#67- What You Need To Know To Start Your Business With Entrepreneur Kelly Alvarez Vitale

Show Notes

If you have entrepreneurial aspirations, but lack the confidence or foresight to pursue them, this episode is for you. Co-hosts Lori Vajda and Nola Boea sat down with successful entrepreneur Kelly Alvarez Vitale to learn how a professional with no previous entrepreneurial experience or a background in business, turned her ambition of creating a purposeful business into a reality. 

Kelly is the CEO and Founder of Strategic Philanthropy Inc., a South Florida-based Woman Owned Company that works with corporations, governments, foundations, and organizations to assist them with their community outreach efforts.  

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In This Episode You’ll Learn 

• How the lack of an entrepreneur role model is often an obstacle that holds women back, and what you can do to move past that obstacle. 
• Learn why your real world experience gives you an edge for creating a purposeful business. 
• Tips, tricks, hacks, and apps Kelly uses to run her business.
• How to tap into your professional network to identify potential clients and customers.

Key points Nola and Lori are sharing in this episode:

(6:20:73) While the statistics for women owned business are encouraging, women having access to funding lags behind men.  

(9:09:02) If the job or career you want doesn’t exist, entrepreneurship lets you create it. Tips to tap into a market that doesn’t currently exist.

(13:47.03) The 5 friendly, supportive and easier-to-use tools Kelly recommends for anyone starting a business. 

(18:25.30) Hiring help to support your business is important for growth. Here are some tips for knowing when and how to start.

Resources 

You can subscribe to Lori and Nola's show, (we love you and want to make it easy) on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Audible, Google Podcasts, Stitcher, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Connect with Kelly Alvarez Vitale: kelly@stratphil.com 

Strategic Philanthropy INC website: https://strategicphilanthropyinc.com/ 
This episode was supported by: Be-YOU-nique

ConvertKit: Our #1 Favorite Email Marketing Platform 
(This is an affiliate link)​

Transcripts

[00:00:00] Lori: From innovative underwear like Spanx, thank you, Sara Blakely, to the online dating app Bumble to getting help with tasks. Yes, we're talking to you, Task Rabbit, women founders have a drive and determination for developing solutions to everyday problems, and establishing businesses around them. And today's guest is among those successful female entrepreneurs. And she's here to make the journey a little less intimidating and overwhelming. Stay tuned listeners because this episode is for anyone with dreams of starting a small or side business this year.

[00:00:38] Announcer: You're listening to the Sticky Brand Lab podcast, where time strapped professionals like you learn how to create a business you love in as little as three hours a week.

[00:00:51] Nola: Despite the arduous roadmap to becoming your own boss, female entrepreneurship is on the rise. In fact, 47% of women started a business in the last year compared to 44% of men. Yet, according to the surveys, one of the biggest obstacles for women to start their own business is the lack of role models. More precisely, female role models. In our desire to make the road to entrepreneurship, a little less intimidating and a lot more doable, we're interviewing a successful founder who is sharing her experience, tips, tools, and insights. But before we do, welcome to Sticky Brand Lab, the podcast where we share essential business tools, shortcuts, and advice from leading entrepreneurs, industry experts and our own real-world experience. So you can launch your business quickly and without breaking the bank or feeling overwhelmed. Because the only thing more empowering than knowledge is being able to take confident decisive action.

[00:01:45] Lori: We're here today with our returning guest Kelly Alvarez Vitale. Kelly is the CEO and founder of Strategic Philanthropy, Inc. a South Florida based women owned company that works with corporations, governments, foundations, and organizations, to assist them in their community outreach efforts. Kelly has successfully guided businesses in their corporate philanthropy efforts to the tune of $9.5 million. Drawing upon her own entrepreneurial journey, Kelly is here to share her strategies, tools, and tips, including organization, prospecting, hiring, running a business during a pandemic, and how she does it all while juggling her personal life as a mom, wife, and BFF. Her story is a how-to guide for any aspiring entrepreneur who wants to create their best and most exciting life. Welcome back Kelly!

