IAM1209 – Female CEO Equips Young Aspiring Entrepreneurs with CEO Skills and Traits

Sylvia Scott is the founder and CEO of the Girls' C.E.O. Connection which she launched in 2009. Her passion is to help high school girls build bright and fulfilling self-sufficient futures. She wants to see independent thinking cultivated within a global community of young female entrepreneurs. Her goal for the Girls' C.E.O. Connection is to equip and motivate the girls with the skills and traits of accomplished women entrepreneurs. Sylvia's personal commitment is to expand opportunities for them within entrepreneurship. Sylvia is an Ambassador for WED/Women's® Entrepreneurship Day. From 2016 to 2020 she was an e-mentor for Afghan women entrepreneurs enrolled in the Institute for Economic Empowerment of Women's Peace Through Business® Program. She is also a business counselor with the Coachella Valley Women's Business Center.

• CEO Story: Started as a conference, which developed into girls creating enterprise organization. Focusing on young women entrepreneurs mentoring and developing their skills.
• Business Service: Coaching program for young women entrepreneurs, communicating to connect, and mentoring program.
• Secret Sauce: I’d rather be connecting people and bringing people together. Maximizing the high school girls in reaching their visions.
• CEO Hack: You really need to know yourself as a CEO. Highly recommended books – Now Discover Your Strength and The Tipping Point. I’m a connector and a maximizer – I like to bring people together and I like to take something that’s there and make it extraordinary.
• CEO Nugget: Listening is the most important communication skill. You’re learning more when you listen.
  Perseverance – when obstacles come your way.
• CEO Defined: A leader, role model, and visionary. CEO is the one who needs to engage, empower, and motivate the entire team.

Website: https://www.girlsceoconnection.com

Realizing A Vision, Your Toolkit For Success. Words of Wisdom for Young Female Entrepreneurs:

https://www.girlsceoconnection.com/realizing-a-vision-the-book/

LinkedIn: sylviarjscott

Facebook: SylviaRJScott

Girls' CEO Connection:

Facebook: GirlsCEOConnection

Twitter: GirlsCEOConnect

YouTube: Girls CEO Connection

Pinterest: GirlsCEOConnect

Instagram: girlsceoconnection

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Transcription

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00:19 – Intro

Do you want to learn effective ways to build relationships, generate sales, and grow your business from successful entrepreneurs, startups, and CEO's without listening to a long, long, long interview? If so, you've come to the right place, Gresham. Harkness values your time and is ready to share with you precisely the information you're in search of. This is to I AM CEO podcast.

00:46 – Gresham Harkless

Hello. Hello. Hello. This is Gresh from the I AM CEO podcast. I have a very special guest on the show today. I have Sylvia Scott of Girls CEO connection. Sylvia, it's great to have you on the show.

00:55 – Sylvia Scott

Thank you, Gresham. It's great to be on your show, too.

00:57 – Gresham Harkless

Before we jump into everything, I want to read a little bit more about Sylvia so you can hear about all the awesome things that she's doing. Sylvia is the founder and CEO of Girls CEO Connection, which she launched in 2009. Her passion is to help high school girls build bright fulfilling, self-sufficient futures. She wants to see independent thinking cultivated within a global community of young female entrepreneurs. Her goal for the Girls CEO connection is to equip and motivate the girls with the skills and traits of accomplished women entrepreneurs.

Sylvia's personal commitment is to expand opportunities for them within entrepreneurship, and Sylvia is an ambassador for Women's and Entrepreneurship Day from 2016 to 2020. She was an e-mentor for Afghan women entrepreneurs and enrolled in the Institute for Economic Empowerment of Women's Peace through Business program. She's also a business counselor with the Coachella Valley Women's Business Center. As I mentioned, she's contributed numerous times to our CEO blog, nation site, and other platforms as well, too. So, Sylvia, super excited to have you on the show. Are you ready to speak to the I AM CEO community?

