Ep. 96 with Ashlei Rolloff | Founder & CEO - NERD HERD

Listening to Your Inner Applause

A job title can feel like a home until it disappears. Kelly Kirk sits down with Ashlei Rolloff, founder of Nerd Herd, to talk about what happens when your identity is wrapped up in achievement, and how to rebuild confidence, clarity, and joy when life forces a pivot.

Ashlei shares her path from early marketing roots and self-taught design skills to becoming a corporate VP of marketing in a predominantly male HVAC industry, then stepping into full-time entrepreneurship. We dig into why niching down is a growth strategy, how specializing in B2B HVAC and the broader AEC space makes branding and lead generation sharper, and what “saying no” unlocks when you track what actually drives sales. We also get tactical about scaling with EOS Traction, peer groups as a true board of directors, time blocking for finance, and building an A-team of partners so you’re not carrying every function alone.

Motherhood brings the conversation to the heart: Ashlei opens up about infertility, IVF, mental health, and the courage it takes to choose a one-and-done family with peace. We talk about work-life integration for parents, the mental load, delegating at home (yes, even a house manager), and why healing work matters for leadership. Ashlei also shares how values, mindfulness, spirituality, and body-based tools like somatic experiencing can help you lead with more steadiness and less burnout.

If this conversation helps you feel seen, subscribe, share it with a mompreneur friend, and leave a quick review so more women can find Reclaiming Your Hue.

Resources Mentioned:

• Start With Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action
• The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma
• Traction: Get a Grip on Your Business
• EOS Website

Connect with Ashlei:

• LI: Ashlei Rolloff
• IG: @ashleirolloff

Contact the Host, Kelly Kirk:

• Email: info.ryh7@gmail.com

Get Connected/Follow:

• The Hue Drop Newsletter: Subscribe Here
• IG: @ryh_pod & @thekelly.tanke.kirk
• Facebook: Reclaiming Your Hue Facebook Page
• CAKES Affiliate Link: KELLYKIRK

Credits:

• Editor: Joseph Kirk
• Music: Kristofer Tanke 

Thanks for listening & cheers to Reclaiming Your Hue! 

Transcript

Welcome And Mission

Kelly 0:10

Welcome everybody to Reclaiming Your Hue, where we are dedicated to empowering women to embrace and amplify their inherent brilliance. Our mission is to inspire mothers and entrepreneurs to unlock their full potential and radiate their true selves. I'm your host, Kelly Kirk, and each week my goal is to bring to you glorious guests as well as solo episodes. So let's dive in. Good morning, Ashley. Good morning. Welcome. I'm so happy to have you here. Yes, I feel the same. And it's really nice to see your face again.

Ashlei 0:45

Yes. I feel like it's been forever since we first chatted. Doesn't it?

Kelly 0:49

Like when was that? Remind me.

How Community Creates Opportunity

Ashlei 0:52

I feel like it was last year. Like before Christmas. It was. Yeah. It feels like it's been like years since we last chatted. Like, you know, everything that's happened, I think, between before the holiday season to today, it's incredible to just think of like all the movement and all the shifts. And there's been a lot. The year of the fire horse.

Kelly 1:17

We are we're gonna have fun talking about all of this. I'm sure that the listeners are so eager. But before we dive in, I would love for you to share how it is that we got connected. Because I love the power of community, and the power of community really played out in us getting connected. So do you remember who introduced us? I think it was Constantina. She is she is a gem. She is, she really is, and I just saw her. What is it last week? Maybe the week before that. I just love where she's going, how she's doing it, who she's surrounding herself with. Yeah.

unknown 1:56

Yeah.

Kelly 1:57

She is a gem. She's a diamond.

Ashlei 1:59

I love it. And an expander, I will add, right? Like, and um, I don't even know that I've mentioned this to her, but I absolutely should. She is the reason why I um hired one of my employees. She connected us. Yeah. Yeah, she connected us. We had coffee, um, and Lauren and I just continued to stay connected. And she had an opportunity where she was now available for work, and I snatched her up real quick. And um, that was an introduction from Constantina. So it's like, you know, a nod to the power of community and just surrounding yourself with people who are like-minded and have the same energy and the same values, like it's just a compounding effect.

Expanders And High-Trust Connections

Kelly 2:44

She, what I appreciate about her is to your point, it the expander. So for the listeners, can you expand on what you mean by that? Because I think that this is important too for the listeners to understand the importance of who you surround yourself with.

Ashlei 3:01

Very good. So there's this book. I have not read it, but um it I can speak to the concepts in it. So this book is about um people in your life, right? They fall into four quadrants. They're either multipliers, dividers, subtractors, or adders. I have the book. Oh my gosh.

Kelly 3:17

I have it. It's I think it fell back here. The power of people.

Ashlei 3:21

The power of people, yes. Um and in that book, it just puts people into four different quadrants, right? And I feel like Constantina is the multiplier. You meet her. Yeah. You meet her and she just expands, expands, expands, right? She's the type of person, and expanders, multipliers are the type of people you meet, and they're always looking for opportunities to introduce you, to be on a podcast, to introduce you to like-minded people. Like, and it's the concept of doing that with with the anticipation of receiving nothing in return, right?

Kelly 4:02

She what I love about her too is she is very cautious about how she's connecting people too. She doesn't just connect to connect. No, like she wants to get to know you, she will spend the time to get to know you, and then be very cautious about how she is connecting you to other people, and vice versa, right? Right. She doesn't want it to be empty calories, so to speak.

Ashlei 4:31

So yeah, it's quality over quantity. And I feel like, especially in the Minneapolis networking scene, you can kind of get a mixed bag, right? Like for sure, not everyone is as intentional and is um connecting you with somebody who can provide value. And I appreciate the people in my life, and she's one of them, that has such intentionality around the people that she's introducing. And you know that when that introduction is made with a person who's an expander and values high-quality relationships, that that that something is going to happen of that, right? Yeah, something is going to manifest out of that relationship.

