IAM956- Marketing Firm Owner Supports Organizations

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[00:00:15.19] – Intro

Are you ready to hear business stories and learn effective ways to build relationships, generate sales, and level up your business from awesome CEOs, entrepreneurs, and founders without listening to a long, long, long interview? If so, you've come to the right place. Gresh values your time and is ready to share with you the valuable info you're in search of. This is the I AM CEO podcast.

[00:00:44.39] – Gresham Harkless

Hello. Hello. Hello. This is Gresh from the I Am CEO podcast, and I have a very, very special guest on the show today. I have Amanda Mottola of Ultra Way. Amanda, it's awesome to have you on the show.

[00:00:53.39] – Amanda Mottola

Yeah. Thank you so much. I'm excited to be here.

[00:00:55.60] – Gresham Harkless

Super excited to have you on as well. And before we jump in, I want to read a little bit more about Amanda so you can hear about all the awesome things that she's doing. And Amanda is the owner of a marketing firm called Ultra Way. She started her life journey in Assun Cham, Paraguay, where she later returned to South America to find her birth family. The poverty and realization that this is where she could be fueled her desire to live life to the fuel fullest and to do honest work for the good of the world.

To date, Ultra Way has taken less and contributed thousands of dollars to organizations supporting veterans, first responders, children, and families. For fun, Amanda enjoys traveling, spending time with family, cooking, antiquing, drinking a good great Cabernet, and writing, of course. Amanda, are you ready to speak to the I AM CEO community?

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[00:01:37.50] – Amanda Mottola

Yes. Of course.

[00:01:38.59] – Gresham Harkless

Awesome. Well, let's do it then. So to kick everything off, I wanted to rewind the clock a little bit and hear a little bit more about how you got started. Could take us through your CEO story? We'll let you get started with all the work you're doing.

[00:01:47.40] – Amanda Mottola

Yeah. Of course. It's not quite a short story, so I'll try and condense it for you. But like you said, I was adopted from Paraguay when I was, you know, very young. And you know, that's impacting me throughout my life. But it's my entrepreneurial spirit that kind of all starts back, probably about the time when I was like thirteen or so. I was going to a private high school and all the other girls got cell phones pretty much handed to them. And so I went to my dad thinking, you know, I was gonna get a cell phone and everyone else was getting one. And my dad looked at me and he said, Absolutely not. He goes, You want a cell phone? He goes, You aren't it.

And I look at him and I go, Dad, it's child labor. I'm fourteen years old. I can't get a job. You're crazy. I was not so thrilled and probably had some not-so-choice words for him. And, I left that conversation bewildered and fuming. And I grabbed a phone book and yes, a phone book. And there had been this cheerleading store on, the main street in town and I called the woman up and said listen, I want a cell phone. I know how to work. I was like I don't have much experience. I'm technically not supposed to work. But, I know a lot about cheerleading. I've been cheerleading for a long time. Can I help out at your store? So she hired me on a Geico trial basis. And I started working there. I made enough money to get the phone. I'm working six bucks, you know, under the table.

[00:03:09.40] – Gresham Harkless

Nice.

[00:03:09.80] – Amanda Mottola

And, I went to my dad. He dropped what he was doing. He brought me to get my phone. And I think for me, that was one of the biggest, you know, lessons that I've learned in my life. It's fueled my ambition and if there's a will, there's a way. So I took that story and carried on to different parts of my life. I had, like, a little brief sports fanatics show in college where I used to interview NFL players. Right. It just really wasn't fulfilling for me at the end of the day. So the summer of twenty fifteen, I set a date to go find my birth family. And that's, like, really when, like, a lot of things in my life changed. And, I was sitting on a couple of boards of directors because I loved giving back. And I was just so torn with what I wanted to do with my life and confused. But finding my family gave me that sense of closure.

And as you mentioned before, it showed me where I could be and made me feel like I have to do more for my fellow Americans, my fellow community members, and my family, that's down there and not up here. So there's so many opportunities here. So I came back from South America after traveling to two different countries to find my family. I decided to get into politics. I ran for the Board of Education with zero political experience. I was new to the town, and like had zero name recognition. I was the only Hispanic candidate and the youngest candidate to run and I ended up taking the seventh out of nine seats.

So I was very proud of that and my trip fueled that drive to step into the unknown and something that in a lot of people's minds had no business doing because I wasn't in education, I didn't have kids, but for me, it wasn't about any of that it was about doing good for my community and bringing kind of a fresh take. So shortly after this, I launched my LLC, as a light at the end of the tunnel sort of idea. I was too scared to do it on to go off and just do it. I had responsibilities and that caused this ongoing fear that it was frivolous to go off and do my own thing when I had a new mortgage, I was about to get married, and I wanted kids, to start my own thing just seemed irresponsible.

