Gold Nuggets
- Easy and Powerful Steps to Branding Your Company
- The way to conceptualize and create the best ever online platform
- Easy Ways to Create Video Content and How to Share It.
- Essential ways to get your business online especially in the age of COVID19
- Essential, Powerful Tips to Maximize LinkedIn For Business
Meet Elaine Slatter
Elaine Slatter is passionate about working with entrepreneurs to achieve their goals. With over 30 years of experience in marketing, sales, customer service & small business ownership she understands the challenges facing business people today. She can help small businesses get started with planning, branding, web design and social media integration. Their goal is to make small business as self-sufficient as possible with easy to understand marketing strategies that our customers can implement on their own terms.
Smart Man, Smarter Woman References
We talk about a lot in each episode; however, we don’t want you to miss a thing! Here are some key items were mentioned if you want to take a closer look.
Website Recommendations:
https://fabfempreneurship.com/podcasts/ (Podcast)
https://xlconsultinggroup.com/
Book Recommendation:
Find Your Why by Simon Sinek
Stay Connected:
Twitter: https://twitter.com/XLConsultingGro
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/elaineslatter/
Learn more about our Cloud Accounting Services here
Transcript
Steve Loates (00:00):
Hello, everyone, and welcome to our podcast Smart Man, Smarter Woman, a podcast for entrepreneurs by entrepreneurs, and thank you for joining us today. I am Steve Loates.
Juliet Aurora (00:14):
And I am Juliet Aurora.
Steve Loates (00:16):
And we are your co-hosts. But before I introduce our very special guest for today’s show, let’s hear a few words from that wonderful co-host of mine, the smarter woman herself, Juliet. How are you doing today, Juliet?
Juliet Aurora (00:31):
I’m a little on the tentative side today, I’ve been having some technical issues as our guest and you know, so I think I have resigned myself to actually having to buy a new computer. For those of you that know me, I absolutely hate switching computers, but I think I have no choice now. I’m on the edge today. We’ll see how it goes. But I am looking forward to our conversation and with our guests today because we do share a similar passion in helping women. So, I think it’s going to be a great conversation.
Steve Loates (01:05):
Absolutely. Well, I was thinking, most of the conversation’s probably going to take place between you two, so I can just sit on the side and observe. It should be fun. A really great thing has come out of our podcast so far, and our guest hasn’t even said a word yet. Juliet had decided to get a new computer. That’s an awesome thing. So, congratulations.
Steve Loates (01:28):
Anyway, as I mentioned at the beginning, our podcast is for and about entrepreneurs. Our goal with each of our episodes is to try to provide you with a little entertainment hopefully, but most importantly, some information, some insight, some golden nuggets, as we call them, that may help you on your own journey. We have a great show for you today with our special guest. I’ve known Elaine for a few years. We actually met, we were both on the same marketing committee for a local Chamber of Commerce, and that is how we initially met.
Steve Loates (02:05):
Elaine Slatter is the founder of XL Consulting Group, which is a full service marketing, strategy, branding website design and copywriting firm. As if that wasn’t enough to keep her busy, she also decided to be an entrepreneur coach, an author and the host of a podcast. Sounds like she probably has lots of free time on her hands. But we’ve got lots of different areas to go in here.
Steve Loates (02:35):
Let’s bring our guests into the show. Welcome, Elaine, and thank you very much for joining us today.
Elaine Slatter (02:41):
Well, thank you both for having me on the show. I love talking about entrepreneurship and Juliet and I could probably talk forever about women entrepreneurs, but I come from the world of welding manufacturing, so I think Steve, you and I could have a good conversation too. Who knows where this is going to go.
Steve Loates (03:04):
Yeah, for sure. Well, I would tell you that it’s probably very safe to keep welding torches well away from me.
Juliet Aurora (03:14):
I will second that. I will second that. Any machinery, you want to keep as far away from Steve as possible.
Steve Loates (03:20):
Yes, we’re not going to talk about starting fires or anything like that.
Juliet Aurora (03:25):
Or cutting down trees or anything-
Steve Loates (03:26):
Yeah, or cutting down trees or emptying swimming pools or things like that. Anyway, Elaine, you have such a fascinating background, lots and lots of things we could talk about, or lots of different areas, I’m sure we’re going to get into. Why don’t we start out, if you could perhaps just share a little bit with us about your own entrepreneurial journey. What were your experiences, what got you to where you are today?
