Welcome to Pleasure & Profits™ - EP 001

Thank you for checking out my podcast. In case we haven’t met, I’m Rachel Anzalone – Satisfaction Strategist. I’m super excited that you’re here. 

Are you a visionary entrepreneur searching for the perfect balance between pleasure and profits? That’s the conversation we’ll explore together. The intersection of well-being and wealth, sharing inspiring stories and expert insights. 

Why Pleasure and Profits? It’s been an idea for a really long time. I first thought of doing this back in 2018 which feels like a lifetime ago now. A big aha came when a client wanted help around developing a team. I jumped in to help, and everything changed when I asked her three simple questions.

What do you want?
What do you want your business to be?
What do you want your life to be like with your business in it?

She confessed that she’d never been asked that and had never considered her business from this perspective. That’s when I knew pleasure had to be in the equation. I’ll be talking a lot about impact, profit and pleasure. 

If you are a visionary with a service or product that makes people’s lives better, then impact is usually a given. What often follows is the belief that profit has to come before impact, or the opposite, over-giving so there really isn’t e profit, and impact suffers.  

Satisfaction strategy is the result of all of my work experiences including entrepreneurship, operations, health and wellness, embodiment practices and more. 

I hope you’ll join me each week as I share my own story and have conversations with peers, mentors and clients who have all inspired me and helped me understand how to make these principles work in my own life. 

Takeaways

• Pleasure and Profits is a podcast for visionary entrepreneurs who want to make a big impact in the world without sacrificing their health and happiness.
• The concept of satisfaction strategy focuses on impact, profit, and pleasure to create a sustainable and thriving business.
• Finding satisfaction in your work and life is crucial to avoid burnout and achieve long-term success.
• The podcast will explore topics such as essentialism, embodiment, emergence, radical trust, intuition, integrity, authenticity, and leadership. 

 If you’re ready to have a deeper conversation about how to maximize impact, profit and pleasure in your business and life, you can schedule a time to connect with me right here >>>

Did this message resonate with you? If you are enjoying the show, it would mean so much to me if you would take a few minutes to leave a review. Reviews like yours help podcasters like me get my podcast into the ears of more people. Thank you in advance for taking a minute to share your kind words. 

Episode Transcript

Hello and welcome to the very first ever episode of Pleasure & Profits. 

I’m your host Rachel Anzalone, Satisfaction Strategist and I am incredibly grateful that you are here with me today and I’m super excited and I'm a little bit terrified about it too, if I'm being completely honest. And so here we go.

Pleasure & Profits is a podcast about feeling good! And about making money. And it’s for visionary entrepreneurs who are committed to making a BIG impact in the world without sacrificing your health, happiness, and wellbeing along the way. 

If that sounds like you, then you are 100% in the right place & I can’t wait to  dive into this experience with you.

Let me start by explaining WHY I’m so excited, and then I’ll get into why I’m slightly terrified as well.

I’m so excited because I’ve been wanting to do this for a long time now. In fact, the idea for this podcast started back in 2018, which I don’t know about you, but 2018 feels like two lifetimes ago. 

But I wanna go back even farther than that to the summer of 2016. At the time, I had a client who I was managing marketing campaigns for, including building her live events or online events, I had managed a big, big book launch effort and a number of other things for the organization. And one day I found myself in conversation with her and her CEO about how quickly the company was growing and about the need to develop some org charts and to really kind of nail down and get some details on each person on the team, what their role was, their responsibilities. Kind of the normal things that happen when a company grows really fast and you just have a team full of people who are willing to jump in and do whatever needs to get done. 

There tends to be a little bit of messiness and unclear roles and responsibilities. And so we're talking about how we needed to do the work to really pin that down in order for the company to continue to grow and for us to figure out where the gaps were for them to hire additional people or just get things a little more organized.

And so as the conversation was evolving and we had kind of limited time in that moment, we decided that I would go to my client's house that evening and we'd spend some time alone together hashing this out. So later that night, I found myself sitting at her counter drinking a glass of wine while she was cooking me dinner.

