Podcast Episode 47 - Burning Down a $2M+ Business

I have some tea to spill for you. Oh my goodness. I am going to be real and transparent, and show you human design in real life.real life. If you want to know what it looks like to feel through a big, reckless decision as an emotional manifesting generator in business, or if you are just curious about what big shifts I am making in my business, this is for you. You probably already know the big news if you've been on my Instagram over the last couple of days. If you're reading this anytime after March of 2023, the concept of whatever we are talking about today is slightly irrelevant.

I love making reckless decisions, and I call it reckless self-trust when I follow my intuition to do something that makes absolutely no sense to anyone around me. As a manifesting generator, and I really feel like this is part of the manifestor side, where I have this vision, this urge, this destination. This is because of inner vision cognition. I can visualize like nobody's business. I get these pictures and images, but it's sometimes hard to put it into words. It's sometimes hard to translate what I'm seeing into sentences that make sense to the people around me. 

Very often when I say something like, "I'm going to quit my nursing job and talk about human design on the internet, because I just know that this is going to be like a million dollar business, even though I've had two five figure months like ever, even though I've made a total $50,000 in the past year and a half, two years, three years. I think that in the next couple of months, this is somehow going to turn into a million dollar business, and I should just quit my nursing job now," it really doesn't make sense, but to me, I just know. 

Something that I see in business is that as soon as we find some sort of success, it's really easy to get complacent. It's really easy to just continue to do what has been working, and it's almost like we're afraid to mess it up. When you have nothing to lose, when you are just getting started, there's this reckless self-trust. You have no followers. You have no one watching you. You're just doing whatever you want, and it doesn't feel like there's any pressure.

As soon as people are successful in business, a pattern that I have witnessed is as soon as you start to do something that is successful, it’s almost terrifying to change or experiment with it, because you’re afraid of losing it. You’re afraid of messing it up. I have witnessed this in myself, in clients, and in people that I watch outside of me.

I've built a really successful business that in its lifetime has generated over $2M in just a couple of years. Teaching Human Design has generated over $2M in revenue for me in the last three years. It can be absolutely terrifying to say that I am going to retire all of my current products and programs because they just don't align with me anymore. That's terrifying. That's a big declaration to make sometimes, but it just feels so right. 

Here's what I'm seeing with this intuitive decision. When you are first getting started in business, you start to flex this intuition muscle. Making intuitive decisions is like going to the gym. You're building a new muscle. If you've never bench pressed in your entire life, the first time you bench press, the bar is going to be hard. The first time I bench pressed, I could barely bench press the bar. Just the bar, absolutely no weight on it, and I was sore for days. My chest ached, and my arms were shaking like a leaf. I was like, "That was the hardest thing I've ever done. There's no way that I'm going to be repping things with lots of weights, doing lots of sets. Are you kidding me?" But the more I went to the gym, the more I practiced, the more I figured this out, the more practice I gave my body, the more it became muscle memory, and the stronger I got.

I feel like intuitive decisions are very much the same, because this decision feels very similar to how I felt when I quit my nursing job. I was at a point where continuing to do what I was doing, or what I have been doing, just feels overwhelming. Let me walk you through all the big shifts that have happened in my business in the last couple of months. A lot of this I have not talked about publicly, so here I am, spilling the tea.

In November of last year, I let most of my team go. There were a lot of factors related to this, but it felt like something I had to do, not something I wanted to do. One of the big reasons was that revenue was not coming into my business the way that it has been previously. Revenue has slowly been starting to go down to a trickle after we had some payment plans from previous launches end, and then we had two big launches last year that just did not go the way that we were expecting them to go. 

We had a business academy launch mid last year where I thought I had invitations for it. I thought everyone was excited about it. It was a massive project. It was something that we'd spent months piecing together, coming up with the curriculum, coming up with the call schedule, adding a support team, making it accessible for a global lifestyle. We were going to teach copywriting by design, marketing by design, branding, selling, offer creation, coaching, team dynamics, and hiring by design. This program was absolutely everything that you needed to know about running a business. You could even join it if you had a team and you wanted all of them to join. It was this massive, massive project. 

