Founder Of Urban20Something: Leah Gervais AKA The 20 Something Boss – S2E43 (#71)

S2E43 Leah Gervais.m4a – powered by Happy Scribe

Three, two, one. Welcome. Welcome back to Boston Cage podcast on today’s show. I’m not going to say she’s a native New Yorker, but we just had a Sidebar conversation. And I’m like, okay, do do you live in New York for longer than six months? You are considered to be a New Yorker. It changes your DNA, it changes your chemistry of who you are and who you’re going to become. As you guys know, I always deem whoever I’m interviewing with a particular nickname. And on today’s show, I’m going to deem her the 20 something boss.

So, Leah, why don’t you tell her audience a little bit more about who you are and why am I naming you to 20 something boss?

I think this is my favorite intro ever I’ve ever had, and I completely agree. I think New York, once you’re in it and it’s your home, there’s really no no turning back. So thank you for that nickname. How fun my name is. Leah, thank you so much for having me I am in the last year of my 20s that my 20s have been such an incredible decade, because during this decade, I went from trying to find my way in New York, trying to find my way as an early College grad and trying to find her kind of niche in the work life here, which is so intense to starting my own business and to starting it as a side hustle.

And to really feeling like I was in a full on quarter life crisis for many years. But because channeling that into a business, a platform, a message. And now it has become my full time business, something that I’m blessed to be able to employ people with. And I’m really passionate about helping people that are in quarter life traps. I don’t think you have to be in your 20s. I think even in your 30, sometimes even your in your 40s, you have moments where you feel like you did everything right in life.

Maybe you went to grad school, you went to undergrad, you did what everyone kind of taught you was the right thing to do. And you realize you’re in a place that wasn’t actually by your own design. And what do you do when you’re in that moment where you want to pivot? But you might not know how that’s what happened to me. And that was the catalyst to my own business now.

Nice. So anyone that’s listening, you could obviously hear the passion. You could hear the distinction in her voice. You could hear the tonality that she knows what the hell she’s talking about because she’s been on this journey. So I’m not going to say it’s a rag to Richard. It’s more so like hustle to actual getting invoices cashed out. Right. So let’s define yourself. If you could choose three to five words, what three to five words would you choose to define who you are?

I would say that I am a mentor for entrepreneurs and a mentor for people that want to start their own business. This is way more than five words, but if I could encapsulate it, I would say that I help people understand that if you want to have your own business, you have to think differently. And I help them learn to think differently than we have learned to through nine to five jobs, through corporate America or through the College system that we’re accustomed to in this country.

Nice, nice. That’s a nice allude to the Apples predecessors, and that don’t know what thing differently came from. Essentially, it was a speech that good old Steve Jobs had pitched way back in the day, and he had made that the tagline for Apple. So that kind of brings me to another question. Obviously, you kind of have this savviness sensibility to you. What does your business really help someone with? How do you take a client and what does the objectives of helping that client get to?

Well, nowadays, what we do is we take an entrepreneur to we have a few different stages of business we can help people with. But the I think the part that will always have my heart the most is Side Hustles people that are in nine to five jobs and they know they want to do something different, but they don’t quite know what or they don’t quite know how. And we help them put a Ryman reason to that passion kind of help them put a structure behind it, because that’s what I needed.

That’s what I did when I was at my nine to five and realizing that I didn’t want to do this and going through what was at the time, one of the most turbulent times in my honestly. And we help them build a roadmap, build a strategy, and most importantly, build the way to think about how to transition from corporate life to entrepreneurship. We also help people with raising income and raising their sales goals later on that are already full time entrepreneurs that have already been doing this for years and years.

But there’s something about that initial Side Hustle phase that I think we will always have a huge that will always be a big part of our business model, because I think that it really speaks to people that have that Hustle and know they want something different but don’t quite know exactly where to start or quite know how. We help them go from passionate but overwhelmed and confused and scale and direction list to working for themselves with clarity.

Very nice. Very nice. So let’s just back it up a little bit. So you’re talking about Hustle, right? Yeah. And you’re talking about corporate America. So you’re talking about this trend. And I love that that’s like the whole definition of what Boston Cage is really all about. It’s like that transitional page. So let’s go back this time travel back. Like, what was your corporate job and what was your hustle?

So my story starts when I was in high school. Honestly, I thought that I would wanted to move to New York City, go to NYU, and be a lawyer, and I am from the middle of the country. So I think I had kind of gotten these ideas from portrayals of what it meant to be in New York and what it meant to be working in these really highly respected, allegedly highly respected corporate jobs. So that was my plan from a pretty young age, and I was able to go to NYU, which I loved.

I don’t have any regrets about that. But I went into it the whole time thinking I was going to go to law school. Now, when I graduated from NYU, I was able to make the decision, do I want to go to directly to law school or do I want to work first? And very fortunately, I decided to not go directly to law school. I had kind of been advised against that. I had heard that it’s beneficial to have some work experience. So I got a job as a paralegal at a real estate law firm on 42nd street, kind of like in the heart of New York.

And I thought, this is perfect. This is going to show me how to not only get into law school, but also to function in the legal field and to be a lawyer and to be mentored by really smart people. And really, I thought that all my dreams were coming true right in front of my eyes. I was so excited to be in New York. I’m so excited to be working at this great firm and to have this experience. Well, it didn’t take me long to realize that I wanted nothing to do with speaking a lawyer.

