How She TRIPLED Her SaaS Revenue Using Human Performance Secrets

Foreign. Business Secrets with Stacia, where we bring you the latest in starting your six figure SaaS business and beyond. Visit SaaS business secrets.com to find out more. Now here's your host, Stacia. All right, you guys. If you ever felt boxed in by a career that looked good on paper but slowly drained the life out of you, then this episode is for you. I'm sitting down with Carrie Taft, former university professor, three degrees, two decades in health and wellness, and at one point burned out, overworked, and done playing by the rules that weren't built for her and weren't built for you either. So hopefully you're watching this because you want to be inspired. And we're going to fast forward. Less than 12 months ago, Carrie tripled her SaaS revenue by applying human performance principles to business operations. No more hustle culture, no more duct tape systems. Actual sustainable growth. That's what I'm talking about. This is going to be raw, real, unfiltered journey from academia to entrepreneurship. And why Carrie is proof that women in tech don't just belong here, we dominate here. That's right. Welcome to SAS Business Secrets. Carrie Taft. Hello. Hello. Thank you for having me. And what intro. My goodness. Amazing. Thank you. You're welcome. Let's start back in academia. On the outside, you know, looking in looks solid, but what did that actually feel like in the inside? Yeah, I mean, it was my dream job to become a professor. You know, I wanted stability. I'd been in healthcare and health and wellness for over 20 years. And throughout my journey, I wanted to be able to teach more people about the human body, about behavior, behavior change, about how we can just exude happiness from the inside and out and how we can heal ourselves through physical activity and through movement. And so I thought to myself, like, okay, what better career role to be in than be a professor? I've done all of the things in terms of like working in clinics, working commercially, had a personal training business, had a dance and fitness studio. Like, I've done it all within the fitness and wellness and the health space. And so I finally landed my dream job as a full time professor and I was so excited. I'd been adjunct faculty for several years and navigated that through Covid and really just going from teaching in labs to now suddenly teaching online, it's pretty challenging to do when you're trying to teach people how to draw blood and analyze someone's blood as they're exercising on the treadmill. And you can't exactly do that on Zoom. So it was hard. And when I finally landed my full time gig, I was like, yes, I've made it, I got this. And then I suddenly hated it. I was completely burnt out. You know, I was still hustling because as a professor you don't make that much money. You still have more freedom, I would say, versus like me working 17 different jobs at once. But you know, there's always the grading, there's the research you have to keep up with. There's all of like continuing education you have to keep up. And it was just really burnt out. And I think post Covid there's been a, like a new wave of how students are participating in higher education and especially with like AI involved. And I just felt like no one's being original, no one's doing their own work now. You know, everyone's turning in AI work and I can't even grade them negatively on that because I can't prove that they're using AI. And so just sober cat, like, why am I doing this? These students, they don't really want to learn. I mean, you have maybe five good students that want to learn and then you have a lot of other students are like, oh, I need a science class. I'm just going to take this class just so I can, you know, continue my scholarship to be student athlete or whatever. And so I was really, really, really torn because I was like, carrie, you landed your dream job. This is exactly what you want to do. You want to stand in front of people every day and talk to them about fitness, talk to them about health and moving their body. And I hated it. And I just, I didn't know what to do. And all throughout, like my PhD program, I was working for a company doing marketing and automations or fitness and wellness companies. And so I started learning a lot about building websites, about conversion, about ads, about automations, and just building systems in general. And I'm like, wait, okay, I can build systems in a business, but I know systems for the body, so how can I like make that translate? And so I found this job. I loved it. I was working it on the side as I was getting my PhD. And then I decided one day, you know what, I want to go all in on these systems for businesses. I want to go all in on helping people realize. It's just like when you start an exercise plan, let's put one foot in front of the other. That's the same thing. When we're building systems in your business, let's tackle one problem after the other, but make sure that these don't keep repeating themselves. So I decided to take the LEAP to leave 24 years of, you know, a complete personality that I had of being in fitness and wellness and health. And I mean I worked in the hospitals. I've worked literally everywhere to do this like 180 shift and I'll