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Enabling & Amplifying Entreprenistas: How to Scale & Build Community in Business with Serial Entrepreneur Stephanie Cartin
80 Plays1 year ago
Update: I recently launched my newsletter, The Sheconomist, and would love for you to subscribe: sheconomist.com - I share so many tools and resources that help young, high-achieving women with radical money and career self-advocacy.
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For our Season 3 debut, we're diving into the entrepreneurial journey of the remarkable Stephanie Cartin, Co-founder of Entreprenista, Markid, SocialFly and Pearl Influential Capital. Stephanie's story is one of courage, determination, and a commitment to helping others succeed.
Stephanie's entrepreneurial journey began when she walked away from her corporate job in 2012 to launch SocialFly, a renowned social-first digital and influencer marketing agency, together with her business partner Courtney Spritzer. For two consecutive years, SocialFly was named to Inc. 5000's fastest-growing private companies and has been working with over 200 well-known brands.
Stephanie is also a co-founder of Entreprenista, a media company and membership community dedicated to serving women founders and leaders.
Stephanie's insights offer a roadmap for aspiring entrepreneurs, emphasizing the importance of intentional decision-making, community support, and mentorship in building a scalable business. She dispels myths surrounding success, urging listeners to define their own paths and prioritize fulfillment over conventional metrics of achievement.
Drawing from her own experiences, Stephanie underscores the transformative power of networking and mentorship, highlighting the profound impact of genuine connections on personal and professional growth.
Are you an (aspiring) entrepreneur? Then consider joining the Entreprenista League.
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Transcript
Empowering Women Economically
00:00:00
Speaker
but we can all share information. We can all help each other. We can refer business to each other. When we have the opportunity to all be in these positions to help others, women can make more money. And at the end of the day, when we have more money, we can make decisions and we can make a much bigger impact in this world when we have the power and we have the money to do these things. So let's all help each other and let's all make a lot of money and make impact.
00:00:27
Speaker
I'm Tamina and I'm extending a heartfelt invitation to you as we join forces in reclaiming economic power for women in a world that is often structured against us. We'll dive into the minds of accomplished female leaders, investors and entrepreneurs to equip you with the confidence and knowledge to build wealth for yourself and other women. So buckle up, get ready to learn and be inspired to take action.
00:00:54
Speaker
Hello,
Stephanie Cartman's Entrepreneurial Journey
00:00:55
Speaker
hello, everyone. I am so excited about this week's guest. She and I connected on LinkedIn a few months ago and I just loved her energy from the get-go. She's someone that I truly look up to, not just as a business owner, but as someone who always shows up as her most authentic self and is not afraid to be vulnerable in doing so.
00:01:15
Speaker
I'm talking about the one and only Stephanie Cartman. An entrepreneur at heart, Stephanie walked away from her corporate career in 2012 to follow her passion to launch SocialFly, an award-winning social first digital and influencer marketing agency based in New York City. SocialFly has been named to Inc. 5000's
00:01:33
Speaker
fastest growing private companies two years in a row, and has worked with over 200 well-known brands, including Girl Scouts, WeTV, Con Air, Nest Fragrances, 20th Century Fox, and Univision.
00:01:49
Speaker
Stephanie's also the co-host of the Entrepreneur's Day podcast and the co-founder of Entrepreneur's Day, a media company and membership community, the Entrepreneur's Day League, which I'm a proud member of as of recently. And the Entrepreneur's Day League is dedicated to serving women founders and leaders. Stephanie's also the co-author of Like, Love, Follow, the entrepreneur's guide to using social media to grow your business.
00:02:13
Speaker
Stephanie also co-founded Market, a marketplace for parents to buy and sell baby and kids new and gently used items, as well as Pearl Influential Capital, a platform that gives influential investors the opportunity to invest in the brands they are helping to build. Stephanie shared her knowledge and expertise in Bloomberg, Forbes, Entrepreneur, Refinery29, and Inc. She's also a recipient of the Smart CEO Bravo Award, which recognizes the top female CEOs in New York.
