Transcription
00:00:02
Hello and welcome to the Champagne Lounge.
00:00:07
Hello and welcome back to another episode of the Champagne Lounge podcast. With me. Your host, Rebecca Saunders. And today I have a phenomenal guest who is on the East Coast and rather fittingly drinking wine as we record this podcast. I'm on the coffee, she's on the wine.
00:00:23
I have the fabulous Heather Roberts on the show today. Thank you for joining me, Heather. I am so excited and I love the name of the podcast. I just think that is amazing because it just says so much like Champagne Lounge that is like luxury and celebrating and all of those things and so oh so excited. Thank you so much for having me.
00:00:46
It's going to be good and it is all those things. Right. We set it up and I've started the Champagne Lounge very much on the basis that as business women, we don't celebrate ourselves enough and we definitely don't talk about the journeys we've been on to get to where we are today, which is rather fitting for my first question for you is I know it's been a big journey to get to the work that you're doing now. What are you doing now and how did you get there? Okay.
00:01:11
What led to great question. So what I'm doing now is I am working with high achieving, high six, seven figure women business owners who are also parents or a mother and basically their life is chaotic and their business is chaotic and we need to distill it down. And we need to focus on what they want from the future. What's their long term goal, their short term goals and so forth. And we put that all together through boundaries, which is a not sexy word, but it should be a sexy word, right?
00:01:48
It should be a sexy word. I can't wait to dive into that a little bit later. So it should be and I have a very untraditional path to this. In 2007, my husband and I co founded our first business. It's an agency consulting company that we still have that helps home decor and furniture suppliers sell to major online retailers in the US.
00:02:11
So, like, we're talking wayfair Amazon. So that's huge, right? That's big. Yes. And then I also founded and successfully sold with a really good seven figure plus exit, a decorative throw pillow company.
00:02:28
Not knowing how to design or any of those things, but was really lucky because we took a different approach. We took accessible price point. In other words, we were a low price point pillow, but with the look of high end design. And we did that through I had artists that were on staff and so that was our differentiator and within two and a half years we were a top five pillow supplier at Wayfair and we were doing very good business. The only thing was that I didn't like it.
00:03:08
So I decided I needed to make a change. Like, literally, I looked at my husband one day and I was like, I hate this, so I need a change. And that allowed me to be able to sell the company. The company is doing amazing now, and it's allowed me to be where I am now, which is helping women. Like, if you don't like what's going on around you, then we need to change it.
00:03:34
Hallelujah to that one. Essentially, yes, 100%. If you don't like it. So many people get stuck. They just get stuck because they don't know the way out.
00:03:42
And it's almost like Groundhog Day. Every single day of just, I don't know why I'm doing this. I don't know why I'm showing up and doing this every single day. It's not bringing me joy, it's not bringing me any enjoyment whatsoever. But in doing that and stepping out right.
00:03:57
Stepping out of something that is paying your bills, paying the mortgage, particularly in today's economic stance of interest rates going crazy, it's not easy to step away. It's not easy to change direction. I know when my husband and I just recently bought our country house, and it's been something that's been on our vision board for a really long time. And so we signed up to that. We've still got our place in the city, and I went, I want to do something else.
00:04:24
He went, Sweetie, we've just taken on the second house and you're wanting to change direction? I'm like, not immediately, but yes. So I know that conversation can be really hard to have, particularly if you've got your husband and yourself work together in the business. I'm assuming you have a similar appetite for risk. I might be wrong in that, but for people that have a steady, salaried person around, or they're the main breadwinner of the household, changing out of that can be really scary.
00:04:55
Really scary. And so it can be really scary. And actually, in 2007, when we decided to take the leap into being entrepreneurs, my husband Josh had actually been in corporate before that, and I had been the stay at home parent, and we moved in the first five years we were married, we moved six times. Whoa. My three children were born in three different states.
00:05:23
Wow. Yeah. My oldest, by the time she was three, she'd lived like four places. Wow. It's a lot.
