Gold Nuggets
- You need to ask yourself, how can I give value, use my intellect and help people
- The entrepreneurs that are most successful are the ones that if they don’t know the answer, they at least are vulnerable enough to say “I don’t know, but let me ask somebody.”
- Don’t do the stuff you hate to do. Get somebody else to do that, because there is someone else that loves to do that and would do a better job than you and probably spend less time doing it.
Meet Rachel Fisch
Our guest, Rachel Fisch, Product Evangelist at Sage has an entrepreneurial journey different from most of our guests – she started in the corporate world, then opened her own business, became an entrepreneur only to return back to the corporate world that she was missing.
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.
Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking by Susan Cain
Learn more about our Cloud Accounting Services here
Transcript
Steve Loates (00:00):
Welcome to our Smart Man, Smarter Woman podcast, a podcast for entrepreneurs to help them on their own journey. I am Steve Loates …
Juliet Aurora (00:12):
And I’m Juliet Aurora …
Steve Loates (00:14):
And we are your co-hosts. We have a great show for you today with our very special guest, Rachel Fisch, a product evangelist for the accounting solutions at Sage. How are you doing, Rachel?
Rachel Fisch (00:27):
Great. Hey Steve and Juliet. So happy to be here and thank you for having me.
Steve Loates (00:32):
Terrific. Well before I do an official introduction of Rachel, let’s hear from my wonderful cohost, the smarter woman herself. Juliet.
Juliet Aurora (00:42):
Thanks Steve, and welcome Rachel. Looking forward to our conversation today. I’ve known Rachel for, I’m going to say it’s been about five or six years. We actually met online, not in a Tinder kind of way, but we met in an industry Facebook group. So looking forward to the conversation. We’ve certainly gotten to know each other. In person we’ve been able to meet, but I think we’re going to have a great show for you today.
Rachel Fisch (01:08):
For sure. Thanks again for having me.
Steve Loates (01:11):
Excellent. Now as I mentioned at the beginning, our podcast is for and about entrepreneurs. Our goal is going to be to always hopefully provide you with some entertainment, some value, some insights, certainly some opinions, and hopefully some gold nuggets that may help you on your own entrepreneurial journey, no matter where you are in that journey. So to get to our guest, a little bit of background about Rachel. She currently lives in the [inaudible 00:01:47] region of Ontario with her husband, Brian and her two guppies, and I’ll let her maybe talk about the guppies. She graduated from the Assiniboine Community College with a degree in accounting. She is currently the product evangelist for accounting solutions at Sage, and before Sage, she spent some time as the national bookkeeping lead with Deloitte Canada, and prior to that she owned her own bookkeeping firm in a small town in Manitoba for a number of years. Rachel’s also a trainer, a great speaker, workshop lead. I’ve attended some for workshops. They were great. She’s also a consultant, and we are thrilled to have her on our show. So officially, welcome Rachel and thank you for joining us.
Rachel Fisch (02:38):
Thank you very much, Steve. I appreciated all of that. That’s wonderful.
Steve Loates (02:42):
So how are you doing in these crazy COVID-19 times?
Rachel Fisch (02:50):
All right. I mean I don’t think anyone is doing fantastic or amazing. I just think that everybody literally in the world is going through a time of adjustment, and if we didn’t already have disruptions as accountants and bookkeepers … of course technology has been a big one lately. Now it’s how do you do that all at home with kids while being their teacher and helping them go through their online learning and things like that. So I think it’s been a huge adjustment for everybody. So I’m certainly not alone there. What’s been interesting to see is people who did work at an office now needing to work at home, especially my sympathies go out to specifically extroverts to get their energy from other people, and so now being at home, it’s just like, “Get me out of here.” Conversely, I’m actually more of an introvert than I thought I was, and so I’m used to working at home.
Rachel Fisch (03:55):
I’m used to having it dead quiet every day through the whole day until the kids get home from school and then it’s like an elephant stampede upstairs, but now it just feels like noise all the time, and so where I knew I was a bit of an introvert before, now it’s like, “My house is so noisy! I just need quiet!” So yeah, I think it’s just an adjustment for everybody at this point, but we’re healthy and we’re safe and we’re taking every precaution, and I’m grateful that I have the kind of job where I can be working from anywhere and so our finances aren’t near as impacted as they could be. So my heart certainly goes out to all of those small businesses and entrepreneurs who are being severely impacted right now, and I certainly don’t want to lessen their experience currently as well.
