IAM1424 – Coach and Consultant Helps Entrepreneurs Bring Their Expertise to Life

Liz Czepiel is an executive coach & learning and leadership consultant. Serving as a strategic business partner, she helps entrepreneurs bring their expertise to life through the creation of various learning initiatives including programs, workshops, and masterminds, and helps leaders turn exhaustion into efficiency and focus through leadership and agile coaching practices. Partners and clients include Girls With Impact, ExecOnline, and MommyPoppins. In addition to her consulting practice, Liz serves on the faculty at Northeastern University and Columbia University.

• CEO Story: Started to work in a finance role, and her dream was to work on Wall Street. Liz felt unsatisfied, and so she got her Master’s degree which she fell in love with dealing with leadership coaching, emotional intelligence, etc. Preparing herself to build her own business further enhances her skill set and manages her own time.
• Business Service: Coaching and consulting. Entrepreneurs that are looking to a broader audience, brainstorm and turn them into a learning program or workshop. Build strategy.
• Secret Sauce: Having a diverse background. Being able to engage in organizations of multiple ranges.
• CEO Hack: Outlook & time-blocking through task function.
• CEO Nugget: Switched the perspective and asked “Why not me?”
• CEO Defined: Having a vision and continuing to evolve that vision by thinking strategically. Stepping out of the day-to-day. Elevation to the strategic level.

Website: https://www.lizabethczepiel.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lizabethczepiel

Previous Episode Link:

https://iamceo.co/2018/10/08/iam080-coach-consultant-helps-entrepreneurs-bring-their-expertise-to-live/

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Transcription

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00:02 – Intro

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.

00:27 – Gresham Harkless

Hello, hello, hello, this is Gresh from the I Am CEO Podcast, and I have a very special guest on the show today. I have Liz Czepiel of lizabethCzepiel.com Liz, it's awesome to have you on the show.

00:37 – Liz Czepiel

Thank you so much for having me.

00:39 – Gresham Harkless

No problem, no problem. What I want to do is just read a little bit more about Liz so you can hear about all the awesome things that she's doing. Liz Czepiel is an executive coach and learning and leadership consultant. Serving as a strategic business partner, she helps entrepreneurs bring their expertise to life through the creation of various learning initiatives, including programs, workshops, and masterminds and helps leaders turn exhaustion into efficiency and focus through leadership and agile coaching practices. Partners and clients, including Girls With Impact, Exec Online, and Mommy Poppins. In addition to her consulting practice, Liz serves on the faculty at Northeastern University and Columbia University. Liz, are you ready to speak to the I AM CEO community?

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01:23 – Liz Czepiel

I am so ready.

01:25 – Gresham Harkless

All right, let's do it. So the first question I have is if you could just build a little bit more upon your background and tell us about your CEO story and what led you to start your business.

01:33 – Liz Czepiel

Yeah, so I, way back when I started my career in finance, had the dream. The dream was to work on Wall Street and this was pre-2008, so I was still looking, really found myself in a financial role for a nuclear energy company, and two years into the role, knew it wasn't the dream, right? Had the cube life was falling asleep at my desk. I was crunching numbers. I could do the work, but it was not speaking to me. And that led me to go back to school. I knew I wanted to return to the classroom.

I knew that my current line of work wasn't working and found this amazing master's program looking at people in organizations and everything that included from group dynamics to leadership to emotional intelligence and how one person acts within the different systems of an organization. And I fell in love with the work. And that was really the catalyst for my movement into the people side of business.

So for the past 10 years or so, I've been in a variety of different roles for some very large and some very small organizations doing everything from leadership coaching to driving different learning programs. Also headed up a diversity and inclusion organization at one of my companies and really loved the work. And I realized that I wanted more freedom in the work that I was doing. So I was gaining really solid experience coaching internally and building out these kinds of programs.

And I realized that at times I felt creatively stifled, if that makes sense. I have always been kind of an overachiever, sometimes to a fault. And I found myself in some of these roles, getting kind of bored. And I was always looking for the next thing. I always wanted the next challenge. And I realized that to find that, I needed to start crafting things myself and working with my clients.

And that's what I did. So about five years ago, I started my practice and it. I know you didn't ask specifically about this, but it filled such a need for me to control my time. Okay, so we all have different reasons why we go into business for ourselves. One of mine was to make sure that I was constantly expanding my skillset and working creativity. I can't even say that word today.

04:04 – Gresham Harkless

No worries. I can't say it either. I was going to help you.