be all in, in SAS. So, yeah. What was your biggest fear that, you know, after two more than two decades of leaving a safe, what we think is safe career path, like, what was your biggest fear that you had about that? My biggest fear was obviously failure. I think also people thinking I'm an imposter, I think that's within myself, like imposter syndrome. I still have that. But you know, everyone's known Carrie as like the fitness and the health person and oh, I want to be healthy. I got to go to her and you know, something is wrong with my body, I got to go to her. And now I'm suddenly talking to people about building automations and adding AI in their business and all these workflows and nurture and all these like words. My art, my typical audience has never heard before. And so I felt like, oh, people are going to think I'm an imposter and then I'm going to fail. That was my biggest fear. It's still new to a lot of people, I think. Yeah, sometimes I do, you know, think about those things where like. But at the same time, like, you only need to know one little more one step ahead than anybody else to be. Exactly. When I first transitioned into teaching, I taught at a college first, before I started teaching at a university. And when I went full time into teaching, I met so many faculty members that told me, you just need to be one lesson ahead of the students, one chapter ahead of the students. And it's the same thing in business. I mean, you don't know everything about everything. It's impossible to know everything about everything. But as long as you know just what the next step is, you've already done pretty solid work, right? Yeah. So have you ever like owned a business before? Like, what made you believe entrepreneurship was an option? Because I don't fit in a box. So I'm really weird because I love rules and I love structure, but I like to make the rules. I don't like to necessarily follow someone else's rules, but if they're my rules, then of course I'll follow them. And I have had multiple companies before, actually. I've had a health and wellness, like a fitness studio. I started a performance center with a baseball Coach and he bought me out of that. I had a private health practice, my partner bought me out of that. So I've like, I've started, I've exited. I've also shut down businesses that weren't doing financially well and then I've shut down businesses that were doing financially well because I wanted to pursue this path of teaching because I love learning, I love education. So I've had multiple businesses that have failed, I've had multiple businesses be successful. So I think I've always been an entrepreneur because I do like to think outside of the box. I do like to just view the world differently. I've had a different or non traditional upbringing. And I'll never forget when I was in like middle school, a teacher told me had to go up to the board and do a math assignment and they said, so you got the answer right but you did it wrong. And I was like, how can I do it wrong if I got it right? And so at that point in time I like, I was like 14 or 15 years old and I realized my brain works differently than what the norm is, but I can still get to the right answer. And so then I was like, you know what I'm going to do me and I'm just going to do what feels right. And I've always been the type of person to follow my heart and I love helping others. And so I'm like, okay, if it feels good and I'm able to help others in the process, then it works for me. And that's much simpler to do. When you're an entrepreneur versus a W2 for someone, I love it. That reminds me, when my son was a kid, I would bring him to all the events and things like that. And the speaker had asked him like, you know, if you could answer this one question, I'll give you like five bucks. And he was like, what is the capital of California? Meanwhile, he's like 4 or 5 years old and he says capital C. And it's like he wasn't wrong. Right? You know, it's like the right no isn't the right answer, but it was the right answer because he wasn't really specific and it was the capital of, you know, capital, overseas, whatever reminds me of that. But I love the direction that you're going and what you've learned a lot of time. My background actually was real estate and actually, well, even going back, back further, my, my degree was in graphic design. And now I get the opportunity to like use that creativeness in a different way. Using, you know, Imagery through AI and automations and like. So my question for you is, how did your background in human performance change the way that you approach this business differently than all your other businesses? So it's, it's amazing what you've been able to do with that. And now that you're, you know, what can you share to the people about how human performance has impacted you on the way that you do business differently with SaaS and working with most founders? Yeah, absolutely. So when we think about human performance or when we think about someone who's starting a fitness program, they typically have two goals. One to lose weight or two, to gain weight. So, you know, they, we wouldn't say, okay, tomorrow you're going to lose £50 or tomorrow you're going to gain £10 of muscle, right? It's one step at a time, one process at a time. And