Elaine Slatter (03:50):
Well, I had a very long corporate career in the welding manufacturing, area, and most of it was in the marketing area. I was director of marketing for a number of years. It was a US global corporation that I worked for, and I handled all the marketing for Canada. Then did IT products for them. Moving the international customer service from Wichita, Kansas into Canada and hiring all the people to be the customer service representatives.
Elaine Slatter (04:24):
So, they came from all over the world. They were from Peru, Colombia, Mexico, India, because we were servicing the international market. That was a very interesting project that I did for the corporation. Then, in the last three years that I worked for them, I was the country manager, which is like the CEO for the Canadian Division of this global corp.
Elaine Slatter (04:53):
I had the typical background from a corporation where you’re doing strategy five year plans, one year plan, marketing plans, and then implementing all those plans for the division. It was a very interesting career.
Steve Loates (05:09):
Very good.
Elaine Slatter (05:10):
When I lost that career, my love was marketing, and I wanted to give back to the community because when you’re in those corporate careers, you’re consumed by traveling, workload, you have your family and that’s about all you can do. I really didn’t have time to do any giving back.
Elaine Slatter (05:32):
When I left the corporate world, I thought, well, what could I do? Because I wasn’t ready to just… I just have one of these business brains that doesn’t stop. I knew I had to do something. In the flow of that, my husband passed away and he was an entrepreneur. He had what started out as a franchise, not a Tim Hortons, but a secondary franchise at a coffee shop in Brantford, Ontario.
Elaine Slatter (06:03):
After he passed away, that was my first probably entrepreneurial thing that I had to do. I had the corporate career on the one side and the evenings and weekends, I was running his franchise until I decided what I wanted to do, and what I wanted to do is not be the franchise owner of a coffee shop. It just wasn’t really in my DNA. But I had to keep it going until I could sell it as a viable business or else I would have lost all the money that had been put into the business if I had to shut it down.
Elaine Slatter (06:43):
That didn’t seem really feasible. So, I wore the two hats; the entrepreneurial hat and then my corporate hat and then I finally sold that business and then continued on my corporate career until I gave that up and then started down a different journey. It’s a weird story, but that’s what I did. I’m late entrepreneur, I would say.
Steve Loates (07:08):
Okay, very good.
Juliet Aurora (07:10):
But even though you were late entrepreneur, just the statement that you have a business brain that doesn’t stop means that you’ve had the entrepreneurial gene in the back of your mind pretty much through your whole career, because I think that is probably one of the core characteristics of most entrepreneurs, is that their brain is always working.
Elaine Slatter (07:29):
Right. That’s very true, Juliet. Funnily enough, even when you’re working for a corporation, you can be what’s called an intrapreneur. You can be entrepreneurial in your corporate career, and I think that’s what I was because before I became an entrepreneur, I was pitching to the vice president that they should move the customer service from Wichita to Canada because we were multicultural and we could handle it way better than the US side could, because they were very… Kansas is in the middle America, and they really weren’t very creative with how to serve the customer overseas, and they weren’t doing a great job.
Elaine Slatter (08:16):
He was frustrated because he was the vice president of international. In a way I was pitching the entrepreneurial side in the company that I work for, which is kind of funny.
Steve Loates (08:28):
Absolutely. Was the birth of your own company, XL, was that, do you think because you had this marketing background and you wanted to do something? What made you decide… because I think the people you usually work with, with your business is usually smaller businesses or smaller companies and not really the corporate world. How did that happen?
Elaine Slatter (08:55):
Well, yes, that’s true. The corporation I work for I realized when I left wouldn’t be any help to me whatsoever, my contacts would not be of any help whatsoever, because we were a B2B business, we didn’t sell to the end user, we sold to distributors, which were the big gas companies like Praxair or those trucks you see running down the highway with carbon dioxide or a gas, to fuel the welding equipment, which is what we sold.