I could not run far away enough from the legal field. It took me a little longer than I care to admit honestly, or that I wish it would have just because I was in denial. I think about the realization that I needed to get out of that field. So I went for years working at that firm as a paralegal while simultaneously setting for the LSAT while simultaneously applying to law school and even being admitted into law schools here in New York. Forum and built things like that, I think, on the East Coast.

And so really, I was in this situation that I think so many people do find themselves in that end up becoming entrepreneurs where you feel like you did everything right. It doesn’t have to mean that you wanted to be a lawyer or that you wanted to go to law school. But it does usually come from a place where you feel like I did something society told me would be respectful, respectable. I did something my parents are approving of. I did something that the younger version of me would make me proud.

And I feel empty. I feel completely unfulfilled. And I just don’t feel excited about this path that I’m on. And that’s exactly where I was at now at the time. I was in my mid twenties, and I also have felt like everyone else in my life was on a clear path, and I wasn’t that’s not true. I don’t think anyone in their mid twenties knows exactly what they’re doing, but I felt very alone in it. So I started realizing that I wanted to do something different, but really struggled to find the courage to admit that to myself.

And I found it struggled to find the courage to do something different because I didn’t know what that difference was. I had I want to go into a different career path. That would have been one thing, or I want to start a business. And here’s the business plan. That would have been one thing. But I really felt like I felt like I was winding back time to being 18 again, where it was like, did I even care about my undergrad degree? Did I even care about all the work that I’ve done as an adult?

So far? Where the hell do I begin? So it was not until the deadline of when I had to actually let the law schools know whether or not I wanted to attend in the fall semester. And up to that point, I’ve been talking with my mom and the lawyer at my firm that I really respected, and my then boyfriend, now husband, who at the time also was a lawyer. And we had all these list going of which law school should I go to. And the morning that I had to make the decision, I ended up sort of surprising myself, telling all of them and declining all of them.

So it wasn’t a matter of which it was just a matter of no. And I remember even one of them in particular, they were like, listen, I understand that you’re not sure right now. I get it. The admission counselor, I think she was trying to look out for me. And so she said, why don’t you defer your acceptance for a year so that you don’t have to take the outside again, you don’t have to apply again, and you’ll just have a year to kind of do other things so that in case you want to do this, you already have an ending.

You don’t have to go through this whole process again. And logically, that probably would have been something smart to take her up on. But even something stronger in my intuition just said, no. It was almost as if I knew I had to completely close this door to find another one that could open, even though I didn’t know where it was opening up to. So that’s really how this all started. And then from there, I realized pretty quickly that I no longer wanted to work at this law firm.

If I needed to kind of put myself out of the legal field to discover what else could be out there for me. I needed to get out of this job. So I decided to resign from that job, even though I didn’t really have a backup job in place. And I started a blog to kind of Chronicle my journey as a 20 something in New York, trying to figure out what the hell she was going to do with her life after having a pretty well paved path set in front of her.

And that blog had no vision, had no clarity, had no intention for how it could even make money. But it is the vessel that ended up. It’s the basis for my whole platform now, and it’s the basis for my whole business, even though I didn’t have that vision at the time. So that’s how it started.

In the name of that blog is Urban 20 something com.

It was. Now it’s just leave com. We’ve rebranded it, but that is what I make in the beginning.

So definitely it’s funny how that works, right? I mean, you start something to kind of, you know, as a pastime hobby, and then it kind of grows into this monster that takes over your entire life and becomes, like your wealth management plan that you never even thought it even existed beforehand. Right. The part that you’re telling your story. Right. So we always hear about the perception of an overnight success. But in reality, how long have you been on the journey to get to where you are currently?

A little over five years. And I would say for those first two years, I didn’t really make any money at all. So I do have kind of an interesting dynamic in the sense that in the past three years, things have happened very quickly. And I do think that if you look from the outside looking in, it could look like an overnight success. But what people don’t see is that there was 2.2 years of stagnation, confusion, lack of clarity, and really no execution on my end for this to really ramp up.

And they were hard. It was very hard to not see any progress. So.

Playing off of the whole time traveling analogy, right. So if you could time travel back, right. And you could be like the good devil or to be the angel, what would you whisper in your ear to kind of change where you are to make it happen a lot faster if you can do that all over again?

I love that question. I think that the thing I like to talk to my own clients about him that I wish I would have understood is the power of truly making a decision. And I think that the reason I didn’t see success for the first year or two or really any momentum at all is because I internally hadn’t decided that I actually believed I could do this. Or that I actually wanted to see if I could have my own business or that I actually wanted to see if my blog could become a business.

So I had kind of allowed it to be this side hustle. Maybe it could work. Let’s see what happens. Hobby type thing. And it sounds so obvious. But what I didn’t understand is that if you have asked something with your efforts, you’re going to get half as results. And so if I could go back, I would tell myself, look, if you don’t want to do this, if you don’t want to do this, don’t do it. But if you’re going to do it, then do it, don’t halfway do it and expect things to magically happen for you.

You really have to go all in. And it was when I sort of made that internal commitment to myself. And at the time, what happened. As I said, I’m going to give myself a year to see if this side hustle will actually do anything. I’m going to start spending more money on it. I’m going to start spending more time on it. I’m going to start doing things that make me afraid around it, and I’m going to see what happens. And if in a year it doesn’t work, then it doesn’t work.