And as the conversation evolved and we talked through each of the team members and sort of the areas of business and who was doing what and how we might organize things, eventually we got to her. And I asked her what her big vision was for the company as far down the road as she could possibly see it. She started listing off things that she wanted to do and create.

And she talked a lot about what her jobs were within the company and what were the things that she was the only person who could do and how all this was sort of necessities. But I could tell as she was talking that all this was coming from her head. It was a lot of shoulds, a lot of should be happening, should be doing, a lot of sharing of things like...we hired this person and they told us we needed to execute X or we, you know, consulted with this person and they advised us that we execute Y. 

So there's a lot of that kind of “External people told me I should do or this is what I see happening out there, these are the things I feel like should be happening.” 

It was all about everyone else and what they wanted and expected. And so I interrupted her and I asked her, “But what do you want? What do you want your business to be? What do you want your life to be like with your business in it?”

She stopped in her tracks, spatula in hand, and said, no one has ever asked me that before. And that was the moment that I knew I was onto something. It was the beginning of what I now call satisfaction strategy, which I'll explain more about in a few minutes. And we'll dig into extensively in future episodes.

But first I want to tell you how I got to this place. In my teens and twenties, I had worked mostly in the hospitality industry. I waited tables, I had done catering, bartending, I managed a little notel motel for a couple of ski seasons. I had done a dozen different jobs at this ski resort, including being the cart girl on the golf course and selling ski trips and selling corporate conferences.

I had spent almost five years working for a regional coffee company. We were a super young team. We were really hardworking and we were absurdly passionate about coffee and community and each other. Hahaha. While I was there, I did everything you could possibly imagine gets done in a coffee shop. So all those things cook, cashier barista, you know, cleaning tables, all the things. And eventually I became a shift supervisor and a store manager and down the road started to work on the marketing with the owner and learned all about grassroots marketing. I started working on writing training manuals. I did a lot of hiring, firing, training, writing and editing operations manuals. 

And I was the person who would get sent in when a store was underperforming. It was my job to go in and sort of clean things up and get things back in order when there were hiccups happening. So all of this before the age of 25, it was a blast and I learned a ton. 

So ultimately my restaurant career landed me in the role of director of operations for one of the largest restaurant franchises in the country. In that job I was overseeing seven restaurants with about 350 employees doing about $14 million a year in revenue. While I was there I learned so much about the details of how systems and operations happen with large numbers of people, profitability down to fractions of pennies, just so much that you can learn in that kind of environment that's so different from being in a small business environment. It was a wealth of information. In my role, I also had the opportunity to learn how to be a leader.

When I had seven restaurants, I couldn't be in all the places at all the time. I had always been a great doer and always the person who could like jump in and take care of things. But I had to learn how to train other leaders and develop managers within my organizations and really to cultivate an environment where people were motivated to work hard and do well even when I wasn't around. 

I am 100% certain that I drove a lot of people crazy as I was...fixated on doing things really, really well and the quality and improving customer scores and every single detail of how things should be operated and run. I was obsessed with it and yeah, I drove myself crazy. I'm sure I drove some other people crazy along the way too. 

At the time though, at the time I was...also really interested in holistic health and wellness and personal development. So these are things that I had been interested in pursuing from, I don't know, probably from my teenage years. I think I first was exposed to yoga. And as a teenager, I started reading personal development books super early on.

I also had some friends who were in the holistic health world and was just sort of learning probably from age 15, 16, 17 about how to take care of my body with foods and herbs and all that stuff. So it was something I was really interested in for myself and eventually decided to leave the restaurant business and train as a traditional naturopath. 

I also became a Reiki practitioner and I started a small wellness center near Cleveland, Ohio. So around that time, I was also learning digital marketing. Kind of on accident, it was in my pursuit of becoming a natural health practitioner, I wanted to learn more about how to have that type of business. And so I stumbled into some online marketing and entrepreneurship circles. And pretty quickly, it was familiar to me, I had done the brick and mortar marketing, I understood systems, there was so much of it that I already had context for. So pretty quickly, I found myself coaching my peers in their businesses and in the marketing, as well as seeing naturopathy clients. 

