CEO Of Uplevel Media, LLC: Karen Yankovich AKA The Linkedin Boss – S2E11 (#39)

S2E11 – Karen Yankovich – powered by Happy Scribe

Resume on that, it is recording, all right, so 3, 2, 1. Welcome welcome back to Boss Uncaged Podcast. On today’s show, we have Karen. I’ve deemed her “The LinkedIn Boss”, and she will tell you for obvious reasons why, surely. So, welcome to the show, Karen. How are you doing today?

I’m good. Thanks so much for having me here. It’s fun to be here.

Great. Great. So obviously, I’ve named you the LinkedIn boss. You want to kind of give our listeners a little bit of why I called you to LinkedIn, boss?

Yeah yeah. So I accept that title. I’ll accept that title because I really do love and really I can really geek out on LinkedIn because I think it’s a platform that’s very much overlooked by a lot of podcasters and entrepreneurs and small business professionals. And frankly, anyone that’s looking to really elevate their career in one way, shape or form, because it is the platform that you can control who you know, right? In the in the equation it’s not what you know, it’s who you know, well LinkedIn gives you the ability to control that. So why wouldn’t you. Right? And that can change everything for your life and your business and your bank account. So that’s what I focus. I help people really see the power in building strategic and profitable relationships and using LinkedIn. LinkedIn’s the tool. It is really not about LinkedIn, it’s about the relationship building. But we have LinkedIn. So it’s a tool that helps us meet really cool people that can change everything.

OK, well, in that definition, the podcast is now officially over. She told you who she is and now you know why she used the LinkedIn boss. Right? So in three to five words defined yourself.

Oh, OK. So three to five words to defined myself. So I am passionate about the things that I that I am passionate about. I can definitely go a little overboard with that. I am strategic, but I am also hard centered. So I think I have a really interesting blend of right and left brain. What other words can I use to describe myself? You know, really grateful for all of the people in my life and I live my life from a place of gratitude wherever I can. That pretty much describes it.

I mean, that’s that’s a great summary. All right. So just to take back in time a little bit right now, you’re the what I’m deeming to be the LinkedIn boss, that journey didn’t obviously happen yesterday right? So how did you really get into mastering LinkedIn? What did that journey felt like?

So, you know, I’m a little bit older than you. And my background is sales. When I started doing sales it was you know, you needed to talk to people, you needed to meet people. You need toprospect. Cold calls. Right. Like actually talking to people. But at the end of the day, what what brought in the biggest sales was the relationships that you built. So even when social media came out and I loved social media and I was teaching social media in general in the beginning, one of the things that I learned really quickly in this digital world was that niching really was important because if there’s somebody that says I need a social media speaker, seventeen thousand names get thrown out. But if somebody says I need a LinkedIn speaker, 10 people say call Karen. So I knew that I needed to kind of niche as I went down my journey teaching digital marketing, like I’ve always done marketing, so when I shifted to digital marketing, I knew that that was important. And what I found was that I saw what a lot of people and I would do is I’d ask people where are you getting most of your business now? And 99 out of 100 times they’d say referrals. And I’d be like, well, how can I best mimic that using the social media tools that are out there? And LinkedIn was that tool for me. I also think that we want to know more now about the people we do business with than we did twenty five years ago. So so LinkedIn checked all those boxes. So I found myself over and over, kind of bringing LinkedIn to the forefront when I was working people with people on their digital marketing to the point where that’s really all I do now, because, frankly, it is hard enough to just stay on top of all the changes LinkedIn makes, never mind all the changes all the other platforms make right? So so that’s kind of why I do what I do. I just found that, you know, if you’re going to tell me that most of your business comes from referrals, then why are we tweeting 600 times a day? Right? Like it’s it can be integrated in it. But what’s the path to the biggest payoff? And that always is LinkedIn. So I just said, that’s why I’m staying there.

Nice. So in that journey right, I mean, I’ve interviewed dozens of people and one person, I deemed her the Queen of the night and she told us this story about being at a bar one time at a bouncer dragging somebody out. So LinkedIn is a completely different space right? So what’s the most craziest thing you’ve experience dealing with LinkedIn customers,

With LinkedIn customers?

Or just in LinkedIn in general.