And I’ll stop. But it did work. And I was able to quit my nine to five job, like, seven months after that.

Nice. So I think one of the things that you just brought up is very powerful is that you confronted that fear, and you became fearless in taking a hobby and passion and really making it into a business. And I think that’s where most business owners, that’s where the great areas I’ll Dibble. I’ll dabble, I’ll put my toe in the water, but they just don’t dive off the diving board in the deep end and then figure out how to swim in the process. They’re trying to walk around and kind of bullshit around the reality that this could really be a business.

So for you, I mean, I definitely commend you. First of all, the fact that you took the leap. Second of all, that not only do you take the leap, but you compound the delete and made it into more of a women empowerment kind of thing, right? You became fearless and you’re helping other people on that journey. So my next question is still traveling back deep, going deeper into your roots, right? You’re a hell of an entrepreneur. You figured out these different modules. You figured out the system in your generation, right?

Past generations. Has anyone else had the entrepreneurial bug or spirit, like a mom or a dad or uncle on, like, have you seen any representations of this when you were younger?

Yes. My dad was an entrepreneur, but he started his own accounting firm. So it was very different than what I do in the sense that he was sort of following a tried and true model. There are other accounting firms, and he just needed to create his own. And accounting itself is a very risk averse field. Where is what I do? I need to take risks basically all the time. But what I did learn from my dad, and I think kind of why I focus on it so much now is the power of how you think and the power of the way you kind of talk about yourself and the way you choose to focus on your success will very much dictate what ends up happening.

And I think that that’s why my dad was able to build a successful accounting firm, because he really focused on the power of positive thinking. He focused on the power of trusting himself, his intuitive practice, his spiritual practice. He really kind of doubled down on himself as his own best asset. And he did teach me that from a young age. She taught me the power of gratitude. He taught me the power of choosing your thoughts and things like that. And I do think that that is a big reason I was able to take risk study young age.

My dad actually passed away the moment that I decided to. I mean, he was the catalyst for my decision to double down. So after those two years of stagnation, it was actually his sudden death that made me sort of wake up and realize that while I thought this dibbling and dabbling, I love the way you phrased it, the dibbling and dabbling was keeping me responsible and keeping me safe because it was stopping me from taking huge risks. It actually was basically guaranteeing me not to succeed.

And that became far riskier when I started having a different perspective about how short life is, how precious life is, how quickly life can change. And it ended up feeling a lot scarier to not totally go for dreams and not totally go for my own potential and to just continue staying on the shallow end of the water. So he taught me a lot growing up about entrepreneurship, and he is still my angelic business partner to this day.

So with that, I mean, you’re talking about your dad was a hell of an influence, and obviously you’re living up to that legacy for what he created and what he instilled in you. So let’s jump into I mean, obviously, now you’re married. Correct me wrong. I think you’re pregnant. You recently had a baby. So how do you currently juggle your family life with your work life?

I have a lot of help. And I think that I got lucky to have really gone all in on my business at a pretty young age, because in the early years, I did not have help. I did it all by myself. I did everything by myself. I mean, I’m sure you know how that goes. You are the CEO, you’re the talent. You’re the janitor. You are everything in your own kind of production company and in your own way of making things happen. So I did that when I was younger, before I was married, before I got pregnant.

And now we have a team on my business, which helps, and I’m able to outsource some of our personal things. And I sometimes hesitate to talk about things this way because I understand how privileged I am. I know that not everyone has access to privilege and to support the way that I do, and I’m very, very grateful. And I think it’s important to normalize asking for help, no matter how small, every time I’ve outsourced something or ask for help in a new way, it’s another form of risk taking in itself.

It has always scared me a little bit. It has always made me nervous to have the responsibility of someone’s livelihood in my hands. I and I think that if we can kind of encourage, especially women, but relatively everyone, to see that as a way for you to better do whatever work that you do, then it can become something that is not reserved for a certain person or something that you feel like you can’t have. I really think that any kind of support is good and is helpful, no matter how small.

And I do think you can do it all, but I don’t think you can do it all alone.

Very well said, definitely. Well, set me do that right. So part of what you have going on, it sounds like you had a lot of systems behind the scenes, like a lot of little things that make this engine turn and burn. So let’s talk about your morning habits, your morning routine. It seems like you’re pretty established. I’m assuming here you can correct me if I’m wrong, but if I had to guess, I would say you have a pretty distinct morning ritual. What is that?

Yeah. I mean, I definitely I will say that I had a better morning routine before I got pregnant. I didn’t realize how much it would kind of shake up my hormones in sleep, but that’s okay. I think the most important things for the morning are you in whatever way that feels good to me, and it changes, and I let it change. I used to be very strict about it, but I realized that, like, I didn’t want to feel like I was in another nine to five job where I had to do certain things every day.

It’s just to get yourself into a limit lift and inspired place. So I think that that comes from first and foremost, making sure that you do not check your phone in the mornings before you do something to fill up your own mind. And most of the time these days for me, looks like journaling. I loved a Journal, right? When I get up. I’m meditating usually right when I get up. But sometimes it looks like taking my dogs on a walk through the park and listening to some sort of positive affirmation audio.

I know that that might sound corny, but I do it, and I always feel better or reading something if I’m feeling in the motor, if I’m reading a really great mindset books, and I’ll read something like that, so I don’t think it matters specifically which one you do. I don’t think you need to do all of them. I don’t think you can do all of them if you want. It just is about getting yourself to a place where you are reconnected with what you truly believe and what you truly want.

