How to Turn Your Passions into Million Dollar Money-Making Hobbies

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Victoria Wieck  0:00  

You know, it’s interesting. I started my podcast Million Dollar Hobbies and it’s truly amazing every single episode. Every other episode is me giving content directly and so it’s guested every other. So whenever I have somebody on my show, usually like I told you I interview people that do not have college degrees, or if they have one they haven’t used it for years. But they just had nothing but this undying passion about what they like to do. And they come up with the most interesting ways to solve problems or the most interesting ways to build brands. And you’re like, jeez, I wish I had known that and I’ve built a $500 million business, and yet I’m learning something every single episode. And like you said, you’re writing notes. I do the same thing. I’m like, Oh my god, it’s just amazing, I thought I knew a lot about jewelry. And then you’ve got these people, yeah, I do this, and I do that. It’s really amazing. No one person has an answer to everything. Everybody told me, don’t call it hobbies, because the minute you hear the word hobby, they know nobody’s making money, it’s a quirky thing. And I’m like, No, this is what everybody aspires to do when they’re retired. I’m asking them to do it now before they retire and actually monetize it. But I am just amazed at how many people have so much to share and they’re willing to share it.

 

Richard Matthews  1:42  

Heroes are an inspiring group of people, every one of them from the larger than life comic book heroes you see on the big silver screen, the everyday heroes that let us live the privileged lives we do. Every hero has a story to tell, the doctor saving lives at your local hospital, the war veteran down the street, who risked his life for our freedom to the police officers, and the firefighters who risked their safety to ensure ours every hero is special and every story worth telling. But there was one class of heroes that I think is often ignored the entrepreneur, the creator, the producer, the ones who look at the problems in this world and think to themselves, you know what I can fix that I can help people, I can make a difference. And they go out and do exactly that by creating a new product or introducing a new service. Some go on to change the world, others make a world of difference to their customers. Welcome to the Hero Show. Join us as we pull back the masks on the world’s finest hero preneurs and learn the secrets to their powers, their success and their influence. So you can use those secrets to attract more sales, make more money and experience more freedom in your business. I’m your host, Richard Matthews, and we are on in 3…2…1…

 

Richard Matthews  2:35  

Hello and welcome back to The Hero Show. My name is Richard Matthews. And today I have the pleasure of having Victoria Wieck on the line. Are you there Victoria?

 

Victoria Wieck  2:45  

Yes, I am. Nice meeting you.

 

Richard Matthews  2:48  

So glad to have you here. As we were discussing before we got on you said you’re calling in from San Diego. Is that right?

 

Victoria Wieck  2:53  

Yeah, from San Diego, sunny San Diego, it’s what they call it.

 

Richard Matthews  2:58  

Land of the perfect weather. We are on our travels. We are in the middle of Central Florida, we get rained on everyday here in the summer cuz that’s the way it works in Florida. What I want to do before we get too far into this is do a brief introduction, so our audience knows who you are. So you are an immigrant from South Korea, you came here, you said you had less than $30 in your pocket and you grew yourself into a more than $500 million business you got to show on HSN, you’ve been doing that, you said 23 to 24 years now. You’re the host of a podcast, I can’t remember the name of the podcast, what was the podcast name?

 

Victoria Wieck  3:36  

A Million Dollar Hobbies.

 

Richard Matthews  3:37  

A Million Dollar Hobbies which is great. You’re talking more about rags to riches stories of people who don’t even have college degrees but have built million-dollar businesses. So you’ve got an incredible story. And I look forward to talking about that today.

 

Victoria Wieck  3:54  

Thank you so much for inviting me to share my story.

 

Richard Matthews  3:59  

Yeah, absolutely. So to start off with, the first question is what are you known for? What’s your business like now? What do you serve? What do you do for them?

 

Victoria Wieck  4:09  

So I started my company back in 1989, and I’m a jewelry designer, and I’ve done it all over the world. And then in 1998, I was invited to come to the home shopping network, also known as HSN. And I’ve had my own show there for 19 years and what I did from 1998 until 2017, which was when I left HSN was pretty much fraying fashionable, high quality, heirloom-quality pieces that you’re going to want to enjoy and you’re going to want to pass down to your future families with a lot of affordability so I’ve made it very accessible because it used to be that fancy jewelry was sold to people with a lot of money, a lot of status. So I made it very accessible and a lot of fun. And then in 2017 after about six months of retirement I actually went to a smaller network so I could do my writing and created my podcasts to help people with big dreams realize that without having to risk everything they have without having to work much harder because there is a way you could work smarter and have a system built for you. So that’s what I do now.

 

Richard Matthews  5:33  

That’s awesome, so now you teach people how to do what you’ve done over the last 20 years which is build big businesses. That’s pretty incredible but what I want to find out is how did you get into business. I want to hear this rags to riches story we talk on this show, every good comic book hero has an origin story. It’s the thing that made them into the hero they are today. Were you bit by a radioactive spider that made you want to get into the jewelry making business? Or did you start a job and eventually moved over there? What was your story like? How did you get into becoming an entrepreneur?

 

Victoria Wieck  6:04  

Yeah, so basically, my journey was a lot rougher than most people because I didn’t speak English. English was my second language and the culture, east and west were very different back then. And the Eastern culture was kind of looked at very strangely by the American public in 1971. So things were a little rough especially for people who are very creative like myself I didn’t kind of fit into a mold of working hard to get your degrees and then climb the corporate ladder type thing which is what every Asian parent tell you to do become a lawyer or a doctor or a dentist whatever and then you’ll have your American dream and that to me was really suffocating I got my MBA and all that. And the higher I got in corporate the more suffocated I was emotionally and also I was just exhausted working 12 to 15 hour days and then you had an hour commute because I lived in Los Angeles each way and the one thing I’ll tell you is I felt very abandoned by my parents. I spent all the time in the world with them before I left Korea when I landed here my parents both had to work two jobs, I saw them leave for work about six o’clock in the morning and I didn’t see them until pitch black I was the oldest of the five so when I started my company it was do or die I had to start something so I could be present for my children I didn’t want to have my children grow up without me. In the corporate world I was making decent money so I would have left them with glorified nannies and so I started my company and I really didn’t have a choice in that because jewelry was the only thing I was really passionate about other than painting. I would  actually love to become a painter. But jewelry design was something I felt I knew and I didn’t have money my parents didn’t have money and I was, how does somebody with no money ever buy jewelry so I ended up actually creating jewelry for people that have a great eye for things that have great taste but didn’t want to have to spend a fortune for it. A lot of times you probably heard it before. A lot of times people will buy jewelry and then they kind of put it in the safe or something they never wear it because it wasn’t practical and the rich spent the fortune on it right? So I made it very accessible, very stylish and also in the corporate world a lot of women were dressed like men. They were the first generation of people actually getting managerial positions and they didn’t want to feminize their look or their presence. Jewelry speaks volumes about your taste level whether you’re an elegant person down to earth person, it can make a lot of statements on that and nothing like that existed at that time. So I guess partly, it was my desire to live the life I wanted to live which is no matter what happens, I wanted to do what I wanted to do to make a living. And the second thing is I kind of lucked out with the corporate landscape out there and the lack of choices that the jewelry industry was offering. I guess mine wasn’t either. I wasn’t bit by a spider and it wasn’t like I had a real plan. It’s just like I got started because I had no choice but to keep moving forward. And I will tell you I have made a lot of mistakes and I mean some of them were pretty devastating and just kind of got me over emotionally but I just didn’t have a choice to even give up. I mean, when you have a lot of money you go, this thing didn’t work. Maybe I’ll go start a bakery or that didn’t work maybe I’ll go get a job. But I didn’t have those choices. I had the one thing I could do and I just kept doing it. Did I answer your question correctly?

