“That ability to kind of stay in your lane, stay focused in a way keep those blinders on so that your message is really authentic and that you’re not getting distracted by what other people are doing or what other advisers are telling you to do because they’re not in your head, they don’t see your vision.”
Bizzie Gold – Serial Entrepreneur; Founder of Buti Yoga & Golden Ratio Nutrition; Fallacies of the entrepreneurial dream; Authenticity; Revolutionizing yoga
Segment 1: (Length :04:00) – General Updates; Introduction to Bizzie Gold and her journey as an entrepreneur; Getting started in fitness; pivoting into authenticity; Starting off in PR; the hustle.
Bizzie’s finer points:
“It’s interesting that you bring up the PR thing because I think that’s a facet of my lifetime that people don’t really know too much about.”
“What’s really funny is when I got kind of in the initial stages of my business development, pigeonholed as this celebrity fitness personality, I would look at myself on camera and look at these pictures and be like, “Shit, nothing can be further from the truth.”
I think for me that caused almost like an identity conflict for me in the beginning of the creation of my businesses because I got in a way forced to be the face of a brand that didn't really match my personality.
“And in the beginning, and I know you and I were kind of just rapping about this before we even started the show, there were so many people that wanted to insert their opinions or advisory services and be like, “Well, all these other people, like Jillian Michaels is doing it this way,” and because at that point in this specific facet of my business I was so new and fresh, I was tempted a few times to listen to those advisory services.”
“What’s funny and I actually gave a lecture on this last year, I took like a visual representation via Google Images from the beginning of my brand, and not just my brand but also my face and my visual appearance which you can see now is primarily black as opposed to the neon thing.”
“So if you look at kind of the visual representation you can almost see this like arc of when I started to listen to people and then I was like, no, fuck that, I’m going to go be who I’m going to be.”
What's funny is when I originally came to market, that was very much a more true variation of what I would be like as a fitness trainer and then all of a sudden, you see this like little pivot to being a celebrity trainer the way my advisers and different people in the investment world are trying to get me to be, and then you see me very clearly through that arc change back to a more authentic version and really when we got back to that authentic version, that's when my business started to grow rapidly.
“That ability to kind of stay in your lane, stay focused in a way keep those blinders on so that your message is really authentic and that you’re not getting distracted by what other people are doing or what other advisers are telling you to do because they’re not in your head, they don’t see your vision.”
“No matter how articulate you are, it’s really hard to communicate that properly to somebody. Only you can truly bring your brand to light which is a whole other set of things that I want to talk about.”
“In that way when I first started this business, I would look at these images of myself or look at myself on T.V. and think like, oh shit, everyone thinks I’m this one way, how I’m I ever going to pivot back to being able to be myself?”
“I would like meet these people somewhere and they’d expect me to be one way and then they’re like, oh wow, she’s kind of like tough and are masculine and like she’s a New York Jew and I’m like “Hey, hey guys, blond hair, blue eyed, New York Jew.”
So I think in that way when people would meet me, in the beginning there would almost be this kind of like disconnect. Like they expect me to be one way and then all of a sudden, I was very much a different way.
“In a way, really to me that PR side and how I grew up and being very academically driven and focused on really my intellectual side, all of a sudden having to kind of portray this like fitness trainer mentality was really tough for me because I think people have an expectation of what fitness trainers are like.”
“I definitely did not fit that mold and honestly, no offense to other fitness trainers but thank God because my brand wouldn’t be what it is today if I had that mentality. I didn’t frankly give a fuck about my looks.”
I worked hard but I work hard to be healthy and to have energy and to feel good and to take care of my kids and to have the energy that it's required of me to have to be an entrepreneur.
“Being an entrepreneur, a lot of people would be like, “God, what don’t you do?” And the answer is, I don’t fucking sleep. Like I don’t sleep. That’s the thing that I don’t get to do. I don’t get to sleep, I don’t get to take care of myself. I try but, you know, it’s few and far between because every time you’re like, today is going to be the day I’m going to take the day off. And as soon as you say that, it’s like the little, like the omen of death for yourself somewhere.”
“I think for me that starting in PR gave me that that drive and that foundation to see all the different facets of what it takes to create a brand, to figure out who your customer demographic is, where in PR you need to know what audience you’re trying to speak to so that you can carefully craft that message for your audience.”
“All of those things really helped me build this brand not to mention as my publicist who’s also in the room can attest to, PR in LA, shout out to Nicole Myden, she’s the bomb, it’s a tough world out there. You’re hustling, people are, sorry LA, I love LA, don’t be wrong but people can be really not nice and it’s a rat race.”
Segment 2: (Length :08:00) – Talking with Bizzie Gold; Burning out and moving to Hawaii; Her spiritual journey with Mayumi Oda; A new approach to teaching spirituality; The true meaning of what it takes to being an entrepreneur.
Bizzie’s finer points:
“So I burned out by the time I was 23 and I burned out in such a drastic way that it actually ended up being accompanied by a diagnosis of lupus, which was systemic and kind of brutal.”
