Tina Tower [00:00:00]:
Happy, happy New Year. Welcome to the first episode of 2026 on the Harem Paya Builder Show. I am your host, Tina Tower, and today I'm doing an episode unlike one that I have done in a really, really long time. So if you are listening to this audio only, you probably can't tell any difference at all. If you are one of our YouTube subscribers, you know, all hundred of you. Hello. This is looking very, very different because for the last year, not quite a year, probably about March, April last year, we have been recording in a studio and I've been doing major batch days. So I do, you know, usually six or seven episodes on a day.

Main Episode

Tina Tower [00:00:47]:
So that every two months I go in and I do the next two months podcast episodes. Which obviously from a business point of view, has its massive upsides from, like a personal point of, maybe even from a listening point of view, it has big downsides. So our welcome back episode was due out yesterday, and I looked at the shorts, the, like, the promo for it the night before, and I was like, you know what? My vibe. My vibe has changed. The November was when I recorded the episode, And I'm like, November 2025, Tina. Different vibe to after the break, 20, 2016. And so made the decision to scrap it. And I'm recording now.

Tina Tower [00:01:33]:
It is Thursday afternoon, the afternoon of the 8th, and I will record it and we won't do any bells and whistles, and I'm just going to send it straight out. So if you are used to watching our YouTube podcast, you know, we have all the graphics going and all the captions going. This is just, just raw. Just me. Hello. With no editing. Let's go. Now.

Tina Tower [00:01:57]:
The main reason that I felt like it was a different vibe was because I do think that, you know, the holiday is a beautiful break. Kind of get a bit of that time and space. And I always, across the break, have like, these not so much like, aha moments, but more alignment where I feel like I can really get. Get more in touch with my intuition and come back feeling a lot more aligned and willing to do, like, that new blank slate. Now I know that we can change direction at any time we choose. It doesn't have to be a new year. I think if you want to choose a new direction in March for it. But there's something really beautiful about the energy of a new year and having that break.

Tina Tower [00:02:42]:
And I know that as a business owner, you know, I take breaks all throughout the year. I did so much travel in 2025, but nothing's as sweet as the Christmas break, because everyone's on a break. No one. Like, your inbox isn't getting filled out. People aren't. The expectation is not there. And so you can really, like, sink into it. And I sunk into it.

Tina Tower [00:03:04]:
I slothed. I slothed so much more than I've slothed before. I loved it. I thought, like, I'd get really, really bored, but, I mean, I spent a full day, like, nurturing my indoor plants, like, going around wiping their leaves, trimming off any dead ones, like, just nurturing my indoor plants. That was the level of excitement. But what I wanted to do the podcast about and why I decided to scrap the other one was the change in vibe that I had. So the clarity that I have got from. From the break with that now, what that is, is really looking at me wanting to lose more.

Tina Tower [00:03:44]:
Now, what I mean by me wanting to lose more is I. I have been playing it safe the last couple of years. Now. I did have someone say to me, have you really been playing it safe? Because it hasn't looked like. It looks like to me, you're experimenting all the time. And that's really lovely that, that people think that. But in I. I am a very creative ADD entrepreneur, and I like to change my mind all the time.

Tina Tower [00:04:14]:
I like to change direction all the time. I have a bit of a brain fart, and I am the opposite of a procrastinator. I will go probably way too fast in the other direction. I have cockamamie ideas and I'm like, oh, that sounds fun. Let's do that. And I will go off and I will try it, and sometimes I will win big, and sometimes I'll go wrong way, go back like that, not work. And I am okay with that. I don't have the.

Tina Tower [00:04:42]:
You know, a lot of people are really fearful of change. They're really fearful of failure. I do not have those proclivities. I don't love to fail. I mean, of course I'd love to win every time, but there's something that I love about the feeling of having your back against the wall or trying something new and going, I don't know if I could do this. I don't know if I'm going to pull this off. I don't know if, like, can I do it? Like, am I going to get to the end and go, oh, like, this is really hard. Like, can I break through? Like, what obstacles are going to be in the way? What hurdles? What things am I going to have to figure out what things Can I not even imagine the Problems that are going to come up, and I'm either going to have to go, all right, we can go through this and I'm going to give up, or I'm going to get through, and then I'm going to get to the end of the other side and I'm going to go, yes, and blow my own damn mind.