04:06 – Liz Czepiel

Creativity in my work. And another reason for me, another big why was ownership of my time. To be able to work on the things that I wanted to work on with the people that sparked that energy in me and, and have that ownership of how I'm spending my days. Right. We spend so much time at work. I needed to own that for myself. So that was the spark to go out on my own.

I started my practice about five years ago and it's evolved from primarily leadership coaching into full-blown project management for different learning programs for clients and also partnering with CEOs to help them scale their business. And I love this statement by one of my clients. He said, you know, I'm looking here I am 10 years into my business, highly successful in the SEO space, and I'm at the point where I'm ready to become a CEO, not just a guy running a company.

So I partner with a lot of people in that same position. Okay. You have a really solid skillset in what you're doing. How do we get you to the next level of actually operating like a CEO and building strategy and being okay, bringing a team along the journey with you? Because that can be challenging. Starting to delegate and trust people with this creation that you've developed yourself. So that's a little bit about how I got into this work.

05:33 – Gresham Harkless

Nice, nice, nice. And it's always interesting how the universe kind of pushes you where you don't necessarily want to be and it leads you to where you want to be and kind of how those kind of opposites kind of attract. So you experience that or the binaries, you experience one side and then you want to, you know, position yourself into doing that. So I know you touched a little bit on it, but I wanted to hear a little bit more about like, how you help the clients that you work with and kind of like, can you take us through, like, exactly what you do from that standpoint?

05:57 – Liz Czepiel

Yeah. So I do a variety of different things and I love that because I've realized over the years that I'm multi-passionate and that's one of the things that my work allows me to do. So in many circumstances, I'm working with startups, organizations in the tech space, and maybe solopreneurs, and they're looking to reach a broader audience. They have this level of expertise. They're not sure how to translate that into something that's actually digestible to their clients.

So in those cases, I partner with them and we have a huge brainstorming session on what they know, what they think the most valuable nuggets are for their clients, and we turn that into a learning program. Sometimes it's online, sometimes it's a live workshop, and Sometimes they're bringing people together in person for a retreat experience.

I partner alongside them to project, manage the whole experience, build out the curriculum and the content, and help them figure out how to leverage what they know in a way that will help them serve more individuals. I also work with clients and help them operationalize everything they need on the HR side of the business to continue growing and engaging their team. So I kind of embedded myself in organizations and helped them figure out everything from their talent acquisition and onboarding processes to driving employee engagement through having performance review processes in place.

So all of kind of the functional, foundational HR things and then for other organizations, other clients, I'm working one on one with the CEO and more of an executive coaching aspect and having those important conversations and helping them overcome roadblocks and being that thought partner to them to continue to build their strategy.

07:54 – Gresham Harkless

Awesome. It sounds like you're kind of like a Swiss army knife, so to speak, where you have these different roles, but you're trying to figure out exactly, like what that client that you're working with might need and then you're able to kind of provide whatever services they're looking for.

08:08 – Liz Czepiel

Yeah, it's all about curing Curiosity. You know, I come in and I have a game plan and a set of templates that I like to use and, you know, all that good stuff. But it needs to be tailored to what the client needs. And a lot of times I start working with someone in one capacity and that evolves because they realize they want to go in a new direction. And, okay, I'm here. What are we going to do? How are we going to get this done? So it's all about being curious and serving the client and where they are and where they want to be.

08:36 – Gresham Harkless

Makes perfect sense. And now I wanted to ask you for what I call your secret sauce. And this might be something that you feel like kind of distinguishes you or sets you apart. So what do you think your secret sauce is?

08:45 – Liz Czepiel

I love that question. I would say something that has served me tremendously and I didn't anticipate this at all, is having the diverse background that I have and being able to engage in organizations from multiple revenue ranges, size ranges, and being able to come to the table and understand the system side of things, understand the numbers and the finance.

Before I started my own practice, I worked for a large consulting firm. So I get that client-consultant relationship. And being able to bring that all to the table in the work that I do now is so extremely helpful, not only to me to understand, you know, the stage of the organization where they're looking to grow, but also to the client. Because a lot of times I'm not partnering with other leadership or HR-type organizations. The industries I work in are across the board. So to have that even language that we can use when it comes to business is an automatic relationship builder.

09:50 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah, absolutely. And yeah, as you said, could you have that diverse background, you can automatically come to kind of a commonplace and probably understand exactly like what that potential client or that client exactly is going through and things you can kind of help them to do to kind of reach those goals. So I think that's pretty awesome that you're able to do that.

So now I wanted to switch gears a little bit and ask you for what I call a CEO hack. This might be an app or a book or a habit that you have, but it's something that makes you more effective and efficient as a CEO.

