blog or YouTube or podcasts, doesn't matter.

[00:08:08] That's one thing that there's like this thread throughout all of our content that we share, that one thing that you can't stop talking about for me, it was money. And like I tried to do the homeschooling thing and everything that came back to you inside of my blog posts in my content was like, but you can save a lot of money if you blank, blank, blank.

[00:08:30] Once you find that thing that you can't shut up about and you're like, if you kept talking about it to your friends, they'd be like enough already. Once you find that thing, it unlocks the flood gates. Of the content that you can create, the things that you can talk about, the things that you can sell and how you can reach your people yeah.

[00:08:51] Viktoriia Miracle: Perfect. Thank you. And the last question that I ask everybody on this podcast, fill in the blank for me. If you really knew me, you will know that I am blank.

[00:09:01] Caroline Vencil: Cheap

[00:09:06] Viktoriia Miracle: I know you have not a cheap freebie for us. What is it?

[00:09:09] Caroline Vencil: I do. I have a business calendar for you, and this is all about my favorite things that you can do to move your business forward, grow your income in just a few minutes, every single day. And it's a brand new one each month. We, my team and I make them, and they are designed to help you with different areas of your business, whether that's, you know, the backend legal stuff or learning how to send some emails to your people, if you've never done it before, growing affiliate marketing.

[00:09:37] There's a lot of stuff in there. It's really good. So I've got that for you guys.

[00:09:41] Viktoriia Miracle: Awesome. And I think I do have your second freebie off money mindset that we just talked about. I think that will be also perfect. So we'll, we'll link everything. If you're watching a listen to this episode, you know, you'll just scroll down.

[00:09:52] There's going to be a link to our web page with the video, audio and transcript. If you love it, just share it with your friends as well. And there's going to be all links that we mentioned in this episode. And always will go like review subscribe, and thank you so much for watching or listening and a well, we wish amazing day.

[00:10:13] I'll see you tomorrow. Thank you Caroline for coming.

[00:10:17] Caroline Vencil: Thanks for having me. Bye.