SDH 460: Going All In With No Safety Net with Steph Gorton

Other ways to listen:

Hello my beautiful friends! This week I’m so excited to sit down with the lovely and talented Steph Gorton! Steph is a business coach out of Perth, Australia who left behind her corporate 9-5 and built an incredible online business where she coaches women who are in the startup phase of their business how to follow in her footsteps and scale their business from zero to six figures. While she is a business coach, what Steph truly does is empower women to simply dream bigger and believe in themselves enough to go after those dreams.

When Steph first started on her entrepreneurial journey she was riddled with self-doubt. She was terrified to fail and scared of being judged, especially by those closest to her. She just needed someone to believe in her, more than she believed in herself and she came close to giving up many times. So when she began coaching, she wanted to be able to give others that amazing gift of believing in them, the way she needed someone to do for her.

With so many online resources, what stands in the way of most people taking action on their dreams is their own mindset and the fear of whether or not what they want to actually do will work. This is what Steph helps her clients achieve.

Steph’s Corporate Journey

It didn’t start out that way however. Like the majority of us, Steph started out in a corporate job and spent six months studying journalism in college before deciding that it was just not the best fit for her and that college wasn’t the right path for her. After some traveling and soul searching Steph found herself working for Aldi’s and helping them bring their stores to Perth. Then, after working for them for five years and helping them build their way across Perth she found herself enjoying her job and making six-figures, and figured she had really ‘made it’.

But at only 25, how could she be at the pinnacle of her entire career? Is this as good as it would get or is there more? She began to grow bored at the thought of doing the same thing forever and wanted to start ‘moving’. Without a degree she found it difficult to find something that would allow her to continuously grow her salary and her experience because a degree seemed to be at the top of every list of job requirements. With this realization, Steph knew she needed to start something of her own and launched her first small business. Once she had that taste of being an entrepreneur, nothing was going to hold her back.

Being in this transitional state and also experiencing a traumatic breakup Steph found herself looking forward, not back.

“I think that a lot of good things come out of the depths of the dark.”

Making Her Leap

Her first startup was focused on helping women find connections through new hobbies and interests. It was a workshopping business created around hobbies such as pottery painting, macrame, resin work, etc. and all of the workshops were hosted in a fun and unique environment where they could help women cultivate the confidence in spending time alone. What made this even more pivotal was the fact that there was nothing like this in her area. Steph saw a need and fulfilled it. It was a massive success and took off very quickly allowing her to quit her job after only nine months.

While it was a massive success, it wasn’t an overnight success. No one bought tickets to her first workshop, but she picked herself up and just kept going. Empowering herself to keep moving the needle forward is what drives her in her current business, helping to teach women how to believe in themselves.

Steph also eventually came into the realization that she should create something to bring in continuous revenue, so she launched a mini course. When COVID hit, Steph took another massive step forward and decided to start showing up even more for her fellow business owners. She wanted to show them she was there for them and support them. To do this she ran a low-cost 4-week challenge for female business owners and at the end of the challenge offered a program they could join in one of the biggest times of need. Again, it was a huge success.

She taught them how to pivot and transition. How to get past the mindset blocks, how to overcome, become more confident, and show up for your audience in their times of need. Once she began coaching, she could see movement.

“Once I was put into a business coaching role, I could see that it had legs. I then started to resent my other business.”

Evolution Into Coaching

She eventually made the heartbreaking decision to sell her business and keep moving forward. She still loves watching the business thrive and is amazed with what the new owners have done. It was very satisfying to hand over the reins to someone and watch it keep growing; it gives her a sense of bittersweet relief.

After selling her business she had some time where self-doubt crept in and feared that without that business she would become nothing and it took a lot of self reflection to overcome those fears.

Steph has now built her coaching business from the ground up, evolving it into a full team. She has learned that having a great team around her can allow her to do even more than when she tried to go it alone and knows that the investment of a good team in her business is a wise one. Her biggest piece of advice to new business owners is this:

“It really comes down to [the fact that] you have to be able to get people results. You've got to create systems to help people elicit their areas of genius, help [them] to find what they're really good at and what they do really well, and stop forcing them to do all the stuff they hate. Because it just takes us away from wanting to grow the businesses.”

She also firmly believes that most business owners choose to stop because they just feel like there's too much to do and to figure out. If they’re not even enjoying it anymore, because they’re not even doing the thing that they love to do.

You can connect with Steph via Instagram (@stephgorton__) and also check out her website.

Until next time friends, keep doing it your way.

Insights:

“She was terrified to fail and scared of being judged, especially by those closest to her.”
“I think that a lot of good things come out of the depths of the dark.”
“After selling her business she had some time where self-doubt crept in and feared that without that business she would become nothing and it took a lot of self reflection to overcome those fears.”