Elaine Slatter (09:28):
I thought, okay, what could I do? I think that was the biggest change and challenge for me is that when I started the business, that I didn’t really have any contacts that could help me get business. I thought that my avatar, my customer avatar would be corporations. But in that first year of business, you find out who your customer avatar is, and it’s not always who you think it is, and that’s what happened to me.
Elaine Slatter (09:58):
I realized that it wasn’t going to be corporations. They’re not going to hire me really as freelance marketer, because they really didn’t know me because the welding industry is very unique. Only those in the welding industry understand it. It was a fabulous career, but it doesn’t mean anything to anybody outside of that [inaudible 00:10:22] of welding, it’s just totally unique, it’s a niche.
Elaine Slatter (10:25):
That’s when I discovered through networking, and through different contacts, friends that I golf with. They said they remembered the Chamber of Commerce. Then I went out to a few things, and then I joined the… And so on. I realized that to be effective, I needed a bit of a niche.
Elaine Slatter (10:46):
Women would always come up to me and ask me about marketing and my career and all that kind of stuff. That’s when I got the idea that I should focus more on startups, because that’s where my corporate background could help, because you’re very regimented in the corporate world, that you have a structure and you work to it, and then a CEO, you’re responsible for all the different divisions; the accounting, and the IT and the sales, and the marketing, it all falls on you. You really have to organize and be organized.
Elaine Slatter (11:24):
That was easy for me then to segue that into helping startups become what kind of company could they be, what could they market, what could they sell, how to do their business plan and the whole thing. Then when they decided what to do, you can implement the plan by helping them get online and helping them with the marketing part.
Elaine Slatter (11:46):
In that way, it sort of evolved, it evolved. I have a whole group of different clients who are at different stages of entrepreneurship. Some are trying to still figure out if they want to be an entrepreneur, some are trying to get themselves organized to be an entrepreneur, and some of them are an entrepreneur and they want to grow. Some of them have an online presence, some of them don’t. It could be a whole different sphere of thing. I think it’s a small business that needs my help. That’s how the business is focused more on the small business entrepreneur.
Juliet Aurora (12:26):
I’d like to go back to one of the phrases that you used, because all the people that are in our audience and entrepreneurs may not know what this is, and it really is the starting point for any kind of marketing that you want to do. You mentioned the words customer avatar. Can you explain to our audience what that actually is and why it’s so important to a small business?
Elaine Slatter (12:48):
Well, I think when you start out in business, you have to know who your target is. You might say, well, it’s everybody. If you’re in a grass cutting company for example, and you’re starting out, you might think, well, everybody has grass, so anybody that has grass. But you really have to narrow it down to match your services with the kind of customer that has a problem and needs your services. That’s what the avatar is, is mapping out who that particular person is.
Elaine Slatter (13:22):
Obviously, if you’re a grass cutting company, you have a couple of options. You have the condo developments that have the townhouses that all have their grass or the common area. You might want to pitch to the actual condo board of directors or who the property managers, if it’s larger, that kind of thing. Or you’ve got the homeowner that doesn’t want to cut their own grass, maybe they have a second property, or they’re too busy or whatever. There’s two different customer avatars there. Your pitch to those two are different, and it depends on your services, like do you also do snow removal, or are you grass and landscaping?
Elaine Slatter (14:08):
You have to figure out what your services on who your target market is, and then you can come up with the customer avatar. Once you get started, once you’ve got your first few customers, then you know what they want more. If you keep that customer map and the journey, how you got that customer, the journey of it, the mapping of that, once you have the avatar, then you map the journey. Then if that’s a good fit, then you do more of that, more of that. You’re looking for the same kind of people.
Elaine Slatter (14:44):
If it isn’t working, then you have to go back on that customer journey again and say, do I need to adopt my services to match those customers, or do I need to find a different kind of customer because obviously it’s not resonating with them, and maybe I need to pivot, move and go in a different direction. In that first couple of years, it’s a lot of learning, you’re doing a lot of learning.
Juliet Aurora (15:11):
Excellent. Thank you. I only asked you to expand on that, because I know that there will be entrepreneurs in our audience who don’t know what a customer avatar is, so I wanted to… It is so fundamental to taking your business to the next level, that I did want to spend a little bit of time on it. Thank you for that explanation.
