IAM1577 – Founder and Author Empowering Moms to Build Better Businesses Through Natural and Fun Ways

Jill Salzman is currently growing her third entrepreneurial venture, The Founding Moms, where she helps mom entrepreneurs around the world build better businesses. She’s the author of The Best Business Book In The World, newly released, and she's a co-host of Inc. Magazine’s top-rated entertaining business podcast, Breaking Down Your Business, she gave her own TED talk on 11/11/11, and Forbes’ named The Founding Moms one of the Top 10 Websites For Entrepreneurs. She’s shared the speaker stage with Richard Branson, Sheryl Sandberg, Daymond John, and Marilu Henner, and in her spare time, Jill enjoys kloofing, baking, and erasing her daughters’ crayon artwork from the kitchen walls.

• CEO Story: Jill’s latest venture was born by accident because of running two unrelated businesses and was pregnant with baby number 2, she was very panicked. She meets up with other moms who are going bananas as well. It went so well that one mom asked to open up another chapter near her place. It rings the bell for Jill as a business idea. And right now it's going global with more than 12,000 members.
• Business Service: Started with meet-ups, and invited speakers. Launched an online platform on a membership/subscription basis. Constantly adding new courses.
• Secret Sauce: Business does not have to be boring. Creative during the webinar. Very transparent and hilarious.
• CEO Hack: Systematizing to make things easy
• CEO Nugget: (1) Have more patience (2) Just do it
• CEO Defined: Freedom and Control

Website: foundingmoms.com/books

Instagram: founding mom
LinkedIn: founding mom
Facebook: founding moms

Episode Link: https://iamceo.co/2019/01/03/iam143-founder-and-author-empowering-moms-to-build-better-businesses-through-natural-and-fun-ways/

Check out one of our favorite CEO Hack’s Audible. Get your free audiobook and check out more of our favorite CEO Hacks HERE

Transcription

The full transcription is only available to CBNation Library Members. Sign up today!

 Please Note: Our team is using the AI CEO Hacks: Exemplary AI and Otter.ai to support our podcast transcription. While we know it's improving there may be some inaccuracies, we are updating and improving them. Please contact us if you notice any issues, you can also test out Exemplary AI here.

00:28 – 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 Harkness 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.

00:53- Gresham Harkless

Hello, this is Gresh from the I AM CEO Podcast and I have a very special guest on the show today. Have Jill Salzman of the Founding Moms. Jill, it's awesome to have you on the show.

01:03 – Jill Salzman

Thank you so much. I'm so happy to be here.

01:05 – Gresham Harkless

Happy to have you. What I wanted to do was just read a little bit more about Jill so you can hear about all the awesome things that she has done and is doing. Jill Salzman is currently growing her third entrepreneurial venture, the Founding Moms, where she helps mom entrepreneurs around the world build better businesses. She's the author of the best business book in the World, newly released. She's a co-host of Inc.

Magazine's top-rated entertaining business podcast, Breaking Down Your Business. She gave her TED talk on 111111 and Forbes named the Founding Moms one of the top 10 websites for entrepreneurs. She shared the speaker stage with Richard Branson, Sheryl Sandberg, Damon John, and Merlo Henner. In her spare time, Jill enjoys Kloofy, baking, and erasing her daughter's crayon artwork from the kitchen walls. Jill, are you ready to speak to the I AM CEO community?

[restrict paid=”true”]

01:56- Jill Salzman

I sure am.

01:58 – Gresham Harkless

The first question I had was just, I don't know what kloofing is. That might be my first question, but.

02:03 – Jill Salzman

No, but here's my first hot tip. Always include something nobody knows what it is. Ask you all about it. I was told that in high school and I use that on my resume all through college. It just means cliff jumping in Afrikaans because I lived in South Africa for a little while and they do this crazy activity there that I do not recommend.

02:24- Gresham Harkless

Okay. Well, now I know. I don't know if I wanted to know because I definitely don't think I'll be doing that anytime soon, but more power to you for doing it. So I wanted to start everything out was hearing about your CEO story and what led you to start your business.

02:37 – Jill Salzman

Yeah, I am on my third business and I mean, I could give you the boring old. It started with a great idea, but that's not true. My latest business, the Founding Moms, was started totally by accident because I was running two completely unrelated businesses and I was pregnant with baby number two and I was very, very panicked. How do you run a business with babies? Who does that? Who's crazy? I need crazy people to meet with me and tell me how they're doing it.

