The Transparent Podcast
The Transparent Podcast
Dr. Jen Huberty - Science, Entrepreneurship, and Health Interventions
Dr. Jennifer Huberty, founder of Fit Minded and former leader of the science team at Calm, joins me to share her fascinating journey from academia to entrepreneurship. Our conversation delves into how our past experiences have shaped our entrepreneurial endeavors. As a former college baseball athlete, I recount my path to founding Transparent Staffing, a firm grounded in transparency. Dr. Huberty discusses her transition from exercise physiology research to entrepreneurship, highlighting the significance of sustainable health interventions and how her scientific background paved the way for her business venture.
Growing a company is no small feat, and the challenges that come with scaling are front and center in this episode. We share stories from my own experiences with Transparent Staffing and Dr. Huberty's insights from the tech world, focusing on the complexities and dynamics of rapid expansion. I recount an incident where a clash in recruiting and sales processes led to resistance within my team, serving as a reminder of the delicate balance required in leadership. Together, we emphasize the critical role of strategic guidance and effective leadership in navigating these hurdles.
Persistence, passion, and self-awareness are hallmarks of entrepreneurial success, and we explore these themes in depth. Drawing parallels between business and sports, particularly baseball, we underscore the importance of resilience and learning from failure. Leadership isn't just about making decisions; it's about trusting your intuition, balancing responsibilities, and maintaining strong client relationships. Wrapping up our conversation, we explore the power of networking, especially via LinkedIn, as a strategy for business growth. Tune in to discover actionable insights and strategies for entrepreneurship and leadership success.
Hi, my name is Nick Ford and I'm the host of the Transparent Podcast, and this week I have a guest with me, dr Jennifer Huberty. And Dr Huberty, I'll let you introduce yourself.
Speaker 2:Okay, yeah, I'm Jen Huberty and I am a Fractional Chief Science Officer, founder and CEO of my company, fit Minded. I spent 20 years as an academic researcher before I ended up at the meditation app Calm. I headed all their science and then decided that it was time to start my own company, and here I am.
Speaker 1:Wonderful. Well, thank you for that introduction.
Speaker 2:Keeping it brief. If you want more, I'm happy to share.
Speaker 1:Yeah, well, just to give you a little background, I was a baseball athlete. I played college sports. Yeah, I was a pitcher at the D2 level on a scholarship. So I did that all four years.
Speaker 2:My brother, who actually is a pre-series company starting his own small business right now. He's been in Major League Baseball his entire career and he was the pitching coach of the Angels. He was the assistant pitching coach of the Astros and the St Louis Cardinals Pretty cool.
Speaker 1:That's so cool so fact for you.
Speaker 1:That is awesome. Yeah, I went to a school called Harding University, which is a private liberal arts Christian school, and I did not want to go there. I was out in Arkansas, I'm in Georgia. I didn't want to do it but I went and I tried out because my brother played tennis there. A guy had spent 10 years in Major League Baseball as a pitcher. He was the pitching coach. I was like, all right, well, I'm going to learn a lot from him. I did that. But I studied sales there and went straight into recruiting out of college and did mostly behavioral health recruiting, placing psychiatrists throughout the state of California, and then did a few outside sales roles after that.
Speaker 1:While I started transparent staffing and really the idea behind transparent staffing was bringing transparency to the staffing industry I just you know, transparency to me means just being direct and honest and upfront about how I work and you know, whenever I place candidates with clients or work with clients, I want to be as direct with both because I think that's going to be the best long-term fit for both. If a candidate knows as much about the job before they take it as they can, there's a lot higher chance of them having a long-term fit, and it goes both ways on the client side too, and I'm playing, you know, the happy matchmaker between the candidate and the client. So that was the idea behind transparent staffing, which I founded in January of 2021. So we're coming up on four years here in the new year.