00:02:43
Speaker
and a Stevie Award for Women Run Workplace of the Year. She considers her most important role as mom to her miracle daughter, Molly Hope. Stephanie is an advocate for women going through complicated infertility and pregnancies. Her story has been featured on The Today Show and Stephanie encourages others to always reach out if they are looking for support.
00:03:05
Speaker
What an intro, Stephanie. Thank you so, so much for being here. I'm so looking forward to our conversation today. Oh, thank you for having me. Excited to chat with you this morning. Amazing. Well, look, we have so much ground to cover, so let's just dive in,
Scaling and Defining Business Success
00:03:21
Speaker
Steph. You and your co-founder, Courtney, have founded two very successful multiple seven-figure businesses.
00:03:28
Speaker
I'm just so, so curious to learn from you what distinguishes a five-figure business owner from a six-figure and a seven-figure business owner. Like how do founders and business owners have to evolve over time in order to set themselves up for success when scaling a company?
00:03:45
Speaker
I think it comes down to making that decision that you do want to set your business up to scale. And it's really dependent on what you ultimately want to do for the business that you have. It doesn't mean that just because you start a business, you have to be running a seven, eight, nine-figure business. You can be running a five-figure business, a six-figure business, and have a really incredible business where your
00:04:11
Speaker
making money where you're fulfilled in your life. So I want to start by sharing that you don't have to be running a multi-million dollar business to be successful. It all depends on how you define success and what's important to you for your life and for your business. Now, if you do want to set up your business to scale, I would say what
00:04:30
Speaker
really differentiates of five and six figure business from a seven figure business is one, like I said, making that decision that you do want to build a scalable company, and then two, making sure that you have the right resources in place and the right community support, potentially a coach. Courtney and I always invested in a really wonderful business coach that helped us because what you'll find is as you're growing your business, you don't know what you don't know and you learn a lot along the way. So being able to
00:04:58
Speaker
have community support, have coaching support, and have those resources to really help you get there and help take your business to that next level or the next step is really important. Yeah, I love that. Thank you for also
00:05:10
Speaker
Starting off by saying, hey, at the end of today, success is how you define success. There might be people out there listening who are actually quite happy in their corporate careers, right? And they just want to maybe find a creative outlet outside of their core job and maybe
00:05:29
Speaker
start something small on the side that provides a supplemental income, which is fantastic, but they might still be able to thrive in corporate for many years to come. And I think sometimes it's so easy to kind of default to think, okay, I want to build the next big thing. I want to take a company public when in reality, that does not necessarily suit everyone.
Investing in Oneself Over Traditional Education
00:05:51
Speaker
So thank you for making that distinction, but I also loved hearing from you that it's all about. Investing in yourself over time. I think that is something that we've heard quite a bit on this podcast. When I interview other very successful business owners and entrepreneurs, they're always like in order for you to really make the big moves you have to.
00:06:11
Speaker
Take some intelligent risks along the way and that might look like investing in a probably not so cheap business coach who can help you expand your horizon. Gain different perspective and kind of hold up a mirror in front of you. So I love that that you brought that up because.
00:06:29
Speaker
I think I recently had a conversation with someone, I think it was Elizabeth Galba, the co-founder of SoCal Ventures. She was saying that at least in the United States, obviously for our listeners from abroad, it's a little bit different, but we're dropping, let's say 200 grand on an MBA from a prestigious university. And that might be a great investment, but imagine if you only took a fraction of that money and invested that in yourself and starting
00:06:56
Speaker
your own business, I think that's a little bit of a skewed perception that we have there because obviously when you're investing, let's say an MBA from like Stanford or Wharton, you're associating that prestige with that investment that you're going to get and that network. And when it's just yourself, you are the only person that you can bet on. So wish that there were more people out there who would take that, that intelligent risk.