[00:02:39] Kelly: Hi guys. Good to see you or hear you.

[00:02:42] Lori: Yes, you too. It's so good to see you.

[00:02:46] Nola: When it comes to a business, whether that's a job applicant or an entrepreneur, men and women behave differently. For one thing, when it comes to applying for a job, a woman is more likely to think about all the reasons why she's not qualified for the position. While men in general have no qualms about applying for positions that they're less qualified for. Which leads us to ask, prior to starting your company, what was your entrepreneurial experience?

[00:03:12] Kelly: Zero. I had zero entrepreneurial experience. As far as me personally. I will say that if you heard the name Alvarez, this is kind of why I keep the three-name, approach, Kelly Alvarez Vitale, is that I am Hispanic. First generation Cuban. So my grandparents came over from Cuba in the sixties and my parents came over both very, very young. One was six, one was nine. So they're practically American. But one of my grandfathers started his own company. He started a jewelry business and the small town where we kind of grew up and didn't know the language, didn't know the country, didn't know anything, and yet was really, really successful and was able to then pass on that business to my father and his brother. So, what I got to witness was how being an immigrant in this country and not knowing anything and being able to work your tail end off nonetheless, but I got to see that even if you knew nothing, you could start a business in this country, if you were willing to work hard and be successful. So I knew that no matter what, when I decided to come, go out onto my own, that failure, wasn't an option. Because if my poor grandfather who did not speak a lick of English till the day he died could make a multi-million-dollar business, then I could follow suit as well with all the opportunities given to me.

[00:04:25] Lori: That is so inspiring. Did you work in the jewelry business at all?

[00:04:31] Kelly: Oh, that's a funny story. So I did not grow up actually working in the store, which is very ironic with immigrant businesses. My dad started working there when he was 14. And so, because they had worked there for so long, he wanted to kind of give us a different life. So while we were at the store playing around or visiting, we actually did not physically work. One summer. He did ask me to come in. I think I was post-college or something to kind of just help out over the summer. And I gave a recommendation on how I thought he could improve a process. And he did not take that well, because he said that I didn't know what I was talking about. And I got offended. And I said, well, this is my last day at the office or at the jewelry store. I'm going to go on vacation with mom at the beach. I think I made it like a whopping three weeks at his office and knew at that point that our relationship as father and daughter is probably a lot more important than working together at the store.

[00:05:26] Nola: But did you find that model of your grandparent's shop that was somehow some kind of inspiration for you to start your own business?

[00:05:34] Kelly: No, not for a really, really long time. I saw how my dad and my uncle worked really, really hard. I mean, my dad's at the jewelry store at eight o'clock in the morning and he doesn't come home till 7:00, 7:30 at night. So, I mean, these are very, very long days. And so I thought to myself the complete opposite. Oh, I'm going to go into Corporate America because I'm going to have a nine to five job so I can get done at five o'clock and I'm just going to climb the corporate ladder and do it that way. And it wasn't until I entered Corporate America and really got to see the cons to it and what that entails and how that is so limiting for women. And if you want to have a life outside of Corporate America, it wasn't until then that I realized, let me pay my own future. Let me form my own path and let me dictate how I want to spend my time, energy and effort.

[00:06:20] Lori: Well, that's really helpful information because some of the numbers that I found around women and entrepreneurship were the following. In the last 20 years, statistics about women entrepreneurs have shown that the amount of female business owners has increased 114%, which is wonderful, in fact. Women launch more than 1100 new businesses every single day in the US, and women-owned businesses generate $1.9 trillion in revenue. Yet the growing rate of women-owned businesses is 5%. And women getting funding for their businesses lags tremendously behind in their counterparts. So, how did your career experience lead you to develop strategic philanthropy?