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01:58 – Sylvia Scott

I sure am. Thank you.

02:00 – Gresham Harkless

You're welcome. Let's do it. There we go. Practice makes perfect. So to try to kick everything off, I wanted to rewind the clock a little bit and hear a little bit more about how you got started, what I call your CEO story.

02:10 – Sylvia Scott

I guess it was back in the nineties, like 97. I read the book reviving Ophelia. It really made me see what was going on in the world with starting like, well, I was doing some volunteer 8th graders, teaching them how to do fundraiser, and I really saw it and I really saw how teenage girls, what was going on in their lives, and I wanted to do something to empower them, and I would do whatever I could. Then I worked in New York City after 911 with this large conference series.

Actually, it was the women's leadership exchange, and I was the conference manager, I met incredible women from all over the country who were excelling in their business, fast-growing businesses. But then other women would come to the conference that wanted to learn from them. I watched how women learned from each other and what it did, what it did for them. But not just these were nothing about a business plan.

It was all about these skills that women needed that made them. These women became famous because of certain skills. Drill CEO connection actually started as a conference called Realizing. Envision your toolkit for success. It was a conference in Southern California, and one of my advisory board members said, you can't just do a business as a conference because it takes, you know, you're getting sponsors.

That's a lot. I used to create five conferences in one year. So then he helped me, one of them created what's called the Girls CEO Connection, which is girls creating enterprising organization. Then it just started growing. Girls who went to the conference wanted to help. We went to Stanford for a conference, and I met a professor who said, this is great, but you need to. William Damon was the same. You need to have mentoring. I thought, okay, well, this business now needs to be more solid.

So I took it from there, and I had an advisory team of girls from Southern California, six girls, from very different backgrounds. They didn't even know each other at first, and they started working with me on it to grow it and decide what would be good. Let's do younger interviews. Younger women to interview. Just move it on that way and start looking for younger women as entrepreneurs. Nothing wrong with older. They like that. We just started looking more towards role models for younger women entrepreneurs. That's what's going on. That's what happened.

04:46 – Gresham Harkless

Nice. Well, I appreciate you sharing that so much. I think so many times when we look at business, you know, even as you alluded to, you know, we think of, you know, financials, you think of marketing and all those things, but we sometimes forget about that human piece. Like you said, the growth that you saw and kind of the experience that just sounds like the young women and sounds like the people that were even involved kind of went through. I love that you kind of started it out as a conference and how it's kind of progressed from there and added the mentoring and all those awesome things. I think we sometimes forget about the growth that we get from running our business or being even involved in experiences like that.

So I appreciate you so much for doing that. I know you touched a little bit upon, you know, how you're working with your young women. Could you take us through a little bit more on the business, how that works, and then a little bit more, too, about your book and what we can look forward to there?

05:31 – Sylvia Scott

Okay, well, with the girls, we started out with a teen board, like for teenage girls, and then we changed it to young women advisors. Now it's young women ambassadors. Now, those specific girls can be from anywhere in high school between the ages of 14 and 18. Usually, they're sophomores. They come on as an ambassador and they actually help me decide what to be done, what's going to happen, you know, what kind of interviews do we want to do? Video interviews with women on who do we want to interview?

I let them. I want them to do the interviewing because what happens then is they learn how to speak on camera, but they also learn how to speak to people they don't know. They have told me that that aspect of the videos and interviewing people on a video made a world of difference. They felt like they could just stand up and talk to anybody.

They could stand up and talk to people because they may get to talk to the person a few minutes beforehand, and they learn, they have to learn everything about what's going on with that person, and then they may get to talk to them in advance. They may not. So that's one aspect of it. When I was doing the conferences, which I'll be doing again, they helped me decide, well, who do we want? Who are the role models? We want to be on the entrepreneurial side of it, and what do we want them talking about specifically under those topics, a passion, vision. How do we want to put this together and help promote it, of course?