Entrepreneurship Roots And Career Detours

Kelly 5:12

So good, Ashley. When we sat down and talked, met for the first time in person, talked about this connection through Constantina. I didn't know much about your business at that point. All I knew was that you and Constantina were doing something very similar. But there was a niche with what you are doing for the branding. So before we share what your business is, I would love for you to share with the listeners what came first for you. Was it motherhood or was it entrepreneurship?

Ashlei 5:52

Entrepreneurship, definitely. Uh, I feel like I've always had that bug inside of me. And I don't think that I realized it until I was probably in high school. And um at that time was involved with uh an organization called DECA. It's a high school.

Kelly 6:09

I was a part of DECA too. If you gotta be on Decca time.

Ashlei 6:12

Yes. So uh yeah, DECA is kind of where I got my start in marketing and just fell in love with all the things business and marketing, and was the merchandising manager for a school store, and then um competed with uh several projects, but one project in particular for a school store went to the international level. Um I took a little deviation after um falling in love with marketing and went to college originally to be a probation officer. So I have half a degree in criminal justice and then decided um it wasn't filling my cup. I wasn't getting that level of fulfillment. And so I took a two-year hiatus to California and spent 14 years working in food and beverage before I came back to marketing and finished my degree back in Minnesota and just fell in love with marketing again and business. And I was blessed. Uh, we'll get into this, I'm sure, at some point here, but I was blessed in my most recent corporate career to work with serial entrepreneurs. And then I feel like I got bit by the bug again. I got that um energy around having multiple different businesses and serving multiple different customers. And um, yeah, the rest is history. And I've been now a full-time entrepreneur since September of 2022. So going on to our fourth year, but my business was started in 2015 while I was finishing out college.

Kelly 7:45

Share a little bit more about what that means.

Ashlei 7:48

Yeah, so I started a business when I was in college. It took me 10 years to get my college degree because I was working full-time, self-funding my way through my education and working full-time as well. So just juggling all the things. Uh, and I had a lot of people coming to me asking for support in the marketing capacity, whether it was websites, branding, you name it. Um, you know, every deliverable under the sun. And this was back in 2015. So I it was during my last year of college, I needed a legal vehicle to move all of this revenue through. And that's when I started my business.

Kelly 8:30

Cool.

Ashlei 8:31

And then um, I was already actually working in my corporate career at that time as well. And so I had a business on the side. I was working for a company where they had asked me to come in and stand up their marketing program. Um, and that was an HVAC company.

Kelly 8:47

Yeah.

Ashlei 8:47

Prior to that, I was in real estate for a period of time. Okay. Um, on the marketing side. Okay. And then I also worked in a bank and then various jobs throughout the food and beverage industry at the management level.

Kelly 9:00

Okay. I want to sit here for a moment. Um, the first thing that's coming to mind is that every story on this podcast is different. It's unique. There is zero, nothing zilch that is cookie cutter. And so I love that you share, you shared. Like it took me X amount of years to get everything finalized with my college degree. And I was also working at a corporate like working a corporate position with a corporate company, and I was a hot commodity. People were vying for your services. And so, because of that, you're like, all right, we're gonna we're gonna start this business because mama got money coming in now. And what I mean is like obviously you have your income that's coming in from the corporate position, right? But there's nothing better than when you are receiving income from something that is yours. Right.

Ashlei 10:14

And honestly, I would have done it for free. That's how much I loved doing the work that I was doing. Like I recall backing back when I was in college and I was working a daytime job, and then I would go to night school, and then I would get home from night school, and I would stay up at this time. Um, the best way to learn things was on YouTube. So I would stay up and just watch YouTube videos for learning how to do graphic design, learning how to do website development. I didn't go to school for that. No one taught me that. That's those are skills that I had to learn on my own. And so I would just sit up and literally nerd out over how can I build this skill set and watch YouTube videos like on one screen, and on the other screen, I would have, you know, Adobe pulled up and I would be inside of Dreamweaver learning how to code or inside of Photoshop or Illustrator, just experimenting and testing out the skill set until it got to a point where I'm like, you know what, I can put a price tag on this. And there is demand, and there's people that are um projecting on me as the expert in this area. And so it took some time for my mindset to get caught up to that space, right?

Kelly 11:27

Wanna talk about mindset and the importance of it?

Ashlei 11:31

It is such an underestimated skill set. Um I'll share a story with you. We were talking before we hopped on here. I was just in Nosara, Costa Rica last week. And mindset is something that I've had to work on for many, many years. Um, and it's it'll probably all always still be the thing, right? Yeah. We're human, right? And and what happened to me in Costa Rica is I I learned to surf for the first time.

Kelly 12:00

It was Congratulations. Thank you. It was amazing.

Ashlei 12:04

And um, I don't mean to be over dramatic, but it was probably the most joy that I felt in my life. Doing something for me, right? Yeah, not being a mom, yeah, not wearing all these hats of mom, entrepreneur, business owner, sister, like all the roles.

Kelly 12:19

Yeah, it's like a it's it's like a an incredible form of bliss. It is like in nature, it is like the strong force of the sea, right?

Ashlei 12:30

The water was 82 degrees, it was sunny, we were caked with sunblock, like it was just magical. And so we were walking down this street in Nosara, Costa Rica, this gravel road, and I caught myself in that moment questioning, you know, can I do this? Is my body strong enough? You know, I still have diastasis recti, which is the separation of your ab muscles from having my daughter, you know, two and a half years ago.

Kelly 12:56

Yeah.

Ashlei 12:56

And I'm like, is my upper body gonna be strong enough to be able to stand up on the board? Will I be able to balance? And you can imagine, like, all of these 20 thoughts happened in a matter of two seconds within my brain. And I caught myself in that moment and realized, like, that's not the thought that I want to think right now. The thought that I want to think is how amazing I'm going to feel after I experience this. How proud of myself I'm going to be after doing something new for the first time and loving it and feeling confident and feeling, you know, the salty water on my lips, and feeling this level of like um just being a badass woman in nature.