Tina Tower [00:05:29]:
Because we did it. You know that feeling that I live for, that feeling. And that is what I haven't done for the last couple of years, because I get paid to give people business advice. And so somewhere along the line, I started feeling increased pressure to never make a mistake. I started feeling like, what would the point be of people paying me if I was getting it wrong? Would people be there going, like, what am I following this chick for? That is like making mistakes left, right, and center. And let me tell you, I'm not making it up like the spotlight once you become successful in business. And look, I'm not getting a violin and cry me a river here by any means, but it's a different thing in that it's really easy to fail when no one's watching. Once you get to a certain level of success, you're in a spotlight where you're held to a different standard, and for some reason, you're, like, expected to hit home runs every time.

Tina Tower [00:06:34]:
And I think there's a lot of shame with people successful in business that they feel shame in going, oh, I didn't succeed in that one. And that's what. That's what I love mastermind spaces about, is everyone's really honest, and you figure that out. But publicly, people seem to think that always you have to have your shit together. And so I have felt this misalignment with my business. In going one, I am bored because I haven't pushed myself in a really long time. What it means to, like, if I'm not losing, if I'm playing it safe and not losing, I'm also not winning. We're just kind of existing and coasting and doing the things that we have to do that we know are going to end up with the good result.

Tina Tower [00:07:16]:
And that is great. That can, like, run a sustainable business. Like, I can work minimal hours. I can have good money coming in. I can keep my clients really happy. Like, all of that can happen. But I'm not going to stay at the forefront of my industry doing that. I'm also not going to be.

Tina Tower [00:07:33]:
You know, they say a boring business is a profitable business, and I do think that that is true to some degree. I, in my 21 years in business have broken so many businesses and different setups that I have because I got bored. And so I used to really poo poo myself for that and go, gosh, if I could just be a responsible adult, Tina, if you could just be like a normal person, you could just continue on doing this. And so I gave it a crack and you guys, I didn't. That's not for me. Because while a boring business is a profitable business, also if you have the nature similar to what I do, a boring business will cease to become profitable because you'll be bored. And what's the fun of that? So I run a business for a few different reasons. I run a business to make a massive impact.

Tina Tower [00:08:23]:
I like to, like, contribution is a high value of mine. I do it to support my family because they rely on me as the breadwinner of the family. I do it to help people I love. I love, you know, not ashamed to say, love being appreciated, love feeling like what I do matters. I love when, you know, when I have someone that comes in and they're like, you know, I want to do this, and this is my dream business that I want to build, and then I can go, all right, do this, this, and this and this. And they go, do the thing. And then they're like, holy shit, I have this now. Like, my dreams have come true.

Tina Tower [00:08:56]:
Like, there's. That's so. It lights me up in all the ways. But also, I do business to bring myself personal joy. This is my. I had a psychologist once that was like, what do you do for fun? What is your hobby outside of work? And I'm like, what? My hobby is work. I have just taken up knitting, which is at the stage it's not fun. But I won't digress into that.

Tina Tower [00:09:16]:
My fun is working. It is where I get so much joy when I'm playing the game, when I'm doing it right. And the fifth one, the fifth reason that I run business is because it pushes me personally to reach my potential. You know, it sounds super corny, but you know that saying, like, a ship in the harbor is safe, but that's not what ships are built for. That is, I'm the ship in this scenario. I'm a ship that has been docked, and I want to take to the open seas. I may take on water, There may be men overboard, I don't know. But I want to.

Tina Tower [00:09:54]:
I. I want to be there. I want to be back in the arena. I want to run more experiments, and that will mean I want to do that both behind the scenes and in front of the scenes. So one of my things for this I've really found, especially in the last six months, social media, I found it increasingly more difficult to, you know, do the same old, same old, like talking head educational pieces and our carousels and all the things that, you know, it doesn't help that the way people are interacting with social media, for someone like me that values like the validation of is this useful? Do people like this? And no one really likes and comments anymore. Like, you used to put out a post and we'd get, you know, 20 comments on there and now, you know, it's crickets. And so that has become more and more difficult. I'm like, is what I'm doing really helping people or am I just adding to this noise? And is it because we're we.