[00:07:13] Kelly: Yeah. Great question. So I was working on the nonprofit side of things 10 plus years ago, and I was a whopping 25 years old. I had just graduated college, gotten my master's and this was kind of my first real corporate job. And in that organization, it was a lot of women and a lot of women had leadership roles. And so it wasn't that there wasn't growth and opportunity for women at this nonprofit. It was quite the opposite. What I witnessed was that there was no flexibility in Corporate America. If you wanted to go and volunteer at your kid's school or take them to the doctor, your kid got sick, you had to take your own PTO time, which is very limited. And you had to take time away to go be a human, be a mom, be a wife, if your husband was sick. And I just thought that wasn't fair. And I just thought, here's somebody who's working their tail end off and having to take their personal time just to handle life. And I just thought that that was really unfair. I also saw how my dear friends were dropping their kids off at their school or daycare center at the crack of dawn, working an eight-hour, nine-hour day, busting their tail in south Florida traffic to try to get home, pick up their kids, try to have dinner, and I'm like, this is virtually impossible. Like you are asking us to be these great role models and parents and wives, but there's no time to do any of it, actually, if you're in a very confined work environment. When you read all these articles like, oh, you should sit down with your family and have dinner. It's like, well, I have to commute to get home and pick up my kid and cook dinner and sit down, I'm going to be sitting down at eight o'clock or nine o'clock by the time it's all said and done. It's not realistic. I witnessed how my coworkers, and they became some of my dearest friends, were dealing with this and it was like, there has to be a better way. This is not how I'm going to live my life for the next 20 or 30 years. That kind of helped shape that I wanted to define my own path. So that was one piece of it. And really, I knew that I wanted to get into corporate philanthropy or community relations, community outreach, it's different companies, and it was a job that nobody retired from. So I could either sit at a job that I didn't love for another 5, 10, 15 years waiting for somebody to retire, because there's just not a lot of opportunity out there. Or I could go out and build it on my own and find a market that currently didn't exist.

[00:09:32] Lori: Can you talk a little bit more about that market that didn't exist? How did the idea come to you?

[00:09:38] Kelly: Okay, I wish I could take full credit for this, but it was probably my husband being very tired of me complaining about my job and trying to get into community relations or corporate philanthropy. The story goes, waiting for somebody to retire from one of these roles so that I could apply at a bigger fortune 500 company. And at that time, he was working for a big bank and he was really involved in the community. And so a lot of the non-profits would come to him with sponsorship proposals, to kind of just get approval from the bank. And one day when we were recently married, we were making our bed and he's like, you know what? It would just be great if somebody handled this for our company, you know, 20 hours a month, just handle all the sponsorship proposals and all the nonprofit asks that come in, because you should do that. I'm like, do what? He's like you should get hired by companies to like handle their community outreach. And like, that is the dumbest idea known to man. Who's going to hire me to do that? I literally, I walked out of our bedroom, probably rolled my eyes, and I came back a week or so later and was just like, okay like what would this even entail? And he goes, you know, I can help you with that, but you've got to do the work on how to start the company. And so I bought a book on Amazon called How to Start a Business. I'd go to coffee shops and do homework, like if I was in high school all over again. And that's how I ultimately came up with a business plan and then executed it from there.

[00:10:54] Lori: Wow. That's us.

[00:10:59] Nola: You make a list, check it twice.

Right now, there are more than 9 million people employed by women owned businesses. Can you tell us what made you decide to apply as a woman owned business?

[00:11:12] Kelly: Yeah. To get more business. A lot of times you are constantly trying to position yourself to either stand out amongst your competitors or to try to gain more business and to try to grow your company. And what's interesting about our line of work is that a lot of times people just think, oh, corporations or foundations give away money. In our line of work, we also found that there are a lot of government agencies that also have a pot of money that they try to partner with nonprofits to further, you know, their business goals and objectives. When you go for a government contract, there are it's called an RFP, a request for proposal, you get extra points if you are a women-owned company, if you are a Hispanic-owned company. So when you get these contracts, they give you the scorecard upfront. They're saying, this is how we're going to grade you. This is how you can tailor your proposal. And so if you know the formula on the back end, I just said, okay, no problem. Like there's plenty of websites. You click on it. You provide the appropriate documentation. And I think you might have to update it every two to three years just to remain active and show that you are in fact, a woman or a minority. And then once you do it, you're kind of in the system and you get points when you go after government contracts.