So I have a pretty funny story that LinkedIn shines in. About six months ago. So it’s December 2020 when we’re recording this. Right. And so once in the spring of 2020, height of the pandemic. My granny is ninety five years old and she’s the biggest Mets fan on the planet. She knows everything. In the nursing home her entire room is filled with Mets paraphernalia. She’s just a massive Mets fan. So I decided I was going to go to Twitter and I was going to get her some Mets juju for her birthday because she couldn’t go anywhere. She was locked in a room for her 95th birthday. So I tweeted the hell out of it. I tweeted Mets players, old Mets players, managers, and I have one hundred and twenty thousand Twitter followers. So I felt like that would give me some visibility, crickets. I went to LinkedIn. I said, let me see who’s in the Mets organization. I went to LinkedIn. I went to the company page. I messaged three or four people within ten minutes. The social media manager for LinkedIn said, “I love this. Give me a little time. I’m going to get you a video”. And then within a half an hour, the manager, the general manager of the Mets, had recorded a video and tweeted it for my aunt. So I use Twitter galore. Right. And I couldn’t get anywhere. But when I went to LinkedIn and went human to human to people in twenty minutes, I had a personalized video from the GM of the Mets for my aunt, which was so fun. Right. But take that concept to everything else you’re doing. Right. We can be we can be pushing noise out all over the place and we’re just getting lost in the in the crazy noise versus actually talking to people. Right. Which is what we do on LinkedIn. It just it cuts above all of the other platforms. So that was a really fun LinkedIn win story for me. I was like, this is so fun and I’m so glad that it was LinkedIn. I didn’t I don’t know why I didn’t go there first. Right. Who knows.

Yeah, it’s funny that you said that I don’t think that we talked about like our backgrounds, but, you know, I’m originally from Brooklyn. So the Mets was my team.

Yea, You got it. So you’ve suffered a lot of years as well, right?

Well, yeah. I was there when when they won everything back in 80. So I went to school watching it live. So obviously the Mets is still my team. So I walked around in Mets hat and everybody in Atlanta *inaudible*

If you go to my Twitter account, you’ll see the PIN tweet is all the videos of my aunt and our Mets paraphernalia and stuff. It’s still there, I think, because it was just such a fun thing, but, you know, that’s just one example. If you wanted to get to the Mets to do business with them, you could do this. You can either tweet them till you can’t stand it anymore or you can go to LinkedIn, the company page, see who’s connected. And again, if I had not had a LinkedIn profile that position me as somebody credible, they probably wouldn’t have answered. Right. But I had a profile that positioned me as credible. So when I reached out to them, they were like, sounds fun, let’s do it right versus the same exact thing. And I feel like I’m credible on Twitter, too. Right. I have a whole lot more followers there, but just it just it’s it’s a human to human piece that has not changed from the time that I started doing sales way back when. It’s still people buy from other humans and no one’s going to buy. I mean, I should say that. But it’s very it’s going to be very difficult for somebody to buy your high ticket items from just just from a funnel or from a tweet or from through your website. They want to talk to you first. Right. So, yeah.

So, I mean, with that, I mean, I think that was kind of like a good Segway to kind of like overcoming hurdles. So what hurdles have you overcome on that journey to becoming successful as you on LinkedIn?

Yeah, well, for me the biggest hurdles are shiny object syndrome. I find myself thinking, oh, that’s a great idea. Let me do that. And then and I can tell you that the further I get away from staying in my LinkedIn lane, the smaller my bank account gets. The more I stay focused on LinkedIn, the bigger my bank account gets. So for me, shiny objects are always a hurdle. I’ve tried a couple of different things, you know, in the guise of multiple streams of income and things like that. And it’s it’s something that I had to work really hard to stay focused on because there’s so much opportunity out there. Right. So so for me, a shiny object syndrome is always a big hurdle, you know. And the other thing really is to you know, I might when I talk about my background, it was I was in it sales way back when. And I was really one of the only women in that in there are very often I was one of the only women in the room. So I had to learn how to be confident, appear confident, even if I wasn’t confident because I wouldn’t have gotten my lunch eaten if I didn’t. So so one of the other hurdles was taking that to digital. Right. Like showing up, being confident. And I don’t want you to fake it. It’s not like fake it till you make it. But sometimes it’s OK to say, you know what, I don’t know, let me check it out and get back to you, because this stuff, it takes a lot of confidence to do that, to say that. Right. So, so, so, so moving taking that from offline to online took a little while to figure out.

OK, so I mean with that, I mean, obviously on that journey you have to have some systems in place to be able to not only do it for yourself, but to do it for your clients. What systems do you have in place right now?

