Episode 220 – Ashley Connell

Hello and welcome back to The Hero Show. My name is Richard Matthews, of course, and [00:01:00] I’ve got today I have the pleasure of having Ashley Connell on the line. Ashley, are you there?

Yes. Pump to be here.

Awesome. So glad to have you here. I know we were chatting a little bit before we got on, you’re in Austin, Texas getting roasted right now. How’s that going for your winter summer in Texas?

Quite the bummer. I got out all of my winter clothes and I am putting them all back in within a month. So

Yeah. Yeah. I was like, we’ve been here in Florida and like Florida, like, it was the first time I mentioned we traveled full-time. It’s the first time we’ve stayed in Florida for the winter. We’re like, oh, we’re gonna stay in Florida for the winter. And then we got like the 30 year cold or whatever, and then our pipes froze over Christmas and I was like, and I had to pull out all of our winter clothes for like a week and a half and now it’s back to being sunny and warm and beautiful.

But for Christmas, we actually got a cold Christmas in Florida.

Who would’ve thought, right? Who would’ve thought.

Yeah. Yeah. And I was informed by some of our local Floridian friends that we’ve made, that we stayed too far north in Florida. Winter actually sometimes will make it all the way down to Orlando. So you have to [00:02:00] be like south of the Orlando Tampa line for you to be escape winter. And I was like, oh, we were just north of the Florida Tampa line, so we didn’t know that.

And I was like, I thought it was just all of Florida. But you know, things you learn.

Hey, Richard, next year, there’s always next year.

Always next year, and next year we’ll book the Keys for Christmas and just come stay out of winter.

like,

Now we’re talking.

Just want one whole Christmas where no cold happens and I don’t have to put on pants or a long sleeve shirt or a jacket. None of those things.

Gosh, I love this.

Yeah, me too. I think it’s good. So before we get too far into this, I wanna take just a brief moment to introduce you to our audience. And so just, I’m gonna go over your bio real quick and then we’ll dive into your story. So Ashley is the CEO and founder of the Prowess Project. And you’re one part fearless entrepreneur, one part fearless woman’s advocate, landing your thought leadership pieces in Forbes.

And you spent the first 15 of these are your career as an award-winning tech marketer in both Austin and London, which is cool. And you’ve got an unstoppable drive to have both career and [00:03:00] time for your family, which motivated you to start Prowess. So before we get too far into this, so why don’t you start off by telling me a little bit about what is it that you’re known for now? Like, who do you serve? What do you do for them?

Yes. So we match up visionary. So entrepreneurs who started a business because they had a craft that they love, whether you’re an accountant and you love accounting, you may not want to run the rest of the business.

So we match those visionaries up with integrators. So the people who will take all of that strategy and make it happen, and who makes stuff happen better than a stay-at-home mom or a woman who was educated, experienced, took time off the workforce, raising children, taking care of her parents, and wants to tiptoe back in, in a flexible way.

So that’s what we do. We match up women who want flexible work with entrepreneurs who desperately need it.

Yeah, I have to say, I know we talked about this a little before we got on. I freaking love [00:04:00] that. Love it. For a couple of reasons. So, I am that entrepreneur, right? The visionary entrepreneur. We run a podcast production agency, right? Then that’s like, that’s what we do. And I have to tell you that like I have personally, my podcast has over 250 episodes that we’ve recorded and we’ve recorded over a thousand episodes for our, or more than a thousand for our clients.

I haven’t touched a single one of the episodes after the stop record button in several years. And it is because of, it’s because of the integrators, it’s because of the people that you’re talking about. And I have over the course of that time discovered that my absolute favorite people in the world to hire are stay-at-home moms.

They are just fricking best.

One, they’re the best and I could get into it for so many reasons of why they’re the best, but they’re so efficient and they have that emotional intelligence to interact with all sorts of different types of people, which is so, so, so huge in business, and oftentimes overthought or overlooked. I should say.

And it is like, for whatever reason, I know this is, [00:05:00] it’s a hot button political issue to talk about men and women in the workplace, but it’s like the best workplaces understand the superpowers that women bring and the superpowers that men bring, right? Like it’s kind of thing.

And when you recognize that the running of a family and raising children and taking care of your parents, all those things that you mentioned, those give women a certain set of superpowers and the ability to connect and integrate and get things done that is just unparalleled, is my is the word I’m gonna go with.

It’s unparalleled. And I like nothing more than that. And then also, like, one of my like core beliefs is that women are a central important aspect. Like, the having children and raising children shouldn’t exclude them from being able to have a career. And it shouldn’t I dunno what you would call that.

But they have so much value to bring on both of those sides, both in the workplace and at home. And so we work with, I personally, we try to hire, stay-at-home moms regularly because of that reason. I was like, Hey, you can both do your best work at home by [00:06:00] raising your children and taking care of your family and contribute to the financial pocketbook of your family and contribute to the companies that you work for and the value that they bring.

Anyways, I love it. It’s my whole point.

Richard, like I am going to take this recording and probably put it on the front of my website and you are going to be doing my sales calls from now on because exactly, that is exactly what we are trying to share with the rest of the world.

Like we had this untapped talent market who we vet and we certified to make sure that they do what they say they can do and match them up with, like I said, entrepreneurs who are banging their head up against the wall cause they’re trying to do it all when it’s not their zone of genius of trying to do all the details and making stuff happen and being operational.

That’s not mine. I’m definitely a visionary. So, let’s let everyone play where they wanna play and everyone’s happy. Right.

Yeah. Yeah. And I have to say, one of my most recent hires, she’ll probably listen to this episode at some point. Hopefully she appreciates it. I [00:07:00] love her to pieces. And I remember, when we had our interview call and I was like, I was like, listen, what I’m looking for is I’m looking for someone who can make these things happen and communicate with our customers and communicate in this way.

And I just can’t, cuz I have too much on my plate. And I was like, and I have no, like, I give like zero shits about how you make it happen. I was like, if you’re taking your kids to dance class or in between meals or whatever you’re doing, I don’t care. I was like, as long as the work gets done, that’s all I’m interested in.

And so she was like, she’d be like, whatever kind of flexibility I want, I was like, listen, nine tenths of the stuff that I need you to do, you could probably do from your phone, and I was like, and I don’t care if you do it from your phone or where you’re doing it from as long as the work gets done. That’s all we’re all we’re interested in.

She’s like, that sounds like perfect. And I’m not the only entrepreneur like that. Not the only one. Theres…

Exactly. Oh man, this makes me so excited. I was just talking to someone else the other day and they’re like, Ashley, this is the future of work. There are these entrepreneurs who do not care. Butts and seats are long gone, nine to five, long gone. It’s just not [00:08:00] sustainable. Like, and it doesn’t fit for everyone in the workforce.

And so I really think this idea of flexibility and work from your phone and work when you can, as long as to your point, the output is there, if not exceeded, then hey, let’s do this.

And I’m in the process now of trying to figure out how can we adjust pay. So, it’s not hourly that it’s more output driven. So we’re looking at trying to figure out like, hey, how can we make it fair so that it’s like pay per client kind of thing that, you know, you’ve got a, this set of here’s your client roster and these are the things that go with that.

If you hit these things every week, you get to pay for those and it that it’s fair and interesting. I haven’t, we haven’t figured that out yet. That’s like one of the things we’re working on because to your point, a lot of the nine to five, you get paid for sitting in a chair for nine hours. It’s inefficient and it’s not family first.

Which, you know, I am a big proponent of family first entrepreneurship. And it is like. So, and that doesn’t just include me as the entrepreneur, that includes everyone on my staff.

Great.

And everyone that, you know, we work for that works with us is like, hey, we’re and I tell people [00:09:00] that.

It’s like we’re family first. And I tell people regularly is like, the greatest gift you can give to this world is to raise up the next generation. Why would we get in front of that? Like, why would we tell women they have to choose.

Well, exactly. So the way that this all got started, and I think this is a really good segue, is because here I was, and you mentioned it in the bio, I was in tech marketing for 15 years and worked with mostly men, or at least mostly men in leadership. And there were maybe one woman in there, maybe, but when I talked to her about, hey, like do you have children?

She’d say, no, I had to choose my career over children. And that just shocked me at the time, it was 2018. And so I was like, is this just the companies that I was working in? Or like, what’s up with this? So Hop Online found the Harvard Business Review statistic that if a woman is out of the workforce for just three years, specifically caregiving, specifically caregiving, she loses [00:10:00] a total of 37% of her compensation power forever.

Wow.

It’s nearly half. Just cut. Yes. And this happens to 43% of educated, experienced women. So this is a massive problem.

Massive problem.

It’s a problem on both sides too because like we’re, like, you’ve seen this happen in France and Japan where the birth rates are starting to drop down to a point where it’s like getting to emergency status, where like France and Japan both have hired in the government Ministry of Sex where they’re trying to encourage people to have children because we know historically if birth rates drop below 1.8, society dies in a decade.

