Digital Chatter Episode #014: Emi Kirschner

Eric: Hello and welcome everybody to another Digital Chatter series. My name is Eric Sharpe and today I am with Emi Kirschner. Emi, say hi to everyone.

Emi: Hey everybody.

Eric: All right. Emi is a lot of things and let me look at my list here. Emi is a business coach, a speaker and author, a serial entrepreneur and an investor and Emi, we just kind of went through the list. You're so many amazing things and I look forward to learning a little bit more about you today. So why don't you tell everyone out there how you, a little bit about how you got started.

Emi: Absolutely. And first of all, cool and thank you so much. I'm really excited to be here with you today and looking forward to our conversation. How I got started. I really have to blame my older kid. It was all his fault. Now he, I guess there's a couple of different layers. One, I've always like not wanted to work nine to five. I like making my own schedule. I only want to do things my way. Having my own business seems to fit into that, but the catalyst for me starting back really almost 20 years ago was my son had digestive issues as a baby and we went so, you know, doctors and tests and labs and specialists and blah blah blah. And the last pediatric, gastroenterologist said to me, we don't know what's wrong with him, see you later. Sorry. And I was like freaked out.

Emi: I mean I was in my mid twenties. I had no clue as a parent, just in general. And then I had no clue what to do with my kid who was like really, really sick. So I started researching and that led me to.. That moment really led me into my first business as a caterer and then as a personal chef. And I've been, just kind of one thing after another. I started my coaching practice as a health coach because I want people to feel good. Like that's the underlying thing is I want people to really feel amazing. And the funny thing about working with entrepreneurs whom I've always worked with, is that when you start talking about why you're not eating and why you're overeating and you're standing in front of the fridge at 10:00 at night, wolfing down a tub of ice cream is really the stress, my sales aren't where I want them to be. I don't know how I'm going to pay my bills, etc. Etc. Etc. We've all been there.

Eric: Oh yeah. We've all been there, absolutely.

Emi: And I just, I started solving those problems and my background in and outside of, you know, running businesses is business anyways. I have financial services experience, I have project management experience, I have events experience, I've marketing and product management experience. So wrapping all of those things up really allows me to help my clients take their business from either new or new-ish or they feel like they've kind of plateaued a little bit and really have them pop.

Eric: Did you go to school for any of this? I mean, how, you know, how did you..?

Emi: The school of along the way? I mean, my business, my degree is in business. I spent a lot of time learning. I've invested in some great coaching along the way, so I mean it's a number of different things. I will have to say that probably catering taught me the most about sales and customer service.

Eric: Why is that?

Emi: Because it's, you're out there. It's really funny because I started catering as a server. I had no intention of having my own business. I had no intention. I just wanted to do it. Side gig make some extra cash.

Eric: Pretty good money. It's stressful. Yeah,

Emi: I loved it and I loved that chaos but you're really out there to get rid of an x quantity of food but not too much and a lot of times,and I was working for a really high end caterer. So a lot of times people were super uncomfortable with what we were serving and if we came back with our...