You know what? For me, it was less about the systems and more about the support. Right. I have, well early on, I was still working full time while I was running this business on obviously a much different level. And because of that I had to have support because there was no way I could do it. So I had to bring in a virtual assistant. I had to bring in people to support me. So so I’ve always I mean, that’s still for me one of the most important things. And also for me, it’s kind of like the big rock things. What are the three most important things I need to do today? So those are really the systems that have served me well, because it’s so easy to get stuck in the to do the to do list and all of the crazy stuff. But, you know, if I, if I so I really like to look at every morning what are the things that I really need to accomplish today and let’s get those out of the way first.

Yeah. I mean I think that’s still a system in itself is more like a time driven stuff, but it’s still something that you do routinely over and over again to to get you to where you are. So we always hear about the twenty years it takes someone to become successful that’s perceived as being an overnight success story. How long did it take you to get to where you are right now?

Oh, boy. You know, more than twenty years it’s I’ve kind of always been entrepreneurial, right? Like, I was a kid in the neighborhood that was always like organizing carnivals and charging for them and things like that. So I’ve always been entrepreneurial. I have always been doing different things. Like back in the early 90s, I had a small I.T. consulting agency that I owned and we had a bunch of stuff and things like that. And I kind of found at the time that. You know, where I’ve learned from all of those things, what I like and don’t like, what I didn’t like was owning the company and being in charge of stupid things, important things like health benefits and where are we? Do we need to buy a new conference table? Like those were not the things that were that that’s not my zone of genius. So what I’ve learned over the years was to strip out whatever I can. And I’m really protective right now about keeping my business lean, because I think for me that works best. Right. So so what I’ve learned over the years is what I don’t want to do more, what I don’t want to do. And as I stay in the place that I like to stay in, which, by the way, is why it’s so important to get help so that I’m not caught up in all the busy work and I can be staying in the place that I love to be. That’s how my business grows. And I wish I knew that 20, 30 years ago. Right. That that it made more sense for me to pay people. Like it makes more sense for me to pay someone to clean my house. Right. So that I can be here working. I didn’t know that because I can clean my house. I should clean my house. Right. But I look at that now is all part of the things that supports my business, not just doesn’t want a vacuum or a living room kind of thing.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That’s definitely great. So with that being said, right, what’s one thing that you would want to do differently if you could do it all over again?

I would certainly listen to my intuition more and less to the people around me. You know, I don’t come from an entrepreneurial family. So so it was a it was not easy to to strike out on my own. So so I thought I had to do the things I thought I had to do. And I don’t regret any of it because it all brought me to where I am today. But I would have I spent a lot of years not being with my kids, working full time while they were home and missing a lot of stuff because I thought that’s what I had to do. And now I know that I didn’t have to do that, but I didn’t know that then. Right. So I would have probably trusted myself in my intuition a little bit more early on.

I mean, that’s a great gateway question because, I mean, you’re saying you don’t come from entrepreneurial background, entrepreneurial family. Then where did you get your entrepreneurial hustle from? What did it develop?

Who the heck knows until I did my twenty three in meet DNA and saw that I really, truly am related to everybody in my family. I was completely convinced that I was dropped, that they found me on the street corner or something because I don’t know. I mean there are a few people in my family that were more entrepreneurial, but very few. My family’s, the vast majority of my family’s working schools are teachers and principals and things like that. Right. They have security, they have benefits, they have pensions. You know, they they don’t understand at all my journey and they can’t. How could they? Right. So so, you know, my dad was was a really renowned basketball coach. His high school record was incredible. You had like two hundred and eighty wins and six losses when he was coaching high school basketball and then he was coaching college basketball and they offered him the full time position, the head coach position, and he turned it down. And it breaks my heart that he turned it down because he couldn’t imagine leaving his job as a teacher and he would have had to leave his security to go to this less secure thing. And, you know, he would have been amazing at that, but he didn’t do it because he felt like he didn’t have he needed the security of the job. So I don’t know where it comes from. And all I know is this is all I know. So I do what I got to do. And this is a much better life for me and for my personality than working for people for sure.

Got you. So I would think you would see your point, right, your entrepreneur on your own. But being that you’re full of family, of educators, I mean, that’s pretty much what you’re doing, right? You’re educating business owners, true?

Absolutely. That’s absolutely true. Yeah, that’s true.

So you kind of took their mindset and you made it into a business.