Wow, I didn’t know that statistic. Wow.

It’s crazy. And it’s like we’ve got 2000 years of reported history where we have birth rate data every single time. Birth rate drops below 1.8, the society dies in a decade. Which is crazy. And so.

Insane.

We’re [00:11:00] fighting this thing where we’re saying women can’t have, they’re having to choose between families or work, and so they’re losing their compensation power.

And the result is that we have women choosing work over family and our birth rate is declining. So like the United States birth rate is hovering right around that, just over 1.8 it’s like 1.82 right now. And the only reason it’s even staying over the 1.8 is because the Hispanic population has an up birth rate of like 3.2.

So, keeping our birth rate healthy is just the one sub segment of our population. And so we haven’t quite reached emergency status like Japan and France have. But it’s to your point, that problem, the thing that you’re talking about is part of the contribution to that problem.

And we need to fix it because children are an important part of our culture and racing up our society and keeping that. And we shouldn’t be forcing women to choose between one or the other and cutting their ability to pay for their, and, you know, to feed their families.

Well, exactly. Exactly. And what hurts me the most about all of it is really, it’s a result of bias. It is this idea [00:12:00] that when women are out of the workforce to be a full-time mom, they lose all of their experience, all of their knowledge, all of their knowhow, blah, blah, blah, blah. Nope, that’s impossible.

If anything, and data shows this, they gain so many traits. They gain better communication skills, they gain better emotional intelligence, they gain better empathy, they gain better time management, they gain better teamwork, team facilitation. It’s proven time and time again, but we’re not looking at it like that.

And it’s abouttime we really start. And so I love to see these forward thinking entrepreneurs who can utilize these women who are completely untapped. And I’m talking, they have one or two degrees, have been in the workforce for 15 years, we’re COOs and now wanna help you with your business. Like we’re not talking just a doer, we’re talking a thought partner.

Yeah. We’re talking people who are top of the line and are willing to come in and work for you and help you because of the flexibility that you offer. Because they understand [00:13:00] their family first as well. Right? And so they’re like, Hey, I’m okay. I’m okay with doing something different or something.

Something that’s not, like, I don’t have to be a CEO of a company, right? With all my degrees and everything because my family’s most important to me right now. And if I can fit a work schedule into it, that’s what’s most important to me right now. And so we’re looking at it, I think incorrectly, where’re like, Hey, I can’t hire this woman.

She’s too well qualified. Things like that. Or and you’re like, no, they want it. They want to add something to their lives where they’re contributing.

Well, so it’s exactly, you’re exactly right. So we pulled all of the women in our community and we’re asking them what would make you say yes to a job? And first, not surprising flexibility, right? You can’t have butts and seats, can’t have nine to five flexibility check. Got it. I thought for sure the second was gonna be money.

I thought for sure, like, oh, I’m gonna contribute to my household. No. The second was impact. I want to be at a company where I am making an impact. And then number third was bringing in more money to help my family.

And generally.

The [00:14:00] second was impact. And I asked them, oh, I asked them like, why impact? And they’re like, Ashley, if I’m gonna be away from my kids and I’m never gonna get this time back, I damn well better be doing something that is going to move the needle it and is going to help significantly a company who needs me.

And I love that message because my message here on the Hero Show is that entrepreneurs are the heroes. We’re making the world a better place. And that’s really what most businesses are, is they’re striving to make the world a better place. So I love that. And my other thing that I think is important there is that a lot of the women who have come home to take care of kids, they generally are in a, you know, they’re in a relationship where they’ve got a husband who’s working, so they don’t.

They don’t need to pay their mortgage. Exactly. But they would love to be able to contribute financially, but it’s not the number one or two. I love that. It, like, it fits in number three cuz it really fits into the idea of a family first entrepreneurship. So I love that. And the other thing that I wanna do is bring up, before we get too far into the interview is my wife and I actually sat down and did this math once.

Cuz you were talking about skills that women have at home. [00:15:00] And we chose for our family. My wife is full-time at home cuz we got four kids and we travel into all sorts of other things. We live a crazy lifestyle. And it wouldn’t make sense for her to work. So she runs our family and I was like, we actually did the math once on like, what would it cost us to like, if she died tomorrow to replace all the things that she does in our household.

And it’s roughly about 500 to $600,000 a year in employees to do the work that she’s done.

You are joking me.

It’s insane. So, cause we’re talking like.

I mean, I’m not surprised by this like, but I love that you actually did the I wish more parents would do that.

Yeah, we did the math. We actually have it written down because it was like any woman who is in modern society, she’s, for whatever reason, we have vilified stay-at-home mother motherhood, which I think is dumb.

But it’s so dumb, but, so we vilified it. So she has that mental like load that she has to deal with. So we were just working on ways that we can be like, Hey, let’s actually take a look at what your contributions actually mean, and like how they’re actually relevant. And I was like, she [00:16:00] does, for lack of a better term, she does mothering.

But you know, we were talking about if she died tomorrow, what would I have to do in order to keep my business doing what we’re doing? I’d have to hire childcare. I’d have to hire cooks. I’d have to hire, you know, taking care of the home. Someone who can manage my finances.

Someone who can do like, we went through all the things that she actually, the work output that goes into making our house function on a daily basis. So much so that I have the time and the ability to run two companies, right? Like, we have to partner that way. And I was like, I could not replace her with hired employees for less than half a million dollars a year.

Wow. And you know what is absolutely beautiful about that? Everything that you just described that your wife does, those are all transferable skills that an entrepreneur can use in their business. Point blank.

Absolutely a hundred percent. And she’s not the only woman who has them.

Great.

She’s not the only one with those skills.

Right, exactly. Well, and I think the whole idea of empathy and emotional intelligence, especially in the workplace, [00:17:00] especially in a small business where like, I hate to say this, but you almost become a family more than you are a like in a work situation. And I know that there’s problems with boundaries and all of that, but like, you need empathy so, so much.

And that’s something that I see time and time again that the women who are part of our talent pool provide to these entrepreneurs. And they never thought it would be possible. They’re like, she just gets me, and she’s three steps ahead of me, if not five steps ahead of me every single day.

Yeah. Yeah. You’d love one of my friends, he’s got a whole thing called Goddess Providence, where he’s talking about like women’s, actually women’s power in community. And.

Wait, I think we have the same friend.

Do we? His name is Lucas.

I think

1. Yes. Yes, yes.

So, you know, Lucas?

Lucas. Yes. Yes.

So yeah, I’m actually going on one of his training classes tonight.

But my point is just, that women have so much power to bring to the community you know, to any of their communities that they’re [00:18:00] involved in. And like, one of my favorite things that I, I’ve just recently started to see this, is that you have the women who have exited the workforce because of like, say aging parents and they’re taking care of their aging parents.

And now they’re in their, you know, they’re in their forties, they’re in their fifties, something like that, where they’re, they don’t necessarily even want to have a full-time job anymore, but they left sort of at the top of their careers where they are, you know, the best of the best in their space.

And they went back to take care of their families. And then they’re coming back and saying, Hey, you know what? I would love, you know, I don’t want to not retire kind of thing, but I also have something to do. And be able to bring all of their skills to bear on someone like mine’s business.

You’re like, like for real , like you.

It’s a game changer.

You’ll bring your 40 years of business experience in to help me, like for.

Right, right. It seems too good to be true, but it’s like, it’s this perfect marriage. I just saw these two problems in the workforce and I was like, this is like they each can be a [00:19:00] solution to each other. And it has worked out so, so well over the past four years that we have been growing and nurturing this business.

And I am so proud to say that we have helped over a thousand women find jobs and really changing the lives, which ultimately means we’re changing the lives of a thousand entrepreneurs too.

Ripple effect. Ripple effect. So that was really long, a long introduction to this, but what I wanna talk about is, your origin story, right? We talk on this show all the time about as a hero, right? Every good comic hero has an origin story. It’s a thing that made them into the hero they are today.

And I wanna hear that story where you bit by a, you know, radioactive spider, the made you wanna get into, you know, helping women in the workforce. Or did you start a job and eventually move to become an entrepreneur? Basically, how did you get here?

Such a good question and I wish I had something very fun, like, bit by a spider. So I think, like where this all stems from is my very first job out of college really. I was an intern. They called me the Guinea [00:20:00] pig. So they would give me all of the projects and it was my job to figure out if they were going to sink or swim, like make them happen.

And I would figure them out. I’d start them and say, is this viable? Yes. Pass ’em over to someone else who was going to maintain it, or no, it was it fail, let’s fail fast, fail, cheat. And so as I continued to do that. I was basically an entrepreneur in all of the different companies that I was at. So I started there.

They then moved me over to London to open up their European office. I then came back and ran global marketing for another tech company, started a marketing agency where I quickly realized what it was to be a overwhelmed lack of sleep entrepreneur made every single, every single mistake in the book.