10:16 – Liz Czepiel

Yes, time management is critical, especially with so many different clients, projects, initiatives, and timelines for all the different pieces that I'm working with. And for me, I keep it simple. I have enough apps tools and systems that I use for project management and building courses and all of I use Outlook I went through this week. I probably have nine different email accounts that I'm managing right now.

So for me to mentally prepare myself and know what I'm doing for the week, I need to have it all in one place. So I have all my accounts in Outlook, and I start each morning by time blocking that day or that week. I use the task function to make sure I know what's coming up, and what's a few weeks out. I use some recurring meetings in there, so I know every Friday this is due.

And then on my calendar, it is just filled with different colors for different projects and priorities. And that's the only way I can mentally make sure that I'm on task. I feel organized. It helps get all that kind of mental conversation out of my head around what's due and to have it in one place where I can actually see it and I know how I'm allotting every hour to the day, that saves me.

11:34 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah, that makes perfect sense. And I can't say how powerful it is just to be able to take something that's in your head and be able to place it someplace else. And it gives you kind of space to not worry about it. Even though we think we're not holding onto it, Even if it's a little small thing or a to-do list, if we don't put it someplace, a lot of times it can block us from doing other things or worrying about other things.

11:52 – Liz Czepiel

Yeah, free up the headspace.

11:54 – Gresham Harkless

Exactly. Exactly. So now I wanted to ask you for what I call a CEO nugget. This is basically a word of wisdom or piece of advice you might have for entrepreneurs and business owners or something you might tell your younger business self.

12:06 – Liz Czepiel

I got to a point in my business where I was doing a lot of comparison. I was looking at a lot of competitors, and I dove into their offerings and their background, and I found myself saying they're just really lucky. They're doing a lot of this work with clients I would love to work with. And I'm not sure how they got there. I feel like I have pretty credible experience and a pretty solid background, but for some reason, these other people have made their businesses work.

And I found myself going through this comparison and internal dialogue one day, and I kind of switched the perspective. I said, well, why not me? If they're doing it with their background, why not me? And that's become a mantra for myself. It's because it's so easy, especially starting out. You have the shiny object syndrome. You're Constantly looking at how you can improve yourself by, you know, maybe following in the footsteps of someone you admire and seeing how you stack up against them. But why not me? Why not me with what I have to bring to the table?

13:17 – Gresham Harkless

Exactly. I love that, you know, why not me? That's a very powerful question to ask. And a lot of the times we kind of underestimate what we're able to accomplish and able to do, but that's just a constant reminder that not only can that person do it, but I can do it too.

So I love that kind of CEO nugget that you provided. And now I wanted to ask you my absolute favorite question, which is kind of the definition of what it means to be a CEO. And we're hoping to have definitions of different CEOs on the podcast. But I wanted to ask you specifically, what being a CEO means to you.

13:45 – Liz Czepiel

I answered this question not too long ago and I'm going to stick with that answer. It means having a vision and continuing to evolve that vision by thinking strategically. I think there's a difference between someone who is running a business and being a CEO. And I think you step into that role as you are able to step out of the day-to-day. Not that that's not a component of your role, but when you're at the point where, you know, you're not responsible for filing the papers or managing the calendar, though, those are super important.

When you're at the point where you can elevate yourself to that strategic level and have a plan for your business for the next three, five years, I think that's when you're at that level of CEO, you are, you know, overseeing and really bringing your vision to life through that way.

14:49 – Gresham Harkless

I love that. And it's this idea of kind of leveling up like you're going through a building or something. When you're on a higher level, you're able to see more out, you're able to make kind of more strategic decisions. As you mentioned, the three or five years in advance. So I think that's a phenomenal definition and I'm glad you shared that with us.

And Liz, I truly appreciate you for taking some time out. What I wanted to do was kind of pass you the mic, so to speak, just to see if there's anything additional you want to let our readers and our listeners know and how best people can get ahold of you.

15:14 – Liz Czepiel

Oh, gosh, yeah. Definitely find me on my website. Hopefully, we'll post that with the link to this recording. And is there anything I want to leave the listeners with? You know I'm always looking to connect with new people. So if you're curious about anything we talked about today, find my website. Happy to hop on a call and get to know everybody.

15:37 – Gresham Harkless

Absolutely. I appreciate that and what we'll do, we'll have the link in the show notes so just anybody can follow up with you Liz. But again, I truly appreciate you taking time out and all the awesome things that you're doing. I hope you have a phenomenal rest of the day.

15:48 – Liz Czepiel

Thank you. You too.

15:50 – 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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