611 Lisa Johnson:

We all know the phrase “money doesn’t grow on trees”. Most of us were taught at a young age that if you want to make money, you have to work hard for it. So as an entrepreneur it’s easy to fall into the mindset trap of “Bussyness equals business Success” that keeps us on a task treadmill of hustle and grind that leaves us no time for ourselves, our friends and family to enjoy the journey. Sound familiar?

MELINDA

I’m Melinda Wittstock and today on Wings of Inspired Business we meet an inspiring entrepreneur who is a self-made multi-millionaire business coach specializing in helping entrepreneurs scale their businesses using passive income from memberships and courses.

Lisa Johnson is a multi 7 figure business strategist who specializes in passive and semi passive income from memberships and courses. She’s also a mom of 9 year old twins, so if there was anyone who had to figure out how to scale their business around a busy life, it’s Lisa. She’s been featured in Forbes, Fast Company and Thrive and is due to do her first Tedx in October.

I can’t wait to introduce you to Lisa! First…

Lisa Johnson is a self-made multi-millionaire business coach specializing in helping entrepreneurs scale their businesses using passive income from memberships and courses. During the pandemic Lisa had a £1.7m launch as well as several others from £60k to £300k.

After a tough childhood spent in social housing, Lisa went on to have successful careers in law, banking and the entertainment industry. Her background in overcoming obstacles has helped mould her into a bold, straight talking coach, who is never afraid to be an authentic and outspoken truth teller.

She has spoken on the BBC’s Women’s Hour and is a Thrive Global Contributor. She has been featured in national newspapers and magazines including Psychologies, The Guardian and Red.  A recent feature on Lisa in Forbes magazine garnered over a quarter of a million views in a week.

Lisa is a huge believer that everyone can become a success no matter their background and is known for her anti-bullying campaigning online.

Today we talk about different types of passive income and how passive income can help you do less and have more.

Let’s put on our wings with the inspiring Lisa Johnson.

Melinda Wittstock:         Lisa, welcome to Wings.

Lisa Johnson:                    Thank you for having me.

Melinda Wittstock:         I think what you’re doing is so important, helping women in particular scale their businesses so they can do less and have more. That’s kind of counterintuitive for us, isn’t it?

Lisa Johnson:                    Yeah, well, I think we were always taught that we can’t do that, and that actually, if we want more, we have to work harder and do more and be more present and work more hours. That’s not actually the case.

Melinda Wittstock:         Yeah, so why is it that we tend to be like this when men are just much more happy about delegating stuff, having other people do it? I don’t know.

Lisa Johnson:                    I don’t actually know why, but I definitely know that when we’re growing up, we hear things… I remember hearing from my dad all the time like, “If you want more money, you’re going to have to work really hard.” I grew up in a poverty situation, so when I heard that from my father, I believed it. And I think that just went in, so that when I was older, I just assumed I have to work hard. And I actually see quite a lot of women who are doing okay not working hard, make themselves work harder when they don’t need to because it feels too easy.

Melinda Wittstock:         Yeah, Isn’t it interesting though that we think that we have to work hard, and at the root of that, is it that we don’t feel deserving unless we’ve sort of martyred ourselves or something?

Lisa Johnson:                    I think so. I think so. I think because we’ve looked up to people who do that, who do so much, who juggle all the roles, and we feel guilty if it’s easy. It shouldn’t be. We can’t be doing it right. We must, must make it harder for ourselves. And it takes a real mindset shift, I think, to stop thinking like that and to think, “Well, actually, it can be easier.”

Melinda Wittstock:         Not only can it be easier, but I find that, and this has been my own kind of personal transformation, the less I’m in that hustle and grind mode, right, that everybody talks about in entrepreneurship and the more I’m in a state of ease, the faster the business grows.

Lisa Johnson:                    That’s definitely how it is. And even people in their first couple of years say to me, “When I went on holiday, when I had a break, suddenly I got more clients in.” It’s because you’re more creative. So you’re thinking of different things to do. Whereas when you’re in that hustle mentality, it’s all about numbers, and that’s not a great place to come from.