Richard Matthews  9:59  

It sounds like it’s a little bit of luck in the right place at the right time and a lot of effort to really push something forward and create something that didn’t exist to meet the market needs. So that’s incredible.

 

Victoria Wieck  10:13  

Yeah. And the other thing, you and your audience both might find it interesting. And this is where the hero part of the story comes in. I was told over and over again, okay, first of all, you’re crazy, you have a degree, you’re not going to succeed, it takes a lot of money, 95% of small businesses fail. I just heard all those stories all the time. In fact, I had a stack of business cards from people giving me cards, saying when your business fails, and you need to go get a job, call me first because I apparently made a very good worker. But what ended up happening was, when my children came, they were very young, I kept in mind why I started my business, which was, do what I do for a living, work less hours, so that I could be present for my family. But that means you can’t have everything. So my dream at that time was to make $36,000 a year, because that’s the number I picked to thinking that I could pay my rent, pay for my car, I didn’t drive fancy cars, and I could be home, sustain my kids, and then have a little money left over to save for their future, like a college fund or something. So what I did was I stuck to the 20 hours a week, and I was present for my kids. And it’s not really realistic to build a meaningful business if you’re only working like Monday, Wednesday, Friday. So what I did was I got up at five every morning and I started contacting companies in Europe because 5 am West Coast time is like 11 to noon Europe, depending on where you are. So I actually ended up opening distribution at Harrods London, Galleries Lafayette, Belgium, all these places, before I started opening up New York. New York opens at 6 am my time it’s 9 am there. So I kind of got very productive to three hours before my kids had to go to school. And then I dropped them off at school, I came back, and then about 10 o’clock in the morning, I’d have my breakfast, all my emails done. And I would hit stores like, Zales KS, all those people are in Dallas. So that’s two hours ahead of me. And I worked the time zones until two. And then at two o’clock, I pick up my kids, and from two to five or six o’clock, it was just their time. And after dinner, about 8 pm is about 10 am 11 am Asia. So I then opened department stores in Japan, Korea, Singapore, Hong Kong. And so I had an international distribution before, I had a really healthy business here. And that’s how HSN found me because they saw my jewelry and the covers of all these magazines. The story is, for all the working moms out there, 20 hours, and I’m going to go over how the 20 hours works out in today’s world. Because that is eternity, you can think about what you do in a corporate world right now. You’re going to meaningless meetings, a lot of CYA meetings, CYA emails, a lot of rah rah sessions, all these time that you’re spending every day, you might be an artist, you might be the marketing content creator. And then you’ll be going into the finance meeting, the marketing meeting, all these other meetings or sales meetings, that have nothing to do with you. Because somebody wants everybody on the hook. So you’re doing your thing. So if you think about 20 hours a week you can do it for yourself. I mean, that’s high productivity time, it’s almost the same as a 50-hour week job, in my opinion.

 

Richard Matthews  14:04  

Yeah, that’s incredible. So you took that time, the 20 hours a week you had, and you built the international distribution for your jewelry. And you took that and built that into a $500 million business over the course of the last 20 years.

 

Victoria Wieck  14:22  

Yes, actually, when my bio was written, I think that was 2017. I mean, I think I can kind of really update that now. But it doesn’t really matter after you even meet the 100 million dollar mark. Because I mean, you have all the money you need by that point. Trust me you do, I stopped counting. But I think just to give you a perspective of how many people have actually been touched by the brand, it’s somewhere between 10 to 15 million women have purchased a piece of my jewelry and I said 10 to 15 million because about five million of those people might be repeat customers, but if they keep buying pieces but I mean an actual number of pieces is just phenomenal so across the globe. So it’s not like a Christian Dior or Gucci kind of a brand but for a small mom and pop brand that was more than I ever thought was possible. I never actually tried to make money, I tried to make 36,000 a year.

 

Richard Matthews  15:26  

But do you still make and sell the jewelry since you’re not on the home shopping network anymore? How is the company performing today?

 

Victoria Wieck  15:34  

I’m on a competing network, a smaller network called shop HQ used to be shop NBC and then they broke off from NBC, so it’s called shop HQ, they rebranded themselves so I’m still on the shopping network. I’m in a smaller network. It’s the third largest network in the US. And I still have a lot of distributors that sell my jewelries. There are 70,000 people that sell my jewelry around the world. So the jewelry portion of it is kind of on automatic cruise control. What I’m doing now is I wrote two books and one of them is science fiction. I did science fiction because it was always in my system, I kind of wanted to write a creative piece. And that one is going to be released in 2021 is called Shattered Sky. The thing takes place in 2047, it’s futuristic science fiction for young adults. And then I wrote a how-to book called Million Dollar Hobbies and then I created a podcast for it. Because I believe that if you have passion. I mean look at my story, no money, no mentors, no family, my parents, I have to support my parents for most of my life. Because once I started making a lot more money, I didn’t want my mom and my dad to work manual labors. I actually put both of my parents back to school. So my father got his doctorate and all this stuff back here. So, basically, I started my company in the most unlikely industry, jewelry industry is known for high barriers to entry, like, you need a lot of money, jewelry cause a lot of money, you need a lot of connections I mean, where do you go buy and have materials from? So if I can do it by working approximately 20 to 25 hours a week? You certainly can do it. And when I started my company, everything cost money. Today everything that I paid for back then, computers were four or 5000 bucks a piece, fax machines were like $1,000 you needed printing machines. I mean, 1-800 numbers were several $100 a month. Today, all of that is free, calendars are free, your social media is free. I mean everything you need everything that I paid for way back then you can do like online surveys, polling, all that stuff is all free. I mean, you can take a masterclass, just like your podcast right now that’s kind of a masterclass on its own. You’ve got amazing guests on and they’re all sharing their journey, how they did it. Even if you’re not getting every single thing they ever did in an hour-long show, you’re still getting enough nuggets there, where you can really benefit from this. So if I break down the 20 hours that I spent, I’m not going to tell you. I have to manually type like typewriters to send out letters, there was no database. So I had to go and pick out yellow pages, I mean, all this stuff. Today, if you look at the 20 hours, let’s say you want it to be really good at social media. And you’re like, oh my god, I don’t have time. In fact, I heard one of your guests earlier talking about business systems that she builds online websites, and teaches people how to meet people. If you were going to do that online, and you were going to put like, let’s say you chose Instagram, Facebook, whatever, like three things. I personally, tell you, you should probably pick a lane, even with social media and matter there, but say you want it to be on, Instagram or Facebook or whatever. If you have to put like three posts a week, and you allocated yourself like an hour a week. That’s plenty of time to do that. That’s one hour a week out of 20 hours. If you were to do lead generation, for example, like two to three hours a week, that’s all you would need. 