00:07:21
Speaker
I was just having this conversation with someone yesterday actually about college and investing in college. And I'm like, I think there's going to be a lot that's going to change over the next 10, 15 years or so. My daughter now is four and a half and I've started a college fund for her. And I'm like, that college fund might be used for her to start a business instead of going to college. So I'm on the same page as you. Yeah, I love that. I definitely agree with you. I do think that the world of
00:07:47
Speaker
higher education as we know it will definitely change in years to come because quite honestly it also becomes increasingly less accessible to a lot of people so college might not be the best path forward anymore for everyone and there's amazing companies especially in a tech world where I'm from right who are now hiring high school graduates if they know how to code for example and you don't necessarily need to have that college degree
00:08:13
Speaker
Anyway, but I digress, Stephanie. You know that I'm a very, very big fan of the Entrepreneista podcast and something that I have noticed and many of the conversations with all the inspiring founders that you interview is that a lot of them would very frequently emphasize the importance of community. You just brought it up a few minutes ago as well. And I know that you and Courtney specifically often refer to your community as your key to success.
00:08:40
Speaker
Curious to hear from you. If you had to build your community from scratch today, let's say you didn't have over a hundred thousand followers on Instagram. You didn't have an email list. How would you go about building community and turning people into loyal fans and hopefully eventually customers as well?
00:08:56
Speaker
Yeah, I would actually do the exact same thing that we did several years ago. So yes, we have over 100,000 followers on our Entrepreneurs to Instagram account, but that's not where we started. We started with zero. We set up our Entrepreneurs to Instagram account when we launched our podcast, and we started by creating really great content. So I'll take you back to how we actually started our podcast.
Building Community Through Authentic Content
00:09:18
Speaker
As you had mentioned in the intro myself and Courtney started our first business social fly, which is a full service social media marketing and influencer agency. We started 11 plus years ago now on the side of our full time jobs. So we were both working in the corporate world and we were working nights and weekends taking on these client projects on the side until we said all right.
00:09:36
Speaker
This is going to be a real business. We either have to go all in and do it or not do it at all because it just became too much to be working full time and then working every night, every single weekend. We wanted to grow this scalable business, which we ended up doing. We knew we had to focus full time.
00:09:52
Speaker
Courtney and I quit our corporate jobs on the same day, which was May 4th of 2012 and never looked back and really grew and scaled our agency business organically, doing great work for our clients, being referred to new clients, always practicing what we preach with our own marketing strategies for our agency business. So we were quickly number one on Google for social media agency and influencer agency and winning awards for our work.
00:10:15
Speaker
What started to happen was because of the quick growth and success of SocialFly, so many women founders started reaching out to us wanting to out to coffee and pick our brain and just wanting to hear how we did it. Courtney and I, we are the type of people, we like to help absolutely everyone. We very quickly realized it was physically impossible to go out to coffee with everyone that was reaching out to us and still run our marketing agency.
00:10:38
Speaker
We started thinking, how can we help as many women as possible? And our idea to help everyone was starting our podcast so we could share all of these stories really at scale with as many women as possible and people as possible. So we started Entrepreneista by launching our podcast and then we created content
00:10:58
Speaker
around the podcast, pulling clips from the podcast, posting them on Instagram and LinkedIn, featuring the new episode every week. And we started growing our email list that way. So that's actually how we started with content. And I would do the same thing today because if you want to build a real authentic community around a specific topic,
00:11:20
Speaker
you really have to create conversation and content around that topic and pull people in. But then the next step is building real authentic relationships with people based on the content that you're creating. So for the two of us, how we met and connected on LinkedIn, I can't remember it was on one of our posts or someone else's posts, we connected. It's about like taking that relationship based on the content you're sharing when you're meeting real people, real humans on the internet, on social media, and then starting that next conversation with them.
00:11:50
Speaker
to actually love that and isn't it funny sometimes our internet friends some of whom we've known for years but never met can end up being our biggest cheerleaders even over our own like family and like friends from like high school or college and so i totally agree it's just so wonderful when you build some something that is actually
00:12:12
Speaker
serving other people. To my point earlier, you always show up as your most authentic self. And I think that has become a big success factor, why you've been able to grow all of these businesses. Because at the end of the day, women were able to relate to you and you were not a gatekeeper. You and Courtney could have also just said to all of these women, oh, we're kind of like doing our own thing. We're busy with our marketing agency and not end up serving hundreds of thousands of women all over the globe.