While I loved working in the holistic wellness world, there was one sticking point for me in working with clients as a naturopath. So clients were coming to me, to diagnose them and to tell them how to fix what was wrong with them, whatever they weren't feeling good about. You might think, of course, that's what we hire health and wellness professionals to do, to look at what we have going on, to know more than us, to tell us what the problem is and how to fix it. But I found that the way I had been trained to quote “care for people,” was really disempowering for them.

They would come to me a lot of times asking for permission or sort of being willfully ignorant, things that I felt were like common knowledge that were just sort of like, it was like a selective memory going on. And I found myself getting really frustrated with the dynamics of those relationships. So as I began to study more about energy medicine and the body storing information and the body healing itself and how stress impacts all these things. I started to ask different questions of my clients. They would come to me and they would say things like, do you think it's okay if I eat X? I would find myself, previously I would have said, yes, that food is good or no, that food is not good or these are the criteria of how we would tell if it's good for you or not, your individual case.

And I found myself all of a sudden thinking things like, well, do you feel like shit when you eat it? Then you probably shouldn't eat it. And of course I wouldn't say that to my clients. I would respond with some gentler version of that question. “How do you wanna feel? Do you feel that way when you eat the food does it make you feel good? Does it make you feel heavy in your stomach? Does it make you feel sluggish?” What are the kind of the after effects and encouraging them to start to pay attention to how they were feeling based on how they were nourishing their bodies. 

So something just wasn't clicking for me and the “healer” / “healee” relationship because the dynamic was they wanted me to just tell them what to do. And I just felt like that was such a disempowering dynamic. And I just could not find my own satisfaction in that. And I started to get frustrated. 

So a few years in, I found myself at big life turning point. I had found myself in a pretty dysfunctional marriage and with a business that wasn't fulfilling me in a city that I did not love living in. So kind of everything was stacked against me there. I just felt like I was ready to scrap it all and start over. And so that's what I did. And I will definitely share more about that, the decision-making process, how that evolved, what happened there at some point down the road. But for now, what's important is that I left that marriage, that city, that business, and where I landed in the following year, so this would have been like 2014, 2015, led me down two separate but important pathways that brought me to that night, sitting at that client's counter, asking her how she wants to feel.

Number one, I started doing contract marketing work for coaches, healers, and online entrepreneurs. And number two, I stumbled into a community of women who were committed to connecting with how they wanna feel in the world.

So while I was being hired to manage launches and marketing campaigns because of my background and my training and my experience and no doubt just my nature, I couldn't help but ask bigger questions. “Why are we doing things this way? What's the bigger picture we're after here? What's the long game vision that you have? How does this impact the other aspects of your business or of your life?” 

And I found a lot of the same circumstances in the marketing campaign and launch management stuff that I found in that naturopathy business, which was people were experiencing a pain point. Usually they felt like they needed to make more money in their business and they needed to do it quickly. They were coming to me and people like me for an answer to tell them exactly what to do to follow a formula that should produce expected results. And that's just not the way it works. 

After all the years and all the work that I've done, and this will be lengthy conversations as we go in this podcast, is that I learned that there is no magic formula, just like in the holistic health world, there is no single thing that works for each and every individual. It is way more complex than that. And all of those factors have to be weighed in the perspective of the long game strategy and not just plugging in a formula that worked for somebody else and hoping it works for you. 

And so it was my observation based on the dozens of companies that I worked with and hundreds of clients that I coached that there are three key areas that we have to focus on in order to create satisfaction in our businesses and that in order for our businesses to be sustainable and thriving, they have to be satisfying for us. So those three key areas are impact, profit, and pleasure. 

Now, if you're a visionary entrepreneur, if you're a person who has an idea of how the world could be better and you've created something, a service or a product that you believe will make the world better and improve people's lives, then impact is a given. And I think if you're listening to me, that's probably the case. I don't think… that I've ever had the experience of working with anyone in the industries that I've worked in, in health and wellness, in personal development, in the coaching industry, and a number of other areas where people are, the ultimate desire, the reason for the business is to impact people's lives and to change the world, really. 