And I think for most of us, we truly believe that we can do a hell of a lot more than other people might think we can. And we just kind of have to remind ourselves of that. And I think if you can start the day from that fresh start right away, you’re kind of off to a really good start. I will also say that before I got pregnant, I made the decision to stop drinking alcohol completely, and that has made my morning a lot better. I didn’t realize how much, even just a glass of wine or two would impact my sleep or kind of not put me in the best head space when I woke up.

And so that was a huge addition to my morning routine. I’m obviously not drinking now that I’m pregnant, but I just thought it was important to say that because I didn’t do it because I got pregnant. I did it beforehand.

Nice, nice. One of the things that you alluded to, and it leads me into my next question. And it’s also a reason why I decided to create, like, the Boston Cage Book Club just for that. You led right into this question, right? So it’s a three part question just about books, and then you’re a very astute person. Obviously, you’re very big into mindset. So I want to know, like, three part question. First part is, what books did you read on your journey to get you to where you are?

The second part of the question is, what books are you actively reading right now? Like, part of your morning routine is like, what books are you reaching out to or probably listening to audio books. And the third part is like, did you have an opportunity, or are you currently writing a book that you’re authoring yourself right now?

Lot of fun questions. I love these questions. So the book that most helped me in my journey, the number one, is, without a doubt, The Science of Getting Rich by Wallace D Wattles I had a little bit of skepticism about reading this book because it sounded almost too calculated to me just from the title. It sounded a little bit like it was too focused on money, and I didn’t know if I wanted that. I don’t know if you’ve read that book, but it is really not about money at all.

It’s really just about how to think about how you can make an income in a way that is not supposed to be stressful in a way that is supposed to be aligned with kind of the way that humans are designed to work together. It really focuses on the simplicity of giving and receiving. It completely changed my life, so I will never forget listening to that. I specifically listened to the audio book rather than read it in a hard copy because it is a little bit dry and abstract.

I will say it was written in the early 900, but I would at my old nine to five job before I went out on my own. I would go to we work location after and I would just work until we were closed on my side. Hustle and I would listen to that audio over and over and over walking through it. I remember walking through the snow and just hearing it, and it was so powerful that I needed to hear going from making being underpaid at a job in New York, which is such an expensive city to now being in a situation where not only did I turn my old annual corporate salary income into my monthly income, but I’m able to help my clients do that too.

I never would have believed that I could do that, ever. And I never would have believed anyone else could. This book really helped me see where I was limiting myself. So that was the best best one. And I really think that this teaching supplier so many places other than money. I would imagine if you’re single, it would apply to dating and things like that. It’s really just about how to live in alignment and really shed like me on how unnecessary stress is, how normalized it is in our society, how we’re all stressed about the same things.

Like, how does that make sense? Why are we all worried about it’s? Just we all feel like it’s normal to worry about money. And it’s like, why why do we all need to have that heaviness. That doesn’t mean life doesn’t throw curve balls at you, but it does mean you can get through those curveballs, and it does mean that you’re stronger than your obstacles. So anyway, that book was the best. I’ve probably read it upward of ten or 15 times at this point. I still read it regularly.

It’s a quick read. It’s a quick listen, and when I’m trying to get to a new income level, I will apply those teachings to wherever I’m at. It really is so powerful. That book was the best. I still read it all often. Some of the other really powerful ones on my journey were the big lead by Gay Hendrix. That helped me really find courage to leave my nine to five job, even though my dad wasn’t entrepreneur. But no one in my life really understood what I was doing, especially my friends at the time.

So I was pretty alone in that. And that book gave me a lot of courage. I loved a lot of Marian Williamson’s work. She is very spiritual. She is so much business specific, but I loved her way of thinking. I loved her way of kind of co creating with, you know, the universe or God, whatever way kind of resonates with you the most. And I love let me try to think. I love Doctor Wayne Dyer. Still love him. And really just any book I could get my hands on about how to think in a more powerful way and powerful way in the power of your thoughts.

And answer your second question. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to.

No, no, you’re fine.

You answer your second question. Still reach for many of the same books. I love reading things. Now here’s something that I think is helpful to share. I don’t know how you feel about this. You might disagree with me, but I do think that there is a benefit to having awareness around the chapter that you’re in in terms of consumption. I personally don’t believe that you should consume content 365 days a year, every single day for the rest of your life. That is new. I think there is such a thing as content overload where it can almost paralyze a person because they might be getting conflicting information or they might be feeling two different things.

So I do think that there are chapters where it can be helpful to kind of go more inward and listen to your intuition a little bit more digest whatever content you’ve most recently read or consumed, and then kind of be able to move on to consume something else. So I’m a little bit in that right now. I think, especially because of pregnancy. It’s my first pregnancy, and there’s just so much information out there for your first pregnancy and planning for a baby, and it can be very overwhelming.

So I like to go back to some of the Old Mindset classics, like, I love listening to audios from Louise hey, who is the founder of Pay House. I love listening to audios from Wayne Wire, and I love listening to Old Mindset books like The Game of Life and how to Play It by Foreign Shovel. So those are probably what I would most reach for now. And then. The other thing to kind of encapsulate my book suggestions that I’ve found so much inspiration from reading biographies and autobiographies of successful people.

