Digital Chatter Episode #008: Michele Scism

Eric: Welcome everyone to Digital Chatter. Today my guest is Michele Scism. She is a business coach and the founder of Decisive Minds and serial entrepreneur. Michele say hi to everyone.

Michele: Hey everybody so excited to be here and be with all of you.

Eric: All right. So Michele you are truly an expert in business and I brought you on today because I want people to learn a little bit about how you got started. So why don't you go on ahead and tell everyone out there you know how you got started.

Michele: Yeah. So my story is you know the classic serial entrepreneur story maybe. I was born into a family that had kids to guarantee they had employees. So I was working in the grocery store by the age of five. You know we had a store, a trucking company, a wrecker service, a mobile home park. If we thought we could make a dime out of it, we did it. And so I did. I grew up in an existence. If you want to you go get it. You know there is empowerment in entrepreneurship. My entire family was full of entrepreneurs and that just is how I started out life and how I just continue. So I Eric, I'm one of those people, I just eat, sleep, breathe business you know that's who I am and that's how I got started. You know in my experience is working through all those businesses, and then I went to college, got an accounting degree and I spent about 20 years in the trucking industry. Built our trucking company to a point where we sold it in 2007 and my entire family retired. And so you know that was kind of the that chapter and then there became a new chapter of decisive minds and how can I help entrepreneurs do what I did.

Eric: That's great. That's great. So are you, you are one of the lucky ones I would say, in terms of you have a fairly great background in between your finance background and you really were taught to be driven. You were taught to never settle. I think that's something that's great to be taught. I had a very similar background my mother as an entrepreneur, serial entrepreneur. She is phenomenal at it and it's still at the course though. So you know, what brought you from where you are way back then to here and maybe walk me through some more specifics like maybe after the whole trucking company you decided to start up this stuff. I mean walk me through that a little bit.

Michele: I'll tell you what happened is I you know, I retired and I thought you know I was in my early 40s I thought I'm just going to travel the world and do whatever I want and things are going to be great. And I forgot my kids were in high school and my husband sitll owned a business. And then I found myself on on the couch in 2009 of my there's got to be more to life than this. I can't take this. I guess maybe it's that you can't take the entrepreneur out of the girl, kind of thing. And so I just kind of started searching and just checking things out online and looking for you know what is out there where the opportunities. I didn't even know business coaching in the form that we do it existed. You know we as we had businesses we would have mentors you know our CPA's and our attorneys and throughout our business that we never really had a consultants or a coach right.

Michele: So I didn't really know what that was and threw some twists and turns and you know how we chase things on the internet. I ended up at an event in November of 2009. What we would call a three day marketing event right now. Right. I just started the business building event. You know went to this event and I watched this guy Adam Raincy standing on stage I could finish his sentences. I knew how to build businesses- he had my, he had the same background that I did in that he had been in business his entire life. And so I walked up to him said listen you make really good money doing this, right? And he said yes,