Elaine Slatter (15:29):
Yeah, you need to find your purpose too, what kind… In that particular case, if you’re a lawn cutting company, there’s hundreds of them. There might be 20 just in your own community, from the guy that’s the local guy that cuts just in his neighborhood to the bigger companies. You’ve got to figure out who you are and what… It makes you unique before you can really get the market penetration. That’s your branding, that’s the whole thing, figuring it out, who you are, what markets you serve, what services you want, and that becomes the key to your branding.
Elaine Slatter (16:09):
It’s the same as if you’re in the sports equipment, you’ve got Nike, you’ve got Under Armour, you’ve got Adidas, you’ve got Puma, you’ve got Fila, they’re all in that business, but they’re all segmented to focus on a slightly different area. The same in like, vodka or gin, or whatever. You’ve got a whole slew of different companies. Beer’s another great example. You’ve got your craft beer, you’ve got your… They all market differently in different ways depending on who they are. Once they figure out who they are, then you can start your branding.
Juliet Aurora (16:47):
That really, I think with a lot of entrepreneurs, when they start, they’re not that intentional. They basically, okay, they open their doors to offer a service and try and market as you said to everybody, because you’re a grass cutter, everybody that has grass is my customer, and they do flounder, because they don’t have a target of some sort, and they’re not intentional about who they want to attract. All they’re trying to do is, get some funds in to put some food on the table for their families. I think that’s a great point, no matter where you are in your journey, make sure that you are intentional about who your target is.
Steve Loates (17:26):
It’s certainly critical for startups, because, as you mentioned, Juliet that one of the biggest challenges for a lot of small businesses, is they’re not, let’s say, overly financed or overly liquid when they first start, and they’ve got to pay the bills. You open up your business, you can have the best of intentions, but then all of a sudden the rent becomes due and this becomes due, and you got to pay for the phone and it is a real challenge to stay focused on who the right customer is for you, and have a belief that, that is the best way to go when you’ve got this little bit of craziness going on around you. It really does take, I think, special kinds of people.
Steve Loates (18:22):
That brings me, I think to my next question I’d love to ask Elaine is, in your experience of working with different entrepreneurs, different types of people, and you mentioned, some of them are still trying to figure out if they want to be an entrepreneur, some are trying to figure out where they want to go, et cetera. Is there something you have seen where it indicates to you, this person should be an entrepreneur, or maybe this person shouldn’t be an entrepreneur and should consider something else? What have you seen?
Elaine Slatter (19:01):
Well, actually, I was working with a client today who’s absolutely at that crossroad of deciding whether to go back into the corporate world or to become an entrepreneur. We’re starting her journey, and she has to do a lot of soul searching because being an entrepreneur is totally different than being in a corporation. I don’t think enough people understand that entrepreneurship, when you’re an entrepreneur, and you’re starting out, you’re the everything. You’re the accountant, bookkeeper, you’re the salesperson, you’re the marketing person, but then you have to do the physical, actual job of it, and it’s not 9:00 to 5:00, it’s going to consume you at least six days a week for long periods of time.
Elaine Slatter (19:55):
If that’s not you, and if your lifestyle isn’t such that you got everybody on board unless you’re young and you don’t have any dependents, you have to have your whole family on board before you do that. I know when my husband started out, he had a corporate career and he got downsized, and he was at that age where, 45-ish, and he didn’t want to work for a corporation anymore. But it was a huge move to becoming an entrepreneur, because he hadn’t… Like me, when I became an entrepreneur, we weren’t faced out the more consumer side of the business. We weren’t used to working with prospective customers and dealing with that part of it.
Elaine Slatter (20:43):
All the courses you take in the world don’t really prepare you for that. But some good things that probably both of us hide from our corporate life with analytics, meaning that we knew how to work on a business, not just in the business. I think that’s the biggest thing that you have to be willing to work hard on all aspects of your business, even the ones you don’t like and reach out and get help at the beginning to get yourself organized.