It’s such an untapped resource. It’s like, Why do we think success is such a mystery when there’s been lots of successful people and they write about them? So some of my favorites have been I Love Life by Keith Richards, The Guitars and the Rolling Stones. That was probably my favorite one. And recently I like Green Lights by Matthew McConaughey as well.

Nice.

What about you? What are your favorites?

I’m curious, man. To your point, I mean, I think we have similar tastes for different spectrums. So to match your original book, I would say Think and Grow Rich as a book that you read it in 1930. If you read it in 1999 and you read it in 2020, then you’re going to be reading it begin the year after that and isolating the different chapters. And like you’re saying, we read the chapters. And that’s one of the reasons why I wrote my last book with, like, a journaling book on how to Journal the content that you’re reading from other books and consolidate them.

So I think that goes through in addition to that was another book that I’ve always recently. I just I love the philosophy of it. Is the five Second Rule by Mel Robin?

No, Robin.

Yeah. And that book is so simple. She’s talking telling the story. And it’s like the second fear or a second some hurdle steps in front of you. Counter five and overcome that bastard. Counter five, push through it, run through that fence. And that’s the only thing that’s different from what she’s saying than anybody else is saying is that it only takes 5 seconds for you to really make a decision. And once you make the decision, commit to it. And then last but not least, my third one would be Traffic Secrets by Russell Bronson.

From just a marketing standpoint to do, he’s obsessed with marketing. He’s obsessed with sales funnel. And that book just kind of gives you, like a blueprint, like a clear itemized blueprint, step by step on how to scale monetize and speak the success you’re looking for through marketing.

Totally. I love all of those books, and I love what you said. I think the biggest thing I got out of thinking Grow Rich was how to make quick decisions and the importance of making quick decisions. And Mel Robbins kind of modernized the concept. But I think it’s amazing that you really highlighted that through both of those. Because when I look at the year my business took off, that was my word of the year was decisions. And it really showed me how much of my life I spent in Indecision and how much of my life I spent not trusting myself or not believing I made the right decision.

And it really revolutionized my whole life when I just started making decisions faster and letting my decision sometimes be wrong. It’s okay. You live to tell the tale, but at least you’ve made more progress than if you were just sort of still wondering what to do about it.

Yeah, totally. Totally. So going to the last question with all this information, all this content is almost hard. Not for someone like you to not write a book yet. So please tell me you’ve written your first book.

I am writing my first book. So I’m about four chapters in, and I started writing it before I got pregnant, and so pregnancy has delayed a little bit. I’m not going to lie. That’s okay. But my book is called The Shiny Object Is You. And it is all about how to avoid Shiny Object syndrome and shines so bright that you really can’t focus on anyone’s path at your own. And I think that you can shift out of comparing yourself. You can shift out of wondering what secret there is to success that you don’t have.

And if you can kind of ditch how much energy so many people waste wondering what they’re doing wrong or what they’re doing, what shortcomings they have or how someone else is doing something and focus so much on what you are doing, right? You will get a momentum, and momentum will always lead you somewhere. I really kind of this is less important about the momentum you’re in specifically, or the strategy you’re using specifically and more important about the fact they’re actually doing it and getting somewhere, learning and learning it.

So that’s what my book is called.

Nice, nice, nice. So it’s gonna be a hard question, and I’m all to myself, so I get it. Like, when are you planning on releasing this monster?

I want to do it next year with my son and have him be on my little book tour with me.

Nice, nice, nice. So you brought up your son. So, I mean, like, my next. So, like, with the book, with your business, with the kid, with the family. Where do you see yourself 20 years from now?

Definitely in New York City, and definitely having as much. I don’t love the word balance, but having as much of I never want to stop working. I never want to take my foot off the gas. I love it. I think it’s in my DNA. I think you probably know how that is. I think if you’re an entrepreneur, it’s a part of your identity. It’s not part of your job. It’s just part of who you are. And I can’t really, ever see myself shopping. That. So I don’t know if that will look like the continued growth in different kind of pillars of my own business, or if that means more than one business.

I’m really open to it in that way. And I know that motherhood, while being an entrepreneur, is going to be imperfect and Rocky and have its challenges. But I can’t imagine my life any other way. And, you know, I think the best I can ask for is to just continue to get up every day and do what I love and continue to help clients get results. And that has brought me more fulfillment than any nine to five job I ever had by far. And I hope to be able to find what works for me to be able to be both a mother and an entrepreneur at the same time.

And it is a lot on my plate at once being pregnant and having my business and everything. But that’s how life goes. You never know what life is going to throw at you. There’s always a million curve vault. And I think after my dad’s passing, I just sort of have let go of trying to find perfect balances or trying to have things lined up in a certain way or trying to have perfect plans, because it really showed me that those points are typically irrelevant anyway. And where you really can find the fullness and richness of life, it’s just in the daily in going through the days, allowing allowing things to come to you, allowing things to happen, allowing yourself to explore things and not trying to control things that don’t really help to be controlled anyway.

Very nice. I mean, just listening to you speak. I mean, obviously, you have a lot of motivational mindset to you, and I think that you bring that to the table with whoever clients that you’re working with. So let’s talk about your ideal customer avatar. Like, what does that individual person look and what are they going to bring to the table?