Steve Loates (04:42):
Absolutely, and that’s actually a great segue for me, Rachel. What the heck is a product evangelist?
Rachel Fisch (04:50):
Oh, gosh. So I think that … I don’t even know. I think this is a Sage specific term and there’s a ton of them, I’m sure. So I think the role that most people, especially in the software and technology world, know and understand is a product manager, and essentially it’s the product manager’s job to make sure that the product or the roadmap and development of the product is on track, is delivering the kind of features that we need. In the Sage world, we have some products that are developed for a specific country and then there are some products that are developed on a global platform and then simply get localized. So the product set that I am the evangelist or the product manager for is accountant segment related products. So any features or functions or products that are delivered to or through accountants and bookkeepers, that’s what I do, but it’s developed elsewhere. So in most cases in the UK, the products that I’m working on, and then we simply localize them to Canada. So because there is a slightly different approach, they had a different term for it, so yeah.
Steve Loates (05:55):
That’s great.
Juliet Aurora (05:57):
It’s a great title. Before you get into your question, Steve, I mean you kind of alluded to Rachel’s guppies and you can’t leave the audience in suspense as to why they’re called guppies. So Rachel, if you could explain?
Rachel Fisch (06:16):
Guppies goes out to our dear mutual friend Kelly Parks. I think Kelly coined the term the guppies, because my girls … my last name is Fisch and so we would call them little Fisch and then the second one came along, it was littler Fisch. Well Kelly just said, “Little Fisch are guppies,” but what was interesting and kind of weird is that this has now kind of on Facebook and my profile and stuff like that, this is what I call them and what my friends call them. What’s really weird is people that I haven’t yet met in person saying, “So how are the guppies doing?” And then all of us think it’s really private and you’re like, “How did you know about my guppies?” Anyway it’s just they’re my two beautiful, amazing daughters who are currently going through their own world of adjustments right now as well.
Steve Loates (07:07):
Absolutely, and in case our audience has not yet grasped it, the three of us, we’ve all known each other for a while, and a fun fact. I took a look on LinkedIn and I noticed that Rachel and I share 527 connections on LinkedIn. So obviously we know a few of the same people, and I was really excited until I saw that you and Juliet share 693 connections. So I thought … not that I’m competitive at all, but I thought –
Rachel Fisch (07:48):
No, not at all.
Juliet Aurora (07:48):
He even beat me at that.
Rachel Fisch (07:53):
And yet I’m not surprised.
Juliet Aurora (07:54):
Sorry Steven, let me –
Steve Loates (07:59):
I’m not going to go there, but we know a lot of the same people anyway.
Juliet Aurora (08:02):
Yes.
Rachel Fisch (08:03):
We do. We do. Yes.
Steve Loates (08:05):
Now one of the reasons why I really … there were a number of reasons why I wanted to have you on the show, but one of them was because most of the guests on our show are going to have taken a career direction opposite to yours, and that is that a lot of them started in the corporate world and left the corporate world to start their entrepreneurial journey. You started out with your entrepreneurial journey and left that to go to the corporate world. So I have to ask the question, can you give us a little bit of background on that and what was the deciding factors for you? Because I think it’s great that it’s a completely different direction than many of our guests. So please, share with us how that happened?
Juliet Aurora (09:05):
Or maybe even going back a step and tell us how you got into the entrepreneurial side before you got out of the entrepreneurial side.
Rachel Fisch (09:15):
Well, you guys just make it sound so logical and linear, and yet I look at my career and it feels like a fricking ping pong ball, out of control. So what I would say … here’s how, and I actually, I didn’t correct you right away Steve, but I actually did not finish and I don’t have a degree in accounting. I just had some courses and some courses at Athabasca, some courses here and there and everywhere. So here’s the real deal. So I … let’s see … how do I stay completely diplomatic here?
