Welcome back to No Silver Spoons. I'm Sarah Beth Herman and I had this week's episode completely planned, thought out, written out all the things. And then something  happened  that my husband said that should be your podcast episode this week. So here I am.  You see, the thing for me is that I am a lifer when it comes to the entrepreneurial journey.

I love to find new ways to generate revenue. I love to find new ways to do things that people haven't exactly thought of yet. I love to think about new businesses, make goals for those businesses, all the different things I could possibly do. And I have been on a mission to add another business to my portfolio. 

I have the plans written out. I know exactly what I want to do.  But I have some really hefty goals and one of those is this year to have a brick and mortar. Now I'm not going to divulge all the information on what that brick and mortar is going to be, because.

It's a really cool idea and I don't want to share it with you yet because I want to have it fully working and thought out to the point where we actually have the brick and mortar before I tell you about it, just in case my ideas change a little bit, I don't want to tell you something and then that not actually be what comes through.

 If you're a girl like me, you love to get your eyelashes done. I have the best lash girl in the world and she's fabulous.

 I've been seeing her every two weeks for the last gosh, Maybe four years. And I love her to death. She knows some of the goals and the dreams that I have,  and she happened to learn that there is actually a brick and mortar business within a 30 mile radius of my home.

That was for sale. And what I knew about the sale of this business is that the owner was in some  situation medically where she couldn't have the business anymore. And so by the end of January, this business was going to be shut down. So two and a half weeks from now, that business is going to be shut down, no longer in existence.

So she was selling it for X dollar amount. And that would have been a fabulous price to pay for this business. If I was buying it for that price. Well,  this week, she actually lowered the price by 20, 000. So it's going to be X dollar amount.

I'm super excited. I'm like, wow, how do I figure out where this listing is? What can I do to find this business? What can I do to like figure out how to connect with this person who's selling it? She says, after your appointment, I'll send you a text message with the link to the ad and then you can contact her.

Cool. So we go about my appointment.  And I head out and later that evening she sends me the link. Well, in between then I had been kind of like researching online to figure out where is this business, where is it actually located? Because the town that it was located in, I didn't really know that well and so I wanted to see like where it was or if perhaps I could find this business.

Online somewhere. I thought I had found it, but I wasn't sure because she hadn't yet sent me the link. So she sends me the link and I go look at it and lo and behold, it was this business that I had seen and I loved the interior of it. It was plumbed out for what I wanted to do. All the things in this location.

Seemed perfect, honestly. I mean, I was like pumped actually. So I tell my husband about it and he's like, yeah, let's do it. Like, this is exactly what you're looking for. Like the business wasn't exactly, it's not exactly the business model that I want to buy.

But it is the framework of the business that I want to create. So for me, it's like, Hey, this is a no brainer. Let's do it.   First of all, I look at the ad and it says like serious inquiries only yada, yada, yada.

I go look at the Facebook page. I go look at the website. Everything is already changed saying that this business is closing at the end of the month. And I'm thinking. All right, like  maybe I'll even be able to offer a little bit less and I can totally snag this business. Let's go. Right. So I, Send an email over saying, Hey, my name is Sarah Beth Herman.

I am a highly qualified buyer. I'm interested in purchasing your business. Here is my information.  Let me know what the next steps are. If you'd like to meet up and chat, whatever it is. She sends me an email back asking me if I ever have experience. In this industry for this type of business. And I say, yes, this is my credentials.

Here's all the things. This is my history. This is like where I went to school. This is all the things that I know. And I'm a five time CEO. I've built multiple brands, eight figure businesses. Like I'm highly qualified. Right? So I send her this and I don't hear anything. And I'm like, that's weird. Like if you're desperate to sell a business and you're literally going to shut the doors.

Maybe she has another offer, right? Like maybe she didn't respond because there's another offer, something going on that I don't know about. And  I don't know, maybe just,  maybe it's not going to happen for me. Maybe it's just that she's not going to sell it to me and she's selling it to someone else.

There's someone else on the table, whatever. So I wait 24 hours and I send her a follow up email and I say, Hey, it's Sarah Beth again. Just following up on this, wanted to check in with you, see if you have another buyer, What's going on?  This, this is where it gets really good. Before I tell you  anything else that happened after this,  I want to tell you a little bit about me. 