Well, I would say that in terms of the stage entrepreneurship our clients are at, they’re generally two. So we either have that five hustler that we kind of talked about where they have the idea, and they have a lot of ideas, but they don’t know if they can do it. They don’t know where to start. They don’t know exactly how to monetize. They just have too many puzzle pieces all over that they don’t know how to put together, and we can help them. And then Additionally, I do help, and I help more in a personal setting through my own mentorship and mastermind entrepreneurs who are established and already have six bigger businesses, and they are wanting to gather their income pretty dramatically.

So my ideal client are sometimes at different phases of business, but the traits and the qualities that we find we’re able to most help people with are typically that somewhat similar to my story, have a kind of type a perfectionist personality, which we try to completely alleviate from them, because I find the perfectionist perfectionism is not helpful to entrepreneurship, but they sort of have this, you know, bottled up ambition where they wanted something exciting for their life. They wanted something excited for their career. They wanted to have a really fulfilling career.

Maybe they wanted they kind of had, like, my childhood dream where they wanted to live in New York or different city. They had this sort of big vision, and they thought that they knew what they needed to do to get there. But those things haven’t matched out for whatever reason. And so we find that our entrepreneurs have a lot of this hustle. They have a lot of this. They have a lot of ambition and they don’t know where to put it. And they might not realize how much they need to step away from being the A plus student or fun being the perfectionist.

They have to start being willing to be messy and to mess up and put themselves out there and potentially be humiliated. And it’s not for everyone. Entrepreneurship is scary and people will make fun of you. That is what has happened to me. But it doesn’t matter if it’s what you really want, and it doesn’t matter because those people shouldn’t be dictating your life. And I think our ideal clients come to us and make the most move and find the most success when they are ready to ignore the things that have been standing in their way for so long.

Nice. Very nice. So what you’re doing? I mean, obviously you must have a pretty expensive tool set, right? And I’m talking more so like software and applications. So what tool do you use on a daily basis that you wouldn’t be able to do what you’re doing without?

Great question. Well, definitely. Nowadays Zoom, especially given the pandemic how you feel like I’m on Zoom pretty much all the time, and I’m sure you do as well. Some of the other tools marketing tools. I want to give a shout out to a I’m a huge fan of Active campaign for a CRM for an email marketing platform. Got pretty into email marketing when I was still at my nine to five job because I saw it. I don’t know if I was right, but I thought that it would help me setup funnels that would help me make sales while I was at my nine to five job.

I thought that if I just relied on social media, I don’t know how that would work because I would be like at this job and how would I be creating content? So I don’t know if that line is thinking was totally sound, but I am glad that I started building my email is from day one because to this day my email is still the backbone of my business. It is where the majority of our sales come from. And I still think that having an email is a very, very powerful thing, even though everyone thinks social media is so powerful.

So we allow Active campaign because I think that they have very sophisticated automations and triggers and funnels, and they allow us to segment our audience in a way that allows us to stay high touch while still scaling. So I’m a big fan of Active Campaign. I do not recommend a platform like Mail chimp in the beginning. Instead would recommend something like Mail or like, it’s also free. It’s how I started. I got to my 1st 500 subscribers there. I think it’s better than MailChimp, although I’ve been looked at MailChimp in a while, so I could be wrong about a few things.

We also use WordPress for our website, and I have no clue how to build a website on WordPress, but I do think WordPress has a lot of strength over some of the more user friendly platforms, like Squarespace, for example. I do think there’s benefits to Squarespace, but for SEO purposes and for just the longevity of your site and the potential, I do think it is worth exploring a WordPress site, even if you’re new to WordPress and using that. If you are just starting a website or you want to start a blog or you want to start a platform or something like that, I don’t think we’ll ever leave WordPress.

So those are probably the biggest ones. I’m trying to think if there’s anything else that we use on a regular basis. I also am a big fan of ads. We use Facebook ads. I don’t use them as much anymore because they have gotten so complicated, but I do think it is helpful to just have some sort of platform that allows you to spread your reach, like, automatically so that you don’t have to do it all organically and you don’t have to do it all yourself. I kind of thought of ads is like my first hire because they helped me grow my audience and my email list so that I didn’t have to do it all organically.

Very nice. So let’s talk about final words of wisdom, right? So let’s just say I’m a College student or let’s say I’m a 35 year old person that’s working for corporate America and entrepreneurism keeps calling me, and I keep dipping my towing, going back to being scared, to leaping and then jumping with fat. What words of insight would you give to an individual like that to help them make that transition?

What a beautiful question. I would love to hear your answer to this so that I’m happy to answer first. I think the the message I would really want to share to them is it might sound like a cliche concept, but to honestly put yourself in a situation where you can Zoom out and look at the bigger picture that is your life day to day. It might feel scary to spend money on a business that you don’t know is going to work. Or it might feel scary to have to do this even though you have a nine to five job.

But in the big picture, what is really going to help you feel like you are living a fulfilled life? Something I think about all the time. My dad passed relatively young. He had a great life and he had three kids and everything, but he was only 58 when he passed away, and it was very sudden. And if I were to, God forbid, pass away at that age, I’d be halfway there. Like my you know, my trip, this journey that I’m on that we’re all on would be halfway over.

And I don’t mean to sound that to feel more bit, and I hope that there isn’t anything triggering about what I’m sharing, you know, but that really helps to remind me even though I still get scared, I still take risks. I still spend money that I don’t always know if it’s going to work. I still fail. I still have launches that don’t work. But it really helps to put into perspective for me that like, would I do it any other way? And the answer is no.

