Show Notes for Episode 003 of the Dream Doers Podcast: “Just Start.. Start Late, Start Over, Start with Nothing!”

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Episode Highlights:

• Start Where You Are, With What You Have

•  Set Up Your Dream Legally & Smartly

•  Create Time in Chaos

• Avoid Marketing Overwhelm

• Systems Will Save Your Sanity

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Episode breakdowns:

[00:00] Starting scared or unprepared is still starting

[02:00] The weight of responsibility – Breaking through the Barriers

[03:55] The first 5 moves – Practical steps to get started

[12:03] Avoid the traps – What NOT to waste time and money on

[14:20] Systems that saved my life – Sustaining my life amidst trauma

[25:34] A sneak peak into imposter syndrome and spiritual alignment

[26:14] Your dreams are waiting on you

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[00:00] Starting scared or unprepared is still starting.

Hey, Dream Doers! Welcome back to another episode where we cut through the crap, pushing past the excuses, and doing what it takes to make our dreams a reality. I’m your host, Jana Marie, and today’s episode is for every single person who has ever said, ‘I wish I could, but…’ If you’re waiting for the perfect time, if you feel like you don’t have enough money, enough experience, you’re too old, or even just don’t have enough energy—this one’s for you. Today, we’re diving into why you should start NOW, no matter your circumstances. Just Start.. Start Late, Start Over, Start with Nothing!

I know what it’s like to feel like everything is stacked against you. Maybe you’re a single mom, or you feel like you’ve already missed your window. Maybe you’re struggling with finances, time, or just plain fear. But let me tell you something—Oprah Winfrey didn’t hit her stride until her 30s. Martha Stewart built her empire while going through a divorce in a world that wasn’t set up for women to succeed. And guess what? They just started. No guarantees, no safety nets—just sheer determination. And to be honest, everything was actually stacked up against them. In a time that was against women rising in business and success, with racism prevalent, Oprah, a beautiful woman of color, Martha also a young woman, went against the flow of society and did it anyway. If there is a will there is a way. And they were pushing through. Which helped pave the way for more of us women today to build big business dreams.

So my question to you is, what’s stopping you? Let’s get into it.

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[02:00] The weight of responsibility – Breaking through the Barriers.

I see you, single moms. I see you, single married mothers—the ones carrying the weight of the world on your shoulders. It’s hard enough to keep a household running, let alone take a risk on something new. The fear of failure isn’t just personal—it’s tied to your ability to provide, to keep food on the table, to keep everything from crumbling. And that’s terrifying.

But here’s the cold truth: Waiting doesn’t make it easier. Time doesn’t create opportunity—YOU do.

My mom used to always tell me, “If you wait to have children you never will, you’re just never ready.”

So, let’s flip the script. Instead of asking, ‘What if I fail?’ ask, ‘What if I succeed?’ What if this small step turns into a legacy? What if you start today and a year from now, you’re standing in a completely different place? Because the time will pass anyway. You might as well spend it building something.

I want you to take a second and visualize the life you want. Imagine what it would feel like to wake up one day and realize you DID it. You pushed through the fear, the doubt, the obstacles. You made it happen. That dream is possible. But it starts with action. And that’s’ why I created the Dream Doers Podcast, we’re not just dreamers, we’re doers.

And I want to pause here and remind you—if no one has ever told you that it’s okay to start over, let me be the one. You are allowed to begin again and again, and again. You are allowed to shift. You are allowed to pick up something new even in your 30s, your 40s, 50s, 60s. We don’t expire, friends. We evolve.

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[03:55] The first 5 moves – Practical steps to get started

Let’s get into the nitty gritty. I’m giving you a blueprint. These are five actionable, no-fluff, just-make-it-happen steps to get going. So if you’re a notetaker, this is when you want to get out your notebook, save this. Revisit it when you feel stuck.

1️⃣ Get Clear on What You Want

This is the vision part. What lights you up? What kind of life do you want to create? What kind of legacy do you want to leave? I did a mastermind group with Tony Robbins and Dean Graziosi and they talked about this so much. They said, ask your friends, “What are the things I talk about the most, what are the things I’m most passionate about.” They will tell you.

Don’t overthink it. Write down what excites you. Is it baking? Organizing homes? Designing websites? Coaching others? Selling jewelry? Whatever it is, name it.

Then, ask: Who does this serve? And then what problem does it solve?

2️⃣ Make Time (Even in the Chaos)

Here’s the deal: you don’t need hours. You need intention. Maybe you wake up 30 minutes earlier every day. Maybe you set aside one evening a week. Maybe you swap one hour of scrolling for one hour of building. I’ve had to do that.

