Latest / All In with Allie / Divorce, Career Pivots, & Actionable Business Advice, OH MY! With Melissa Franks

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Divorce, Career Pivots, & Actionable Business Advice, OH MY! With Melissa Franks · All In with Allie

• 0:05
  Hello, Melissa Franks, Welcome to All In with Ali. How you doing.
• 0:10
  I am good. I'm so happy to be here with you today.
• 0:13
  I am so excited to have you. So we were just talking. So
• 0:17
  Melissa, she and I worked together until just a couple of weeks ago,
• 0:22
  and we were like meeting every single week talking, not every day, but
• 0:29
  most you know, most days, I feel like and I felt like such.
• 0:34
  I was so integrated in your life and like real life and your business
• 0:39
  too. So it's been a couple of weeks. So I'm selfishly excited to
• 0:44
  catch up with you, but then also to pick your brain as well,
• 0:49
  because you bring I mean, there's just not only so many interesting things going
• 0:53
  on in your life that you have so much wisdom to share with us,
• 0:57
  but also so much genius related to scaling and optimizing businesses as well that obviously
• 1:07
  everybody's going to be pumped to hear about. So first let's get started.
• 1:11
  Let's catch everybody up to speed on who you are, what your background is,
• 1:19
  how you got here today. That is a fantastic question and a loaded
• 1:26
  one I know one hundred percent. And you know what funny is it in
• 1:29
  the corporate world you get coached very early to have an elevator pitch, you
• 1:34
  know, about who you are so like. What they love to tell you
• 1:36
  is that if you've got into the elevator with the CEO and you, you
• 1:38
  know, only had the amount of time that it toes to get to the
• 1:41
  bottom floor, what would you say? And you get a lot of coaching
• 1:42
  around that. And what I have found is that it just doesn't do it
• 1:48
  justice as far as I'm concerned, because my story is really interesting. But
• 1:53
  what I will say first and foremost is mom, I'm a mama. Three
• 1:56
  boys. They are fourteen, twelve, and ten. And to everybody's pause
• 2:02
  right there, let's just pause right there and bow down and go on.
• 2:09
  Oh man, I will say I did it on purpose. I hated being
• 2:13
  pregnant, so the goal was to get it done as fast as possible,
• 2:16
  you know, So I wanted a big, full house of rambunctious boys.
• 2:20
  That was what I picked. The universe gives you what you can handle,
• 2:23
  and they knew I couldn't handle another night another one of me. But I
• 2:28
  professionally, I was a hustler. Like at fifteen years old, as soon
• 2:34
  as I could get a workers permit, I was like down in the factory
• 2:38
  outlet center that was literally getting built, like in construction mode, banging on
• 2:42
  door, saying who will hire me? Who will give me a job?
• 2:45
  I always always had a job. Before that, I was babysitting like a
• 2:49
  maniac, you know, Like I always had some way of generating revenue.
• 2:53
  And I think it's because I grew up in a house where money was really
• 2:55
  scarce. You know, my mom decided to be a wife, and then
• 3:00
  she ended up getting divorced and then had to figure out with two small kids,
• 3:05
  how to make an income without a college degree and without really any transferable
• 3:08
  skills. And I knew I never wanted to be that. And so when
• 3:13
  I was still in college, I still like a solid year of college left.
• 3:15
  I started my corporate career. I was an administrative assistant. Was willing
• 3:20
  to do like whatever it took to learn and get my feet wet. And
• 3:25
  that served me really well because it taught me the power of saying yes to
• 3:30
  any opportunity that's given to you. The worst thing that can happen is you
• 3:34
  can fail, and you'll dust yourself off and try again. And so I
• 3:38
  spent over twenty five years inside of large corporations, multinational large corporations. I
• 3:45
  was an English major. I thought I was going to teach English in high
• 3:46
  schools. I never knowing you now, that's mind blowing. Yeah, that
• 3:53
  was my big plan, right, Wow, I did not know that.
• 3:57
  And then I realized when I was a senior in college that I to the
• 4:00
  same age as all of the seniors in high school, and like, it
• 4:02
  just was not going to work. Like they're like, I'm not learning English
• 4:06
  for me, It's not going to happen. But I you know, I
• 4:10
  entered the insurance industry ten years into my corporate career. I knew nothing.
• 4:15
  My mom was still handling my car insurance policy. Like, I literally knew
• 4:18
  nothing about insurance. I didn't know what it meant. I just knew you
• 4:21
  had to have it or you couldn't drive. And I built a career over
• 4:26
  fifteen years. It got me into the c suite not only of an insurance
• 4:30
  company, but inside of a technology company to booze. So this girl that
• 4:32
  loved to read Jane Austen novels and like dissect complicated pros, all of a
• 4:39
  sudden is leading a very large At the time of my exit, it was
• 4:46
  three hundred and fifty million dollar company and in the IT sector and financial services,
• 4:53
  and I pivoted and left and went to a startup for a year.
• 4:56
  It was a really, really great experience. I learned a lot. I
• 5:00
  also learned what not to say yes to in the future, So that was
• 5:05
  a really big lesson. And you know, now I'm in a really big
• 5:10
  personal transition, and so I'm leveraging my expertise to be able to, you
• 5:15
  know, keep a roof over our head and do all the things that we
• 5:17
  need to do while really focusing on my family and what they need from me
• 5:23
  right now. Beautiful. So for anybody who was like me just a couple
• 5:28
  months ago and who does not have a corporate background, what does c sweet
• 5:32
  mean? So it's the top of the food chain, for lack of a
• 5:36
  better way to say it. So the execs of the company. So,
• 5:41
  if you think of a company like a pyramid, at the very very top,
• 5:44
  at the point of the pyramid is where you have your very top executives
• 5:48
  and they are known as officers of the company, which means that you have
• 5:54
  legal and fudiciary financial responsibility. So whenever I made a decision, I was
• 6:00
  personally liable for the outcome or no pressure, none at all all of what
• 6:08
  was happening. And so what I carried with me not only was am I
• 6:11
  doing the right thing by the employees of the company. Am I doing the
• 6:13
  right thing by our shareholders, so the people that actually own the company?
• 6:17
  But am I also making sure that I'm doing the right thing morally and ethically?
• 6:21
  And I'm not going to land myself in jail? Right? So the
• 6:24
  C suite is the CEO, it's the chief financial officer, and the chief
• 6:30
  operating officer, which is what I'm known as. And then you've got a
• 6:33
  bunch of other casts of characters depending on the company that you're in. But
• 6:38
  those three roles that I just mentioned, they're always there, and those are
• 6:42
  the three at the top of the pyramid that are making all of the decisions.
• 6:46
  Got it? Okay? So you did this for how many years?
• 6:50
  So it was four years that I was operating at that level before I decided
• 6:58
  that I needed a new challenge, because that's really what it was. I
• 7:00
  got bored. I know, it's a horrible thing to say, not at
• 7:04
  all, I think I think that's I love that it only took you four
• 7:09
  years to make that decision. So take us through that, because I'm sure
• 7:14
  that that wasn't a light decision to shift. So take us through that season
• 7:19
  of your life. Yeah, it was. It was a really interesting time.
• 7:23
  So things that we don't talk about, especially those are the very very
• 7:28
  top because we're paranoid and somebody, honestly is always out to get you.
• 7:30
  So a couple of things to know. When you are a woman inside of
• 7:33
  a technology company, inside of a financial services company, you're the only one,
• 7:39
  the only one. I had nobody that looked like me. I had
• 7:42
  nobody that I could talk to you, I had no mentors. And if
• 7:44
  there was a woman above me organizationally, she was single and a workaholic.
• 7:50
  So is that the reason why? Because at that age, usually women are
• 7:56
  having babies and they don't want to devote their entire life to the jobs,
• 8:00
  so they get passed up. I think that they get passed up. I
• 8:03
  think that they're ruled out just by virtue of what people consider baggage. I
• 8:09
  you know, we could probably do fifteen podcasts on you know, why why
• 8:13
  women struggle once they hit middle management to make it farther up the pipeline.
• 8:20
  But it was hard for me to get there, and I didn't even know
• 8:26
  that's where I was headed. But what I can say is that I've always
• 8:30
  had a strong point of view that if you tell me I can't do something,
• 8:33
  watch me do it anyway. I'm going to do better than you,
• 8:39
  faster than you, and all the things right. So I got there out
• 8:43
  of sheer wheel will and determination and to prove everybody wrong. But I was
• 8:48
  alone. And I talk a lot on my podcast and other venues around the
• 8:52
  power of relationships. The thing that nobody says is that it's incredibly lonely at
• 8:58
  the top of a company, and if you're a woman at the top of
• 9:03
  the company, you're it's just you and you have you don't have trusted advisors,
• 9:07
  you don't have anybody to turn to, because it doesn't it doesn't exist.
• 9:09
  And so I didn't know that. And when I got up there and
• 9:13
  I realized I'm on my own and people are coming to get me on a
• 9:18
  really constant basis. And then I got what I thought was really lucky and
• 9:22
  had a female CEO joined me almost at the same time, and it turned
• 9:26
  into an absolute disaster. I became a whistleblower, which is not something I
• 9:31
  ever thought that I was going to do. You know, the ripples are
• 9:33
  talking about that I can What I can say is that because we're a few
• 9:39
  years out now, we were in the middle of a global pandemic. They
• 9:45
  had placed a leader in our organization that, by all accounts, was not
• 9:50
  qualified. There was lots of documentation about the fact that was this the CEO
• 9:54
  or somebody else. I was the CEO, and there was a toxic culture
• 10:01
  being propagated by the CEO. There was a lot of gas landing happening.
• 10:05
  There was a lot of harassment happening, retaliation, and I had stepped in
• 10:09
  to kind of be the buffer. And it wasn't so much to protect her,
• 10:13
  but it was to shield the hundreds of employees that we had working.
• 10:20
  And so I became her translator, and I became I became the face of
• 10:22
  the company. I became you know what was good, and that was a
• 10:26
  heavy weight to carry because I wasn't the CEO and I had my own,
• 10:30
  my own challenges, and the problem with that was that I became affiliated with
• 10:33
  her. So in the eyes of the outsiders, you know, I wasn't
• 10:37
  necessarily part of the problem, but I definitely had a stigma and eventually when
• 10:41
  I realized exactly what was happening and that I had to speak up in order
• 10:45
  to save the company, literally, in order to save the company, I
• 10:50
  did, and I did in the most loud pull all of the strings,
• 10:56
  call in all of the networks, like I was calling people that were retired
• 11:00
  that had a lot of influence in pull and other continents, and we did
• 11:05
  it. We ousted her, and that was the right thing to do.