Connecting the dots. Yeah. There you go. I agree. That’s true. That is true.

That’s really interesting. I mean, there’s always one of those things that you to look at your history, to kind of see the common denominator. And I think in yours that’s definitely what it is. So you say you have kids. I mean, obviously at one time it must have been very crazy.

It was insane. I had four kids and I was a single mom when the youngest was in kindergarten. So it was insane.

So how do you juggle your work life with your family like now?

So my kids are grown right there out of the house. But here’s the beautiful thing. I one of the things that I deliberately did when I was creating the world I live in now is I deliberately created a business that doesn’t require me to be anywhere at any one time. I don’t have to be in this town on every Tuesday ever. So I am able to my kids are grown. I have two granddaughters and another one on I have a grandson on the way. So my daughter who is pregnant, I told her my plan is I’ll come hang out two days a week. I’ll work Tuesdays and Wednesdays from your house and I’ll sleep over Tuesday night and I’ll help you with the baby. And she’s working from home. And I’m not going to I can work from anywhere. I deliberately created that. So I feel really lucky that I was able to do that. And and again, when you know better, you do you do better. Right? I could have done that when I was younger. I just didn’t know that I could do it then. So now I do that. I’ve created my.. Parents in their 80s, like, you know, recently I had to do something to help them out. I had to go to Florida for two weeks and I’m so grateful that I was able to do that so.. So now I’m by myself most of the time, right? So it’s not like it’s taken up a ton of my time, but I’m so glad I can do it when I, when I can.

I mean that’s definitely awesome. Awesome life to live. So with that. Right. I mean it seems like. Well, let me ask you a question. What are your morning routines like, I mean, considering that you have all these things going on, you have your regime. So, like, what time do you wake up and what do you usually do when you wake up?

I am a serious morning person. It’s just there’s just nothing I can do about that by eight o’clock at night. I’m looking at my watch. Go on. Is it eight o’clock? Can I go to bed? Because I like I typically get up probably around 5:00 a.m. every day. But here’s the thing, because I’m a morning person, that’s also when my brain is most in gear. So I struggled a little bit with the all of the morning, like one of my the mindset coaching my program, very good singer. She has a program that’s that’s called “Morning’s that matter”. And I’m a big fan of that kind of thing. I forgot the guy’s name who wrote the book, “With the mourning rituals” and things like that, so I love those things, but I have to build in some work. I need to dump my brain a little bit in the morning. So I typically get up, walk the dog, do a little mindfulness stuff, sit down at the computer for half hour, get rid of all the things that came to my head overnight, and then I go back out for another hour. And kind of I really do I really do think mindfulness is important. So I do. I do. It’s important that I incorporate that into my mornings. But I’ve I’ve given myself permission to actually spend some time at my computer in the morning because I know that otherwise it just keeps popping back in my head and it interferes with that mindfulness. Right. So so that’s pretty much my routine. It’s not it’s not a exact science, but it is pretty much what I do every morning. And thankfully, my main assistant in my company lives in England. So she’s up early so I can be messaging her at 5 a.m. and I’m not messaging somebody in California where it’s 2 a.m. for them

Nice. So you come across like a very super absorbent person that kind of get information and absorb it, retain it and then use it really quickly. Right. So are you a big book reader? Are you a book reader?

So I am a big book reader.I have always been a big reader. I have so many books. I love, love, love books. But full disclosure, I have a kid that works for Audible so I can listen. I can now I can get audio books for free. So it’s made it’s given me. I although I have to say with the with the explosion of podcasts in the last few years, I don’t listen to as many audiobooks because I’ve got so many hours of podcasts that I want to listen to and haven’t gotten to yet. Right. So I like so what I often do is I’ll listen to the audio book first to see if I resonate with it or at least skip through it. And then if I like it, I’ll go online and buy the book because I really do like that. I typically like to have the actual book for most of my favorite books. In fact, sometimes I’ll buy multiple copies of my favorite books and I’ll send it to my clients and things like that. So yeah.

So I’ll make a recommendation. I mean, what books are you reading right now?