Rachel Fisch (09:50):
Okay. So I think that early on, coming straight out of high school, it was simply not an option for me to go to post secondary education, but I had been working and was always a very hard worker from the age of 14. If I was old enough to get a job, I always had a job, sometimes two and three and four jobs. I remember working at Ford all day in their quality assurance group, actually at the Oakville plant, and then I’d go to my night job at the check processing plant at Scotia Bank, but it was just something that I did. When I was old enough, again, post secondary education I didn’t feel was an option for me, just because of my own family history. So really my only option was to apply as an adult student. So I did work until I was able to qualify as an adult student to McMaster University.
Rachel Fisch (10:49):
And I was very excited, got accepted to the business college there at the university and was very excited, and I think within … accepted and working on how this is all going to work and working but staying at home so that I could afford my tuition and all of that stuff, and within a month my dad announced that he had got a job offer in Calgary. The whole deal for me going to McMaster, which is something that I had wanted to do for years, was that I had to stay at home in order to do that because I had to pay for all of my education and everything myself as well, and I just didn’t have the funds to do it all. I had to pick and choose. So the option was either do I stay behind in Hamilton and try to make the education thing work or do I go out to Calgary and see where it could take me? And I was already feeling job-wise that there was really only so much that I could be doing without some kind of schooling and stuff like that.
Rachel Fisch (11:41):
At the time … now this was mid nineties, late nineties. So I’m totally aging myself here, Calgary was very much the land of milk and honey. There was a big boom going on. Their population had grown. It was growing by hundreds of thousands a year and things like that. So it was crazy, and so I thought, well let’s just kind of go out there and see where things take me, and so I got a job at Circa Food Service. Of course, this was a few acquisitions ago, so it kept getting bought up by a bigger and bigger corporate entity. So I actually started on the corporate side of things, but for one of my promotions, they’re like, “Okay, you really have to start getting schooling.” The problem with that, although I was very blessed to be at an organization that then paid for that schooling, was that I had learned so much on the job that I couldn’t do the schoolwork fast enough to satisfy me.
Rachel Fisch (12:38):
And I kept just getting impatient with it. And so I would take some courses and do what I needed to do, what my boss had asked me to do, complete what courses they needed me to complete, but it really wasn’t a passion of mine because I was working my way up to be doing the things that I was excited about. So anyway, while I was in Calgary, I happened to meet a lovely gentleman whose last name happens to be Fisch, but then his family was from Brandon, Manitoba, and so I had worked at a couple of places in Calgary and then come to Brandon, Manitoba, took a government job there. So I feel like I can make all the government employee jokes because from my experience they’re a hundred percent true.
Rachel Fisch (13:26):
Anyway, and so working in government for a little bit there, and again, I was getting to the spot where there was only so much that I could be doing. There was only so far my career would get without a designation, and so it was I think my second maternity leave, and this was when the designations were all merging between CA and CMA and CGA. I was always interested in the CMA program. That’s the education track that I was on, and then finally I’m like, “I’m going to do it. This is it. Let’s do this.” Got my degree waiver, got my acceptance into the accelerator program. “Okay, we’re going to do this,” and then in November for a program that started in January … and at the time the program that I got admitted to was a four year program in 18 months with a baby at home.
Rachel Fisch (14:15):
So I already knew that this was going to be a lot of really hard work. Because Manitoba was the first province to both through the merging of the designations, they didn’t grandfather anybody through on that program. In November they said, “Oh by the way, the 18 month program that starts in January doesn’t exist anymore, but we’ve got a nine month program starting in January,” which is essentially four years worth of schooling in nine months with a baby at home, and so at that point it was a serious pause on where I thought my career was going to be going, what I thought it was going to be doing, and I think, “You know what? I don’t want to be a tax accountant. I’m not going to have an accounting firm.”
Rachel Fisch (14:56):
For as frustrating as it is to be competing with people who have their designations or are more highly educated than I am for different careers, and now I was working up to corporate controller at a couple of locations as well, are the things that it designation will bring me, is it really going to be worth my life for the next bunch of time? And then of course that’s not including articling and everything like that. So it was actually at that time where I really got to thinking, I’m like, okay, so I’m frustrated with not being able to get above corporate controller. I’m frustrated with the quality of employers that I’m being exposed to as a non-designated corporate controller. How else could I be using my skills? And so it came out of, I need flexibility. I’ve got a toddler and a baby at home. I need to be of value, I need to use my intellect, I need to help people.