Tina Tower [00:10:54]:
Everything looks so generic, so same, same, so done with AI. And so I went to create like our next social media, like messaging and our campaigns and all of those different things. And I was using ChatGPT to help me with that. And when I read it all, I was like, I can do this and I can do it all so much quicker and so much easier using ChatGPT. But it's like soulless. Even this episode, right? It's a lot. I know the regular listeners to my podcast will probably be able to tell this is less polished than what you've become used to in the last year. I would shudder to think what the transcript looks like where I'm going off script and not finishing sentences and doing all of the different things.

Tina Tower [00:11:35]:
That's how I used to do it was off the cuff. And to me it's more fun because it's human to human and it's, it's. What it's all about is sharing our ideas with the purpose to help someone that's listening on the other end. And so one of the things that I want to do is do social media in a different way as well. So not do it as polished, not do it with, you know, all the bells and whistles of cap cut and spending all the time on the graphics and the captions and all the things like, maybe that's going to work, I don't know. But I want it to look more real and raw. And so I'll be doing a whole lot more in like in the moment, which is not as good from a batching point of view because I love batching. I love batching from a time point of view because one of the things that I also find quite Challenging is, you know, if you're posting every day, like in the moment, it's like, oh gosh, I've got to come up with another idea again the day.

Tina Tower [00:12:31]:
And some days you feel, you know, you know what it's like. Some days you feel like I'm, I'm on fire, like I'm ready to get out and do my videos. And then other days you're like, shield me from the world. I am not ready. And so that's going to be challenging with that. But what I want is to connect with people. That is my main thing. I want, I want to connect, I want to get conversations going again.

Tina Tower [00:12:53]:
I want social media to be social. And I think that, you know, it's a different vibe when something's been bad attached. Like when you've sat down and you've done 50 social media posts in a day, that is a different vibe. You just whacked some clever captions that chat GPT has stuck out on your beautiful, you know, photo shoot. Photos that were so or haven't been like your AI photos, like, it just hits different, you know. And so I changed the way we're going to launch this year. So we're launching her empire builder in March and I'm going back to Palm Springs to do that. Which I did a launch from Palm Springs in 20.

Tina Tower [00:13:32]:
No, I did another. Did I do it in 2024? I don't think so. I think it was 2023. And I love Palm Springs. Anyone that knows me knows I'm low level, obsessed with Palm Springs. I haven't been back for a year because of the political situation in America. So I wasn't planning on going to America until that situation had changed. But I miss Palm Springs a lot.

Tina Tower [00:13:55]:
And that meant if I wasn't going back to America, that I was also going to withdraw from my mastermind that I'm part of there. And I love my mastermind. I love the people that I'm with. I love all the ideas that get generated there. And as I am going into something new, which I'll talk about in a moment, I really could use the assistance of my mastermind in doing that. So I was like, all right, well, if I'm going back for that, then I may as well go back and launch. So I'm launching in Palm Springs in March and I'm going to launch in a way that I haven't done before and that is doing it all in the moment. So usually in a launch, like at the moment, we're in January right now, we're what, seven, eight, nine weeks away from launch? I think about eight.

Tina Tower [00:14:38]:
Usually now I would be scheduling in all of the social media for the next two months in the lead up to launch and all the launch socials and all of our emails, all of our content, like all done. So then all I have to do in the launch is just talk to people. But I have felt, felt a little on autopilot when I've been launching. I've ran a launch, live launch 21, 22 times and so the last couple have felt a bit autopiloty and I think that that energy comes through and a lot of launching is about that launch energy and about connecting with people. And so I decided I'm not going to schedule anything, I'm going to do it all in the moment. So I'm going to be writing the emails in the moment, no chatgpt allowed, like just from my brain, old school, just from my brain and putting that out there. And then same with the social media, just talking heads or using pictures. We will have some scheduled content that's member content that we'll have in there, but the bulk of it will be done in the moment.