Kelly 13:38

Totally.

Ashlei 13:39

And the minute that I reframed that in my head, I felt the anxiety shift from nervousness to what I like to call my inner applause.

Kelly 13:51

Ooh.

Ashlei 13:52

And so it's like that feeling that bubbles up in your chest when you get anxious and nervous, being able to quickly reflame, reframe that and say, This is actually my body telling me, get it, go for it. Like this is gonna be fun. And it was, it was the most joyful experience. I was able to confidently get up on the board. I think by my third time, I was up on the board every single time for the duration of we were out there for like 60 or 90 minutes and like rolled the waves, felt confident to the point at the end where the instructor who was working with us, he was like, I'm not gonna tell you your timing. You know. And it's getting out of your head and into your body. Yes. And it's like when that happens and you feel like, oh my gosh, I'm doing this thing. I'm doing this thing. It's new. I didn't feel confident going in, and now I feel confident, like that level of empowerment is just so phenomenal to feel.

Kelly 14:50

I wonder if we can make some connection here to exactly what you're speaking to, Ashley, in terms of just getting out of getting out of your head and into that, like almost, it's like your your gut instinct. Like the instinctual, like, I'm a part of this, right? Like I'm a part of this earth, and molecularly, like at a cellular cellular level. Wow, tongue tied a little bit there, feeling it, feeling the waves, feeling the motion of it, going, all right, now's the time, let's go. And business and how we make decisions and right timing, right hire. Maybe this is an opportune moment to talk about like what you're experiencing right now. We were talking a little bit about that off-air. And there's practicalities that place that play a role in what that looks like, right? And then there's also your gut instinct. And I feel like you had mentioned you're sort of in that crux right now, you know? And so let's talk a little bit about this.

Ashlei 16:12

So it's interesting that you're bringing this up because literally I was writing a blog post in my head when I was surfing. Okay, that's the entrepreneur in me, guilty. Um, and at first, it's like every time I got up on the board and I rode the wave, different insights were coming to me after the fact. Like I would get up, I would ride the wave, I would, I would, you know, get off the board. Um, and I would think to myself, like, what is the lesson that I can learn from what just happened there? And this kept on happening over and over and over again. And for me, when I was on that surfboard, there's certain positions that you need to get into. So you lay on your stomach, your feet are at the tail, your hands are kind of underneath you, almost as if you're doing like a yoga position, like a um like a vinya vinyasa. Yeah, like a vinyasa, exactly. And after, so the wave is coming up to the tail of the board, you feel that little push and you paddle, paddle, paddle. And then when you're on the board, you push yourself up, and then you have to bring your leg to the side at a 90 degree angle and then kind of pop up on the board with your back foot at 90 degrees and your front foot at 45 degrees. So you can imagine the checklist that's going through my head, right? I'm like, okay, this is a lot of moves. I need to like and like do them in this order. And the first two times that I did it, I forgot the 90 degree leg move because I do a lot of yoga, and that's like an extra move on top of um when you're in yoga and you're going into like warrior two.

Kelly 17:47

Yeah.

Ashlei 17:47

It's very similar stance to that. Okay. But you have this 90-degree move that's like added in there where you're bringing your leg up. And the first two times I was like overthinking in my head. I was trying to go through the checklist. And the third time I was like, what if I don't go through the checklist and I just trust my body? Lo and behold, that's the time that I got up. And that's the time that I surfed the wave, like probably a hundred yards into the shore. And it was amazing. And I thought to myself in that moment, like, what did this just teach me? Yeah. This just taught me that in business and in life and in motherhood, sometimes you need to get out of your head and just trust your body. Because your body knows what to do.

Kelly 18:36

A thousand percent.

Ashlei 18:37

And so it was so many of these lessons, right? Like, even um, I had a another ride on the wave where I was thinking about balance and um, you know, how sometimes so when you're surfing, you have to kind of lean forward with your your front foot, put all the weight there. And it's this concept of like failing forward. You're gonna do things over and over in life again. But the beauty is if you're able to fail forward, catch yourself and try again. And not every surf, not every wake is going to be this, you know, magical experience that just takes you over the moon, but that's life, right?

Kelly 19:17

I just giggle at life and nature and how nature can really teach us a ton, just it like metaphorically about life. Right.

Ashlei 19:31

And I did not go in thinking, oh, I'm gonna write a blog post about this experience. Absolutely not. Are you going to?

unknown 19:37

Yes.

Ashlei 19:38

Of course.

Kelly 19:40

Yeah, of all the items.

Ashlei 19:43

I have one queued up in my clod right now. I have a cloud project built out that does all of my writing for LinkedIn, and yeah, I have this story baked into there. I need to figure out what graphics I'm putting in with it.

Building Nerdherd In HVAC Marketing

Kelly 19:55

But yeah, spoken like a true branding girly. Yes. I love it. Um, one thing that I want to come back to so that we can catch the listeners up to speed with where Ashley's at right now. What was the amount of time that you spent in that corporate position before you were like, all right, now's the time. I'm just gonna whirl 100% into the business. And this is probably an opportune time to share what the name of your business is as well.

Ashlei 20:31

Ah, yes. So the name of my business is Nerdherd. Um, I named the business before I was in the HVAC world, before I was in like the tech heavy world with AI, um, I had this vision that I know about myself. I have this skill set, unique skill set, where I have left brain qualities and right brain qualities. And I couldn't tell you one way or another which side is more prominent. I feel like it's definitely equally balanced. Yeah. And so uh at the time when I named the company, it was that we provided creative services and we also provided more technical services like development. And at that time, there weren't many companies that were doing both branding and uh development. Sure. And so that's how the company was originally named. And as my business has morphed over the last what 11 years now, it'll be this year, uh, the name has still fit in a really unique way, right? Like when I left corporate, my corporate role was in a um HVAC company, which I'll get to in a minute here. And the work that we did in the industry was very technical, but we were bringing this right brain side to it, right? This creativity, this branding piece.