Maybe that makes me a little clickbaity.  Maybe that makes this a little bit frustrating of an episode to listen to, but  I want to tell you A little bit about me. And I want to tell you a little bit about how I operate as a human. And if you have listened to this podcast for any length of time, you've probably gleaned a little bit from me. 

My whole heart and soul is for others. I love others first. I love them so hard that oftentimes I sacrifice myself so that they can have a better experience in life. Because of me. My life mission has been to create generational leaders. Had has been to create moments of goodness with others. It has been to lend grace, to give kindness where kindness is not  deserved, but often required in order to move forward in life.

And so. What happened next with this, with the sale of this business,  it broke my heart. If I'm being completely honest, I'm going to actually read you the email that she sent to me and replied to me wanting to purchase this business. 

I opened it and I read it multiple times. I read it multiple times with my mouth and jaw hitting the floor with my eyes wide open. I remember I was actually standing in the kitchen of my house and I was thinking to myself, there's no way, there's no way this email,  there's no way someone would write this email to me.

There's no way.  All right,  here goes. And actually I will post a picture of this.  At the very end of the, I will post a picture of this at the very end of the episode, blurring out any identifiable information for this business owner, just because I don't want to create some, any sort of like.  Situation, but I just want you to see  what exactly happened with the sale of this business. 

So the email reads, to be honest, the client list I have spent years growing consists of pro choice, anti Trump, anti organized religion, pro trans rights, and  LGBTQIA2 plus communities and allies. I can't in good conscience sell that trust. I can't in good conscience sell that trust to someone that prides themselves on their faith that opposes everything I have worked so hard to build.

I appreciate your interest, but I will have to pass. Best of luck. 

A moment of silence  for the shock that I experienced while reading that. First of all,

 first of all, you are in a desperate situation where you need to sell a business  And you vetted me out, you read my bio, you looked at my website, you did all the things 

the thing that I found perplexing about this email is  not only that she surmised her own opinion of me based on my bio and what she thinks I say online,  but that she was in a desperate situation where she wanted to sell a business and she's in dire need of selling this business. And instead of having a conversation with me and talking to me about this business, she chooses immediately that she's going to put herself in a worse financial situation  than the

 she chooses, she's going to not sell the business and put herself in a horrible financial and business situation versus just having a conversation with me.  You see the problem I have with that email is that she has no idea who I am. She doesn't know my heart. She doesn't know anything about me. She is basing.

What she knows about her clientele, which for one, I don't know that anyone could know every single person that comes into their business, their personal beliefs and values and everything. 100%, first of all. Second, I don't know that she, it.  In my opinion, completely impossible that she would know my person to the core  because of my faith  and my utmost adoration for Jesus Christ.

I have lost a lot of business. Truly I have. People assume That I am whatever fits into the box  of what Christians have been bad at, what people who have lived in a world where they judge everyone for absolutely everything. They have put me in that box. But truly if you knew me,  there isn't a person on this planet.

In truthfulness that could tell you I have ever done anything that would be remotely in alignment with what she stated in that email. Not even one. There's no one, there's no possible way someone could ever tell you I have because I love generously. I do not care what anyone else chooses to do with their lives.

I, it is not my place. Let me rephrase that.  In my life,  I have never Never ever, ever decided not to be friends with someone, decided not to love someone, decided that someone else's life wasn't worth living because of their own moral compass or standards. Absolutely not.  Now, here's the deal.  The way that I live my life is in the likeness of Jesus, meaning that I love how he loves every person in this world.

is loved by him. Every person is loved. Good, bad, indifferent, no matter what they have done in their life. Jesus loves them. He loves them. And I believe that he is the only person that can judge. The only, that is not my place to judge, to decide who that, if that, to decide if that person is good or bad or any of the sort.

Now, I have my own moral compass, I have my own beliefs, I have my own desires, I have my own thoughts on many things. I don't have to agree with what the world has in store in order for me to love someone else. That, that, those two things, those are parallel situations. Those are parallel movements in my life.