And I built that up in my head. But having the LLC though gave me that glimmer of hope that maybe someday. So through that, I was unhappy in the corporate world dealing with politics. At one point, a little little bullying action going on. Then I got laid off while pregnant and that was kind of the icing on the cake for me to get out. Because I was so set on the fact that this biweekly paycheck just hung over my head as a motivation but also like shackles. It made me feel like this was the right thing to do for my family, and my future, and it was secure until it wasn't secure. So getting laid off for me was a huge game changer and it was I guess kind of the kick in the pants I needed to go full force with my business.

And of course, my son when he was born I looked at him and I went there's no way I'm going back to the potential of having a bullying or a confrontational situation with a teammate, that wasn't acting like a teammate or the politics of business or the red tape or any of that or the facade that a company was doing good for the community when it was more for like a face a Facebook plug. So I just looked at my son and I go I'm not going back. I have my LC. I'm gonna do it. You know? That's not working for someone else is not guaranteed. I was just ready to kind of take the bull by the horns and do my own thing. Started consulting in twenty nineteen, for just one client while I raised my son. My husband was working in a different state.

So it was a full-time mom and part-time work, which was okay. I got my feet wet a little bit and my confidence up. And then in twenty, I went full force, and ended up hitting my pre-COVID sales goals, and my client goals despite being in a new state and having zero clients. So I was looking back on it like it floors me. And it just feels like everything happened the way it was supposed to. Even though sometimes I was banging my head against the wall or coming home miserable and it's just like looking back now it's like I wish I could have told myself then it could be so much better.

[00:07:23.30] – Gresham Harkless

Yeah. Well, I appreciate you for sharing that. And I think so many times we have, those those seeds of, like, kind of imposter syndrome or feeling like we shouldn't take those chances or take those gaps. But I think, like you, I've been laid off. And sometimes when you get laid off, it kinda snaps you into, okay. Nothing is guaranteed. These things that we think are guaranteed that we think are sometimes stable, and sometimes are not.

And sometimes the best bet that we can make is on ourselves just as you did when you were a kid, and finding a way out of no way. Sometimes we have to be able to do that, and there are opportunities that us to start to look at things in a completely different way. And so I touched on it a little bit when I read your bio. Could you take us through a little bit more on this LLC, this company that you started, and how you serve the clients that you work with?

[00:08:06.19] – Amanda Mottola

Yeah. So one of my first few jobs out of college was at a promotional marketing company. And when you're in college, they teach you all about, like ad agencies and just like these higher level marketing job concepts as opposed to like all of the little things that go in marketing. Because every company should have some sort of marketing department or not they outsource like every company should be doing marketing no matter what they are. And, I had no idea that, like, the branded product ad specialty space existed. And it's like a twenty-billion-dollar industry. And it's so much fun. Essentially, I online shop for my clients.

So I have, a database of branded products for everything from pens to more corporate premium gifts like Bose speakers or various other apparel items. What I do is I put together a package for my clients based on their budgets their needs, and their marketing goals. And I give them the right items, and then we put the brand on it. So essentially I'm a distributor, and I love it. I love what I'm doing. And, in every job since that promo company I worked for, I always tried incorporating that into each of the agencies I worked at because I just felt, like, drawn back to it because I just enjoyed it so much.

So that's the full, the main focus of what we do, but we also do some consulting, and eventually, we're gonna be adding some sweepstakes and contests, because I have experience in that as well, working on some, you know, major, brand programs. So that's what we have in the works right now. It's a lot of fun. I enjoy, showing my clients that there's an easier way to do marketing, just because I have a great sense of knowledge on all the decoration methods and the opportunities that exist within the promotional product space.

[00:09:56.00] – Gresham Harkless

Awesome. So would you consider that to be what I call your secret sauce, the thing you feel sets you apart and makes you unique? Is it that ability to make that transition and to be able to bring that to life for clients and customers?

[00:10:05.89] – Amanda Mottola

Yeah. Of course. Some of my competitors focus purely on the transaction. So if you were to come to me and say, hey. I want a pen. They'd be like, alright. Here's x amount of pen options. Take your pick. And there are some online-based companies where that's pretty much their model. If you go on, you buy what you need, and that's it. You search through a bunch of items. I don't have products on my site because for me, it's about the conversation and the relationship, and I'd much rather have a client with me for life than someone who just comes and orders pens once, doesn't see any results, and then doesn't use me again.

[00:10:38.29] – Gresham Harkless

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

[00:10:49.29] – Amanda Mottola

There's a couple. One is this book called The Daily Stoic. So this book, I read daily. It's six meditations on wisdom. So there's one for each day. Three sixty-six. I don't know why there are three sixty-six.

[00:11:06.60] – Gresham Harkless

A leap year.