Rachel Fisch (16:03):
What are the different ways that I could be doing that? And that’s when I came up with Fisch Books. It was actually Fisch Financial originally. I liked the alliteration of it, but everybody kept thinking I was an investment or an insurance firm, and so I had to rebrand after a couple of years, and so I came up with Fisch Books, but it was basically out of that … I don’t know … honestly, Steve, I don’t know that I would have taken that level of pause on my own, but being forced to, it really made me think about what was it that I did really want and what would fulfill that? And so that’s when the entrepreneurship came into play. I think what’s interesting … as I said, I actually started in corporate and then kind of had a meandering road through government and so on.
Rachel Fisch (16:55):
I always felt a little bit of a tug back to the corporate world. I really genuinely loved … and when I was involved in meetings that involved Deloitte and KPMG and other things like that, what I really loved about those, even in my role as a bookkeeping firm owner or as a software trainer, was the level of strategy and execution. It was just a whole other ball game in the corporate world then you really see kind of the entrepreneurship or the small business level, and I loved it. That was what really got me excited, and so when Deloitte can calling for me it was, “Okay, let me get this straight. I can keep all my same contacts on networks that I did in my own bookkeeping firm, I can use all the same technology, I can do what I do and what I love, but add that corporate strategy element to it? Oh my gosh, this is a no brainer. Yes, absolutely.”
Rachel Fisch (17:56):
And so that’s what brought me to Deloitte, and about a year later just decided that I love the technology side of things and so when the opportunity came up at Sage, again, it felt like a bit of a no brainer to now advocate for accountants, but on the technology side, but still having that history of practice behind me I think was really critical. So I know that was a really long meandering story, but as you can see it’s a little bit more of a ping pong than I think he thought it was.
Steve Loates (18:24):
Yeah, that was awesome and I really appreciate you sharing your personal backstory there. I think it always makes people much more real, that when you learn that they went through these things that so many go through. It might be a little bit different, but I think we all have interesting journeys even though they’re all a little bit different. So thank you.
Rachel Fisch (18:51):
Oh, absolutely.
Steve Loates (18:52):
Thank you very much for sharing that. That was great.
Juliet Aurora (18:55):
I think also what was interesting about your story was that in either … in all your major changes in your career, it was to fill something within you that … when you went into the entrepreneurial role it was because you hit this ceiling that you didn’t know how to get past so you decided to create your own, and when you went back into corporate through Deloitte, it was because you weren’t getting something fulfilled within you in the role that you were in. So I think for the entrepreneurs in our audience, it is important to be able to … and for Rachel, she said that she was forced to take that pause, but I think it’s important for us to force ourselves to take it, to make sure that you are on that right journey.
Rachel Fisch (19:45):
Well, I sometimes wonder, and it’s really not a lot of good to reflect sometimes, certainly no time for regrets, but what would have happened if I wasn’t forced to take the pause? I am not the type of person who’s usually very self reflective. Juliet, you probably know that about me. All that’s froufrou stuff, whatever, but I will take advantage of an opportunity when it’s given to me, and in this case it was door slamming in the face, “Okay, now what am I going to do with this?” And I think that my business … they talk about the stats with startups getting up to five years and the challenges that they face at different levels and then the transition from startup to scale up, and all of those things absolutely fascinate me, but I had definitely reached a turning point in my practice where it was either I invest some money and go big or we just shut it down.
Rachel Fisch (20:40):
It had to go in one of those two directions. I felt like to maintain our current client base, our current staff base, the current workflows, something about it to me was just untenable, and so I needed to move in one of those two directions, and that happened to be the time when Deloitte had reached out and I got introduced to somebody there and then the wheels just started spinning, but I can definitely see when it comes to other entrepreneurs with businesses not lasting, there’s something about that timeframe that just changes the way that your business works or it may change what you want to get out of it or may change your mission and what you’re trying to accomplish with it, and in my case, I felt that at the time the best decision was to take this additional opportunity, but it had to come at just the right spot or else it may not have turned out the way it did.