So I just started a little meetup and I said, hey, if you live in the Chicago area, come and meet with me. Let's talk about this because I'm going to go bananas. A lot of people also feel like they are going to go bananas. So we got together in a coffee shop and after a couple of meetings, we decided to meet up monthly. One woman said, could you open up another chapter close to me? When she did that, I went, boom business idea. So it kind of just started feeling like the biggest thing I'd ever done. It is, to date, the biggest thing I've ever done.

It's phenomenal. It's been eight years. We're in almost 60 cities around the world, in 12 countries. We have 12,000 members. I'm two books in. It's just a, it's been an amazing ride. I love it. I love entrepreneurship altogether and learned a lot over the years.

03:56- Gresham Harkless

Awesome. Well, that definitely sounds like a great entrepreneurial story because a lot of times you have an idea, but you actually. Well, it doesn't actually become an idea because you start to scratch your own itch, so to speak. So it sounds like you had like an issue that you just wanted to solve yourself. Then next thing one other person says, oh, can you do that? Then you say, okay, this might be a business.

04:17 – Jill Salzman

Yeah, Every single company I started before that, all two of them, I thought the same thing. Oh, if I start this, people are going to come. It's hilarious that I kept hearing, no, no, you got to be self-serving. You have to be solving a problem that's closest to home. I would laugh and go, no, no, I gotta figure it out. Then lo and behold, I hit it. It's just so fascinating that I really, truly can't express to you enough how much I thought I was the only one.

I was sure of it also because nothing existed beforehand specifically for moms. But it's just crazy to me how I was 1000% confident. I've learned in eight years there are probably millions of us around the world. I'm sure there's a whole segment of dad entrepreneurs as well. But it's just funny that I thought it was just me, and it's not. Solving my own problem has been the biggest boon to my business and helped out so many other women that it's. It just excites me to talk about it.

05:14 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah, that's awesome. That's awesome. I wanted to hear a little bit more to excite you even more, to find out how you're serving these clients. So what are you doing with the women? What does the founding moms do?

05:24 – Jill Salzman

We began as just those meetups like the one I told you about, where I went for coffee, and we met up once a month and we invited speakers eventually to come and teach us how to do things. A couple of years ago, we decided to launch an online portal arm, complement to the offline world. So we launched the Founding Moms community, where for 35 bucks a month, you get access to video courses we release every month. You get a forum. We have business coaching programs.

We're constantly adding and coming up with new things because as our members show up and say, well, I'm looking for this, we will create it and we will serve her. So we do monthly webinars, weekly Facebook lives, daily email. I mean, there's so much going on because so much help is needed. I could cry. So it's a lot of work, and it's a lot of serving a lot of different people with different needs.

06:14 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah, that makes sense. But I imagine incorporating that online arm probably helps out a ton because you're able to kind of serve probably more people than may be able to show up at the meetup and everything, you would think.

06:25 – Jill Salzman

I'm ready to say, yes, you're absolutely right, because that's the theory behind the whole thing. But so far, our online platform is so new that more people are still showing up offline. We're sort of. It's not fully combined yet. We're in the middle of working on that. But until then, yes, that's the theory, and that's what I think is going to happen in the future. But it's not happened yet.

06:45 – Gresham Harkless

Okay, but it's in the works. That all sounds good. So. Now I wanted to ask you for what I call your secret sauce. This could be for you or your organization, but what do you feel kind of set you apart or set your organization apart?

06:56 – Jill Salzman

I can't tell you. It's a secret.

06:58 – Gresham Harkless

Okay, that's true. That's true.

07:00 – Jill Salzman

I'm totally joking.

07:01 – Gresham Harkless

It's just me and you, right?

07:03 – Jill Salzman

Totally. No one's listening. I for sure have taken a stance on the fact that business does not have to be boring. So every single webinar I do, almost every Facebook Live I do, I get dressed up, I wear boas and mustaches and weird sunglasses and hats, and I am pretty much the clown, the face of the company because I like to impress upon people, business doesn't have to be boring.

