Girls Who Do Stuff

Syliva is an author and financial wiz for small businesses. She shares her story about how she created her dream job.

Sylvia shares  ways to make more money as a small business owner

• Increase the number of clients (this one is the most common but also results in you working every night until midnight)
•  Rasing the average order value, VistaPrint is really good at this
• Some examples of add ons for service products are
  • private coaching
  • photos of events for portraits
• Decreasing your costs (all the little subscriptions add up, maybe there is one tool that can replace a lot of those little one-offs)  

We discussed the power of outsourcing. The mindset issues you need to overcome to start outsourcing. In the early phases of her business, Sarah mentioned how frustrated she was with people saying you should outsource when she thought "I don't have the money to pay to outsource!" We discussed the possibility of hiring on a specific project on Upwork to get started instead of having to bring on an employee.

We also talked about the importance of planning special days. This is another form of self-care. It is important to carve out time to do self-care days. Sylvia tries to do a self-care day once a week because as entrepreneurs the weeks can blur together.

The Girls Who Do Stuff talk about how to handle mommy-guilt and managing time as a business owner. The guilt can be strong and we need to give ourselves some grace. We discuss batch processes versus just working when free-time is available in your schedule.

"If you theme your days and batch your work, it's a lot more efficient that way. And it opens up the door for you to have self-care days or maybe creative days, right? Cause if you're bouncing between so many meetings and. Networking meetings or whatever it is, then all of a sudden you don't have that time bandwidth to do creative work because you're constantly interrupted." - Sylvia

Also mentioned in this episode:

• VistaPrint
• ClickFunnels
• Kartra
• Upwork for hiring outsourcers

Haley Lynn Gray founded Leadership Girl with the radical notion that women can harness their unique power and skills to become highly effective leaders. 

She is the best-selling author of Leadership Girl and a graduate of Duke’s Fuqua School of Business with an MBA with a concentration in entrepreneurship and Innovation.  She has experience with starting up successful small businesses, growing them, then selling them.

Haley has worked with hundreds of small business owners since Leadership Girl was founded.  She has a passion for helping their owners find ways to grow their business, acquire visibility, and transform into the go-to expert in their industry while saving them significant amounts of money.

Haley is the founder of the 64,000 strong Women’s Entrepreneur Network Group on Facebook, which she successfully grew in only two years.  It is recognized as one of the best, most engaging, and helpful groups of this type on Facebook.  

Haley on the Women's Entrepreneur Network Group: I started the group to put resources and training and other information in front of small business owners, primarily women. It's about 95% women and 5% men. And I thought that it was really important to put high-quality information in front of people, get them engaged, and make it a very limited promo kind of environment.

"It's 64,000 people, but it's not everybody saying, Hey, buy all my stuff, all my stuff, buy all my stuff. And it was important to me to make it really valuable for people. And over the years, I've tried to take it to a whole new level striving to make it a better and better and more supportive environment. So I've been working on bringing in other experts that are carefully curated, who are experts in their field, people who do things that are perhaps adjacent to what I do. Or they may even do very similar things to what I do, but they happen to be experts in their niche. So I'm trying to bring those people into the group and promote their businesses as well.

But also. Bring those resources to the members of the group and cut through a lot of the fluff and some of the nonsense and the BS that you see in the online world."

Many of us were taught that you don't talk about money. The topic is especially taboo for women.

The Girls Who Do Stuff share their experience with their money mindset. Is money bad? Is wanting money bad? Are the views you had of money that you were brought up on still true for you today?

We have a great conversation about setting pricing. What pricing yourself too low does to you, other business owners, and your customers.   

Melissa realized she had a mindset problem after she had racked up over $75,000 in consumer debt all while managing a $50 million budget at work to the penny. So she knew it wasn't an issue of skill but something else, there was emotion wrapped in it. She had an epiphany and put in the work. She took charge of the emotion and the strategy to deal with the problem.

Some money tips from Melissa:

• When looking at what came in, what went out, look at the bigger piece of information as well, which is was it in alignment with what you want or was it in violation? Your dreams, your values, your priorities, and your money should all be going in the same direction.
• Start to develop a money win for the day. Do something well financially every day. They will begin to build up and at the end of the week, you can celebrate all the things that went well.
• What you really want is to have your life and your money aligned.
• Financial happiness and security comes down to your relationship with money and that’s not something that comes easily. 

If you’re a rockstar at work, but struggling with managing money at home, you’re not alone. Designed for you, Master Your Money Now offers programs and coaching to help you fix your relationship with money forever and for good.

FINANCIAL EMPOWERMENT PROGRAMS + COACHING

Founded by Melissa Ternes, Master Your Money Now provides financial empowerment programs and coaching to help successful women get out of the all-too-common money traps of paycheck to paycheck living, juggling money while growing a business, and not having enough to invest. She shows women how to go from making money to building wealth, without the pain of deprivation and restriction.