[00:12:24] Lori: So how did you find the resources? How did you decide which ones to use for yourself? Because that's often the thing that gets in people's way, when they launch a business, is not having those processes in place, those templates that they can rely on. So what was your experience there?

[00:12:44] Kelly: Yes, there are definite resources that will say like, oh, you should have a bank account or, oh, you should do this. I was looking for a hundred-step guide to be like, okay. Bank account, check. Accounting services, check. You really had to rely on other people who had started a company to be like, Hey, I think I should do invoicing. Like what software do you use? Or somebody in passing would be like, oh, did you pay your county taxes? I'm like, I'm sorry, come again? But, what? No, you have to pay your city and county taxes. And I'm thinking to myself again, if I registered with the state, shouldn't the state tell the county where I live. Hey, a business just opened up and the county should reach out to me and they didn't mean you kind of had to just figure it out. So I was very dumbfounded that all these systems didn't talk in place and we had to really talk to people. Again, for the operational side, things just kind of bubbled up based on different conversations that I'd had with different entrepreneurs and a lot of Googling. So that was probably the most challenging part because there wasn't a very clear how-to.

What I did know was for technology purposes. I mean, 10 years ago, I was a one-woman show. Literally nobody except me and my husband, who would help me with some basic accounting. So I knew that anything that I did, as far as technology was concerned, needed to be one cloud-based and offer exceptional customer service, because I was going to be the one on the phone or the chat feature talking to these individuals. So I went from being a PC person to switching everything to Apple, because Apple had great customer service. You know, I went with Dropbox as our kind of intranet so that's kind of where we keep all of our documents and everything because of their chat support, if I can give a shout-out to Dropbox. I mean, they are fast, they are efficient. We did a time tracking system called Harvest where we're not only does it handle all of my invoicing, but it tracks all of my time of how I was spending that time with clients and so forth. And then we use a project management system called Teamwork. And that Teamwork's to us, at this point in the game, is yes, it's technology, but ultimately it's a process. Super user-friendly, lots of tutorials, all web based that my team and I can access anywhere anytime, no matter what. So that's really how we kind of came across process and technology and operations. Some of it was trial-and-error and some of it was saying, no, I really need to make sure that I have access to all of my information across all devices at all times, whether I'm on vacation or not. And so those were a lot of the drivers in starting the company.

[00:15:16] Lori: One of the things that often comes up that can't be simply done through a tool or a technology, is the things that are specifically related to your business. And when you're working with other companies and organizations, you often have strategies that you have to put together, you have reporting systems that you had to put together. What was that process like in finding remedies for those?

