E94: How to Navigate Business Challenges Without Losing Yourself

Feeling stuck after a failed launch? Struggling with fear of rejection in your business? This episode is for you! 

In today’s episode of The Positive Voice Podcast, I’m pulling back the curtain on a tough realization: I built an entire website in six hours—not just for fun, but as a way to avoid facing rejection. If you’ve ever hesitated to put yourself out there because you feared crickets instead of conversions, I want you to listen closely.

What You’ll Learn in This Episode:
*Why rejection in business feels so personal—and how to move through it
*The difference between a zero-dollar launch and a failed idea (spoiler: they’re not the same!)
*How to pivot with purpose instead of panic during economic uncertainty
*The secret to building sustainable income streams that outlast momentary setbacks
*The ONE thing every entrepreneur must have in place to scale effectively

💭 “If something happens to you and it stops all your income, you don’t have a business—you have a very expensive hobby.” That truth hit me hard during my entrepreneurship training at Cornell, and today, I’m sharing why long-term sustainability matters now more than ever.

✨ Links & Resources Mentioned:
📌 Join the Kitchen Table Dreams Community – https://coachchefkim.com/kitchentable
📌 Apply for the Kitchen to Calling Mastermind – www.teachmehowtobake.com/coaching
📌 Check out my new blog, Bookish Eats! – www.bookisheats.com

📌 If you're interested in Build Your Signature Course workshop – Read More Here

💬 Let’s Connect!
If this episode resonated with you, leave a comment below! How do YOU handle rejection in your business? Do you run, hide, or push forward? I’d love to hear your thoughts.

🔔 Don’t forget to LIKE, SUBSCRIBE, and hit the notification bell so you never miss an episode of The Positive Voice Podcast!

#EntrepreneurMindset #BusinessStrategy #OvercomingRejection #CreativeEntrepreneur #SmallBusinessGrowth #PivotWithPurpose #KitchenTableDreams #ThePositiveVoicePodcast

Visit https://nutrimill.com/KTD for $20.00 off your next purchase of a Bosch mixer or Nutrigrain Flour Mill

Transcript

Kimberly Houston (00:00.628)
Hey friends, welcome back to the Positive Voice podcast. I am your host, I'm Coach Chef Kim. And today's podcast is going to deviate just a bit from kind of the series we've had going on because my coach posed a question to me earlier today that I took to Instagram and it got quite a few DMs. And so I decided I was going to bring this to the podcast. So

Let me tell you what happened. So if you are new here, you may not know, and for those of you who are a little bit unfamiliar with me, I am in a coaching program. And the coaching program is teaching me the business of coaching. I have a degree in transformational leadership and coaching. So the foundational principles and psychology of coaching of human development

of personal development. have studied those things for several years in addition to positive psychology, fully understanding the science behind changing your thoughts. And so I have all of this textbook knowledge of coaching, but what this program is teaching me that other programs I've been in previously did not teach is how to run the business and how to make money. And so

I was, we start all of our conversations with a win. And so my win was that I launched a new website. The reason that was a win is because I was very excited about this. It's something that I had wanted to do for many months and didn't have the time. Putting together a website for me is really easy. So it wasn't like this was going to be a feat.

When I sat down to put it together, it only took me about five or six hours to pull together the new Bookish Eats website. So if you want to check it out, bookisheats.com, where I'm combining my love for reading and recipes together, Bookish Eats. All the recipes are inspired by books that I'm reading. And so this is something I've wanted to do for months. And so I realized that I wasn't feeling very joyful. There was nothing wrong.

Kimberly Houston (02:27.712)
I just realized that I was lacking joy. And so when I'm coaching people and we're talking about chasing joy, I don't tell people to start a new business or to start a passion project. I'm like, you need a hobby. Well, something you've always wanted to do or experience and you've never done it, go do that. Go chase the joy. And so I decided to create this website and we had a really good coaching session.