Speaker 2:That's awesome, congratulations.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and when I started Transparent Staffing I had the opportunity to. I was working as an employee benefits broker and one of the ideas that our sales leader had was just go help people, just try to help clients with something that you're skilled at and build a relationship with them and then hopefully they'll buy benefits from you. So that's what I did. I reached out to a client and offered to help them with staffing basically just offered to help with job post writing and do a little bit of like advising on what kind of job boards to use and that kind of thing. And that turned into me talking to the owner and turned into them being my first client. That's cool, and so that's how it got started.
Speaker 1:And so it was kind of a side business and my boss knew I was doing it. He was okay with it. He thought it was a good option to build connections with clients and then eventually sell benefits. And benefits was a long-term game. It was usually a year to two years to try to bring on a client. So what do you? What do you think about that? You know, I don't know how you got started with your company if you jumped straight into it or kind of had a side business going first, but what do you think about that?
Speaker 2:going first. But what do you think about that? Well, I, you know, I, basically my, my small business is um is quite unique and interesting in the sense of, like I was, I'm a scientist. I didn't get and I didn't get a marketing degree or a business degree or, you know, I didn't go to school for any of that. I have a master's or a bachelor's and master's and a PhD in exercise physiology and I've been working helping people change their behaviors my whole life, like through research. So I've been developing and designing studies, getting grant funding from the government to implement those studies, whether it be after school like a YMCA or Boys and Girls Club for Physical Activity and Nutrition, whether it be after school like a YMCA or Boys and Girls Club for Physical Activity and Nutrition, whether it be a PTSD intervention in a cancer clinic those kinds of things I was doing as a researcher.
Speaker 2:But when I was a researcher, I was always thinking outside of the box and I was always thinking about industry and business, even though I had no business degree. It was like this thing that was inside of me and I started. I actually took one of my quote unquote research interventions, which was to help women improve their physical activity. I actually took that and made it in a business in the sense of women paid to be in a research study, did what I asked to do. I published the papers and someone said you know, you're basically running a business. I'm like I am, they're like yeah, and so, and I kept, I kept also working with it's like.
Speaker 2:My thing was why do scientists create interventions or studies that are going to go away when they're over? Especially if you're with humans and trying to change health behavior and improve health? It doesn't make a lot of sense. The government gives you $1 million to do this study and then, when the money's gone, then what happens to whatever the study did for people or so? My thing was like, okay, boys and girls club, what are you doing in here? Let's evaluate it, let's see if it's working and if it doesn't, let's modify it and get it to work so that it went to the masses. Right, so right. I just was always thinking like that. So, um, I kind of I kind of pushed myself out of academe in my own way. I quit. I guess I resigned as a tenured faculty. I resigned as a tenured faculty. Most people would never do that.
Speaker 1:Where was that?
Speaker 2:That was at ASU.
Speaker 1:Arizona State University yeah, so.
Speaker 2:I was there 10 years. 10 years before that, I was in University of Nebraska, omaha and the Med Center in Nebraska. So, anyway, my business startup, my small business that I run now, is a fluke. It's like taking my skills and my passion and the way I think about things and selling it. That's literally what I did.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, you're. You're a fractional chief science officer consulting companies. I mean very, very interesting Something that I have not been exposed to a lot. So thank you for that background. You know. So, with some of the companies that I know, just off of talking to you about some of these, these businesses, you've helped scale and you use science to help them implement.
Speaker 1:You know, it sounds like systems and policies, do you? Do you think that? You know, I've talked to some entrepreneurs in the past that believe in buying a business or buying into a franchise, and you know, then they have a business model to follow and it's kind of like, just go play the playbook and you know, play the playbook well and you'll do well. Versus, like me, you know, I built a brand and built a company from the ground up, which I've loved but isn't for everybody. Do you think, like you know some with the companies you've seen? You know, if you're giving advice to a one I call it a one entrepreneur, someone who thinks they want to be an entrepreneur but hasn't done it yet, how would you kind of, you know, look at those two options versus, you know, like buying into a franchise or you know, buying a business versus just starting something organically from the ground up.