Steve Loates (21:42):
It has to come at the right spot, but it also takes the courage to make the decision. I mean there’s lots of times opportunities and things appear in front of people, but if you don’t have the courage to … they often say sometimes you have to take that flying leap off the cliff and hope that the net does appear, and that does require a certain amount of courage. So I certainly applaud … some of the moves you have made, I think that it required a lot of courage to do it. They were big changes. I mean when you moved with Deloitte, I mean you also moved halfway across the country as well.
Rachel Fisch (22:27):
We did, yes, and I felt crazy honestly at the time. I did not feel courageous whatsoever. You can ask my husband, I’m sure he’s got a few choice words for me around that time as well, and again, there were multiple factors that were going into it. Again, at the time I did my due diligence. I thought it was the best choice for us at the time, but what I will also say is that I’ve done other podcasts or other interviews where people ask me about kind of my career journey, and I can genuinely say that I wouldn’t have gotten to the point that I’m at now without the step before it, regardless of how painful it may have been. I never would have started my own practice if the door for my designation was shut. I probably would have continued on the corporate controller path. I never would have made the jump to Deloitte if I was feeling amazing in my firm. It was starting to get uncomfortable, and I never would have taken the jump for Sage without my experience at Deloitte. So I think anytime there’s an opportunity to take a look at where you are based on where you’ve been … as I said, I couldn’t have come to this spot without all the steps before it.
Steve Loates (23:41):
No, that’s great. Let’s come back a little to your experience in the corporate world. You probably come across lots of different entrepreneurs now in your role, whether they are in a small startup or even in a small, medium, or a large firm, and I’m sure you see some that are really successful and some that are really struggling. No mentioning names.
Rachel Fisch (24:14):
Oh it’s not that kind of podcast?
Steve Loates (24:14):
Not yet anyway.
Rachel Fisch (24:18):
No, I wouldn’t. I wouldn’t.
Steve Loates (24:21):
What would you say … are there certain things you see in the ones who were being successful versus the ones who were struggling that maybe you could share with our audience that may help them?
Rachel Fisch (24:34):
I think so. So I mean Juliet certainly knows this. I’m sure you do, Steve, as well. I’m a huge believer in community and collaboration, and to me part of that came out of being a bookkeeper with my own practice, banging my head against the wall with clients or with the different situations and circumstances, and realizing that, well wait a minute, there’s over 30,000 bookkeepers in Canada. We can’t all feel like this. I must be the only one who can’t figure this out, and so after continuing to talk to someone, I realized, no, we really are facing similar challenges when it comes to clients and technology and workflows and how this is all going to work, and to be able to collaborate effectively I think is absolutely critical. So then this also then translates to entrepreneurs.
Rachel Fisch (25:31):
The ones that I’ve seen the most successful are the ones that if they don’t know the answer, they at least know somebody who does or is vulnerable enough to be able to say, “I don’t know, but let me ask somebody.” The ones that I find consistently are not as successful are those ones who, although they started the business with a greatest of intentions with a brilliant idea, they simply don’t trust the people around them or don’t include anybody around them because they want to be the be all and end all to that company or that product or that idea, and it really does take a village and it really does take a community, and so hiring people who are smarter than you and then trusting them with your baby … which I get it. It’s tough to do, needing to kind of release some of that control, but it’s genuinely the only way that that baby’s going to grow, and so those entrepreneurs who hire well, trust in the people that you’re hiring, and include them in the growth process, I think are ultimately the most successful. It’s the ones that want to hold on … like white knuckling that company that they’ve built and that or that product that they’ve built that ended up getting in trouble the fastest.
Juliet Aurora (26:55):
I think that’s great advice. It actually … and Steve can attest to this, that I’m probably one of those people who have held on with white knuckles longer than I should have, and it was a tough process for me to even start letting go, and we talked about this on another episode, that basically you’re having to undo all the knowledge and all of the things that you did to get you where you were, where you had to hang on and you had to fill in all these roles and wear all these different shoes, and now you’re saying, “Okay, well no. You shouldn’t be doing that anymore. Let it go,” whereas to get where you were in the first place before you can hire the team, you had to do it all. So it’s significantly a change in mindset as well.