At the end of the coaching session, this is where we peer coach one another. And at the end of the coaching session, our coach said, I love the way you guys kind of work through bringing together community and squad life and all that in your coaching session. But in the top of this, when you asked Kimberly to share a win, Kimberly said she built a website in six hours and I immediately wrote down what was she avoiding.

And luckily for me, it was the end of our time together. And I was like, it is time to go. But because I am who I am, I really sat with that question in, yes, it was cool that I built a website in six hours, but what was I running from? And the answer to that was rejection. And so if you are an entrepreneur,

or honestly, this doesn't even have to apply to business owners. If you are someone who fears putting yourself out there because you think that you're going to be rejected, this conversation is going to be for you. So let's kind of pull back the veil and dig into this a little bit. For the last couple of weeks, I have really been paying attention to and listening to

people who have coached with me currently, previously, and then like really previously, early on in my coaching career. And I get a lot of the same questions. And so I have a belief that as a coach, I should solve problems. I should help people with their pain points. And some of the things that I understand

Kimberly Houston (04:56.682)
is that like it's difficult to help people if their fundamental basic needs haven't been met, right? So in a former life, I was a preschool teacher and my kids were unable to learn if they were hungry, if they were dirty, if they were cold. And so before I could even really get into the lesson of the day,

I needed to make sure that my entire class had had breakfast. If the kids came in wearing the clothes they had on yesterday, like we had a washing machine at the daycare, I would take care of their basic needs first and then I would teach them. Right? And so as a coach, those things roll over. I am an alignment coach that assist high earning women.

in making sure that their business scales with purpose. So essentially, if you make $100,000 a year and you wanna make $500,000 a year, I help you do that strategically without losing yourself in the process. And so one of the things that I realized was, well, in order for people to be able to scale, there's some things they need to have in place, right? You need to have an offer, one offer in place.

that you can run at any time and it makes you money. For a lot of people, like if you think about like Red Lobster and their Inlet Shrimp or Lobster Fest, people know that's coming every year. And so that's a moneymaker for them, right? Like they have signature specials. Olive Garden, the never ending pasta bowl. Signature specials. And so

that still applies to small business owners. There should be something that people know is coming, something that you are known for, something that drives traffic, drives conversion for you. And so as a business strategist, I help you come up with that. And so people have this need, desire, want to grow their businesses, but then they don't have certain things in place. By not having

Kimberly Houston (07:23.096)
things in place like your signature offer, how are you gonna grow and scale your business? Because we are in the climate that we are in currently, one of the things that I know about myself is that I can feel when things are happening energetically. And the energy

feels like 2020 to me. The way that our nation is moving feels very much so like what it looked like before COVID really hit. The reason I remember this is because before COVID shut down the world, I was in a major career in life transition. Major. Super huge.

And then COVID happened and I've been feeling that again. And so I was like, okay, during COVID when we had to pivot right from having a bakery and doing end to end products with users picking up things, I had to come up with different ways to make money. And the thing that really moved the needle for me was having digital assets.

Lots of digital assets. I'm not saying everybody needs lots of digital assets. I'm just saying that's what worked for me. And so I had courses. I have done 20, I've created 20 online courses since 2020. I have written, I don't know, probably 30, 40 eBooks. I have published four books on Amazon.

And those digital assets, while it is semi passive income, it's not fully passive. Because if I never talk about it, people can't go by it, right? And so I was like, man, this is starting to feel like that again. And I really want for people to be ahead of this energetic shift that I can feel coming. And so I was like, what can I do to help people, to help entrepreneurs?

Kimberly Houston (09:42.894)
prepare. One of the things that COVID taught me is that pivoting with purpose would outlast just throwing up things. Everything that I did in my pivot in 2020, 2021 served a purpose and still serves a purpose, right? I didn't just create things to create. I created things with intention and those things still serve me well.

And so I knew that when I prepared to offer webinars or workshops, whatever, that whatever it was, I wanted it to be different than the status quo. I wanted it to really dig into who people are, who they want to be known for, what they want to be known for, and then help them create a product around it. That is my intention. That is what I wanted to do.