• 11:07
  But I was marked as a whistleblower. And so what that meant is that
• 11:09
  I was dead woman walking because as much as I say that you're protected from
• 11:16
  that perspective, you have a scarlet letter on you. There was no future
• 11:20
  in the US. I could have gone to Europe and had a future,
• 11:24
  but for a year I carried that weight. The company was thriving, the
• 11:28
  employees were doing incredibly well. Everybody was so happy. We had a new
• 11:33
  interim leader. Like things were on the outside fantastic, but on the inside,
• 11:39
  I was target number one because I was the one that dared to speak
• 11:43
  up. I was the one that dared to call people out and very large
• 11:46
  authority figures, and I was the one that dared to call in every favor
• 11:50
  that I had in order to make a change, which was the right change,
• 11:54
  And at the time, I had an executive tell me, the one
• 12:00
  thing that I want you to do is take care of the business. That's
• 12:03
  your top priority. And I took that really seriously. I considered leaving at
• 12:05
  the time because it was a lot. It would have been a lot easier
• 12:09
  to walk away and let somebody else deal with the mess, let somebody else
• 12:13
  try to figure out what to do with her, let somebody else care for
• 12:16
  the employees. But I decided that like that wasn't me ethically speaking, Like
• 12:22
  I had hundreds of people relying on me to pay their mortgages and to be
• 12:28
  happy at work and to ensure that they could retire when they wanted to,
• 12:31
  and God helped me. We were in the middle of a pandemic, so
• 12:33
  we had insurance clients and all sorts of other people that needed us to not
• 12:39
  fall apart. And so when we came out of that, I was exhausted.
• 12:46
  And the upside was that my team became incredibly high performing, so they
• 12:48
  didn't really need me. They needed me for coaching and mentorship, but day
• 12:52
  to day I wasn't in the business anymore, so I like to say,
• 12:56
  kind of like sat, you know, in that glass office and look on
• 13:00
  all the people and said, well, look at how happy they are.
• 13:01
  They're doing what they want. And I knew that it was time to change.
• 13:05
  And then we had more leadership changes and the company was changing some more,
• 13:09
  and I just didn't have it in me to fight the fight anymore,
• 13:13
  to fight those that were after my job, to fight to prove that I
• 13:18
  deserved my seat, because once you get it, you have to keep earning
• 13:22
  it. When you're a woman, you don't just get to sit there and
• 13:24
  be comfortable. And so I decided it was time to kind of push reset
• 13:30
  and find something else to do. I had done the work that I could
• 13:33
  do. I had left the legacy that I wanted to leave, and it
• 13:37
  was it was time to open a new door. And where did you go
• 13:41
  at that point? So I had a founder approach me who had a really
• 13:46
  cool business idea. It was super disruptive and I love new technology and I
• 13:50
  like making noise, as that last story probably identified, and so it was
• 13:58
  what I can now say was an opportunity too good to be true, and
• 14:05
  so I jumped in with both feet. I was really excited. To build
• 14:09
  multiple businesses at the same time and learn things I hadn't learned before. And
• 14:16
  hindsight twenty twenty because I just had a conversation with a lawyer about this,
• 14:20
  you know, a couple of weeks ago. You should listen to the expert
• 14:24
  advice that you're given, because that lawyer told me to walk away. It
• 14:26
  was bad. He just the spells. The smells bad is what he said
• 14:30
  at the time, and it still smells bad today. But I was really
• 14:33
  blinded by new and shiny and exciting because I had been really really wiped out
• 14:41
  in the prior job. So I jumped in and then it was exactly what
• 14:46
  one expects a startup to be. It was disorganized, it wasn't well thought
• 14:50
  out. We pivoted the business model a lot of times. And I believe
• 14:54
  in startups. I think that they, when done properly and correctly with the
• 15:00
  right foundational basis, are really good for the economy. The approach that this
• 15:05
  founder took just wasn't wasn't one that was going to lead to success. And
• 15:09
  so, you know, about ten months in we had to call quits.
• 15:15
  They're out of money, and our value systems were really misaligned and that happened
• 15:20
  sometimes. So do you think, because I know the background of that story
• 15:26
  in hindsight, do you think the reason why or I'm sure there were many
• 15:28
  reasons why ultimately it fell apart, But do you think the big reason is
• 15:33
  because it was so scattered, because they did change business models and you know,
• 15:39
  maybe like a little shiny objects syndrome, a little too unfocused. When
• 15:46
  you're going to start a business, whatever it is. You can decide that
• 15:50
  you want to start selling the flowers that you're growing in your front yard,
• 15:54
  or you can decide that you are going to introduce new financial models and disrupt
• 16:03
  the economy as you know it. Either direction, you need to know where
• 16:10
  you're going. You need to establish a strategy. You need to declare this
• 16:15
  is what I am and I'm not doing, and then you have to make
• 16:18
  sure that you build a really strong foundation because what I do know absolutely is
• 16:23
  that the market is going to shift and pivot. The products and services that
• 16:26
  you offer day one are not the same that you offer your five It's just
• 16:30
  any business, it doesn't matter what it is. However, the mechanics of
• 16:34
  how a business functions, specifically in the US economy, are steady state you're
• 16:41
  going to have the state. You're going to have to pay taxes every quarter.
• 16:42
  That's just the way that it goes, right. You're going to have
• 16:45
  to make sure that you have contracts in place with your third party providers because
• 16:51
  we like to sue people here in the United States. You know, there's
• 16:53
  a lot of you have to you have to manage your money. You need
• 16:56
  to know your data, you need to know how much money is coming in
• 16:59
  and how much money is There are foundational things that you need to really establish
• 17:03
  in order to have a successful business. And with that startup specifically, none
• 17:07
  of that was established. And it's okay day one, It's not okay day
• 17:14
  two hundred, yeah, you know. And so I think that's that makes
• 17:18
  the difference between a business that has a fighting chance at making it past year
• 17:23
  one and what's going to sink well before that. Okay, And we are
• 17:29
  going to get to your advice on all of that, because you are the
• 17:33
  like the go to resource for all of us who are trying to optimize and
• 17:38
  scale our own businesses. So we are going to get to that. But
• 17:41
  I want to before we dive into that, I want to get and dive
• 17:45
  a little bit more into your story because it's it's fascinating to me. So
• 17:51
  okay, I was just kind of getting like an idea of the timeline of
• 17:55
  what your career looked like, just so I can have it straight. So
• 17:59
  let's go to you being ultimately a whistle blower in this corporate tech business,
• 18:06
  the only woman at the top, well until the CEO came in. How
• 18:11
  old were the boys at this time? So the boys were nine, seven
• 18:18
  and five. How did you do it? Really? Just pure grit,
• 18:25
  one hundred percent. So from twenty sixteen, you know, So I had
• 18:30
  a three year old, three five and seven. Starting in twenty sixteen,
• 18:36
  I had a global position inside of that company, a global executive position.
• 18:38
  So I had always had this goal when I got into corporate world. I
• 18:41
  said, before I'm forty, I'm going to be a vice president. Rang
• 18:42
  the bell at thirty seven. It was great until it wasn't. And what
• 18:48
  that meant was, I was on an airplane three weeks out of the month.
• 18:52
  And when I say airplane, I mean I'm flying from San Francisco to
• 18:56
  Munich, Germany. That's a nine hour flight, even on a Sunday night.
• 19:00
  And then I'm coming home on a Thursday evening afternoon, so I'm literally
• 19:04
  like in the air for eighteen hours and on the ground from maybe seventy two.
• 19:08
  And I did that for eighteen months. So I had a three year
• 19:12
  old at the time, right that was the youngest one. I did that
• 19:15
  for eighteen months, and it required that period of time taught me exactly what
• 19:19
  it was going to require. I took another role later when I was home
• 19:22
  for about a year barely traveling, and then the travel started. It repeated
• 19:25
  itself, except I was doing it domestically until COVID hit. So I had
• 19:30
  about a four year period where I was on the road three weeksut of the
• 19:33
  month for at least ten months of the year. And all that it equated
• 19:37
  to was having massive systems in place and a massive amount of organization. And
• 19:47
  my husband at the time stayed home, but to be clear, he was
• 19:51
  not helpful, and so while there was an adult supervision, I guess nobody
• 19:57
  was going to burn the house down. I was still Saturday and Sunday making
• 20:03
  dinners for all of the nights that I was going to be gone. Because
• 20:06
  the kids knew how to microwave stuff so they could heat up their own food.
• 20:10
  I was ordering groceries once we were able to do that from the airport
• 20:15
  lounge, so that the groceries would be sitting on the doorstep when I got
• 20:17
  home, so I could put them away at midnight. I was arranging car
• 20:22
  pools and scheduling doctor's appointments to only happen on Fridays because those are the only
• 20:26
  days that I was home. And I had a system for everything, because
• 20:33
  I was basically living a single life of a mother that was on the road
• 20:37
  with a bunch of very small children and blocking and tackling somebody that wasn't being
• 20:42
  very helpful. And that's how we rolled, and that's how we did it.
• 20:47
  And the kids. Kids are resilient and they learn stuff. So like
• 20:51
  when mom would drive to school and she was on a call, they knew
• 20:53
  to be quiet. My kids are the only kids that on the way to
• 20:56
  school in the morning would be silent for forty minutes. Okay, do you
• 21:00
  give us a tip around that, because mine have not learned that trick yet.
• 21:06
  You know, I think that it comes to like treating them like humans
• 21:11
  and not. Oh right, so we had I mean, the running joke
• 21:17
  at preschool was that I was the only mom that could show up like in
• 21:21
  a full business suit and not end up with glue or paste or whatever on
• 21:26
  me. Because all I did was say to my kids, dry clean only,
• 21:30
  and they would back up like they knew they knew, right. So,
• 21:34
  and we explained that dry clean only means that it costs, like this
• 21:37
  is how much it costs every time you get your fingerpaint on Mom's pants,
• 21:41
  right, And so at a very early age, I had very direct conversations
• 21:45
  with them around mom has to work, and today that looks like Mom needs
• 21:48
  to be in a meeting while she takes you to school. And remember that
• 21:52
  when mom works, mom gets paid. And when mom gets paid, that
• 21:55
  means you get to play baseball. It means that you get to I don't
• 22:00
  know have all these movies in this closet because at the time we had DVDs
• 22:03
  in the house. I know that's not a thing anymore. You know,
• 22:06
  you get to you get to go to Disneyland literally whenever you want, because
• 22:10
  that was what we did. We went to Disneyland a lot. We live
• 22:11
  in California. It was easy to get to. But I always equated it
• 22:15
  to it's important that I can focus and that we can all attend to this
• 22:21
  meeting together because this is what it's going to enable in our lives. On
• 22:26
  the flip side, because again I was the only woman in most of these
• 22:30
  meetings, I would get into a call in the car and I'd be like,
• 22:34
  just so, y'all know, my three kids are in the car,
• 22:37
  so you are now having a Frank's family meeting, So you look like a
• 22:41
  seven year old to opine on your security measures. They're here. Just let
• 22:45
  me know and we're going to emboce you for any comments that they were.