We had absolutely zero enrollments. We did all the things that we typically do in our launches, but it just landed flat. That started to cause a lot of panic. That started to cause a lot of stress for me, and suddenly, there was this pressure. My husband had just left his job in the military, and we had just moved to Florida and bought a new house, and we'd dipped into our savings to furnish this new house. We had some fun trips planned, and then all of a sudden, I'm like, "Oh my God, the money is not coming in." This really triggered a fear of replenishment and this fear of loss. 

As a competitive gymnast, I did this thing where I would get mental blocks, and every once in a while I would come up against a skill that I had done perfectly thousands of times, and then suddenly, I could not do it anymore. I was starting to think, am I going to get like a mental block, and I'm just not going to be able to sell? I'm not going to be able to market anymore. I've ruined it. Everything is crumbling. The world is ending, and I am trash. I just had this whole spiral of things not going the way that they're supposed to do. I was dealing with a lot of pressure, but it's situations like that that matter. 

It's situations like that when you're manifesting, when you're creating the life that you want, you're going to come up against these challenges. My life's work is to be a strong person. Strength is the gift of gate 34, and confidence and self-assurance are the gifts of gate 20, so my big life's purpose and my big challenge is how can I feel confident in the powerful action that I am doing right now, and not think about trying to force it to look a certain way? 

The shadows that I face are when things are not looking the way that I want them to look or the way that I expected it to look, I want to try and force it to look a certain way. I'm just going to keep forcing, keep forcing, keep forcing in order to get what I thought I wanted. But where I get that strength and self-confidence and build this reckless self-trust muscle is by learning to trust myself and learning to trust that if in this moment I'm being called to take an action, even if it's something that I have never thought about before, have never considered before, that this action is correct, and I can trust myself. It's trusting myself in the present moment, and really taking action right now that is the lesson for me. 

In November of last year, I made a lot of big decisions that really catalyzed the decision that I just made recently to let go of all my current programs and offers. November was a big shedding month for me. There was a lot of letting go. I have stepped into a year eight in numerology, and I want this to be a successful year. 

I want this year to be wildly abundant. I want this year to be a really fun year of just growth and expansion for me. I feel like it's time. I've been doing all the inner work for a while now, and I'm ready for growth. I'm ready for another season of growth, and it's just that time in my life and my experience where I'm ready for a new phase. 

What I'm so proud of is that this feels so different from the decision that I made with quitting nursing, even though it's the same as in letting go of a previous identity. Even though I am letting go of a previous version of me, somebody who was very successful, in order to become somebody new, there's not nearly as much grief. When I made the decision to leave nursing, I grieved the loss of this part of my identity that was dying. Eden as a nurse, Eden in the nursing world, died; she stopped existing. I am no longer that person, and I cried for days, weeks.

But this time around, I haven't cried about this. I haven't felt like I am grieving a previous version of myself. I would say that burning down a business that's generated $2M in the last three years and retiring absolutely every single one of those offers, is just as reckless of a decision as letting go of a nursing career. Financially, this is letting go of something much bigger, and letting go of this business that has built millions of dollars for me, and it's provided so many jobs. The ripple effect of the actual work has been insane. The number of people that have learned human design from me and have gone on to build incredible movements, incredible communities, incredible programs and offers is amazing. They've gone on to do such amazing things, and it's time for me to move on too. 

It's time for me to step into a new identity, because while I'm great at teaching human design and explaining it, I've been applying it and working with it so much that I don't want to just be the person you go to to learn fun facts about human design anymore. I'm tired of just being the girl who creates the fun Instagram content around human design because there's so much more to the work that I do, and it's time to actually showcase that. 

I've been hiding behind the safety of this identity of human design teacher, and what I didn't realize I was doing was I was taking all my intuitive insights, my information, my concepts, and the lessons that I was learning from studying different modalities outside of human design and trying to force it to fit into the language and the system of human design. If I came up with a concept, movement creates momentum, and I just want to talk about that, or I just want to talk about motivation, I don't want to have to think about how that applies to human design.

This concept that feels really true for me, this concept that if I just shared this message could be really helpful for people, I've been filtering and distorting that message trying to make sure that it’s accurate to human design. I have been feeling like I have to make sure that it fits in the system. I have been trying to figure out how to individualize this and make sure that this one idea, this one message that I want to say and share is applicable to absolutely everyone through a human design lens.