Find more info on Melissa on MasterYourMoneynow.com

The ladies of Vibe share with the Girls Who Do Stuff the journey of how they went from knowing they wanted to start a business, to running the successful coworking space inside of the Cary Towne Center Mall. Learn how Vibe discovered their signature vibe on this episode.

Leah Campbell has a varied 20-year career working in the fields of public relations, marketing, and administration.  One common thread with all of them -- and what she enjoys doing most – is connecting people. Whether it was arranging a play date for her son, a love connection for a coworker, or an introduction between two enterprising solopreneurs.

Nanette Mattox has worked as a solopreneur graphic designer for small business clients and non-profits for the past 10 years. She has enjoyed a long career in retail department store advertising, catalog, and marketing as a senior-level art director and graphic designer. She has managed teams of highly productive creatives in a fast-paced environment and interfaced with all levels of senior management. She has a, “get it done” work ethic. Active with The Heart of Cary Association’s Events Committee, she and her family have enjoyed living in Cary for the past 10 years.  Nanette’s passion for cooking had her working part-time at a local kitchen store, loving chatting with customers about shared foodie experiences.

Listen to how these women leveraged their passions to create a business to empower other women to thrive in business.

There are a lot of myths about female working partnerships. Leah and Nanette discuss this topic.

We also discussed the role of collaboration between business owners and how a community of like-minded people often breeds incremental success for everyone involved in the community.

Leah and Nannette discuss what they've learned from their first year as Vibe. How they went from focusing on "Who needs an office?" to "How can we serve you?" How they work to creatively meet the needs of their business owners with solutions that are at times, highly personalized.

So if “working from home” no longer works for you, check out Vibe.
Also, follow them on Facebook and LinkedIn

Also mentioned in this episode:

• Podcast Cary
• Vibe has a great space for events!

Revolution Studios owner, Somer Handley has been recognized not only as a leader in photography but also serves as a business mentor to those in her industry.  Somer and her studio have been named the Face of Boudoir and Glamour Photography for four consecutive years by MidTown Magazine and is most recently featured in The KNOW the past two. The KNOW is a publication of  Women Leaders, Mentors, Creators, and Entrepreneurs you need to “KNOW” and be doing business with!  In 2019-2020 Somer was chosen to lead the KNOW Women of Raleigh as their Ambassador.

The Girls Who Do Stuff discuss boudoir and Glamour photography with Somer. How does she guide the experience to help women feel empowered and sexy? Jenny shares her experience with our listeners.

Somer shares about what it feels like for her to be operating in her gift and it starts a conversation about how often times men have no issue standing up at a conference and saying "This is my Gift" where women are more likely to qualify their statements with things like, "I'm not being cocky" or try to shrink themselves instead of owning what they are good at.

Somer shares what she has learned about preventing burnout in growing her business and her brand.

Somer also serves at the Know Raleigh, Currently ranked 7th in growth for businesses owned by women, Raleigh is booming with female entrepreneurial energy. They release the KNOW Raleigh book, help members connect with tribe members and host public events.

You can find out more about Revolution Studios on their website | Facebook | Instagram

Katie understands the challenges of returning to work after a career break because she'd been there! As the Founder of Back to Business, her mission is to help women re-enter the paid workforce by providing professional job search advice and resources, and by encouraging their connection with employers who are interested in this untapped talent pool.

Kaite shares about her experience of wanting to return to the workforce but finding it very challenging. In fact, it took nearly two years! And when she began to share her experience she found she wasn't alone. This is why she wanted to start the Back to Business Women's Conference to share what she had learned to help other women gain the skills and confidence necessary to return to employment.

After talking about the idea of the conference for a while she was challenged by her sister to do something about it. So Katie printed up some one-hour business cards and went to a job fair and introduced herself to people and told them about the conference she was starting in the fall!

Katie told the story of how the conference went from idea to reality in a short amount of time and how it has grown over the years.

Jenny and Sarah ask her Katie to share all about the experience of launching a conference and the lessons learned along the way. Was there pushback from the "mom" community for returning to work? Katie didn't feel that it was her experience. She felt like she was very supported by her friends along the journey.

Katie has also started a podcast called "Get a Job, Here's How" with Katie Dunn to help you get a job. And she's not just going to share advice on topics in each episode - she is going to tell you EXACTLY how to do it, because "Here's how" are two of her favorite words!

Find out more about:

• The Back to Business Conference Website
• Facebook
• Twitter
• The Get a Job, Here's How Podcast

Tango is not just another sex box. Candice went to Harvard and had to overcome the stigma of being more than a "Birchbox for dildos". She learned how to apply science to intimacy and created her company.