That’s one of the one of the books that I’m giving right now to my client. I will now, I’m not really seeing clients in person, but one of my favorite books is “The Miracle Equation” by Hal Elrod. Have you read that? “Have not”. So remember the whole shiny object syndrome gets in the way? Well, the miracle equation, basically, it is something like massive, focused and consistent action produces miracles. So the book is really about staying massively focused on your goal. And that’s really what and that ties back to the work that I do on LinkedIn right? If you go on LinkedIn and you just say, I want all these things, you’re less likely to get any of them. But if you go on LinkedIn and say, I want a fifty thousand dollar sponsor for my podcast and that’s my goal, and you say massively focused on it, you’re more likely to get it right. So that’s why I love this book, because it teaches really like that whole big rock thing. So ties and all the things we talked about. You’re right. So how I read the book, The Miracle Equation is one of my favorite books currently because it’s it’s just done such a great way to it’s just it’s a really good book.

Yeah. Sounds like a definitely a solid concept, kind of like a mixture between law of attraction and taking action combined.

Exactly. Because it absolutely is. Because he’s infusing, he teaches you how to infuse yourself with that confidence and in creating a statement and then just like screaming it to the universe a million times a day if you need to if you start getting distracted. Right. Staying really focused on that. And by the way, when you do that, then that’s when you can work less hours, right. Because you’re focused in the hours you’re working instead of all over the place.

Gotcha. Yeah, I’m going to check that one. Don’t be surprised if I hit you back up with some questions on that one.

Yeah, I’d love that. Tweet me your message me on LinkedIn. We can chat about it.

Cool. Cool. So what do you see yourself in 20 years from now?

Oh, God. 20 years from now I better be sitting on a beach with a Mai Tai in my hands. I just had a big birthday. So 20 years from now I think I’m going to be I’m going to be watching this company be run by somebody else. But, you know. The reality is, I love what I do so so I will still be doing what I’m doing. And and when I say that when I say that it’s not because I don’t want to be working, because I absolutely do. But I do think that as as every year that goes by for me as a grandmother, right, I want to be able to spend more and more time with my family and less and less time behind this computer. Right. So I think in 20 years will be I will be I will have morphed into something that is more a figurehead in this company and less the person doing all the work.

Great. Great. So on that journey. Right. I mean, earlier on we talked a little bit about systems. We talked about what you do on LinkedIn. What tools do you use to do what you do?

Yeah, so I can’t even believe I’m going to say this, but the toll that I probably rely on the most is Asana, which is a project management tool. And if my team is listening to this, they’re going to be laughing because I bought it. I didn’t fight it. I didn’t fight the need for it. But I was just like, I don’t get it, I’ll get it. And I have a really logical brain. So for me to be saying, I don’t get it, I don’t get it, but now I really love it because it allows me to empty my brain. Right. Like, if like, for example, when you and I first met, we met at Bidvest. Right. When you and I first met and we had a conversation about coming on here, I literally made an Asana task that said follow up because maybe we’ll be able to do something for his podcast. So that way, if I didn’t hear from you, I would reach back out to you. Right. So Asana lets me get it out of my brain. I don’t have to remember it. Right. So Asana is probably the tool that I use most. And slack. I love Slack because as my team grows, it feels a little bit like being around the water cooler. My team’s all over the world. We have people everywhere. So Slack that gives us a chance to interact during the day as days go on and feel more like a cohesive team than just, you know, VA and we get to be more of a team. Ontraport is the engine that runs my business. So Ontraport is where our customer files live and all the payment processing and everything happens. So, yeah, those are the those are the tools that I’m just looking at my tabs that are open ahead of me. Those are the tools that I am in probably the most. And then of course, you know, there’s the all the all the productivity stuff like Dropbox and Google Play, Google Drive and all that other stuff.

Wow. I mean, that’s definitely some some insightful nuggets that you just dropped. I mean, to your point, I mean, Asana is definitely one of those tools that’s kind of at first you kind of like this is like Trello is like everything else. And then you start with more like.

Yeah. And I think they probably are kind of all the same. It’s just which one did you pick and then make it work for you. Right. But that’s the one that we use. And in the beginning, I just didn’t get it. But once it clicked, it’s just great to be able to just because I am committed to not having to be locked here, even though these days we’re not really going anywhere. The more I have in the cloud, the less I need to take with me if I’m going to speak at a conference or if I’m going on vacation or if I’m just going to the beach house, you know, I don’t have to. I don’t I try to have very little paper. So everything really gets out of my brain into the cloud somewhere. I can access it from anywhere.

Great. Right. So if I’m a new entrepreneur and I’m coming out of maybe college and I kind of know what my journey is and I’m kind of figuring out how do I get my profile on LinkedIn? What words of wisdom would you give to me to get me to the next level?

