"Do not wait until you have the perfect website, the perfect product, the perfect class, or the perfect business card" with Dr. Cali Estes, Ph.D

Dr. Cali Estes, Ph.D., ICADC, MCAP, MAC CPT, CYT #1 Best Selling Author plus a highly sought-after Celebrity Coach, Counselor, Life Coach, Transformational Coach and Wellness Guru that blends talk therapy with forward and positive change to assist her clients in unlocking their true potential. She offers a unique service of combining holistic modalities with talk therapy that gets to the Root Cause of the issues you are experiencing and helps you simply “Unpause Your Life”.

Named ‘The Female Dr. Drew’, by the media on the red carpet and one of ’99 Limit Breaking Disrupter Females’ by the Huffington Post, Dr. Cali Estes has helped CEO’s, top musicians, actors, and even women entrepreneurs break the barriers that hold them back from life and achieving their goals and dreams. Dr. Cali is known as the ‘Battery Recharger’ and is one of the top Transformational Coaches that can assist you in achieving your dreams and goals and breaking barriers.

Link to website www.caliestes.com

Hi! My name is Dr. Cali Estes and I am a Transformational Life Coach and Addictions Coach, Therapist, and Wellness Guru. I am the founder of the largest online addiction professionals’ educational school in the globe, The Addictions Academy. I was not born wealthy or with any resources, but by the age of 14 I knew I wanted more out of life than to be married to the local boy-next-door and have a baby at 19. I set out on a journey that took me across the country and I started several different companies with less than $300 in my bank account. One of my goals was to make $1 million dollars and I achieved that by the age of 30, only to lose it all in the economic downturn and have to start over completely homeless and broke, living in a house with no heat and running water at Christmas time in Philadelphia. 

I had to go back into the workforce, making others money. I was not happy putting in 60-hour workweeks for $42,000 a year. I could not pay my bills and I hated the fact that the owner of the rehab I worked for pulled up in a Porsche and never worked a day in his life. It motivated me to launch my next company, The Addictions Academy, and the Addictions Coach. I began because I got tired of working for other people making little to no money and feeling like I was putting my heart and soul into helping people recover from addictions.  One day, I came home from work and told my husband I had quit my job and his only response was, “we have rent due next week”. I said I will make more money in one week working for myself than I would in a month working for anyone else. True enough, 24 hours later I had my first client and my first $3000 check in hand.

My business is based in Miami Florida. We are international in scope and I have staff across the globe

The very first thing I did to start my business was to go buy cheap business cards and put them out everywhere. I went to the local gyms, Starbucks, Panera Bread, anywhere that I could find a poster board to put my business card up I did. I didn’t have money for a website so I started a LinkedIn page and utilized that because it was free at that time. I taught myself how to build a quick webpage on WordPress and I started marketing that through social media. 

The most effective way of raising awareness for my business has been face-to-face contact and referrals. I have been on TV, I have written 2 #1 Best Selling books, and I am all over social media. However, most of my referrals come from word-of-mouth. After I have helped one of my clients tackle their vices and get clean, they refer me business. They tell their friends about me and I can help those people as well. 

One of the biggest challenges in this business has been having to deal with competitors that hate the fact that I am in their space and they slander me on the Internet. Watching people that are not clients, not even paying students, that have never met me in person or ever even spoken to me on the phone, post nasty things about me has been incredibly challenging and trying. I have had to overcome this because mentally it is designed to break you down and of course it is designed to get you to quit and to close your doors so that your competitors can succeed. Overcoming this over the past eight years with my company has probably been the most difficult thing, especially when people call me and say I saw this on the Internet about you is it true? And of course, it’s not. 

Staying focused in my business has never been an issue for me because I use the law of Attraction and a vision board. Every morning I get up and I focus on what the goals are for that week and for that month and I try to make sure we hit our goals as quickly as possible each month. If I ever stray from focus, I will take the day off and have a self-care day. Enjoying the beach, or a movie, or just going shopping can reset and refocus me for the following day. 