Whereas when I was at my nine to five job, I knew that the only reason I was doing it that way is because thought I should because I thought it was responsible and because really, I was operating under other people’s values. And when I looked at my own values, I believed in myself. And I believe that things were going to work out. And I believe that things would be hard and that I was strong enough to overcome it. And I think if you can believe that about yourself, I think that’s the key.

I think there’s too much mindset chatter about basically surpassing the challenges that come with entrepreneurship and thinking that if you just have a good mindset, things will all work out. I don’t think that that’s the point. I think the point is to know that there will be obstacles and there will be hard times and you will fail and you can do it anyway. And if you can get to that place of inner knowing, of competence, of shortness of trust, and to Mel Robbins point with the five second rule, you get more confidence, the more you do it.

But if you’re waiting for confidence, you’re not going to get it. And you’re cubicle, you’re only going to get it from proving to yourself that you do fail sometimes, and you still overcome it, that you do make a decision, and it still doesn’t work out, and you’re still going to be okay. I think so many times people know they want to do something different. They don’t think that they can. And they’re sort of waiting for assign a system, a structure, permission, assurance, and that isn’t something that is brought to you.

That’s something you create. So that would be my advice is to Zoom out, look at what you really want out of your life. And if you know that it’s somewhat different than the path you’re on right now, have the courage to know that even if you don’t feel sure now or you don’t feel confident now, you can create those feelings, but only if you actually create them, not if you wait for them. Okay.

I would say something along the lines of life is parallel to existence, but perpendicular at the time. And when you look at our glass, every single green and every single bit of information that you put out into the world, it’s slowly falling on the other side. And once that time is up and it flips over, everything restarts so you don’t restart. But time continues moving forward, so you’re going to have to build a package of information to leave behind these bread crumbs for your family and for future entrepreneurs or future whoever your target may be.

So they can utilize this content that you’ve been building for a period of time to help them grow and prosper and flip over those grains of sand over and over again.

I’m fired up. I’m going to have an inspirational day from what you just shared.

Oh, so well, I’m thinking about what you just said, so I’m just recapping in my head. I mean, it’s definitely powerful, definitely insightful. So how could people obviously you’re talking about being fired up. A listener of this podcast listening is like, oh my God, she’s in later 20s at this point time, she’s pregnant. She’s doing all these different things. She took her hobby, made it into a profession, took that profession, made it into a business. She’s scaling. She’s monetizing it. She’s making money. Oh, my God. Where do I sign up?

How do I get in contact with her? Where do I find her online? So help them find you. What can people find you online?

So my website is my first and last name, Leander Com, and you can find out more info about me there. You can also always email me or DM me on Instagram. I try to be really active there, but if you are in kind of the shoes that we just talked about, if you are on the cusp of starting or on the cusp of leaving the nine to five or on the cusp of scaling, maybe you’ve already started, and it’s just not really getting where you want it to be.

Then I encourage you to investigate our program called Scalar Side Hustle. So it is my signature coaching program. It is a four month coaching program, and it happens just a few times a year. The doors open and closed, much to the dismay of some very smart people that have told me to keep the doors open all the time. I like the cohort aspect of it. So we really have everyone go through these four months of kind of an incubator together of how to go from a Side Hustle idea or a Side Hustle that is up and running, but just not scaling, and we help you scale it.

And we do that through mindset work for marketing work. We really cover pretty much all the odds and ends of what it means to put a business out there online at this day and age and make it income limitless. That program in particular is based on the six month period I went through when I lost my dad. I decided that I did not want to do this whole half and half out life anymore and truly changed my entire value system. To give this my all. Now, I don’t think you need to go as extreme as I did, but I realized that there were so many things I was doing that were inconsistent with what I said I wanted.

For example, I always said I wanted to have a successful business and that I wanted my blog to take off. Yet I was too afraid to ever spend money on it, to spend money in the form of ads, to spend money in the form of mentorship, to spend money in the form of support anything because I didn’t have enough money. I was working at a nonprofit in New York City, and I had student loans and I didn’t have enough. And so I just never did it.

And when I made that decision, when I doubled down, I went into debt to do this. Now, I’m not giving any one financial advice that I’m not sharing or giving anyone feedback on what they should or shouldn’t do. But I want to be transparent about my journey, and I want to be clear that I had to go against what I thought was a very big value of mine. Don’t go into consumer debt that you don’t know is going to be pay back soon to make this happen, because my value of going all in ended up becoming bigger.

So sometimes you are going to have to change some of the way you’re doing things in order to make things happen. I remember being very afraid. People that I grew up with were going to laugh at me and they did, and I had to do that anyway. So there was that six month span between my dad passing, changing kind of how I was functioning and going about the world and really my ideals to starting to offer a service, starting to sell it, to being able to give my nine to five resignation and having my first five figure month.

It was a six month period, and that is what I based this program off of. So it’s really about a catalyst for you. And if you are feeling like you’re at that point where I you know, you’re ready to go all in, but you don’t know what that quote looks like for you and you don’t really know how to put it all together. This is the program for you, and at the time of this recording, it will be open for the last time this year. So there’s no time like the present to join.

Wow. I definitely appreciate that. So I think that I like to end my podcast and going into a bonus round with Cones questions. Right. So my first bonus question, and I think for you, this is going to be a very interesting answer because I don’t know how you going to swing it.