00:05:31
But we hit a point where this isn't what we want anymore and we need to do something different. And we literally took a leap of faith because when we decided to do that, we didn't know what we were going to do. Oh, really? You had no business idea at all? Wow.
00:05:47
None. We had a house in St. Louis, Missouri, that we had built 18 months before, and we have three children and they were all in private school in the US. And it wasn't working in corporate anymore. And so we moved back to North Carolina, where I am from and we had a house to sell and three kids that needed to get back in school and no idea what we were going to do.
00:06:16
My friends and my parents and our family thought we were nuts. But we just took the leap of faith of us. And it's worked out because the agency is in consulting businesses, still doing multiple millions and doing amazingly well. But it's allowed me to explore what I really want to do and what I really am passionate about. Is Josh still working in the agency?
00:06:43
Is he still keeping that going and gives you the ability to do what you're doing now? Yeah. So it's actually kind of interesting. I work in that company about two to 3 hours a the. I don't like to say this, but I'm the CEO, so I set the vision.
00:07:02
Josh runs the day to day, he's the president. And that's a system that's worked well. For so and you said you don't like to say it. Why don't you like to say it? I don't like to sound like I'm bragging.
00:07:18
Isn't that interesting? That is super interesting. Yeah, it's a conundrum. It's a serious conundrum, because I have always excelled when I fly under the radar and I just do what I do. Like, I just be me and I do what I do.
00:07:36
And I don't need a title, I don't need the accolades. I just do what I do. And that is the reward at the end. Right. So that's why I don't like to say, oh, that's why I say, I'm the founder of Extraordinary Women, my company.
00:07:59
Now, I don't like to say, oh, I look at myself, I'm the founder, right? I'm the co founder of our other company, RSG Sales. I'm the founder of Ebuy Design, my pillow company that I sold. All that other stuff is just noise to me. Interesting, because it's that whole thing of not celebrating the successes of where we've got to and accelerating ourselves into that next thing.
00:08:24
And it's interesting that you don't like to say it. Right. It's one of those icky things that we go I don't need to say it because I'm just so sure of what I'm doing and why I'm doing it. That's it. I know what I'm doing.
00:08:40
I don't need to verbalize it.
00:08:45
There's power in that. There's a lot of power in that. But it must have taken you. Have you always been that way or was at one point you went, I want the title, I want all the things, I'm going for it, I'm going big.
00:09:00
No, because when we created our company together, actually, Josh was the leading person, right. He was the one know, doing everything. But he took a couple years away from the company and I continued to grow it and it was successful and we were doing amazingly well. And actually it was 2012, so it was five years. And I actually said, so we have a decision here.
00:09:35
I need you to come home because either I have to hire somebody and I am doing more than I should, I'm doing all the family, all this, all this. And he was traveling quite a bit. I was like, so here's the deal. You either quit what you're doing and come home, or I have to pay somebody a whole hell of a lot of money. And he rightly chose to come home.
00:10:02
The thing that actually led me to start my throw pillow company was used to I had grown into the boss. Like, I was the boss. I developed the clients. I was the boss. He came back and he thought he was going to be the boss.
00:10:22
Power struggle. Yeah. I was like, I love you and I want to remain married to you. So I've kind of wanted to do this, which is start a product company. So let me do that.
00:10:34
Still keep my hand in RSG sales and from a top level, like, not the day to day role, but the top level role. And that's how we got to where we are. So that's how we figured it out. He always said he needed a boss. He needed someone who, at the end of the day, could go, no, this is a decision.
00:10:54
We're moving forward. And that's actually how we came to it. Oh, I love that. That just works. But you've got to get to that point.
00:11:01
You've almost got to go through the struggles of it not working to find out what's working for you, right? Oh, yeah. I was going to kill them. Yeah. It's a lot when you're working with spouses.
00:11:13
We haven't gone down that route yet, but I can see definitely the struggles in that. But in terms of the struggles of finding your rhythm together, aside from that being a pivotal piece, right, for both of you, for both businesses, what has been the biggest struggle that you yourself have had in growing both of these businesses? Love this question because I talk about this a lot. Having been a stay at home parent for 14 years, the first 14 years we were married, really? So we moved a lot.