Kelly 21:53

Which I think is interesting too. I mean, if you think about correct me if I'm wrong, but I On the labor side of things, that HVAC trade is heavily male dominated, right?

Ashlei 22:08

Predominantly male. I like to say predominantly male, because it's not male dominated, right? It's predominantly male. And there's just a slight shift, right, when you phrase it that way. It's like, yeah, this is this is the makeup of our industry. Not to say that that um the male aspect dominates it.

Kelly 22:31

I like that. So that being said, how do you feel in in knowing that you're bringing both aspects of it, that that helps to support this industry?

Ashlei 22:48

I think um having having both a creative side and a technical side are really interesting for the HVAC world because they're you're working with primarily a bunch of males who are left-brained. And I love the challenge of being able to bring feminine energy to that space. And I don't mean to say feminine energy or masculine energy from a male-female perspective. It's not that at all. Right. Um, I tend to have a little bit more masculine energy myself, and my husband has more feminine energy. So it's it's it's beyond just the gender roles.

Kelly 23:27

Okay.

Ashlei 23:27

Um, but being able to have that contrast where um no one in the industry looks like me.

Kelly 23:35

Yeah.

Ashlei 23:35

There's very little female leaders in our industry. There's certainly more than there ever has been. But I would say females are probably a fourth of the workforce in the HVAC world.

Kelly 23:47

Okay.

Ashlei 23:48

But I've loved that contrast. I've loved the challenge of being able to be a woman in a predominantly male environment and being able to show up and be a leader in a way that they haven't experienced before and to be able to challenge the status quo. Like that is exhilarating to me. Um and it's it can be even mundane things, right? Like when I was in my corporate role, I was in that role for seven years before I branched out three years ago to run my business full-time. And I remember one of the last things that I did that I was incredibly proud of is I helped influence a um maternity and paternity program because they didn't have a leave program for folks that are like looking to add to their family. Yeah. And I'm like, holy smokes, this company has been around for 50 plus years. But they just they didn't have, they didn't have a need to put a policy like that in place. Sure. And it wasn't just a maternity leave, it was paternity leave as well. And that felt really, really good. Um and so it's the you know, little micro shifts like that that are compounding. And um, so to back up and give you a little bit of history on my corporate role. So I started there in 2016. I was hired on as a contractor initially, and then uh was made an offer for a full-time employee after three months. And uh it was supposed to be a six-month contract, and ultimately I had to go to my boss at the time and ask him if he would hire me on that day because I was closing on a house and I needed to be full-time employment. So you can imagine like the anxiety that I was feeling in that moment. And he said, Yeah, we'll do it. Oh my gosh.

Kelly 25:40

Um how is your mortgage coming from the mortgage world? Being a mortgage lender, how is your mortgage lender? Like, I'm sure your mortgage lender was like, Ashley, get this done now. Yeah, he's like, You have three hours to get this done.

Corporate Highs Then Identity Whiplash

Ashlei 25:59

Good luck to you, soldier. And so I remember walking into my boss's office and I was like, You will not regret this. Like, I will do everything in my power to make sure that you know that this is a good move. And I did. I poured my heart and soul into that job. Absolutely loved it. Um, and then uh it so in that role, it started off as I was working for one company. Fast forward seven years. I uh just under seven years. I had three teams reporting to me. I was the VP of marketing. I had 20 direct reports. I was flying um private planes, so cool, between Minneapolis and uh North Dakota to our other office where some of my direct reports were officed out of. And it was, it was literally like the the highest moment of my life. I'm like, who can dream this up? I'm getting paid multiple six figures. I am flying on private airplanes, I'm doing something that lights my soul on fire. And it was amazing. Like, I still think back to those moments, and I'm like, man, I was on cloud nine. Um, there's another side to this that I'm sure we'll get into too, as far as just, you know, the level of um fulfillment and taking care of my body and all of that. Um go ahead. But let's dive into it. Yeah, okay, we can get into that now. Um, for me, I what I didn't realize in that moment is that I had to get into the mentality of putting myself first, taking care of myself first. And at that point in my life, I'm a little ashamed to say, if I'm being candid, that nothing came before my job. Nothing. Not myself, not my family. Uh, didn't have kids at that time, but uh nothing. Like it was the classic corporate story, right? Like you're grinding it out. I was voluntarily working 60 hours a week because I loved my job. Um, coming home at the end of the day, having the fish bowl of wine, um, you know, getting up the next day. I mean, there was times where I had worked until 3 a.m. I didn't leave the office until the next day. And it's like, that is not the life that I want to be living. And I had an opportunity in my last year and a half there to leave and go consult. And I was talking to the leadership team about this because I knew I knew the the shoes that I had to fill. Um, at that time, like I just want to preface like I was able to grow my team because the leadership team were serial entrepreneurs and they had eight companies. So there was just a lot of variety in the types of companies that we were supporting and the types of activities that we were doing within these businesses. And I got to a point where I was like, I've built the thing, right? I've built the machine, the team is running really smoothly. Um, quite honestly, I'm a little bored. I need a little bit more to do. I need more of a challenge, not necessarily more to do, but more of a challenge.

Kelly 29:08

Yeah.

Ashlei 29:09

And I knew that I could offer more. And then I started looking, uh, I had somebody reach out to me and they were interested in bringing me on as a consultant. And I talked with the leadership team and they said, What can we do to keep you here? We don't want you to go. And so they allowed me to create a new profit center. So that was company number nine, okay, which was an agency. And they knew that that was my dream. My dream was to build an agency. They knew that I had one running on the side. And they said, Why don't you just come do that here? You know, you can continue to do all the things that you're doing. I could not say no.

Kelly 29:45

No, of course.