Speaker 2:Well, considering I'm a scientist and I consider science and art, I would never go buy a franchise. I would create my own thing and do my own thing. I would never be. That's just my personality. I would not be locked into a box of how I can advertise what I can say Like no, thank you. Although I would be lying to say I've never looked into buying a franchise, for just an investment. Um, never really found one. I'd love to own a coffee shop one day. That'd be cool.
Speaker 2:But um as you as you sip your Starbucks.
Speaker 1:I mean I've I've been meeting with, uh, another investor about starting coffee shops and here in Atlanta and there's a, there's this franchise that's down in Florida that we love and actually buy their coffee. I have their coffee on subscription. It's called Badass Coffee of Hawaii. Yeah, they are awesome. So I've met with them twice now, very seriously about bringing a franchise to Atlanta. And you know an investor that I'm talking to.
Speaker 1:He's met with the human being, which is another franchise, and you know, when I look at doing that versus doing my company, it's like you're kind of working for someone else again. You've got to follow their playbook. You have to do things their way. You still own your own business, um, but at the end of the day, you can't do everything the way you want to. But then again, like badass coffee at Hawaii, you're like if you were going to Starbucks doesn't do franchises, but you're buying into their marketing. You're buying into their branding that they already have built. You're buying into their marketing. You're buying into their branding that they already have built.
Speaker 1:I just I struggle with, you know, feeling like I'm going to be working for someone else again instead of doing my own thing. Like you said, you would want to do like I don't know, I've, I've, I've a hard time with that, but uh, but yeah. So coffee shop would be great. I've heard that they're hard though. The restaurant industry in general is difficult.
Speaker 1:But when you're advising companies, I've worked in the church world before and a guy that I worked with in the church world he was an executive minister and he was talking about just he had to run the business of the church. It's a nonprofit but it still has a budget and still has to pay bills and has staff and that kind of thing. And he gave the advice to me of when implementing something into the church world or in the business world like in my business idea that you come up with alone and implement that you, you know, built on your own, is actually worse than a B plus idea that you have buy-in from your whole team on. So he was saying, even if it's a little bit worse idea than what you think, if your whole team's bought into it it'll go better and be implemented better than if you had an A-plus idea that you just went in and told people we were going to do.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 2:I think in a small company I mean, I can only speak for my size, to be honest, but I have three, four full-time employees, five including myself, and then a couple part-timers, fractional people, um and I think like just decision making as a whole in small businesses, like when you talk about ideas and like having a b plus idea versus an a plus idea, and buy-in is like I'm learning the more I can be honest and transparent with my team, the the better off things are. So like, let's say, I'm going to transition an employee. That's a big decision and that's not something we want to be telling everybody. But when it's a decision that impacts the entire company right, and it's a big playing role, then maybe it's good to just check in with the others, like, how are things going in this area? Not specific with the person in this area, what do you think the strengths and the weaknesses are, what could help us moving forward?
Speaker 2:And then maybe even I'm considering this, I'll decide, I'll decide. I'm the CEO, I get to decide. But you're a big player at this company. You know you're what makes the company run. You know I'm open to hearing your feedback about this because I think you can learn a lot that way. So it's just like a twist on what you're saying is, like you know you got to get buy in in all things when the company is small because it's like it's too, it's too close for comfort, you going to have these big huge mega corp salaries.
Speaker 2:But people who do that know that. But their value system is wrapped around what they get working at a small business.
Speaker 1:Yeah, right.
Speaker 2:So that's part of that. That's part of what they're investing in. They're looking to be in a small family relationship type feel Well, right Got to talk to your family member sometimes before you make decisions, Right Like yeah, for sure, I agree.
Speaker 1:Yeah, my husband makes decisions without me.
Speaker 2:I'll kill him, just kidding.
Speaker 1:Yeah, he does it.