Right.

So outside of your new spouse, your husband, outside of your new baby boy, that’s going to be born pretty soon. What is your greatest achievement to date?

What a beautiful question. Thank you for asking me that. I think that when I look at the hardest thing I ever had to overcome was losing my dad but something that I also think shaped me a lot as a person that I don’t think about enough is that I had I grew up with pretty debilitating scoliosis and I wore a black rice for, like, ten years growing up. And I was on the custom surgery a lot of the time. It was just a very challenging part of my childhood, and then a very challenging part of my early adulthood.

And managing basically, chronic pain was something that I really had to figure out how to do. But I have figured out how to do it, and I was able to do it without getting surgery, even though many doctors told me I was on the path to do that. And that is something I’m very proud of. Not that there’s anything wrong with surgery, but I think anyone who lives with anything chronic, whether it’s illness or pain or condition, it can feel it can be suffocating at times.

And I know that not everyone is manageable. So I’m not trying to say that I feel like everyone should be able to manage it. But there were times where I felt very hopeless and I don’t feel like that anymore. And I feel like I can manage it. And that’s a big achievement of mine.

Very powerful, very powerful. So I got another bonus question, and I could assume, but I’m not going to allude to who I’m thinking that you’re going to answer this question with. Right. But if you could spend 24 hours with anyone uninterrupted for those 24 hours, right? Dead or alive, who would it be and why?

It would be either my dad or Jesus Christ? My dad, because he’s my hero and I miss him very much or Jesus because he’s one of the great teachers of the world and one of the wisest people that ever lived. And I don’t think that anyone would surpass time to understand his way of thinking and the things he knows definitely very interesting.

I was like, I was like, I know she’s going to have to say our dad without saying, you have to see your dad.

Right. It’s kind of like a weird time. Like my father were like, Jesus. But those are the two names that came to mind.

Well, I mean, both of them are very influential in your life. It goes hand in hand. So going into clothing again, you’re a fellow podcaster. So this is when the microphone and the show becomes yours. And you could ask me any question that you would like.

That is so fun. What would you tell yourself at the beginning of your mindset entrepreneurial journey? I love the devil as angel on your shoulder.

What would you say to yourself for me would be focused on? Your point is kind of more so. It’s a gift and a curse. It’s like I’m so diversified in my education level between the different principles that I understand and I dibbled and dabbled. It and that’s who made me who I am. And that’s why I’m a growth strategist now. But if I would go back and I would say, okay, pick one thing and do a little bit more deeper diving, and I’m getting that deeper dive over a period of time.

But what would it look like if I had went down one rabbit hole versus pretending I’m in the Matrix and spitting between three different rabbit holes at the same time?

That’s a great one. Do you have any? Is there anything you do different about your journey? Like, I know that regret, you probably don’t have any, but is there anything that you’re like? Oh, I really wish I would have done that different.

So for me, because believe it or I had a stroke back in 2018 because I was a workaholic working 20 hours every single day. I literally I was working myself to death. So if I could do anything a little bit differently in that side, I would probably say scale back on the working for hours. Now. Obviously, I made a full recovery, and I think it was more mindset than anything that I fought to recover to where I’m at right now. But again, that’s part of my journey.

But if I can go back and change anything, I would probably say focus a little bit more work a little bit less, strategize more, make more things, more of a systematic. And that’s why I’m a system guy now. Kind of figure out how can I do what I was doing so much of before with utilizing system? So I’m not the pinnacle point or the Keystone to every single thing that I’m doing.

Oh, my God, what a story. I’m so happy that you are okay. I’m so sorry that happened to you. Do you feel like it was a hard mindset shift for you to get to to believe that you could make as much money if not more by working less? No.

Because I mean, going back to my story a little bit is like I have a creative background and I have a technical background. And then I Dove into the financial sector. So I’ve had a series six insurance licenses up and down the East Coast and all that. So I understand the value of leveraging capital, but I also understand. So I always define myself as 50% created 50% analytical. But I was think about being split equally between both those platforms. Financial is like stocks and markets and bonds.

And then over here, it’s kind of like font and colors and shapes. They really don’t communicate with each other. And I was making them both work, but it took 20 hours a day for me to make that happen. So to answer your question, I think definitely. I think once you isolate on a particular thing. And that’s one of the beautiful things about this podcast. As I interview people, I’ve had people on this show that they’re specializing and coaching people how to be fearless. And you would think, like, how the hell do you make money coaching on one particular topic?

But it’s such a coordinate. And so many people are fearful of making leaps and fearful of making jumps that the reality is the only thing that they need is like a couple hundred people to buy into that system, and then they can be wealthy. So taking that aspect of it as much like my stock side well, over a period of time, if you do one thing long enough, you would reap the rewards of it. So it’s the same principles.

Yeah, that’s what an amazing story. Oh, my God.

Cool. I definitely appreciate you coming on the podcast today for those that don’t realize we just met for the first time today on this particular podcast. But I think the synergy is there. I think you give so much to the audience. You give so much details about who you are, how you’re delivering the stuff, and what your journey looks like. And definitely I commend you for being who you are and continue to keep doing what you’re doing.

Thank you so much. I very much appreciate your time and inviting me on this podcast, and thank you so much for your kind of supportive words. I so believe in what you do. I think your audience is very lucky to have you to support them through this journey.

Definitely appreciate it. Essay Grant over and out.