what I tell people is, okay, we're going to look at first. Let's, for example, look at only what you're eating for breakfast. We can't change all of our habits all at once. Or let's look at how many steps you're taking a day, right? You might think, okay, if you're maybe averaging, let's say, a thousand steps a day. Now I tell you to take 7,000 steps a day, you're going to be like, I can never do that. But if I say, okay, well, how about you park further away every time you go somewhere? How about every, you know, one hour or every two hours you set an alarm on your phone and you get up and you walk around your house and then you can continue to work, right? That's our behavior change theories about doing a little bit and a little bit at a time. And then as humans, once we start recognizing that we're making changes, we, we get really excited, we start building our confidence and we start to not feel overwhelmed anymore. We start producing serotonin, we start feeling happier. And I take those exact same principles and translate that into business. And what that means is, okay, taking a step back and looking at where are my barriers, what thresholds do I need to cross in order to achieve my dream goal? You know, people say, okay, like when it's the beginning of the year, these are my resolutions. Want to lose X amount of weight, for example, okay, in my business, I want to earn X amount of dollars. Well, we don't go from $0 to $100,000 in a month, right? We slowly get there. We go from zero dollars to 100, then a thousand, then 10,000, and so on. And so forth. And that's the exact same principle I take with business. So I say, okay, what processes do we have currently in your business? Where do you want them? In a dream world? If we can wave a magical wand, what would your dream business look like? What, how much would you be making? What would your normal day to day look like? And then we reverse engineer that in teeny tiny little steps and actions that they can take every single day. And we really ground everything in the client journey. So like, I wouldn't say let's go in and do a complete 180 in your business, but I would go in and I would say, okay, well let's look at your new lead lead sequence, let's look at the new lead journey. What happens when someone comes in? Let's go ahead and take that one little step, build your confidence, overcome those hurdles. And now you can see that it's working and you feel good, you feel happy, you feel less stress. Same exact same behavior change theories that we use in health and human performance into business. And then we slowly add on and add on and add on to progress further and further in our business. And I think especially working with founders, right, We, I think we all have some form of ADHD because we're like, oh, but we call it shiny object syndrome. Right. And I think working with founders, you know, they feel so overwhelmed because they're wearing 17 different hats. It's, there's a lot of trauma happening. Exactly. And if I can say, okay, well let's just take one hat off, put it on the wall and see all the magic that happens on its own, how would that make you feel? And then they immediately feel good because you're like, oh, wow, that works. And then they continue and it's the exact same principles. Beautiful, beautiful. Thanks for that. So now for those who are thinking about, you know, like how you, you didn't just grow, you tripled your revenue and someone who's like, I want to get into the space too, like, what would your advice be? Or like where? Or can we take them back when you first got, you know, oh man, we should. I've been doing automations for this business. Now I'm going to start my own SaaS business. What was broken in your business before you fixed it? Everything. I think founders, they don't think things through. And I say this as a founder myself, we're just like, oh, I got this, I'm just going to hop on. And then instead of having a structure, you're just putting out fires as you go along. Yeah, I actually think that's a great thing to do as a founder because it builds grit, it builds motivation. It build your muscles that you need to use in order to sustain entrepreneurship. Because, let's be honest, shit gets tough, right? It gets hard. There are days you wake up and you're like, do I even want to do this? Like, why am I even doing this? That's when you got to use that discipline muscle. That's when you got to use that grip muscle. And so I think what I mean, nothing really was working in my business when I started. I forced myself every day for 30 days to show up online and talk to people who were my ideal clients in Facebook groups. Where they were. That's where they were. That's where I showed up. That's where I talked to them, and I provided some value. I flexed my muscles. I trained my muscles every day for 30 days just to fill my pipeline. And then I figured it out as I went along. So there are so many founders, I think, who are such perfectionists that they want to have everything, like all their ducks in a row. They want to have everything perfect before they get started. But you don't know if what you've lined up is actually going to be working for you. And so I think for me, where I was, like, struggling was I didn't have anything really built, but that