[00:15:43] Kelly: I'm going to go and use our project management system Teamwork. I was able to manage all of the tasks. Right? And the thing is like, when you don't know what you don't know, everything's a lot of trial-and-error. And so, I wish I would have had countless hours and time to sit and watch every tutorial and everything imaginable to be like, I'm going to build it right from the start. And that's the thing. It can't be built right from the start because your company is always changing and evolving and growing. And every time you think like, oh, well, once I get to this spot, we're going to be a really good place. Then guess what? You get there and then your company grows again and you got to change and adapt. And so, I had to make peace with the pursuit of perfection. That perfection was not achievable. Once I made peace with that, I just know that fine-tuning your process is a work in progress. And so, for instance, we have some new team members on our team. I'm the one doing the training, because I want to make sure that they understand our culture and what's important to us. And in our project management system, we have templates that I built. They make complete sense to me. And then you try to train somebody and it's like, you're speaking to them in a project management system. They're like, I have no clue what this means. And I'm like, that is crystal clear. I don't know why you don't understand that. And in this training, I have realized that, oh, this process was for Kelly who was managing everything 10 years ago. This process was not established for the random employee that you hired that now you're expecting them to do the job exactly like you. So when you do hire somebody that might not necessarily be part of your industry, you're not necessarily know the know-hows of things. And in training, I'm like, I now realize why this didn't make sense to any of the previous people are hired because it doesn't give a good how-to. So we have spent this month fine tuning the process documents so that if somebody goes away tomorrow, somebody else could step in and be like, okay, here's the how-to on how Kelly expects everything to be done. And it is painstakingly terrible. But, little known fact, I'm very pregnant. And so I have to go on maternity leave for at least a few weeks. So I need this team to be in as good a shape as possible until I can get my head up from the ocean and breathe again and kind of step in. So I have really been sprinting since August to try to get everything in as best order I can, because I know that I have a ticking time bomb and a deadline that is like, it's looming that I'm trying to kind of get done and make sure that my team is in a good spot so that they feel empowered and they feel good about the job that they're doing when I'm away for a little bit.

[00:18:25] Nola: Can you tell us, how was it you initially determined that it was time to start hiring?

[00:18:31] Kelly: Sure. So probably maybe five, six years ago, you look at the amount of hours in a day. And when you're starting the company, you're thinking, okay, there's X amount of hours in the day and I can take on X amount of clients. And then you quickly realize that you can't do that because, oh, by the way, you have to prospect and you have to get clients and you have to do invoicing. And you quickly start to realize either I'm going to burn out because I cannot literally do this all, or I need help. And so I started very slow. I unfortunately, or fortunately, depending, you know, I am a Type A, I know that I have control issues. So letting somebody come in and take things off my plate was very scary for me because it's my name on the company. And so I started really slow. My number two, who was with me for five or six years, came in working 10 hours a month. She would help me with some admin stuff. And then she did a good job and you're like, okay. I feel like I could trust her a little bit more. And then you realize, well, I'm like her so much that I want her to stay. I have to go get more business. Because you want to keep talented employees. And so it's like, oh, well now I can scale because I have this great employee and I want to keep them, but that now frees up time for me to go out and get business. So for me, it started slow and I've had very honest conversations with my team to be like, anytime we get an opportunity, I go to them first and say, is this something we can handle? Because if the answer is no, I'm comfortable. I'm fine. I don't need more stress and more to do. So you have to also make peace with, are you trying to reach a certain income level or are you trying to get to a certain check box? You need to make that answer. But for me it's I want it to make a good living. But I also wanted to have flexibility and I wanted to have a life I'm only going to do this if my team can take on more, because I'm not going to drive myself crazy growing for the sake of growing,

[00:20:19] Lori: When things don't work out, they get derailed, how do you best handle failure?

[00:20:25] Kelly: So, one of my first clients who I still have to this day, they've been with me probably the longest now, was talking about bringing their community relations, corporate outreach, corporate philanthropy, in-house. And they currently outsource it to our company. And they said, Hey, we're thinking about bringing it in-house. Would you like the job? No, I didn't want the job. I did not want to go in-house. I had built the company. I built the lifestyle that I wanted. And so I remember getting off the phone with the primary contact there and I bawled. Because I took it as personal versus business. And once I mourned that, I mean, I bawled like if someone had died, cause I thought I was going to lose this client. And what did that mean? And all the ramifications from that. And once I mourned the client, I spoke to my husband about it, what am I going to do? And this is one of my bigger clients and whatever. He goes, well, if you lose this client, what's interesting about being an entrepreneur and starting your own company is, there's not just one client, there's three clients, five clients. And he says, okay, so you lose one client, but it's not like your income goes to zero. You still have income coming in. Versus if you were in a corporate job and the budgets came in and you were no longer needed, they would fire you and your income would be zero. And that was just such a profound takeaway, an aha moment to be like, okay, so yeah, maybe my income dips that month or those six months or that next year as I try to find another client, but I didn't get fired from a job. I didn't go from a hundred to zero. And so that was a really, really eye-opening experience.