“My whole body would like little by little start shutting down and it was a combination of obviously stress at work, not taking care of myself, not sleeping anywhere near as much as I should and eventually, my body just kind of shut down.”
“I ended up quitting my job at 23. I moved to Hawaii and I basically just quit at life if we’re being honest. I went back to teaching yoga. So I had gotten certified to teach yoga when I was 19 just before I moved to California.”
So I moved to Hawaii, taught yoga because that was a skill set that I had that was solving a problem in Hawaii.
“Lived on a farm. Imagine like a New York Jew from the Upper East Side all the sudden having to like harvest vegetables at five o’clock in the morning and battle cane spiders and centipedes and living with Japanese in-laws at the time that really didn’t like just my style of life down from cutting vegetables to my lack of cleanliness. It was a contrast.”
“Not to mention I was used to being the boss then all of a sudden, I had, and she’s still one of my biggest influence today, Mayumi Oda, she’s a famous Japanese artist and spiritual teacher. I was lucky enough to have her as my mother-in-law.”
“I think at the time I didn’t really feel like I was that lucky because she kind of railroaded me and just forced me into submission every single day which was not something I was used to. I guess it’s just the Japanese way. They kind of force you to submit and then they’re like, “Okay, you can come into the family. Now you can live, we’re fine.”
“She’s been really kind of influential and pivotal and really just my development as I think the adult that I am today. I definitely kind of had that spiritual arc while I was living in Hawaii and I would say not spiritual in what I would consider kind of like an escapist, I’m going to wear a turban and chant all day, that’s not how my spiritual journey went down.”
I do think that a lot of people try to escape from the mundane stresses of their life by trying to go on a spiritual journey and a lot of times that spiritual journey is frankly bullshit and they're really like I said, just trying to escape from their life and sort of find some sort of energetic connection to augment their life, which is really what I was seeking to do. I wanted to have a way to augment my life.
“in my BREAK program we only practice what I call directed meditation which we can touch on later. Really to your point, in my program that I teach, the whole first unit that I teach is called spiritual intelligence, which to me if you look at earlier on in the corporate world, people were really measured as potential employees based on just your IQ.”
“Now we’re kind of in this like a little bit IQ mixed with EQ and I really think the next generation it’s going to be a spiritual quotient because at a certain point, your overarching belief system is going to determine whether you’re a fucking bad ass employee or whether you are a shit, entitled, lazy ass employee.”
I know for me, I've dealt with a lot of hardship and I think some people that follow me on social media they know that with my first daughter we both had a terrible birthing experience and she has cerebral palsy. She died for 20 minutes, it was a nightmare.
“But she’s alive and well and she’s a little bad ass. She wants to be the first ever special needs supermodel so if any of your listeners are connected into that world, holler at me.”
“Her handle is @saraiaiko, S-A-R-A-I-A-I-K-O. She’s such a little bad ass and she really is a fantastic model despite the fact that she has CP so her movements are not as fluid as a lot of other kids.”
“What’s interesting is the parts of the brain that get affected with kids with CP, they affect you’re kind of natural ambulation, your gait but when it comes to her acquiring a new school which was actually walking a catwalk, like a raised catwalk, all of a sudden, she can do that perfectly which is really bizarre because it’s a different part of the brain, it’s a new skill.”
“So when she walks, she walks kind of funny and then all of a sudden when she hits that runway, she’s insane you guys, crazy.”
“I am so aligned with who I am, why I’m here and when some instances like this come in my path, I use them as a way to motivate me and challenge me to think about things in a different way, find creative solutions and I think a lot of people will probably have heard this in some type of a corporate lecture setting so I don’t mean to sound cheesy but really when these shit situations happen, for others that don’t have that entrepreneurial mindset, they’re going to be like boom, failure, boom I’m a failure, boom, I should stop. I see these things and I’m like, shit, how can I buckle down and get really creative and find a workaround or some way to get through this and I let it make me stronger.”
I always find a way to make that obstacle just push me further, push me in a different direction or teach me something about myself that allowed a situation to transpire and know that I'm not going to repeat that again because I'm actually paying attention to the lesson.
Segment 3: (Length :10:00) – Connecting with your audience; Revolutionizing yoga; Building multiple brands; Having a true entrepreneurial mindset.
Bizzie’s finer points:
“I think creating that dialogue with your customer base right now, there’s never been a better time than now to truly engage on multiple platforms and different ways of contact to take their information or their opinions into account.”
“. I think honestly one of the things that shaped Buti the most is that a lot of the things that we’ve created have come directly from the customer saying like, “Hey, have you ever thought to do this? What if we did this?” and me just kind of keeping a very close pulse on what’s going on in my customer demographic to the point where people will be like, “Oh my god, I can’t believe you actually responded, like is it really you?” I’m like, “Yeah, it’s fucking me. Hi, I actually give a shit.”
I'm here because I care about what you think about our company and I want you to know that.