Rachel Fisch (27:48):
Absolutely, and so hiring a team as your business is growing and hiring people and then training them, and then of course it was easier for me to just say, “Oh, just forget it. I’ll just do it,” because it’s faster than me training you how to do it, except that I can’t clone myself, and so if something else is going to get done, it has to be somebody else ultimately, and so the way that I ended up kind of … or the goal that we were working towards actively at the time when I closed the business was that I would be doing more of the high level or the consulting or the onboarding, the speaking gigs, all of that stuff, the consulting, and so my staff would then do the regular bookkeeping work.
Rachel Fisch (28:34):
I actually found I got bored of that. I got bored with … I mean I love the … I got my energy from that part of the client engagement process. I loved bringing them on, getting them excited about technology, getting them set up with us as a firm. When I had to sit and actually do the work month after month and do the bank recs, I’m like, “Okay, I’m done.” So I was like, “Wait a minute. There are people that really love to do that, so I’m going to hire those guys and they’re going to take it on so I can still do the stuff that I love. They can do the stuff that they love, and everybody’s happy and yet the client is still being served well.”
Steve Loates (29:14):
And Juliet, I had no idea you were like that, that you were hanging on to stuff too long. Is that true?
Juliet Aurora (29:21):
So I hid it really well.
Rachel Fisch (29:27):
I never would have guessed. No, but it’s tough, and I’m wondering then, as we’ve talked about kind of that five-year rule or whatever, that part’s hard, and I think that sometimes, yeah, it’s just easier to close up shop or it’s easier to pour good money after bad, but ultimately you have to pick a path. Are you going to grow it or you’re going to close it?
Steve Loates (29:48):
Yeah. No, I think you’re absolutely right. You’ve got to make decisions that are right for you and then act upon those decisions, which isn’t always the case.
Juliet Aurora (30:01):
And I think also that one of the things you said is interesting. So you said that one of the things you thought … and you and I have talked about this multiple times, is that I will try to clone myself.
Rachel Fisch (30:13):
Yes.
Juliet Aurora (30:14):
But you also said that you realized that you didn’t enjoy doing a part of the work.
Rachel Fisch (30:21):
Yes.
Juliet Aurora (30:21):
So if you had actually cloned yourself, you would have had another person who didn’t like to do the piece that … so being aware of what your strengths are, and that’s what you do, and finding and hiring other people who have the strengths of the things that you don’t want to do or aren’t good at is –
Rachel Fisch (30:43):
Absolutely. Well that’s why the hiring well is so critical. I mean honestly when you think about the kind of person it takes to be a really fantastic accountant, they are usually not marketing rockstars and vice versa, and so I think one of the number one challenges that accountants and bookkeepers have is actually marketing themselves, getting out there, growing their business, growing their clientele, figuring out how they differentiate from the competition, stuff like that, and so outsource it. I think that as an entrepreneur, especially as a solopreneur, that the idea is just so drilled into our heads that if something is going to get done, I have to be the one to do it, but there is so much more freedom in I don’t have to do this stuff I hate. So get somebody else to do that, because there is somebody else that loves to do that and would do a way better job than you and would probably spend less time doing it too. So yeah, just trust people with what they know.
Steve Loates (31:40):
Yeah, but I think that’s a wonderful message and a very important message for entrepreneurs, that those that do tend to be more successful no matter what it is they’re doing, ask for help and recognize that even though it’s probably their drive, if you will, or their initiative that got them started and got them part of the way on that journey, every entrepreneur hits a wall. Wherever that wall is, we all hit it, and whether you find a business coach, whether you find a mentor, whether you join a mastermind group, whether you join a Facebook group, whatever it is you join, it is very, very important, and I think that’s awesome advice to ask people for their help, for their input, because most … it’s been my experience, most people will share. Most people want to help other people.
Steve Loates (32:47):
It makes them feel good that they’re being asked and that they’re helping. So I think that’s a very important lesson for every entrepreneur, and not just entrepreneurs, but really for all of us, whatever it is you’re doing. Never be afraid to ask for help. So that’s great. Well that brings us to the part of the show … for those of you who are not familiar, you may remember or may not a TV show called the Actors Studio with James Lipton, and on that show he always asked his guests a series of questions and always asked them the same questions, and we do exactly the same here on the Smart Man, Smarter Woman podcast. So if Rachel is ready, we will begin our questions.