• 22:49
  Yeah, it's now a five thousand dollars call. But treating them like humans
• 22:55
  from a really early age and allowing them in and understanding that work is good
• 22:59
  and that it delivers value into their lives that they can actually understand and feel
• 23:04
  is it made it really possible because then they understood the importance of what I
• 23:11
  was doing. And we also had a lot of conversations around respect like this
• 23:15
  person has taking time out to talk to me, I'm taking time out to
• 23:17
  talk to them, So we need to be respectful of the time that they're
• 23:18
  giving us. And this is what it looks like, and to this day
• 23:23
  they're great about it. All I have to do is say I'm in a
• 23:26
  meeting or hey, guys, I'm gonna be in a meeting in five minutes,
• 23:29
  and it's like ghost Town. It's that's really good. That's really good.
• 23:33
  I don't I don't paint the full picture. I mean, I think
• 23:37
  Cruz is getting to the age where he could understand that now before. I
• 23:41
  mean, you know, if it's just too complicated, but but I love
• 23:45
  I think that's actually a brilliant tip explaining, Hey, here's what's in it
• 23:48
  for you, Like let's be respectful, but also here's what you get out
• 23:52
  of this respect too. This is how it trickles down. So if you
• 23:56
  help me here, I'm gonna help you. You know, it's gonna it's
• 23:59
  gonna support you in the future. I think that that's brilliant. So the
• 24:03
  kids are very young, hubby is not helpful. I know there are listeners
• 24:11
  right now who unfortunately can relate to that too. I feel like, I
• 24:18
  mean, this is a generalization, but but I've heard mostly either one or
• 24:23
  another side. Either your your partner just gets it and they're the teammate,
• 24:29
  or they just don't. And there's very little in between. As far as
• 24:33
  like the women that I've worked with, so unfortunately, you come from a
• 24:37
  you know, a situation where your partner just wasn't helpful. How did you
• 24:44
  navigate that? Because you have to be not only are you a mom of
• 24:48
  these three boys, and you're clearly doing an amazing job. If they're listening
• 24:52
  to you, they're keeping their hands off like they get it, you know,
• 24:55
  like they they kind of it almost seems like they kind of took the
• 24:59
  role of a supportive partner in a sense. They might they probably sense that
• 25:03
  mom really needed them to have her back. But with these three young kids,
• 25:08
  you climbing this ladder with all of this responsibility in a role where you're
• 25:15
  traveling so often, you're one of the few women who get it. You
• 25:21
  don't have people that you can really talk to. How did you navigate,
• 25:23
  specifically having a partner who wasn't as supportive as you could have used in that
• 25:30
  time? That's it. It's a really important question because, like you,
• 25:37
  I think there's a lot of people that are living this reality right now and
• 25:41
  are carrying a ton of shame around it and don't want to speak out loud
• 25:47
  about what's really happening. So a few, a few things when I don't
• 25:55
  care how old you are when you get married. You tell yourself a fairy
• 25:59
  tale of how things are going to play out, and then life happens.
• 26:03
  It just is. I don't care if you I was twenty nine when I
• 26:08
  got married, I don't care if you're twenty two or forty five. Like
• 26:12
  you walk into that with rose colored glasses on and a fairy tale in your
• 26:15
  head. The thing that we do not recognize, especially as women, is
• 26:22
  that who they met is who we are, and we're going to continue to
• 26:29
  evolve, but that core DNA of who we are is never going to change.
• 26:32
  I had somebody say to me very early on. It was very early
• 26:34
  in this traveling period of time. They were trying to get me to move
• 26:37
  to Europe. Like people were flying out to meet with my husband to try
• 26:41
  to convince and move to Europe. I mean like there was like a full
• 26:42
  court press on trying to get us over there because that was kind of where
• 26:47
  the company was headquartered at the time and the most opportunity for me professionally,
• 26:51
  and he wasn't having it. And this woman who was a mentor for me
• 26:56
  for a very long time, we were sitting it was like midnight she had
• 26:59
  flown and we were in like a Denny's because it was the only thing open.
• 27:03
  And she cried at me and she said, did you just wake up
• 27:10
  one day a couple of years ago and become a high performer? And I
• 27:12
  said, what are you talking about? And she's like, he married somebody
• 27:17
  that strives for more. He married somebody that's a high performer. He married
• 27:21
  somebody that is going to bust through walls and ceilings and all of the things.
• 27:26
  That's who you were, you know. And one of the reasons that
• 27:30
  I had mentioned that I started, you know, working at fifteen or even
• 27:32
  earlier, is because that's who I was. I've been a hustler from the
• 27:34
  jump, and that I never hid that from him. But the thing is
• 27:38
  that when you get married and you tell yourself this fairy tale of how things
• 27:44
  are going to play out, sometimes you ignore who you really are. And
• 27:48
  so I tried to put on that whole entire costume. And that's that's what
• 27:53
  I refer to it as as best wife in the world, best homemaker in
• 27:57
  the world, best mom in the world, best corporate executive in the world.
• 28:02
  Right, Like I carried all of these costumes. I literally had a
• 28:04
  Massiveleuveton bag where all the costumes sat and depending on the situation, I put
• 28:08
  them on. And so for a very long time with him, I just
• 28:14
  ignored the fact that he wasn't being supportive. In my head, it was
• 28:18
  like, you expect me to be the house the homemaker and clean the house
• 28:22
  and do the dishes and have those meals prepared before I leave, and like,
• 28:26
  take care that I'm supposed to be making your life because you're the husband
• 28:30
  easier. And I literally went and he wasn't working at the time. He
• 28:34
  was not working at the time, so he was supposed to be the stay
• 28:38
  at home dad, right. We were supposed to be rewriting narratives. And
• 28:42
  one day I was on an airplane. I don't think I'll ever forget it,
• 28:45
  and I was, you know, managing all the schedules and stuff,
• 28:48
  and I'm like, this is not no, this is not what we're doing.
• 28:52
  And I got home and because he was a n idol and he was
• 28:56
  still up, and I said, listen, you decided you wanted to stay
• 28:59
  home and run this run this place, so you need to run this place
• 29:03
  here effectively, or all of the things that I'm delegating to you, and
• 29:08
  I'm not doing them anymore. I'd love to tell you that that worked well.
• 29:12
  It did not. But I had to kind of set a boundary for
• 29:17
  myself. So when you're asking hind of the question, like how do you
• 29:18
  navigate this unsupportive environment, I had to And it wasn't an ultimatum, but
• 29:23
  it was like, this is what I need from you, and if you
• 29:26
  can't give it to me, then things are just things are going to have
• 29:30
  to change. And he didn't step up, and he didn't do what I
• 29:33
  needed him to do and continue to be wholly confrontational, not even unsupportive,
• 29:38
  but confrontational about the strides I was making professionally. And I had to decide
• 29:45
  that his opinion didn't matter anymore. And I wasn't in a situation where I
• 29:51
  could I could leave the environment at the time, and there's a whole bunch
• 29:53
  of reasons for that. But I had to have a very big girl conversation
• 29:59
  with myself, say what do I want for my life? And if continuing
• 30:03
  to listen to his opinion and doing and pandering to his needs, is that
• 30:07
  going to get me where I want to go? And the answer was resounding
• 30:11
  no. And the direction he was sending me in was not going to give
• 30:15
  my kids the life that I wanted. It was going to create the humans
• 30:17
  that I wanted to create as humans. And so I had to make a
• 30:19
  decision and say, then I have to get on the path that's going to
• 30:23
  get me where I need to be and grow, where I can feel most
• 30:29
  fulfilled, and where I can ensure that I am raising good humans that are
• 30:33
  going to be productive in the world and beyond. And it's that is a
• 30:38
  hard decision to make. So you know, I'm not saying it lightly.
• 30:41
  And for those that are in this position, I know that what I just
• 30:42
  said is a whole bunch of scary things. But you've got to decide if
• 30:48
  you're going to fight for yourself, because if you're not going to fight for
• 30:52
  yourself, nobody is fighting for you. Mel Robbins says this over and over
• 30:56
  and over again, but nobody is coming. She's like super famous saying this,
• 31:00
  right, nobody is coming. If you want to achieve a fitness goal,
• 31:03
  you've got to do it yourself. If you want to lose weight,
• 31:04
  you got to do it yourself. If you want to make a million dollars,
• 31:07
  you've got to do yourself. And if you were in an environment where
• 31:11
  you are waiting for that partner to step up and support you and they have
• 31:14
  not demonstrated that they have the willingness to do it, they're not going to
• 31:18
  So what are you going to do? So that looked like I mean,
• 31:22
  I'm sure I can only imagine how that must have felt. Okay, so
• 31:26
  you have this opportunity to go to Europe. It sounds like you wanted to
• 31:30
  go. Your company clearly wanted you to go. Your husband was like,
• 31:34
  it's not happening. That's not what I want. Not only that he wasn't
• 31:37
  being supportive. You come home, you say, this is what we need
• 31:41
  to do. You need to meet me halfway. We need to be a
• 31:44
  team. Here, here's the support I need, and he resisted it wasn't
• 31:48
  happening. So at that point you just decided, like what was it?
• 31:55
  Just this thing like, Okay, I got to do this myself. I'm
• 31:57
  you. I'm sure you were faced with many decisions at that point. You
• 32:02
  couldn't like you said, he couldn't leave yet, but I'm sure there was
• 32:07
  a point where like should I leave my job? Should I back down or
• 32:13
  take you know, like a lower position or or a less stressful position.
• 32:17
  What do I do? And your decision was, I'm just going to do
• 32:21
  it all for a season. And you knew that that season it wouldn't be
• 32:24
  forever, but that's what you decided, Like you weren't willing to compromise on
• 32:29
  what you wanted for your boys their home life, nor were you willing to
• 32:32
  compromise on what you wanted as a career in them or as a career woman
• 32:37
  in that moment, Yeah, it was an and situation. This is what
• 32:39
  I want for myself, I love, this is what I want for my
• 32:43
  family, and this is what we're going to do. And then I attacked
• 32:45
  it like I do anything else. So we've got to figure out that the
• 32:49
  primary goal at that point was how do we get on secure enough financial footing
• 32:53
  because that guy loved to think that I was a money tree. In fact,
• 32:57
  my kids last night said mom is actually an acronym for made for money,
• 33:02
  made of money. Like I'm like, oh, gentlemen, let's have
• 33:06
  a conversation and we're carefulling, right, But that's you know, it's it's
• 33:08
  a that's that's a legacy of their dad's way of thinking. And so I
• 33:15
  just I built a plan and I said, so, what's priority number one?
• 33:17
  It's to get on stable financial footing, So how are we going to
• 33:21
  do that? And Ladies is going to scare the Holy but Jesus out of
• 33:23
  you. But I canceled all the credit cards. I literally I canceled every
• 33:27
  single one. And then I called a debt consolidation company even though I didn't
• 33:30
  need it, and I said, so, how do we make this work?