was also kind of a blessing because I built it as we progressed. I built it as I needed to and kind of put out those fires. And then when it was a little bit calm, and I was like, okay, how can I make this better for next time? And I truly believe that if you do something more than once, it has to be a system. You need to record it, you need to video it, you need to automate it. It has to be a system so that you, as the founder, don't have to work harder and reinvent the wheel every single time. Right? Yeah, I 100 agree every time when I got started as well. Well, it's like, you got to be the product of the product. So create one system at a time that's going to, like, replace something that you already are using and then, you know, implement that. I remember talking to, actually, I knew it wasn't even prospecting. It was, like a past client. We're just, like, catching up. And I'm like, yeah, I'm actually, like, I'm actually building this whole new white label, and it's going to save you, you know, lots of money. And, you know, and they were like, what? I want that And I was like, oh, you know, I just started, but, you know, totally beta, blah, blah, blah, blah. But that's, you know, you never know what you don't know unless you actually take action on it. Exactly. You know, and people come to me all the time. They're like, oh, you know, I need to get a niche first. I need to. I need to know who I'm talking working with. I'm like, it's anybody right now. Because you don't know. You're not working with anyone yet. Exactly. It's. It's like having a baby, right? Like, when I had my daughter, who's going to be 20 next year, I read every single book. I read all the blogs, I did all the things to prepare. As soon as I had her, that shit went right out the window. You can try to be as prepared as absolutely possible, but until you're in the thick of it, you don't actually know what you don't know. And theory is great until it's not. Until you gotta actually do it. Every kid is different, every client's different. Exactly. And it's the exact same thing in business, right? You might build this amazing thing that you think is amazing, and then you go out and take it to market and no one wants your. And you're like, oh, well, now I gotta start over, right? The whole thing. Spend all this money and time and nobody wants it. Exactly, Exactly. Yeah, for sure. It's how I like that analogy. Girl, I. I was not like that. I was like, 20. 20. Yeah. I was 20 years old when I had my first sign, and I'm like, all right, we're gonna do this. Well, that was me as well. 20 years old and like, oh, my goodness, what do I do? But again, I like to learn, right? I like to read some, like, scouring everything. So learn the lessons. Yes, definitely. Awesome. So what now? Like, what's changed in your life once business stopped depending on you? And to survive, you know, you create all these great systems, like, what's. What's it like now for you? So now I can kind of pick and choose which clients we work with, which is nice, because that alleviates a lot of stress. And in the beginning, I worked with anyone and everyone. And now we have a clause within our internal, like, mission statement is to not work with asphalt. We did. In the beginning, we did. Now we don't. And it feels good to be able to be empowered and say, like, sorry, thanks, but no thanks. You're not a good fit for us. Or, you know, hey, let me Refer you to someone else who I think is going to be a better fit. I do also want to say, you know, I don't, I don't want to sugarcoat things. Just because we've, quote, unquote, made it and are, like, financially secure and all that doesn't mean. Mean that there's not stress still in our business, because there absolutely is now. There's just a different type of stress now. It's like, okay, managing a team, growing into other markets, marketing in a, like, at a different level than we were before. So there's like other stressors. But I will say, like, once you've, like, met your initial goals, whether it be amount of clients or amount of revenue, it feels good to, like, take a step back and be in awe of, like, what you've created and be like, okay, wait, my life is actually a little bit easier right now. Or not stressful in the same way it was before, and I think that's the best thing. And I'll never forget my moment where I was like, oh, my goodness, my business is running without me. I was out a Mexican restaurant and we were having margaritas, and I wasn't looking at my phone at all. Like, I had it all the way face down. I had it, like, on, like, flight mode. And I told my partner, I was like, his name is Adam. And I said, adam, oh my goodness, I'm here. Totally in the moment. I can be here. And I, like, I cry because I was so proud of myself and proud of, like, what we had built as a team and all of the hard work. And that truly, for me was like, that aha moment. Like, okay, we got this. We can do this. And I, I hope every entrepreneur experiences that at some point. Yes, yes. I love it. And especially those out there. I really want to, you know, start speaking more to the women out there who are watching this. Single moms, mom, you know, just entrepreneur women in business. They're not, you know, represented as much. And that's why I love, you know, reaching out