Elaine Slatter (21:15):
With a company such as yours, Juliet, get yourself organized. This is the biggest failing, I see, that when they start out, they don’t have the bookkeeping set up. They have no clue how to do any of the paperwork, their follow ups probably pretty lousy. They don’t know how to… If a customer calls, I’m having this problem, even at the moment trying to get contractors in Muskoka to put a new set of stairs in. The number of phone calls and requests like, okay, if you say that you’re going to send me a quote tomorrow, I expect that quote to be tomorrow. Don’t tell me tomorrow, if you mean next week. Because now I’ve got to call you back, “Hey, I didn’t… ” Or call you back, “I didn’t get the quote, blah, blah, blah, blah.”
Elaine Slatter (22:04):
Be professional. You got to be on top of your business in all aspects before you… If you’re not going to do that, don’t bother going into business for yourself to be an entrepreneur. It’s not glamorous being an entrepreneur. If you’re trying to feed your kids and your family by being an entrepreneur, you got to know the good side, but also the ugly side of it. Like the things that you don’t really want to do are probably the most important, getting your books done right away.
Elaine Slatter (22:39):
I have people that I have mentored and I’m still a Futurpreneur mentor, and I’ll say to them, “Okay, what do your bookkeeping results look like this month?” “Oh, well, we haven’t done them,” or, “We’re going to do them at the end of the year.” I’ll say, “Well, how would you know if your business is doing well or not doing? Well if you don’t look at the numbers?” Because the whole purpose of bookkeeping is not the recording of it, but it’s the interpretation of the results, profit and loss statement. What does it tell you? It tells you about yourself sales, it tells you about your expenses.
Elaine Slatter (23:22):
You need to understand what all those lines are on your profit and loss so that you can make decisions on your company. If your lawn cutting business, are you ready to buy a new lawn mower and hire another person to help you? Or are you not there yet? What can you do to finance it? All those questions. Entrepreneurs think, oh, I’m going to set up my business, oh, I’m going to lease a car. I’m going to do this. I’m going to get my office. I’m going to do this and I’m going to do that, before they even have the clients. They might have spent 50 grand and they haven’t even got their first client.
Juliet Aurora (24:03):
You’re definitely speaking our language. This is what we see all the time, and is probably one of the reasons that we’re so passionate about trying to provide real time financials for business owners. I’m going to segue that conversation a little bit, because I know that this is something you and I both feel very strongly about, which is helping women and women entrepreneurs, women in need. With your experience, and you have an organization as well that you’ve started, a community of women, Women Entrepreneurs Supporting Each Other. Maybe you want to give a shout out to that organization. But what I’d like maybe you can tell us, is there a difference between female entrepreneurs and male entrepreneurs?
Elaine Slatter (24:46):
Totally. I think we could spend an hour talking about it-
Steve Loates (24:49):
Is it time for me to leave? Should I be leaving this-
Juliet Aurora (24:51):
No, we’d like your perspective as well.
Elaine Slatter (24:55):
No, I think you know what, if we could take a woman entrepreneur and a guy entrepreneur and join them together and make a different entrepreneur, we would definitely have the right mix. Because this is the difference that I see. I don’t know Juliet, if you see this. A guy starting a company doesn’t have any fear whatsoever. He’s all in, he’s going to spend the money, he’s going to get the car, he’s going to start the office, he’s going to do all that. If it costs him 50K, he doesn’t care, because he has a vision. He knows what he’s going to do and he’s on the path. Good or bad, doesn’t matter, he’s pulled the trigger, he knows he’s going to do it, and off he goes.
Elaine Slatter (25:44):
Okay, that’s the guy entrepreneur, as I see them. The woman entrepreneur, on the other hand, is totally the opposite. They analyze everything; themselves, what they’re going to do, everything, to the nth degree. They’re almost the opposite. They’re in analysis, paralysis, analyzing everything. They have such a huge fear that unless they are 100%, perfect, that they are not going to launch.
Elaine Slatter (26:18):
You’ve got the two completely different viewpoints. The women have these great ideas, but they have more fear. The guys don’t give a you know what, they start something, which could be a lousy idea, because they haven’t really thought about it enough. What we need is a convergence. We want some of the male part of the no fear to come over to the women’s side, and we want some of the analysis part to go over to the guys side, and then I think we’d have the perfect mix. Because if you do a business model canvas and you do a business plan, you can get some kind of analysis, but then you don’t want to be in paralysis that you never launch because it’s not perfect. Because no business is perfect. You need the plan to set the parameters of where you’re going and who your customer’s going to be. But you have to be prepared probably by one month in to take a look at that and adjust, because nothing is exactly the way you picture it. Whether you’re a guy or a girl, it doesn’t matter, your business doesn’t…
Elaine Slatter (27:31):
You can project all you want, you can do all your numbers and all that, which is great for the bank and for your peace of mind of launching, but when you actually start day one or two or three of the business, it could be completely different. You have to be flexible in that way.