Ashlei 29:46

I'm like, this is the dream. Like, yeah, I have the paycheck, I have the team. Uh, I was the only female leader at that time in the organization that had a title that was above a director level. And I'll I'll I'll restate that that was above a manager level. There was no directors, there was no VPs, like I was the only female. Um, and so of course I said yes to that. And it was wild and fun. And I was having the time of my life building out this agency. And fast forward a year and a half from that point, I leadership switched hands. And as a part of that transition, they had decided to divest virtually all of the companies that they were involved in, the agency being one of them. And I remember the moment that I got this email, I'll never forget this. Uh, it was my day off. It was a Friday. We were, I was in the car with my husband. I was on Cloud Nine because we were talking about the previous day that Thursday, I was talking with the executive team about partnership splits and you know what this would look like from an equity standpoint and all of that. And then on Friday, I got an email on my day off saying that they were going to go in a different direction. And I was like, oh, my heart sunk. I couldn't even focus that whole weekend. It felt like my identity had just gotten ripped from me. Like I didn't know who I was without my job. I didn't know what that meant for me. I didn't know like how to even move forward. It was so debilitating, really. Um, and that was my first red flag to start to understand that there is more to me than my identity behind this job. There's more to me behind this title.

Kelly 31:36

Yes.

Ashlei 31:37

And so that put me on the path of figuring out well, what is that? How do I find joy again? How do I find like how do I find a hobby again at that point? Like I didn't have a hobby. Work was my hobby because I loved it so stinking much. And so it really put me in this this interesting space over the last, well, I'm, I mean, I'm always going to be on the journey, but I would say the first two years of being a full-time entrepreneur was just this discovery process of looking at my business and figuring out, you know, yes, I have this business. At that point, it was a full service creative agency. We did everything from websites to lead gen to branding to strategy. And it took me, it took me a year and a half of running my business full time to start saying no to the things that don't light me on fire.

Kelly 32:31

That's a pretty good amount of time, though. I mean, you think about some entrepreneurs where they've been operating their business and and they just want they want to cast the net really wide, right? And I'm sure that there are people who are listening right now who are like, oh yeah. That is perhaps my strategy and approach for business. And there is also another way, too. Right.

Ashlei 32:59

And to get the courage to say no takes a lot of it takes a lot of guts.

Niching Down And Learning To Say No

Kelly 33:06

And I was Well, you're so it's interesting. Like, what needed to be true for you to say no?

Ashlei 33:15

I needed to give myself permission to change my mindset.

Kelly 33:18

Okay.

Ashlei 33:18

And the mindset change that needed to happen was that um people will still come to me. They will still want my services. They will actually want my services even more if I have the courage to say no to things. Because it shifts your business from the cookie-cutter agency. We do everything for everyone. We don't really have a target demographic to really niching down and saying, no, this agency is built for the HVAC industry, for the greater AEC architectural engineering construction. That's really our niche. Um, and within that niche of AEC is HVAC. And once we started to niche down, our customers knew who we were for. And I can say this with a hundred percent certainty because we track this attribution on the back end of our CRM, which is HubSpot, to know why our customers choose to work with us. Every single one of them has said, because you specialize in HVAC, because you know the intricacies of our business. Yes. And it's not just HVAC, but it's B2B HVAC, which is very different than residential. And so the more that we niche down and we said, okay, the first niche was our industry. So we went from serving everyone to quite honestly firing clients, which was, oh, it's like, you know, you're you're releasing that revenue to create space for more opportunity. But there's a little bit of like sticker shock to that, right? It's like, well, how am I going to backfill this revenue if or this, you know, gap when I let go of this client, if I don't have something in the pipeline that is going to easily slide into it. That takes a lot of courage.

Kelly 35:06

Yes, it does.

Ashlei 35:07

Yes.

Kelly 35:08

I would also say arguably faith.

Ashlei 35:12

Yes. Believing in yourself, right? Trusting yourself. And like I go back to that thought quite often. It's like, okay, if I'm going to make a bet on anyone in this world, who's it going to be? Better be me.

Kelly 35:25

Mm-hmm.

Ashlei 35:27

And if I don't believe in myself that I can do this, why would anyone else? Why would my team? Why would my husband? You know, we've had many conversations around, you know, sitting in the bathtub, scrolling on my phone and looking through all the job boards, thinking, like, what if I just burned it all to the ground?

Kelly 35:45

Ashley.

Ashlei 35:46

It's like, what if I just burned it all to the ground and, you know, just went the easy path? Because I know I could get another six-figure job and corporate, right? Like, that's not a question. Would it be easier? Sure. Would my soul die? Yes. So it's it's choosing yourself and believing in yourself.

Kelly 36:03

Choose your hard. Choose your hard and choose your, you know, the it like, do you want to do path of least resistance? Because that is not always the best case. In terms of like fulfillment, is probably the best way to like encapsulate that. Encapsize it. Right. Because now there can be a path of least resistance in what you're speaking to when you go niche, niche, niche, niche, niche, and then everything, it's like the proverbial arrow, right? It's like all of this resistance, and then all of a sudden you go, I've got it, and it goes. And the business just goes.

Ashlei 36:46

And I will just throw this out there as a caveat for anyone who's listening. Follow your own path. Just because I'm sitting here sharing my story and I'm like pro-entrepreneur because that's what brings me fulfillment, doesn't mean that somebody couldn't have that same level of same level of fulfillment in a corporate career. Like being an entrepreneur is not for everyone. Totally. It is the hardest thing I've ever done in my life. I would give birth to my daughter, 22 hours of labor, four and a half hours of unmedicated pushing. I would do that 10 times over again versus starting my business because of just the effort.

Kelly 37:23

That one, the latter is temporary. It's temporary. The entrepreneur aspect is like you're in it minute by minute, day by day. Right. And it just keeps going.

Ashlei 37:34

Right, right. And I would also say, like, as much as I say, like, yes, I would choose, you know, laboring with my daughter all over again, like that is the easiest path, but the most fulfilling path is also like being able to see something through long term. And for me, what that looks like is the entrepreneurial path. And everyone has a different story. And their story might be, you know, grinding the corporate ladder, and that is okay. But figuring out, you know, what are the things that that bring you joy and how can you just add more of that into your life?