Melinda Wittstock:         Well, also, real creativity and a lot of the solutions come when we feel happy-

Melinda Wittstock:         … when we’re doing something we like.

Lisa Johnson:                    Yeah. So let’s do more of that.

Melinda Wittstock:         Gosh, it’s so true. I remember one day, when I had this long list, the to-do list, right?

Lisa Johnson:                    Yeah.

Melinda Wittstock:         And if you have a to-do list, your work is never done.

Lisa Johnson:                    No.

Melinda Wittstock:         I remember having this epiphany that I was going to change it to an inspiration list and it was going to come from my morning meditation. And I would literally ask in my morning meditation for what were the highest leverage activities that I could do today that would advance the business the most, like by leverage, doing one thing that has a multiplicity of outcomes, and these began to come to me. And I found myself doing less, but doing the things that mattered most.

Lisa Johnson:                    Well, that’s what’s important. Because otherwise, we can all be busy, can’t we? We can all fill 24 hours of a day with busy-ness. But is that busy-ness taking you to your goals? And I think that if more of us kind of worked out what we wanted our life to look like before our busy-ness, and then modeled our business on that life, then we wouldn’t do as much. And then we would go, “Well, this thing that I have on my to-do list, is that taking me towards the life that I really want to lead, or is it just another thing to do because that’s what everybody says you should do?” I think there’s a real difference.

Melinda Wittstock:         Oh gosh, yeah, no, that’s so true. So what was the moment or the spark where you started in your own life to really start to understand this in the context of your own business so you could share it with others?

Lisa Johnson:                    Yeah. It was a pivotal moment where, a year into my business… So I started Lisa Johnson Coaching and started it after having a wedding business for a couple of years. And I’d learned quite a lot about how not to do things in my first business.

Melinda Wittstock:         First businesses are good for that, right?

Lisa Johnson:                    Yeah, true.

Melinda Wittstock:         That’s where you learn all the things not to do. Yeah, it’s so true.

Lisa Johnson:                    So because of that, this business went really well in the first year, and I was completely booked solid all the time. I was earning around $220,000. Which for me, from where I’d come from, was huge in that first year. But I was working around 80 hours a week. And I have little twins. They’re nine now, but they were younger then. So they needed me a lot of the time, and I wasn’t really seeing them. I’d given up my 9:00 to 5:00 for 6:00 in the morning to eleven o’clock at night, and this was supposed to be success. People told me I was successful. If you’re fully booked, you’re successful. So that’s what I thought it looked like.

And then the boys moved schools because we moved house, and it was their first week of school and I forgot to pick them up. I was so busy in my office with all of my one-to-one clients that the school rang and said, “You haven’t picked the kids up.” It was just that guilt moment of knowing that you’re putting a business before the life that you wanted to lead, before the kids. Which the whole point was to give them a life that they wanted, and I realized then that something had to change. For me, it was like, “If this is what’s going to happen by having this much money, I’d rather forego the money and forego the business and go back to where I was, because I don’t want to become this kind of parent and this kind of person.”

And then very soon after that, I was listening to a podcast where they were talking about passive income and different forms of passive income. They were actually arguing about whether it existed, and that piqued my interest and I started listening to that. And then I went down a rabbit hole of wanting to learn everything that there was to know about these different streams of income that were a bit more passive.

So I ended up spending eight months and a hell of a lot of money learning everything from the best people in the industry. And then slowly, implementing and adding these different income streams into my business, and some worked and some didn’t, and I refined things that I’d learnt. And by the end of year two, I was working 30 hours a month, not a week, a month, and I was only well over a million. It changed my whole life. That’s very easily scalable. By year three, I was on multi-seven figures a year. I’m still only working 30 hours a month.

I then looked at my clients who were all having the same trouble. They’re all doing well in their business, but they were just shattered. They were burning out constantly in these one-to-one modalities, and started to teach them how they could do the same. That’s how it all kind of started for me.

Melinda Wittstock:         That’s amazing. What were some of the passive income streams that transformed your own business?