Tina Tower [00:15:44]:
So that, you know, is not. And this is the thing, like, it's like, okay, so I also teach launching and we have a very rigorous system for launching inside her empire Builder, which is everything that we need to teach. And I would always encourage people to schedule. And so this is something new. And so my fear has been, all right, if I start experimenting, are all of my clients going to go, oh shit, should I be doing it that way? And so this is my thing is I've put a new session into her empire Builder which is my experimentation results. So at the moment in her empire Builder we have five live sessions every month. We have a masterclass, AI implementation, guest expert, virtual networking and bi monthly we switch between a Kajabi workroom and a Facebook work room. So we cover off a lot of education.

Tina Tower [00:16:31]:
So the AI session, I teach both the masterclass and the AI implementation session. So the masterclass, very foundational, that will stay exactly the same because like the foundations that you need to have in your business, to have that engine running behind the business, to have it profitable and everything running like clockwork. But the AI implementation, I'm going to be doing like my experimentation results, what's been working in the month, but also what hasn't worked. So what I tried where I felt flat, what went really well so that I can keep innovating and keep having fun. But then Pass those lessons directly immediately onto my clients. Yes, sometimes I won't succeed, but I am okay with that. So I'll be doing that through launch and also through welcome to Adulting. So welcome to Adulting is something that kind of has become its own beast by accident.

Tina Tower [00:17:23]:
So for anyone you know who. I haven't talked about it on the podcast, so if you don't follow on socials, I'll just give you like the Cliff Notes here. So I ran a session for my kids. My kids are 16 and 17, so I ran a welcome to Adulting session. I am a nerd, I will tell you that. So throughout their life I have ran like PowerPoint presentations for giving the big information. We talk a lot on every. But I find there's something special about having a formal sit down of like, here is this chapter that is ending and this new chapter is beginning and here are the new rules for that and the things that I want you to be aware of.

Tina Tower [00:18:03]:
And I want to kind of make a big deal out of it because they're things that are really important. So we did this when they started big school when they were about five. Then we did it again when they started high school. And that's where we kind of started bringing in money and sex ed and all of that sort of thing. And now we've done the welcome to Adulting session. And when I was talking about it, my kids were kind of paying me out a little bit, going like, oh, mom, like you're so cringe. And they were doing that while their mates were there and their mates were going, hang on, I kind of want to be part of this as well. Can I come? And so I said, yeah, sure.

Tina Tower [00:18:39]:
Like, like, the more the merrier. And so we had quite a few kids all packed into our lounge room and I plugged my laptop into our big screen TV and I ran them through this welcome to adulting course where I went through, you know, drugs, alcohol, sex, contraception, investing all life admin, like managing their email inbox. Because I don't know about you, but my teenagers are there. They've subscribed to every single freaking thing. But they've got jobs now. I'm like, where are your pay slips being filed? How are you going to do your tax returns? Do you know where to file your receipts? Like all of these really simple things that they have no system for that. I'm like, you need to have a system for that so that you can one, do your tax return. But then if you ever get audited or you want to go for a home loan, like everything is all there really, really, really well.

Tina Tower [00:19:29]:
How to do their own phone bills, their subscriptions, how to do their bank accounts, like all of that sort of thing. So we covered off quite a lot of stuff. Anyway, I did one post about it online and it was, it was not a post that, you know, it was just, it was, it was just, hey, I did this thing and I have never in my life had a social media post that's been blessed by the algorithm gods in that way. I think it's up about 4,000 and something comments from it. So I put it up there and literally I went to bed and the next day there were so many comments that I went straight on and made a landing page for it for a wait list, thinking, let's just see how it goes. And organically, with one post, we've got 1500 people on the wait list for welcome to Adulting Online course. And so my goal is to create that over the next few weeks so that I can formally film it. And we'll have a version for Australia, a version for the US and a version for the uk.

Tina Tower [00:20:23]:
A version for Canada and New Zealand will come later as well. So that will be launched and that is something very different to what I've done before. So everything that I have done in terms of online courses has been more premium pricing. Even our main evergreen course, which is idea to launch is 997. So welcome to adulting will be 297 or we'll have like a deadline funnel for 97 that people will be able to get it straight off the back of ads. So it will be interesting. Or we'll do 197. I haven't quite decided yet.