 

Victoria Wieck  19:41  

If you’re trying to make 36 people, that’s all you would need, because you only need a few people to respond. When you look at and set your goals realistically so that you actually can achieve them. It’s aspirational, but if you say something like oh, I want to be like Victoria, I wanna make $500 million, that’s unrealistic. That’s like saying, I just had 50 pounds of COVID weight and I’m gonna lose it well what’s it? You know what I mean because every year people have this whole new New Year’s resolution they’re like oh, I want to lose some weight and I want to be fit and the fact is 80% of Americans actually give up whatever that program they were on by February every year because whatever they thought about was just not sustainable. Whereas if you said I want to lose 10 pounds in the next 10 weeks so that breaks down to one pound a week, it’s much more sustainable right? So whatever your business goals are, set it and make sure you define what it is that you want like I had a $36,000 goal. I want to work 20 hours a week, and here’s what I’m willing to do. If you keep doing that you’d be surprised. You’ll find out later that I’m not trying to make a bunch of money from anybody. On TV we are judged by dollars per minute so we literally get paid on a dollars per minute basis and you got to do several 1000 bucks per minute for you to stay on so it’s massive so for me to write a book for over a year that’s insanity, it’s such a horrible waste of time if you’re just looking at the money it’s a poor ROI. But that way I can reach a lot of people with evergreen content, what needs to be on your website? What is the difference between building a brand versus building a business? Because when you build a brand, the brand grows on its own and it’s not that difficult to do that but a lot of small business owners are so concerned about making profits they don’t actually build a lasting brand. I pretty much give a workshop once a month. It’s limited to only 20 to 25 people so people can actually ask questions and have it answered for free. But I would just say that what I want to do is when I come on to these shows, I don’t want to inspire people, I don’t want to encourage people, I don’t want to motivate people you already get all that. Every podcast gives you that what I want to do is I want you to take action because only your actions result in something. 

 

Victoria Wieck  22:18  

One time I was in Las Vegas and I saw this guy who was a veteran, he didn’t have arms, and when you walk by he just had like the rose tabs and he was playing the drums because had little drumsticks tied to his arms and it was really great. There are so many people coming out of the convention that passed by him feels horrible and will talk about him for years like I’m talking about it now but only one or two people actually gave him any money. So you can feel horrible but you haven’t changed his life until you take that action. So if you’re going to change your life whether you are starting a business now or you started a business and you’re struggling and you don’t know how to get it done and you’re like oh my god I don’t have time I don’t have this I don’t have connections I don’t have money all of the excuses, you’d be surprised if you actually realize you have no option but to go forward you got to find the one thing you could do even if it’s a small thing you could do to help yourself. Like when we came here we didn’t speak English, there’s nothing and the one thing I did was I decided that without speaking English I’m not going to get anywhere and that one thing even a 13 year old child can do on her own. So I had my dad go and get an English to English dictionary because there was no English to Korean dictionary back then. I’m sure he could have found one but it was not easy so he would just circle any words that had less than five letters in them, just circle them. Because a 13 year old kid can’t remember a 20 letter thing so he circled them and my dad didn’t speak English either. So during the day when they went to work, I looked at the English dictionary, and then every time you look up a word would be described in English, you end up with 10 words or something that you have to look up again, but eventually, I found out the American public actually lives on 2500 word vocabulary.

 

Victoria Wieck  24:18  

I found that out, I even think English is such a big language but it’s not so I learn pretty quickly within a year because my goal was to do 200 words a day because I had 6 am to midnight every day to do this with. And eventually I put out two books. So think about the one thing you could do. And if you come to my website and my Million Dollar Hobbies Show, there are six key pillars that every small business needs. You need some visibility. You need to understand how to handle money. You need to find your ideal customers. Loads of them you need to find borderline fanatically in love with you and your services so that they talk about you to other people and then how to use video because that’s one thing I know how to do well is storytelling, how to use storytelling to create a memorable brand in the minds of your ideal consumer because when you’re on TV, you got to do it many dollars a minute. It’s not just sell, sell, sell, and then the most important thing of all, a lot of people say we love our customers, I know my customers, and I do everything for my customers. But when you go to their website, when you go hear them talk, you don’t see them as customer centric businesses. If you look at all of the businesses that are kind of ruling our lives today, Starbucks, Amazon, all these companies, they’re very customer centric. And there’s a trick to understanding how you look like your customer centric on your websites on all your messaging.

 

Richard Matthews  26:09  

That’s amazing. So it lets you talk forever because it’s amazing to hear some of those things. I have a couple of questions out of those things. You mentioned a couple of things. One is learning how to build a brand because that will outlast anything building for money or profits. And the second thing is customer centric. So I’m curious, what are some of your thoughts on how you build a brand that is not focused on profits like the brand is bigger than the company that makes sense. And the reason I ask is because I’m in the process of building a company. We sell refillable candles, glass refillable candles, they’re super cool. We’re doing a couple of million dollars a year in sales with those, we’d really love to grow that but I know that’s one of the areas that I need to help our business grow is sort of figure out how to build the brand and not just the product, if that makes sense.

 