And so I feel like impact is often a given. Unfortunately, is that there's a belief that profitability and growth and scale has to happen first before impact can happen. And so a lot of times I see entrepreneurs placing their desire to have impact on the back burner while they try to build something first. The other thing that happens often, you know, with entrepreneurs who have big hearts, who want to have big impact, who are over-givers is that they focus so much on impact that they aren't profitable. They're struggling financially. And if you're not producing a profitable business that's sustainable, then you most certainly can't have the impact that you want to be having in the world. Profit, as I said, is number two. And so often, again, we'll talk about this in future episodes.

We, as entrepreneurs, what I see a lot is people focusing on top line revenue growth or this idea that they have to scale and grow and grow and grow. When, in fact, what they really need to be focusing on is profitability and optimization in order to increase profitability without overextending themselves in the process. This is especially true if you're an owner operator, if you're hands on in the business. It's really easy to just get caught up in working more and more and more and working harder and harder in order to grow your business. But if you take your time and your energy into account, ultimately, if the profit's not there, if the profit's only there because you're working the job of six people, then it's not truly a profitable business in a way that is sustainable and can be thriving. And so these two things, impact and profit, I think often are really given for entrepreneurs in this space.

And the thing that I see missing so often is pleasure. And on the next episode, I'm gonna answer that question specifically, why pleasure? But for now, the short answer is, if you're not loving your work in the world and you're not enjoying your life outside of your work, then you will ultimately burn out, you will crash or you will quit, you'll throttle. And ultimately, you won't be able to have the impact that you desire to make or that the world really needs from you. 

So satisfaction strategy is the result of all of these areas of my work in the world. Business operations, marketing, health and wellness, embodiment practices, my teachers, our business and marketing masters, holistic wellness, trailblazers, energy healers, embodiment, meditation and breath work facilitators, authors and activists. All of whom I hope to share with you via this podcast, either by sharing my experience and my perspective of their work or by bringing them directly to you as guests so you can experience the magic of their work yourself. 

So we're going to dig into impact, profitability, pleasure, and how those three things intermingle to create a sustainable and thriving business strategy. We're going to talk about essentialism, embodiment, emergence, and how those approaches support and enhance your ability to have impact through your work in the world. We're going to talk about radical trust. We're going to talk about intuition, integrity, authenticity, and leadership through example.

I'm really, really excited to bring you some brilliant guests who I feel so blessed to count among my teachers, my peers, and my friends. And I'm excited to have this conversation with you and hope that we... I'm really excited to have this conversation with you and hope that we can find even more ways to exchange ideas and inspiration through this podcast. 

Now, at the beginning of this episode, I said that I would share why… in addition to being super excited, I'm also a little bit terrified right now. So the reason for that is because over the years that I've been supporting speakers, authors, coaches, and visionary entrepreneurs behind the scenes in their businesses, that's exactly where I've been, behind the scenes, whispering in their ears. So I have done brilliant work with my clients at their kitchen tables, in car rides between San Diego and LA, in golf carts between stages and hotel suites, in hotel bathrooms while they get their hair and makeup done to go on stage, in green rooms, in pajamas and saunas, in production studios, and definitely behind the curtains. I've always been the behind the scenes person… until now. 

And so in the interest of vulnerability and authenticity, I'll share a couple of things that you should expect from me. Number one, my voice will definitely shake. Number two, I will 100% for sure cry on this podcast at some point. I will probably hit the microphone with my flailing hands, which if you are watching on YouTube, you will have the pleasure of seeing. This Sicilian girl talks with her hands. Cannot put them away.

I will swear, I will totally put my foot in my mouth. I'm sure it'll happen. You will, if you're watching this on YouTube, wonder what I'm looking at. If I'm not looking at the camera or where or what's going on. And 100% for certain, my cat Trixie will make an appearance on the video. So I just have to say that that's all okay because perfection is 100% a myth. And we're all just doing the best we can every day, including me. 

And my intention is to be an example of integrity and authenticity and not an example of perfection. So if it sounds like I'm coaching myself a little bit, I am, that is true. Again, I am just so, so grateful that you're here and I'm really, really excited about what we're about to share together. 

So take care and I will see you on the next episode.