My coach told me this morning that I'm really self-aware and that people work really, really hard to have the self-awareness that I have. And I have wrestled with that thought all day because yes, I am self-aware, but almost to my detriment. The thing that I've realized about myself is that I'm typically ahead of the mark. And while I am very proactive, I try not to be reactive. A lot of other people don't think that way.

And so to kind of land this and bring it home to show you what I mean about rejection, I knew my intention going into offering a course on creating a signature product. And then that didn't sell. Let me take that back. There was one sale. And then I sat with it. I looked at the data. I looked at the email opens. And then we discovered that I'd never posted it on social media. And so I was like, dang.

Okay, let's refine the offer and repost. And so this time I honed in on a product that anybody could make that would make them money. And so I offered an opportunity to create an online course and to be able to do it in two days. For me, and I know that sounds crazy, but for me, the same way I put together a website in six hours,

Kimberly Houston (12:11.744)
I can throw together a class overnight too. And so I was like, well, I'm really good at that. I can teach people how to do that. And so I put it out there and we created all these digital assets and there were videos and there were stills and there were reels and there were emails. And then one more person bought the offer. And what I found myself doing was trying to figure out

why people weren't responding in the way that I thought they would.

And when we look at that in its simplest form.

One of the reasons that people don't show up for themselves is that they think they're going to have crickets. They think when they launch, no one's going to purchase. And I've had zero dollar launches before. I'm not new to this. But what happens when you are stuck with the idea that not only do people not want what you offer,

you then begin to internalize that and it feels like they are saying they don't want you. Now the mindset coach having to have this moment of revelation is wild. And if I am having this moment of revelation, then I know 100 % you have had this moment. So let's talk about how we work through this, right? Cause this isn't a trauma dump type of situation.

Kimberly Houston (13:47.298)
I'm always here to teach you. So let's talk about what this is. The process that I had to go through, my process might be a little deeper than yours, right? It's been about 10 hours since I had this conversation with my coach and I've had time to process it. Still processing, but had time to process it. I built an entire website to bring me joy because I did not want to face another. I'm going send out this email. I'm going to make another video and no one signs up for this course. I wanted to avoid

not only the heartache of people not signing up for the course, but also the heartache that I know is going to come when shit hits the fan.

Because this isn't the first time that this has happened. I'm very aware that when I offer something because I had a dream about it or because I had the idea just popped into my head and it literally arrests me and it won't let me go and it won't let me go until I release it. And I mean release it as in create it. Because I know the patterns that I have with these things. I know

when we hit the point where people are going to be looking for this, I would have already offered it and may not be in position to be able to take the time to offer it when people need it because I predicted it a while ago. All right. So let's talk about how this has worked. The thing that I decided to do was to go ahead and have the class. I'm going to have the class.

It will be recorded and then this course will just become another course in the vault. It will become something that can be of assistance to people when they need it. It just may not be live because I will probably have moved on to something else.

Kimberly Houston (15:46.548)
That was one of the first things I thought about. The reason I thought about that was I'm a runner. When I feel rejected, I run. I run away from the situation that is causing me angst. When I posted this on Instagram, a lady said that she's a hider. So she hides whenever she feels like she's being rejected. And so you may run. You may hide.

you may become mute. I used to do that too. I used to not speak. I could hold a grudge. I don't do that anymore. But like, what do you do when you've been rejected? What do you do where you're trying to avoid rejection? Like you need to be aware. You need to be self-aware of what you do or don't do whenever you feel like you've been rejected. Whenever that...

that feeling triggers you, what do you do? You need to know. And so because I typically run, I decided I wasn't going to run. I'm still going to do the class. During the time that I I was going to do the class, those two people that paid will have me to themselves at a price that is significantly lower than if they were to have me to themselves for real. And that's their blessing. The next thing that I thought about was how do you handle

Like where does the emotional intelligence come into this? And this is the part that I want to really try and help people with. When you know that rejection is a possibility, you have to understand that it's not about you. You have to be able to accept that not everyone is at the place that you are at when you have the idea, when you launch the product, when you do these things. I call them zero dollar launches when no one buys.

the day that you launch a product simply because it's all it is. It's zero dollar launch, right? But if you have the asset, if you build it and you have the asset and you still have ownership of it, it will still sell. It will sell when it's time. It will sell for years to come. I created a photography class in 2021.

