IAM503-Entrepreneur and Productivity Consultant Exceeds Her Clients’ Expectations

Angela Proffitt is an Entrepreneur, Productivity Consultant, and Wedding & Event Planner & Designer, with nearly two decades of experience within the creative industry. As the industry's leading creative disruptor, she has become a trusted resource and ally because of her commitment to exceeding the expectations of her clients and her passion for educating professionals.

Her mantra “You don't know, what you don't know,” fuels her books, online classes, live events, and consulting. This has allowed her to help thousands of wedding & event clients, and hundreds of small businesses achieve success, grow steadily, and “wow” consistently; she calls it GSD (Get Sh*t Done).

• CEO Hack: Wonderlist and Marc Opolo
• CEO Nugget: Don't hire your friends
• CEO Defined: Leader taking risks, trying new things and gaining trust from people

Website: https://angelaproffitt.com/

YouTube – bit.ly/gsdchannel
Facebook – https://facebook.com/AngelaProffittLLC/
Instagram – https://www.instagram.com/angelaproffitt/

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Transcription:

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Intro 0:02

Do you want to learn effective ways to build relationships, generate sales, and grow your business from successful entrepreneurs, startups, and CEOs without listening to a long, long, long interview?

If so, you've come to the right place. Gresham Harkless values your time and is ready to share with you precisely the information you're in search of.

This is the I AM CEO Podcast.

Gresham Harkless 0:30

Hello, this is Gresh from the I AM CEO podcast and I have a very special guest on the show today. I have Angela Proffitt of GSD Creative.

Angela, it's awesome to have you on the show.

Angela Proffitt 0:40

Thanks so much for having me. I'm excited to chat.

Gresham Harkless 0:43

Me too excited to have you on. What I want to do is just read a little bit more about Angela so you can hear about all the awesome things that she's doing. Angela is an Entrepreneur, Productivity Consultant, and Wedding & Event Planner & Designer, with nearly two decades of experience within the creative industry.

As the industry's leading creative disruptor, she has become a trusted resource and ally because of her commitment to exceeding the expectations of her clients and her passion for educating professionals. Her mantra “You don't know, what you don't know,” fuels her books, online classes, live events, and consulting.

This has allowed her to help thousands of wedding & event clients, and hundreds of small businesses achieve success, grow steadily, and “wow” consistently; she calls it GSD (Get Sh*t Done).

Angela, are you ready to speak to the I AM CEO community?

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Angela Proffitt 1:25

I am. Let me know what I can do to help.

Gresham Harkless 1:27

Absolutely, let's do it. So I wanted to kick everything off with what I call your CEO story, hear a little bit more about your businesses, and how you got started with everything.

Angela Proffitt 1:36

Probably like a lot of creatives, I never set out to become an entrepreneur. I didn't even know how to spell the word I still kind of don't. But I did the thing that I guess every mom and dad thinks that you should do go to college, and get a degree, I knew that I loved people. Growing up, my family had a wedding venue on the Gulf Coast. In the summers I with my brother and sister would spend time putting flowers together pouring sweet tea, and cutting the pie. But I never thought in a million years, I would end up owning a business and being an entrepreneur. After graduating from college and working in the healthcare field for about 10 years, I worked in a mental hospital in a morgue and an AIDS clinic.

Some seem like sad, morbid things, but they set the foundation for helping me understand people and how I could best serve them. About 10 years into living a double life, I was really given an opportunity to choose. Do you want to jump in, take a risk, and go film a TV show to do a wedding with someone who was on American Idol? Or do you want to leave that corporate America job nine to five, because I would work my job and then I would work on the weekends? I had to make a really quick decision. I didn't talk to anybody about it. I just thought, what I'm gonna go in, I'm gonna resign on Monday, get on a bus on Tuesday and that was over 10 years ago, and I've never looked back. So it's just all about following your gut.

Gresham Harkless 3:13

Yeah, absolutely. I think it's so hard sometimes. I know people that might be listening to that might be thinking about something they want to do, or they've been thinking about it and they hear about it in the shower so many times, but what made you have the ability to be able to make that change was it just having that quiet space where you knew that this is the way I should go? Not this way.

Angela Proffitt 3:32

Honestly, I didn't put too much thought and effort into it. Because I would have that fear too much fear. I knew that I was good at taking care of people. I knew that I loved doing events. We had so many events on the books that I knew in my head even though I'm not a numbers girl, that I had enough money to live without having a steady paycheck nine to five. I always knew that if this whole event thing didn't work out, I could always go back to the healthcare industry with something great to fall back on.

So honestly, I was at the Corvette Museum doing an event for 800 Indians when I got the call and got the opportunity to go on the road and start planning a wedding and I thought to myself, I'm just gonna do this. I'm gonna sign the paperwork and all the confidentiality stuff. I didn't know what the hell I was doing. Sometimes I still don't know what I'm doing.