And that’s where I got this idea for Prowess Project.

That is wonderful. I love the story. I’ve been in, you know, similar sort of [00:21:00] vein where most of mine was actually on the entrepreneurship stuff, but I started a lot of things growing up. But what really stuck out to me and what I think relates to your story is when I was at a mastermind group mastermind meeting of you know business owners who’d hit a certain income level.

And what we were all asked to bring something to share to the group, something we had learned. And, you know, I got up and I shared all of my stuff with the group and they were like, oh, that’s really cool. We learned a lot from you, blah, blah, blah. Anyways, it was really good from that aspect. But at the end, the guy who put the mastermind together pulls me aside and he goes, listen, you’re doing really good work, but it was just me.

I was a solopreneur right? All by myselfHe was like, but you’re your own worst enemy. And I was like, what do you mean? He was like, you need to hire someone to do Y, and Z. These implementation things for you. And he’s like, because it’ll unlock your business. And he’s like, you need to do this. And I looked at him and I was like, I can’t, I don’t know how to afford that person.

And he was like, trust me. Just bite the bullet. Hire someone full-time to do these things in your business. I was like, you’re not gonna understand it until you do it and you have the perspective shift. And I was like, nope, don’t believe [00:22:00] you. Blah, blah, blah. And I was like, I can’t, I can’t. I couldn’t even see how it would happen.

And I remember vacillating with that decision for three months. Three months where I was like, nope, can’t afford to hire someone. I can’t do it. I don’t know how I would pay them. I don’t know how it would function. And finally, I was just like, he told me just to do it anyways. And so I hired someone full-time.

And it was about two weeks into having hired someone where I was like, oh, I get it. Cause, now you’re on the other side and you have a whole different perspective on it, and you’re like, oh, because now my work output went up not just 2 Xed, but like 4 Xed.

Exactly it. And Richard, it’s so funny because I have like consultation calls with entrepreneurs all the time. And I talk to you probably three times outta four, where they’re like, I know I will come back to you in three months. I need to fail on my own and I will come back to you. And every single time [00:23:00] they come back and they’re like, okay, I’m ready now.

So, yep. And I’m like, but just if think you would have done this three months before, like how much your business would’ve been like the opportunity cost is just outrageous.

It is, it’s outrageous. And I look back at myself and I go, man, I should have just listened to him when he told me what I needed to do. But at the same time, it’s like, I didn’t see the math, I didn’t see what was happening. And so, like what you do as soon as you hire an implementer, like what an implementer does is like, you know, as a visionary, right?

The entrepreneur type, like me, we have our skillsets and the lanes that we’re doing, and when we’re doing all the work, we’re doing all of the work not as good as someone who can do it well, right? And so when I said we 4 Xed our output, what I meant was now we’re taking all the stuff that I was doing not as good as I could, right?

Not at the speed or quality or level that I could have. It gave it to someone who could do it all better than me and faster than me. And now I’m working on just the things that I’m good at are, like I said, the output went up 4 Xed.

Like in two weeks. And I was like, oh, I see it now. [00:24:00] And once you’ve seen it, you can’t unsee it.

You can’t unsee it, in nor shore you. It’s in rear view. Like, let’s go like I, and then you hire another implementer and take more stuff. That’s not your zone of genius off your plate, and it just continues, continues until you’re doing only the stuff you love.

Yeah. And I was like, we’re at on one of my companies, we have four full-time staff members now. And we’ll probably be at 12 or possibly 15 by the end of this halfway year point in this year for our growth thing, growth things. And a lot of that’s just, it’s understanding that we can scale with people and we can make a bigger impact with people.

And you know, I tell all of my staff now, when we get on our staff meeting calls as that, you know, hey, we’re a family first company. And one of our core values is that we are and I say this all the time, profit first because we can’t run a company without profit.

Our team is second and our customers are third, and it has to go in that order cuz we can’t serve anyone without profit. We can’t serve our customers without our team. And you don’t have a business without your customers. So it’s profit first. [00:25:00] Team second and customers third. And that’s the way that we prioritize everything in our business.

Good book by the way. Profit First. Good book.

It is a good book.

You read it?

I have, I’ve read it a number of times, that’s actually why I used that terminology profit first. But it’s the you know, cause you don’t have a company without profit. So we do that. And you have to have that in place. So that’s like, you know, you don’t have a business without that.

But then the very next thing has to be your team. Because your team is what makes your value that you’re giving to the world possible. And then for, you know, to your point, your audience is the solopreneur who’s trying to, like, they’re really good at what they do and they want to expand their impact.

You have a glass ceiling holding you back and that glass ceiling is implementers.

Absolutely. I say all the time, your income is in direct alignment with your impact. Over and over and over again. Like your income is direct alignment with your impact. If you cannot exponentially grow your impact, [00:26:00] you are going to make the same amount of money or you’re going to make the same amount of profit.

Just point blank. And you said something about the team, I love how it’s profit first and team, then customers. And what I saw in the workforce that I thought was really broken too was that we as a society put more weight and importance on hard skills, quote unquote. So do they know QuickBooks? Are they are they accounting?

Can they.

How to use X, Y, Z software.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Or workshop, or whatever your skill is, you’ll put on the dashboard.

Versus. Right. Versus the soft skills that are compatible to yours. So we spent the past three years building out our matching algorithm that takes into account compatibility with from the solopreneur and our integrators.

So we’re really trying to de-risk [00:27:00] that matching process in hiring someone as much as possible.

Yeah. You know what else is really, really fascinating about the whole, the difference between hard skills and soft skills. One of the most important soft skills that people don’t understand unless you’ve actually tried hiring people before, is that showing up is more valuable than anything else.

Ooh, tell me more.

So what I mean by if you’ve hired people before, getting someone to show up is like, it’s the first hurdle.

And the thing that I love about your market, right? The stay-at-home mom or the women, is that like they, it’s almost, it’s funny that you don’t see it because you’re like, why would you not show up?

That’s exactly what I’m thinking.

Yeah. It’s like, why would you not…

We need to raise that bar.

We need to raise that bar. And I cannot tell you.

It’s like we run our e-com company. We’re trying to hire people in like, the Warehouse stuff like, we’ll hire 20 people to get one to come back for the second day.

Whoa.

Which is crazy. And that it’s so common and same kind of thing when you hire people who are virtual workers who are, you [00:28:00] know, when you’re, especially when you’re building this kind of thing, getting people to show up is half of the battle.

And what I have found is when you get into the caretaker motherhood marketplace for workers showing up is such a default for them that they never even question whether or not they’re gonna show up. Like, to your point, you were like, I don’t get it. Why was that a thing? It’s a thing.

Yeah.

When you hire people outside of that marketplace, you have to deal with whether or not they’re gonna show up.

Crazy to me.

It is crazy but it’s also, you know, potentially it’s a cultural problem we have, who knows what causes it. But it’s a problem. And if entrepreneurs have hired people before and they’re like, I don’t wanna hire people, I’ve gotten burned. That’s generally the reason.

I mean, snaps for that all day long. Yes, I agree. Wow. So interesting. I can’t wait to take that back to the team and just share that. So thank you.

It’s a crazy cool thing. And I said, the people that I have hired and worked for who come out of[00:29:00] the places that you’re talking about, it’s not the thing that you have to worry about is getting them show up. And then what’s interesting is, the reason that is important and ties back to the hard skills is almost all of the hard skills can be learned.

All of them, whether or not you know them yourself is like, if you know them, you can train them. If you don’t know them, you can hire someone to train them. There’s courses to train on them. And here’s a wonderful thing about the marketplace. You’re talking about for workers, they learned how to take care of children and learn how to take care of their parents, and learned how to run a household and learn how to cook and learn how they have the skill of learning things.

So all of your hard skills are acquirable.

Well, yes. And now too, like those are the very obvious things that they’re learning. But now it goes so much further than that. It’s all of the applications online and all of the different portals that they have to use. So all of these women are incredibly tech savvy. And so it’s amazing to me when every single day they are bringing to me different [00:30:00] websites that they are learning different tools, that they’re learning different automations.

Like, Hey, Ashley, we can increase our input by this percent just by adding this tool in this business. I mean, that’s what I’m hearing on a day-to-day basis, if you’re having someone who’s constantly looking on how to improve your business, like that’s invaluable.

Yeah. Yeah. And I, you know, I’m a sort of an automation, that’s why I do a lot of teaching and training on our staff for those kind of things. But yeah, the,

Oh, I love.

Yeah, it’s a wonderful thing. And my point is like, you hire someone for the soft skills. The ability to learn, the desire to show up and their compatibility with you on the team.

And then any of the hard skills that they’ll either already have them or they can pick them up quickly.

Yep.

And, you know, you have your onboarding stuff with your team and you get ’em up to speed. You could show up easily.

Well, and name a job that you walked into and you didn’t have to learn anything, like, name one job.

None.