This has slowed down my content creation immensely, and it's made me really lean into my perfectionism abilities to where I overcorrect my content. Looking back, I'm seeing the version of me who has made a lot of really big decisions, who has let go of a lot of her team members, a lot of her support system. She's let go of her stress. She's taken back control of her health. I feel like a completely different person, and I just don't recognize myself. I do not see my magic and my power shining through in the content that I have out there. 

I'm feeling really called to support a different group of people. This is going to be the shift in my perspective and my language. I am 26 years old. I found human design when I was 20, and I have navigated career decisions and direction decisions. I've learned so much about how you learn according to human design. 

I have a lot of information that is really applicable to people who are probably in their early twenties. The thing is that my audience, my demographic, is like 85% older than me. I have a good amount of people in that 25-35 age group, but I also have a very large number of people in the 35+ age group. Most of the audience that I have that is learning from me is significantly older than me. 

I have two and a half years left before I go up on the rooftop, and I'm in the last phase of my three line process.I feel like there are some very specific experiences, things that I need to learn, and things I need to do before I go up on the rooftop. What I've heard from a lot of six line profiles who are already on the roof or that have come down from the rooftop and are sharing their wisdom with me, is that there is sometimes a burn everything down phase, and it's really informative.

I’m in the process of going up onto the rooftop where I am starting to reflect. I'm starting to see the patterns. I'm starting to learn what wasn't working. I've been leaning on the system of human design to explain everything that I've been wanting to explain, and to share all the information that I want to share, and to share the wisdom that I've wanted to share. Through that, I have distorted my true message, and it's not resonating as strongly. It's not connecting with people the way that I know it could connect with people. It's not connecting with a social audience the way that I'm connecting with people in private coaching calls, mastermind content, or if I'm actually teaching people. It's a very different energy.

There's just this disconnect, but I really feel like I'm myself again. I feel like I have my energy back. I feel like I have my reckless self trust, my drive, my fierceness, my opinionated self, my “I don't give a fuck what anyone else thinks, I'm doing this,” this bubbly, fun, playful chaos that I know I am that just doesn't care if it doesn't make sense to other people. I feel like I have that again. Looking at my offers and what I have created in the past couple of years, I don't see the true essence of me in those offers.

As I'm thinking about making the most of my business and creating a business that's really sustainable, I think that it's going to cause more confusion than clarity if I keep these offers around. If I keep the offers that I have available available, I'm going to continue to get questions that I am currently getting. It's going to cause confusion with the message, with the clarity, with the potency, and just the frequency of what I want to be sharing. 

I also think that the way that I want to be describing this and the people that I actually want to be talking to are maybe going through things that I went through and not necessarily going through things that I haven't gone through yet, but that my experience applies to. I'm really not the person to talk to about getting a divorce or going through the dating field. I married my first boyfriend just after we turned 19. I never had breakups. I have never gone through a divorce. I have never gone through raising kids AND building a business. I have never left a corporate job. Even though I was in the nursing world for a little bit, I never really had a real job. I have not worked in the real workforce, but I have a lot of experience online. 

A lot of the deconditioning that people are coming to me for is letting go of beliefs that they have picked up from the corporate world, from the school system, from their life experience as an adult that I just don’t have the life experience in. There's a disconnect sometimes, and I think that the message that I have to share, the content, the lessons that I want to be reflecting on, especially before I go up on the roof, I want to reflect on my life. 

I want to reflect on the things that I've gone through. I want to try things again from a different perspective. I want to try teaching human design basics again, from a different perspective and a different lens. I want to try teaching business by design again, from a different perspective. I want to teach relationships. I think that everything that I want to teach has to be focused on what it is that I actually do and human design can be a tool that supports that, but my brand and my business has to first and foremost be my truth.

Human design can support that, but the only thing we are ever selling is our version of the truth. If I am judging myself so harshly saying that my truth does not align with human design perfectly, and then distorting and changing that, I'm not even giving the world a chance to judge me, I'm just judging myself. I am interrupting my flow of creativity and my authentic expression, just because I'm afraid that it doesn't perfectly fit into the lens of human design. 