[00:11:09.39] – Amanda Mottola

Right. I was like, that's okay. So, yeah, it's it's just really great. Like, the passages are fantastic. So it breaks down, a philosopher's word, into modern-day text, the author's Ryan Holiday. And it's just very digestible. It's a great way to start the day. It gets your head in a good space because it seems like a lot of them are very similar in the sense that it says don't worry about what you cannot control. That seems to be the premise of most of them. But I mean, it's such valuable content to have replayed every day in your head. I know since I started reading it, I just don't get stressed out.

I get stressed and it also could be not having the stress of working in that corporate environment and like that cutthroat environment. But I think this book has helped, set my mindset right for the day. And then the second book I just started, so, it's called Traction. I guarantee this book's gonna help me increase my revenue, from the few chapters I've already read. And then, I also do, like, a gratification journal, which I find if I don't do it, I'm not as successful. But when I do it, like, good thing, like, pretty much flies at me crazy. So those are probably my biggest hacks.

[00:12:26.00] – Gresham Harkless

Yeah. Absolutely. And so I wanted to ask you for what I call a CEO nugget. You might have already touched on this, but this is a word of wisdom or something you might tell a client, or if you jumped into a time machine, you might tell your younger business self.

[00:12:37.79] – Amanda Mottola

I want people to know it's possible to love what you do. I've seen so many people throughout the years and not that I'm old or anything, but I've seen people, young and old, that are just miserable with their jobs. So if we spend the majority of our life working, like, shouldn't it be something we love?

[00:12:53.89] – Gresham Harkless

Awesome. Awesome. So now I wanted to ask you my absolute favorite question, which is the definition of what it means to be a CEO. And we're hoping to have different quote-unquote CEOs on the show. So, Amanda, what does being a CEO mean to you?

[00:13:04.00] – Amanda Mottola

It means being a leader and sending the elevator down to future generations.

[00:13:10.10] – Gresham Harkless

Nice. I love that. I love your analogies, because getting that opportunity to continue to succeed, but also understand that we're all intertwined and be able to bring people along to show them and to even learn from them. I think that is true leadership. And I think when you're able to do that and you're executing on that, as you said so well, you're not just impacting yourself or your family. You start to create that ripple effect and you're impacting your clients and the people your clients work with and they serve. And it starts to get broad and you get to see that impact that you make. But if you're doing it well, then you really, start to see the fruits of that. So I appreciate that.

[00:13:44.89] – Amanda Mottola

Yeah. No problem.

[00:13:46.39] – Gresham Harkless

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

[00:13:58.29] – Amanda Mottola

Yeah. Of course. So I talk a lot. I think I probably dived into more than what you needed me to. But, yeah, I love connecting with new people and learning new things. I'm big into travel and culture, so I love knowing people in different areas. In case I end up there, like I wanna, I always have someone I come and be like, Hey, like, I'm in Atlanta or Hey, I'm here. Like, let's get together. I know COVID makes things challenging, but hopefully, things will get back to normal sooner rather than later.

But, yeah, please follow me, on Facebook and Instagram at Ochoaway. Part of the reason why I created Och Your Way was it didn't exist, so I was able to get the handle for everything without fighting for it. Yeah. So it's the power of creating a brand and having a word that doesn't exist. But, yeah, please follow us on our journey. We're hoping in the next few years to hit the million-dollar mark. That's that's my goal. I wanna bring on more teammates and show them that they can love what they do and still have that rhythm. And, yeah, feel free to pick my brain, and reach out. If there are any Paraguayans out there. There's not a whole lot up here.

So, yeah, definitely reach out to me. I'm putting together this, custom curated branded, Paraguayan box of goodies, which I'm gonna sell. And then a portion of that is gonna go to help helping someone find their family.  So I'm gonna be I'm actually in the process. I came up with the idea on Friday. Oh, nice. Fully ready to be executed. So if anyone is Paraguay ing out there or just loves supporting adoptees on their journey of just reconnecting with their past, keep an eye out because I'll be posting this, cool custom box that I'm putting together, some awesome Paraguay swag.

[00:15:41.10] – Gresham Harkless

Nice. Well, I appreciate that, Amanda. We will have the links and information in the show notes. I truly appreciate you for diving in deep because I think that's the beauty of hearing so many stories and hearing what everybody's doing is that it brings us so much closer together. And I love that idea. You had it right before we had the opportunity to do the podcast, so I love that even more. So we had the opportunity to talk about it. And I think so many times in life, we don't realize the impact that we can make.

But I think that when you start to believe that you believe and execute on crafting your life, your business, and all those things with that rhythm that you spoke to, that's when you start to see great creations and making a huge impact and things just take off from there. So appreciate you for doing that and sharing that with us today, and I hope you have a great rest of the day.

[00:16:22.79] – 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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