We have a ton of fun doing what we're doing. So I end up often looking like the crazy person who's leading this company. But I don't mind because we attract the best members who get it, who don't need stuffy, who don't want to go through all of those business practices they read about somewhere and use all those business terms and jargon that I can't stand. We are very transparent, authentic human, and hilarious in a lot of what we do. Yeah.

07:54 – Gresham Harkless

That's awesome.

07:54 – Jill Salzman

Yeah.

07:55 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah. It seems like a lot of times I always find, like, humor and being able to kind of break the ice, so to speak, helps people to kind of digest information or drop their guard, so to speak. So sometimes when you're talking about all this business jargon, nobody knows what the heck you're talking about anyway. So when you're able to put, like, a mustache or whatever on, like you said, that drops people's garden.

08:12 – Jill Salzman

I mean, I don't know what the transgender community thinks of it. I am not trans. But beyond that, I just love that people see it and go, oh, wait, I'm allowed to laugh. Like, I can have a good time. It's relieving for them. I think you probably know this too, as the podcast host. The number one thing you constantly hear from entrepreneurs is fear is the thing blocking them. Everybody has fear about moving forward or doing the next thing, and it kind of cuts away at the fear if you're laughing. Like, you can't really be that scared if you're rolling in it.

08:43 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah, I've never been too scared when I was laughing, so I think that makes perfect sense that I'm laughing too much sometimes. But that's completely different now. I wanted to switch gears a little bit and ask you for what I call a CEO hack. This might be an app, a book, or a habit that you have, or maybe it's a little bit more about your community that you can tell us, but it's something that makes you more effective and efficient as an entrepreneur and business owner.

09:05 – Jill Salzman

There are so many things I've learned over the years, and I hate to use a word that we like to hate in the business jargon world, but systematizing has made things so easy for me, and I didn't use to understand what that was, but for me, at least, if I. Every time I figure out something that's really tedious for me to do and I figure out how to make it so much easier or get it off my plate and give it to a virtual assistant, that's just. Life is that much easier, and running a business is that much more enjoyable.

I need a lot of things systematized because we have a lot of content that we're constantly producing. So, yeah, just making sure it all runs really smoothly is tough. But if you systematize, it's way easier. Can we think of a different word for that? I don't even like the word, but I don't know. Making things happen routinely and regularly and consistently.

09:51 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah, that's almost as fun. They just put. Yeah, put ing in the back of everything. Sometimes that helps. So systematizing sounds a little bit better than systematized, right? Okay, that'll work. You'll buy it. All right. No, I think that makes perfect sense. It's funny, because a lot of times when you're running a business or you're looking at a business, you forget that they're made up of systems. So a lot of times those businesses that are most successful, when you break down, distill everything down, you realize the systems and their steps by which everything's done to be successful.

10:18- Jill Salzman

The way you just said it reminds me that the easiest way I've learned to do it is just go grab a pad of sticky notes and just start writing each thing that you do, each step, and just put it on your wall and just walk yourself through it and you'll just start. Do that for a week and you'll realize the entire system or the way that the system should run.

10:34- Gresham Harkless

There you go. As you see on my wall, I have a bunch of stuff up there. Right on time. So now I wanted to ask you for what I call a CEO nugget. This might be a word of wisdom. Or a piece of advice that you. Or if you can hop into a time machine, what would you tell your younger business self?

10:51 – Jill Salzman

Oh, well, I feel like I got two different answers for you. If I hopped into that machine and met myself 10 years ago, I would say I would just yell at myself to have a lot more patience. I had no patience for years and nobody worked fast enough for me. Nothing was done on time. Nothing was done quickly enough. I have learned that it really does pay. I mean, patience really is a virtue. Why fight it? So I would tell myself, slow down. Not actually, that's not true.

I wouldn't say slow down. I would just say, that if I'm doing everything at lightning speed, just know that it will. It will happen. It will come. Wait, what's the other thing you asked? Because I had a different answer for it. Oh, what I would tell Just like the thing or the phrase or the piece of advice I would offer most people, I just like to plagiarize Nike. Just do it. Just do it. Don't think about that. Just do it.

11:41 – Gresham Harkless

No, never.

11:41 – Jill Salzman

Not enough doing.

11:42 – Gresham Harkless

There you go. Especially in business, you have to do. There are no entrepreneurs. There are real entrepreneurs that are out there and entrepreneurs take action.