Then we have, for the program, I have a coaching program called communicating to connect, to realize your vision. It's for high school girls and mentoring, which I've done a lot of the mentoring, but I've got other women entrepreneurs who want to be mentors. The girls just have to let me, girls just have to let me know.

07:32 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah, that makes so much sense. I appreciate you so much in hearing, like, the stories of the impact that you're actually making. Then, of course, hearing the progression as well, too, through the years. Imagine the young women being able to kind of see them blossom and grow and make that impact themselves. So what would you consider to be what I like to call your secret sauce? This could be for yourself individually the organization, or a combination of both. But what do you feel kind of sets you apart and makes you unique?

07:54 – Sylvia Scott

I'm very. Well, for me, people have always said I'm very eclectic. You can't come to my house for a dinner party and see the same people. None of them are from the same background. I have always been involved with different types of people, and I just believe in that. I don't even think about it. I don't. I don't think about it. I would also say I'm somebody who's known as a connector and a maximizer, and I'd rather be connecting people, and that's what makes me unique. Yes, networking, but that's nothing. I'm a connector, and I like to bring people together, and I don't care if it ever helps me at all. I think that's the same.

You know, what makes the business unique is that we're reaching girls all over, no demographics. I don't care where they come from, between the ages of 14 and 18, and encouraging them about entrepreneurship, not just about stEm, not just about these specific things, but about being an entrepreneur, but learning all these skills and putting them to use now and getting them involved. We want to maximize the potential of high school girls in reaching their visions and not the vision of somebody else so that they're reaching their own visions.

09:18 – Gresham Harkless

Nice. No, I absolutely love that. Especially as you talked about, like, those communication skills and how that bleeds into the self-confidence and the ability to kind of see things, I think those are foundational skills that you can see, you know, throughout someone's life, you know, as they go on. I love that you're planting those seeds. Of course, I love that connection piece because I think there's a time and place, of course, for, you know, networking and getting to know people, knowing people's name and their email address and their phone number, but actually getting that opportunity to really connect people on a deep level, I love that that's part of who you are and what it is that you're doing. You can definitely hear within the organization as well.

So, I absolutely appreciate that. So I wanted to switch gears a little bit, and I want to ask you for what I call a CEO hack. So this could be like an app, a book, or a habit that you have, but what's something that makes you more effective and efficient?

10:06 – Sylvia Scott

Okay. It's two books that I think really make a difference, and made a difference to me. I mean, I've read a lot of books. John Maxwell, everybody, you know, as much as I can, but I think you really need to know yourself as a CEO. So what's really set me thinking about different things as time goes on is Marcus Buckingham's book now, Discover Your Strengths, and then the tipping point by Malcolm Gladwell to know, are you a connector, a maven, or a salesperson? That's when I realized I'm a connector. In all ways, as well as in knowing your strengths, yes, I take in a lot of input, and a lot of ideas, but I'm a maximizer. I'd like to take something that's there and make it extraordinary, exemplary.

11:06 – Gresham Harkless

Yes. No, I appreciate you so much for sharing both of those books. I feel like we're definitely kind of like-minded in that way as well. I think that knowledge of self is one of the most powerful things that you can kind of learn and to kind of cultivate. But I love how you talked about even leaning into that because I often say, like, if you run your own race, you can't lose. I think so many times we can start peeking over to someone else's lane and start trying to run their race or start seeing that they're doing something that we want to try to do, and we lose the essence of who we are.

We lose, like our maximizer within us or our connector within us, or whatever it is that it ends up being that makes us who we are. Part of our secret sauce. So I love those two books because they help guide you there. But I love to. How you, you mentioned, like, maybe even leaning more into that might have, you know, been, you know, a lot. Probably a little bit less of a headache and heartburn, I guess.

11:56 – Sylvia Scott

Yes, that's right. That's right. Exactly.