I have lost employees at the busiest time of the year and that's stressful. But again, once you mourn the first one, people come and go and you just have to realize it's not personal it's business. Everyone is doing whatever they need to do to further themselves, their careers, their families.

And I want any client that we lose to know that I don't take it personally anymore. We're just going to continue to have a very good professional relationship. I'm going to maybe what we call drip on you throughout the year. Stay in touch in a non-businessy way. Sending birthday cards or saying, Hey, I saw this article about your company, like congratulations on this. Or just staying in touch so that when the timing is right, and it's all about timing, that they'll think of me and say, you know what? She was a pleasure to work with. And I want to work with her again. Employees that I have lost in the past, I have not shouted from the rooftops or screamed. I've been like, okay, what doors can I open for you? And what recommendations can I give you? If I think there's a strong candidate, because one, I want them to recommend my company, should somebody ever want to come work for us. And two, some of them I might want them to come back one day when the timing is right. And if you treat people professionally and you treat them well and you treat them kind, when your life paths cross again, and maybe you'll get reunited again.

[00:23:09] Nola: That's great advice and a great perspective.

[00:23:12] Lori: It is. I kind of believe that whatever you put out comes back threefold.

[00:23:16] Nola: So how has being an entrepreneur affected your family life?

[00:23:20] Kelly: It gave me flexibility and that's what I wanted. I had no issue working hard. I just don't want to be told that I have to sit in an office when I can get the job done in four hours versus eight. I always thought to myself, why aren't we rewarding individuals for getting the job done faster, versus being like, well, if I have to be here for eight hours, it's going to take me eight hours to do XYZ. So for me, I wanted to take my kids to school. And I wanted to be the one to pick them up because I wanted to be involved in his life and stuff like that was important to me and might not be important to somebody else. And that's absolutely fine. Somebody, you know, I have a coworker right now who is an equestrian. She wants to go riding in the middle of the week. Go ride, baby ride. Do whatever it is that you'd have to do, just get the job done when the due date is, you know. So I don't care if you work at six o'clock in the morning or at three o'clock in the morning, I need you to get the job done by the deadline and it has to be done right. For me, flexibility is key. And that's what I'm not willing to give up in any way, shape or form.

[00:24:19] Lori: How do you balance your other personal relationships? That of your spouse and that of your girlfriends and the other things that make you also well-rounded? Or maybe you just don't. They're just waiting.

[00:24:35] Kelly: You know, I have a cousin who's practically like an older sister, who often says work-life balance is a myth. It doesn't exist. Because there are some times when you are a great wife. There's sometimes when you're a great mother. There's some times when you're a great worker. It's hard to split your life in thirds or fourth. So right now, I'm in a season of I'm sprinting right now. I'm a really great worker. Right now. But then over the summer, when, you know, I'm a little bit slower with work and so forth, like I'm a great mom and wife because I have nothing but time. So I just have to know that there are seasons. Every day you're not going to get it right. Every day you're not going to be everything to everyone. And it's making peace with that. On a Monday, you're not going to be a great wife, mother, friend. Monday might be, you're a great worker. Tuesday, you're a great mom. Making peace with that, I think has been really, really instrumental.

[00:25:30] Lori: That's some really great advice. So is there anything that you would have done differently starting out in your business from today?