Gresham Harkless 4:27

I'm building the airplane on the way down, all the way up, I should say. Sometimes it says a lot of times what we have to do, but I think you're absolutely right. I think sometimes even if we do our businesses on the side while we're doing our full-time job, you still have to kind of deal with that fear of being able to take that step because you can have all the business all the clients, but if you don't actually take that step and it's hard to kind of take that next level without letting go of that one thing.

Angela Proffitt 4:52

You got to focus and you got to be hungry or you're never going to grow. If you have something steady to fall back on. Then you've got something steady and it doesn't force you to work hard and to hustle.

Gresham Harkless 5:04

Exactly. Yeah, sometimes we need to have that parachute removed for us to really like see how great we can be. I know we touched on a little bit, I know you touched on it as well about GSD Creative. You take us through a little bit more about what you're doing for your clients.

Angela Proffitt 5:18

Yeah. So we have been doing and I know one of the things that I was listening to some of the other people something that makes us different is because my background in psychology, and because I've worked hands-on with people, and it takes a lot of patience to work in the emotional money spending business. When I worked in healthcare, not only did I have the opportunity to really learn about healthy brain activity, but also about EMR, which is electronic medical records. At a very young age, I was helping doctors' offices go paperless. When I started my company, the event company, I knew that I would only be paperless. So we invested in software and did a lot of just from the ground up that's one of the main things that we do is we go into companies, and we help them become more productive.

The first thing is we do a psychology methodology called true colors. It's a really fun team-building activity. I learned it in healthcare, it's really needed in the creative industry so that people can first understand how people perceive them as a person and a leader. Next, how to customize the message the way that your team members need to hear it, or your clients need to hear it. We've really mastered the psychology of that. Then on top of that, we make sure that our clients and our vendors know that we are paperless and that everything's backed up in the cloud. It's like a security blanket. That's how we've gotten clients all over the world because we're able to use technology, such as we're doing today using Zoom and Google Drive, and all the great software. That's what we really do for our clients.

We sell a very, very specific experience based on psychology and we have a process and we follow it. That's one nugget, I would say is get a process, get your shit together, and don't veer from it. Because every time we veer from it, it's never a good thing. It doesn't end up good for you and your team or the client. We've had to learn that the hard way. But yeah, that's the main thing is the psychology piece of it, customizing everything that we do and the experience, but having that process, and then making sure that all of our client's data and information is backed up. So from a security standpoint, everything is safe.

That's really, when you get down to the core of it, like GSD you gotta be fun to sell stuff. But really, if I tell people, Hey, I'm gonna come in and take away your pen and paper, and we're gonna learn how to be more productive. Their psychology, they just like, look at me with deer in headlights. Kind of makes it fun.

Gresham Harkless 7:53

Yeah, absolutely. I imagine you're probably getting into people's comfort zones as well, too. Especially if you have that pen in the pad, you're used to using that. But I love the fact that a lot of the solutions that you're talking about are based on that psychology because I think so many times we see things and kind of shiny object syndrome, where we see somebody's doing X, Y, and Z, and we're s like, oh, we should be doing that.

But really, this sounds like the solution. Correct me if I'm wrong, but the solutions you provide are based on that psychology, based on who you are, who the team is, what they do best things like that the true colors, as you spoke to on it. Rather than those outside, this is the newest thing you have to try whether or not it works for your team or not.

Angela Proffitt 8:31

Amen. I didn't build my business looking at what everybody else was doing because I don't care. I know what we can provide. It's called Blue Ocean Strategy, you create something different. That's a book, you create something different and unique, and people will come. If you service them and communicate with them, and have great customer service, and just great morals and values and be upfront with people, you tell the truth.

Sometimes I don't tell them everything because they don't need to know everything, but that's our job, is to protect our clients.

Gresham Harkless 9:00

I appreciate you for focusing on that, appreciate you for sharing your secret sauce as well. I wanted to switch gears a little bit and I want to ask you for what I call your CEO hack. This could be like an app, book or a habit that you have, but what's something that makes you more effective and efficient?

Angela Proffitt 9:14

Oh my gosh. So I have a book on that, Entrepreneurs must have outs. It's one of the most probably like most frequent questions I get asked, but I will say our favorite app that we use internally is called Marco Polo. It's a free video texting app and we have put a process in place. It's not meant for the to-do list. It's meant for clarification.

So each of our team members, we use a free app called Wonder List and each person has their own wonder list. Within each list, there are projects and clients and to do list, but we always set a deadline.

Gresham Harkless 9:50

Awesome. Now I wanted to ask you for what I call a CEO nugget. So this could be like a word of wisdom or a piece of advice and sometimes I'll say if you can hop into a time machine, what would you tell your younger business self?

Angela Proffitt 10:00

I would tell my younger business self not to hire my friends because I grew up around a family business. A lot of my family, we all still work together, we all still love each other and get along. I have a really close family but as a young entrepreneur, I didn't really understand how to run a business yet. I just knew I needed hands and people kept asking me to do things. What happened was that June is a really busy wedding month and so I would be booked every Saturday in June.