Elaine Slatter (27:50):
A woman has a problem that they did all this analysis and they think they’re and they either have the fear of the launch or they launch and then they get really upset because it’s not exactly as they had planned, and that’s the world of entrepreneurship.
Steve Loates (28:06):
Could I just add just one small thing, and I do not wish to speak for all male entrepreneurs. Let me just make that clear right off the top. But without destroying the myth, I can tell you that this male entrepreneur, when he started his first business, was scared to death, but did a really good job of hiding it.
Juliet Aurora (28:34):
That’s a [inaudible 00:28:35]
Steve Loates (28:34):
No one who knew me would have known how afraid I was. But I was scared to death. I can remember saying to myself that first morning when the business opened, I’m looking around and saying to myself, what have I done? But anyways, that’s just my two cents worth there for the male side of the equation.
Elaine Slatter (29:01):
No, but that’s really good though, Steve. You have the bravado to go for it, even though you were scared, where’s the women are scared, they talk about it, about that fear so much. They lack the bravado sometimes to just go for it, even though they’re afraid, not realizing that everybody’s afraid. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a guy or a girl, and you’ve just mentioned you were totally afraid. He just didn’t want to show that to Juliet, right?
Steve Loates (29:36):
Absolutely.
Elaine Slatter (29:36):
You know what I mean?
Steve Loates (29:38):
Absolutely.
Juliet Aurora (29:40):
What I find interesting as well, is the depiction that you have given of male entrepreneur versus female entrepreneur. Steve, if you’re honest, that is us to a tee. That it is Steve who has these ideas, “We got to try this, and let’s go do this.” I’m like, “Okay, well, no, hold on, hold on. Let’s think about it. Let’s work out what the numbers are going to look like, and is it realistic?” There are times-
Steve Loates (30:05):
Are you? I don’t remember that conversation. Are you sure that happened?
Juliet Aurora (30:06):
There are [inaudible 00:30:06] that I know, that I’m holding Steve back, and I’m sure that there are times that Steve, and correct me if I’m wrong, you’re probably thinking, I wish Juliet would just stop and just let us do this and go forward. Absolutely, even now, 20 years later, we’re still doing the same things, and maybe it is ingrained in who we are as janitors that we need to fight it to overcome it.
Steve Loates (30:34):
Absolutely. I think there’s some truth.
Elaine Slatter (30:36):
Yeah, it’s the same in the corporate world, men will apply for a job when they have 50% to 60% of the qualifications and women won’t even apply unless they have 90% to 95% of the qualification. I think it’s slightly an agenda thing.
Steve Loates (30:55):
Yeah.
Elaine Slatter (30:56):
Sometimes the melding of the two is the perfect thing, the perfect complementary, your complementary skills. That’s not a bad thing either.
Steve Loates (31:08):
No, and I think for us, I think it’s worked very, very well. Being husband and wife and business partners is certainly not without its challenges. But I think overall, I think it has served as well, having complementary strengths, and have the ability to be brutally honest with each other and still be together. It’s been great. I do want to touch on your book, what made you decide? We’ve written a book, and it’s hard work. It really is hard work. What makes you decide to write a book and tell us a little bit about it.
Elaine Slatter (31:50):
Well, the reason I decided to write the book is what Juliet, and we’ve been just talking about that, women struggle with the entrepreneurship part. Because I kept getting all these questions of how do I launch? How do I do this? How do I do that? I thought, women obviously have a bit of a problem getting their businesses launched. So, why don’t I write a startup guide that is geared to women? When I wrote the book, first I had the typical women reaction, the fear part of writing a book, like who am I? Why am I writing it? Who’s going to read it, all that stuff went through my head, whereas if I was a guy I’d probably just write the book.