So, I am done filtering myself. I am done holding back on my opinions and the things that I have to say. I'm done making it so much more of a big deal than it has to be, because really all I'm doing is I am getting paid to talk. I want to be paid to talk. I want to talk about what's on my heart, and I don't want it to be so slow and tedious. Previously it's felt very slow and very tedious. I just want it to be me connecting to what it is that I'm creating, me channeling whatever message wants to come through, and me allowing it to be exactly what it is. If those are simple messages of me just taking a picture and writing some text on my phone, and then that is the post, that's what I want it to be. Currently, it is way too much effort, and it's just not worth it. I want my content to be more helpful than it is. There's so much more availability to show what it actually looks like to live your human design in real life. 

This has been me explaining what I'm feeling, what I'm thinking, how I'm moving through this decision. After the 24th of March, I am removing every single one of the offers that I have on my website. From March 6 to March 24, if you use the code “BURN,” because we're burning everything down, everything on my website is 50% off. This is absolutely ridiculous since I already have low pricing, but I will not be editing anything. I will not be updating anything. You are getting the offers as they are. 

If there's anything that you've been called to, anything that you do want to learn about, go learn about it the way that it is, but know that I'm going to be shifting my content to be much more lifestyle focused, much more lesson focused. I'll talk about human design, but it needs to be more human design in real life and less obscure details that you can find in your human design chart. We'll still talk about obscure details, but it's going to be more of obscure details in the wild because I think that that's going to be more helpful. 

This has been me just talking through how I made this decision, the things that I felt through. Yes, there is human design information in here, but I'm not teaching you what an emotional authority is. I'm not just regurgitating information and giving definitions. I am explaining how it shows up, and I'm showing you what it looks like in real life. So, that's what I want the focus to be on. I want it to be more focused on the inner work that I do, the healing that I do, the application that I do. That's what it's going to be. 

I have the vision, and I can't explain it to you, but as soon as you see it, as soon as you feel it, you'll get it. So, just keep hanging out, keep watching, and eventually you'll understand what it is that I'm doing. But I am recklessly trusting myself, because I'm showing myself and everyone else in the world that even several years into my business, I will still make the reckless decisions. I will still do the things that don't make sense to other people but make sense to me. 

What I want to do is live my life, focus on me, and show you the things that I am doing, and along the way you'll learn what it looks like. So, right now I am burning my business to the ground, and I am going to build it back up again from scratch using my human design. I'm going to build it up around the skills that I actually have, the things that I'm really good at, not just human design. Human design will be one of the tools that I use, but not the box that I fit myself in. I will be reintroducing my brand, my story, my concepts, my core messaging, my mission, my manifesto. You'll get to really know me, and you'll get to see some of the behind the scenes of how I'm using my design and my human design chart to support this, but not to completely limit myself with the system. 

Here are a couple of core pieces of information: intuitive decision is a muscle. The more you flex it, the less of a big deal it feels like. I am somebody who will continually be letting go of old identities and stepping into new phases of my life and changing who it is that I am, changing who it is that I get to be. I've done it with nursing, and I'm doing it again. I'm getting stronger every single time that I do this, and I'm going to show you that it's the skills that I learned along the way, not the things that I did. 

I've learned what it takes to be somebody who builds a multiple seven figure brand, and I'm going to do it again, not just based around human design. I'm going to do it again with a personal brand. I'm going to do it again based on the skills that I have, based on my lifestyle, based on the way that I view the world, just by sharing my perspectives. I'm going to be basing it around my truth instead of human design that is somehow flavored with my truth.

If you want to stay along for that ride, if you want to watch me do this, come hang out with me on Instagram and maybe on TikTok.Maybe I'll be playing around with some things there. If you are interested in any of the offers that I have, if you want to learn human design with me, this will be the last chance currently to get into SSCC, and learn absolutely everything about the human design system inside of that with me, from my perspective. All of it is going away on the 24th of March. 

So, burn it all down with me! Thanks for coming to my wildfire pivot party over here, and stick around for the wild ride to see what it looks like to recklessly trust yourself, and create a life that's just even better than you could possibly imagine.

If you want to purchase any of Eden’s current offers, use the code “BURN” for 50% off! After March 24, 2023, these offers will no longer be available! Head over to www.edencarpenter.com to snag her offers while you can!