• 33:34
  And They're like, oh, you just don't pay your bills and then
• 33:36
  we start negotiating a settlement on your path. So I ended up paying significantly
• 33:38
  less and I were made in credit card debt. My credits were went into
• 33:42
  the toilet and I'm still building it out. But I literally was like you're
• 33:45
  cut off, dude, Like you're done. Wow, Like if I if
• 33:49
  the first thing I need to do was take over pure financial control and stop
• 33:52
  this runaway train which had us living paycheck to paycheck and bonus checked a bonus
• 33:58
  check and then like that cycle going over again. I'm just cutting you off,
• 34:01
  and by virtue, I'm cutting myself off because I'm the one that got
• 34:04
  punished for it with the credit score. But like we're just we're done,
• 34:08
  game over, game over? What was his response? What could he say?
• 34:15
  Because my response was go get a job, right, and that wasn't
• 34:20
  He just didn't want to do that. No he didn't because he hit hold.
• 34:23
  And this is we all do this. We told he had told himself
• 34:25
  a narrative that his role as a stay at home dad was too important and
• 34:29
  too necessary inside of our family structure to but he could order groceries or take
• 34:36
  the kids their doctor employments. What but that's I mean, that's a parent
• 34:39
  And this alley is this is I guarantee you that thousands of your listeners can
• 34:45
  be like, yeah, I get that. I know, like I know
• 34:47
  that. This is the reality of it. Nobody talks about it because it
• 34:51
  carries so much shame, you know. But I wasn't in a situation where
• 34:54
  I could afford to get a lawyer. I wasn't in a situation where I
• 34:57
  could afford to go get an apartment. I wasn't in a suation where I
• 35:00
  could do any of those things. And I was making multiple six figures a
• 35:01
  year. It wasn't like I was, you know, making twenty five k
• 35:05
  at Starbucks. But I had to take over control and so if I was
• 35:10
  going to live a life of and this is who I am and this is
• 35:15
  what I want for my family and etcetera, etcetera, etcetera, then I
• 35:19
  had to start saying no somewhere. And that was the first place that I
• 35:22
  started saying no. And how long ago was this? I feel like that
• 35:30
  was probably four years. Okay, Okay, so you're actively going through a
• 35:38
  divorce right now, just so we can tie this up in a bow.
• 35:44
  But I'm curious for anybody who and this is a complicated question, but you
• 35:51
  said a few minutes ago, you said who you marry is is who you
• 35:55
  marry or however you said that right, like the person you are when you
• 35:59
  got married is the person that you're going to be. We're all going to
• 36:00
  grow, we're all going to evolve, but the bones are there, the
• 36:02
  structure is there. So you married this person. It's not working out.
• 36:09
  If you could go back in time, and obviously, like this person gave
• 36:15
  me three beautiful boys, right, it happened for a reason. Okay,
• 36:21
  but if you were their red flags before you guys got married, that maybe
• 36:27
  you overlooked and maybe you would have made a different decision. Yeah, I
• 36:34
  mean fully transparently. We should have never gotten married. We are two very
• 36:40
  completely different people, and he had provided enough evidence very early on. I
• 36:45
  had known this this guy since I was fifteen years old. He sat behind
• 36:49
  me in my Spanish three class. And the way that I met him as
• 36:52
  he pulled my hair. And I'm not joking, like I could not stand
• 36:55
  him in high school, you know. And we just were not this We
• 37:00
  were not this wired the same at all. And I, because I know
• 37:07
  myself well enough, I was blinded by the goals that I had set because
• 37:12
  I didn't just set professional goals, I set personal goals. My twenty fifth
• 37:15
  birthday, did not get out of bed, did not get out of bed
• 37:17
  because I had been telling myself a story since I was five. But by
• 37:21
  twenty five, I was going to be married and I was going to a
• 37:22
  kid, and I had neither. Okay, so you were on a fast
• 37:25
  track to get married, to have the career, the husband, the family.
• 37:29
  Yeah, I mean, I grew up inside of a very big Catholic
• 37:34
  family. I live in the same town right now that I grew up in.
• 37:37
  And when I grew up here, we were like a farming community.
• 37:38
  We were known from being the chicken capital of the world. That was like
• 37:42
  our claim to fame. Right, everybody knew everybody. Everybody graduated from college,
• 37:45
  everybody moved back, everybody married each other. That was just how things
• 37:47
  played out. And as much as I had big city dreams and I had
• 37:51
  moved to the big city and I had come back and I had these big
• 37:54
  jobs and all those things, when you are a small human and you're goal
• 38:00
  oriented and you set those goals for yourself, they don't leave you. So
• 38:04
  I didn't even necessarily realize as I was going Looking back, I do,
• 38:07
  but as I was going through this, all I was doing was achieving the
• 38:10
  goals I had set for myself, just writing a program any means possible,
• 38:15
  and that the big personal goals were get married and have four kids. Literally
• 38:21
  that was I wanted four boys. I got three of them. That third
• 38:23
  pregnancy sucked, so the fourth. But like that's who I am. I
• 38:30
  am a high performer. I am a goal setter. I shoot for the
• 38:32
  stars and I get there every single time. And so yes, there were
• 38:37
  red flags, but I'll also say, is knowing him as I know him,
• 38:42
  a lot of the negative personality traits were not displayed to me. Because
• 38:46
  they were saved and given his gifts to his friends. So I got the
• 38:52
  best of him because the worst of him was directed that these people that he
• 38:55
  had known since he was a small kid and would take it. And then
• 39:00
  when they became adults and they didn't want to take it anymore, I became
• 39:04
  the only audience. And so there definitely was an awakening period where I was
• 39:07
  like who, like who are you? Like? Why are you? You
• 39:10
  know? I can vividly remember and this happened over and over and over again,
• 39:14
  where I would say, like, I don't allow people to talk to
• 39:17
  me the way that you're talking to me right now, Like in my grown
• 39:21
  up, big person world that's not inside this house, nobody gets to talk
• 39:24
  to me this way. So I don't know why you think that you get
• 39:27
  to talk to me this way. I mean, we would literally have these
• 39:30
  conversations, and so I picked wrong. I should have never married him,
• 39:32
  I should have never gotten into the environment. And I was purely driven by
• 39:39
  the need to achieve a goal that I had set, without the maturity to
• 39:45
  understand that sometimes how you achieve the goal is much more important than actually achieving
• 39:52
  the goal. That's powerful. How you achieved the goal, the journey,
• 39:58
  the path toward the goal is more important than achieving the goal itself. That's
• 40:04
  really powerful. Yeah, yeah, and this this idea, because we all
• 40:09
  do this on some level until we have the awareness that we're doing it.
• 40:14
  What program did we pick up from Disney? From you know, whatever religion
• 40:21
  you were raised on, your parents or whatever, what was downloaded into your
• 40:25
  psyche as something that you needed or should strive for that you blindly are running
• 40:34
  toward or barreling toward that you don't even really want, or maybe you want
• 40:37
  it, but not necessarily in that way, right, Or you're telling yourself
• 40:42
  some limiting story that it's this person or nothing, it's by this time or
• 40:46
  not, it's by it has got to be this perfect amount, this perfect
• 40:51
  job, or whatever, and that level of control is so stifling and limiting.
• 40:59
  So thank you so much for sharing that with us, because what you're
• 41:02
  going through, I mean, I had a close seat in view to you
• 41:08
  know, the last few months of you navigating a divorce, and it was
• 41:15
  really painful to watch. And I can imagine, you know, with a
• 41:19
  family and all and so much time invested in history. Obviously, it's not
• 41:24
  easy regardless of your situation, but especially with yours, and I respect you
• 41:30
  so much from making that decision for your family and for yourself and how you've
• 41:35
  come this far with such frustrating or lack of support. Frustrating lack of support.
• 41:45
  So thank you for sharing that with us when we're talking about this programming
• 41:52
  and these goals that we all kind of set for ourselves. So you got
• 41:59
  married, you ended up c suite exec working for this company. It sounds
• 42:07
  like you kind of burn yourself out a little bit and then you were able
• 42:09
  to pivot pretty drastically. I'm going to ask you the same question as I
• 42:15
  did with your husband, if you could go back, and for anybody listening
• 42:22
  who is currently in corporate or who wants to remain in corporate, if you
• 42:25
  could do anything different related to your corporate career, what would that look like.
• 42:32
  So one of the things that I was known for, very very early
• 42:39
  was being the one that would run into the fire when everybody else was running
• 42:45
  out. Like if there was a massive chaos, business is failing, everybody's
• 42:52
  getting fired, whatever, I would be the one that would get called and
• 42:55
  I say, do you want in? You want to help? You want
• 42:59
  to turn it around? And I always said yes. I was always up
• 43:04
  for the challenge, and I built my career by being known for somebody that
• 43:09
  could see the big vision through all of the chaos and the noise inspire others
• 43:16
  to act even when it wasn't clear if the results were going to yield what
• 43:21
  we want, and to be incredibly decisive and deliver results right, that was
• 43:27
  what I was known for and it built my career based on that. I
• 43:30
  was a problem solver. You could literally put me in any any situation and
• 43:36
  I would find the people that could help me, and then we would we
• 43:38
  would get stuff done. And I think what I lost sight of as I
• 43:44
  moved up the ladder was there was this push and pull between doing this sort
• 43:49
  of work that I loved, which was helping organizations transform themselves, helping to
• 43:57
  you know, save the ship whatever it might be, kind of in the
• 44:00
  fire, and what was expected of me to continue to proceed up the next
• 44:06
  level of hierarchy. And so looking back, the roles that I was in
• 44:14
  the shortest amount of time, or that I was hatching escape plans for before
• 44:19
  I even started them, were ones that I chose purely because it was going
• 44:22
  to advance my career. It was going to change the title on my business
• 44:25
  card. It was going to give me what I perceived to be gravitas.
• 44:30
  And what I have realized now is that how you treat people and the relationships
• 44:37
  that you build and your track record for performance is what matters most. And
• 44:47
  you can put Honestly, you can put whatever job title you want on your
• 44:52
  LinkedIn entry or your resume or a business card that you print out. Nobody
• 44:57
  fact checks that. But what you can to replace is your actual experience,
• 45:02
  how much time you spent doing things that you love, how much growth and
• 45:07
  excellence you've achieved by doing things that you enjoy. And if I had spent
• 45:10
  more time focused on that, you know, I may not have left the
• 45:17
  corporate structure to go to a startup. Maybe I would still be inside doing
• 45:21
  those things. But what I can say is that now that I look at
• 45:23
  any opportunity. I had a recruiter laugh at me the other day because I
• 45:28
  was actually like, I'm like, I don't care what the title is.