That doesn’t exist. There’s gonna be a ramp, there’s going to be like an onboarding. [00:31:00] So to me, it’s silly to think that this would be such a pain to really teach people like how to do all of these hard skills when really you’re going to be teaching one way or the other.

Yeah. And I think part of the misunderstanding on the entrepreneur side is like, Hey, I don’t know how to do X, Y, Z, or I don’t want to do X, Y, Z. I’m just gonna hire someone else to do that. And then you’re expecting I’m gonna hire someone and they’re just gonna be able to take it off my plate.

Well, taking it off your plate it’s like a, you know, in video editing, it’s a cross fade. We’re like, you’re going to be doing most of it at the beginning, and then they’re gonna be picking it up and then they take it over. It’s a cross fade kind of thing where there’s that training portion where they can take it over.

And that cross fade sort of like time is gonna be dependent on, you know, what their hard skills that they have now are, and how good you are at teaching the skills or how good your processes are documented and that kind of stuff. And as you get better, right, like one of the things that I love doing is having staff who are trained on doing process documentation so we can train them so the next person who comes in has all the documentation and that cross fade period is shorter.

[00:32:00] So anyways,

Exactly. You’re exactly right. And it’s interesting that you’re saying this because the way that it works for women to join our platform is they go through a certification first, where we are teaching them how to be what we are calling online business managers. But essentially it’s like the right hand woman, the number two, the integrator, et cetera.

And so we are teaching that specifically for coaches, consultants, solopreneurs, so they know how to maximize the effort for those types of businesses because you’re exactly right, our job is to lessen that cross fade. How do we make that as short as possible? So I love that. I’m gonna borrow that cross

You’re gonna steal my video metaphor. That’s,

Yes. Yes, I am.

For anyone who’s done video editing, it’s you know, they’ll understand that immediately. And, you know, everyone’s seen that right? Where they have the one part of the video fades out and the next part sort of like fades in over top of it.

It’s a cross fade. So it’s a good metaphor. So what I wanna talk about is your superpowers, right? So every iconic hero has a [00:33:00] superpower, whether that’s the fancy flying suit made by their genius and intellect, or the ability to call down thunder from the sky. In the real world, heroes have what I call a zone of genius, which is either a skill or a set of skills that you were born with or you developed over the course of your career that really energize all the other skills, right?

And the way I like to frame it is, if you look at all the skills you developed over the course of your career, there’s probably a common thread that ties your skills together, and that common thread is probably where you would find your superpower. So what do you think your superpower is for that framing that you bring to bear on the Prowess company? Project?

Yeah. Love this question. I think that each person has many zones of genius. I don’t think there just has to be one. The one that’s coming up for me right now is I think I have a zone of genius of making people feel special. And I really like to, and think I have a uncanny ability. I can be talking to a room of people, [00:34:00] but I have been told that people feel like I’m talking to directly to them, even though there’s an audience you audience of

I have something

about that.

If you want.

400.

Oh, tell me, I didn’t.

Oh tell me.

There’s some psychological reasons for that. It’s one of my superpowers is the frameworks that make things happen.

Love this.

This is super interesting and I love what you’re saying. Cause it’s one of the, it’s a rare trait to be able to make someone else feel seen and heard.

That’s what someone says, when you’re saying, you make people feel special. So there’s two aspects of that. I’ll go over both of them for you. The first one is a physical thing. And it mean, it’s literally, it’s looking someone in the eyes, and let me give you an example of that.

I went to Bible college and was trained as a preacher, right? So I have a degree in preaching. And one of the things that they did with us on a regular basis one of the experiments they did in peer preaching class where they made us all participate in was how to speak to a group of people as if you were speaking to an individual, right?

And we have this weird dichotomy in our world where we think. [00:35:00] Like either we are an individualistic society or we are a community based society. And the reality is, is that we can’t be one without the other, right? Community doesn’t exist without individuals, and individuals can’t exist on their own without community.

So what’s fascinating about that, is you can see it happen in real time. And so they taught us this in Bible college. So the experiment was you get up in front of the class of people or your audience of people, and you can test this out if you want, if you were ever next time you’re in front of an audience.

It works every time. Tell the audience ahead of time. I’m going to ask you a question. Don’t answer it right, but I’m gonna ask you a question. And so you look into the audience and you look at someone right in the eyes. Just pick someone out. Doesn’t matter who it is in the audience and say, what’s your favorite color?

Don’t answer me just what’s your favorite color? Think about it, hold it for me. And then just step back and at the room say, who did I ask that question to? Raise your hand if you think I was asking that question to you. What you’ll see is the person that you were looking at, and for two or three feet around them, everyone will raise their hands. You’re asking me that question.

Oh, that’s so good.

Now, [00:36:00] repeat the experiment. And what you do is you say, Hey, I’m gonna ask the question again. Don’t answer it.

Yeah.

And instead of looking at someone, look in between two people, look at no one. So look in between two people. So you’re not looking at anyone in the eyes. And then ask the room again, who did I ask that question to?

No one will raise their hand.

What.

Or you’ll see them look around at each other, be like, were you looking at me? Was he looking at someone else? Right? Eye contact is like a physical connection. That it’s a real thing to actually be able to see someone and to make them feel seen and feel heard. So part of it is, I would bet I would put money on the fact that one of the reason people you feel special around you is because you are comfortable looking them in the eye and actually seeing them.

Wow. That is fascinating. I mean, it’s like light bulb, light bulb, light bulb, amazing.

The second aspect to that is stories. And it’s something that I’ve seen you do a really good job so far just in here, is someone who [00:37:00] understands how you see another person is by hearing their story. And so the way you hear someone’s stories, people hear like, what does active listening mean?

Right? You’ve heard it as active listening. And then people are like, well, it means I look at them and I hear the things that they’re saying. No. It’s like what active listening means is I hear your story and I listen to what you’re telling me. And then in my own head, I go through my own story and I see where we have connection points, and then we exchange stories together, right?

And that’s what we’re doing, right? I hear your story and I tell you and tell you a story in return, right? And we’re exchanging stories. And then exchanging of stories is a skill that people learn, people who are good at it, like yourself or like me. And it’s something that you can develop the skill, but it’s a skill that the other person.

Will feel seen and heard and appreciated when you don’t just hear their story, but connect their story to yours.

That is also so fascinating. I mean, now that you say that, it makes so much sense when you’re looking back, but I wouldn’t have articulated it that [00:38:00] way. But now that you did, I mean, it’s amazing.

Yeah. And like if you listen to interview up to this point.

Thank you you, Richard.

You and I have been doing that throughout this whole interview.

You’re right. You’re exactly right.

Wow, and so that’s, it’s

Oh, good.

It’s something I teach people when they’re like, one of my rules for podcasting, I have a 10 Commandments of podcasting series I’m actually doing with Lucas.

And the last commandment is learn to give good interview. And we teach that as a skill because it’s a learnable skill. Is how to exchange stories with one. Because that’s how you help someone be seen. So anyways, my point is I love that superpower and to come by it naturally instead of having it trained like, I was trained and I was trained with my superpower where I can like sort of see the frameworks that I’ve got really good at sort of describing it.

But it’s a cool superpower to come by naturally.

Oh man. This is fantastic. I’m almost speechless just because my brain is going a bazillion miles per hour, like thinking through all of this, cuz you’re exactly right. That [00:39:00] is the exchanging of stories. Wow. Ugh. So good.

So, here’s a really, really useful thing. If you start training your women on how to do that with people that they’re getting hired with you’ll exponentially increase their results and it’s a trainable skill.

Okay. That crossed my mind. I was like, after this, I’m making a note to go through and teach them how to do this. You’re exactly right. So good. We’re on the same way, blank.

So good.

So now here’s my kicker for you. The flip side of every superpower is the fatal flaw, right? Just like every Superman has his kryptonite, or a wonder woman can’t remove her bracelets and victory without going mad, you probably have a flaw that’s held you back in your business, something that you’ve struggled with.

For me, it was perfectionism. I struggled with perfectionism for years, which kept me from shipping products. It kept me from hiring people, which we talked about already. Cause I was like, they can’t possibly do it as good as I can. That’s stupid, by the way. And I also struggled with lack of boundaries.

And so I didn’t have good boundaries [00:40:00] with my time. I didn’t have good boundaries with my clients. And so it kept me from having sort of discipline I need to actually really do good work. But I think more important than what your flaws are is how have you worked to overcome them so that our audience can learn a little bit from your experience.

I love this question because I’ve been thinking about this quite a bit lately. Especially now that we are rounding out our fourth year of Prowess Project. I was looking back on my leadership thus far and how do I take it to the next level because I know that I can’t continue to show up the way I have been and expect to grow and have different results.

I just can’t. And so what I realized my fatal flaw had been over, I guess at this point it was three and a half years is. I’m trying to do too many things at once, almost like a lack of focus. And I realized that I was doing that because I wanted everyone to feel special. I wanted [00:41:00] everyone to feel included.