Then I would keep getting more questions of, well, can you do this date? I'm like, well, I can't because I'm broke. But I don't want to say no because I want to help these people. So I just started getting my friends to help me. But as I grew over time, they didn't know what it takes to run a business. There was a lot of rudeness and jealousy and hate and demand that I don't pay, you don't pay me and I'm like, I hand you a freakin iPad, you work 12 hours and run an event when I spend 200 hours in the background for a year planning this shit. You make an out, it's money on the side.

At that time, this was a long time ago, but I had a good business manager, still the same person today, I had a good accountant. They gave me some great advice. They're like Angela, you're gonna have to start over with new people who can meet you where you are, and you can lead them and become a better leader.

Gresham Harkless 11:26

I appreciate those nuggets. Now I wanted to ask you my absolute favourite question, which is the definition of what it means to be a CEO. We're hoping to have different, quote and quote CEOs on this show.

So Angela, what does being a CEO mean to you?

Angela Proffitt 11:38

It's an honor to be able to be a leader who is trying new things, taking risks, and having people actually trust me and follow me.

Gresham Harkless 11:52

Absolutely. I appreciate your time even more and what I want to do is pass you the mic, so to speak, just to see if there's anything additional, you want to let our readers and listeners know. Then of course, how best they can get a hold of you find out about all the awesome things you're working on.

Angela Proffitt 12:03

Absolutely. So I would say you mentioned the word goals. For a long time, I never sat down and whiteboarded it out. Even though I hate paper. I do love the huge papers.

Gresham Harkless 12:16

I have them right in the corner.

Angela Proffitt 12:18

I see that and I love it. I love idea paint, and where you can just write all over the wall. But I will say that about 10 years into owning my business every single year through EO, they have a skid a new coach, and a new mentor every single year. About 10 years ago, I had a mentor and a coach who at the time I'm like, Damn, you're hard on me. But I'm a hard-headed girl. So I just kind of needed to hear it that way. He's like, What are your goals? What do you want out? What's your what's your end goal? I'm like, I don't know, I've never really thought about it. I'm like, I just take however many events come to me and how many weddings and how many this and how many then? He's like No, but what are your goals? I'm like, I don't know like there's always money in the bank. I work and I like what I do. He's like, What are your goals?

I really didn't understand what that meant until he took me through the actual exercises of writing it down. I mean, he kind of had to come up with it. It's like, okay, in January, you don't want to do a bunch of weddings, you want to go to three Caribbean islands, and do five destination weddings because you hate the cold. Okay, that's a goal. In February, it's Valentine's Day, so you're going to have a tonne of couples reaching out to you because it's never one holiday that people get engaged. Depending on the month that these people are getting married, do you want to do two weddings a month and maybe nine months out of the year? How much do you want to make from each of those events? Let's break out the planning the design and the services.

The reason I say this is because of having someone who not necessarily is older and age. He was like a dad figure but had someone who understood strategy and listened to them. I was so hard-headed. I was like, No, you don't understand. I can't do that. I don't know how many people are gonna like call me and again, you're afraid. You're like shit, I've got 30 to $50,000 a month that has to be paid, going out. He's like, No, the money will come. Be passionate. Be a good leader. We're going to whiteboard out your entire year. Then it gives you the opportunity to say no, or I'll pass one. So that year that he helped me we did over 250 events. Believe it or not, they I wasn't that profitable that year. But the next year, we completely changed our business model.

We went from doing about 30 and being way more profitable because we only took the really large events that we did full service. So just if you can get a strategist or a mentor or someone that can challenge you to whiteboard out your life and it's uncomfortable. But we do it every year, every December, my team and I go the first week, every week is my birthday week. We go to the beach and we call it GST retreat, and we get shit done and we map the year out, and sure stuff changes. But at least you have a little bit of a road and a little bit of a path that you want to stay on. That's what I'll leave you with is to have a strategy, and look at your analytics. How people can find me, my website is angelaproffitt.com, with two F's and two T's. We also have gsdcreative.com, which is solely for people who want to get shit done, and to be productive with their time.

Gresham Harkless 15:44

There you go. That should be everybody. Listen to this podcast. If you listen to this podcast, you definitely want to get shit done. So we will have those links and information in the show notes.

Thank you so much for reminding us of that because I think we sometimes can chart out our lives, we can chart our goals, we can say we want this this month or that month. Writing it out, putting it on a whiteboard, putting it on as big or post-it notes, a lot of times helps them ensure that they will happen because it makes it something real and tangible.

I appreciate you so much again, Angela, and I hope you have a phenomenal day.

Angela Proffitt 16:16

You too. Thanks so much for the opportunity. Have a great day, guys.

Outro 16:20

Thank you for listening to the I AM CEO Podcast powered by Blue 16 Media. Tune in next time and visit us at iamceo.co. I AM CEO is not just a phrase, it's a community.

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This has been the I AM CEO Podcast with Gresham Harkless. Thank you for listening.

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