• 45:30
  I care what the work is, the people that I'm working with, and
• 45:32
  how much you're going to pay me for it, And they're like, but
• 45:36
  you're a C suite executive and I'm like, that doesn't mean anything. I'm
• 45:40
  the CEO of my household. I mean, we throw around the term CEO
• 45:45
  and it fill in the blank all of the time. And so I think
• 45:49
  for those that are in corporate, want to stay in corporate, don't see
• 45:52
  a way out of corporate, or trying to do some sort of side hustle,
• 45:53
  but aren't really sure if that's the thing. What you need to really
• 45:57
  be clear about, what you need to get quiet about. You need to
• 46:00
  spend time really getting specific about is what lights you up? What do you
• 46:05
  love to do? And not I love to fill in an Excel spreadsheet,
• 46:09
  but it's what sort of work do you like to do? What sort of
• 46:12
  impact do you like to have? When you describe what you do to somebody
• 46:16
  that knows nothing about what you do, What adjectives and words are you using
• 46:22
  that not only describe how you're showing up, but how you're working and how
• 46:25
  you're interacting with other people. And I think once you get really clear on
• 46:29
  that, where you work doesn't matter so much because it's all about what you're
• 46:34
  doing and how you're spending your time. So drop the ego. It's I
• 46:38
  mean, titles are great. And if you find a job that has the
• 46:43
  trifecta of the title and the pay and the work that you love to do,
• 46:45
  congratulations you've made it. But if it doesn't, what I'm hearing you
• 46:51
  say is so much more important than the title than what it looks on a
• 46:54
  resume is the fulfillment. Of course, pay is very important, but more
• 47:01
  so the relationships that you have and maintain, and then also that level of
• 47:07
  fulfillment in the job. Okay, cool, that's helpful, thank you.
• 47:12
  So what or where on your path did you decide to dip your toe in
• 47:17
  to entrepreneurship and what led you to that decision, because it's so fascinating to
• 47:24
  me because the last thing you need are more things on your plate. And
• 47:29
  here you are. You have a business, you have like well, multiple
• 47:36
  different types of things going on, you have a podcast, you have these
• 47:38
  three boys. I mean, there are so many things that you manage and
• 47:43
  that you take on. So I would love to hear what led you to
• 47:45
  the decision to take on another thing as big as entrepreneurship. I mean,
• 47:52
  what else am I going to do? No? Initially it was like it
• 48:00
  was necessary, right, So I think we all I mean not we all
• 48:02
  many women specifically have a journey into network marketing that takes them as far or
• 48:09
  as little as they want to go. And the pandemic hit and I was
• 48:15
  crazy bored. I was in a house to somebody that I didn't really like
• 48:20
  being around and had a very different schedule than I did. I was used
• 48:23
  to being on the road all the time, or in an office or like,
• 48:27
  and all of a sudden, it was in my house, or if
• 48:29
  I wasn't in my house, I was in an office, but it was
• 48:30
  silent. And I was the lead champion of eight hour work days because I
• 48:36
  didn't want people killing themselves. So I had all of this time on my
• 48:39
  hands because I wasn't sitting in an airport or on an airplane or doing anything.
• 48:44
  And so I fell into network marketing partially to fill my time because I
• 48:47
  was bored and I needed something productive to do, and hey, let's make
• 48:52
  some money. And you know, the money tree was not dropping leaves like
• 48:57
  crazy, so it was helpful. And then I realized, like, this
• 49:00
  really isn't my jam. Like it's great for the people that are successful at
• 49:04
  it and enjoy doing it, but it just really wasn't how I wanted to
• 49:07
  spend my time. What I did, however, though, is learn a
• 49:09
  ton of skills. So I started learning a ton of things that I would
• 49:15
  have never learned inside of a corporation. I learned all about social media strategy,
• 49:17
  and I learned about all these tools that are out there on how to
• 49:21
  use these things. And I learned how to use my platform and that I
• 49:24
  could. I always say, give me a microphone and a stage, and
• 49:29
  you know, I'll keep you entertained for days on end. And so I
• 49:30
  all of a sudden had this platform where I could communicate and share what I
• 49:35
  knew, and it was really enjoyable. So the next thing I said was
• 49:37
  how can I monetize it? And so then I just started playing around with
• 49:40
  things because you know, I joked initially with what else am I going to
• 49:45
  do? But it was kind of that I'm not somebody that's going to sit
• 49:49
  around and watch Netflix for days on end. It's just not who I am.
• 49:53
  And so I had an opportunity to say, well, how can I
• 49:57
  grow and develop? What can I learn? How can I monetize it?
• 50:00
  What can I do with it? And really have been running experiments since April
• 50:05
  of twenty twenty with what can I do? What can I learn now?
• 50:09
  How can I convert it into something that could potentially make money? And you
• 50:13
  know, where do we want to go? It was never and still to
• 50:16
  this day, is not necessarily intention to retire myself or to replace my corporate
• 50:23
  income or do any of those things. But I have time. I know
• 50:27
  it doesn't sound like I do with all of the children and all the things,
• 50:30
  but there's time, and I'm using to spend my time to help other
• 50:34
  people in their businesses and to continue to educate and grow myself personally and professionally.
• 50:39
  I'm not choosing to use my time by staying up to date on whatever
• 50:45
  it is you people are watching streaming platforms. You mean you're not up to
• 50:52
  speed on Kyle Richards and Derey and My Housewives of Beverly Hills and what's going
• 50:58
  on there? Mauricio and Kyle? Are they together? Are they not come
• 51:01
  on the Bravo? So the one, the one thing that I'll carve a
• 51:06
  smage of time out for is that. But you know, even then,
• 51:09
  you know I'm not We're probably two weeks behind. You know, it's like
• 51:14
  an hour here, an hour there, a week it's not. There's so
• 51:17
  much time if you actually look at your I actually just recorded a whole gass
• 51:22
  that dropped this week that like, we have so much time that we waste
• 51:25
  every day. I ran a little bit of an experiment with myself when my
• 51:30
  life changed and I had to be more available for the kids, and I
• 51:31
  said, Okay, so I'm going to stop working nine hours a day and
• 51:36
  I'm going to start working six. Guess what, I was still delivering the
• 51:40
  exact same results in the exact same timeframe, and I was working three hours
• 51:45
  less. So then I said, well, I wonder what happens if I
• 51:47
  work four You know what, still is productive, still delivering the same results
• 51:53
  on the same timeline. But now all of a sudden, I had five
• 51:58
  hours a day extra. That's twenty five hours a week. Yeah, of
• 52:04
  course I can have a side hustle. If I can carve out twenty five
• 52:07
  extra hours a week, you know, it's a no brainer. So for
• 52:12
  me, it was just how can I use the time to the best best
• 52:15
  way possible? And what you just said is so true. By the way,
• 52:19
  this is why I'm such a proponent for when you kind of like know
• 52:24
  what you're doing for online business, and you know how to create offers and
• 52:28
  you know, like the foundational things that you need to do go, Like
• 52:31
  when you get an idea, put it out there. I'm such a proponent
• 52:36
  for like stop overthinking and put the thing out and like just freaking go because
• 52:40
  I've done it the other way we all have where you give yourself a week
• 52:45
  to iron out something and to get all the details, and it's like,
• 52:49
  you don't need a freaking week, you need an hour, an hour of
• 52:52
  focused attention in deciding I'm going to get this done in an hour versus and
• 52:59
  if you can yourself all that time, you're going to give yourself that time
• 53:02
  and it's not going to be spent wisely. So that's a fantastic tip.
• 53:07
  And I encourage everybody listening right now to test that yourself. What in your
• 53:13
  job in your business is taking up X amount of hours and test out.
• 53:16
  I love going from from nine to six or you know, four hours to
• 53:21
  two hours or whatever, because it's it's very gratifying and exciting. And then
• 53:27
  yeah, magically, now you have half day or a quarter of day or
• 53:30
  even an extra hour to devote to your health, your well, you know,
• 53:34
  whatever you want to do, so that's really powerful. Another powerful thing
• 53:38
  that I'm noticing, like kind of a theme in your world too, that
• 53:43
  I just want to highlight before we go, because I really want to pick
• 53:45
  your brain on small business tips and I want to shift gears there. But
• 53:51
  one thing that I want to highlight too is this idea that some things in
• 53:57
  life are meant to be stepping stones, not where you live and plant roots.
• 54:01
  And it sounds like you've really mastered this. There are things that come
• 54:07
  into your life to shape you, to give you wisdom, they're not meant
• 54:10
  to stay forever, whether it's a person, whether it's a situation, a
• 54:14
  job, whatever. And some of us, I think, some people that
• 54:19
  look at themselves as fiercely loyal. I can say this because this I'm one
• 54:23
  of these people where you that loyalty is almost to your detriment, and you
• 54:29
  hold on to things and people in situations for too long versus allowing it life
• 54:36
  to flow right, It's that controlling. So I just want to highlight and
• 54:39
  applaud you for I mean, I'm sure it hasn't been perfect, but it
• 54:44
  seems like you know, in the corporate space and then this business and even
• 54:49
  your your marriage which is hard. It's a hard pill to swallow obviously for
• 54:52
  you in the situation, for other people to hear. Sometimes we marry the
• 54:59
  wrong one guy. It happens, and you're much better off owning it obviously,
• 55:06
  like do what you need to do, try, but like, if
• 55:08
  it's not going anywhere, do what you got to do, and don't make
• 55:14
  yourself a bad person for doing that for yourself. So I just want to
• 55:19
  highlight that because I think that if more of us allowed that level of flexibility
• 55:24
  and understanding in our life and ask yourself that question, is is this a
• 55:30
  forever thing or is this just a stepping stone to the next thing, we'd
• 55:34
  be able to grow a lot faster and probably be happier. Would you agree?
• 55:37
  I agree completely. And one of the things that was coming to mind
• 55:42
  is just because you outgrow something doesn't mean that you've failed. And I think
• 55:45
  that we get ourselves so wrapped up in failure. Like one of the things
• 55:49
  that I teach my children all the time is take accountability, Like just own
• 55:52
  it. It doesn't mean you're a bad person. It maybe means you made
• 55:57
  a bad decision, but just own it and move on. And we have
• 56:01
  to find a way consistently to take accountability for the decisions that we make,
• 56:07
  the moves that we do or don't make, own it, give ourselves some
• 56:10
  grace, and then just move on. There is no shame in saying this
• 56:16
  once served me and now no longer does. Thank you so much, it
• 56:21
  gave me all of these great things. This is what I learned. Even
• 56:23
  if it was a colossal, you know, firestorm or whatever it was,
• 56:28
  you still have something good that came from it. So take it and own
• 56:30
  it and move on. One of the things that I see women do constantly
• 56:36
  is apologize. They just like a I am so sorry, Like you know
• 56:39
  those people that say they're sorry to their own shadow, you know, when
• 56:43
  they're walking around the house. And I think it really comes down to just
• 56:49
  not wanting to admit that sometimes we pick wrong and sometimes we do something wrong,
• 56:55
  and there's no shame in it. It's just a matter of take accountability,
• 56:59
  move on, and you're not a failure. You can pick yourself back
• 57:01
  up. You're gonna be fine, You really are. Yeah, because when
• 57:05
  you're not busy shaming yourself for being human and choosing wrong. And we could
• 57:10
  even play with the idea of like there's no wrong choice, because it leads
• 57:14
  you to the next thing if you allow it to. You know, so
• 57:17
  like when you're not shaming yourself and you're able to take accountability, now we're
• 57:22
  able to extract the wisdom from this situation that wasn't a forever thing, so
• 57:25
  you can go find the next thing or the forever or whatever. So I
• 57:30
  just think that that's gold. So thank you for being open and sharing that
• 57:35
  with us. Okay, let's switch gears. Okay, let's talk business business
• 57:39
  baby. Okay. So currently what you're doing is as far as like your
• 57:46
  current business is. You're playing this what you're calling an on call COO.