I, someone gave me a great idea and I’d wanna go do that. Even though I had all these other things to go do. I wanted to help women, every single woman, no matter if she wanted to be, to get into tech, into customer success, and to teaching into nursing. Like I wanted to help all of them, but no, no, no, no.

Like if you’re every, you can’t be everything to everyone or you’re nothing to nobody. And that was the problem that I had. And so what I had to. In order to overcome that, and I’m feeling really crystal clear on our focus and our path now. So I feel like I am, you know, rounding that corner is first I had to get it into a mastermind group where I had the accountability where other people were going to look at me and be like, oh my gosh, Ashley, stop it.

You have too many ideas. Like, just chill, chill, chill. So first I had to do that, but then I had to commit. So I [00:42:00] changed the copy on the website. I changed the copy of the emails. I started and really, really niche down. I niche down two, if not three times to get super specific, solve one problem and not go after everyone.

So, that was my journey.

That’s a really important lesson to learn. I know I struggle with that for years, I’m still working on, the more I get, the better we get in business, the more narrow we get. And what’s interesting is you’ll probably love this connection. The things that you do are very similar to the people that you’re talking to in that when you learn to focus on one and look it in the eye, all the people who are close to it will come to you for the same thing.

But when you try to talk to everyone and then you end up talking to no one.

Yes. And when you said that about the example, or the like you were saying, like, look someone in the eye and then you’ll have all those people who raised their hand and said, yes, you were talking to me. That was exactly what I was thinking. And what I’ve also found that was really, really interesting [00:43:00] when we are nicheing down, and just because I got really, really specific in our messaging, we’re still having other people who don’t fit that persona come to us.

So it’s not like we are losing out on revenue, but now it’s our decision. Do we want to spread ourselves into multiple directions? And so, instead of us just saying yes to everything, now it’s our decision to say no to things. And that puts the power to me, in my, in my opinion, to us.

Yeah, because you’ve decided to talk to one avatar specifically, right?

The avatar. Yes, yes.

One avatar specifically.

Yes.

All the people who are close enough to that avatar are going to start hearing you where before they weren’t right? Cuz you weren’t talking to anyone. You were talking to no one.

And so nobody heard you. So it’s harder to grow, but now that you’re talking to one person, all the people who are close enough are going to see you and hear you and think you’re talking to them. And sometimes if you’re really clear about it, they might even say that. But I know you target [00:44:00] this person specifically, but I’m close enough. Can you help me?

Yes. That’s exactly what I’m hearing. That’s exactly what I’m hearing. I’m close to that.

All the time. It happens every, all the time. And it’s because you’ve learned to talk to someone individually. It’s such a powerful thing. And that’s why I love the training that we got in Bible college about that. Cause it’s been so applicable into the business world. And super useful.

So I have one other thing you said that I want to comment on for you because I think it was really, really useful for you cuz it’s useful for me. I also struggle with the whole, all the ideas come and I want to implement all of them. And you can’t build in your project management system and idea dashboard.

And what you do with an idea dashboard is you have say so when we use ClickUp for our project management, you can probably do this with any of ’em, but we have a form a form that I have for myself and then all of my staff has. It’s like when you have an idea, whatever it is, we have a few pieces.

Like what is the idea? What are some examples, how can we implement it, what are the resources that we would need for it? And then how does it align with our company values, right? Like for these kind of things, where does it fit? [00:45:00] Is it gonna help us with profitability? Is it gonna help us with our team? Is it gonna help us with our customers?

Where does it fit in the realm of our values? And so at this point, I’m the one who mostly contributes to it, but I open it up to the team, they can contribute to it as well as they have ideas, they put ’em in there. Now, the important part is that you have the things you’re doing now, ideas are great, but ideas are only good if you execute on them.

So it goes into what I call a capacity defense plan, right? So, you have your capacity and then once a month or you know, once a quarter or how often you need to do it, you go through all of the ideas and you decide, does this thing, this idea, does it fit with our goals? Do we have the time that we want to take it from idea to, it’s a project for this quarter, or it’s going to be a regular part of what we do, or it’s something that we’ve decided that it’s not going to fit.

And it does a number of things. One, because it gets some time to sit there and ruminate, right? Cuz it is not like I have to do something about this now you’ve got a place for ideas to go. They can sit there and you can think about them and the team can look at ’em and then you can come back together and you specifically have a time where it’s like, Hey, what we’re doing [00:46:00] now is we’re going to go over our ideas and decide which of these past muster.

Which of these are gonna go into our recurring stuff, which is gonna be like a one-time project for this quarter to make something better, right? Or which ones don’t. And so then the ideas get the, cuz like one of the important parts of entrepreneurship is having that ideation, having that be a part of your process.

And when I learned that, I learned it from Layla over at Process Driven. She’s got a wonderful YouTube channel, but I learned this process from her. It was such a huge benefit to me to have this capacity defense plan. This the idea that like, hey, ideas need a place to live in your project management system.

So that they get dealt with because part of the growth of your business is gonna come from your innovation, and your strategy and all those things. Those come from the ideas. So how do you have ideas part of your process so they don’t like railroad your business, if that makes sense.

It makes perfect sense. And again, it’s so funny how things happen because this morning at a coffee shop, I was just thinking about of course, all the ideas and I was like, man, I need a place to just jot these [00:47:00] down and we’ll decide what month we’re going to do them in. And now we’re talking about this on a podcast.

It’s just so crazy.

I’ll when we hop off, I’ll show you my little capacity defense plan.

Please do. Yes. That’d be great.

And then, just for fun, my son printed a snorlax that just finished while we run our interview on my 3D printer that’s sitting next to me.

So cool.

A squishy, low poly snorlax that my son’s gonna be very excited about.

So, um,

Love it. Love it, love it.

So fatal flaw is, that was really good. I wanna shift gears a little bit and talk about your common enemy, right? And your common enemy. Every superior has an arch nemesis and it’s the thing that they constantly have to fight against in their world. And in the world of business, this takes on a lot of forms, but I like to put this in the context of your clients, right?

And now you probably actually have two clients, cuz of your business. You have your women who want work and the people who are hiring those women. So you have two, you could put it in either one. Oh, look, my light’s dying. That’s always fun. The batteries run out here, we’ll go like that. Add more light that way.

The, so you have two clients. And what I want to hear from you is it’s a mindset or it’s a [00:48:00] flaw that you’re constantly having to fight to overcome. So you can actually get them the result that they came to you for. And you can pick either market, but what would you say is your common enemy.

First and foremost, and you already spoke to it today, is on the entrepreneur side. Being nervous to invest in employees before they quote unquote feel ready.

Yeah.

And, it’s like anything, right? Like, you don’t get to live in the house before you buy it, right? Like you don’t get to drive off the car before you buy it.

Like you don’t. It’s

You don’t get the benefit.

Right. You don’t get the benefit before you invest. And so that would be probably the first one. The second one is we believe a ton in quality. So we work really, really, really hard to vet and certify these women so that they can be your COO even though you’re not [00:49:00] hiring them to do that.

But that’s the capacity. They’re going to overdeliver to be these amazing, amazing resources for you. And we get a lot of the time, well, okay, yes, you charge X, or I could go on Upwork and get this for $3 an hour. I’m like, you could, you absolutely could, and that may work for you. And if it does, well hot damn, that’s amazing.

Like , just shout it to the rooftops, but it may not.

And oftentimes you get what you pay for. And so, that would be our what do you call it, friendly enemy. What, what did you call it?

You’re my common enemy. You’re arch nemesis, so to speak.

Common Enemy. Yes.

Common enemy, like every superhero has their common enemy, you got yours. Right?

A hundred percent.

I love the thought too, because you were. One of the pieces of advice my dad gave me, I was getting ready to get married to a girl when I was younger.

I was like 19. I was like, I think I wanna marry this girl, dad. And I was like, but I don’t know if I’m ready for it. And then he said something to me that like, changed the rest of my life. And he was like, if you wait till you’re ready, you’ll never do anything. And [00:50:00] the point that he was making was that part of the process of getting ready is taking action.

Right? You know, you’re not ever gonna be ready to be a dad. You’re just gonna be a dad. Right. Never gonna be ready to be a husband. You’re just going to choose to be a husband. You’re not gonna be ready to hire an employee until you decide to hire an employee. So part of the process of being ready is taking the action, taking the leap.

And that is, it’s such a hard message to swallow until you get it. And then once you get it, you’re like, oh, right. And my Fun little metaphor for it now is, I call it, I call entrepreneurs like myself and like yourself. Parachute builders we’re the kind of people that jump off of the cliff first, and then we learn to build parachutes on the way down.

Uhhuh. Why do we do that to ourselves?

Because deadlines.

Do we love the thrill? Like what is wrong with us?