Kimberly Houston (18:14.272)
a cell phone photography class in 2021. And that class to this day still makes me money and it is now 2025. I created a baking course for children in 2021. To this day, it still makes me money. Just because you had the idea to release it in one season doesn't mean that's like you planting a seed in the ground.

We do not get the harvest as soon as we plant the seed. The harvest comes later. Sometimes the harvest comes in a couple of months. Sometimes it comes in a couple of weeks. Sometimes you can see sprouts in a couple of days. But then there are other times that it takes years for things to happen. And I have learned that I am a seed in the ground type of planner. I am the type of person who I have this idea.

It makes complete sense to me and it falls flat. When I first released my photography course in 2021, six people signed up for it. And not when I launched it, like later within that year, six people total signed up for it. Two years later, 66 people signed up for it in three days.

What you have to understand is just because people don't buy when you want them to, it doesn't mean that you are bad. It doesn't mean that your product is bad. It really could mean that it's out of season. It could mean that it's out of season. I am a firm believer that whoever is supposed to hear what I have to say will hear it. It is my job to continue

to use my instrument and open my mouth. It is not my job to tell people when and if they can spend money because I release something. So if you're an entrepreneur and this has been a thing for you, that every time you release something, a new class, a new product, a new opportunity for people, and people aren't like banging down your door when it happens, faith is still believing in that thing.

Kimberly Houston (20:36.834)
when there's silence. Faith is still knowing that you showed up in a way you were supposed to show up when there's crickets. Faith is believing in the thing that you created, the thing that was inspired by where you are in life at the moment, the thing that you've created based on

the things that you can see based on the way the world is moving, based on the way life is happening, based on your own life experiences. When you understand that it's your job to create, not critique, it will absolutely and fundamentally change the moment that you are in.

It's not my job to critique how many opens there were on the emails. It's not my job to critique sending it out to a text message thread and no one sharing it when you ask them to. It's not my job to critique asking people to share something and it's not on the top of their list of things to do. It's not my job to judge that. It's my job.

to create what the universe and I know need to be co-created. That's my job, right? And so I did. And as I think about this, and I was having a conversation with a friend a little bit ago, we get so caught up in people not doing something, or we get wrapped up in, well, if I don't sell this, then I can't do X, Y, Z.

When it comes to creativity, we take advantage of the opportunities to create. For someone like me that can put together a brand new blog in six hours, that is not normal. I'm aware. You want to know how I know this? Because the very first time I launched a blog, it took me about six months to do what I did in six weeks and six hours.

Kimberly Houston (23:00.086)
The reason I could do that now is repetition. The reason I can put together a course in two days is repetition. The reason I can launch new offers overnight is repetition. I did not wake up like this. I studied and I learned and I refined.

And so if you find yourself as an entrepreneur, as a business owner, particularly right now, trying to figure out how are you going to move forward? What are you going to do next? Particularly if you're someone in the culinary industry and you serve the client and you're trying to figure out how do you make ends meet when butter, eggs, when all these things are going up, when the things that you normally were able to get now have tariffs on them, right? Your supplies and stuff. As you begin to think about

the fact that the face of your business is going to fundamentally be changed over the next four years. I want you to really sit with the idea. Now, not later. What am I going to do when the cost of business is no longer worth it?

What am I going to do when I can no longer afford to keep my business open at the price that I'm at? What am I going to do when my customers cannot afford the bare minimum cost of what it cost me to make this? And I'm not even including like your time, your expertise or any of that.

just the simple ingredients it's going to take for you to be able to do orders.