Victoria Wieck  27:01  

Yeah. Oh no, that makes total sense. That’s exactly what I did. And without building a brand, you don’t ever get to the $500 million. I mean it’s really rough to do it any other way. I would say that, understanding what a brand is, every brand has to stand for something. If you look at for example, and I’m going to pick this example just because you’re a guy and it’s something that you would probably know. If you were to think of someone like Armani or Ralph Lauren, for example, they’re two very different brands, right? You may not realize what those brands actually stand for because their brands are very subtle. Because they don’t say these things in their branding messaging, but you as a consumer know this. Armani is really a lot about that incredible fabric and the drape and the fit, whereas Ralph Lauren it’s more about that polished Americana denim type of a look. So imagine if you find that there are always these competing trends out there. So for example, let’s say tomorrow morning you wake up and you know all the fashion magazines are talking about the pink ruffles, the pink ruffles are it and even the guys are wearing the pink polka dots ties or whatever, that’s a big thing. You will not ever see Armani coming out with pink ruffle suits for a guy you won’t see them coming out with pink period. I mean, if they do anything it might be like a little scarf thing that goes on one of their suits or it might be in the accessories area but they will probably choose to set out that they might do that in the ones. Same thing with men. You have to stick to your brand once your branding is finalized. For example, if you’re into candles, right now a lot of the trends out there could be you want it to be organic you want to be this you want to be that all those trends are out there. But you have to understand that the word trend means exactly that. Whatever is in trend today is not going to be in trend tomorrow, right. You want to go to timeless trends. So there are always minor trends and there are life changing trends that stay with you forever. Let’s say years ago when we all used to travel for example, if you go back 30 years I mean there were beautiful luggage, people used to travel with Louis Vuitton this or that all those wealthy people used to have that for real status. Today, the major trend is all the bags now have rollers at the bottom, that was a big life changing trend, right? Same thing with clothing, a lot of women’s clothes, they don’t want to have to iron them and take them to dry cleaners. I’ve met Jersey and whenthey came out was like oh who’s gonna wear polyester who’s gonna wear this. But it’s kind of changed how we live. Some of this has to do with identifying and understanding which trends are going to be the ones that are going to be in there forever otherwise, you don’t want to spend all that money and time branding yourself only to find out oh, neon yellow color candles, nobody wants them anymore, so it’s 90% off tomorrow. The brand has to be more than your product has to be more than your team of people behind you. It has to be more than the CEO, it really needs to be about a concept. 

 

Victoria Wieck  30:54  

I invite you and all of your listeners to come to my website because I actually go over these things but the only thing is I don’t know how to do this any other way. I really believe in small workshops because that’s the way you’re going to actually get content. So like if you come to me and you want to talk about candles and somebody comes to me and they want to talk about CBD oils or whatever. I want to be able to answer them in a very meaningful way. So for example, I just got through telling you I do jewelry design and all that right. But if you look at what my brand actually stands for, I say that my brand actually helps people memorialize their finest moments in life, like weddings, anniversaries, christenings, graduations, promotions, it’s all celebrated with a piece of jewelry. And it used to be before you didn’t really have choices that were individualized, stylish that really memorialized who you were. So every wedding has a love story. Your love story is very unique, why should you go to Zales or wherever and buy something that’s made for 4 billion people? So I wanted to kind of make sure that that’s memorialized correctly. And when you do that, the designs are very timeless, because it’s something that has to be lasting forever. The design has to be somewhat timeless. So the challenge is then what does the word timeless mean? Does that mean it has to be boring? This is why everything looks the way it does? No, it doesn’t. Because I add freshness to it. Because you are a modern person. So a lot of times when I do jewelry design. My bridal designs are a little different. But for anything else, if I add a floral hint to something or texture that has a little bit of something found in nature, that’s butterflies, flowers, ladybugs, these things have been around for billions of years. So it’s not an obvious thing. But there’s a lot of different ways you can actually make something timeless. So what I’m saying is that every brand has the opportunity to create a distinctive, unique brand without a whole lot of money, you just have to think about it very carefully. And then the other thing too, is I always say to people I have a video influencing. The last time I offered it, 300 people signed up on day one. And then by the time I actually did, it was like 3000 people that wanted to get in. But here’s the thing, if you’re a small business person, the best thing you could do is learn how to use video. Because you are getting hit if you’re a small business owner, you’re selling candles, you’re going to be hit by the Walmarts and Amazons of the world and then you’re getting hit with the Etsy’s of the world at the other end. So you’re actually in the middle of it. And there’s not enough money or time out there for you to spend to kind of uniquely stand on your own. I just got through telling you that you want to have legions of borderline fanatic fans fall in love with you. How are they gonna fall in love with you? If they’re gonna read about you. If you come on and say, hey, I’m Richard, let me tell you a little bit about my candles. And here it is absolutely gorgeous. And let me tell you a little bit about this. What happens is, they say a picture’s worth 1000 words a video is worth a million words. It could be the 32nd video.

 

Victoria Wieck  34:25  

And I do two things, one is storytelling. And the second is using video and the video, a lot of people think about the lighting, the sound and all that’s great. But that’s kind of like saying, going into a restaurant and you’re going to focus on how big the steak is and what temperature this was cooked, who cares. All they care about is, would you’d be better off caring about the sizzle and the smell before all the other stuff. It’s like somebody telling me I’ve got a high-quality microwave and it’s traveling at a certain speed. I don’t even care about that. Right? So video influencing is one and then storytelling. Everybody has a story like your show is about Genesis the origin story. Why is storytelling really important? Because stories are memorable. Stories emotionally move you. If people don’t emotionally connect with you, you will never build a brand. So, if it’s dollars and cents, it’s just like a lot of electronics, like, okay, I bought this little ear thing, my thing broke. I went to Amazon and bought it for $9. Okay, I don’t even know what brand it is, I don’t care what it is. You don’t build loyalty on something like that, because it’s not an emotionally connecting thing. Candles can be very emotionally connecting if you make them. Because a lot of people will talk about, oh, my candles are organic, and my candles are this my candle, it’s all about the word I or my. I’m just gonna give you a quick demonstration of customer centric versus YOU centric. Because a lot of small businesses make this mistake over and over and over again. Because they believe that the way they set up their expert authority is by letting people know how great you are, how great your business is, and all the accomplishments you and your team have made. So you keep talking about yourself. That’s what ends up happening even though you’re not a braggadocious person. So for example, if you said I designed his wonderful candles because I believe that people should have candles that smell good and blah, blah, blah. And I have a degree in chemistry and I traveled all over the world looking for these class candles. And by the way, I personally believe that you should save your money. So it’s refillable, okay, so use the word “I” five times, okay? And you set it with heart and soul because you think this is helping people. But if you said something like, I know that candles can change lives. And you guys love candles, who wouldn’t love a house or a room full of wonderful sounding smelling memories evokes wonderful memories for most people. For example, smell is one of the most sensitive senses that we have. You’re talking about your audience you say you know, we know that you love neutrals, and neutrals, when you have your wonderful dinners and you’re decorating for holidays or whatever, that neutrals allow you to be the designer, the neutrals allows you to be the creative person that can create all kinds of looks and smells and by the way, those neutrals can be easily coordinated or worked with a little pop of color and little pop of different kinds of scents so now, here you’re saying the word You. And by the way, you don’t have to pay another Penny and you can save the planet by not having to buy all those extra glasses every time you do this because it is refillable. So our brand actually allows you to be the creator and gives you tons of options to give you and your guests an amazing experience that’s memorable. And you get to save money and you get to save time and you contribute to saving the planet. Now that is a cosmic centric message. I mean, I just kind of cooked this up over. But you see what I’m saying?

 

Richard Matthews  38:57  

That’s amazing. I’m fairly certain you’re probably just doubled the size of my business.