Lisa Johnson:                    The very first one was just an online course. So a course that was put on my website that people could buy. So I literally could wake up the next day and have money in my bank account. However, even though that’s great because it was really passive, I wasn’t feeling aligned with the integrity. I’m very much about integrity, and I had no idea whether these people were finishing the course, whether they were getting results from it. I’d heard that people, they buy courses, they don’t finish them.

Melinda Wittstock:         And they don’t finish them more often than not. Yeah.

Lisa Johnson:                    Yeah, that’s what I heard. So I started to feel worried that I wasn’t really doing what I set out to do. So I decided to make it semi-passive. So rather than just putting this course out there, I would teach the module every week live.

It was already written, so I’ve got the PowerPoint presentations, I’ve got the workbooks. There was nothing new I had to do. I just had to show up for 10 weeks for one hour a week and deliver live. And then I can see that if I showed up, they were going to show up. And people started asking questions and then getting to the end of the course and they were getting much better results. So that was more aligned with what I wanted to do. And people were saying to me, “But that’s not really passive. That’s semi-passive.” But if somebody had come to me and said, “I want you for 10 hours, one-to-one,” I could have maybe charged $20,000. But this way, I was making half a million for the same 10 hours. So to me, rather than passive income, I kind of like the word leveraged income, because you’re leveraging your time a bit more.

So first, it was courses. Then I started a membership, and that went amazingly well.

Melinda Wittstock:         That’s nice because you have nice recurring revenue from that.

Lisa Johnson:                    Yeah. It was like a whole recurring revenue engine, and one that I only needed to be available for for about an hour a week, because you can curate other people to come in and teach in your membership. So it was very, very passive for me, and yet it was making me quite a lot of money. And then I started doing things like affiliate marketing, and I had a jewelry range that was completely passive. So all of these things that I was trying and seeing which ones made the most amount of money in the least amount of time.

Melinda Wittstock:         You see, there’s so many women who go into coaching, consulting because they have an expertise. And the first thing they do is one-on-one. And then with the online course, I mean, a lot of people are obviously transitioning to that. That’s a massive growth business, online learning. But there’s a whole bunch of other things you have to master in that though, like all the marketing, and getting your offer right, and reaching the right people, knowing your ideal customers, all those sorts of things. Which people who do it well make it look really easy, but it’s not. So what was your learning curve on all of that?

Lisa Johnson:                    I think people make business complicated. I don’t actually think business is. I think we make it complicated by seeing what everybody else is doing and feeling like we need to match it in some way. I developed this system that I trademarked called The CASsH System, because I realized that over and over again, when I was doing these passive income streams and teaching others, it was just doing the same thing over and over again. So I now teach this system, and I’ll tell you exactly what it is now so that everybody can go away and just do it.

It’s a five point system. So if we take the letters, C-A-S-S-H, for CASsH, the C is work out exactly what you just said, your ideal client. So even if you’ve got a business that isn’t going to be the same ideal client as your passive income streams, it could be something completely different. It could be a hobby you have that you’re turning into a course or membership. Work out everything about that person. And instead of thinking, “Do I want a membership or do I want a course,” think, “Who do I want to help? Who do I want to serve?” and start there. Because they will eventually tell you what they want, if you know who you want to help. So that’s the C.

Then you go on to the A, which is audience. This is the bit most people get wrong. You need to grow an audience of the people that you just said that you wanted to help. So you can grow that audience anywhere. Some people use an email list. Some people like me, Facebook group, Instagram. Wherever you want to grow and nurture this audience. And you need to give value. You need to nurture as you’re going along.

And then you can go to the first S, which is the structure and the systems part. This part, people don’t like because people don’t like the tech. They’re like, “The tech puts me off.” But actually, there are so many tech options out there now that have been made for an end-user like ours, like somebody that doesn’t know much about tech. We have Kajabi, Thinkific, Teachable, MemberSpace. There are all these different things. So find one that works for you and work out how you want to deliver your product. So for me, I’m always going to do video. I love video. Other people hate being on video, so they’re going to do workbooks or checklists or audio. And just work out those structures and systems.