“This isn’t for me some show that I’m trying to put on Instagram to be like, look how perfect my life is because those people I fucking guarantee you their lives are not perfect at all. And they don’t look like that. So for any of you that are out there listening and you’re looking at those Instagram accounts, all of that’s doing is giving you some sort of propulsion to an entrepreneurial goal based on money and wealth, that’s external validation, that is ego driven, that is not what makes for a successful entrepreneur. It just doesn’t.”
“For my companies collectively, each of our businesses grow about 400% year over year and we didn’t even start spending any money at all on marketing of any kind until just last year.”
“So a lot of it’s been just completely organic grassroots growth in addition to obviously some PR stuff in the beginning there but I actually haven’t done any PR for five years but now that Nicole is in my life … You got to trust the person that’s kind of setting you up these t’s to bat and for a while no one understood me but Nicole gets me so that’s why we’re here talking.”
I own five different companies. They range from obviously the Buti brand which is a workout methodology that fuses yoga, tribal dance, plyometrics, deep core strength and it really is a workout to me that transcends what happens on the mat.
“That’s not what the practice is about and I think a lot of traditional yogis will look at it and be like, “Ew, that’s not traditional yoga.” It’s not traditional. It is definitely an evolution of yoga, absolutely. Yoga’s over 6000 years old. I’m pretty sure that human civilization has different needs now than they did 6000 years ago so you’re welcome.”
“In my brand what we convey to people that get certified with us, be it Buti or HotCore or deep or Yoga Teacher Training program, they really truly exemplify those core values on and off the mat.”
“Their lives look succinct throughout because it’s a genuine shift within themselves. How they see themselves and how they’re then willing to show up to connect with other people, which I think is what’s really missing in the yoga community.”
The yoga community can be really judgy and that's not very welcoming. If you want people in the world to take yoga and participate in the benefits both spiritual and physical, how are you going to shut people down like that and make them feel like they're not welcome because of your yogi judgment.
“That’s not something that I personally liked in the experience of yoga while I did personally experience a lot of benefits from it, which is in essence why I did what I did. I want more people to get the benefits of it while also recognizing there is a more deep journey that can exist in the practice of yoga than I think what a lot of Western traditions are offering now.”
“On the flip side, if you’re showing up for this physical practice, for a lot of people it’s transferring them into that kind of escapist meditative escape from your life problems thing again, which I think is also not a solution to modern society.”
“So trying to bridge that gap between like just the physical and then the physical mixed with the escapist spiritual and instead bring people a practice that genuinely makes them better fucking human beings so that we can actually change the world, which is really at the core of everything that I do.”
We were one of the first people in the industry to offer online streaming workouts. We've been rated number one online streaming workout by a variety of different entertainment and kind of lifestyle publications and apparel, things like that.
“Throughout this process when I was training a bunch of celebrity clients, one day they were just like, “God, Bizzie, you really need to come up with your own supplement line because you’re crafting us all these special concoctions everyday so that we can look the way we do you and you’re always complaining about one ingredient or another or a company will somehow get bought out and then they’ll ship their ingredients, like you should just do this yourself.”
“So then I started a supplement company, which is now doing exceptionally well. The website for that is my goldenratio.com”
“Golden Ratio, what we really focus on there is obviously ingredients sourcing but also without really allowing the taste to diminish, because at the same time, people care about ingredients but they also don’t want to taste something that tastes like shit or you feel like chalk is going down your throat.”
“So we have our standard products and then we’re expanding to 12 more products that are coming in stock in the next four to five weeks, from pre workouts to hormone balancing and things like that.”
To get the rest of the podcast, tune in . . . .
“Segment 4: (Length :03:00) – Hustler Thought of the Day:
Nothing like watching your vision come to life and getting to share it with the world. Ideation is an interesting gift. You have to walk a line between trusting you’ve received the “right message” and executing on it quickly and with ease AND learning to be humble and steadfast. – Bizzie Gold
GENERAL NOTES:
Bizzie Gold – Serial Entrepreneur & Founder of Buti Yoga & Golden Ratio Nutrition
Bizzie is a serial entrepreneur with 5 global brands held by her successful Buti Inc. parent company. After several MASSIVE changes in her life personally and professionally, she began healing herself “through a combination of energy work in conjunction with yoga, she found spiritual, emotional, and physical healing, the ability to shed the past in order to be present in the present.
One of the world’s top Personal Development + Wellness Experts, Bizzie Gold has appeared on The Dr. Oz Show, TODAY, E!, EXTRA, Home & Family, Bethenny, ABC NEWS and MSNBC to discuss her unique approach to sustainable transformation that has garnered widespread Hollywood praise. Some of her past celebrity clients include: Julia Roberts, PINK + Jennifer Love Hewitt, among others.
Gold’s off-the-cuff humor and focus on diligent accountability, helps clients achieve striking breakthroughs in record breaking time. An industry disruptor to the core, Gold is bulldozing the model of “coaching” that financially preys on countless people across the globe, replacing it with a sustainable model that puts the client’s swift breakthrough at the forefront of all work together.
Whether Gold is helping a client break through emotional addiction or bring a consumer product to market, she does it with harsh accountability, thought-provoking Directed Storytelling® exercises and a lot of humor.
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