Such a great question, I would say, remember all of the experience you have if you are twenty two and just graduating college, you may have written in the newspaper for your sorority or fraternity, you may have been on the school paper. There’s there’s lots of credible things that you may have done that are credible. That’s experience. LinkedIn doesn’t say list your jobs is to list experience. So pull from all the things. If you, if you it doesn’t matter. Whatever you did, it’s experience. So know that you’re stepping into the workforce or the world or the new entrepreneurial world with experience. So, so, so pull from that and shine a light on all of that. The other thing is there’s probably a lot of things that you’ve done that you can be sharing, like start to whatever it is you’re looking to do, you need to start to show up like, you know, your stuff. And we have this ability to do that now because of things like blogs and podcasts and YouTube videos. Right. So so create some kind of a content strategy and then go on LinkedIn and show up. So so you know how like they people think about LinkedIn as a resume, right, LinkedIn, your resume is all about who you used to be. On LinkedIn I want you to think about, like dress for the job you want, not the job you have. how up for the person that you are stepping into. Don’t make stuff up. But but be confident in saying, you know, this is how I can transform your life if we work together and that and don’t don’t think that you can’t do that because you don’t have experience or whatever you can you can you might feel like a fifth grader right? But to a third grader, you’re a big deal. Right. So show up confidently that you can help the people you can help and look and put your brand out to the future. Not looking back to who you used to be.

I think as officially, you need to have like a T-shirt that says LinkedIn Boss. I mean, in that last eight months, you officially sealed the deal with that, right? I mean I mean, the information you gave is definitely is something that you know, I think what you just said, you don’t have to be 20 years old. You could be 40 years old, 50 years old, and converting between jobs, switching locations. And what you just said could definitely help anybody. So I definitely appreciate that. So how could people find you online? I mean, your website.

So I’m @karenyankovich everywhere. I have a podcast called “Good Girls Get Rich” and I run a LinkedIn masterclasses on demand. If you go to KarenYankovich.com/MasterClass, you can you know, you can hear in a little bit more of a logical order a lot of the things we talked about today. And I kind of try to take you down a little bit of a path so that you can start to implement some of the things.

Great, great. Great. So going into the bonus round. Right. And in every episode I always make this statement. This is like my favorite question to ask, actually, because everybody’s answers uniquely different. So if you could spend 24 hours with anyone dead or alive, uninterrupted, who would it be and why?

I’m going to go with Michelle Obama, OK? I mean, she sounds like she just looks like somebody that you have a lot of fun spending a day with. Plus, she’s met a lot of cool people. Right. So I’d love to just talk to her and just so she can’t stand me anymore.

Great. Great. So another one would be if money wasn’t a factor, would you still be doing what you’re doing right now?

I think I would be I think I would be, at least to some degree I would be, because the transformation that people get is incredible, right? I mean, money helps me build the team so I can deliver it at the level that I want to deliver that. Right. But, yeah, I think I would be doing it to some degree at least. Listen, I went into this business because I was telling people what to do and they didn’t ask me. Right. Like I’d be hanging out with you at a Mets game and and you’d be talking about something. I’d be saying things like, well, you should try this. And then I’m like, maybe you should do this for a living one. So people actually ask you for help. So I was doing this before. I was doing this without getting paid, before I created a business and I created the business so that I could help people that were actually asking for my help and not just shoving it down people’s throats. So I think the answer is, yeah,

Gotcha. So one of my final questions, right, is outside of your kids, what is your greatest or most significant achievement to date?

Oh, boy, outside of my kids, I guess, I guess that was my granddaughters, huh? You know what I think? I think really and truly it is, my achievements are the successes of the people that go through the program, the program that we’re running right now, the women that are coming into it with no sense of how to how to land twenty and fifty thousand dollar contracts or getting them in their lives are being changed. Right. So so I feel pretty proud of that. I’m pretty proud of what we’ve put together. And I love that we’re changing lives every single day. And I saw a statistic a couple of months ago that women in 2019, like last year, women made five hundred and forty five billion dollars less than men for the same jobs. That’s a big damn number, right. So I want to help women take a bite out of that. And that’s why we’re doing that. So that’s why I’m pretty proud that we’re doing that.

I mean, I think that is another good Segway into I mean, just tell us a little bit more about that programming, what’s included in the program? What does it offer?