Have you ever heard of the “8-8-8 rule” is a time management strategy that suggests dividing your day into three equal parts: 8 hours for work, 8 hours for sleep, and 8 hours for personal time, that helps you aim for a balanced and fulfilling life.  Did you all hear that? That means we have 8 hours of PERSONAL time to spend however we want: on our hobbies, on building a new business, with your children. We have no excuses. We all get the same amount of time in a day and we all choose where we spend our time, energy and money, and on who.

Time is a currency. Spend it like your life depends on it—because your future does. Your children’s future does, and their children. You’re building generational wealth here, keep that in mind.  I did that about 10 years ago in my business, I had a notepad next to my computer, and when I sat down to work I started tracking the time and everything that I was doing. So if I was checking emails, I would have a start time and an end time, if I was editing, I had a start and an end time, if I took a phone call, I tracked all of it and I figured out where all my time was going and then I figured out how to spend less time on the things I was doing, which was what I was mostly what I was doing, and then I shifted, so I traded out sacrifice. I had to pay a photo editor so I could get my time back, I was spending so much time editing. I started paying for a bookkeeper to handle my finances. They are a professional at it so they can do this in 5 minutes when it takes me 5 hours. The return on my time was what was most important, that way I could spend my time doing what I wanted to do.

So start tracking where you spend your time every day and see where it goes.

3️⃣ Business Setup (Don’t Overcomplicate This!)

Let’s over complicate this. Lets talk logistics. If you’re starting a business, you’re going to need:

• A Business Name. Now before you pick a business name, make sure you check Google to see if it’s trademarked. That is a huge no no. So find a business name that is creative and unique and not already taken.
• A Business License (you can check your local/state requirements)
• An EIN (it’s free and easy at IRS.gov)

And use ChatGPT to ask: “What are the legal requirements to start a [your business] in [your city/state]?” Boom. Tailored info. No excuses. Use tech to your advantage. I was so anti Ai for so long I rode that fence, I wanted to kind of figure it out, so I dove in just to see what it’s all about and in all areas of my life it drastically changed everything for me: how I functioned, how I organized myself, why? Because it literally takes all of the knowledge of the internet and collects it all into a little answer for you. Chat GPT has become my best friend. I talk to it like it’s my friend every day, “Hey good morning, I have a question for you, can you do this for me? So I have this idea, can you really help me wrap my brain around how to simplify this,” or whatever you need to ask it. I had dinner one night and I had some odd things in my fridge and I said, “I’ve got this, this and this, what should I do? What can I make? Can you send me a recipe? Boom.. Sent me a recipe in under 10 seconds, we made it that night, and it was delicious. One of the best meals we’ve had in a long time. So when I say hop on the Ai train. Say goodmorning and goodnight to your Chat GPT friend because these robots are running this world so I’d be kind.

4️⃣ Make a Micro Investment

You don’t need a $5,000 brand launch. You need these things:

• A domain name (maybe $12 a year, $20, $30 max)
• A logo (you can hop on Canva and just type in: “Masculine, barber shop logos,” and it will pull up all of the logos, and it’s free. You can also pay for a paid plan, and get tons more options. Canva has also been my best friend. It also has Ai in there, so if you want to generate a new logo specifically for you that’s not been created anywhere else, you can use the Ai in Canva and say, “Hey I want to create a logo that looks like this, it’s got these three colors,” and it will create it for you.
• A basic email (Gmail works just fine. I’ve had so many people say, “You really need to have a professional email Jana. Liten, I’ve had a business for 20 years, multiple. I’ve always had a free Gmail account and nobodies ever questioned it. It works the same.)
• A business bank account. So if you already have a bank that you use, just go to them and say, “Hey I need to create a business account. It takes less than an hour. I’d plan for an hour just because they might ask you questions, you might need to provide certain things, or even call up there or email if you have a way to contact them that way and see. “What do I need to do to start a business account?” And some banks you can even do it online, in under a couple minutes.

Small moves with big energy. That’s how empires start.

5️⃣ Celebrate Micro Wins

Seriously, dance after you publish your first blog. Toast after your first Etsy sale. Share your excitement. Progress deserves to be acknowledged. That energy is contagious. Let it fuel you and be the snowball effect that keeps you going.

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[12:03] Avoid the traps – What NOT to waste time and money on.

Now let’s debunk a few myths really quick:

🚫 You do NOT need to be on every social media platform. Choose one. Master it. Don’t scatter your energy and feel like you need to do all of it. If it helps, Pinterest is actually not a social media platform. It is a search engine and one of the top search engines in the world. You really need to check out Pinteret and maybe dive in there.

🚫 You do NOT need to pay $1,000s on branding. Focus on your offer and message. That’s what moves people.