00:12:42
Speaker
that notion of also paying it forward and building, gather with your community and growing with them and evolving. I think that is a big part of this journey of entrepreneurs, obviously social fly and everything else that you
00:13:00
Speaker
over the past couple of years. Thank you. And I will say, Courtney and I had one of the most incredible mentors who is now one of our like closest friends in business to this day. And she comes and speaks to our Prenista community as well. Her name is Carrie Curpin.
00:13:15
Speaker
And Courtney and I were introduced to Carrie through, I actually spoke at an event and one of the other speakers, we chatted after the event and he's like, oh, I need to introduce you to Carrie. She has a similar business. She has a few years ahead of you. Like I know she'll love meeting the two of you. And this is like super early days. This is going back, I've lost track of time now after 2020, but this is going back probably close to 10 years, nine, 10 years ago now. So Carrie agreed to meet with myself and Courtney. We went to her office and we had heard about her company and she was like,
00:13:44
Speaker
I'm going to teach you guys what you need to know. You can learn from me. And then she started referring business to us. So business that, cause she was farther ahead of us in business. So she would refer business to us. That wasn't the right fit for her. And those clients became some of our biggest clients. And Courtney and I have always been naturally like this wanting to help others, but we saw early on.
00:14:02
Speaker
these champions and other women who wanted to support and mentor myself and Courtney, and how impactful that was to us. And then us really being able to pay it forward to help everyone because I truly believe there is enough business to go around for everyone.
00:14:18
Speaker
In the US alone, there's over 13 million women owned businesses in the US alone. There's plenty of business opportunity for everyone. So if we can all share information, we can all help each other. We can refer business to each other. When we have the opportunity to all be in these positions to help others, women can make more money. And at the end of the day, when we have more money, we can make decisions and we can make a much bigger impact.
00:14:43
Speaker
in this world when we have the power and we have the money to do these things. So let's all help each other and let's all make a lot of money and make impact.
Celebrating and Supporting Women Founders
00:14:50
Speaker
Yes, I love that so, so much. Get more money into the hands of women, especially female founders and business owners. That's a great segue to my next question, actually, Stephanie, because I think, unfortunately, there are still women out there. And arguably, it's probably older generations of women who are now
00:15:10
Speaker
maybe close to traditional retirement age who oftentimes were the first and likely only woman in a room and they had to put up with a lot of BS, a lot of microaggressions, a lot of
00:15:25
Speaker
discrimination so what i've heard from some of my other female friends and mentors who are maybe a couple years older than me they were having trouble connecting with with those women who were another ten twenty years ahead of them because they're off times was that notion hey i've gone through so much
00:15:46
Speaker
BS, so now I need you to work really hard to follow in my footsteps. But that's something that I actually see changing among millennials, Gen Z, where we're more likely to actually support one another. And obviously systemic discrimination is not just going to go away overnight, but we also cannot just sit here and wait for, you know,
00:16:08
Speaker
all the white men to wake up one day and be like, oh, we've been kind of not so great to a lot of women out there, right? So let's make some changes. I think we have to take matters into our own hand and women coming together in support of one another is serving us so much more as opposed to pop culture and society always trying to pit women against each other. I don't think that is serving. Any of us is only going to reinforce the patriarchy.
00:16:35
Speaker
I love that you brought up the story with Carrie and how she's been mentoring and coaching you and even referring business to you because yeah, you're a hundred percent right. There are so many businesses out there. It's the big, big pine. We all deserve to have a small piece of it.
00:16:52
Speaker
So absolutely. Yes. So yes, great segue to my next question, as I was mentioning, because what I love about the businesses that you have built is not just the financial success of paper. We already talked about that earlier, but also the fact that you actually truly embody women supporting women and obviously do a lot in that space. But I argue that it all culminates in your annual Entrepreneista 100 awards.