00:11:48
So I was not quite employable. And then we had our daughter. So I was a stay at home parent, and I didn't understand the value of the things that I was doing at home. Meaning I was the financial person. I took care of everything at home.
00:12:12
If it was money, things need to be done in the house. The kids, their education, their this and that was our division of kind of services. That sounds really crappy to say, but his job was to work. My job was to handle everything else. And I volunteered a lot.
00:12:32
I raised money. I co wrote a cookbook. I did a lot of things, and I undervalued those skills 100%. What I didn't realize is if I can get 100 people on the PTA Parent Teacher Association to all agree on one thing. That's a minor miracle.
00:12:58
That's like herding cat. That's huge. All 100. Yes. Massive.
00:13:05
My biggest struggle was understanding that I had this skill set, and I didn't know that that same skill set was applicable in our business. So that was my biggest struggle. And it took me sitting in a meeting with a client and a buyer, and one of the people on my client's team looked at me and said, you're so cute. Oh, no. And in front of the buyer, who I also worked with other clients.
00:13:45
And I was a humiliated, b, furious. Furious. And I was like, no, I belong here. You don't. The fact that you just did that.
00:14:06
Wow. Literally. Yeah. And so I looked at the table and the buyer, and I said, I think this meeting is over. Thank you so much.
00:14:19
We're going to regroup. And I left the buyer, and I apologized to her for that experience, and I went back and I fired my client because that's not okay. No. Not on any level. No.
00:14:39
Wow. There's so much to unpack in that. In terms of what was the next step like in terms of moving forward from that and walking into you're obviously working in a very male dominated environment in that space that they think that's okay. What's been the process of growth for you there, for you and your team and the suppliers and clients that you work with, to say that's not okay? I think that's been interesting because we actually in our agency and consulting company and in the throw pillow company, and in the company I have now, we tend to hire women.
00:15:18
We empower women. We have done that from an intern level of, like, college age kids, and we have them as interns. So the reaction has been, how do we further empower other women? Love that. Which leads to the work that you're doing now.
00:15:39
Right. In terms of the boundaries piece and what that means, and in terms of the things that you're seeing people struggle with with your clients now, in terms of setting those boundaries not just at work but also at home, what are the big things you're seeing that are so I'm going to say fixable. If you just became aware of it. Yeah. Number one, their opinion and their self worth matters, they keep sacrificing for everybody else.
00:16:17
And if they actually put themselves first at that front of the line that's how I like to describe it. If they put themselves at the front of the line, they would be able to better serve and help their clients, their family, whatever their life. Right. The second thing is that I'm leaning in because they are afraid to admit what they really, really want.
00:16:49
It is like what they really, really want in their heart and their soul. They're a little afraid to admit it. Some women are like, I really really want to lean in to my business and my career. Fantastic. Other women are like, my business is a vessel that I can lean into and have the kind of family life I want.
00:17:19
Every way is fantastic. It's totally individual. So those are the two biggest things, and the third is that they actually don't have sounds so corny to say good boundaries, meaning they just put up with a lot that they don't necessarily have to and they don't realize they can say no. The Champagne Lounge isn't just a podcast. It's an instant digital community for ambitious businesswomen and entrepreneurs like you wanting more connection, community, and celebration.
00:17:58
So wherever you are in the world, whatever stage of business you're at, if you're looking for that ultimate female cheer squad of like minded women, head over to thechampainlounge.com to come and join us.
00:18:12
What are the things that we can say no to that we don't realize? I mean, I've done a lot of work in this space myself, and I know that when I started putting those boundaries in and going, you know what, I don't need to come to family dinner that often. I don't need to. It's not my thing. The pushback initially was interesting, but now it's like, actually the whole relationship dynamic is so much better because I'm happier because I'm not doing stuff that I feel that I should do.
00:18:37
I'm doing stuff that I want to do. Yes. That took me a lot of work. What are the things we can people can start doing? No.
