It’s the ultimate entrepreneur’s dream – to wake up to so many clients kicking down your door that you don’t know what to do with them all.  Everywhere you turn, people are paying attention to you and your business.  You’ve become an overnight sensation – requests for interviews, autographs, and guest appearances with John Stewart and Stephen Colbert are flooding your email and voicemail every minute.

What are the odds that this will happen to your business?  What are the odds that it will happen to mine?

I don’t know for sure, but if 90% of all small businesses fail within the first three years, the odds of building a successful business and becoming famous seem astronomically small.

And if we’re honest with ourselves, we don’t actually want to be that famous.

What we really want is for customers, speaking engagements, and guest interviews to come to us.  That really isn’t too much to ask.

Is it?

 

Enter Laura Roeder

I first met Laura Roeder through Rich, Happy, and Hot B-School 2011, which she co-taught with Marie Forleo.  The course was phenomenal – I learned so much about developing my business, and I got to network with over 400 awesome students in the program.

In fact, B-School is where I fell in love with marketing.

But after the course ended, something was still missing.

I now knew how to grow and shape my business, but I still didn’t have a clue how people like Laura Roeder got to be so successful and famous.

And then Laura offered her Creating Fame course in November of 2011.  Right away, I knew it was the missing piece I’d been looking for.

 

On Creating Fame

Before I enrolled in Creating Fame, I still thought of myself as a start-up entrepreneur.  I had all the mental baggage that went with it: hero worship of successful people in my field, a niggling suspicion that I would never be that successful, and a real sense of division between myself and “successful” entrepreneurs.  I felt more like a kid playing dress-up than a real business owner.

Creating Fame changed all that.

The very first video was a TED presentation by international author Simon Sinek called “Start With Why.”  His presentation forced me to think about why I was in business, not just how I was making money or what I liked doing every day.

Once I figured out that my dream was to support and encourage people to follow their dreams, my whole mindset shifted.  I no longer felt like I was trying to copy what other successful business owners in my field were doing. Instead, I focused on building a business that would help other entrepreneurs reach their dreams, by helping them to figure out this online marketing thing that so fascinated me.

But the Creating Fame awesomeness didn’t stop there.

As Laura took us step-by-step through how to land guest posting opportunities, speaking engagements, and interviews, a second revelation hit me: the uber-successful entrepreneurs in my field were still just entrepreneurs.

They had the same business needs as I did – creating great blog content, connecting on social media, growing their business.  I stopped thinking of these people as untouchable gods and began to think of them as more like my college professors: older and wiser, but still just people with their own careers who also needed help from time to time.

 

So, am I famous now?

I regret to say, the answer is no. At least, not yet.  I’m quick to incorporate new ideas that make sense to me, but these two mindset shifts were so major that it took a few months for them to settle in.

I’ll also admit that I paid little attention to the second half of Laura’s course, which was much more the practical “how to get these famous-making opportunities.”  That was deliberate – I knew I had lifetime access to the program, and I wanted to be sure my mindset and approach were set before I started making a name for myself online.

Luckily, a new session of Creating Fame will begin on April 16^th. As an alumni, I get to go through the whole course again!  And this time, you can bet I’ll be paying a lot more attention to the “practical” stuff.

What about you? Leave me a comment below and tell me what you are doing to become famous in your field.

~  Felicity

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