00:17:20
Speaker
creating and holding space, not only recognized, but also to create those moments of visibility, I think is so, so important, especially for female founders and women leaders. So, would love for you to share with us more about how the Entrepreneista 100 Awards came about and all the amazing impact it has had on women business owners within the Entrepreneista community.
00:17:42
Speaker
I'm so glad you brought this up because celebrating and supporting women founders is so important. We are all working so hard and it can be like these days of nonstop go, go, go, go and highs and lows over the course of an hour. And sometimes it can be hard to just stop and celebrate all we're accomplishing in our businesses.
00:18:07
Speaker
For Courtney and myself, as we were growing SocialFly, we started applying to and winning awards for SocialFly, and we saw the impact that winning these awards, it gave us credibility, it helped build our reputation as an award-winning business, it helped building our personal brand and our business brand.
00:18:28
Speaker
And as we were setting out to build more and do more with entrepreneurs, we said we want to create an awards platform for women founders because really there were not a lot of award programs out there for women founders, specifically for a lot of women founders who were early in their business. Because with a lot of these other award programs, you have to be doing like multiple seven plus figures in your business to even apply or even potentially win.
00:18:56
Speaker
And there's so many women who are building these incredible businesses that really deserve to be celebrated. And why are we waiting to celebrate these businesses until they've already like, quote unquote, made it, right? And scale these huge businesses. There are women who are making an impact much earlier in their business. And we wanted to give them a platform and a place to be seen and also nonprofits as well. So we set out to create the Entrepreneuristo 100 Awards and it's presented by Chase Inc. They're an incredible partner of ours and they are
00:19:26
Speaker
so focused on supporting women founders and leaders and giving women these tools and financial tools to be successful as they're growing and scaling their businesses. We select 100 winners and all of the winners get featured across entrepreneurs.com, other media outlets as well.
00:19:43
Speaker
other placements through social media, and of course, that badge that says that you won an Entrepreneur's Day 100 award. Recently, actually, a winner from last year reached out to me on LinkedIn, actually, and she said to me, do not know how much winning this award meant to me. I was able to get investors in my business after they saw that I won this award because it built that credibility with them that I deserve to be featured and get this investment. So many great things happened from the awards over the past year, and this is year two now.
00:20:12
Speaker
Amazing. And it just goes to show how it came from a place of let's celebrate each other. Let's provide those key moments of visibility and it has grown ever since. And for those people listening who might not have a business yet or just getting started, make sure that if you don't apply this year, maybe next year, because this is now happening every single year. So thank you for also like sharing that example of your
00:20:39
Speaker
community member who was reaching out to you on LinkedIn and sharing, hey, I've been able to get a seat at the table just because of that added credibility. I think, oh, that's just so, so powerful. And I can't even imagine what it must be feeling like for you on the recipient's end of that message. It must be so incredibly rewarding and must be such a moment like, wow, this is actually something that
00:21:07
Speaker
friend and business partner Courtney and I came up with and it's now actually having a real life impact on other women. So that's just so, so fantastic.
00:21:17
Speaker
I get so excited every single day when I see the connections that are happening in our community, when I hear the wins that are happening from our members connecting and doing business together. I'm getting emotional even talking about this and I feel like I cry like happy tears multiple times a week. For our entrepreneurs and team, we have a Slack channel about member wins and member love because
00:21:37
Speaker
Anytime anyone on our team sees all these great things that are happening, we post it in our Slack channel and we celebrate our members internally every single day because we get so excited. We know how much work goes on behind the scenes, building everything we've built behind the scenes with entrepreneurs. By no means is it easy for any business around a company. We're so blessed that we're running a mission-driven business where everything we do every single day has such tremendous impact.
00:22:03
Speaker
even when we're having late nights and working really hard, getting all of these emails ready to go and building everything with the awards. We have our event that's coming up next May, actually. We're about to announce it, so maybe this might be one of the first places we're announcing it, depending on when this episode comes out. We're doing our big founders weekend event, May 3rd through 5th, 2024, at the Ritz Carlton in Orlando. So we're planning all of this stuff behind the scenes, and it's so much work behind the scenes for our team, but then we see, we know the impact.