They are not intersecting crossroads.  So now I may choose to not do business with someone. I may choose that I don't care for someone because of how they treat me or the way that they have dishonored me or the way that they have harmed me in some way. And then that's a choice that I choose not to do business with them or not to work with them or not to have them in my life. 

But I don't just blanketly decide that there is a group or a community that I don't care for because of their own personal beliefs. They're going to be judged one day and so am I. I have no room to say their judgment will be different than mine. Or my judgment will be different than them because of the choices I've made.

You see, we all have to live with our decisions in life. Every one of us, we have no exemption from that.  For someone to callously tell me that she can't in good, that she cannot in good conscience sell her business to me. Knowing how her clients are, I find that  quite frankly appalling because you have no idea who I am.

You have no idea the philanthropy that has existed in my life, the way I have loved and cared for my communities, the way I have poured into businesses for nothing. Like I literally have made no money pouring into businesses. I've literally done that. I've literally served, my husband and I have  built nonprofit organizations and served over 3, 500 meals to our community, our local community.

Like  what, what are you doing? What are you saying? And so I'm telling you all of this because I read the email  multiple times. It broke my heart and it made me feel terrible because I thought, what do I have listed on my bio that anyone could ever surmise that I didn't deserve? to care for a business and its clients, because I just wouldn't be able to based on whatever my bio said online, whatever someone vetted out for me online.

And so I had my heart broken  and my husband, he walked out getting ready for us to leave because we were going to go for breakfast. And I said, I wanted to show you this email I just got. And so I hand him the, I hand him my phone and he reads it.  And the very first thing he says to me,  he sets the phone down.

He looks at me dead in the eye and he says, That wasn't meant for you. 

Okay.  He said, don't you feel bad about that for one minute because you dodged a bullet. I don't know what was behind the scenes of that business. I don't know what, I don't know what was included in that business. I don't know what drama followed that business. I don't know what bad things happened with that business and this community, but you were never meant.

For that business that was not meant for you, no matter how much you could afford it, no matter how much you would have nurtured it, no matter what dreams you have that could have been in alignment with what you thought that business was. It wasn't meant for you.  So  here we are on this podcast episode. 

And while everything is fresh in my mind,  I want you to rem, I want you to remember these words that I'm saying to you.  I want you to remember that some things aren't meant for you.  Sometimes you will have dreams and goals and ambitions and things that you want to do, and they're just not meant for you in the scenario that you're in. 

Sometimes you have to keep working a little bit longer, trying a little bit harder, continuing and moving forward regardless. 

You see, the funny thing about entrepreneurship is it is a whole life experience.  Entrepreneurship is your whole life.   It's this fully immersive experience where you're not just working. You have clients, you have colleagues.  Your whole life surrounds around entrepreneurship. It's so many different facets of your being.

And so when you get knocked down, it breaks your heart. It breaks your heart because you're like, wait, they don't even see me. They don't even know. They don't even know who I am or what I stand for. And they've rejected me.  I want to encourage you that  sometimes if things don't work out, it doesn't mean you quit and you give up. 

What it means is that you stay the course for a little longer and you find the right path  because that's my journey right now. I'm adding to my portfolio.  I'm busting my tail. I'm doing everything I can to move myself and my business forward. And expand my horizons, make my portfolio bigger, make my businesses better.

 And things are not always working out.  In fact, I re I face more rejection now than I ever have before. You see, when I started my businesses, I thought it was rejection when I didn't get clients. No, I just didn't get the clients yet. I just didn't get them yet. It's not that I faced rejection starting a business, not making a sale or not getting a client.

It was that it wasn't here yet.  Now I'm in a phase where I'm actually getting rejected  because of what people think I am.  They don't even know me. They don't know my person. They don't know that I've lended grace to people that never deserved it.  But Jesus did the same thing for me.  Same thing.  I've made so many mistakes in my life.

I have hurt people. I have been good to people.  I've loved other people at the expense of my own heart.  I've tried really hard  and I've failed big.  But the most beautiful thing. In my whole world  is that I've kept going and that's my encouragement for you today. 

Keep going.  And sometimes  things just weren't meant for you and that's okay. We're just going to keep going down and we're going to find the path that we're meant to be on. I'll catch  you guys on the next episode.