Elaine Slatter (32:38):
But then I realized when… I decided women learn differently than guys do, they like examples. I went out through my networking group and found women entrepreneurs who’ve been successful or had challenges, who were willing to tell their part in the story, just like this podcast is.
Elaine Slatter (33:02):
Once the stories came in, that’s when it became the framework of the book because I didn’t realize what their story was going to be. But once I got it, I thought, oh, that will fit this chapter or that will fit that chapter. In a way, all the stories framed the narrative of the book, which it fit perfectly together in the end.
Elaine Slatter (33:28):
Then because I was writing for women, I was showcasing women businesses, and the problems that women had had, or the problems they’d overcome, or successes that they’d have. Whatever it was, it didn’t really matter. It was just that they were living examples.
Steve Loates (33:48):
Excellent-
Juliet Aurora (33:48):
Quite honestly, women do have different sets of challenges than men do when they start a business. I know even in my own example, there was no bank that would give me any money. They wouldn’t give me a dime to start my business. Even when I wanted to buy a house, I still remember going to apply for a mortgage at multiple banks and they all… I wasn’t married at the time, and I was trying to get a mortgage. I remember the bank… I vividly remember multiple bank managers saying to me, “Well, can you get your dad to cosign the mortgage for you?” It wasn’t even can you get a cosigner, can you get your mom to cosign it? It was, “Can you get your dad to cosign it?”
Elaine Slatter (34:32):
That’s right.
Juliet Aurora (34:34):
No, I think that your book and the focus of it is going to be so fundamentally important because women do have, they do experience different challenges. It’s certainly changed over the last 20, 30 years, but there are still differences. Can you share the name of your book and where people can get it-
Steve Loates (34:52):
I was going to say, where can they get your book?
Elaine Slatter (34:55):
Okay, The book’s called Fabulous Fempreneurship, which is a little bit difficult spelling, I guess, but fabulous, and then fempreneurship F-E-M-P-R-E-N-E-U-R-S-H-I-P. You can get it on the fabfempreneurnership.com website or you can get it on amazon.com.
Juliet Aurora (35:20):
Perfect.
Elaine Slatter (35:20):
I believe you can get it at Indigo online as well.
Steve Loates (35:26):
Awesome. Well, we’ll make sure that we have that information in the show notes, so that anybody who wants to pick up a copy of the book can do so. We’ll have the web address as well for Fabulous Fempreneurship, he says very carefully. That brings us… Wow, the time has flown here. That brings us to the part of the show where we ask you, as we ask all of our guests, the Smart Man, Smarter Woman version of James Lipton’s Q&A from the Actor’s Studio.
Steve Loates (36:04):
If you are ready, Elaine, I would like to begin that segment of our show.
Elaine Slatter (36:09):
Sure. No problem.
Steve Loates (36:11):
Okay. Our first question is, what one word best defines an entrepreneur?
Elaine Slatter (36:19):
Tenacious.
Juliet Aurora (36:20):
Perfect.
Steve Loates (36:21):
What profession other than your own would you like to attempt?
Elaine Slatter (36:27):
Financial Advisor?
Steve Loates (36:30):
What profession other than… I want you to know, would you like never to attempt?
Elaine Slatter (36:37):
I’d never want to be a retail franchisee ever again.
Steve Loates (36:45):
Yes, spoken from experience. What sound or noise do you love?
Elaine Slatter (36:52):
I love the sound of water.
Steve Loates (36:55):
Excellent. Yes. Agreed. What book would you recommend every entrepreneur should read other than your own?
Elaine Slatter (37:08):
I think they should all read Simon Sinek’s, Find Your Why.
Juliet Aurora (37:14):
It’s a great book.
Elaine Slatter (37:14):
Great book.
Steve Loates (37:15):
We are big fans of that book. When your own entrepreneurial journey is completed, what do you hope your legacy is?
Elaine Slatter (37:26):
I hope my legacy has been able to help women launch successful businesses. I really want more women to be entrepreneurs, and that’s my passion is helping women.
Steve Loates (37:41):
Awesome. Awesome. For anyone in the audience, if they want to be able to connect with you, what is the best way for them to be able to do that?