And then the next S is selling. Which, as we know in the online world, is launching. Launching these days is more than just putting your offer out there and hoping that somebody wants it. Audiences have been burned before. They’ve taken courses that haven’t lived up to their expectations. So we need to warm them up. We need to get them ready to buy from us. So it should be really a six to 12 week process when you launch something. And if you do it right, you can rinse and repeat over and over again.

And then the H in this CASsH System is keeping your clients happy. Because the first time you do any kind of passive or semi-passive income stream, it’s not very passive, it’s hard work. You’re growing an audience, you’re getting your offer right. You are learning how to launch, and writing everything that goes into that. The time that it becomes passive is the second, third, fourth, fifth, and sixth time. That’s not going to happen unless your clients are getting the results that you’ve promised. So find ways to make sure that they are. And if you do those five things, you will always be able to add in passive income streams.

Melinda Wittstock:         Exactly. Because as your clients, and this is the real sweet spot, as your clients are really getting results, they become your best evangelists and in a way, your best salespeople.

Lisa Johnson:                    Absolutely. I didn’t spend any money on Facebook ads in any meaningful way. I tinkered until I hit seven figures. I didn’t have affiliates or anything like that. It was my audience who had done my courses who were shouting about me to their friends. So that was a nice, cheap way of setting up the next course. But that will only happen if you do get them the results. That’s why integrity is so important.

Melinda Wittstock:         Absolutely. So how do you get people through your courses? Because we were talking about this. A lot of people don’t finish courses. So what have you done there to really get them through so they get the results so they can become your evangelists?

Lisa Johnson:                    Yeah. We change it every time. The first time… I have a big program called One to Many about how to make passive income. And as people were going through it, we noticed that people were dropping off around module two and three. So we went to them and we asked them why, and they said, “It’s the tech. You’re telling us to put a funnel in place. We’re finding that difficult, like lead magnets and designing things. We find the automation hard.” So what we did the next round is we gave every single person a bespoke funnel to them and we designed a lead magnet for them. So we got an in-house team to do it. So that got everyone through that really sticky period, and we could see people were moving on the next time.

And then we noticed that they were stopping around module eight. So we said, “What now? We’ve given you everything that you’ve said that you needed. Why are you stopping?” And they were like, “Life gets in the way. We’ve been doing this for two months. We get unmotivated after this amount of time.” So we decided to put in accountability pods, really small pods where people would be checked on and basically forced to finish the course, because accountability is needed, and that worked. Now we have this massive high percentage. Over 80% actually finish the course, finish the program and get results. Just make sure each time that you’re watching and you see where the sticking blocks are.

Melinda Wittstock:         Exactly. That’s so, so important. So you can’t set it and forget it. It’s not completely passive.

Lisa Johnson:                    No.

Melinda Wittstock:         You’ve got to be always in touch with your customers. But I love how you framed this. So who are some of the folks that you now help? What are some of the businesses? Where’s your sweet spot in terms of your clients?

Lisa Johnson:                    Yeah, there’s been so many. Usually people come to me wanting either a membership or a course, and they’re not quite sure what to do it on. Sometimes they don’t want to do it on whatever their normal business is. If they’re a coach, for instance, they might not want to do it, a course on coaching. So we look at other things that they know. Because I’m a big believer that everybody’s an expert. The definition of an expert is somebody that knows the most about a particular subject in an average room. Not the internet. So everybody knows something about something that somebody else wants to know. If anyone’s ever said to you, “Can I pick your brain?” it means they know. And it might be about something really random.

For instance, I could probably do a course on potty training twins. I think the first ebook, the first passive income that I bought was on taking two under twos around Disney World. So somebody has done that before, and so I’m going to buy from them. So I have people that have memberships in the theater. The person that had the theater membership, she made 600,000 in a year on her theater membership. Just people that like the theater. Yeah, she has no expertise in that, she just also likes the theater. Dating, sex, Caribbean cooking, guitar playing, parenting, all sorts of different types, confidence for kids, photography. You name it, there will be a course or a membership on that subject.