 

Victoria Wieck  39:04  

What I’m saying is there is an artful way I mean, I can take a look at your website and go over every word that matters. But when you do the same video, the video could be maybe 30 seconds. And that will make all the difference and then there are tricks like, you could use, I say, tell your story, because your story is unique and if they fall in love with your story. And if you said you know, hey, I’m on a mission to make sure that during COVID times whatever meals you have, it’s going to be memorable, it’s going to be something that has an X-Factor, something that makes you feel good as a host or a guest and it makes you feel good because you can do so many different things. And let me tell you a little story about how an amazing event that our clients had so you can have other people tell you the story. You could tell their story, our client had her wedding anniversary, and she chose whatever candles went with the flowers that she had. And she was glowing and radiant. And she basically permeated all this positivity and beauty around her. And we applaud her for doing whatever. So again, you can tell your story by shining a light on other people’s stories, and you can have other people tell your stories, but you gotta get it from all different angles. And I would say you did a video because who reads anything anymore, anytime we do it, you can do anything in the video, it will increase your engagement by 90%. That’s a fact. So this is why you got everybody, Facebook, Pinterest, everybody’s going to video. So if you’re interested in mastering your storytelling, the difference between my storytelling workshops, and how other people teach storytelling, because first of all, most people who teach storytelling have actually never told a story. They haven’t sold anything. I mean, it’s interesting there are people who charge like $25,000 and up on how to pitch yourself and none of them have been on TV, and I’m like, how does that work? If you can’t get yourself on TV, how are you teaching? So here’s the deal. What I do in my workshop is if you come to me or anybody in your audience signs up. And instead of just telling them what they have to do, I will ask them to tell me their story. And I pretty much go through their story, and I’ll go, you know what, I like that. But why should I buy from you? You still haven’t answered this or I might say, your story could be told so much more powerful if you use this part. And not that because a lot of times they don’t really realize. I had a woman who pitched me on my show. And she told me about how she grew up poor and she was the first one that actually graduated from high school in her family. It was all great. Then she went through that 15 degrees she had. And I was like, okay, enough, already, the point she was trying to make is that she was the first person who actually read in her family, to get the first college degree. And then she went on to that and said that she’s highly educated. That’s it, I don’t need to know every single degree you got, and what you do. And by the way, I asked her, what is it that she teaches, and she says something like, I teach people to overcome fear because they have to know what they can’t do. And I’m like, well, yeah, you need 15 degrees to do that, because most people know what they can’t. The point is a lot of times every person comes to life with rich stories about ourselves, and what’s inside of us. And you need to be able to bring that out and present it in a way that’s going to connect almost like a magic bullet to your audience’s heart. Did you know that I’ve done somewhere between 500 to $750 million, with less than $10,000 worth of advertising and most of that money was done before the internet. And that is something. 

 

Richard Matthews  43:15  

That’s insane. 

 

Victoria Wieck  43:16  

Yeah, I don’t believe in advertising, I don’t.

 

Richard Matthews  43:21  

So just a video and I’ve got a whole pile of notes that I’ve been taking over here on the side because that was some really fantastic information on how to build a customer centric story and how to build a brand that’s memorable by actually standing for something. And I said, I’ve gotten a whole bunch of things just off the top of my head from what you were talking about for our brand, but bringing light to moments that matter. And learning to tell a story and how to move people. So anyway, I got a whole bunch of notes from that whole bit. So that’s really fantastic. But what I want to talk a little bit about is your superpowers. And I almost feel like we got a preview of your superpowers just a second ago. But we talk on this show all the time, every hero has their superpower, it’s the thing that makes them who they are, whether that’s super strength or the ability to call down Thunder from the sky. I call it a zone of genius, which is either a skill that you were born with, or you developed over time that really allows you to help the people in your life overcome their villains, and come out on top of their journey. And the way I like to frame it is if you look at all the skills that you’ve developed over the course of your life, the course of your business, there’s probably a common thread that ties all those things together. That common thread is where you find your superpower. So with that framing, what do you think your superpower is in business?

 

Victoria Wieck  44:44  

I would say I don’t even know if this is a superpower or personality trait. But I would say the number one thing about me that most people don’t know is my curiosity. And let me tell you why having curiosity is really important in your journey to success. In my book, I actually listed several “C” words like confidence, courage, all that. But I would say the number one thing you should have is curiosity because when you’re curious about something, you never accept the status quo. Basically, right after I started my company, I had a lot of time trying to figure out okay, what went wrong? I mean, I’ve told you many times many things go wrong, I got screwed over so many times, I was so innocent, because I like to look at people for their good no matter what. I looked up all the gifted people and found out what their superpower was. Okay, so I looked at people like Leonardo da Vinci, Thomas Edison, Albert Einstein, Mozart, Mother Teresa, all these people that we would not dispute that they were gifted. Mozart wrote most of his music before he was 20, some of them he wrote when he was a child, that’s why he has very childlike happiness to it. Beethoven, deaf and mute some of the best music ever, very complex music. So I looked at what was the common thread and the common thread was curiosity. The biggest problem a lot of small business people have is that so many people reach out to me, and they’re like, oh, I have this business or that business, by the way, I give a lot of speeches, I’m the director of a lot of different female business groups, and they’ll tell me, oh, my business is crushing, it’s on cruise control. And I’m thinking to myself, the fact is something like 75% of small businesses even if they’re successful enough to have built a business, they have a business that’s not saleable, they can’t sell it to anybody. So they’re hoping that their kids will take it over, where they’re hoping that you can still make some money in retirement, okay, so I try to tell them look if you really want to upscale it, you can’t be happy with where you are, curiosity keeps on making you elevate yourself and keep on evolving. In my business, for example, in fashion, in jewelry, designers come and go, my business, I’ve never had a bad year, my business kept on growing because I keep on evolving. So I would say in order for you to go from zero to a million, it takes a lot of effort, but from a million to 10 million, it’s a really critical time in our business journey, I would say that in simple words, you start your business, then you have to keep elevating. And then you’ve got to amplify them. So you elevate high, and then you amplify them wide. So eventually you elevate and then curiosity will cause you to innovate, so elevate, innovate, and then eventually, you’re gonna have to dominate that industry. And it could be a small niche, but you have to dominate the industry. And that’s how you basically end up scaling much faster. I would say, from the first million was a couple of years, from there to 10 million was one year. And then from 10 million to 100 million was like four or five years. And so again, it’s curiosity. I think I was born curious, and I think I kind of had to stay curious because I live on a small island in Korea. So all I saw were these beautiful beaches all the time, there was nobody there except just beaches. And we saw dolphins and beaches most of the time, I got sick of it. And I would ask my parents to read to me, other places, other kids, like, how do people live? I know, there are people on the other side of the world, how do they live? So I basically ended up seeing the world through books. I’ve traveled millions of miles to see my customers all over the world. And the easiest thing to do is do what other people do in other parts of the world, or do what people do in different industries. 