[00:25:38] Kelly: For us, we have invested in a big project management system and my philosophy at that point was, just start it, get it, figure it out later. You wish that you had time have had time to watch every tutorial and watch everything to really maximize every piece of software that you should be using so that you can maximize time and be more efficient. And that's not realistic. I would love to say like, Hey, I wish 10 years ago I would have had known all these processes and I would have built it differently. So I wouldn't have to redo the work. So I always think, oh, I should've done this differently. I should have built it this way, but you don't know what you don't know. And when you're at that stage, you're only building for that moment in time and you don't know what a year or five or 10 are going to come down the line. It's really hard to forecast what your business is going to look like. You might hope and you might plan and you might put some strategies in place. But you don't know. I mean, no one knew about COVID no one could've planned for that. So whatever strategy you had was out the door. 2020, I was at, it was going to be my best year. I mean we're going to have a bangin' 2020. And then it was like, oh my gosh, are corporations going to stop giving money because the economy tanked?

[00:26:46] Lori: No, and it goes with our philosophy of, embrace the messy perfection is over-rated.

[00:26:52] Nola: Well, on a personal note, just so that we and our audience can get to know you a little better, we have a unique question for you. If you had a magic stick and could bestow three things on any woman dreaming about starting her own business, what would they be?

[00:27:11] Kelly: I would have cloned myself so that I could have had another stellar employee who knows exactly what I'm thinking and can do the job like I want them to do. So again, I always joke. I'm like, gosh, I just wish I had another me managing this aspect of the business. It's kind of like Multiplicity, but with Multiplicity, that movie, the clones just got dumber and dumber. So I don't know how I necessarily feel about that stuff. A second me was a dream.

The other thing that I would try to bestow upon people is a dream team. If you're going to grow the company, you can't do it alone. There's only so many hours in the day. But hiring and keeping talent is really, really challenging and really tough. And so really trying to invest the time and energy. I mean, for the size of my business, the interview process that I make people go through is crazy because if I don't get it right, it's a lot of time and energy to try to rehire to promote the job, to hire somebody, to train them, to do whatever. And it's me training them. I don't have an HR team or anything along those lines. So I wished them a dream team of stellar employees that are with them that can help grow the company.
And lastly, I would wish them a lot of patience. I think people will think, oh, I'm going to start a business and I'm going to be rich overnight. And it's like, oh yeah, no, that is not how that works. My husband and I saw a documentary years ago about Pixar and they were 10 years in and they thought they were about to go bankrupt and they had their first hit with Toy Story and I think it was Steve Jobs who said it took 10 years to become an overnight success. Because nobody had heard of this company. And then all of a sudden there were everywhere, you know? And I was like, well, this company just started yesterday and they're so successful. I want to be that. And Steve Jobs was like, it took 10 years. Because it does take time. And if you're leaving a corporate job and you're trying to make that same type of income immediately, it might take a few years, but then it might come tenfold. So you just have to kind of be patient and build it and wait for it.

[00:29:07] Nola: Well, that's great advice. And thank you Kelly, for being our guest today. If somebody wants to learn more about you and the services provided by Strategic Philanthropy, Inc. How can they connect with you?

[00:29:19] Kelly: They can go to my website, which we just recently shortened the URL. You're welcome. They can type in StratPhil.com, S T R A T P H I L.com. And they can email me at kelly@stratphil.com.

[00:29:35] Nola: Well thank you so much for listening to this episode. We hope it makes all the difference in getting started on your side business so you can create your best and most exciting life. Not sure how to turn your idea into a profitable side business? Contact us at stickybrandlab.com/contact. We'd be happy to help you. If you found the information shared here today helpful, let us know by posting here where you're listening or on our Facebook page. This way we can learn about your business goals and ideas, as well as send you love, encouragement, and congratulate you on the amazing and courageous decision you've made.

[00:30:08] Lori: Be sure to come back next Tuesday and every Tuesday for another informative, inspiring and motivating episode. And remember. Actions create results. So tap into your desire to create a business and brand you love by taking 1% action every day. Small steps, big effects.

[00:30:27] Nola: Do you have questions about creating a personal brand, side hustle or small business? Sign up for one of our clarity sessions. For more information, contact us at stickybrandlab.com/contact.
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Nola: Welcome back.