Speaker 2:I don't love it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean I'm married and we have three kids and so if I make big decisions without my wife, that that would be unwise. Happy wife, happy life. I think that goes both ways. Yeah, I, I think. As far as like the B plus idea thing, I just remember, you know, my first job out of out of college being in a recruiting agency. It was a $1.5 billion staffing agency. It was a huge agency.
Speaker 1:I just remember being in a meeting where our executive team like the executive vice president and the vice president and some of the directors of our team they got us all in a room of like 30 people of the directors of our team. They got us all in a room of like 30 people and they had us whiteboard this new process of how we were going to do recruiting and sales on the team. And the team always bought into it and we're excited and they like kind of led the meeting and we had built out this new system and it was like everyone was so excited about it and they're like, okay, well, we're going to go, we're're gonna all meet and then put this into like a playbook we can follow and we'll meet next week and roll it out and we'll start doing this, this new system. Well, the next week they come back into the room and they present this playbook that we were all gonna follow and it was completely had nothing to do with what we had all worked on the week before and and it was like obvious to all of us, like okay, so either they just ignored it, what we talked about last week, or what I found out later, was they had already determined what we were going to do and just kind of, you know, I don't know what their plan was, but they implemented something that we were not all bought into and it went horribly. No one wanted to do to do it, we all just kind of went back to our desk. We're like, well, we're just gonna keep doing things the way we've been doing it, so you know.
Speaker 1:But then again, like, if you have too many people, too many cooks in the kitchen trying to to make decisions like that, especially as you get bigger and scale and things like that, it gets, it gets a lot, it gets a lot harder. Um, so'm curious it sounds like you've worked with some teams to scale to, to kind of how, how they grow and that kind of thing, and, um, have you worked with, like venture capital backed companies where, like they have the capital to, like, scale quickly and hire quickly. How do you, how do you control that Cause it? You know, it seems like the last few years a lot of tech companies have had to end up laying people off because they try to grow too quickly or they adapted to the post-covid, you know boom of things. How do you kind of see the challenges there?
Speaker 2:as far as scaling, well, I mean, um, I think always with everything, in my opinion, slow and steady wins the race. I remember being at Calm. I'd come to a meeting for all hands. There'd be 30 people there, or 40 people there, and the next meeting there'd be 60. And the next meeting there'd be 70. It was like going and then then it's 120. It was like I remember one meeting saying to one of the girls there what the heck is going on, like, yeah, what are we really like building? Like growing this fast, like I couldn't believe it. Anyway, I just remember experiencing that and I remember feeling like, wow, this is really fast. And this is without my own company, never being a CEO, you know, just a director of science at calm, that's it, that's all I was, and a professor, right, like who cares? So I remember having those things like I shouldn't say who cares, but I'm just saying like it's not owning a business. In terms of answering this, question.
Speaker 2:So I don't want to insult anyone, including myself on the podcast, but no, I'm saying like I just am trying to say that I had this intuitive thing of like holy heck, what are they doing? Do they know what they're doing? Who's giving instruction? Who's deciding that we should be hiring all those people? And then, like I remember, in marketing alone, it was like we had this person and this person and this person and this person. I'm like what?
Speaker 2:I couldn't understand it, right, but again, no business sense, not having my own. Well, I had business sense, but no business of my own. And I look back now that I have my own company and this is how I think most in small businesses work. At least I'm understanding again, every day is a new day. I am a kindergartner, I'm a infant child, like every day is new, but it's like raising a teenager.
Speaker 2:Right, every day is a new day, but like it's like when you have a small business and you and you're generating revenue and your business is growing, it's like you hire to cover the new business and then you start to get a little bit busier, but not enough to hire someone and you just need like a little bit more money so you can justify hire someone, but then you got to hope that that money stays where it's at, because if you hire something and then it doesn't, then you you just over committed yourself and there goes your line of credit borrowing and like blah, blah, blah. So that's like a hard thing to do, right, like I'm experiencing that right now. Like I'm hiring a scientist, I'm able to. It's 100 ago, but six months ago I was too scared to do it. I should have done it because now I got to train someone, I got companies coming in and you know so it's like that same thing.
