Super Power Experts - Overcoming Obstacles as a Solopreneur

Overcoming obstacles as a solopreneur can be tough. The most significant ones they often face are those that live between their ears. In this episode of A Glimpse Inside, host Wendy Perrotti coaches Beth on ways to get out of her head and move her business forward. This is a no advice, no judgment zone. So, no matter where you are in the process, whether you’re just considering and noodling some ideas or whether you’re really up in it, listen in and find comfort in knowing that we all wonder what the hell we’re doing sometimes and that the solutions to those stuck spots are just as universal.

Welcome to A Glimpse Inside. I’m Wendy Perrotti. You’re listening to episode two of our four-part series on the side gig explosion. If you’ve been starting a business or you’re in the throws of getting one rolling and missed episode one, it’s called who do I think I am starting in business? I suggest you go back and have a listen. No matter where you are in the process, whether you’re just considering and noodling some ideas or whether you’re really up in it, you will find comfort in knowing that we all wonder what the hell we’re doing sometimes and that the solutions to those stuck spots are just as universal. My guest today is working on overcoming obstacles as a solopreneur herself, but before we hop in with Beth, let’s review the rules of the game here on the A Glimpse Inside coaching episodes. We’re going to discuss Overcoming Obstacles as a Solopreneur.

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Compass Point

This is a no advice, no judgment zone. We’re here to experience one another as whole spectacular beings capable of absolutely anything. The goal of coaching is to give us the space to play with the messy insides of our minds, to shine a light on what’s hidden, untangle what’s unclear and inspire the individual creativity and innovations that lie inside each of us. Just like the toddler learning to crawl or stand, walk, run, this is a process of growth and it takes time, my friends. It takes persistence and it requires your willingness to accept the joy in even the tiniest of building blocks. And while change may be constant in our lives, growth only happens in one direction. Nothing in nature ungrows and neither will you.

Welcome, Beth, I’m happy to have you here to discuss Overcoming Obstacles as a Solopreneur.

Thank you, Wendy. I’m really honored to be here and spend this time with you.

I’m so grateful for you to agree to do this work on the show so that other people can benefit from your process.

Well, one of the things that’s really important to me through this process and really any process is the ability to share. So being able to share my sort of my story and how I got to where I am today and sort of the ongoing challenges of it all, I’m happy to have the opportunity to do that.

I totally appreciate that. Thank you. And that is a perfect segue to my first question. What’s important for us to know about you, Beth, before we start coaching?

Wow. I guess the personal sort of mixes in and crosses paths with the professional in the sense that I’m 53 years old and I’m a widow and it’s coming up on 10 years actually this summer that my husband died suddenly, he was killed in an accident, car accident. I have two children, 27 and 21 now. So they were 11 and 17 when that tragedy took place. So as you can imagine, our lives were completely tossed around and I’m not sure that they will ever find their way completely back up, but we’re all doing well and we’ve certainly come a very long way.

Part of that for me was getting the help that I needed immediately. And I had taken a back seat to my full time career prior to my husband’s death. I just was burnt out. I had been working full time since I got out of college back in the 80s and I stayed with the same company for 17 years. I worked in commercial real estate development. The late 80s, it was the time when, in commercial real estate, anyway, I can only speak to that honestly, but I obviously I know from other people’s experiences, but in commercial real estate, and it is still today, a very male dominated industry. So back then, I was actually so grateful to land a … I actually took a secretarial position with this development company and I was the 11th employee. And when I left, close to 20 years later, there were almost 300. So I rode the wave pretty nicely and I worked my way up to vice president of corporate marketing.

Wow, that’s a long way up.

It was a long way up. I fought my way. I mean, again, being one of very few girls in general in the company for a long time, but then in any type of a leadership role or a management role, what I did was, and I don’t think I really thought so much about it at the time, but I really enjoy reflecting on it and sharing it with my daughter and her friends and other young people professionally now, is I worked in every department. So whenever there was an opening, and because we were small and I had a really great relationship with everybody, whenever there was an opening, if they didn’t come to me about the opening, I went to them. So I started in development and then I went to construction and then I went to leasing, we didn’t even have a marketing department, and I went out and worked … The year that I got married, I went and worked on a job site in Princeton, New Jersey, which was close to where we moved to when we first got married.

And I worked there for, I don’t know, maybe a year and a half, then a position opened. We took on a third party management project and they asked if I wanted to go work in that office. And it was a mixed use product project, so it had retail and office, a hotel, a daycare center, a bank. It was something completely new for the company and obviously completely new for me, but because I had gained a little bit of knowledge and experience in each different area, it was a good fit for me. And that’s where I really found my place. I loved working with the retail tenants, although the retail at that time … That property was not in great shape. We wound up converting it to outlets, retail outlets, and the outlet industry then was just coming into its own. I mean, there were only a handful of retail outlet centers in the country at the time. So I worked on the marketing of that, I worked on the leasing of that, I worked in the property management office. Again, I was the number one person to deal with the tenants and went through all those changes. And getting involved in the outlet industry, I met lots of people and I did all the conventions and I traveled and it just kept growing and growing. And I was really happy. I really loved my job. I loved the people I worked with.

But over the years, what was suffering was my family life. And I really wanted to be a mom, as much as I fought it, because I think a lot of us do when we’re climbing that corporate ladder and things are looking really good and we’re happy with where we are professionally, something always suffers. So my marriage was fine or so I thought. My husband worked in heavy highway construction so he was able to leave really early in the morning and get home earlier in the day, and he was an excellent cook so he took care of the kids, dinner, if daycare was involved at the time or I had a nanny at a certain point. Any of that kind of thing, he was great. We made a good partnership that way.

So, I don’t know, I guess it was about the early 2000s there started to be some shakeup in my company. We had gone through a lot of changes. And it’s true what they say, marketing’s always the first thing to go, so I had to let a couple of the girls go in my group. And it was heartbreaking to do that. I had never really had to do that before. And I went to my boss and I said … Well, I’ll tell you why I did this, I was sitting by my pool one morning because we were now living in a different house that we had built and we were really happy, we had put in a pool and … My daughter was probably three at this point and my son would have been about 10. So I read this article in Oprah magazine that I still have, and it’s about doing the impossible, really thinking what is something that you just never think could imagine yourself doing or you could never imagine that you would be able to accomplish something.

Okay. So you know what? I’m going to stop right there for a second. We’ve got to take a really quick break and I want to leave our listeners on that cliffhanger of what you saw in that magazine and the changes that it made for your life. So everyone just bear with us, it’s a super quick break. We will be right back to hear the rest of what’s important for us to know about Beth and then we’ll dig into some coaching with her. We’ll be right back to discuss more on Overcoming Obstacles as a Solopreneur.