Melinda Wittstock:         I love that. Because here’s the thing, I think a lot of women talk themselves out of this because they think, “Well, I know about this, but surely there are millions of other people who know more than me.

Lisa Johnson:                    Yeah, they do. There’s two reasons why people consistently don’t follow through with having a passive income stream. The first one is that they think they’re not an expert. They think they need to be some big guru that they see online. When actually, you only need to be a couple of steps ahead, and I think we know that these days.

But the second thing is if they think somebody’s already done it. Which I always think is really funny because nobody ever goes, “I want to be a hairdresser, but I can’t because somebody has already done it.” No one does that. And yet with online courses, we do that. There’s enough room for everybody, because if somebody has already done it, it means there’s a market there. And it’s much better to know there’s a market for something that you’re about to start, than to be the first one to try and see if there’s a market.

Melinda Wittstock:         Oh gosh, I know that one, being a kind of leading edge technology, kind of personally, where you end up out there on the bleeding edge, educating your whole market. Now that’s not passive. That’s hard work.

Lisa Johnson:                    No, I bet it’s not. But yeah-

Melinda Wittstock:         That’s definitely hard work. So timing is a lot of it. So depending on what you’re doing. But this is true that everybody has an aspect of their business. So say if you break me down right now, right? I’ve scaled a whole bunch of businesses in media and tech, so scaling things, or how to create and grow a team or a team culture or mindset. There’s a whole bunch of different components in my own life or in anybody’s life, like how to grow businesses when you’re a single mom and you’ve got two teenagers. Right? I think of all those different things. There’s so many, and everybody has so many.

Lisa Johnson:                    There’s so many.

Melinda Wittstock:         We’re kind of spoiled for choice about what we actually have to offer. I think almost anybody.

Lisa Johnson:                    We are. And I think that that’s a real entrepreneur issue, isn’t it? That we know quite a lot and it’s like, “What do we need now?”

Melinda Wittstock:         Which one? Yeah, which one do I do?

Melinda Wittstock:         That’ll be my problem. It’s like, “Wow, is it this one or that one? Which one?”

Lisa Johnson:                    Yeah. And I hugely believe that profit follows passion. So I never start with the which one do I think is going to make the most money. I always start with which one is going to make me jump out of bed in the morning and be excited to do this.

Melinda Wittstock:         Right. Vital.

Lisa Johnson:                    Then the money follows. Yeah.

Melinda Wittstock:         Exactly. Vital, because we do the things that we like to do. So we should, because those are the things that get us kind of vibrating at this kind of higher energy that unlocks a lot of synchronicities and really just getting into the realm of the conscious piece of this. When we’re creating from a place of joy, more good manifests. But if we’re slogging it out and we’re not enjoying it, then we just get more of that.

Lisa Johnson:                    Yeah, and it’s really unproductive to do that. And you start resenting your business, and that’s not why you started a business in the first place. So it’s always good to go for the thing that you are most passionate about.

That doesn’t have to be… When someone comes to me and says, “Okay, I want to do a course,” we’ll look at, “Well, can you teach somebody to do what you do first?” Or, “Can you teach someone to do a DIY version of what you normally do for them?” But then we’ll look at other jobs that they’ve had in the past.

If somebody came to me with a great… she had a great business.. It was coaching for women. But when she came to me, she said, “I don’t really want to do that as a course.” And I said, “Well, there’s an entrepreneurial gold rush right now. There’s more people than ever before starting their own businesses because of this pandemic, which just happened.” So I said, “Well, what else have you done in your life?” She worked for 15 years as a PR for huge companies. I’m like, “There you go. You know how to do PR. There are a hell of a lot of entrepreneurs that need PR, so do that.” And then we go on and say, “Well, if you don’t want to do any of the things that you’ve done before, what are your hobbies? What do you like? Let’s turn that into something.”

Melinda Wittstock:         Exactly. Yeah, no, this is so, so true. So Lisa, you’ve got a TEDx coming up.