It’s the power of deadlines, right? Where you’re like, if you have a deadline that you can’t push back, you’ll absolutely get things done. So when you jump [00:51:00] off the cliff, you’re like, listen, I’ve got 900 feet before I hit the ground and die. I gotta make sure I get a parachute done before we get there.

Now, that comes with a caveat. You should not jump off of the cliff if you don’t have the skills to build a parachute, right?

Good point.

But if you have the skills, or the capacity to learn the skills in the amount of time before

your deadline.

I was gonna say, capacity to learn skills or the people to outsource, the parachute making in the time that you need it.

Yeah. I was like, there’s some caveats there.

Then there plug that gave up the Mastermind. Yeah. There’s some caveats, but yes, you’re exactly right.

Yeah. And it’s, you know, it’s a whole immovable deadline thing. That’s why I was like, I always love that cuz it’s the thing that entrepreneurs really get paid for is we get paid for the taking of the risks.

Right.

Oh God, yes. Yes.

And where other people aren’t willing to take the risks, you’re willing to take the risks, you’re willing to jump off the cliff and figure out how to build the parachute on the way down. And sometimes we fail and we blow up our businesses and we don’t grow a great job, but you learn the lessons and you try again.

Right.

Yep.

And that’s, anyways, my whole point there is I love, I love that as a common enemy because it’s [00:52:00] so true, right? And it’s not just something that you struggle with, but a lot of entrepreneurs struggle with is this idea that I’m not ready to take the next step. In your case, it’s take the next step to hire someone, but for whoever’s listening, it’s almost anything, that thing that you’re vacillating with, probably just do it right. just do it. It’s Nike.

Yep. I love it. Yeah. Nike was onto something, huh?

We’re onto something with that. So I wanna talk about the flip side then, right? So the flip side of your common enemy is your driving force, right? Just like Spider-Man fights, save New York, or Batman fights to save Gotham or Google fights to index and categorize all the world’s information, even if sometimes we don’t want ’em to do that.

What I wanna know is what it is that you fight for your mission, so to speak.

Our mission really is all about specifically gender equality in the workforce. And making this idea of nine to five obsolete and proving that someone’s background or professional prowess [00:53:00] is not wiped clean because they’ve been out of the workforce for three or for however long. There’s something called the motherhood penalty in Corporate America where if a every kid that a woman has, she loses between 10 and $16,000 a year on her salary.

And again, it’s this bias that she’s a mom now, she’s distracted, she’s not gonna get her job done. She’s like, she’s X, Y, and Z, and it is crucial for me that I shatter that notion. And that is why we are building Prowess Project. That is why we are working so hard. That is why we are debunking this myth because if anything, stay at home moms are the real hero.

And especially the fact that they know that they can have this career and raise children and [00:54:00] find happiness and design it the way that they want it to be.

You can have your cake and eat it.

You can.

You can, and I love the way that, you talk about it too because you’re talking about it from an equality of opportunity standpoint where mothers should be given the same opportunity. We’re not saying, they need to have the exact outcome, right?

Because it’s a different outcome to work in at home with a flexible schedule. We’re not saying, you know, be the CEO, show up 90 hours a week and not take your family. We’re saying like, hey, you should give them the same opportunity to see if they can fit into your workplace as anyone else, right? And then if they fit, great.

If they don’t, they don’t. But for a lot of things, they’re going to fit and they should have that opportunity. So, I love that you’re approaching it from that quality of opportunity and just show where they fit. Some other really fascinating data we could get into that, on that with stay-at-home moms too.

So what’s interesting to me, so you mentioned that the negative statistic of the mom tax, so to speak , that’s really fascinating. Yeah. Motherhood penalty. That’s what you called it. I was like, it was mom tax. That’s not quite right. Motherhood penalty.

I like Mom tax though. They’re good.

Mom [00:55:00] tax is good too. And this is probably data you should look into because it’s probably would be really useful to know.

And it’s one of the reasons why my wife is at home. And we mentioned this earlier, like the amount of money that she saves us by actually doing all the things that she does. There is a tremendous correlation for a married couple when the wife is a full-time homemaker and the upper income limit two income families tend to max out right around 150, $200,000 a year in income.

Whereas single income families where the husband is working and the wife is doing homemaking average $400,000 a year over the course of their career. And it is it’s a tremendous correlation that we have lots and lots of data on, doesn’t get talked about much. But there is some benefits on the other side if you intentionally work on it like my wife and I were, it’s like, Hey, it’s a partnership and your job is grow the business and do nothing else.

And my job is to home [00:56:00] make. But if you know the math and you make an informed decision that way, there’s benefits both ways. And so my,

I’m, yeah, I wanna check out data.

So, the mom tax, the mom tax is a mom tax if they don’t, if they don’t know the other option, right? And so they just let them selves get tax that way.

But you can, if you learn to focus it properly, you can move it into having the husband’s side increase. But it has to be intentional. And there’s some data to back that up. I’ll have to see if I can find something for you and send it. But it’s useful to at least think about, especially with the work that you’re doing.

Right, right, right. So, okay. I’m very curious because you’re saying that, okay, so you’re looking at it as a whole, as a partnership.

As a whole, as a partnership.

Yes, because there’s the motherhood penalty and there’s the daddy bonus. So it’s interesting because as a [00:57:00] father has a child, he actually progresses further, gets the promotion quicker and makes more money.

Again, mainly because of bias. But I’m wondering if there’s something to your point there when you’re looking at it as a partnership. Ooh.

Yeah. If you look at it as a partnership, and again, that goes right back to understanding like how community was really supposed to work. You can make these choices and you can have benefits in both. But I think the problem is, we’re making decisions without having all of like the data and understanding what the decisions we’re making are.

And so.

It’s that, and then there’s also.

And we certainly have the biases go.

Right. But what I’m also seeing too, a lot is like, why can’t the mom be the breadwinner or whatever we wanna call it and the dad be the homemaker. And there’s bias that way too. Yeah. And they absolutely can, especially if you’re looking at it, a partnership.

And so I just, I really like the way that we’re thinking about this. Oh, I got a data project.

Yeah. Data project. It’s [00:58:00] worth looking into. And then, it has the benefit of, again, being, we talked about family first entrepreneurship and we’ve talked about birth, race, we talked about all sorts of things. Like, we have to figure out as a society, how to make family work with growing and getting better, right?

Like with, because entrepreneurship is gonna solve our problems. If we can’t figure out how to both have family and entrepreneurship and work and satisfying work, we’re never gonna figure this out. So these are like really important discussions.

I completely agree. But I think what really catapulted us was. And I hate saying this, the only silver lining in Covid really was this idea that people can work remote, and you don’t need FaceTime. The only silver lining was terrible, but like I do think that that proved to a lot of people, especially small businesses who don’t have a physical product that, Hey, I can save a lot of overhead and I can access talent everywhere if I think about work a little bit differently.

Yeah. [00:59:00] And I was like, we’ve been doing the whole work from home thing since 2017, since we started traveling. And so, we were ahead of the curve on that. And then like during Covid, people were like, how are you doing this? And we’re like, well, we’ve been doing it for a while. So, we got hit up a lot for it.

But yeah, one of my other companies we needed a customer service rep and we were having a hard time with the whole show up thing. We were talking earlier and we couldn’t get someone.

Right, right, right.

Convinced the owner of that company, I was like, can we hire remote? Because if we hire remote, we can access a worldwide pool of talent.

And we hired she was in my personal network, but we hired a stay at home mom, and she has been one of the best hires in the company. And the owner is still a little, like, I don’t quite understand the remote work thing, but she’s also a really good hires.

Yep. I mean.

Anyways, the message is changing.

Yes. The message is changing and I love it. I love being on the forefront.

Now I’ve only got a couple more questions for you. I wanna talk about for a minute some practical things, right? I call this the hero’s tool belt. And in its practical portion of our show, every superhero has their tool belts with their awesome gadgets, like their batarangs, and their webs, slingers, or their laser eyes, or their big magical hammer.

[01:00:00] Whatever it is. I want you to talk about the top one or two tools you couldn’t live without to do what you do in your space. Could be anything from your notepad to your calendar, to something you use for marketing, to something that you use for your actual delivery. Something you think is essential to getting your job done.

Just a, a practical day-to-day tool to be the entrepreneur that you are.

Oh my gosh, Richard, are you stumping me? I mean, there’s so many. I think, I’m stumped of, of just finding two of them.

of

So what was the first one that popped into your head?

I mean, the first one was Zoom because I’m interacting with people all day every day. And the, just the fact that we can have conversations and I regularly have conversations with Australia and I’m sitting here in Austin, Texas, it’s amazing. And I can see them like, wow, like its just phenomenal. So

Does blow your mind when you’re like, because you go back to when we were kids, it was, it was science fiction, right? And we saw that in science fiction. We’re like video calls and like that kind of stuff. We’re like, psh, that’ll never happen. But it would be so cool. I like, have specific [01:01:00] memories of me and one of my friends at a sleepover when we were like 12 years old talking about some science fiction book we were reading and they were talking about like having video chat and we’re like, oh, that would be so cool.