Tina Tower [00:20:55]:
I think we'll start it at 97 and then I'll experiment with it at 197, see if it drops too much and if it does, we'll go back to 97, but I'd rather 197 for obvious reasons. So we'll see how that goes. But this is what I mean, right? I don't know what's going to work best. And so I want to run experiments. I've never built a business of Facebook ads. The business I have now is all being organic and so I have never like put money into leads and conversions and I haven't done. We've. We've done a little bit of experimenting with VSLs but not like a fun that I've put money behind.

Tina Tower [00:21:30]:
And so I'll be doing all of that and so What I'm going to do with that is every week I'm going to share on my social media, like a summary of how that's gone, how much list growth we've had, what our expenses were, what the profit was, the revenue was, what went well, what didn't go well. And so we'll put a summary of it on social media and then to my members, they're going to have the entire spreadsheet with all of my key metrics in there and every granular thing that I did and then a copy of everything. So if we do an ad, I'll give them the Canva template to it. If we do VSL, I'm going to give the scripts and the ChatGPT tweaks to be able to make to it. So I'm going to share everything along the way. And what that I think will do is make it so much more fun for me because I get to get back and play the game, but also give me something that I can then test a whole lot of things on to then teach as well so that I'm doing and teaching at the same time. So I am, I am excited about it. It should be entertaining, if nothing else should be entertaining.

Tina Tower [00:22:35]:
But I mean, that's what it's all about, right? Like, that's, that's what we want to be able to do is, is really we're all in business to help people and also to live with joy. And that's what I want to be able to do. So one thing that I do know for sure is that you know when people are looking. So if you're listening to this and you're like, okay, what does this mean for me? Like, what should I be doing with my business? I do think that in the age of AI that we are in, that the more we can just drop the facade a little bit and go, all right, this is where it's like, the more human we can be. And I don't mean human as in like false vulnerability. I cannot stand false vulnerability when people are like crying on the Internet or trying too hard to be relatable. That's just, that's just icky. But I do think that I, I have definitely been guilty of the facade in terms of not wanting to show any failures.

Tina Tower [00:23:35]:
I talk about them in our membership quite a bit. But, but I mean, don't get me wrong, I. This can make me sound a little bit arrogant, what I'm going to say here. But you know, welcome to the raw age. I do have my shit together. I You know, I'm a pretty. I'm a pretty together person. You know, I don't tell.

Tina Tower [00:23:53]:
We don't have any yelling in our household. My husband and I have a really great relationship. I'm feeling really healthy and happy. Life is good. Life is really good. And so I don't, like, I don't want false vulnerability to be relatable, but at the same time, I want to feel brave enough to try something that I could fail spectacularly at. And when I try it, I want to be able to share those results because I am a teacher and I want to be able to go, okay, here's what I did. This worked.

Tina Tower [00:24:28]:
You can do it too. Or this didn't work. Maybe it was me, or maybe it's the market, or maybe it's this. Like, what do we think? How can we work out? Like, what's your experience with this? As well? And so hopefully that is really, really fun because I know that at the moment I'm going. Usually I do three year, five year planning, and at the moment I'm doing one year planning. Because one thing I know for sure is that you can never even imagine how quickly life can change, both on the ups and the downs. And at the moment, we're in this really, like, tumultuous time. I think we need a whole lot more optimism, we need a whole lot more love, we need a whole lot more camaraderie together because there's too much happening that, that for me, like all of the drama in the world and all of the anguish in the world that is not welcome in my home.

Tina Tower [00:25:25]:
And so much of what we're seeing on social media especially is. Is all of this really contentious, divisive stuff that I want to get back down to, actually, when I say, hi, friend, like talking to my friend, you know, having those social conversations. So I hope you join me. I totally go for those big goals. We'll be going for them this year together. And let's cheer each other on. Thanks so much. I hope you liked the off the Cuff episode.

Tina Tower [00:26:00]:
I'll see you soon.