 

Victoria Wieck  49:05  

For example, I found out that when people do heart surgeries, the needles and things that go through your body have to be so nimble. They were all done by computer technology, like CAD CAM technology, which was then adopted into the golf technology where they can put the weight wherever they want because they were able to create a piece and then subtract the weight out of that. And I’ve also like, whoa, that’s just so perfect for jewelry, why isn’t a jewelry industry use? So eventually, I went to see a guy out in Hong Kong whose father had a jewelry company, and I convinced him to start a small jewelry company. So again, being curious, and always learning something new, keeps you ahead of the competition all the time. That adds value to your clients eventually and then all you got to do is like in your business you need just a couple of people who really love your candles and I mean there’s a lot of things. In your kind of business, you get the packaging, the branding, the actual product itself, the messaging, and then finding the right kind of people. On my journey, I did Neimans and Saks, all the department stores, all the cruise ships and all the duty free. I mean I basically went everywhere around the world and every distribution channel gave me something new to think about and I tried to be the best provider for that particular industry so I ended up making friends with a lot of different people. And you find out that in retail like Princess Cruise will hire somebody from Macy’s, so my Macy’s buyer, the first thing should do is call me and say hey, I got no jewelry here that’s worth selling, and that actually happened and then she went from there to Nike from there to wherever, so basically you end up over a career, like your business grows pretty quickly, because people always remember who made them the best money. When somebody calls me when I want to call somebody now. It could be somebody in the Middle East, it could be anywhere. I pick up the phone. Hey, my name is Victoria, here’s what I do, you can check it out. I don’t get a call back, I call them again. So my Hail Mary is Look, I just made your competitor $30 million last year. Are you interested in talking to me? They usually call me back right away.

 

Richard Matthews  51:44  

I love the idea of curiosity being a superpower. I talked about curiosity all the time. As an interviewer one of the things that I teach for other people who want to get into podcasting. I also have an agency that does podcasting, and one of the things I teach interviewers is if you want to be a good interviewer, there are two things you need to learn to be ignorant and curious. Even if you know a lot about the subject that the other person was talking about, you need to be ignorant and curious about that subject. And it’s interesting to hear that from another perspective where curiosity is a superpower that can allow you to grow a huge business by being curious about how to make the product better, or how to tell the story a little bit better or just all the different things that sort of go into pushing the envelope because curiosity is really what allows you to do that.

 

Victoria Wieck  52:37  

You know, it’s interesting, I started my podcast Million Dollar Hobbies, and it’s truly amazing. Every other episode is me, giving content directly and so it’s guested every other. So whenever I have somebody on my show, usually, as I told you, I interview people that do not have college degrees, or if they have one, they haven’t used it for years. And they just had nothing but this undying passion about what they like to do. And they come up with the most interesting ways to solve problems or the most interesting ways to build brands. And you’re like, jeez I wish I had known that. And I’ve built a $500 million business and yet I’m learning something every single episode. And like you said, you’re writing notes, I do the same thing. I’m like, Oh, my God, it’s just amazing. I thought I knew a lot about jewelry. And then you got these people, yeah, I do this, and I did that. It’s really amazing. No one person has an answer to everything. Everybody told me Oh, don’t call it hobbies, because the minute they hear the word hobby, they know nobody’s making money, it’s a quirky thing. I’m like, no, this is what everybody aspires to do when they retire. I’m asking them to do it now before they retire and actually monetize it. But I am just amazed at how many people have so much to share, and they’re willing to share it. I may be here sharing my story, and that might inspire you and many of your audiences. People sitting there and I hope many of them got some great actionable tips. Every day I listen to at least three podcasts every morning when I’m getting ready after I finish my emails, when I’m getting my hair done, or preparing breakfast or whatever. I usually listen to at least one or two a day because, as I said, it’s a mastermind class. Your episode I was listening to this morning about, I forget what her name was, but she was talking about building a website, it’s so true what she said, which is, most website builders know how to do the technical part of it. But they’ve never really thought about that being the gateway that being the storefront for somebody who actually has to do business. And so, somebody like myself who’s into marketing and into marketing, we don’t know anything about the technical side of it. Like, that’s the last thing I want to know. So I think that she found herself in a really great niche that kind of marries the two of them together. So I learn something every day by just being out there and, and keeping your ears open. And I think that’s my superpower, which is my ability to never accept the status quo.

 

Richard Matthews  55:51  

Absolutely. So the flip side of your superpower, then, is, of course, the fatal flaw. And just like every Superman has his kryptonite, or Wonder Woman can’t remove her bracelets of victory without going bad, you probably had something that you struggled with in growing your business. For me, it was a couple of things I’ve struggled with perfectionism for a long time, which is where you don’t ship a product because you could tweak it a little bit more, make the copy a little bit better. But I’ve had to work on overcoming that because if you don’t ship then you don’t actually have a product you’re holding yourself to no standard at all. So what is something that you’ve struggled with in growing your business? I think more important than what the flaw is, is how have you worked to overcome it so you can grow in spite of that flaw?

 

Victoria Wieck  56:30  

You know, I have many flaws. It’s pretty tough to pick the one. But let me try to think about what my biggest flaw is. I have such a big heart, I want to help anybody and everybody like anybody who’s ever asked me for help. I’ve always helped them like whether it’s money, it could be the Policeman’s Ball too It could be somebody asking me to help them with a website, I’ve done that a lot just looking at aesthetically. The other thing is and this might be a really great lesson for you is a lot of times I tried to see the goodness in people. I still have a real problem not trusting people because I want to do business with people that I can trust so what happens is I got screwed over by manufacturers left and right in the beginning and I still do get them. But in the beginning, for example, I had no money so I couldn’t make any samples and jewelry samples cost money, 300 to $1200 per sample and you need 100 of them so I ended up doing a lookbook and I ended up going to stores asking them if you had something like this could you sell it and how much would you sell it for and then I worked my numbers backward when I finally actually got up a few orders from the Neiman Marcus store in Beverly Hills on where they drive the department manager was like oh my god, yeah, we could sell a boatload of them because your designs are beautiful, whatever so then I went to look for a manufacturer. The manufacturer asked me how many can you sell if we make it? I said I don’t know cuz I’m brutally honest. I can sell one, I could sell 1000, I could sell 100, I could sell nothing, to be honest with you, I don’t know what I’m doing. Three or four of them said you need to pay me upfront, and then a couple of guys said, we’ll do it for you but they gave me all this whatever. So what happened was those guys that said they’ll do it for me, one of them never shipped the sample they shipped it to my competitors, see if you were sitting on something that you know it’s gonna sell because your manufacturers usually know as they will pulse on what’s going on. So if you know it could sell 1000 pieces because they see this all the time they see designs, they’ve done this for years and they go, last time there was a huge trend it kind of had a flavor kind of like this. They kind of know that this could be the big thing, usually big manufacturers are doing business with somebody already. So they gave it to the competitors because they knew that the competitors were already in many of the major stores so they ended up getting it. I never got mine. The way I found out is they didn’t send it. So I went to the trade show to find new manufacturers and that’s where I actually found the live samples of my designs. Now my designs are not very, very distinctive. And you just can’t fake that it’s very distinctive. So you would think I would learn from that because it was everything I had and I lost a lot of time and stuff like that happened to me many times but you get to the point and the jewelry business is very cutthroat. So the question is do you then become a nasty person and don’t trust anybody? Or do you still trust somebody? Once I got my business got to a certain size, I would ask people, what can you do? For example, can you do sapphires? Oh, yeah, we did that all the time. Well, what about turquoise? Yeah, we did that all the time. Well, you know what turquoise mines and sapphire mines work very differently. That’s like saying, candles versus steak, they’re very different. They will always tell you, they’ll do everything, and they don’t. They’re nice people, they want to please you, they think they can go get it, but they’re not the prime source. So there’s a lot of times, I have a real tough time. I’m a very conflict free type of a person, I have a really tough time judging somebody by what they’re saying, but I’ve kind of developed a system now. I’m still a victim of that. And the same thing with buyers, like when they tell you, they can sell 4000 pieces or something, and they give you an order for 50 pieces. And you’re like, I went through all that work for that. The trust factor, I guess I’m still too trusting. And it has cost me money in a big way. Some of those mistakes actually almost caused me to go bankrupt because they would literally ship it to my competitors or direct competitors, there were a lot of backdoor money type things to which I don’t actually ever touch. But in the end, things happened for the best, and they worked out pretty well.