Kelly 38:07

Well, and I do want to speak a little bit more into this as well. Figuring out do you have the entrepreneurial skills, the skill sets? Because that's vitally important as well. Somebody listening right now could be in that corporate position. Like there's a million different ways that we could cut this rug, right? Somebody could be in the corporate role doing that for 25 plus years, 30 plus years. I have literally had somebody across the room from me interviewing on this podcast who was in that position, and something shifted. Something shifted. There was a situation that happened. There was enough of the entrepreneurial skills that were being utilized in this corporate realm that gave that confidence to that person. There's a few people that are coming to mind actually now. And they're like, I can do this. That's okay. That is okay. And to your point, oh my gosh. I mean, we we need to have people in a corporate setting. Absolutely.

Ashlei 39:23

How the world runs.

Kelly 39:24

It is. It totally is. That's just life. Okay, so to put a pin in the original question that I asked, which was the amount of time that you spent in the corporate world before it all of a sudden just shifted, right? So let's just finish out that portion of your story. So you were figuring out identity and what happened next. So that there's a week three-day weekend basically, where you know that this is the circumstance and what happens after that.

Ashlei 40:03

Yeah. So I was in my corporate career. I um had this opportunity to go and consult, um, said no to that, stayed, built the agency underneath the corporate umbrella for a year and a half, then the transition happened, and then I moved into a consulting role to finish out that year.

Kelly 40:23

Okay.

EOS Traction And Peer Groups

Ashlei 40:23

Uh, and then ultimately, so that would have been 2023, January 1st, 2023. I was full-time entrepreneur, and um, I did have the opportunity to take the clients, a few of the clients that were a part of that agency and transition them to Nerdherd so that we could still fulfill our obligations. So that felt really good. And I was really blessed to have that opportunity. That does not happen very often. Um, and that really started my my journey of becoming an entrepreneur. And before we hopped on air here, you and I were talking about uh EOS. And how I got introduced to EOS is when I was early in my full-time entrepreneur days, I was seeking out business owners that had businesses that were 10x the size of my business because I wanted to understand. I was on a learning quest. I wanted to understand and to get really curious around what are the things that they're doing and what are the commonalities. And to be clear, these were not businesses that were in my same field. These were businesses, like all kinds of businesses, just entrepreneurs that I looked up to and I, I, I, I had the same values, I had the same mindset, and I'm like, this is just a person I need to learn more about how they started their business. Sure. And there was a common theme. EOS kept on coming up. And I'm like, what the heck is EOS? Not to plug the book. There's literally a book that's called What the Heck is EOS. Um, but that was the thought that was going through my head. I'm like, there is this common theme, there is this structure that business owners are following. And so I purchased the book Traction, which is the book that explains everything about EOS. There's a ton of EOS books, but that is one of them. And that's like the that's the place to start to understand the frameworks, the methodology, the meeting cadence, the structure. And quite honestly, these things are things that Fortune 500 businesses are already doing. EOS just gives a really sticky name to the things and formulates it in a way where you have different tools and processes that are really easy to stand up in the business. And I went down the path of reading the book and then figuring out for the size of company that we are, what makes sense? What are the different tools that make sense for us to bring in? So that was a big part of getting the maturity that I needed in my company to really be able to scale. Also, peer groups. That was a piece that I, for anyone who's considering becoming an entrepreneur or who is an early stage entrepreneur, or even, you know, they've been doing this for 10 years. If you have not found yourself a peer group or people that you can rely on as your board of directors, that's the place to start. My mistake early on was to hire a bunch of consultants, pay them, you know, hundreds of dollars an hour to essentially be my board of directors, and then found out that I could do this much more economically with a peer group. And those are the people who understand the isolation that happens when you're an entrepreneur because our spouses. Have a threshold for how much they want to hear about our business.

Kelly 44:05

I'm saying this with a smile on my face. I can't identify to this. I work and am in business with my husband. And he he is like he loves what I'm doing with the podcast, right? So you mean he's like spitballing ideas for it because he is like an entrepreneur.

Ashlei 44:25

Yep. He's the visionary. Yes.

Kelly 44:27

Oh, for sure.

Ashlei 44:27

Yeah. Yeah. For sure. Um, and so yeah, that that was just a big pivotal moment in my journey, too, is finding a group of people that understand the struggles that you're going through and that you can kind of workshop and get ideas from and uh have a sounding board.

Kelly 44:45

Um this is exactly why I have the podcast. I love that. It's I mean, it's this is your sounding board. This is a niche, right? Like this is moms who are entrepreneurs, but like look no further. This is your peer group. Can you give examples of uh or an example of a group that you're a part of?

Ashlei 45:05

So I'm currently a part of um EO. EO is the entrepreneurial um organization.

Kelly 45:12

Okay.

Ashlei 45:13

They are I interviewed several peer groups, like all of the big ones in the Twin Cities. I'm not going to name all of them.

Kelly 45:19

That's okay. You don't have to, yeah.

Ashlei 45:21

I I interviewed several of them to understand like what is the right fit. Each one of them had amazing qualities to them. But for my business at that time, I needed an organization that was going to give me the tools and the education that I needed to create a baseline for all of the areas that I didn't have a skill set in. So we talked about entrepreneurs, right? Like somebody who's in corporate for 25 years potentially wants to branch off and become an entrepreneur. What most people don't realize is that when you make that commitment to be an entrepreneur, you are not doing the thing that you love 24-7.

Kelly 46:02

Right.