Melinda Wittstock:         What’s your TEDx Talk about?

Lisa Johnson:                    It’s called How to Use Adversity to Fuel Your Success. Because I had a lot of adversity growing up. I was bullied really badly as a child because when I was 11 years old, I grew up in what you guys I think call welfare, like the projects, over here in England and-

Melinda Wittstock:         Council houses.

Lisa Johnson:                    Yes, council houses.

Melinda Wittstock:         I used to live in London. I’m a cheater.

Lisa Johnson:                    There you go. I grew up in a council estate, and when I was 11, I got a scholarship to a private boarding school and was bullied mercilessly for being poor, because everybody there was rich. For years and years. So as well as affecting my money mindset, you can imagine my thoughts. My entire adulthood is ‘rich people equals bad people’. How to undo all of that knowledge.

But also what it did was it made me terrified all the time and feel like I believed the things that people had said about me. It was only as I got older that I realized that actually, all of that was for a reason, and it was really pushing me to do more. Because anytime that something was difficult when I was older, like let’s say I was too terrified to start a business or walk onto a stage, I would just think to myself about those people that told me I would never amount to anything, and I was stupid, and I was ugly and all of these things, and I would kind of do it as a stick two fingers up to them. Like, “Let’s see. You watch me do this. You told me I couldn’t. Now I will.” So instead of that bullying stopping me, like it does so many people, I turned it around and used it to my advantage to push me further. There’s no way I would have a multi-seven figure business if I hadn’t been bullied.

Melinda Wittstock:         Isn’t that interesting? What a great topic for a talk. I think this is true. I mean, I’ve come to realize on this entrepreneurial journey, which is basically a great way to get therapy, is that when I look back and I think it’s all the challenges, all the adversity, all the kind of fail moments, right? Those were actually wonderful gifts because they were an opportunity to grow, to learn, right? To solve a problem. And it’s sort of like the universe showing you in a way what you don’t want, but then it’s what you choose to do as a result of that adversity. But it’s often the impetus.

Lisa Johnson:                    Yeah, absolutely. And we get to rewrite our story whenever we want to. There’s no full stop at any point. We get to say, “Well, actually, if this isn’t who I want to be, I can change that. And if this isn’t the life I want to lead, let’s change that.” We get to do that. I have a little tattoo of a semicolon on my wrist to remind me constantly that if I’m in a position that I don’t want to be in, I can change it. It’s all up to us.

Melinda Wittstock:         So true. This is so important, especially for women, to hear because often, people generally can fall into kind of like a victim kind of mentality where it’s sort of like, “This big external world out there is doing these things to me.” And in that victimhood, give up their power.. Because any individual really does have the power to change. And I think there’s new awareness about this, that so much of this is just internal. It’s our own mindset. If we can just change the way we’re thinking, often the external starts to change around us.

Lisa Johnson:                    It really is. And when you’re in your darkest time, you don’t realize that. It’s only afterwards when you look back, that you realize that was the start of something. I always think now when things are really tough and when I have clients who are going… They’re at rock bottom. I remind them, that’s the beginning of their TEDx Talk. That’s the beginning of their book. They need that bit to be able to say what happened next.

Melinda Wittstock:         Right. How do they react to that? Are they a little stunned by this kind of knowledge?

Lisa Johnson:                    Yeah.

Melinda Wittstock:         Because it really is a journey. Because I look back on my life and I think of, “Gosh, knowing what I know now, if I’d only known that 20 years ago.

Lisa Johnson:                    You wouldn’t worry.

Melinda Wittstock:         Completely different mindset,” right?

Lisa Johnson:                    Absolutely. You would know that you needed it to get where you are now. I think that when you’re in it, it’s really hard to see that.

Melinda Wittstock:         It surely is. So you have this TEDx Talk coming up and your business is growing. I can imagine it’s going to grow even more. Lisa, what’s next for you? I mean, where do you see your life and career going? You’ve got these two nine-year-old twins, and kind of what’s next for you?