 

Richard Matthews  1:01:36  

Trust is one of those interesting things. A lot of people think that trust is something that you earn, but the reality is, trust is something that’s given first, and then it’s kept or lost. 

 

Victoria Wieck  1:01:48  

I agree with you there. 

 

Richard Matthews  1:01:50  

And I think if more people understood that, the world would be a better place. But it’s interesting, because you have that choice, anytime you go into a new relationship, do I choose to trust this person or not. And you have to start with that trust. And if you don’t come into the relationship with trust, and you’re not going to be able to grow and do the things that you’ve done, sometimes it doesn’t work out, sometimes the trust is broken. But in order to grow and continue what you need to do you have to start somewhere with trust, whether it’s hiring a new manufacturer, getting a new buyer, or whatever it is, you have to make a leap at some point, in order to take your business to the next level.

 

Victoria Wieck  1:02:30  

Yeah, your top employees, the same thing, you got to really trust their abilities and their intentions as well.

 

Richard Matthews  1:02:38  

Absolutely. 

 

Richard Matthews  1:02:38  

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Richard Matthews  1:04:10  

I’m gonna skip over a couple of questions because we hit a lot of these things already. And I want to talk a little bit about your guiding principles. One of the things that make Heroes heroic is that they live by a code, for instance, Batman never kills his enemies, he only ever puts them in Arkham Asylum. So as we get near the end of the interview here I want to talk about the top one, maybe two principles that you live your life by that you run your business by that maybe something you wish you had known when you first started out 20 years ago.

 

Victoria Wieck  1:04:40  

Well, that one is very easy. The code I live by is to treat other people the way you want to be treated. But more than that, there are two great quotes. One of them is a quote by Maya Angelou, which says, people will forget what you did or what you said, but they’ll never forget how you made them feel. That goes back to the customer centric thing. You can give them the biggest value, you can sell 50 candles for five bucks, okay, that’s the biggest value. But if you don’t make them feel special, if you don’t make that emotional connection, where they feel like they were part of a movement, they were part of helping you, they were part of beautifying your environment, or they were part of something, you will never build a brand. Everything I do is about the customer, and about making them feel something. And that is a really great personality. Even when I was raising my kids, every time I say no to something, I would say yes, five times. So I would say something like, I love the fact that you helped me unload my groceries yesterday, and I love how you took care of your cat, your room is tidy. And I love this, this. And by the way, if you can help me fix this one thing. Or if you don’t say certain things I could, if you can phrase it differently that would really make me so happy. So you forever know, you want to do the five yeses. So I think that making people feel like your life was better off by having to interact with them. Personally as well as business wise, I think that’s a huge thing. And then the second thing is, there was a very little known quote by Nelson Mandela. And he says something to the effect in an interview, everything seems impossible until it’s done. So no matter how high you gotta climb, it looks impossible like you’re having to climb Mount Everest by yourself with no ropes in the middle of winter. When you look into that quote, you’re like, oh, I can totally relate to that, I gotta drop my kids off and pick my parents, and I have no money, I got laid off, and my husband’s sick, all this stuff. And it’s just impossible. And I can completely sympathize with that. But I actually think, when he said, everything is impossible until it’s done, it’s like, not getting it done is really not an option. So it’s going to get done, however possible it is. So what are you going to do to get it done? Because of that he eventually came out of prison and became president of the country. So I would say those two quotes, really kind of shaped my branding, how I approach problems, how I approach my customers, it shapes everything that I do.

 

Richard Matthews  1:08:04  

I love that second one. everything is impossible until it’s done, which means it’s going to get done. 

 

Victoria Wieck  1:08:10  

It’s going to get done

 

Richard Matthews  1:08:12  

The next thing that you said was, how am I going to do it? So you forced yourself into a higher level of question, not Can I do this? But how is it going to get done? This is a better question to ask yourself, and it fires up different parts of your brain that actually start working on those solutions.

 

Victoria Wieck  1:08:28  

Yeah, exactly.

 

Richard Matthews  1:08:32  

So that’s incredible. And at this point, that’s basically the end of our interview. But I do have a couple more things I want to cover. One of them is something I call the hero’s challenge. I do this at the end of all of my interviews, to hopefully find stories that I might not find on my own. So the question is simple. Do you have someone in your life or in your network that you think has a cool entrepreneurial story? Who are they? First names are fine, and why do you think they should come to share their story with us here on the hero show? First person that comes to mind for you.

 

Victoria Wieck  1:09:03  

The first person I would say is my very good friend, Tonia DeCosimo. She’s an amazing person. She actually runs a professional Women’s Network called P.O.W.E.R. So it’s called the Professional Organization of Women of Excellence Recognized.

 

Richard Matthews  1:09:23  

Is she in the magazine?

 

Victoria Wieck  1:09:27  

Oh, yeah, I’m on the cover of it this year. So here it is. Do you see it? Okay. 

 

Richard Matthews  1:09:34  

Yeah, there you go. 

 

Victoria Wieck  1:09:37  

She has about 30,000 high-power professional women that I’m a part of. And usually, this is a very high honor because usually, she has pretty mainstream top-notch female icons like Susan Lucci, Gloria Esteban. I think my next issue is Gloria Gaynor. I was in that magazine as well. If you have a small business and you want to immediately have places to sell things, for one thing, she’s got 30,000 people there but also mentors like myself we give a lot of our time for free seminars, free webinars and he kind of asks some of us to come and inspire them and give them real actionable tips. And so I think that if you interviewed her that might be really interesting because she has a very different kind of a business than I do but she impacts a lot of people every day because some of the members who myself and their mega businesses.