Time Blocking AI And The A-Team

Ashlei 46:03

You are not just like, I'll speak from a marketing perspective. You're not just creating beautiful marketing or doing branding. You're also doing HR, you're doing sales, you're doing um admin, you're doing accounting to some degree, right? Like even I outsource my accounting, but there's still things financially like I need to forecast, I need to budget. Like, um, and some of those skills aren't ones that I had been able to flex my muscles in in the corporate world. Um, yes, I manage budgets, but to what extent, right? Right. And at the end of the day, when you're an entrepreneur, all of that falls on your shoulders. And so being able to find joy or delegate to the right people to balance out all of the things that need to happen when you're running a business. It's not just that you're doing the thing that you love all the time. Yeah, it's more than that. And um, the people piece like that's hard. Um, you know, dealing with all of the paperwork, you know, filing your taxes, staying up with all of the regulations that are coming out with new paid leaves for Minnesota and like all the things that like these rules that you have to follow and stay abreast to.

Kelly 47:17

Yeah. What does that look like for you in terms of? I mean, are you carving out time, like time blocking to learn about some of that stuff to keep yourself abreast because you are the head of the business, right? Like it is your job. It is our job, right? Do you carve out time? Do you just kind of do it on the fly? Like, what does that look like?

Ashlei 47:44

Time blocking is absolutely necessary. Um so for me, I have a time block every single week for an hour on um the first day of the week to go through, look at my finances, update my forecast, update my budget. Like I have a calendar invite for myself on my calendar that has a list of all the things that I need to do within that hour.

Kelly 48:05

Perfect.

Ashlei 48:06

Um, and we are a very heavy AI shop. And so I also have different AI tools that I've developed and built out that I use to help with financial analysis.

Kelly 48:17

Okay.

Ashlei 48:17

I'm gonna asterisk that and say, be cautious of what you're putting into AI tools and around the data retention and sharing and all of that. I'm an entrepreneur, I like a healthy dose of risk. And so um, that's just my way of incorporating certain tools to help with that. Okay. Um, so that's a meeting with myself every single Monday that I'm sitting down and I'm reviewing that. Um, on the HR side, we work with a company who's an outsourced vendor. They handle all of our HR and our accounting and our bookkeeping. Okay. And so working with partners that are very highly skilled in tax planning in areas that you don't necessarily want to have a daily pulse on is important.

Kelly 49:04

We like to call it our A-team. Yes. Yes, exactly. Know your like figure out what your A-team is gonna look like. And to your point, it could be an it could be HR, it could be accounting, it could be um helping out with social media, like the posting of it. It's so funny. You were like, I do all of that the social media piece, like you do all of the marketing stuff for others. And you're like, I'm I I don't have the time.

Ashlei 49:36

The shoe shiners shoes are the dirtiest.

Kelly 49:41

Oh my gosh. I haven't heard that one before. That one's good, Ash. I like it.

Delegate And Elevate At Home

Ashlei 49:45

It's it's so true, right? But it's like, you know, I it's things like that. Like you and I were just talking before we hopped on here about what our next hire looks like. You know, I just made an offer to an employee this morning who's gonna start on Monday. And we're already looking at, okay, what does that next next employee need to be? Um, who is that next employee and what are the things that they're gonna do? But it's it's not that we can't do that in-house. We're obviously a very capable marketing agency. We can do those things, but we just don't have time to do them. Yeah, right. So it's it's also looking at your business and determining where does it make sense to place your time and energy? What are the most high value tasks that we need to be focused on? Um, and for me, we haven't talked about this yet because this is new since we chatted last, but um, we're in the process of hiring a house manager because my husband is home during the winter and he does the cooking, the cleaning, all of that. So blessed to have him. But he does go back to work um usually around the end of April. What does he do? He's in road construction. Okay. Yeah.

Kelly 50:50

That makes sense.

Ashlei 50:51

Yeah. Um, so seasonal job. Uh, and then our daughter goes into daycare, but there's still things that need to happen around the house that I don't want to do. I don't want to do the dishes and the deep cleaning and scheduling appointments, like um, you know, my own aesthetic appointments, Botox, hair, like all of that. I don't want to schedule that. Um, I don't want to think about, you know, when is it that we need to get my doctor in my daughter in for her next checkup? When is it that my husband needs to have his appointments scheduled? Like that is extra weight in my brain mentally, that I can't hold all of that. And so there's absolutely no shame in looking at bringing in some domestic help, whatever that looks like, whether it's a cleaner or a house manager, whoever. But um, I caught on to this idea of a house manager maybe six months ago. And I'm like, this is this is what I need in order to be able to be as available in my business, because that's where that's where my highest value is, is being able to bring in that revenue.

Kelly 51:55

So you're the um second person that I know from the podcast that it is exploring or has already made the hire. The other person is um the owner of the transaction company that we use for our real estate business. And we're getting together with her on Monday for lunch. And I told her point blank when I saw that she had posted something on social media about this recent hire house manager. And I'm like, you're gonna need to tell us, because it's both both my husband and I that are sitting down with her about what that looks like and the why behind it. Because I while I don't think that we will need a house manager, I definitely think maybe the first step is cleaning. Like I think about the amount of time for the type of person that I am and how I want the house to look that I spend cleaning. Right. And it's not even the deep clean. Right. So I love that you share that because there are there are specific milestones that we can hit in our business that require us to be able to scale means that we need to we need to make some form of a hire, right? Whether it's in the business or it is something on the personal side within the household that is mission critical. Right. It could be a nanny, it could be a house manager, it could be like, I just I just need somebody to come and clean the house, you know, once or twice a month. Right. To do, you know, all of the deep cleaning stuff.

Ashlei 53:41

For me, it's just it's uh it's a decision around how can I free up my mind to be less stressed and more focused. And you and I were talking about this exercise that they use in EOS. It's called uh delegate and elevate. And in this exercise, they are breaking down all the tasks that you do within, let's just say a week, right, or a month, into four different quadrants by what you love and what you're good at, all the way down through what you don't like and you're not good at. Um, and in this exercise, looking at just evaluating your life, right? It doesn't even have to be in your business, but just in your life and whatever's falling into that bottom right-hand quadrant, those are the things that give you insights into how can I outsource these? How can I ask for help? You know, maybe it's not outsourcing, maybe it's asking your partner, like, hey, these are the things that I really don't like doing. Yeah. Maybe it's asking help from family, but just finding ways to keep yourself in your zone of genius, doing the things that you love and that you that bring you joy. That is my mission this year, is how can I put myself and my team in their top left quadrant 90% of the time? It's literally on our business plan.