12:00 – Gresham Harkless

Yes. So I wanted to ask you now, you might have already touched on this, but I call it a CEO nugget. This is a little bit more of a word of wisdom or a piece of advice. It might be something you would tell a client or somebody you work with, or if you happen to be a time machine, you might tell your younger business self.

12:15 – Sylvia Scott

Now, to tell my younger self something I read, my dad used to say this, too, in school. They told you to say, you talk too much. John Maxwell has a saying that you can't learn anything, basically, is what he's saying. Listen, you're learning more when you listen because when you're talking, you're not learning.

So you're not learning when you're doing all the talking. So listening is one of the most important communication skills, as well as when you're in business. Perseverance. Perseverance. You can walk up to, you can run into an obstacle at any time in business. You go under it, you go over it. You might be able to go through it, but, you know, sometimes when I was out walking, at times in one area, they put up these wires all at once. I thought that was in my path.

Well, sometimes I walked underneath through the wires. It was an obstacle for other people. But for me, I could either step over it, go through it, or try to go all the way around, but you just have to keep persevering to reach your vision. That's what you want. It's your vision. You want to be persevering to reach your vision.

13:31 – Gresham Harkless

Nice. I absolutely love both of those nuggets. I know that's something that you mentioned, that you mentioned in your book as well, too, which I'm super excited about.

13:39 – Sylvia Scott

Good. Thank you. I do, too.

13:41 – Gresham Harkless

Perfect. Perfect. So now, I wanted to ask you my absolute favorite question, which is the definition of what it means to be a CEO. We're hoping to have different, quote-unquote, CEO's on this show. I know we talked about this a little bit. So, Sylvia, what does being a CEO mean to you?

13:55 – Sylvia Scott

Being a CEO, to me means, and I've been around a lot of CEOs, and they are not role models. They say they're CEO's. They're not somebody I really want to follow. I have to follow them. They're not, see, they're not role models. For me, being a CEO is a leader, is a role model, but is also a visionary. I think in those three elements because the CEO is the one that needs to be able to engage and empower and motivate the entire team, whether it's business or you consider your own CEO. You know, in my book, I say it with branding.

Now, you are the CEO of your life. Look at you. Consider yourself that. You've got to look at, you know, how are you going to motivate yourself, engage yourself, you know, empower yourself, but to keep going towards your vision. As a CEO of the business, there's a vision, there's goals that need to be reached, and the CEO also needs to be the role model whom people will want to follow the leader.

15:06 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah. I appreciate you so much for sharing it because I think you want to make sure that you actually step into and walk into those shoes, so to speak. I love the leader, the visionary, and that role model piece. Truly appreciate that definition. What I wanted to do is just pass you the mic, so to speak, just to see if there's anything additional that you can let our readers and listeners know and of course how best they could get a hold of you. Get a copy of your book, and find out about all the awesome things that you're working on.

15:31 – Sylvia Scott

The website is girlsceoconnection.com and my email on that and the phone number on that so you can email me, it's sylvia@girlsceoconnection.com, and then the phone numbers on the contact sheet on the website. Then I think what I'd like to say is, if you have young people in your life, you want them to be a certain way, just let them think about if they want to try being an entrepreneur, let them try.

15:58 – Gresham Harkless

Well, no, I appreciate that and we will definitely have again the links and information in the show notes. Appreciate you for reminding us of that. Of course that last piece as well too. I think it's so powerful. Thank you so much for doing that. Of course, taking some time out today and I hope you have a phenomenal rest of the day.

16:13 – Sylvia Scott

Thank you, Gresham.

16:16 – Outro

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. Be sure to follow us on social media and subscribe to our podcast on iTunes Google Play and everywhere you listen to podcasts, SUBSCRIBE, and leave us a five-star rating grab CEO gear at www.ceogear.co. This has been the I AM CEO Podcast with Gresham Harkless. Thank you for listening.

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