• 57:52
  Right, so you you have all of this experience obviously from corporate and a
• 57:58
  lot of other things that you didn't highlight in the show. But you know
• 58:01
  business, you know small business especially, I mean you know all business,
• 58:07
  but especially small business and how to optimize and scale it. So, first
• 58:10
  and foremost, what do you consider a small business? So I think that
• 58:16
  there's there's degrees of small business. There's a way that IRS codes you.
• 58:21
  So anything under one hundred and eighty million it's small business, just in case
• 58:27
  you're wondering. So, oh, so there's all right, all of us
• 58:32
  here, but I I feed business and tranches. So there are the companies
• 58:38
  that are on the road to a million, and then there are companies that
• 58:43
  are sitting in the one to three space, and then you have about three
• 58:46
  to ten and then is this annually annually? Yeah, So so really what
• 58:52
  we're talking about when I say that, and you you point out a good
• 58:57
  note, like my niche of businesses rain is from zero to seven hundred and
• 59:01
  fifty million, So like that's really and it's a big band. And what
• 59:06
  I have the ability to do is understand what that billion dollar company needs to
• 59:12
  have from an operations perspective, and then can break it down to bite sized
• 59:15
  pieces to the business that literally just got their incorporation documents from the irs and
• 59:22
  the stake and are starting to sell their first product. And I can break
• 59:27
  it down to that, if you want to get to a billion one day,
• 59:29
  if you want to get to a million one day, if you want
• 59:30
  to get a five million, whatever it might be, these are the things
• 59:34
  that you need to have and when you need to have them in place to
• 59:37
  ensure a solid foundation, to ensure that once you build, you can optimize,
• 59:42
  to ensure that once you optimize, you can actually scale, and you
• 59:49
  don't. I'm very famous for saying this, and everybody that holds a C
• 59:52
  suite title always cringes when I say this, But a business doesn't really need
• 59:57
  anybody that's the chief of something until they're at about five million, and then
• 1:00:02
  really what that is is a chief of sales. Okay. So, and
• 1:00:09
  it's it gets very unpopular because everybody loves to call them the cheat themselves a
• 1:00:14
  chief of something. But the thing is that until you get above five million,
• 1:00:22
  you need experts. You need people that can help you execute and help
• 1:00:24
  you operate your business at all of You need somebody that can operate marketing,
• 1:00:29
  you need somebody that can operate fulfillment. If you have actual products, you
• 1:00:31
  need somebody that can they can actually operate your business and pay payroll and do
• 1:00:35
  all those things. But you don't need somebody that's got that chief title because
• 1:00:38
  they're really there to talk big vision and big picture of big strategy. And
• 1:00:43
  so the reason that I call myself a non call COEO is because I come
• 1:00:46
  in and you, just like an on call doctor, you call me when
• 1:00:50
  you need something. Hey, we're about to hire employees. What do we
• 1:00:53
  need to do currently, this is what I'm doing with a startup. We're
• 1:00:57
  running payroll for the first time today. Right, they just hired their first
• 1:01:00
  employees this month, So how do we do payroll? How do we create
• 1:01:04
  an employment contract? What else do we need to do? Oh, we
• 1:01:07
  need a holiday schedule so we can communicate to the employees when there's paid holidays.
• 1:01:12
  You know. I come in they said, we're ready to hire employees.
• 1:01:15
  Can you please help us figure out what to do? And that's what
• 1:01:16
  we did. Right. I'm not here forty hours a week. They're not
• 1:01:21
  paying me my humongous salary that I would normally make as a C suite executive,
• 1:01:25
  but they're bringing me in to help them define, optimize, and scale
• 1:01:31
  their business based on something specific that they have. Yeah, because nobody knows
• 1:01:37
  how to do that stuff. No, I mean, and furthermore, a
• 1:01:40
  lot of us are creatives, right, So like that makes me. I
• 1:01:44
  mean, just hearing you talk, I'm like glazing over. I'm like,
• 1:01:46
  oh, you know, like drolling out of them, Like, well,
• 1:01:49
  I don't you're speaking another language talk, you know, talk creative to me.
• 1:01:53
  I don't know what you're saying. So I love that you have this
• 1:01:59
  this very legs strategic brain that can come in and support and I want,
• 1:02:04
  like you creatives out there, you need to call Melissa because she has strategy
• 1:02:07
  calls. Right now. Okay, I'm going to be hiring Melissa, surprise,
• 1:02:10
  I'm telling you here, but this is what we need because if that's
• 1:02:15
  not your wheelhouse, if you don't think in that way, or you don't
• 1:02:19
  want to because you want to stay in your lane, you don't necessarily And
• 1:02:22
  I thank you for saying that we don't need to be hiring coos and CEOs
• 1:02:29
  and CFOs if we haven't freaking cracked six freaking figures yet, let alone a
• 1:02:35
  million, let alone four. I think that that's incredible advice because you hear
• 1:02:40
  a lot of chatter and a lot and it's all ego right, it's like,
• 1:02:44
  oh well, my CFO, let me, let me And it's like,
• 1:02:46
  wait, we don't even need that, which I think takes a lot
• 1:02:50
  of pressure off of us who are just trying to do what we love,
• 1:02:53
  but become more successful at that in terms of revenue, in terms of impact.
• 1:03:00
  So, speaking of hiring, if somebody is a solopreneur right now,
• 1:03:06
  or maybe they have a few contractors, who do you recommend being the first
• 1:03:12
  employee hire? And I realize all businesses are different, but I don't know
• 1:03:15
  if there's like a general answer or some direction you can lead us. So
• 1:03:22
  often what I recommend there's a few ways of looking at this. And I
• 1:03:27
  want to tea back off to the CEO comment that you made. There is
• 1:03:31
  no shame in a founder or an owner of a business saying that they are
• 1:03:36
  not the CEO. They're two very different things. The best thing that you
• 1:03:39
  can do for yourself right now is go google what the responsibilities are of a
• 1:03:44
  CEO and say do I want to do that? All day long? Because
• 1:03:45
  I'm guaranteeing you that most creatives are going to say, no, I don't
• 1:03:49
  want to do that. That sucks, It sounds super boring. I'm glazing
• 1:03:52
  over. So don't carry shame. Call yourself a founder, call yourself the
• 1:03:55
  owner. You don't have to call yourself the CEO. And as far as
• 1:03:59
  the or hire goes, what I recommend is that for businesses that have clients
• 1:04:09
  and spoiler alert, whether you're a direct to consumer or your business to business,
• 1:04:12
  you all have clients that your very first hire is somebody that supports customer
• 1:04:17
  success because what is going to make or break your business is client retention and
• 1:04:24
  referrals. When you are small, the majority of your new business comes because
• 1:04:29
  somebody had an excellent experience and they tell somebody else you can, and you
• 1:04:32
  know, all of everybody's going to come at me right now. You can
• 1:04:35
  pay for ads on Instagram and Facebook, you can do the best reels and
• 1:04:41
  YouTube videos and tiktoks, and you can dance your heart out. The bottom
• 1:04:45
  line is that your credibility comes from people, real people, real life people
• 1:04:49
  that know you and are willing to tell other people to come talk to you
• 1:04:55
  straight fact. That's I mean, that's the way that it goes. And
• 1:04:59
  the way that you keep them tighten in your circle is by blowing their mind
• 1:05:01
  with customer experience. If you can pay somebody, I don't know thirty grand
• 1:05:06
  fifty grand a year and they white glove experience, every single business and every
• 1:05:12
  single human that comes into contact with you, nobody's gonna leave. Everybody's going
• 1:05:16
  to be talking about how amazing you are. It's never a waste of money
• 1:05:19
  to invest in how you're servicing your people. Ever, Oh my gosh,
• 1:05:23
  that's such good advice and you're so right, right. I think as creatives
• 1:05:29
  we get in this weird experience because if you're in a specific industry, you
• 1:05:35
  know who else is in your industry, and you're probably following a lot of
• 1:05:39
  them, and it feels like you're a diamond dozen and you are. But
• 1:05:43
  like the person who's following you or the person who chooses to work with you,
• 1:05:48
  you could be the one person that they go to for that specific thing
• 1:05:53
  forever, right, like if you're a business coach or you're a mindset coach
• 1:05:58
  or whatever, like people need at all levels, and if you do a
• 1:06:01
  good job with that first interaction, you can be the one for that specific
• 1:06:05
  thing that you're offering. But if you fumble the ball because you're trying to
• 1:06:09
  do it all yourself and you don't get back to messages and people have issues
• 1:06:14
  and they can't get a hold of you or they can't log into their stuff,
• 1:06:16
  then they're just going to say this is too difficult. I'm moving on
• 1:06:19
  to so and so who also shares the same information one hundred percent. And
• 1:06:25
  I think one of the things that is most often overlooked about the importance of
• 1:06:29
  customer success is that if they're doing it well. They're in conversation with the
• 1:06:32
  clients and businesses that you support, and they are learning the other problems that
• 1:06:36
  they're having. So if you are in the business where you want to continue
• 1:06:40
  to introduce new offers, you want to introduce new products, you want to
• 1:06:42
  solve bigger and different problems, you're getting that from your customer success person because
• 1:06:46
  they're in real, live conversations helping them solve one problem and they're also hearing
• 1:06:51
  about something else that they're suffering with. And in some cases it might be
• 1:06:55
  we're not going to do that. That's not a vertical that we're going to
• 1:06:57
  go into. But you know what, we know somebody that you should go
• 1:07:00
  talk to. And by solving a problem for them, by just giving them
• 1:07:03
  a referral, you've retained the client. And so the value is two fold
• 1:07:10
  in that customer success So yes, of course you get to retain them,
• 1:07:12
  but they're also giving you a ton of information about what your competitors are doing,
• 1:07:15
  what other problems they're having. They can help you differentiate your business much
• 1:07:20
  faster if you have a customer success person keed in and having actual, real
• 1:07:25
  relationship building conversations as they come, be rueful beautiful. Okay, so customer
• 1:07:30
  success, what would be is there a second hire that would come naturally after
• 1:07:34
  that? You definitely need somebody that's an operator within your business. So notice
• 1:07:40
  I say operator and not chief operating officer. So you need somebody that's going
• 1:07:44
  to do the things that are going to ensure that you don't seek your business.