00:18:47
So you actually hit on it. It's time boundaries. Like set time boundaries around the things that you're willing to do and the ones you're not willing to do. Another is if it doesn't bring you joy, why are you doing it? If guilt is leading that, then stop.
00:19:09
Guilt should not run our lives. We should be running our lives from a place of contentment and peacefulness and joy. And so those are the two biggies that I see. Like you said, though, there's pushback, right? And a lot of women don't like to handle the pushback.
00:19:34
So here is my take on that. Don't allow them to pay the rent in your head. Meaning don't allow them the space in your head. That's not okay. If you're thinking about, oh, I've missed family dinner and my mom's going to do this or my brother's going to do this or my sister's going to do this, you are allowing them to pay rent in your head.
00:20:03
And that's crazy. Given me a time.
00:20:08
Don't that's a them problem, not a you problem. In terms of bringing them along for the ride is a big thing as well. Me doing the work is all well and good, but if I haven't told my husband that's what I'm doing and why, that dynamic is a little bit strange too. It's bringing them along for the ride, I think is important. Yes, that was going to be.
00:20:30
My next thing was like, here's the whole thing, though. You have to communicate. If you're not willing to communicate, that, hey, actually, this is a great time to bring this up. Earlier today, I had a conversation with Josh, and I was like, I want us to talk about what our expectations are for the next three years. We're both 52.
00:20:52
We're going to be 55 in three years. And so it's like, what are the expectations? And we literally, as we I'm drinking tea, he's drinking coffee. And this morning he was like, this is where I want to be financially in three years. This is where I want to be from a work standpoint, from my hours, because I literally kept feeding him questions.
00:21:14
I was like, this is what I need now. I need to understand. So I set good expectations of what you need. So I don't work Mondays and Fridays. I don't work before 11:00 on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursdays.
00:21:31
It's setting up what I need. He would go nuts if that was the case. He enjoys working, and he wants to work eight to 9 hours a day. And all that I've done that, it exhausts me, and I'm done. I'm at a stage of my life where I don't have to do that.
00:21:51
But it was literally this conversation this morning, because then I was like, okay, great. So we also need to put on the calendar, literally on the calendar, vacations. So once a quarter, we are going on vacation. That's just us. That's not family.
00:22:09
That's not this, it's not that. But it was literally this conversation this morning of setting the expectations that we each have. And it was in a non judgy, non argumentative. It was, just tell me what you want. This is what I want.
00:22:28
Great. We can make that work. Yeah, definitely. It definitely makes sense to me, for sure. And interestingly you say about the holidays and putting them in because it's so easy to get to halfway through the year and go, we haven't done anything.
00:22:43
We haven't been anywhere, we haven't put anything in the calendar. And I look at my calendar and I know a number of the friends that I have do this. And it's a habit that we've done for a very long time. We put the holidays and the family time in first, and then the work comes around it because it's very easy to run your own show and work and work and work and work and work and not reap the rewards. And yes, we're probably very unemployable as entrepreneurs and as business owners, but what's the point of doing it if we're not having the fun?
00:23:15
Exactly. And so I shared that with a friend, and I shared it in a podcast episode. I'll find the number and I'll link it in the show notes later. But around planning the holidays. And she went, We've had the postit note of our holidays that we want to go to on the calendar, but we haven't actually put it in the calendar.
00:23:32
And now you've made me realize that we should be putting the dates in, not just dreaming of the destination. And so that is huge in sitting down and having those conversations. But I know if your husband's anything, like most mine, will go, we're doing what now? Do we really need to sit down and work that through? I don't understand the thought process that you're doing, and it's taken me a long time to get him on board with, no, I need to plan this so that we can go over this stretch.
00:24:01
It's a very different place to get someone into, headspace wise, that is. I'm going to say not the norm. Because we're not normal, right? We're not normal doing our own show and going against the constraints that society puts on us. What was so funny about this morning was I looked at him and I said, hey, we have been like two ships in the night here for the last few weeks, and I need to have this conversation with you.
00:24:27
I need to understand the parameters, the expectations. What do we want to do over the next few years? He looked at me and goes, I don't have the brain space to do that. And I went, all right, let's take it down. I'm going to ask you one question.