Rachel Fisch (33:42):
Sure.
Steve Loates (33:43):
Okay. What one word best defines an entrepreneur?
Rachel Fisch (33:51):
Guts.
Steve Loates (33:53):
What profession other than your own would you like to attempt?
Rachel Fisch (34:02):
I’m thinking something musical or something physical. Something completely opposite to what I’m doing. So something in music. I don’t know what it would be.
Steve Loates (34:13):
So not to put words in your mouth, but a drummer?
Rachel Fisch (34:15):
Okay. [inaudible 00:34:20]. Well, I was a choir director for over 10 years and I absolutely loved it and there were lots of things that I learned there that I took into my professional life, so something like that.
Steve Loates (34:30):
Perfect. What profession would you not like to do?
Rachel Fisch (34:37):
A firefighter.
Steve Loates (34:40):
Okay. What book would you recommend for entrepreneurs?
Rachel Fisch (34:46):
So I’ve recommended this book almost any time anybody has ever asked me to recommend a book. It’s Quiet … oh gosh, what’s the full title? Something about an introvert in a world that can’t stop talking, and I found it so fascinating because it allowed me to truly understand how introverted I was, even when I could stand at the on a stage and talk to 300 or 500 people doing presentations or doing whatever, how exhausting it was. Understanding how I got my energy, how I restored my energy, how I use my energy, but then it also gave me fantastic insights as to how to recognize … basically the thesis is that introversion, extroversion, it’s not an on off switch. It’s a sliding scale, and so although there are some people that are 100% one or the other, very few people are and that everyone else is somewhere in between. I’m pretty cemented right smack dab in the middle, which allows me to speak in front of hundreds of people and yet allows me to crawl up in a ball and not move from my house for a month at a time. So somewhere in there, but it not only allowed me to understand myself better, but actually to understand people around me better and how to leverage that understanding of how they were.
Steve Loates (36:13):
Okay. Well we will try to get the title of the book and we will put it in the show notes.
Rachel Fisch (36:19):
Yes, by Susan King.
Steve Loates (36:20):
So hopefully we will find it. When your own business career is completed, what do you hope your legacy is?
Rachel Fisch (36:31):
I just want to have helped people. I just want them to not have had to have the same struggles as I did to learn the lessons that I had the privilege to teach them.
Steve Loates (36:44):
Awesome, and if anyone in our audience wants to reach out and connect with you, Rachel, what’s the best way for them to do that? And I will spell the name, because even though she says Fisch, there’s a little bit of a catch in there. It is Rachel, R-A-C-H-E-L, and Fisch is F-I-S-C-H. So if someone wants to connect with you, what’s the best way for them to do that?
Rachel Fisch (37:13):
Honestly, the best way to do that is on LinkedIn, and if you’d like to connect, just say that you heard me on this podcast. So I’d love to connect with you or on Twitter @Fischbooks, F-I-S-C-H-B-O-O-K-S.
Steve Loates (37:27):
Awesome. Thank you, and that brings us to our quote, which we have a quote for each episode, and so our quote today, and I think you may both enjoy this one: “In politics, if you want anything said, ask a man. If you want anything done, ask a woman.”
Rachel Fisch (37:54):
Nice.
Steve Loates (37:55):
Any guess as to who said that?
Rachel Fisch (37:59):
Oh, I don’t know. I’m sorry.
Steve Loates (38:02):
No, no, no. It was Margaret Thatcher. The politics were the clue and certainly her personality, but anyway, thank you very, very much Rachel. This has been great. We really enjoyed having you as a guest, and thank you to my awesome cohost for another terrific job, and most importantly thank you to you, our audience, for tuning in, giving us a listen, and we really hope you found some value, and if you did, then please subscribe, leave us a review, or share it with a friend. We really would appreciate that. So thank you to everyone and until next time, take good care of yourself and those you love. Bye for now.
Song by Adam Vitovsky / CC BY 3.0