• 1:07:48
  So they are going to be receiving every invoice that you get and ensuring
• 1:07:53
  it gets paid on time. Most of the small businesses that I see on
• 1:07:58
  average are paying twenty five percent more for services than they should because they're paying
• 1:08:02
  late fees, or they're paying those invoices on credit cards, and then they're
• 1:08:08
  not paying off their credit card balance and they're paying interest. These are easy
• 1:08:12
  problems to solve. The operator also makes sure it's totally boring you guys,
• 1:08:17
  but they make sure that everything in the business is running correctly. They make
• 1:08:23
  sure that emails aren't bouncing, they make sure that meetings are happening, they
• 1:08:27
  make sure that contracts are getting signed. They will remind you, as the
• 1:08:30
  business owner, Hey, this freelancer you hired for three months in their contract
• 1:08:33
  expires tomorrow. What are you going to do? The operator is the one
• 1:08:39
  that makes sure that all of the cogs in the machine are oiled and they're
• 1:08:43
  running smoothly. And it allows the owner, it allows the creative, It
• 1:08:46
  allows the person at the forefront to focus on what they're best at, which
• 1:08:51
  is generally product sales, marketing, and client engagement, and they don't have
• 1:08:58
  to worry about all of the knits and nats that's required in order to make
• 1:09:01
  sure business is running. Got it okay? Anything else you want to add
• 1:09:06
  around hiring? Any advice for anybody who What about the person listening who is
• 1:09:15
  feeling trepidacious about hiring and they're worried about spending the money. They think that
• 1:09:20
  they can handle it themselves. What advice would you give? Is there a
• 1:09:25
  certain level that you think somebody needs to bring on that first layer of support.
• 1:09:30
  So there's a few things. The first thing that I'll say is for
• 1:09:34
  all small businesses, I recommend you don't hire an employee first. You hire
• 1:09:38
  a contractor first, or a freelancer, and you hire them for a three
• 1:09:43
  month period and whatever work you give them, what you want to do is
• 1:09:46
  make sure that by giving them that work, you're actually getting the result that
• 1:09:49
  you want. So the way that you figure out who that should be is
• 1:09:54
  very brass tacks. What do you hate doing and what can you hand somebody
• 1:09:58
  that you never have to think about it again. If it's going to require
• 1:10:01
  you to you know, write copy or to proof read or double check for
• 1:10:08
  the whole duration of the contract, that's not the right thing to delegate.
• 1:10:10
  This is literally like I can give this to you and I don't have to
• 1:10:13
  think, I don't have to think about it unless there's a problem, of
• 1:10:15
  course, But I can hand this over to you and you will have a
• 1:10:17
  long list of administrative things. You'll have a long list of maybe other things
• 1:10:20
  that you you know, like I'll write copy all day, but I don't
• 1:10:24
  want to sit in Canva and create graphics. Right, That's something you can
• 1:10:27
  delegate, So so contractor before employee always, And that's not only to do
• 1:10:34
  it's to verify that you need the role, and it's also to make sure
• 1:10:38
  that you have the right fit, the right person. Yes, the second
• 1:10:41
  thing is handing off things that are going to actually free up your time.
• 1:10:44
  So this is your proof of concept period to say if I give these things
• 1:10:46
  to somebody else, is actually going to give me time back to do the
• 1:10:48
  things that I really need to focus on to move the business forward. If
• 1:10:51
  it doesn't do that, then you've missed the mark and you need to try
• 1:10:54
  again. Let the contractor go start over, go again. Once you've confirmed
• 1:10:59
  that you have the right things, you've been able to hand them off to
• 1:11:02
  somebody successfully, you know how much time it's going to take, then you
• 1:11:06
  can hire the employee. What I do need to call out in all of
• 1:11:11
  these scenarios, contractor employee is that you always need to have a legal agreement
• 1:11:15
  between the two of you, between your company and their company, or your
• 1:11:19
  company and the individual, specifying the terms and conditions of the relationship, how
• 1:11:25
  much you're going to pay them, how you can terminate if they do not
• 1:11:29
  deliver. And there's a lot of in some of my consulting arrangements, I
• 1:11:33
  do this for people on their behalf. That's one of the things I'm doing
• 1:11:35
  for a client right now. But you do not ever agree to pay somebody
• 1:11:41
  for work until you have a contract. Just don't do it, Okay,
• 1:11:45
  it's you will end up at some point not getting what you wanted and having
• 1:11:50
  to pay for it anyway. Got it. That's huge advice I've never heard
• 1:11:55
  anybody give that advice before ever. So then would you recommend because you said
• 1:12:00
  that you can do it, you would just need somebody in your corner who
• 1:12:03
  can support you in writing up that contract. Or do you recommend having a
• 1:12:09
  lawyer as a small business, you know, in the background somewhere for certain
• 1:12:15
  specific purposes. So I'm definitely not a lawyer, So I should preface that
• 1:12:19
  advice I'm giving right now is based in my work experience. But what I
• 1:12:24
  can say is that small businesses can get themselves into a lot of trouble sometimes
• 1:12:29
  by hiring high priced external resources a CPA when you really need a bookkeeper if
• 1:12:38
  I don't need a CPA because they're different, and a general counsel. And
• 1:12:44
  so what I recommend most often small businesses, all you need is boilerplate templates
• 1:12:49
  for things to get through, and legal Zoom is a great resource for that.
• 1:12:55
  And if you are a creative and you're like, I don't understand,
• 1:12:58
  like this is Greek and I don't understand what this is, and what you
• 1:13:00
  can do is you can hire somebody at a significantly lower rate, like somebody
• 1:13:03
  like me that will say I understand all these things are structured. We're going
• 1:13:08
  to use an already lawyer approved template, and this is how we're going to
• 1:13:11
  make this go forward and make sure it looks great. On the flip side,
• 1:13:14
  often people when they don't understand contracts or they get a notice in the
• 1:13:16
  mail, they will pay their attorney five hundred dollars an hour to tell them
• 1:13:19
  it's no big deal, don't worry about it, or here, let me
• 1:13:24
  draft an email on your behalf or whatever, when they don't really need them.
• 1:13:27
  And the current business that I'm working for has probably spent fifty percent more
• 1:13:31
  in legal fees, and they needed to because the founder is not well versed
• 1:13:36
  in the topics, whereas somebody like I am, who can read the documents,
• 1:13:42
  who can register your business with the Secretary of State, who can do
• 1:13:45
  any of those things. You're paying a fraction on the dollar, so you
• 1:13:48
  just need to Lawyers are good. Yes, CPAs are good. Yes,
• 1:13:51
  you just need to make sure that you're only using them when you absolutely have
• 1:13:56
  to. Got it beautiful, that is? I mean we should come back
• 1:14:02
  and do a whole episode just on I like step by step hiring, because
• 1:14:08
  I know, I mean, I'm like soaking it in. I'm gonna go
• 1:14:11
  back and listen like, okay, okay, first customer service got it,
• 1:14:14
  but but I know so many other people. So I mean, just what
• 1:14:16
  you shared is game changing. So thank you for that. I ask my
• 1:14:20
  next question for you would be what do you see because we've already talked about
• 1:14:26
  hiring, and I know we can make a lot of mistakes there, but
• 1:14:30
  what are some other big common mistakes that you see small business owners making early
• 1:14:36
  on when their goal truly is they're taking their business seriously. They want to
• 1:14:42
  get to seven figures and beyond. But where do people trip themselves up?
• 1:14:46
  That you see? So it's in two lanes and they're very similar. I
• 1:14:53
  see a lot of business owners buy a bunch of tools very early. I'm
• 1:14:57
  gonna automate this thing, I'm gonna buy that thing. Tools are expensive often
• 1:15:02
  there's redundancies and their capabilities, and when you're small, you pay the most
• 1:15:10
  money that you'll pay for a tool. The bigger you get, the more
• 1:15:12
  negotiating power and leverage you have, so you can actually call a company and
• 1:15:16
  say, I understand that this is how much it is per seat, but
• 1:15:20
  you know what can we negotiate and they will always give you a discount.
• 1:15:24
  You have to be big enough to do that, right. So tools is
• 1:15:26
  one of them. And what that goes hand in hand with is that when
• 1:15:29
  you start automating things, you lose your ability to tell what's real and what's
• 1:15:34
  not real. And so data and metrics are going to tell you actually how
• 1:15:39
  your business is performing. So one of the things that business owners most often
• 1:15:44
  don't want to do because it's not sexy and it's hard and it's math and
• 1:15:47
  it's all the things, is determine what key performance indicators are going to use
• 1:15:53
  to measure their entire business. I know, I know, but the data
• 1:16:00
  doesn't lie because you want to get right. I mean, Kelly, if
• 1:16:03
  we use some examples that you gave, like if you had really tracked data
• 1:16:10
  a specific level for offers that you sold for two weeks versus when you took
• 1:16:15
  that same offer and sold it for seven days, right, and you can
• 1:16:18
  see how many dms am I getting day one, how many DMSM I getting
• 1:16:21
  day too? When do people start to buy right, Like, how do
• 1:16:24
  we you were able to compare over and over, you'd be able to see,
• 1:16:28
  well, for an offer this size that gives us transformation seven days is
• 1:16:33
  the right selling period fourteen days is a waste of my time or vice versa
• 1:16:36
  right, whatever it might be. If you start to track metrics and data,
• 1:16:42
  then you can determine how to bring offers into the world. You can
• 1:16:46
  determine what the right timing is to introduce products. Even over time, you're
• 1:16:50
  able to see, like, we should never launch a product in December because
• 1:16:54
  nobody wants to buy. These things are all over on Amazon watching the Deal
• 1:16:57
  of the Day right like you. You can really start to see those things,
• 1:17:00
  but often businesses don't. Metrics are not sexy. They really are not,
• 1:17:04
  but they are what will make or break your business. I think they're
• 1:17:09
  sexy when you when you start to understand them and you start to gamify it
• 1:17:13
  in a way that you that it begins working. It's not sexy when you
• 1:17:16
  first get started and you're like, I don't know what any of these means,
• 1:17:19
  and when you're not winning, that's not fun to look at. But
• 1:17:23
  it is. I mean, I've I've played around with more metrics lately than
• 1:17:27
  I have ever before, and you know, I'm going to talk more about
• 1:17:30
  that. And when you start to see the patterns and you start putting those
• 1:17:33
  patterns to use for you and you start to see the results of that.
• 1:17:39
  That's when metrics get sexy, and that's that's a secret of big corporations.
• 1:17:44
  They drive every decision based on data. It's facts and it's data and it's
• 1:17:49
  information. And one of the things that every small business is to understand is
• 1:17:56
  that the more data that they have, the more value their company has.