00:24:43
And then I asked a second, then I asked a third. And then he was like, oh, I get where you're going. Okay, I'm on board now. So that's how I approach it. Yeah.
00:24:53
Start small, start small. So, look, it's business ownership and doing things your way isn't necessarily easy, but it's totally worth it in every level. I fully believe, and I know that you do too, because of the work you're doing now. And we talked earlier about the Champagne Lounge being somewhere that we don't celebrate enough as women. We don't celebrate our achievements.
00:25:15
What has been the biggest achievement to date that you've gone? I did that and I've just brushed past it and I didn't give it time to celebrate it enough. What's one thing that if you look back over your career, your life, you go, I did that, but I didn't actually give it the acknowledgment that it needed.
00:25:36
I have to pick just one. You can pick several if you want. I'm sure there's many.
00:25:46
Number one, I had built a million dollar plus business that is our agency, and it's still growing, and it grows 30% to 40% year after year. I haven't maybe taken the credit that I should or the celebration. The celebration. Number two, I just started a decorative throw pillow company from my kitchen table, and it was doing several million dollars in sales within two and a half years. Number three, I have three and four.
00:26:25
I have a very willing and amazing partner in my husband and three kids that are now in their twenty s and they're probably the thing I'm most proud of. They're great human beings. I've stepped out of my comfort zone. I have my own podcast of boundaries, business and Boobs shameless plug. Love it.
00:26:51
We're going to link it. We're going to link it. It's a good one. I guess then if I wrap that up. My biggest accomplishment that I maybe don't celebrate is I did the unexpected.
00:27:06
I did what I didn't know I could do. And I'm 52 and I'm actually in a place that I can be celebrating that. Cheers to that. Cheers to that. That's amazing.
00:27:20
And you've got the wine there. To cheers it, right? Like you can hello. Yeah, cheers to the thing. It's those things that we take time and go, I can see it in your face and you won't see it in the recording because we're doing audio, but it's one of those things you go, I did that and I didn't really acknowledge it enough.
00:27:39
And so, yeah, it's those things to step back and go, I did it because it is so easy to just strive to the next thing to hit it and go, keep going, and keep going and keep going. So I love all of those accomplishments and I'll be cheersing you later when it's a more appropriate time for me to have, for me to have wine. Here, then it's not good on a Monday morning. Well, I do allow champagne as a breakfast drink on very special occasions, so I do feel they're recording a podcast a week. It might get a little bit out of control, breakfast champagne might get a little bit too much, so I try and keep it to special occasions before midday.
00:28:24
But in looking forward, looking forward to the work that you're wanting to do, where you're wanting to go, what does next look like for you and the work that you're doing for the women that you're working with? The work that I'm doing now is changing lives. It's changing the lives of women one at a time. Because when we do that, the ripple effect is you can't calculate that I have been the person that is trying to keep it all together and juggling and doing all of that and 03:00 a.m. Working and all that and I don't want anybody else to have to do that again.
00:29:09
I unapologetically change the lives of women who work with me. I love that. I love that and that resonates with me so much. Which is why I knew that we were to have the best time on today's show. Because the ripples of the work that we're doing for the women that we're doing it for across the world is just mind blowingly huge if we think about.
00:29:34
Yeah. Yes. Which is just incredible. So Heather, on that note, I'm going to wrap the show. This has been big, powerful episode.
00:29:43
There's been lots of takeaways, lots of lessons and a hell of a lot of celebration for all the stuff that you've achieved and are doing next, and I'm excited to see where that goes. So I'm going to link everything of where people can find you, your podcast and your website to the show notes. Thank you so much for coming on the show. I really appreciate you. Rebecca, thank you so much.
00:30:06
I'm so honored that you shared this time with me. It's amazing. Thank you. It's been amazing. Cheers to you, Heather.
00:30:13
And we'll see you next time on the Champagne Lounge podcast. Thanks for listening to the Champagne Lounge podcast. If you'd love to be part of our thriving global community, head over to.com to join us.