Kimberly Houston (24:51.604)
The next four years of our economy are going to look very interesting and it's not the first time in history that things got really expensive. Like it's not. It's not the first time that eggs and butter have been astronomical. It's not. It's really not.

But if you're not prepared and if you're not preparing for and if you're not preparing in case of, then the question that I would raise to you is, do you have a very expensive hobby or are you an actual entrepreneur who needs to be prepared to figure out other ways to bring in income when the way that you do it currently no longer serves you?

Kimberly Houston (25:43.254)
It's easy to ignore the hard conversation. It is. As someone who can see things from the outside in and can see how things can help people, I'm a business strategist. Strategy is in my, out of my top five strips, three of them are strategy. Okay. I am like really good at predicting things because I'm really good at strategy. A lot of stuff is just data. I'm not saying like I have some magic.

wand or something. It's just data and I know how to read it. But because I can do that, that puts me at a disadvantage sometimes. I like to be ahead of the ish hitting the fan. I'm trying to watch my mouth. I like being ahead of that. I don't want the ish to hit the fan. That's messy and I don't want to clean it up. So I do things that make sure that doesn't happen.

And so as a business strategist and an alignment coach, I do my part to help other people. And the thing when I, when I sat down and really thought about my mission in life, right? Like, yes, offering this class or this workshop is something that I was led to do. It was inspired action. Like I literally woke up and was like, I should do this. It was inspired action, right?

those two people who pay for it, they're supposed to be there. They're supposed to get what they're gonna get and we're gonna pitch if it. But that's my job, right? Like my job is to show up for those two people as though 200 people signed up for it. And so I'm still gonna show up in the fullness of who I am. When I think about this from the perspective of other people, of other entrepreneurs.

True entrepreneurs accept a challenge and they move accordingly.

Kimberly Houston (27:43.986)
Life and business as we know it are going to change exponentially, fundamentally under this new administration. And that's not fear-mongering, that's just truth. If you do not think about your business from the lens of someone who is preparing for longevity,

meaning you are going to have to do things you've probably never done before to stay in business. If you're not thinking about it on that level, you have a glorified hobby. When I took the entrepreneurship course, the women's entrepreneurship course at Cornell back in 2020, the very first week of class, our instructor said, if you were to get injured, hurt,

sick or died. Does your business keep going or does it stop? And if the answer is it stops, she looked into that zoom screen and said, you are not an entrepreneur. You have a very expensive hobby. And that stuck with me, which is why I was very prepared.

Two months later, when I was injured and my business needed to close, my business could not go on outside of me, right? And so that was when I had to learn how to build systems and infrastructure so that my business could thrive even when I wasn't there. And that's when I built the photography business. 100%, when I was not working, it kept going up until I closed it last year. That business...

even though it required me to show up. It could still run if I got sick. I still made money when I was taking my son back and forth to college. Like the PayPal alerts would go off. I had systems in place that allowed me to continue to have a six figure business even if I wasn't present.

Kimberly Houston (29:56.66)
If something happens to you and it will stop all of your income.

I want you to understand that this podcast was for you. You have got to put systems in place that will allow you to continue to grow, scale and thrive even in your absence.

Kimberly Houston (30:24.728)
So it is my hope. This was a little bit longer than I thought it was going to be. It is my hope, my prayer, my wish that this lands for you. I didn't write it out like I normally do beforehand. I can't give you your points A through Z. This one was right off the cuff and right off my heart. I want for small business owners to thrive during this administration.

And I can tell you 100 % that unless your business is bringing in a whole lot of money, you will not. Unless you start creating things that will run in your absence, you will not. And so instead of getting to the point of you don't know what to do, I just want to give you the charge, the homework, the opportunity to really sit down and look at your business.

and figure out ways for you to be able to sustain your income and grow it under this administration. That's all I got for y'all today. Hopefully it lands in the way that it needs to. Hopefully you understand and hear my heart because I really do just want the best for all of you. Until next time, stay sweet friends.