00:22:29
Speaker
see all these incredible things happening with our members every day and it is like the best thing ever. I'm getting chills at talk about because having received some of these messages obviously in a different context but when there is women reaching out to me sharing, hey because of you I opened up a brokerage account to start investing in the stock market on the something that we share and that's also how we were able to initially connect with
00:22:51
Speaker
Both of us kind of struggling with fertility. There have been so many women reaching out to me over the past year, ever since I started sharing about my premature fertility decline online. Started documenting my egg freezing cycles. Women reaching out to me saying, Hey, I've been gassed by so many doctors and they all told me like to wait until I like I'm age 36. And then I heard about your story. And now I actually made an appointment with a fertility specialist.
00:23:16
Speaker
for next week. And then there is another woman within my community who reached out recently like saying, Hey, I'm kind of bummed, but just wanted to let you know, I was also diagnosed with diminished ovarian reserve. And if it hadn't been for you, I probably wouldn't have found out for many, many years to come. So I think that just goes to show that again, the power of community, the power of
00:23:41
Speaker
addressing also historically stigmatized topics at the end of the day, which could be fertility, but could also be money, for example, which brings me to my next question for
Financial Education for Women
00:23:52
Speaker
you, Steph. Obviously, most of us have grown up in a capitalist society, so we're all conditioned to become
00:23:58
Speaker
consumers, especially as women. But unfortunately, rarely do we receive proper financial education and learn how we can actually leverage money as a tool to unlock freedom in our lives. With you having been an entrepreneur for the majority of your professional life now after leaving the corporate world,
00:24:17
Speaker
and having built a few freedom-based businesses. I'm interested in learning more from you about your relationship with money and how that relationship with money might have changed over time. Yes, I love this question and I love talking about this topic because
00:24:33
Speaker
Growing up and even through college, I had no idea how to manage money, anything about money. I literally had a credit card in college and when I graduated from college and I did not understand, oh, you need to pay this off every month, you pay interest. I was taught nothing.
00:24:52
Speaker
And it's just mind-boggling to me that financial education is not better. I remember in elementary school learning about there's a quarter and a dollar and a dime and adding things up. They were not teaching us about how to manage money, how to balance a checkbook, what credit cards are. I don't remember a single course, class, anything growing up.
00:25:16
Speaker
So I was in for such a rude awakening after college, trying to learn all of this and feeling like, wait a second. I mean, I had signed loans for my college that my parents said, here, sign this. I had no idea. I was completely, did not know any of this information.
00:25:32
Speaker
So now being able to take charge of becoming financially independent and finding the resources to learn everything and finding people to teach me, because I'll be the first to say I am not a money expert by any means, but what I am an expert at.
00:25:48
Speaker
is finding the right people who have the resources and the right tools to be able to teach me things and to be able to help. So hopefully others can relate to feeling like I did growing up in a household where no one taught me anything about money. I never learned anything in elementary school, middle school, high school, or college. And having to find those resources later on, I really made a point to find the right people to help me learn how to invest my money, make sure I'm setting myself up
00:26:17
Speaker
for the future, learning how to budget. These are all things that are super important and that we should all be teaching children from the time they are in preschool and elementary school. 100% agree. There is a stat out there that one of my previous
00:26:34
Speaker
podcast guest Tori Dunlap, who is the founder of her first 100K shared a while back. And apparently a person's relationship with money is cemented as early as age seven. I believe it.
00:26:49
Speaker
And I mean, I know Molly is not there yet, but she's slowly but surely getting there, right? So I think as family and friends, and especially as parents, you have such a big responsibility to be a great role model for your children. If you end up having children, right? Like I remember one of my first memories that I have with money was my dad telling me how important it is to save and invest for retirement. That's probably.
00:27:15
Speaker
the earliest money memory I have. And I might've been seven, I might've been five, I might've been 12. I don't remember, but not everyone has that. And similar to you, I was just in high school, college, spending money on like clothing and things that didn't necessarily add a whole lot of value to my life, having moved over to the U.S.