Speaker 2:It's like even at a bigger scale, like right now I'm in a place in my company. I need someone to advise me on growth. I need the best and baddest COO I could ever find Right.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:For this pit, these pivotal things. So it's like who was doing that at this big company? Who was that person? That was giving this advice that we should build so fast, and that's what a lot of companies do, and especially in the areas of science. All these companies let go of their science teams because they had to cut for money. Right, covid wasn't the thing anymore. It's like the COVID growth was like trailed off. And it's like okay, what does science do for us? Let's cut them all. Which?
Speaker 2:is like well, you're not using it correctly and you don't really need five people. You need fit-minded right Like you need someone, tominded right like you need. You need someone one really good person but you right, who can manage other people or who has a team, but you don't need to blow all this money. So it's like at that situation, looking back at calm, it's like do we need 25 people in the marketing department, or could we have done a badass job with five, and then you don't have to fire people later.
Speaker 1:That bothered me a lot. Like I would. I was working with companies, you know, through COVID, that were hiring and scaling and some of our venture capital backed and the word. They were just like hiring in anticipation of growth and especially on sales. Like I had a friend of mine that he was one of 10 account executives that they hired over a six month period and they were paying all of them $100,000 base salary plus commission and he had been there a year and a half and he said he was the top, the top performing account executive.
Speaker 1:And I've been in sales my whole career and I know how comp plans work and that kind of thing. I was like oh well, like how much business have you closed in the last year? Like 12 months. And he's like 60,000. And I was like and you're the top performing, they're paying 10 account executives a million dollars a year and you're the top person. You only made 60 grand, you're not even validating your salary. And he was like well, it's a venture capital backed company and they can tell the venture capital team that they've got a million dollar sales team that's going to blow this up and they're building products and the research team is doing X, y, z to scale the product and we're going to sell it. And I was like that is, this sounds like a terrible idea. What are y'all doing? Who's your chief sales officer?
Speaker 2:Yeah, and growth too.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah. So it is interesting working with with different companies and seeing how you know how they approach things, and I'm with you with with my business it's it's steady, slow and steady wins the race and being strategic about who I hire. And you know, I just had a a friend of mine start on Monday and he's my vice president of sales and recruiting and he came from, you know, a tech ed company that he's been at for like seven years and he's very strategic. I'm the. I'm the let's just go do it person and make it happen. He's the let's figure out how to do it first, and so we will hopefully balance each other out well.
Speaker 1:But you know I'm very into motivational speakers and you know I love listening to some of these like motivational speeches and you know one is like Art Williams, has one called Do it, and he talks about just going out and doing it.
Speaker 1:He started one of the largest insurance companies in the world and you know I love studying what successful people do versus what people who ultimately fail do, and you know that kind of mindset, mentor type stuff that I like to study.
Speaker 1:My granddad was someone I looked up to in that and he used this guy called Ernest Nightingale, who was like a Tony Robbins of another generation. Called Ernest Nightingale, who was like a Tony Robbins of another generation, and he defined success the best way I've heard and he defined it as the progressive realization of a worthy ideal. And he said that every philosopher throughout history disagreed on many things, but they all agreed that you will become what you consistently think about. So if you set goals and you consistently think about it, you're eventually going to hit those goals, if you think about it every day. So when you look at some of the people who have succeeded or the companies that have succeeded, but what do you think kind of separates the people who end up failing versus the people who ended up succeeding, that you've seen goodness gracious it's just not, it's just a little question, right, yeah a little question.
