Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Steph Wharton. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Steph, appreciate you joining us today. One deeply underappreciated facet of entrepreneurship is the kind of crazy stuff we have to deal with as business owners. Sometimes it’s crazy positive sometimes it’s crazy negative, but crazy experiences unite entrepreneurs regardless of industry. Can you share a crazy story with our readers?

Absolutely! For context—like many other entrepreneurs—I used to struggle a lot with comparison and self-doubt. Although every now and then old thoughts creep back up, there’s one particular instance in my business that completely changed the way I see things.

For the longest time in my business, I had felt called to create a free challenge where folks could sign up and create their own brand design concepts to add to their portfolio. Having started my entrepreneurship journey as a brand designer before pivoting into coaching, I knew the power that having an intentionally curated portfolio could have in your business. Oddly enough, one thing always held me back from creating this challenge: the fact that someone else beat me to the punch and created their own before I had a chance to announce my idea to the public.

It was over a year before I realized that I still had this urge to create the challenge. Listening to my intuition, I decided that it was high time I got over it and created my own version of this challenge—one that would likely be ten times better simply because it would have my spin on it, my expertise, and my unique perspective.

In the past, most of the freebies and lead magnets I had created to attract new folks into my community had generated less than 100 sign-ups. Knowing how specific and needed this challenge was, I figured I could easily break my own record. So I set my goal to attract 100 people to sign-up to the challenge, with a dream goal of 300—which I knew I would not hit.

I decided to “open the doors” to the Build Your Own Design Portfolio Challenge a couple of days before I was set to host my parents here in Kelowna, British Columbia, and basically go on vacation.

What happened next was completely unexpected and unprecedented.

Within the first day, we hit our first 100 sign-ups.

By day two, we were up to 500, followed by 1,200 by the time Friday rolled around. You can imagine my shock and disbelief when by the end of the two-week period, we had hit a staggering 1,600 students inside the challenge.

As you can imagine, my whole body was shaking.

The last two weeks had been spent playing tourist in our own city—going to the beach, boating on the lake, listening to live music, hiking through the mountains, and wine tasting our way through wine country.

All the while, my cellphone kept blowing up with notification after notification of more people who were dying to join this new challenge.

Needless to say, this experience is something I’ll never forget. It’s something I’ll continue to refer back to whenever self-doubt creeps in and tries to keep me small. It’s proof that if you’re really meant to do something, you need to go all in and believe that you can achieve anything you set your mind to.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers?

My name is Steph, and I am a quirky Latina—born and raised in Argentina—who ditched the corporate hustle culture in Toronto and instead opted for slower living and entrepreneurship in wine country.

At the time, after studying business through university and working in the corporate business world for almost 7 years, I started to experience really bad anxiety. The workload I was handling was too much for one person, I was burning myself out, and I was basically just going through the motions and waiting for retirement. Keep in mind I wasn’t even 30 years old yet.

The overwhelm and desperation led me to take several online courses and eventually find a hobby in brand design as a way to fill my cup back up so I could go back to my job the next day without completely losing my mind. As you can imagine, this hobby quickly turned into a little side hustle.

It wasn’t until about a month before I got married that I truly considered taking that business full-time. It happened so suddenly. My soon-to-be wife looked at me and said something along the lines of “hey, don’t hold me to this, but what if we quit our jobs after the wedding and move somewhere else?”.

And so we did. We came back from our honeymoon, a week or so later heard about this place called Kelowna in British Columbia, and a week later we put in our notice, packed all our stuff up, and never looked back. The rest is history.

Now I run a successful coaching business helping folks break the rules and expand their brand and visibility beyond social media so they’re no longer feeling glued to their phones—but living their best damn life. We do this through private coaching, a membership, rotating workshops, or my newest program—a high-level mastermind centered around sustainably running a business you’re obsessed with while prioritizing living a life that’s a whole damn vibe.

What I’m the most known for is my fiery passion and signature visibility framework—the exact framework that brought in $22k in sales from one podcast interview alone, got me speaking in front of an audience of 6,600 who saw me as a leader they could trust, and brought in 1,600 folks into my challenge on the very first round.

When I’m not coaching clients on all things business, you can find me tasting my way through wine country, watching Spanish shows on Netflix, or boating on the lake with friends. That’s my version of living a life that’s a whole damn vibe.

How’d you build such a strong reputation within your market?

There’s honestly so much I could say about how to build strong brand recognition and reputation. If I had to pick the top two things that have helped me the most, they would have to be specificity and visibility.

I noticed a clear shift in my business once I got very specific about how I wanted to help my community. I went from being more of a generalist in the coaching realm to confidently owning the fact that my genius lies in expanding your brand and gaining visibility. This not only helped with my messaging as I started being much more specific with who I was calling in and how I could support them in their business, but I also started to gain a lot more confidence. I was no longer feeling as much of the pressure of comparing myself to other seemingly more successful people. Instead, I started to trust more in my decisions, in the fact that I have something worth sharing, and that I bring a unique perspective into the industry that people want to hear. It’s that confidence—brought about through specificity—that folks started to really notice and tune into.

When it comes to visibility itself, I had developed a signature visibility framework that allowed me to expand my reach through partnerships and collaborations to get in front of folks who were actively looking for support and/or to learn about my area of expertise. This framework focuses in part on booking speaking gigs inside coaching programs, virtual conferences, podcasts, and the like—essentially making it so that both your existing community and folks who are now getting to know you, see you literally everywhere. The additional exposure allowed me to reach more folks than I ever could have reached on my own while being able to impact more folks through both my paid and free content.

Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?

Throughout my past life—in both school and corporate—there was always an understanding that the harder you work, the more money and success you would have. We’ve been so conditioned to believe that if we work harder and prove ourselves, someone else will validate us and deem us to be worthy—worthy of recognition, more money, a promotion, or whatever it is you’re working towards.

But here’s the thing: working harder and working more doesn’t typically equate to more success.

Let me be clear, there is nothing wrong with hustling in moderation. Some of the most ambitious and determined people will put in ridiculous amounts of hours, sweat, and tears, into going after what they desire. And that’s incredibly inspiring.

But at the end of the day, when you overwork yourself for too long, you’re bound to hit a wall. That’s what often leads to overwhelm, burnout, and feelings of not being worthy of those goals you’re trying to reach in the first place.

Working harder to reach my goals was something I had to work on—to unlearn.

Now, instead of working 12 hours a day, checking my phone incessantly all evening in hopes that someone is interested in working with me, or doing all the things people say you have to do in order to succeed, I choose to break the rules. I now focus on my top 3 non-negotiables instead: serving my clients and community, promoting my business, and living my best life.

It’s the simplifying of what I focus on and prioritizing happiness that allows me to lead a much more successful and fulfilling life.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://stephwharton.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/stephwharton_/
• Other: Podcast: https://open.spotify.com/show/1RhvC3iM3L4x1ECAlB5kVD?si=aea4cae525864688

Image Credits
Nadia Iannone