Building a Business From a Surprising Opportunity

This episode is part 1 of 2 of a recent workshop I did in Salt Lake City.

What if your next awkward job interview could be the catalyst for launching your own business? Join me, Annie Veblen-McCarty, as I share the raw and inspiring journey from a web design graduate struggling to find a job in a tough tech market to becoming a thriving entrepreneur and coach. Hear the intimate story of how an unexpected interview led me to realize that my future wasn't in job searching but in creating my own opportunities. With my mom as my first client, I navigated the early days of web design, long before user-friendly tools were around. Plus, get a behind-the-scenes look at how my husband and I have successfully run an automotive garage for over 21 years, emphasizing the values of hard work, adaptability, and authenticity. 

Entrepreneurship is a multifaceted journey filled with its own set of challenges and dichotomies. From balancing legal obligations and meticulous bookkeeping to maintaining visionary goals, this episode uncovers the real-life complexities entrepreneurs face. We'll explore why wearing multiple hats is essential and how seeking help can save your sanity and your business. We'll discuss the common pitfalls that can derail your progress and share actionable steps to empower you to manage both the tangible and intangible aspects of entrepreneurship. Get ready for a conversation full of practical insights designed to help you harness your strengths and achieve effortless productivity in both your business and life.

Chapters

• 0:00 Empowering Entrepreneurial Success Through Coaching
• 7:09 Navigating Entrepreneurial Challenges and Dichotomies

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

Hey, this is Annie Veblen-McCarty and I'm gonna teach you how to be effortlessly productive. I've been an entrepreneur for over 20 years and I got sick and tired of experts preaching what business and life should look like and what I should be doing as a leader and to turn a profit, only to find myself wasting time, burned out, feeling inauthentic and still not making any money. On this show, we are ditching the shoulds. I'm giving you permission to do business differently. As a certified master coach, I believe that everything you need to have success and build the life and business of your dreams is already living on the inside. I'm going to empower you to lean into what you do best, help you see your path forward clearly and give you the strategy and action steps along the way to become effortlessly productive. Let's dive in.

Speaker 2: 0:58

It's really, really, really important to me that people get the honor they deserve, and when people have worked their ass off, I never would just be like here's Annie, have fun, like I want you to know how important this person is and how amazing they are, and I want to set the stage for you to just like lean the fuck in and just take everything in because she is a wealth. Knowledge in your life is about to be changed forever, so let's all give it up for annie at avm coaching and look, and we love you. Thank you for being dork. I appreciate you, friend. You can have that back. Oh, thanks, so ever it's okay.

Speaker 1: 1:39

I have three kids. I've had way worse, okay. So, like Josh said, at the last retreat we actually it was in Dallas in March I think, and we had started talking about a couple of us coming and doing workshops. So I've known since Dallas that I was going to do this. I think it was a week ago. Today, josh and I were on the phone talking about the M&M launch and he was like so I've been thinking about, like what you're going to talk about at the workshop. So I am a very like last minute for those of you who've been on my calls before, it's like an hour before and I'm like maybe I should start planning what I'm going to talk about today. So I am used to that. So Josh said that he wanted me to speak on entrepreneurship because I've been a business owner for a very long time. So I just want to share a little bit about my story and my background with you to start.

Speaker 1: 2:38

So I never really intended to be an entrepreneur. Never really intended to be an entrepreneur. However, I have not held a W-2 job since I graduated from college, so I had lots of them before that High school and college did the whole work for other people thing, no-transcript. And I graduated with a web design degree so that went really good. So I actually decided my husband had another year of school. I was like I'm going to go to get a specialty web design certificate. So I'm like maybe another year of school and things will be better. So I did another year of school. I started applying for jobs. Nobody at tech companies was hiring anybody, especially somebody who just graduated and had literally zero job experience whatsoever. So I got one job interview and I've actually never shared this story before. So I went to NYU in New York.