 

Richard Matthews  1:10:59  

We’ll reach out later and see if we can connect and get an introduction and get her on the show. But the last thing I want to do is I want to find out where can people find you, where can they learn from you, where can they pick up your jewelry if they want to pick up your jewelry? Where can they light up the bat signal so to speak and say, hey Victoria I would like to get your help to grow my business and I think probably more important than where is who are the right types of people to do that?

 

Victoria Wieck  1:11:23  

Yeah so I would say the first thing is to start listening to my podcast because what I try to do is I try to not focus on theoretical businesses, theoretical successes I’m looking at people who are very passionate about finding the extra factor on what they were doing so a lot of rags to riches stories, people that just didn’t luck up, they had to grind it out and learned a lot. So Million Dollar Hobbies Podcast. I have advertisers or anybody I’ve been asked to do that but I haven’t because it’s not about making money for me it’s really about providing amazing content. And then when they come to VictoriaWieck.com you will see a lot of educational opportunities. I do focus on the key things you need, you’re going to need several things. One of them, like I said, is building a brand a lot of small businesses don’t know about or they’ll realize that later or they get displaced by a brand coming in. So it’s really important that you know how to do that video influencing, video marketing, these are all things that people charge 10 $20,000 for, I’m giving it away for free and you’re actually seeing it from a real person who has actually made a real living doing that. If you go to my website right now whatever you can sign up for just go ahead and sign it up. Because what we’ll do is we’ll ask you later on qualifying questions, like, what are you really interested in? I have a lot of people like your business that are on the cusp of doing seven figures, but they want to do a lot more, that’s a critical time. Businesses can go broke and they can also grow broke. So going broke is when you don’t have a whole lot of customers and you’re just making ends meet and eventually you get tired or somebody comes in, it doesn’t track so you go broke, growing broke is when you’re doing good six to seven figures and then the stakes get higher. And you’ve had to now invest more money into your systems and everything else and if something goes wrong, that could be the end. I’ve seen a lot of businesses grow broke, that’s a huge phenomenon. There’s a way you can avoid all of that. As I said, I’m all about risk free. And I mean nothing can be completely risk free but you can always test to see what the outcome might be and I say you have to test because if you knew the outcome ahead of time you wouldn’t be considered a test right? So if you’re going to keep expanding your boundaries you do need to test and there is a way you can actually get that done. So for those of you who are really high level, like you want to take your business to major stores around the world, there’s a lot of tricks on how you deal with the majors. I am thinking about doing a special class for those people that are at that level but most of you are going to be able to get a lot of free information or minimal like I have one class going on right now that’s limited to 20 people so there’s no room there now but I might open up another one. That’s like a $3,000 program. So again, you’ll be able to get a lot of free information. And even with that, somebody like yourself can probably just use that free info. It’s just that it just takes time because I only do one topic a month and it is limited to 25 people I don’t know how to do it any other way right now I’m thinking about it I want to impact as many businesses as possible but I also want to provide real meaningful help, not just like a gloss over. So come to both of those places and then my jewelry you can go to ShopHQ.com, I’m on it every month about twice a month. Sometimes it’s only once a month, sometimes it could be three but usually, I’m on live twice a month live and you can actually see you can go to Google and you can Google me on youtube.

 

Victoria Wieck  1:15:42  

It’s one of the most googled brands for jewelry so just Google it and you’ll be able to see some of their storytelling mastery as well as how I talk to my customers and you can do it. It’s not going to be easy if you’re not used to doing it, especially for people who are shy. It took me a long time, I am not a braggadocious person, I’m an introvert so when I go to a party I’m actually standing in a corner by myself, and people will come and talk to me and I hate to talk about myself or my jewelry even I just want to draw in a habit sold but I realized that wasn’t possible, people don’t find out who you are. So my branding is I’m an immigrant, I’m a mother, I’m a daughter, my customers know me as somebody who they can trust. I’m a very honest person and because when I talk about things on TV whatever I can’t do I just tell them that like I’m not very good at this, that’s not my forte or whatever because if you’re not good at something. It’s like if you’re selling skincare, one of the worst things you could do is, this is great for your acne, the 18 year old, for teenagers, it’s great for anti-aging well that doesn’t work because the 14 year old skin is growing and the anti aging person needs to get all the collagen or everything else they’re very different things. So there is a designer on cosmetics on TV and she says look if you’re under age 40 just turn off the TV you have no business listening to me I sell anti aging that’s a very smart move. I have another friend who does nutrition and she does plant-based foods and the same thing you can’t go and remove the line in between you just gotta figure out who your target market is. If you’re going to do both where plant food is actually beneficial for people who are trying to get their different messaging different branding so don’t try to do too much. I try to give a lot of information because I’d like everybody. I always have a mission so my latest mission is I want to create between now and when I die. Hopefully, talk to me for a while. I want to create something like 1 million millionaires just by my messaging by just reaching out to people on my podcast because some people just need a little help some people need a lot of help. Some of you are going to be a lot bigger than I am because you’re starting now at a time when everything is free you’re already there. A lot of them said, well I can’t do this and somebody I had a person of my clubhouse, guys can, by the way, come to my clubhouse, I’m shy and I don’t do this and I don’t know I am afraid of video and so I asked her okay, so tell me about your chocolates a woman teaches chocolates and she goes well I used to work with so and so and I do this and that and I said you have no trouble talking you just think you have trouble talking but when I asked her about specifically about the chocolates that she makes and she does custom chocolates for corporations and everything you don’t have a problem talking you don’t have a problem with your product and that’s all you need. It doesn’t have to be introvert-extrovert. Like your guest said earlier, just be you, just be the best of you and let people see the real you. You don’t have to freak out just because you’re on camera. So that’s what I try to teach people. Right now I do a lot of keynote speeches, like with P.O.W.E.R I’m the keynote speaker for their annual gala. And there’s gonna be like 1000 women there. But it’s still not millions, that’s why I started my podcast and you’re helping me kind of spread that message and anyone who’s listening, just come on over.

 

Richard Matthews  1:20:09  

So the podcast is Million Dollar Hobbies. And I assume you can buy that on Google Play or the Apple podcasts or the normal places there and then your website is Victoria Wieck and it’s Wieck right?

 

Victoria Wieck  1:20:22  

Right, VictoriaWieck.com. And there’s one chapter of each of my books. They’re both going to be published next year.

 

Richard Matthews  1:20:33  

Awesome. Thank you so much for coming on today, Victoria, and sharing your story and giving all the incredible insights that we got to talk about today. I enjoyed it a lot. So again, thanks so much for coming on today. Do you have any final words of wisdom for my audience before I hit this stop record button?

 

Victoria Wieck  1:20:49  

First of all, thank you so much for letting me share my story. And I would like to sort of sign off by saying, remember, the one thing you can do for yourself, think about the one thing you can do for yourself because the rest of it’s gonna fall into place. And I encourage you to take action.

 

Richard Matthews  1:21:10  

Thank you very much.