And we’re like, we would be like, you know, and we were just building all this cool stuff and because, you know, we had phones that were connected to wires that if you wanted to pick up, it was like, Hey, this is the Matthews residence, you know, how may I help you? Or how my director, like that was our life and, and my Oh, I had son.

Yeah, my son and my daughter, like, they’re 13 years old. My oldest one is 13, and when he first started playing with the iPhone, and like to this day, it’s, he knows now, but earlier. And my toddler does this now all the time. We get on the phone with someone, like an actual phone call with like, you know, her aunt or grandma or something like that.

And it’s not a fa a video call. They’ll be like trying to show them toys and like other things. I’m like, we’re on a phone call and they’re like, I don’t get it. Why is there no face? Like, why can’t I see them? And we’ve completely shifted that and it’s like, I don’t know. We’ve made the world a smaller, more connected place and I think we are all the better for it.

Yes. I completely agree. And you know what? Also, I [01:02:00] think it’s really funny when you were saying like, I picked up the phone and you did this symbol, like with their thumb out

with the pinky out here.

Yeah. Like, our kids. Dunno what that means.

No, no idea. Like, this is not, like, this doesn’t look like the phones in their world like this, I guess more would look like the phones in their world.

Like just, your palm would.

Yeah. You’d you’d have to hold it up like this in front of your face.

Yeah, that’s even funny to me. Like even that symbol, like next generation will have no idea what that is.

The other discussion that’s super fun on that is like, my son and I are having this regular argument right now. It’s not really an argument, it’s more of like a lighthearted thing, but I’m like, you need to learn to type. And he’s like, I don’t understand why I need to learn to type cuz he’s like, I can just tell my computer what I want it to do.

Right? Like, all the dictation and the Siri control and the voice controls of it. And I’m like, listen, I was like, you are probably the last generation that’s gonna need to learn to use the keyboard in the mouse for IO on a computer. But like, you’re not gonna get out of it. Your kids will probably get out of it.

And like, [01:03:00] I love that you’re really pushing the envelope here, but also you’re gonna need to learn to type cuz you’re that cross fade generation.

Whoa. I never even thought about that.

Yeah, it’s crazy because their baseline of technology interaction started with voice control. It didn’t start with the keyboard in the mouth.

Wow. Well, yeah. It’s funny that you say that because I can even like see my daughter, she’ll go up to the TV and she’ll wanna change the channel and she’ll swipe it, swipe the tv.

Yeah.

Right. Versus like using the, the control. Cause she’s so used to like a phone or swiping it and we’re trying to limit screen time, so before blah, blah, blah, blah.

But like, it was just, it’s funny watching her trying to swipe the channel.

Screens are a part of our lives that aren’t going away. You need to learn how to, one of the things I say all the time is like, as a parent, your job is not to teach your children how to avoid danger. Your job is to teach them how to navigate danger safely.

Completely agree. So what [01:04:00] age would you say that putting, giving them screens is okay. And I don’t mean giving them screens and not seeing them for four hours, but what would you suggest.

We started teaching all of our kids how to use technology from the moment they were, it was like, my son at he’s 13 now, but he was like six months old. First time he figured out how to unlock my phone.

Yeah, yeah.

It was funny cuz he thought it had something to do with my finger, but it was a passcode, right?

The original iPhone had like a four digit passcode and I would type in the passcode and he would open and he would like to, he liked looking at pictures of himself, so he would go through the little photo item, just swipe through ’em. And he didn’t understand that. He was like, so you push the buttons, like the keys, and it unlocks and I can get to the pictures cause that’s what he wanted.

And he’s like, but when I do it, it doesn’t unlock. Right. It just, you know, and I try it four or five times and then the phone shuts off because you’ve input the passcode wrong for too long. And then finally he decided, he was like, it must be the magic, must be your finger. So he would grab my finger and put it on there, and I’m like, that’s, it’s also not that there’s an actual like passcode that you don’t know.

But anyways, my point is, is like we’ve been teaching them how to use technology from the very [01:05:00] beginning, and it’s like our kids go through homeschooling. And so like they’ve got online curriculum and everything and we teach them in to use the tools they have available to them. So like when they get to tests and other things like that, I was like, you don’t have to know the answers to the questions.

What you have to know is how to get the answers to the question, how to figure it out. You have to learn how to use a calculator. You have to learn how to use the Google search engines. You have to learn how to use the tools that you have available because that’s what’s actually gonna be expected of you in the real world.

100%. Oh, I could not agree more.

When they have like problems, like problems that are tough in their schoolwork or even on tests, like particularly on tests is like get as far as you can and then when you get stuck, bring us in. Right? Like, we’ll sit down and we’ll figure it out as a team.

Because in the real world that is such a more valuable skill.

God, that’s so true too. Oh, I love this. Gosh. All this parenting. Filing it away. [01:06:00] Filing it away.

Yeah. And so, we teach them to live in the world. They’re going to live in. Which includes screen time. Right. And so, we talk about, I talk about this a lot. You know, they, you hear things like all things in moderation, right? Because like, you drink too much water, you can die from hyperhydrosis or whatever, right?

You don’t drink enough water. You can die from dehydration. You need to have enough water, right? And what I’ve learned over the course of time is like when we just saying all things in moderation isn’t quite enough. So we talk about what I’ve started talking about is something I call structured moderation.

And so I’m gonna give you a really wild example. My wife and I a number of years ago we were in Oregon. And in Oregon, Oregon is really famous for weed. Like really famous for weed. Like if you’ve ever driven into Vegas, Vegas has, you know, all the billboards as you’re driving up that are like, you’re almost at the casinos.

You can almost spend all your money here. Look at Vegas. You’re almost here like every 10 feet. There’s another billboard telling you how awesome Vegas is gonna be. Oregon’s the same way, except the billboards coming from California to Oregon are like, you’re almost to the weed.

I love it.

Um, Yeah. And we were [01:07:00] never users of weed at all before, cuz we lived in a state where it wasn’t legal.

And when we started traveling, we ended up in Oregon for the first time. And I was like, well, you know, we in Rome, might as well do as the Romans do, right? And we were at this really cool little it was the world’s smallest harbor, right? And it’s actually a really tiny harbor, super cool. But they’ve got like 14 shops up and down, like the little gift shops and everything that are, you know, downtown.

And three of them were weed stores because they got more weed stores than they do coffee shops in Oregon. It’s crazy. So anyways.

My God. I love this.

It’s crazy. So my wife and I were like, well, might as well do as the Romans do, right? So, my wife stayed in the car with the kids and I went in and I talked to the guy behind the counter.

I was like, so I’ve never done this before and I have no desire to smoke weed at all, but I am willing to try some edibles. What do have? And and he goes, oh, come with me, young Padawan. And he brings me over to the counter where they’ve got chocolates and they’ve got gummies and they’ve got brownies and they’ve got, you know, all the different things you could get.

I spent $250 on weed edibles. Cause I didn’t know what to do. And I asked the guy and I was like, so we’ve never done this before. What do we expect?[01:08:00] And he was like, well cuz you’ve never done it before in your weed versions. He’s like, put all your kids to bed so you don’t know how it affects you.

And he is like, and then put on your favorite movie and then have one of these things and wait 45 minutes. Don’t, he’s like, don’t eat another one, but he is like, just wait

45 minutes.

See how it tempted.

You’re gonna be tempted. You’re gonna be like, it’s not working. He’s like, don’t give in, just wait.

So anyways, you can imagine how that whole experience went, but what I mean is, like you’ll hear in entrepreneurship communities and other things that, you know weed can make you slow. Right? Or alcohol can mess with your mind. Right. And there are things that can be addictive or they can take you off of your game.

Same thing with food, right? Food can be that way. And, you know, where you eat too much or you don’t eat enough. I actually struggled a long time with not eating enough. I didn’t know that. I just didn’t realize I was undereating until I got a health coach who was like, Hey, you’re actually not hitting your caloric intake for your output.

Which is why you’re not able to put on weight. So I had to learn how to eat more. And my my wife and I, and the reason why I bring up the weed specifically under structured moderation is like, we still [01:09:00] use it on occasion, but it’s generally only on Friday nights where we’re like, it’s like a Friday night.

It’s video games and hanging out with the kids and playing board games. And it’s just a fun thing. Like someone might have a glass of wine, we’ll have a weed edible, right? And it’s a structured moderation.

Right, right.

Right, where you can have like anything, even the things that the society considers bad for you, right?

Like wine, you know, four ounces of red wine is actually really good for you, right? Four ounces of wine a day, but if you drink a whole bottle every day, you’ll probably kill yourself when alcohol poisoning, right? So, it’s a structured moderation, meaning how can you structure your life to have the things that people think are dangerous?