I have always tried to stay above the competition in many ways. In our educational school, The Addictions Academy, we have strived to offer not only every educational class that we possibly could but also a full marketing program to help our students gain clients. Most of our competitors only offer one or two classes and no way to teach the client and the students how to get clients. By offering a full marketing program and a way for them to build their business and their brand we have stayed above the competition. In the Addiction Coach, where I help the clients get sober, I created a proprietary subset company called Sober on Demand.

This is a signature service well where we bring the entire treatment concept directly to the client. We bring mental health and addiction therapies and coaching wherever the client is. We can go on tour with the musicians, the onset with the actors, in boardrooms with the CEOs, and we are able to do our work in hotels and from the road. This signature service has pushed me above the competition because most people have a brick-and-mortar treatment center where a client must check-in for 30 days. We are able to do in 3 to 10 days what it takes a treatment center at least 30 days to do because we are customized, private and we don’t shuffle clients to groups that are not customized to their needs. We can spend 8 hours a day Deep Diving with a client and getting to the root cause of their issues when a treatment center cannot. At most, they get 4-6 hours of therapy in a 30-day stay at a facility. I know that does not work for clients and we solved the problem to understand what does work and we offer that customized hands-on approach. 

I think the most effective marketing strategy has been positioning myself as an authority in the addiction industry and space. When I was on the red carpet at The Comedy Club in Los Angeles on the LA Strip, where I was performing with famous musicians and comedians, they interviewed me and dubbed me ‘The Female Dr. Drew”. There had been no real female influencer in the addiction industry, meaning most of the high-profile addiction coaches and addiction professionals that are on TV that you see are men. I was able to fit into that need of a female role model. In addition to that, I have published two best-selling books and built myself as an authority brand in the space.

One of the best pieces of advice I can give a new entrepreneur is to just get started. Do not wait until you have the perfect website, the perfect product, the perfect class, or the perfect business card. Make something, put it out there, and start moving. Just Jump! If you wait until everything is perfect you will never succeed and you will never fulfill your dreams.

My favorite book is ‘The Power of Positive Intention”, by Dr. Wayne Dyer. I utilize the law of attraction for everything that I do, and I focus on abundance coming in and sharing the wealth. I am not a big blog or an app person I’m more of an old fashion book reader.

My favorite business tool or resource would definitely be “Go to Meeting”, because it is super easy for me to talk to all of my staff all over the globe face-to-face as if we were all in the same office. We can have a meeting, see each other, and have a great conversation and move forward. 

My favorite business role model is Lisa Nichols. She is an immensely powerful woman that came from nothing and built her entire coaching practice and is at the top of her game. It is nice to see more women taking the stage and commanding a presence. 

If I had my way, I would work all the time with no break, however, my husband keeps me in check with balancing my work-life situation. We have a ‘no working on the weekends’ rule where we hang out and have a good time. We travel, go out to eat, and do fun things. I think it is important that you are not working all of the time and that you have downtime because I am most creative after I’ve had downtime. I also go to the gym every day and work out to release stress and clear my head. I have gym equipment at the house if I’m ever in a time crunch and want to get on the Stairmaster or do Yoga or Pilates I have a full studio in my house for that. 

My favorite way to decompress is working out. This boosts my serotonin and dopamine, relaxes my muscles, and clears my head. My second favorite would be a long walk on the beach at sunset watching the sun go down over the ocean, preferably in California or Clearwater Beach.

In the next six months, I will be launching a new venture, a mastermind group for entrepreneurs that want to level up. It is called The Mastermind Money Club to help people network with each other and get ideas to grow their business and I am working on my fourth book.

Your readers can find me at www.Cali Estes.com or the www.TheAddictionsCoach.com, or at www.TheAddictionsAcademy.com. I am on social media as Dr. Cali Estes.