00:27:36
Speaker
from abroad to attend college in the States, I didn't even know the importance of credit cards and establishing credit because in Germany where I'm from, that's just not a thing. And at the same time, I now looking back when I reflect on my time in college of my male peers, which
00:27:55
Speaker
already invest in the stock market. Some of them would not even trade, but actually mine Bitcoin. That was like early in the days, like 14, 20, 15. Some of them were interning with Robinhood over the summer, right? So that was happening. But simultaneously, I didn't have a single conversation with one of my girlfriends about anything money related beyond, okay, let's
00:28:20
Speaker
go on this spring break trip together. And that was really, really mind blowing to me. And then I made a promise to myself when I started my first job in corporate that I would use that pivotal moment in time as a reset and start educating myself proactively on all things. And now I help
00:28:37
Speaker
that the women worldwide do the same, start investing. And over time, my relationship with money has also changed quite a bit because again, growing up, we're oftentimes being told that talking about money is impolite, but that's just so wrong because men are having conversations about money.
00:28:55
Speaker
closed doors all the damn time in boardrooms on the golf course wherever, right? And all of a sudden when women start talking about money and demanding to be paid for let's say speaking engagements or whatever it might be, all of a sudden we're being perceived as greedy and that just doesn't sit right with me and the podcast normalizing, having conversations about money and wealth building.
00:29:18
Speaker
It's so important. I ended up investing in an investing app. It's called Public. It's a really great app, especially if you want to learn about investing because it makes it really simple and easy to set up an account and learn about the different stocks or asset classes that you want to invest in. And now they've expanded so much on that app as well.
00:29:39
Speaker
invest in treasury bonds and it's really simple and easy to use. And I ended up investing in that app and now I invest using that app. It's similar to some of the other apps that are out there, but a lot better in my opinion. But it's a great first app to download and play around on there just to learn. And you can read up on every single different type of investment and people are sharing information on it. It's awesome.
00:30:00
Speaker
I love that. Thank you for sharing that. We're always about sharing very tangible advice. So we'll make sure to link to that in the show notes for our audience members to check out. That's great here. Maybe one follow-up question for you
Financial Transitions and Planning in Entrepreneurship
00:30:13
Speaker
Steph. Could you talk maybe a little bit more about that shift from working corporate first, the first couple of years of your career and then becoming a
00:30:22
Speaker
business owner and I'm assuming that you are making a lot more money now as your own boss than you are back in corporate. How have you been able to leverage your financial resources to really build a life that is in true alignment with your values and your passions?
00:30:39
Speaker
Absolutely. And I am now, but Courtney and I were not in the early days. So when Courtney and I started our business and left our corporate jobs, of course, it took a few years for us to be able to, you know, make as much as we were making in corporate. We essentially invested in ourselves and in our future by not making as much initially when we started our business because we took a big risk by leaving our corporate jobs. But eventually it was very important for us to be able to set ourselves up financially for success and not just us, but our employees too.
00:31:09
Speaker
So, one of the things that we did was we have always worked with PEOs, which essentially when you have a smaller business, you can essentially get the benefits like you work for a big company, but even with your business. So, we use ADP, their PEO, and you're able to get their 401k platform.
00:31:30
Speaker
through ADP so then myself and Courtney and all of our employees are able to be investing into their 401k while they're employees of a smaller company. So that's something that was really important to us. It's how do we set ourselves up financially and also set up our employees financially for success using the tools and resources that are out there and available.
00:31:54
Speaker
And then for me personally, it's just been about saving and budgeting and it's not always easy. My husband and I also made the decision after we had my daughter that he was going to stay home with Molly and take care of her. So we're on a one income family over here. So I need to be sure that we're building these scalable businesses that my family can afford to live and afford to see for the future as well. So I think when you're in corporate, you have your salary.
00:32:21
Speaker
And that's really it. You can set yourself up to hopefully get raises each year, but you're kind of maxed out in terms of how much you can make, unless you're in a sales role, of course. But when you have your own business, the bigger you build your business, the more potential there is to make more money.