Right? People are like, oh, your kids can’t play video games or they can’t have screen time. Sure they can. Sure they can if they learn structured moderation. So you should both demonstrate that to them and then teach them how to build structured moderation into their own lives. Right? And I know that’s a really long answer to that question, but yeah.

Structured moderation I think is the answer to that question.

Oh, I love that. I love that. Another thing that I’m just filing away oh, a hundred [01:10:00] percent. That’s good.

Well, thank you .

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Now back to the Hero show.

So, I’ve got two more questions for you. These should be quick. Your own personal heroes, right? Every hero has their own mentors, just like Frodo had Gandalf or Luke had Obi-Wan, or Robert Kiyosaki had his rich head, or even Spider-Man had his Uncle Ben, unless he watched the newest movie, then it’s Aunt May.

Who were some of your heroes? Were they real life mentors, speakers or authors or peers who were just few years ahead of you, and how important were they to what you’ve accomplished so far?

So one would definitely be my [01:12:00] mom. And I know that sounds like a cheesy answer, but she is the,

One of my favorites.

Yeah, she is, her story is crazy. She had me super young, got married to my dad finished college very, very late after going to four of them. And then started her own business, got divorced, my dad passed.

She was a single mom and now she has a multimillion dollar business. And it is designing her life in a way that she never thought was possible. And just seeing all of this, the roadblocks that she ran up against that , and her mindset with that was, these are happening for me, not to me.

And so how do I use this to my greatest advantage? She would definitely be, definitely be one of my heroes.

That’s that’s wonderful. And you would be surprised the number of people who I have on here who answer with some version of my mom or my dad or my [01:13:00] uncle who really.

Yeah.

helped me be who I am today. And I always loved that because it’s a reminder to me of one of the most important things that I think was ever said to me.

I was 17 years old at the time, and one of my mentors was like, listen, someday your kids are gonna have a hero, and if you’re not worthy, they’re not gonna choose you. I was like, that hit really hard, even for a 17 year old because I was like, he was right. I was gonna have kids.

I got four of ’em now. And I always am thinking to myself am I acting in such a way that the people I’m influencing would choose me to be their hero? Right? That when someone asks them, are they gonna say my name and I’m not gonna know it? And am I worthy of that? Am I worthy of being chosen as someone’s hero?

And what you find out is that there’s a lot of people a lot of people who answer this question, they’re, if you were to go and ask that person, does so and so think I’m their hero? They wouldn’t even know. Right? And so the reality is, is have.

Yeah.

You have people who are looking up to you as a hero right now.

[01:14:00] Are you worthy of that position? And that’s one of the things I I think about regularly. So anyways, I love that question and I love your answer.

Well, I love that takeaway. I think I’m gonna add that to the post-its that I have on my monitor because this whole idea of are you worthy.

Are you acting in such a way that you’re worthy

of being chosen someone’s hero?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Right? When they ask, you know, who’s one of my heroes? And they say, Hey, it’s Ashley. You may not ever know, but you know, are you worthy of that position?

Oh, so, so cool. These are such great questions. Love it.

Well, thank you. I just put a lot of work into this. We’ve done 200 episodes on this plus.

Yeah. Yeah.

So my last question for you is your guiding principles, right? One of the things that makes heroes heroic is that they live by a code. For instance, Batman never kills his enemies. He only ever brings ’em to Arkham Asylum.

So as we wrap up the interview, I’m gonna talk about the top one or two principles that you live your life by, right? Maybe something you wish you had known when you first started out on your own hero’s journey.[01:15:00]

Another like, cheesy moment, but always do the right thing. I think that, and I know that the right thing can be, you know, different things for different people, but in business it has paid me in spades just to not do anything shady. Even if people say or give me that sort of recommendation, or you could, or, oh, you don’t have to tell them, or da da da da.

In beyond business, even just in life I heard this, that I don’t lie because the truth is easier to remember. And I loved that. And and so that’s one of the ways that I live my life is let’s just have respect for everyone. And in turn, that means doing the right thing, being honest, putting them, treating them as you’d wanna be treated.

Yeah. Having integrity.

Yeah. And you probably wouldn’t be surprised by this, but probably [01:16:00] out of the 200 episodes, probably 219 of them, the response to that question is some form of integrity. And it’s one of the, again, one of the reasons why I run this podcast is because we have this cultural misunderstanding that entrepreneurs are villains, right?

You know, every children’s story you pick up and movie you pick up is some variation of entrepreneur spills, oil on ducks for money. And that’s just not reality. It’s just not reality. That’s not the way businesses run because we operate in a world where we have to exchange value for value.

Well, it’s that, and you said too, like really entrepreneurs are paid for their risks, the risks that they take. And I think integrity is so huge in that because all you have when you’re taking this risk is the trust in other people, or you are trusting other people. So if you’re not living in a life that is aligned with integrity, like that is you are betting against this risk that you’ve just put everything into your heart, soul, blood, tears, everything.

Yeah. Yeah. That’s

I’m not [01:17:00] particularly surprised that integrity.

Yeah. I was like, that parachute metaphor. If you jump off the cliff and you have to build the parachute on the way down with your team, like you have to trust each other Right. Or you’re not gonna get it done right. It’s just not gonna happen.

And you’re gonna, all gonna splat into the ground before you get that parachute built.

That’s so true. Yes. Yes. It’s really, really interesting the, how much, like that’s what’s coming up for me is how much risk is intertwined with trust and integrity. It really, really is. Or else, why would we do it.

Yeah. Yeah. And what you’ll learn too, as you grow your business and grow your team and grow the people that you’re working with, is that the bigger your ability to trust each other gets, the bigger risks you can take.

Totally.

The bigger value you can bring to the world and the more impact you can make.

So trust is sort of like that key that starts it all off. So

Bingo. Bingo. Oh, I love

it..

I dunno about you, but I think that is a perfect place to put a bow on the interview.

Yeah.

That’s where we’ll wrap it. [01:18:00] So, I do.

I love this.

I do finish every interview with a simple challenge. I call it the Heroes Challenge, and I do this to help get access to new stories I might not otherwise find on my own.

So the question is simple. Do you have someone in your life or in your network who you think has a cool entrepreneurial story? Who are they? First names are fine. And why do you think they should come on our show and share their story? First person that comes to mind for you.

First person that comes to mind for me, her name is Brie. She had a women owned marketplace, meaning all the shops were women owned and she decided to sunset it last year. And so I always think that it’s really, really valuable when entrepreneurs share that story of, Hey, what was that like? Because one thing she, and not to seal her thunder, but one thing that she says is, I’m an entrepreneur for life.

That’s just one chapter. So I think she would be a really good person to have on there.

Awesome, man. I love that. And I was like, we have, we have had stories, everything from the startups to [01:19:00] big, you know, $500 million a year companies to people who have been, you know, like you and my who are in the middle of our stuff. So, I love getting all stages of sort entrepreneurship story and really telling it.

Because again, our goal is to change the story. So,

Yep. Oh, I love it.

Thank you for that. We’ll reach out afterwards and see if we can get them to come on and say hi. They don’t always come in and say hi, but when they do, we get really good stories out of it. But in comic books, there’s always the crowd of people at the end who are cheering and clapping for the acts of heroism.

And so as we close, our analogous to that is where can people find you if they want your help in the future, right? Where can they light up the bat signal, so to speak and say, Hey Ashley, I would like to either, you know, be a work from home mom, or I need the implementers and I need your help.

So I think where can they go and then who are the right types of people to raise their hands and actually, you know, light up the bat signal and ask for your help.

I love it. So on the entrepreneur side, these are solo entrepreneurs. Typically it’s coaches or consultants, really subject matter experts who have an online business and wanna keep doing what they love and don’t wanna run the business. So on that [01:20:00] side, you can head to ProwessProject.com and find resources and how to get us there.

And then if you are, and you don’t have to be a mom or a caregiver, but if you are someone who is interested in being this idea of an integrator implementer or what we call an online business manager and running the business for one of these subject matter experts, again, head over to ProwessProject.com and we are at Prowess Project on all social channels.

And you can hit me up on LinkedIn, or what have you. So Please, come say hello. We’d love it.

Awesome. Thank you so much, Ashley, for coming on and sharing your story with us today. It was a fascinating conversation. I always love it when they go a little bit over. Cuz it generally means we got into good stuff. So thank you for that.

A hundred percent.

And any final words of wisdom for my audience before hit this stop record button.

Final words of wisdom. What’s coming up is just the the just do it. And I know it’s all entrepreneurs on the phone, but if you are on the line, but if you do have a [01:21:00] big problem that you’re trying to solve or if there’s something that you’re waiting, just always remember about the opportunity cost of e either starting or whatever it is.

That has been a huge thing for me lately, is what is the opportunity cost of not acting. And the fact that you said just do it is just that for me was what I needed to hear too.

Perfect. Thank you very much for coming on today, Ashley. I appreciate it.

Yeah, you too. Thank you.