After taking sexuality studies at Harvard she learned to critically analyze porn. This was for her, like many people, her first introduction to sex ed, but she learned quickly that pornography didn't translate into relationship success.

She dedicated herself to figuring out what makes for healthy intimacy and became an educator. After getting her masters in secondary education one of the things she really enjoyed was gamification for learning and using gamification to create bonds. Her passion project was trying to distill the science of better sex into these hands-on experiences that are fun and enjoyable to talk about and add some spice and variety into the bedroom.

Candice talks about the benefits of having playfulness in your relationships, the different types of kits they offer and why she was passionate about creating this resource for people.

She also shared about her own experience of being sexually assaulted that lead to the creation of the healing kit and working with a trauma expert to help others start the healing process.

"My body became a weapon that I used against myself. It became something where, I would put myself in an unsafe space, with people who I wasn't necessarily sure that they would look out for me." - Candice

Tango got started when Candice started to think about the ways we can think outside of the box to encourage adults to have healthier relationships without like saying, sit down and read this book right now. How can we make it fun for them? 

Also mentioned in this episode:

• Girl Wash Your Face by Rachel Hollis
• CrowdFund for Tango 2.0 on IndieGoGo

You can Follow Tango on Facebook | Pinterest | Twitter | or email a question

MeiLani unpacks some of the practical aspects of how her business (Why NOT ME? AirBnB) works for our listeners.

She shares the story of her son being diagnosed with cancer and how it caused her and her husband to evaluate how they were spending their time. They had reached the point in their cancer journey where she felt she could no longer "sit around and wait for him to die." Struggling to find the time to spend more time with her four kids she returned to her dream of entrepreneurship that had gotten placed on the back burner.

MeiLani shared about how grateful she was for the Ronald McDonald House and the opportunity it afforded their family to have not just a home away from home, but a house away from house experience. Where they could enjoy meals, play games, and spend quality time together. It was this experience that led her to want to provide the same experience for other families, whether they are dealing with illness, or long-term students, flight attendants, or even sports teams. There is something about staying at a home versus a hotel/motel that is ideal for connecting with others.

Instead of dwelling on questions like "why me?" Why did this happen to us? MeiLani and her husband took the cancer diagnosis as a challenge and embraced the mindset of "Why Not Me?" Raise up and turn your trials into triumph. So after Why Not Me AirBnB, she started other classes to help children learn to invest, and courses on mindset.

"One of my pet peeves is when people ask "Where do you find the time to do all that?" I don't find it, I make it."- MeiLani Hock.

Running a real-estate business is tough and MeiLani talks about how she reconciles building a team, her faith, ethics, and the day to day or running her business. She shares about how to train people. She also shares about how to handle situations when they are "less than smooth". She calls it planning your divorce while you're still in love. Being clear about expectations and what will happen if expectations are not met. 

Upcoming for MeiLani

• She will be launching the "Why Not Me Academy" Podcast
• She has a book coming out soon
• They are hosting AirBnB host retreats and Power Couple retreats.

Find out more from her website

Sarah shares about her struggle with launching her second business because she had an idea of what she wanted it to be and it wasn't until she embraced the surrender and let it be what it was meant to be. Joe Woolworth from Relevant Media Solutions and Podcast Cary shares about his first year in business and goals that he set for his business.

Creating the habit of identifying and celebrating the win is important for business owners and entrepreneurs. 

We address the idea of a "Stupid Goal". Your goals can change.  Your goals can shift.  And if you are doing something because you should instead of because you want to it may be time to reconsider that goal. The obligation of getting it done should not overcome the joy of the task you set out to do. 

Jenny shares about how she got into social work. After nearly failing out of college, she had to work her but off to get into grad school. She was the kid who shouldn't have gone straight into college and wished she would have known a mentor to help her at that time in her life. But after learning from her undergrad of what not to do, she took fewer classes over a longer period of time and set herself up for success in grad school. This chapter of her life led to her graduating with honors and was part of the catalyst for her exploring the entrepreneurial track in her life. She quickly found herself with a terrible boss and thought about changing career paths completely, and this detour brought her back to her first love, photography.

Sarah shares her catalyst to becoming an entrepreneur was through trauma. Putting herself in dangerous situations as a social worker with gangs, group homes, and having to call the cops from her car. She couldn't help but feel that this is not what mental health was supposed to be. She is an advocate at heart and cannot stand mistreatment.

"This is not in alignment with who I am. I want to create a safe haven where clients and therapists know they will be treated right. If I can't change the system, then I will remove myself from the system and create my own." - Sarah

We discussed the changes facing the upcoming generation's approach to college, employment, and fulfillment. Imagine if it were possible to gain years of work experience to identify your passions and what aligns with your personality before choosing to fulfill higher education. 

Also mentioned in this episode:

• StoryBrand by Donal Miller
• Western Governors University