Speaker 2:I mean, well, like, I think, just generally, people that succeed really in anything like what is consistent, I feel like, is like persistence. Persistence, like you get stuck, you fall off the horse, you fall and scrape your knee, you get back up and you try again, and you get back up and you try again. I think that's, that's big and that's been the biggest thing for me. My dad used to tell me I should have named you Jennifer persistence I love it Instead of Lynn, like your middle name should have been persistence, because I in my career I had so many people like when I did my dissertation for my PhD, the dean at the college at the University of Utah told me I would never get my dissertation published.
Speaker 2:It was a horrible idea. She didn't like it. And I was like, okay, well, I'm just going to do it anyway. And it happened to get published in a pretty good journal. And then I had people telling me, like you know, you shouldn't do research like this, you need to have a better agenda. I didn't listen to that, you know. Then people are like you're starting your own company. You're crazy. Well, you know, it's just like I could listen to all the naysayers or keep on keeping on Right. So I think people that like are passionate, persistent. I think another big thing is owning your strengths and the muscles that you need to flex more Like.
Speaker 2:I don't like to say weaknesses or anything like that, although we have to. Sometimes it's kind of like how we describe them, but I call them when I work with companies and I do needs assessment for science. It's like your gap, your, your strengths and then your gaps, or your knowledge gap, right, yeah, what are your strengths, what are your gaps and how are we going to use science to fix those and, to you know, grow your company, right, so, yeah, people who can take their strengths and own their gaps, like I. I know, working for me, I give a lot to my EA, I give a lot to my FCO.
Speaker 2:Like too much, too much. I own that. Right, I own that. I need to do a better job at like, one step at a time, because not everybody's crazy go-getter type A PhD like me, right, I got to sometimes. So it's like being able to look at those things. I think that also makes someone very successful, like CEOs in general. If you're able to inward reflect, trust, your intuition, be a compassionate person. Those are the people that are going to be successful long-term, versus people that are throwing around their ego and telling people what to do and not caring because it's their ship.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:I told you no, I love it. I agree with. I agree with everything you said and I think you know the persistence part. You know I I love this idea that, like persistence is another word for faith, because you wouldn't persist if you didn't have faith in what you're doing. And Art Williams, in that speech he talks a little bit about that. But you know, I think every sales leader I've worked with to help them with recruiting for salespeople, they've loved athletes, high-level college or professional athletes. Because I compare it to baseball, for instance, the best Major League Baseball players in the world strike out 7 out of 10 times. If they couldn't go dust their bat off and not cry about it every time they struck out and just keep going and know that hey, if I get three out of ten at bats, I get a hit, I'm one of the best in the world. Like failing seven out of ten times are one of the best in the world.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's like how many times they say how many times did Kobe, michael Jordan, all the greats, how many times did they miss versus how many times did they take it?
Speaker 1:Yeah, exactly, and it's what you said. Though it's being persistent, it's not letting those misses get you down and beat you up. You just keep shooting and you know you're going to keep getting better, and that's business. You have to be willing to take risks sometimes, um, and that's, you know, business you have to take. Be willing to take risks sometimes, um, hopefully they're calculated, uh, scientifically backed risks sometimes, uh, especially their bigger scale risks you're taking, yeah, but yeah, if I had to break it down to like three things, I'd say, uh, you know, people who have goals that are persistent and that are consistent with what they do, um are the people who are gonna you know, succeed usually yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you know something I'm struggling with now with you know, I've been kind of a sole operator for the most part. I've had 1099 contractors and some part-time people and I had a full-time recruiter and now I have a full-time you know vice president who's joined me. But I struggle with where do I spend my time, like where? How do where's my time most value be spent, especially now that I have someone I trust to kind of run things and do some of the account management and and recruiting and stuff. So like, delegating is hard for me because I just I like the work for one thing and I'm good at it. That's why I've been successful. But you know, for you you've got a team of four or five full-time people plus some contractors. How do you allocate your time? Like how do you know where to spend your time?