Yeah, so we do have men in the program, too. We don’t care what your body parts are, how you identify. But we do think that women need a little bit more support in there in showing up and shining a light on their genius. Right. So so what we did was it was this this was originally this is a pretty interesting story of how this rolled out. Originally, it was a six module program that was delivered in six weeks and it was a digital program. And as a digital program, it was relatively inexpensive. But what was happening was people were buying it, as they do with most digital programs and as I’ve done a million times, and it would sit in their hard drive and they weren’t really doing the work. So I was like, all right, what do I how do I get people to have more success? So we started to one of the places where people were getting stuck was they didn’t want to write their own profile. So I was like, all right, we’re going to write the profile for you. So I brought in a team of profile writers and now we write their profiles for them. So we’re taking that barrier out. But of course, the investment went up, right, because now we have to pay people. And then we found that we were just giving them all the time in the world to complete it. And then they were just kind of taking all the time in the world. Right. So we’re like, all right, now it’s going to be it’s a six week program. We’re going to give you another six weeks to finish this. You have 12 weeks in the program. And still they were doing it, but they needed a little more accountability. So we added in coaching and we added in a couple of different kinds of coaching mindset coaching, because you know what we talked about showing up for who you want to be. Sometimes we need to we need a little help with that. Right. So we have a mindset, coach, that we brought in that works with every one of our students to help them think bigger because you have to raise your personal energy as you’re raising your bank account. Right. So it’s all in alignment. We also brought in a publicity coach. So we’re helping these women and these men get get press and media. Using LinkedIn to develop relationships with journalists that write about what they’re doing. Not that the visibility is going to actually necessarily make the money. But when you can use as seen on NBC in your profile, it gives you credibility and that helps you man the bigger contracts. Right. So we were so we’ve we’ve really it’s a very comprehensive ‘done with you’ program now. We don’t do it for them. Anything we do for them is write their profile. But it’s really comprehensive. And what we’ve done is we’ve just keep adding things as well as we see a need so that we have a higher percentage of people getting the success that they want. We’re doing everything we can for you to get fifty thousand wins at the end of the twelve weeks. If that’s what you want, we can do and we’re doing everything we can to help them show up to get it as well. We just were recently asked to do some more accountability around consistently connecting with people, so we’re trying to figure that out now. Right. So we’re always adding, as we see, needs that people want. But what I think is unique about it is the fact that we approach it from the right brain and left brain. Right. We’re giving you all the strategy, but we’re also helping you be that person. So we’re helping you also with the energy around becoming a multiple six and seven figure earner.

Nice. Nice. And I think that that’s probably part of the underlying synergy between you and I. Like I would deem myself to be half analytical, half creative and just hearing you speak I know that that’s who you are, right? You’re both you’re very analytical, but you’re very creative in your analytical responses and how you do things. So it’s very cool to see that. So in closing, I always give the microphone to the person I’m interviewing to give them an opportunity to ask me any questions that may have come up during the podcast. So the mic’s with you.

Yeah. So I want to ask you what is your favorite thing about doing this? What is your favorite thing about hosting this podcast and getting to interview people on a regular basis?

At first I was kind of one of those people that wanted to be behind the scenes, kind of the man behind the curtain kind of thing. And then once I jumped in front, the cameras started having these conversations, is giving me an opportunity not only to help myself grow, but to help multiple other people grow. Every single time I release episode, just like what you’re talking about today, is essentially driven towards LinkedIn, which you’re also talking about the laws of attraction. You’re talking about understanding wealth and how to manage it to a certain extent and understanding the journey to that success. And every single person, every single person I’ve interviewed, they’ve given a little bit a little piece of the puzzle for the viewing audience to continue on their journey to get from where they are to the next level.

I love that, I love that. Good for you. And you could see it in you you can see in you that you really enjoy getting to know people and dig in a little bit of their psyche.

Oh, yeah. Yeah, definitely. It’s one of those things. It’s like once you know what your gifts are, you just kind of just accept it. And to your point, you kind of focus in on it and you run with it.

Yeah, yeah, well, you know what, not everybody does that, though, so that’s why you’re here and that’s why I’m here.

This is true. This is true. Well, If you have got any other questions?

No, I think that was. That was great. Great.

Well, I definitely appreciate taking time out of your busy schedule to come on the show today. LinkedIn boss, we appreciate you.

My pleasure. My pleasure. Thanks for having me here.

S.A. Grant. Over and out. I think that was definitely a-