11:48 – Jill Salzman

So, yeah, a thousand percent, absolutely.

11:51 – Gresham Harkless

Let me ask you this. So what made you? Do you feel like, made you more patient? Was there something that kind of forced that or just kind of manifested itself over time? You just look back and say, maybe I should have just cut myself some slack.

12:02 – Jill Salzman

I mean, I probably said that to myself every day for a long time. No, I don't think it was one, like a big event. I think it was over time being able to have enough time working in entrepreneurship that I started being able to look back in hindsight and see, oh, man. Well, that didn't happen until this date. Oh, wait. That next thing I was waiting for didn't happen for two years. The best example I could think of on the fly right now is that I did a TED Talk, as you had said, at the beginning, on 1111 11. So a long time ago, 2011. I thought at the time I was obsessed with TED talks.

I just thought, oh, I did one. Forget it. I'm done. I can retire. I'm going to be so famous. I thought all of the positive things about it. Then it was sort of like crickets. Nothing happened after year one. Nothing. Six years later, the COO of Facebook and the founder of the Lean In organization, Sheryl Sandberg. I don't know how she found it somehow she found my TED Talk six years later, and she put a giant photo of me in her newsletter to millions of her members. Just talking about it. It was Mother's Day.

Just talking about how the title of my TED Talk is Why Moms Make the Best Entrepreneurs. I just remember in that moment, even thinking six years, who. If you had told me in year two that something was coming out of this, I would never have thought you were right. So I've learned the hard way and the long way that patience really does pay off. But all of this stuff takes time, and I hate it. I hate it. But it's true.

13:29 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah, it's the law of the universe sometimes. But it's like your overnight success, right? The six-year overnight success, it sounds like. Yeah, absolutely.

13:38 – Jill Salzman

That's going to be my next book title.

13:39 – Gresham Harkless

There you go. There you go. Awesome. Awesome. So now I wanted to ask you my absolute favorite question, and it's the definition of what it means to be a CEO. We're hoping to have different quotes, unquote, CEOs on this show to kind of look at, see what it means to be a CEO, what it means to be an entrepreneur, what it means to be a business owner. But I wanted to ask you, what does being a CEO mean to you?

13:58 – Jill Salzman

CEO to me means freedom. It's just the freedom to. To do stuff when I wanted to do it, how I wanted to do it. I guess the negative answer to that, the flip side is control. It's freedom and control all at the same time. I love it all because you just get to do your thing when you want to do it when you need to do it at your speed. I've worked in corporate America, and I've worked in other places. I would never trade this for the world. I used to joke, well, if you paid me five mil, maybe I'd give this up. I don't think I would. It's just such freedom. It's amazing. I love it.

14:32 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah, absolutely. That makes sense. A lot of people are driven by that freedom when they decide to start something because it lets you create whatever you desire to create, not what somebody else is telling you to create. So I think that's an incredible definition.

14:43 – Jill Salzman

Yeah, well, I'd rather be a prisoner of my own ideas.

14:45 – Gresham Harkless

I love that. I love that. That's a T-shirt. That's a T-shirt idea. Well, I. There you go. I appreciate you, Jill. What I wanted to do was pass you to the mic, so to speak, just to see if there's anything additional you want to let our readers and our listeners know and also like how they find out about your book that just went live and all the awesome things that you're doing, including your podcast and of course, finding out more about the community.

15:06 – Jill Salzman

Yes, thank you for asking. I would love it all. If you guys go to founding moms.com you'll pretty much find everything there. The podcast is called Breaking Down Your Business. That has its own URL, breakingdownyourbusiness.com but foundingmoms.com you can find my books, you can find all of our offline exchanges, you can find our online FMC portal. Everything, everything ever known to womankind or mankind is there.

15:30 – Gresham Harkless

Awesome.

15:31 – Jill Salzman

Well, oh, and I'm at Founding Mom all over the socials. Come find.

15:35 – Gresham Harkless

Okay. Absolutely. What we'll do is we'll have those links in the show notes just so that anybody can follow up with you. But Jill, I truly appreciate you. I hope you have a phenomenal rest of the day.

15:44 – Jill Salzman

All right.

15:46 – 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.

[/restrict]