Lisa Johnson:                    Well, after this pandemic, I want to travel a lot more. I was doing quite well on the traveling front until we were all stopped. So I want to do a lot more of that. I’m going to Necker Island with Richard Branson this year.

Melinda Wittstock:         Fantastic. I’ve been there twice, actually.

Lisa Johnson:                    I’m so excited to go.

Melinda Wittstock:         It’s beautiful. It’s got such a lovely energy about it.

Lisa Johnson:                    Everyone says that. I can’t wait to experience it.

Melinda Wittstock:         And it’s always nice to get off a little boat and get a glass of champagne right away.

Lisa Johnson:                    Absolutely.

Melinda Wittstock:         That part’s good and so you see all the lemurs and all… Yeah.

Lisa Johnson:                    I’m starting to build a property portfolio and kind of go down that route, see where that takes me next.

And the biggest thing that I want to do, and the thing that I really realized is my passion over the past couple of years is I want to bring integrity to the online industry, and I want it to be seen as a huge thing. When we launched in October, I did my first affiliate launch in October and we brought in $2 million in a week.

Melinda Wittstock:         Wow.

Lisa Johnson:                    I said to everybody in it beforehand, “We’re going to show the whole world that you can do this the right way. We’re not going to allow anybody in if they say they’re using a credit card. We’re not going to allow anyone that’s on the bread line and saying, ‘I can’t really afford it, but I’m going to do it.’ We’re going to turn people away that we don’t think should actually do the course. If we think there’s something else better for them out there, that’s what we’re going to do.” And we very vocally did this and still made two million. I feel like things are changing, that we don’t have to use these tactics that we’ve been taught, I don’t think we need that anymore. I think people are realizing that if you have a good product, you can sell with integrity, you can sell with transparency and honesty and still do really well.

Melinda Wittstock:         I think that’s beautiful, because I think there’s so much loss of trust generally. Loss of trust of media, of institutions, of government, of all of it, right? So I really think there’s an opportunity, particularly for entrepreneurs, to stand up and claim this and do business ethically. It’s so, so important.

Lisa Johnson:                    We get to be the change makers, don’t we? That’s what’s so brilliant about it. I had so many bad experiences when I started, and I nearly left the industry and said, “I don’t think this is for me.” I felt like a bank robber that didn’t want to steal anything. So I was like, “I don’t think this is for me.” And then I had a mentor that said to me, “Well, you get to change the industry if you’re in it. You don’t get to change it if you’re not.”

Melinda Wittstock:         Yes. Well, that’s so, so true. And I think having the confidence just to follow your heart and reinvent the way that you see it is so important. I think more women in particular just need to stand and claim that, and support each other in that as well. Because I think we’re more wired for that, actually. Whether it’s really bringing consciousness and conscious principles into business, or really leveraging social impact models where we can use business to solve a lot of the world’s problems, for instance, it seems like we’re kind of wired to go do that. And particularly women supporting each other in that effort as well I’m seeing more of.

Lisa Johnson:                    I think women realize that there’s no real success unless you’re bringing people with you.

Melinda Wittstock:         That’s true, because we’re a lot more inclusive just by nature. We care what other people think, I think, a lot more-

Lisa Johnson:                    Yeah, we do.

Melinda Wittstock:         … than men.

Lisa Johnson:                    We definitely do.

Melinda Wittstock:         And just much more community-focused. So Lisa, I could talk to you for a long, long, long, long time. There’s lots more to talk about, so you’ll have to come on again-

Lisa Johnson:                    Definitely.

Melinda Wittstock:         … at some point in the future. I’m wishing you all the best with your TEDx Talk, and I’d like to make sure that people know how to find you and work with you.

Lisa Johnson:                    The easiest way to find me is on Instagram, @lisajohnsonstrategist. Yeah, that’s probably the easiest way. I’m in my DMs all the time. So if you have any questions or anything, you can always just chat to me there.

Melinda Wittstock:         Fantastic. Well, thank you so much for putting on your wings and flying with us.

Lisa Johnson:                    Thank you for having me.