Episode 94: Entrepreneurs Who Grew 6+ Figure Businesses With Shannon Graham

Helen MacMillan is a Master Healer, Life Transformation Coach and Wise Woman. A “serial entrepreneur” who has built 3 successful businesses, Helen transitioned 12 years ago from an illustrious 30 year career in physical therapy and complementary wellness to the life coaching industry. Her expertise in the area of creating joyful and sustainable success has been featured on podcasts and television interviews and in print media articles (Essence and Ebony magazines). Ever evolving and answering the call to her next level of passion and purpose, Helen is currently launching her 4th business – SovereignMinds – a personal development company that supports ambitious, multicultural individuals in achieving the mental and emotional liberation that allows them to experience uncompromised success.

Inspiration:
Shannon was exposed to personal development as a teenager and experienced profound results, so like a good movie, he had to share. Once he saw results that others were getting from what he was sharing, that’s when he really started to light up and set him on a course to where he is today. He started his coaching business at age 21, when coaching was unchartered territory.

Challenge:
His biggest challenge was his age. Credibility was a challenge with his pretty baby face and working with high level executives. They were skeptical, and generally skeptical because coaching was new.

Tony Robbins says “the most certain person in the room wins”, so Shannon persevered through the age issue because he was certain he could help his clients. He also developed his ability to communicate his value. He removed the attention from himself and put it on his clients. He was able to contrast for them the cost of staying where they were versus the value of being where they wanted to be. Shannon positioned himself as the vehicle to get them from A to B. He learned that although most people are skeptical at first they are truly open and just need communication in a way that allows them to soften.

Overcoming Challenges:
Shannon had a lot of success getting paid for his knowledge and experience working with high level executives on mindset, peak performance and confidence. Later he started working more with other coaches to help them build their practice, so he could help others help more people. Shannon woke one day realizing he was happy, but not as fulfilled as he could be. He no longer wanted to get paid for his knowledge and experience, but instead to be paid for his creativity and imagination. He decided he wanted to have a seven figure business working with less than 10 clients per year. This led to a major fundamental shift where he drastically increased his fees and changed his commitment structure to a three year agreement.

Shannon wanted that commitment to truly help clients. In the coaching industry, often coaches “promise the moon, but show up in a helicopter” and he wanted to ditch the helicopter and “show up with the spaceship.”

His first client in the new structure had a big ask, to raise the GDP of New Zealand, by raising GDC (Gross Domestic Confidence). New Zealanders have “tall poppy syndrome” – the culture makes them believe that they shouldn’t get too big, that they should stay small. New Zealand has some of the most innovative geniuses in the world, but tall poppy syndrome caused them to sit on their value or their ideas. The theory was simple – if they could get people to raise their confidence and ability to communicate value, they could bring existing world changing technologies to the global scale and increase the country’s GDP. When first asked “how do we do this?” Shannon had to be honest, he had no idea! But he knew he could figure it out. And he did! They started working on the confidence of an inventor with the least confidence, and started a ripple effect where others could believe in the possible too. An inventor (with new confidence) pitched his transportation technology to India and this resulted in the equivalent of 20% of the bilateral trade between New Zealand and India that year. Listen to Shannon’s story on human potential and how it works at the 20 minute mark.

Passion:
Shannon’s passion is working with people on world changing endeavors in his program called Legacy. He also loves working with people in a second project called Second Summit that helps people who have exited companies with wealth, but don’t feel fulfilled, and have a desire to get back in the game and do something worthy. He’s also passionate about artificial intelligence and recently launched a company about that.

Vision:
Shannon sees automation wiping out many jobs in the next 5-10 years, but this presents a huge opportunity in AI technology where the barrier to entry in the industry will be lower than ever before. His vision includes helping people figure out how to get in the game, stop careers that they truly don’t love and get passionate about something that in effect translates to making good money. His future vision includes a level of thinking where solutions don’t create more problems.

Advice:
His best advice was garnered from his interpretation of a book called The Science of Getting Rich. He has distilled the lessons of the book to one phrase: Desire is expansion seeking to express itself.

Tools, Podcasts & Books:

• Tru Niagen – cellular energy and repair supplement

• The Science of Getting Rich by Wallace D. Wattles

• The Future is Faster Than You Think by Peter Diamandis

Looking Back:
Shannon would encourage his younger self to get support. Because his business model was simple, it allowed him not to have a team. He prided himself on the lone wolf mentality for a long time. Shannon realized there is a difference between what we ALLOW ourselves to be, to do, to have and to give and what we WANT to be, to do, to have, and to give. Shannon graduated from not needing a team to being honest with himself and what he wanted, which actually was having a team. To get clarity, be honest with yourself and what you want. 

Interview Links:
Find out more about Shannon Graham by visiting https://www.shannongraham.com/

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