00:32:38
Speaker
Now, I caveat that with saying, the bigger you build your business, the more people you need to hire or freelancers you need to bring on and expenses do become higher, but you can learn ways to be able to keep expenses down and keep profitability up. But it's not always easy. Yeah. I can only imagine that 100% agree with what you just pointed out there. I think
00:32:59
Speaker
The W2, so a corporate job, again, can be great. I have zero regrets about having started my career in corporate. I've learned a lot. The first couple of years, my learning curve was really steep, gotten promoted a bunch of times. I think I've 5x my salary over the past five years or so.
00:33:18
Speaker
which is great, but inevitably there will be a pay ceiling unless I try to work myself up to C-suite and a Fortune 500 company, which if you'd asked me a couple of years ago, that might've been my ambition, but it has changed over time.
Encouraging Intelligent Risks and Policy Proposals
00:33:35
Speaker
So I love bringing on guests who talk about that transition specifically, because I know that a lot of our audience members
00:33:43
Speaker
are also in a position where most of them still work in corporate, but some of them have been thinking about starting something on the site or have had a site hustle for some time now. Some of them recently shifted to becoming full-time solo entrepreneurs. So having someone like you who's been there, done that, and has come out stronger and is now able to support her entire family as a result of taking that intelligent risk many years ago is very inspiring and hopefully
00:34:13
Speaker
a call to action for some of our audience members.
00:34:16
Speaker
Okay, it is possible, but make sure you have the community and support and resources around you to help you because it's definitely not easy and it's scary, but it can be done. Amazing. Well, Stephanie, I have one final question for you. I want you to imagine that you have the power to enact a single universally binding law that every organization must obey, which is specifically designed to uplift women's economic status. What law would that be?
00:34:45
Speaker
Okay, so this would actually be for insurance companies. They would be required to pay for fertility treatments and IVF, IUI, everything related to fertility has to be covered without having to go through all of these hoops first to get coverage because
00:35:06
Speaker
I see so many women that are desperate to want to have a family and they are getting jobs at Starbucks who covers for fertility treatments because their insurance doesn't cover it. So I would say for all insurance companies to be able to provide all the fertility coverage that is necessary for women because otherwise it can be so expensive
00:35:35
Speaker
for fertility treatments. And even for myself, when I was going through things, I had some fertility coverage through insurance, but not full fertility coverage. We spent so much money out of pocket and that could, one, that can bankrupt a woman and two, many can't afford that. So then they can't have the family that they so want. So that would be the law that I would enact.
00:35:58
Speaker
I love that. I think it's very timely. I just read an article in the Washington Post this morning about a woman doing egg freezing. So I'm just like so glad going back to the whole notion of destigmatizing topics that were historically considered atebu. I see like finally we're starting to talk about fertility, infertility.
00:36:19
Speaker
Ms. Karage's menopause of that, like women's reproductive health as a whole, it's about time. Thank you so much for sharing that. And thank you for having joined me on the show today. This was such a wonderful conversation. Again, thank you so much for showing up as your most authentic self. As always, you radiate just this very special energy and I cannot wait for our audience members to have the chance to listen to the conversation.
00:36:43
Speaker
Oh, thank you so much for having me. And for everyone listening, feel free to reach out to me anytime on LinkedIn or Instagram or email if you have any questions or need anything at all. I'm just a DM or message away.
00:36:56
Speaker
I highly recommend following her on Instagram. She posts pictures of beautiful and adorable daughter, like almost every day. And it just like warms my heart all the time. So definitely make sure to follow Stephanie, follow Entrepreneista, subscribe to the Entrepreneista podcast, and maybe even check out the Entrepreneista leak, which is a membership community that I myself recently joined. I'm very excited about. I'll be right here. Thank you.
00:37:22
Speaker
Hey there, not so fast. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider leaving a 5-star review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you've listened in from today. Reviews are a podcaster's most important currency. It helps me create visibility for the incredible women who join me on this show. And if you've made it this far, I'd like to believe that supporting women is one of your favorite pastimes.
00:37:47
Speaker
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