🚫 You do NOT need to have a website before making money. You can start selling right from Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, or a simple landing page. So if you haven’t checked out Canva again, i would highly encourage you to do this. They just added websites to their offerings. So you can create a free website within Canva, get your $12 URL within Go Daddy and just tag it to Canva website and Boom! You have a website. It’s beautiful, it’s simple. Your message is what’s most important. So have a few powerful photos instead of a bunch of random photos that’s going to get everyone lost on your page so remember, keep it simple.

🚫 Don’t let “market research” be your procrastination tool. Take action. Adjust along the way. Learn as you go. Any business owner knows that you will start something and then you will shift, and then you’ll cancel this subscription, and you will join in on this course and you will evolve and you one door will close, and another will open and you just keep going. But you have to first, start!

Messy, beautiful, imperfect progress > endless overthinking. Perfectionism leads to procrastination which leads to paralysis and that’s why we get stuck. But you’re not alone. I’m a recovering perfectionist too. But you’ve got to let that go. It’s not got you anywhere so far. Cut the fluff, and jump in imperfectly.

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[14:29] Systems that saved my life – Sustaining my life amidst trauma

If you’re balancing motherhood, a job, and trying to build a dream—systems will save your sanity.

Here are some of my favorite programs I use that have saved my butt literally, in many ways, and brought so much balance to my life. I was at a point in my life where my friends were like, “Do you even work anymore?” And you know what, after finding all these programs I don’t feel like it, I’m just focusing on the things I love. And that’s photography, collaboration and networking. Right? It’s not all the back end stuff. And I didn’t start this way. Let me say that. Of course as you start your business you;re figuring out, “Ok, I’ve got to know all the things. I’ve got to have my hand in it for a minute so that I know how it’s functioning and then I can hire out.” That totally makes sense. That’s what I did and then I figured out by tracking my time, what’s consuming my time that I didn’t want to be spending my time over there, and then I started paying for the appropriate people.

I’ll drop some referral links in the comments too if you want to check any of them out for a discount. I am not paid to talk about them and they do not sponsor me, but MAN will I sell the moon to you all with these programs because they have quite literally saved my life. I could go on and on so here we go, write this down:

• Google emails, calendar and drive for all your personal and business schedulings and communication. And remember keep it organized from the jump.
• QuickBooks for all of your bookkeeping.
• I DO have a favorite CPA here in Kansas City, and I’m going to give them a shout out if you all want to call them, they are called Hovee & Co and they now run all my monthly bookkeeping as well as my year end taxes. Best investment to an amazing team, I’ve made.
• Canva as I’ve mentioned is absolutely one of the greatest gifts to the business world. All the business worlds. You can create logos, flyers, websites, ads, social media content and really anything you can think of. They have thousands upon thousands of premade templates for free, but you can also buy from shops like mine for more cohesive photos and templates if you’re wanting more, and you can organize so much of your branding items in there also. And again, make sure you do, from the jump, organize your photos in folders. Organize each type of business or endeavor you’re doing, inside folders.
• And this is absolutely one of the best programs I could ever, EVER, ever, ever, ever thanked for all things business in my life: Dubsado! It’s a funny word I know. I love that they are a young couple and have young kids, so their kids helped name it Dubado. Hands down one of the greatest gifts I could have ever come upon. I did a lot of research for other client management programs but Dubsado landed on top for all of them. It is a whole system. If you don’t’ want to start with Quickbooks as I mentioned above, you can do all of your bookkeeping in Dubsado too. It also manages your proposals, contracts, invoices and payments, email scheduling once you tie it with your google account. It manages your to do lists, task management with a team, a portal for your clients to store everything they need in there from their appointment dates to important links, forms and questionnaires and so much more. And the two very best things about them? Their customer service is out of this world and get back to you in what feels like in a few minutes instead of the next day or two days later. If you say you want something implemented into Dubsado or have this great idea, they typically listen and apply it right away, it’s pretty cool. And their entire system is brandable to match exactly the feel you want your client experience to be. That was really what sold me on them, because every other platform was just so bulky and ugly. But everything is beautiful. You can even have technically beginner website within Dubsado by using Forms and Proposals. It’s pretty cool. I can dive more into that if you all are interested. Leave me some comments below and maybe I can go more into that on short clips on social media. But, I have my entire, and I mean ENTIRE workflow in here. Which means I can be sitting here recording my podcast, I can have an inquiry for my photo booth come in, fill out the proposal on my website, it’ll send the contract, have them sign the contract, it then sends them the invoice and they pay it and I just got a booking and I’m over here recording and didn’t do a darn thing. I have literally been on the beaches of Mexico, enjoying the drink under the little cabana and the palm trees and my phone said,  “Ding, someone just inquired.” “Ding, someone just signed your contract.” “Ding, someone just paid the invoice.” And I had a new booking. And it felt so great because  all I did  was lower my sunglasses and I had a new project. Friends who are anti-automaticions bc they think they are un-personal, let me tell you, if you are manually typing emails to each client, you are already saying the exact same thing over and over. You might as well set them up as canned emails and schedule them to send for payment reminders and all the other things. Dubsado lets you personalize it to your clients and trust me, they don’t know any different. It’s still my voice, still my brand and all the same thing I would send them myself. I just have a robot do it.  I do 100% of everything in there. I connect it with Quickbooks just as my CPA works in Quickbooks as it’s easier to track multiple businesses in my case. Dubsado actually lets you have up to 3 brands. Meaning, 3 different businesses I can toggle back and forth between to track each of my businesses separately and brand them separately and connect them with my separate Gmail’s and calendars. There’s even schedulings in there if you need to send that to a client to select when you’re available.  You can add admins or people to only certain tasks. I can go on and on, but if you are brand new to business, or even someone established I would say Dubsado is hands down the thing I would purchase immediately to set you up solid from the start. And not only look legit, but be extremely organized. Everything is in here. Then you can spend the time doing the thing that you love. Grab 20% off your first month or year here.
• Lastly, I don’t care what kind of company you are, even if it’s your personal life, I would highly suggest getting the lowest subscription plan to SmugMug. Or another subscription plan that works for you but the lowest one works for me. SmugMug is an online photo storage system and after all the other programs from my favorite phone devices, they will eventually be saying, “Phone Full” (if you know what I mean) and “Upgrade your storage plan.” It’s all a part of their plan. And we fall for it, so we upgrade and now they’re making so much money from us even though it seems like just a few dollars to us. But Smugmug is unlimited photo, video and raw storage. So even as a professional photographer, I can back up my client’s Raw photos straight from my card, immediately. If you have all your images on your phone and you’re at your kids birthday party documenting it, it will upload directly to your SmugMug account from your phone automatically, the second you take the photo. And SmugMug even automatically creates organized folders for you: by year, and by month. It’ll auto upload from your phone, and it also has capabilities to auto upload from your computer. And it’s UNLIMITED if you miss that. No more paying to upgrade your things. Your photos and videos are uploaded on the cloud for good. Even if you’re a calligrapher, a zoo keeper, a chef or a stay at home mother or father, you’re most likely taking BTS photos of what you’re doing so this is a great way to ensure everything is safe at the best possible cost there is out there, I’ve done the research.. And if you’re a photographer, you can even SELL your products on Smugmug. This is what I used for years and years and still do for all my businesses. There are  lot of photographers that use SmugMug as their main website and also the place their clients can buy products and photos. Grab 20% off your SmugMug subscription here.
• So write out the tasks you do repeatedly—then ask: how can I automate, delegate, or simplify this?

For me, when I started organizing my days into themes—admin days, creation days, rest days—it helped me to stay focused. I didn’t feel like I was spinning all the plates at once. Especially when kids came along. I had to be disciplined in all these areas.

And when life threw curveballs (because it will), I had structure in place. I could pause and come back without chaos. If you’re thinking or feeling overwhelmed by starting late, you may already have kids or chaos around with no organization or structure, then make time to carve out 20-30 minutes after they go down each night, when the world gets quiet and work little by little on one of these tasks.

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[25:34] A sneak peak into imposter syndrome and spiritual alignment.

Let’s be real—after you start, those voices creep in:

• “You’re not good enough.”
• “Who do you think you are?”
• “You’re a fraud.”
• “There’s already people who do it so much better?”

Sound familiar? That’s imposter syndrome. In the next episode, we’re cracking it WIDE open. Because it’s not just mindset—it’s spiritual, too.

We’re going to talk about alignment, purpose, and healing the inner wounds that try to sabotage your growth. We’re diving deep, and it’s going to be transformational. Make sure you don’t miss it.

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[26:14] Your dreams are waiting on you.

Listen, I want to say this as loud and lovingly as I can:

You are not too late. You are not too old. And you are definitely not too broken.

You are becoming. You are learning. And you are building.

And if all you have today is 10 minutes of courage and a $20 investment—you can start. You can absolutely start. Start with what you have, and make it work.

I want you to DM me or leave in the comments here or even the reviews, your biggest takeaway from this episode. Share it with a friend who needs that push. And remember—you don’t need permission. You just need to start.

You’ve got this. I’m rooting for you. I’m walking with you. And I’ll see you in the next episode of Dream Doers. 💛

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