Elaine Slatter (37:51):
Well, I think the easiest way is through LinkedIn, because that way I can link them to any help that they need, through my Rolodex of people on LinkedIn. I would say LinkedIn is the best.
Steve Loates (38:08):
Okay.
Elaine Slatter (38:09):
My email address, my phone number’s all in my LinkedIn. Everybody should be on LinkedIn, because that’s where you’re going to make your business relationships, not necessarily your customers, but that’s where you’re going to make relationships with like-minded businesses, or businesses that you can do business together or work together with on certain different things. I don’t know, I love LinkedIn, it’s not just a resume place, it’s where I meet a lot of business people.
Steve Loates (38:42):
Absolutely, we, again, are huge fans of LinkedIn. If you’re only on one social channel, that is absolutely the one you should be on.
Elaine Slatter (38:51):
Yes. It’s amazing to me that there are a lot of people that don’t understand the value of that platform.
Steve Loates (38:59):
Yeah, for sure. Well, maybe we need to have another show just about LinkedIn and why you should be on there.
Elaine Slatter (39:06):
Yeah. Oh, totally.
Steve Loates (39:08):
Do you have any final words or anything you’d like to touch on, Elaine, to share with our audience of entrepreneurs?
Elaine Slatter (39:16):
Well, for the women who want to be entrepreneurs out there, my challenge is that if you’re still going on that journey of I’m not sure, to speak to a professional like yourselves, the AIS, for the bookkeeping and accounting and the planning of what you do for that aspect. Then just go for it, don’t hesitate, just go for it. If you’re having any problems finding money or that kind of stuff, I’d be glad to help people with all those avenues.
Elaine Slatter (39:57):
I have contacts everywhere like BDC, the banks, Futurpreneur, which is a great organization for anybody, not just women, but the under 40s. They have funding and they have entrepreneurship… Mentor, sorry. I’ve been a Futurpreneur mentor for probably seven to eight years, and I’m telling you, mentorship is one of the biggest things that every entrepreneur should seek out. Find somebody in your industry, an older person, retired person, young person, it doesn’t matter who your mentor is, but if they can help you with a roadblock, then go for it, find a mentor and get over the roadblock.
Steve Loates (40:37):
Yeah, absolutely. I think we probably recommend that on about every episode is to find a great coach, find a great mentor or find a mastermind group, find something, someone who is a little ahead of you in your journey, because I also find that most people want to help if you ask, they absolutely want to help you.
Elaine Slatter (41:02):
Totally. Lisa, Lisson, the CEO of FedEx has a great thought on that mentorship. She said, a lot of people are afraid to find a mentor. But if you find somebody on LinkedIn who you think could help you, just ask them if they have 30 minutes to help you. That’s all they have to do is give you 30 minutes and then you have to be prepared for the questions that you want to ask, direct questions that you want to ask to make the most of that 30 minutes. That will set you on your way. Don’t be afraid to ask somebody.
Steve Loates (41:40):
Absolutely. That’s great advice. Speaking of words of wisdom, that brings us to our section of the show where I get to share a quote. The one I picked for today’s episode was from Arianna Huffington and the quote is, “We need to accept that we won’t always make the right decisions. That we’ll screw up royally sometimes. Understanding that failure is not the opposite of success, it is part of the success.” Wise words-
Elaine Slatter (42:20):
I love that.
Steve Loates (42:21):
… wise words from Arianna. That’s why we always tell everyone, right Juliet? There is no success and failure, it is success and learnings always.
Juliet Aurora (42:32):
Totally, always.
Steve Loates (42:35):
Thank you very much, Elaine, you’ve been a great guest. Lots of great stuff there for our audience. Thank you to my awesome co-host, Juliet, couldn’t do this without you. But most importantly, thank you to you our audience for tuning in and giving us a listen. We sincerely hope you found some value. If you did, please consider subscribing to the podcast. You can find us on iTunes, Spotify, Google, all the regular places, or you can simply go to our website smartmensmarterwoman.com, and subscribe there and you’ll get notified every time we upload a new episode.
Steve Loates (43:16):
Thank you again to everyone. Until next time, take good care of yourself and those that you love. Bye for now.
Song by Adam Vitovsky / CC BY 3.0