Speaker 1: 3:47

When you go to like internships and stuff like you are wearing your suit. So I like get my suit on, I have my tailored skirt and my heels and I go to this job interview and pull up and it's at a townhouse and I'm like, okay, this is interesting. So I go knock on the door of the townhouse and this guy answers the door. It's not even his townhouse, he lives in his mom's basement. And I was like, oh, oh, okay, now I see why I got this job interview. So I go down to the basement with this super sketchy guy who looks like he had never seen the light of day for the last three years. And there's one other girl interviewing there and she's wearing sweatpants and this big baggy t-shirt had like stains all over it, and I'm like in my suit, like, okay, this is super, super awkward. So, on the spot, he basically is like you're hired. And I'm like, so, on the spot, he basically is like you're hired. And I'm like, okay, this is great, I got a job. Well, I literally never heard. He was like, yeah, I'll be in touch when we have clients for you. Never heard from this guy again. So meanwhile I had already.

Speaker 1: 5:02

My mom was my very first client. She has been. She was an entrepreneur for many years too still is. So I had been building her website. So this was like back in the day there were no drag and drop website builders and you actually had to know how to like code and do all the things. So the tech companies were not doing well and they were not hiring at all.

Speaker 1: 5:27

But this was in the early 2000s, when everybody who had a business wanted a website. So I was like, okay, this was not really what I pictured when I graduated. I really just wanted to work for somebody, but that was not an option at the moment. So I was like, okay, I have one client. She paid me pretty good money. Yes, it was my mom. I gave her a little bit of a discount. But I was like I'll just go find new clients. So I just went out and was like, ok, I guess I have my own business now. I did not go to school for business. I did not know what I was doing at all. Business. I did not know what I was doing at all.

Speaker 1: 6:14

Like Josh said my husband also when he graduated college, he opened this automotive garage which I very quickly became. He is like Josh, he is full vision. He is not a details person. So I think it was tagged they opened September 3rd, so we are about to have our 21st anniversary of our business. So I've been in business for over 21 years now.

Speaker 1: 6:34

So it got to tax time and he and his business partner were like help, we've kept zero books, zero records and we have to file taxes. So I came into that business as a CFO. I had never done bookkeeping, accounting, any of that either, and was like I am just going to learn. And so I share all of this with you guys, because as entrepreneurs, you know, we have a lot of different things that we are in our purview. Right, we have a lot of different things.

Speaker 1: 7:09

You might start your business being like, okay, this is simple, I'm just going to have people pay me to do stuff. And then you start to realize and, like Josh said, I have had network marketing businesses and now my life coach business. So you have the very strict legal stuff where you are following regulations and rules determined by the government and the place that you live and you, as an entrepreneur, have to navigate that. You have to figure that out and abide by these rules and pay your sales tax or whatever it is, have your company founded properly. And then we have stuff like the details, like I said, like bookkeeping we have to figure out how we have to keep track of our expenses and income and file our taxes and like all these very detailed things. And then we have the vision right, as an entrepreneur, we need to have that vision of who we want to help and how we're going to meet these people, who these people are, that big picture that is driving us, our purpose.

Speaker 1: 8:11

And we have these very intangible things that we have to master as an entrepreneur, like momentum. How do you define momentum? How do you grab momentum? How do you hold on to that momentum? How do you grab momentum? How do you hold on to that momentum?

Speaker 1: 8:24

So, as an entrepreneur, there's lots of different areas that we have to master.

Speaker 1: 8:30

So we have these dichotomies where we have to be an expert of these very tight legal rules and also, at the same time, of these intangibles like momentum.

Speaker 1: 8:41

We have to have the details, part of it, and we have to be able to be a vision person as well, and so we have to wear all these hats and navigate these things, and some of us have strengths that lend more towards one area. But, as an entrepreneur, we can't ignore the other areas. Maybe we need to hire somebody to do those and help us ignore the other areas. Maybe we need to hire somebody to do those and help us. Maybe we need to call our wife in and be like help. We've kept no business records for four months of this business, whatever. But there's a lot of different things that we have to navigate, and so, as an entrepreneur, we hear these things right. We're told like you have to take ownership, you have to do things this way, you, you know. This is what a good entrepreneur does, if we're not aware of that, we can accidentally go down these roads without even knowing that we're going towards these dark side things and it will rule our business and we won't understand why we're stuck, why we're not seeing the results.