Speaker 2:Well, I'm at the point now in my company where I'm trying to spend my time basically with my CEOs and connecting to you know, making relationships with potential new clients. So I guess you could call that head of sales, right. And when you're a small business, you could be seven things at once. So I'm head of sales right now, I'm head of marketing, I'm head of ops, I'm head of science. It's ridiculous. So for me, I just want to be, right now, head of sales and head of science and I need this team around me to do all the other things.
Speaker 2:So for delegation of my time, it's really centered around the growing of the business right, which is the customer, and making sure that we get good satisfaction scores right, like people, like the way that they worked with us. Although crazy, I keep, I keep companies. For a long time. I literally have, like I would say, more than half of my clientele. One to two years have been the retainers. That's a long time, that's great. So I got to do a good job and I don't want people to stop working with me if I'm not doing a good job, that kind of thing.
Speaker 2:So for delegation, it's like I just tried to delegate what I can and I'm also getting advice from people.
Speaker 2:I meet with people occasionally who are bigger and badder at the things that they do and I ask for advice. Like today I had a call with this guy who does growth fractionally and it was just an intro call, but I was saying something to him about what I'm doing and he said something else and I was like why is that a bad idea? And he was like you know, he's like no, no, no and just. But I was just checking in with a growth guy about what he thought, about what I was thinking, and and like, even like with this, this COO role at my company, it's like I want to find the right, like what is the next big hire for me? And so it's like I talked to COOs and ask them is what in my brain equal to what you do, or equal to what a chief of staff does, or equal to what a project manager does? Like, how am I supposed to know? I don't know. I'm a dang scientist, for God's sake. Like I am a scientist, that's it right.
Speaker 2:And also a CEO, but in scientist clothing.
Speaker 1:Yeah, well, that's kind of who I just hired. I called him vice president of sales and recruiting, but really he'll be the COO and the president as I grow because I'm planning on scaling next year and growing and putting some investment money into it to hire some people and stuff and he's a director of systems. Really, he was a project management lead for a huge tech company systems. Really, he was a project management lead for a huge tech company and he project managed like verizon and netflix and other big companies, and so you know, that's that's who he's gonna be as my coo. He's just very systemed and process oriented, whereas I'm just, like you know, sales and um growth and let's just go do it.
Speaker 1:Why are we still talking about it? Let's like we could just go do it now and I just and I also have a lot of ideas and, like you know, I brought up the coffee shop idea to him and he was like stop, like no, that's a distraction, we need to grow this business. And I was like, yeah, I need you, I need you, I need you to be in my corner. Well, you know, the idea for the podcast was always to bring transparency to the world of small business and most of the people listening are typically entrepreneurs of business. They want to have or, you know, wants to do something on the side. What would you, you know, tell them like how to start? Like you know, you started kind of on your own and just started getting clients. It sounds like how would you advise them to get started?
Speaker 2:I have no clue. You know why I have no clue? Because I have no experience in that. Really, I don't think I. Literally this is how I started no clue. You know why I have no clue? Because I have no experience in that. Really, I don't think I. Literally this is how I started my business. I told my best guy friend His name is Rodney Lee Nelson. You should get him on the podcast to big companies. He works for Arizona e-commerce. He's like a COO ish kind of a guy, but he works with small businesses and and big businesses. He's awesome. Anyway, he'd be a good person for you because he has a lot of examples, whatever. Anyway, he happens to be my best friend of 35 years. He was in my husband and my wedding on my side, so he was wearing a tux with all the girls. Wow, yeah, cause we've been friends since like sixth grade, like literally sixth grade, so he's like my brother. Anyway, I was like I don't know what to do with my life. I don't want to stay calm. What am I gonna do?