• 1:18:00
  So if you want somebody to buy your business one day, they're not just
• 1:18:03
  buying the widgets that you're selling. They're not just buying the employees. They're
• 1:18:06
  not just buying your talent. They're actually buying your client data. They're buying
• 1:18:13
  all of the relationships that you have, They're buying the email list that you
• 1:18:16
  have, they're buying the reach that you have. So the better you manage
• 1:18:21
  all of that data from the outset and the more you can demonstrate mastery over
• 1:18:27
  it aka metrics and KPIs, the more valuable your company becomes. The better
• 1:18:32
  decisions that you make, and when you can tell somebody that's looking to acquire
• 1:18:35
  your business, oh, this is how we determined that we only introduce products
• 1:18:40
  in the third quarter. Let's look at the last three years of data versus
• 1:18:43
  doing a second versus third quarter launch, and here's why, and you can
• 1:18:45
  actually have that real conversation back. Nobody can argue with facts, nobody can
• 1:18:50
  argue with data, right, it's just right there in front of you.
• 1:18:53
  But when you start automating things into tools, what you end up with is
• 1:18:56
  a bunch of dashboards all over the place, and you have a lack of
• 1:18:59
  anration of data. And then you can't see your trends because you're looking at
• 1:19:03
  how my social posts are performing one day versus how my campaign is performing over
• 1:19:06
  here, versus how my emails are doing over here, and you don't have
• 1:19:10
  a cohesive way to see what was actually happening inside of your business. That's
• 1:19:15
  interesting because one of my I mean, I'm pretty sure something that I'm going
• 1:19:19
  to be doing in twenty twenty four is trying my hand at ads again.
• 1:19:26
  I'll probably have somebody help me with that. But I hear what you're saying,
• 1:19:30
  and I totally see why you're saying that. So then do you recommend
• 1:19:34
  having a completely separate account? What would that look like if somebody were wanting
• 1:19:40
  to do both organic and ads. I think that what you need to do
• 1:19:45
  is look at everything that you're doing as an experiment, So this is something
• 1:19:49
  to my client, we're working on the framework for this right now. So
• 1:19:54
  they want to experiment with a new customer segment. So it's the same product
• 1:19:57
  but in a new customer segment. And so when you frame it as an
• 1:20:00
  experiment, you say, here's when it's going to run. Here's the hypothesis
• 1:20:04
  that I'm making. So if I do these things, this is the result
• 1:20:08
  that I'm going to get. And then this is how I'm going to measure
• 1:20:11
  my performance. And then you can have you can go you can run two
• 1:20:14
  experiments. You can say I'm going to do this one thing and I'm going
• 1:20:16
  to do organic and I'm going to do paid ads and we're going to see
• 1:20:18
  what happens. But then you have just like you would in science class,
• 1:20:23
  you're going to have very set step of procedures and then a way to measure
• 1:20:28
  what the results are, and then you can do it over time. Right
• 1:20:31
  the next time, then you say I'm going to do both. I'm going
• 1:20:33
  to do it this way and that way, and you can see the results.
• 1:20:36
  But if you're very intentional with how you're framing it out, then you
• 1:20:40
  have some controls in place so that you can see what the measurements are and
• 1:20:44
  how it's going to perform, and then you know where to spend your time
• 1:20:46
  and your money the next time. Okay, so track track your metrics.
• 1:20:50
  Is there a tool you recommend that somebody could do this easily on? So
• 1:20:57
  this is where it becomes a mixed bag kind of on what you're using inside
• 1:21:00
  of your business. So we're using a sauna with the client that I'm working
• 1:21:06
  right now. I know some people really like Monday, you know, so
• 1:21:10
  I think you can use either one of those things. What I would say
• 1:21:13
  is that if you're really looking to automate it, the best thing that you
• 1:21:19
  can do is go to fiver not joking and find a freelancer that knows how
• 1:21:27
  to use Zapier integrations really well. And then what they can do is they
• 1:21:30
  can take all of your existing things. So they can take your mail chip
• 1:21:32
  or your floadesk account. They can take your Facebook pixel for the ads,
• 1:21:36
  they can take your CRM if you have one for your clients, they can
• 1:21:41
  take whatever data points you want, and they can use Zapier as an integration
• 1:21:44
  point and they can actually pull it all together and then inside of a tool
• 1:21:46
  like asauna or something else. They can create you a customed dashboard and you
• 1:21:50
  can see exactly what's happening. Y'all. Did I mention that Melissa does strategy
• 1:21:59
  calls and those the things I help with, right? Is that I would
• 1:22:02
  help you brivate person. I've actually run that project. So all you had
• 1:22:05
  to say was like, this is what we're going to do, and this
• 1:22:09
  is when we need a reporting by and then I get inside your house a
• 1:22:12
  little bit and you give me all the cleaning supplies so to speak, and
• 1:22:14
  then we get it done. Wow. That I mean that right there is
• 1:22:17
  sexy to me, just like, Hey, Melissa, this is what I
• 1:22:20
  need help with and you that's exciting to me. Thank God there are women
• 1:22:28
  like you out there who love to do this kind of work. Can I
• 1:22:31
  get an amen? Okay? So my last question for you before you tell
• 1:22:36
  us where we can all find you and book calls with you and all the
• 1:22:40
  things. For those of us listening right now who want to optimize, who
• 1:22:45
  want a scale, who want to continue to grow, what would be in
• 1:22:49
  this This is a you may not even be able to answer this, This
• 1:22:53
  may be too complicated a question, but is there something that we could do
• 1:22:59
  today this week that would, I don't know, ensure us that we're on
• 1:23:04
  the right track. Is there something that we get clear on. I know
• 1:23:08
  we need to know where we're going, so we already know that, but
• 1:23:11
  is there something else that comes to mind that you have a feeling that most
• 1:23:14
  of us probably aren't doing or aren't doing well, that would help us to
• 1:23:17
  see results a little bit faster. So one exercise that I love to assign
• 1:23:27
  people when I start working with them is to create a list. Literally,
• 1:23:33
  don't pull any resources up just right now, get out a piece of paper,
• 1:23:38
  get a pen. List every single expense inside your business and how much
• 1:23:43
  you're spending on it right now. Just write it down off the top of
• 1:23:46
  your head. Once that list is done, I want you to go pull
• 1:23:51
  up whatever bank account you're paying for business expenses through whatever credit card you're using,
• 1:23:57
  like all of the things like knowing the entrepreneurs that I know it is
• 1:24:01
  multiple bank accounts, multiple credit cards, thanks some other crazy slash fund somewhere
• 1:24:05
  else. I'm not joking you by watching something real time earlier today, and
• 1:24:10
  then I want you to write down every single expense that's hit those accounts.
• 1:24:15
  It's business related for the last ninety days. And then I want you to
• 1:24:17
  compare that list to the list that you wrote down. I guarantee you,
• 1:24:24
  I guarantee you that the actual expense list is in the range of fifteen to
• 1:24:29
  thirty percent higher than what you think. And the reason that this is important
• 1:24:33
  is because you are setting your revenue goals, you are putting the energy into
• 1:24:39
  your sales approach. You are putting your energy into a new client acquisition based
• 1:24:43
  off of that list on your paper, not based off of your bank account.
• 1:24:48
  So good, that's huge, That's huge. I love that and I
• 1:24:53
  get asked it always, and I understand why people ask me this question,
• 1:24:57
  but it frustrates me a little bit when people are like, what should I
• 1:25:00
  price this thing? Like what what should my prices be? And it's like,
• 1:25:04
  I can't answer that question. What's your overhead? What are your business
• 1:25:10
  goals? Right? Like, like, if you don't know what your true
• 1:25:13
  overhead is, then how are you going to price anything accurately? This is
• 1:25:16
  why people have to go get another job, because they're not connecting what's actually
• 1:25:21
  happening in the business with what they're charging and what they're making happen. As
• 1:25:26
  a business result, so there's a mismatch. So that's huge because I know
• 1:25:31
  right now, I mean, this already gives me anxiety because I'd come up
• 1:25:34
  with like ten things and I know there's thirty one hundred percent. And it's
• 1:25:39
  always little things, right, It's always like the app that you're spending six
• 1:25:43
  dollars on every single month. That adds up and if there's one thing,
• 1:25:46
  there's probably a few more. Okay. That's that's such a tangible, actionable
• 1:25:50
  tip. Thank you, You're welcome, and I guarantee that you will find
• 1:25:55
  cost savings because what I would also argue, and this is what I do
• 1:26:00
  with people, is if that list had ten things on it and your bank
• 1:26:01
  account has thirty, then I need you to tell me why you need those
• 1:26:04
  other twenty. Okay, if they are not top of mind to you,
• 1:26:09
  then they are not things that you're touching and using every day. So how
• 1:26:12
  important are they? Two? Really? Boom beautiful, Melissa Franks. This
• 1:26:17
  is an incredible conversation, so freaking helpful. I feel like this was a
• 1:26:24
  coaching call for me, which I'm so thankful for. So thank you so
• 1:26:28
  much. Where can everybody find you? Where can they listen to your podcast.
• 1:26:31
  We'll link the place for people to book a call with you, but
• 1:26:35
  tell us what we need to know. Sure, so I am on Instagram
• 1:26:41
  at Melissa underscore Franks is very easy. In fact, all of my handles
• 1:26:45
  are those things. So Instagram is the best place to find me. LinkedIn
• 1:26:50
  is another great place. And my network is your network. So for anybody
• 1:26:54
  that's in corporate or small business or whatever, and you find something in my
• 1:26:58
  network that would help you, just send me a message and I will make
• 1:27:01
  the connection happen. Happy to do so. And then, like Ellie said,
• 1:27:08
  I've got strategy calls that I am offering right now. If you're interested
• 1:27:13
  in more of the on call COO services, I do have room for one
• 1:27:17
  or two more clients, depending on side one because I'm a snag one.
• 1:27:21
  Sorry, there you go. One more client, and so those require conversation,
• 1:27:28
  So you know, hit me up on Instagram more scheduled the strategy call
• 1:27:32
  and then we can really figure out exactly what you need. The one thing
• 1:27:35
  that I pride myself on, real real strongly is that I'm going to be
• 1:27:41
  very candid with you about what you do and don't need. And if you're
• 1:27:44
  not ready for me. That's okay, because I've got some products that you
• 1:27:46
  can buy. Two. But let's have a strategy call and see how we
• 1:27:49
  can kick off twenty twenty four. Super Strong, Beautiful, You're a boss.
• 1:27:55
  I admire you. You're an amazing mom, You're an amazing business owner
• 1:28:00
  and businesswoman and just human in general. So I'm honored to know you,
• 1:28:04
  and I'm so thankful for your time and you sharing your genius with all of
• 1:28:09
  us today. Thank you. This is a lot of fun. We'll have
• 1:28:12
  you back anytime.