to you to share your story as well too. Because, you know, for those women out there maybe are thinking, can I do this? What do you want them to know? First off? Yes. No one is your biggest critic other than yourself. You can do absolutely anything you put your mind to. I know that sounds super cliche, but honestly, if I can do it, anyone can do it. And it doesn't mean that our success is going to be linear, but whatever you decide means success for you. You can do it. Doesn't mean that it's not going to be hard work and you're not going to have to hustle. And maybe you have to do things after the kids go to bed or before they wake up in the morning, but you could totally do it. Another thing I really have, like two things I really wish someone would have told me is when you present yourself, you don't say, hi, my name is so and so, and I have three kids or whatever. I'm a mom of so and so. No, hi, my name is Carrie, period. I'm me. You know, I'm not so and so's mom. I really think that's important for women in business to be. Or I hear people say just, I'm just XYZ or whatever. Yeah. Or I'm just a stay at home mom. I'm just this. No, you are not just that. When I go out to eat, if I go by myself and they say, oh, just one, and I say, one's enough, I literally say that because I'm like, no, girl, don't downplay me and say just one. And I want women to. To not have their entire identity in being a mother. Unless that's what they want. There's nothing wrong with it. But if that's not what they want, then they shouldn't have that be their entire identity. And the more we're happy as women ourselves, the more we're able to make our kids happy, the more we're able to make those around us happy, including our clients. Right. And I just think that's so important. And then the second thing I want to share is surround yourself with those who are more successful than you and those who are doing what you want to do because they're more than happy to give back. They're more than happy to mentor. And it's really motivating for you to be able to look up to them and see what they're doing and, and see that your dreams are not just random dreams that you're never going to reach. They're actually attainable. I think that is super important. And there's sometimes I've been in rooms where I am definitely the smallest player in the room. And I'm like, holy shit, am I supposed to be in this room right now? And it says my name on the table. Am I really supposed to be here? And I'm like, yes, Carrie, you are. Stop letting that imposter syndrome come in. But we as women, we need to stick together. You need to find your girl group where you all can be besties and hype each Other up. And if I so may, I might get some hate for this, but stop calling yourself a girl boss. You are just a boss, period. And men don't go around and say, I'm a boy boss. You know, I'm a boss. And so I think we as women just need to not be afraid to take up space and claim what we want. I love it. Yeah, you know, it's. It's a lot of fun. I love this business too. And, you know, happy wife, happy life, happy, happy woman. Everybody is happy around here. It's like what? I posted this the other day. If you hang out with me enough, you will start believing in yourself, be working out and getting after whatever you are. You can have it all. Absolutely. Absolutely. What are you building next at Taft Systems? What's next for you? So I have so many dreams and aspirations. I'm really actually trying to slow down just a little bit for the rest of the year and really just put our focus and time into our operations and into planning for 2026. One of my big goals is to go on a vacation next year without my laptop. And we've currently booked a trip to Turks and Caicos in March. So I'm going to make that goal happen. I'm also starting a program with the Goldman and Sachs There are 10,000 small businesses program. So I'm really excited. I've been accepted into that. Our goal truly is to slow down a bit and just focus more on the clients that we have and more, I want to say, organically grow our client base. We don't have any huge promotions coming up and we don't have any huge, like, new offers, offers or anything. We're really just getting even tighter on, like, our internal processes because we've grown so fast. Like, never my wildest dreams, when I imagine that we could just triple our revenue and triple our business in one year, that was wild. And so, you know, it's been fast, fast, fast, fast, fast. So I'm like, okay, let's all slow down, let's breathe, let's enjoy. And that's what's on the docket for us. Yeah. Beautiful. This is the perfect time, the perfect season to do that again. Thanks, Carrie. This conversation is such a reminder that reinvention isn't just reckless an idea. It's often necessary. And. And you're living proof that your past doesn't disqualify you. The pivot doesn't make you an imposter at all. And women absolutely belong here in tech systems and leadership. So thank you again. So much. You guys go ahead and follow Carrie and check out T systems. And seriously, stop waiting for permission, because I'm. Well, I can give you permission, right? This is your permission. If you're waiting on a sign, this is it. You two can do it. Period. All right. Thanks again, guys. Much love and aloha.