Speaker 2:and then he goes, you know you're starting your own business. I said, no, you're crazy. He goes, no, I'm coming over. Came over on a saturday, came over on a Saturday and literally we sat at my desk all day long like iced tea breaks for him and that was about it. And he's like okay, what have you been doing for the past? You know, five years with Calm. And so we typed up everything, we organized it. Da da da. And the next thing you know, it was on a website. And then I got so lucky because I knew I was going to start my business. I didn't want to tell anybody, but somebody wrote an article about me leaving calm.
Speaker 1:Oh, wow.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I had talked to the guy but I was like I didn't tell him anything because I I, when I resigned I was like six months I had to keep quiet and also didn't didn't, uh, tell anybody like I was just yes doing stuff for them, whatever.
Speaker 2:And then anyway the article came out the day I opened up my doors. So then we're like seeing that and that and like anyway it was kind of interesting. So I ended up with two customers in the first week and I saw that article and we're like what is just?
Speaker 2:whatever. Yeah, or they had talked to me once before and I said I couldn't help them because I work for calm, like because I couldn't take consulting gigs when I was at calm anyway. Um, so yeah, and then the next thing, you know I'm I had started a following on LinkedIn, but then I started really investing in it and telling my story and that's what helped too. So it's a combination of the right place at the right time and LinkedIn. So, yeah, I did nothing to be like, oh, how do I my marketing dollars? Maybe maybe 12,000 a year, maybe maybe 15, like 12 to 15 a year for marketing a year. So that includes writing design, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah. Why? Because I only write on LinkedIn. That's all I do for my marketing. I just write posts on LinkedIn about what's in my brain.
Speaker 1:That's all I do. I write. I have a newsletter, you know. I have around like 6,000 followers and most of them are all subscribed to my staffing and recruiting newsletter and that's the only marketing I do. And really I just started it because I like writing and I just wanted to share my thoughts on the industry and stuff and what I was seeing. But when people, when clients, look at my profile, my hope is that they see me as like a thought leader, like, oh, this, you know they can see that I, you know I have 6000 people following a newsletter. That's you know something to people.
Speaker 1:Um, but the power of LinkedIn, like, for me, I've probably gotten all of my clients from LinkedIn and it's just. You know I'll go look up psychiatric, nurse practitioner jobs and find out who kind of the hiring manager is or who the owner of the company is and say, hey, I've, I've placed these, these positions for other companies and I know I'll help you place these, these jobs and let me help you. And you know some people ignore me and some people are like, yeah, like how do you work? Tell what's the meaning, but that's just. You know I enjoy connecting with people and LinkedIn to me if you want to start your own business. Linkedin is a powerful tool to, to get clients and to connect with people and like this kind of thing.
Speaker 1:We met on LinkedIn and, uh, you know you're someone that I can learn a lot from and so, uh, so yeah, that's. That's advice I'd give to people wanting to to to start a business is first understand the business. Like you are an expert in your field and you understand how to help companies, and you did it for calm, and now you're using that knowledge to help other companies and that's what I did. I learned how to do recruiting and sales and now I'm I'm doing that and helping companies with recruiting and I love it. I love connecting people. So, uh, so yeah, um, thank you so much for your time to to join the podcast. You just share a little bit with my audience about, like, how we could help you, like what would be a great referral for you and kind of you know if you have anything else to add about what you do.
Speaker 2:I guess I don't know. That's a really good question. I mean, I'm happy to like, I'm happy to connect on LinkedIn. I do like connecting as well so people can reach to me, out to me on LinkedIn if they want to learn more about what I do and how I help companies grow and drive revenue, even small companies. They can find out all that information, obviously on LinkedIn and schedule a 30-minute consult or whatever. And if they have some special thing that they're doing with their business and they think I might have clients that could use them, obviously they can reach out that way as well. But yeah, that's.
Speaker 1:Awesome, well, sounds good. Yeah, well, I'll leave a link to your LinkedIn then in the podcast notes and thank you again for joining the join the podcast and I appreciate you taking the time. I know you're busy.
Speaker 2:Yeah, thanks for having me. I appreciate it a lot. It was fun so thank you so much.