Kelly 55:06

Well, and I think what you're gonna come to realize is there'll be some form of harmonization that comes out of that, right? Because every single person is wildly different in how they approach work and the things that they love or don't love. And so I'll be very curious to see how this all pans out for you.

Ashlei 55:29

Yes, yes. I wish I could like fast forward six months and get like a you know, two-minute blip of what does life look like? Because it feels like it's going to look radically different just with the growth in my team and the additional support at the house, and you know, just also feeling like I can feel supported and I can step into my own agency without feeling guilt.

Speaker 3 55:56

Yeah.

Ashlei 55:56

Right. Like not feeling guilty because we have domestic support and one kid, right? Yep. But feeling like, okay, I'm doing big things in my business. My husband is doing big things in his career as well, and he's taking on additional responsibilities and running a marathon coming up here in the summer. And so it's like, you know, we have very active lives, but also remembering not to compare ourselves, right? Because that was my biggest piece when I was hiring for this role initially was like, well, who am I to need this level of support? There's people that have three kids and they seem to manage it. I have one kid and I'm losing my mind trying to keep, you know, the house clean and the chemicals in the pool so it doesn't turn green, and you know, navigating.

Kelly 56:42

Let's just say for a hot second, like pool maintenance is speaking on the real estate side, like people decide that they don't want to buy pools more oftentimes than not because of the maintenance of it. It's a science experiment.

Ashlei 56:58

Our pool has been green many times, and then we've paid for it.

IVF Infertility And One-And-Done Clarity

Kelly 57:03

Oh my gosh. Well, I want to switch gears, and you gave me a nice little segue to be able to do so. You mentioned obviously you're on this podcast because you're an entrepreneur, but you're also a mom, and you're also a mom. So when did your daughter come into the picture?

Ashlei 57:22

Yeah. So two months after I left my corporate role, we found out we were pregnant. And look at that timing. Look at that timing. Um, but for us, it was uh it was a little bit uh preconceived. We have an IVF baby, and so my husband and I, we got married in September of 2020. We had tried, I don't, COVID wedding. No kidding, yeah, which was great. It was so great. I because we had to keep the numbers small, and I'm doing air quotes here with my fingers, right? But it's like we we really got to choose with great intentionality the people that we wanted to be a part of that moment.

Kelly 58:01

Yeah, there's nothing wrong with that.

Ashlei 58:02

No, it was beautiful. It was, I mean, we put the whole wedding together within a matter of three months, okay, and just decided like, all right, we're gonna do this and we're gonna do it now. And um, yeah, I wouldn't have changed it.

Kelly 58:16

It's funny, it sounds similar to our experience, except ours was um 2022. We got engaged, um, found out that we were pregnant, and initial game plan was that we were gonna do a destination wedding. So it was already gonna be a small group of people. Destination wedding in St. Lucia, get a catamaran, do all of the fun things. Oh my gosh. And I started planning it, and then I found out that we were pregnant. Found out we were pregnant, realized that I was almost in my second trimester by the time I like went to the doctor and stuff, and so we needed to make a shift very quickly. Like, do we wait until after the wedding? Do we wait until after Maddie arrives to do the wedding? So that I'm not like a huge bump in a wedding dress for photos and stuff. And uncomfortable. And uncomfortable. Or do we do it before when I'm still in my second trimester? You if you look at wedding pictures, it doesn't even like look like I'm pregnant. The clear indicator, if you know me, and pardon to the men who are listening right now, my boobs. Ah my boobs are not that big. But I bet they look great in the photos. They looked great in the photos, and I loved it. But but yeah, we were we were always gonna have a small wedding, and then we just went with that. You know, it was I love that it was amazing. That's how it was supposed to be. So amazing. Yeah, loved it.

Ashlei 59:57

Anyways, so yeah, we got married, had a COVID wedding in September 2020. Um, we had then tried for about a year and a half of getting pregnant before we realized that we would need to go the IVF route. So, what that looked like for us is um unfortunately in the healthcare system, they tell couples who are trying to get pregnant, try for a year, which seems like an eternity when you're wanting something so deeply. Yeah. So we tried for a year, no luck. Um, I spent that entire year feeling like a failure. And as an Enneagram three, which is an achiever, that's really difficult. Like it got to the point where, you know, you're doing your pregnancy test each month, and it's like, oh, great, here's another, here's another, you know, negative result. And that really started to weigh on me. Um, we finally got past the year mark, no luck. And the doctor said, Okay, we're gonna have you go through some tests. I went through some tests, everything cleared out. Then they said, Okay, now we need to look at your husband's side of things. Um, and then we started digging in a bit deeper, and he went through similar testing, and we found out that um the issue with the infertility was on his side of the equation. And so you can imagine, like, I went through my own bout of depression.

Kelly 1:01:25

Yeah.

Ashlei 1:01:25

On top of running a business that is less than a year, you know, my full-time venture. Um, and well, uh, let me take that back. I was still in the corporate world at that time, but I knew that I was going to be exiting and was exiting my corporate role, building up my business, and then dealing with the IVF situation. Um, and then my husband had about six months of six to eight months of going through his own version of depression. Um, and he he will say like those were some of his darkest days. Like he still wears uh a yellow bracelet that is suicide prevention because he was having some of those thoughts. And it's just like, you know, the weight of going through all of that and feeling like, you know, the issue is on my side and feeling all the feels from sadness to guilt to anger to grief, and then finding out that no, I'm okay, but now my partner, you know, my best friend, the person who I love most in the world is now going through this. Yeah. And having so much sympathy because I know how that feels because I just got out of that space is so difficult. So he went through his kind of cycle of figuring out, you know, what does this mean? And, you know, can we even move forward? What are our options? Um, we went through an adoption class, got like all the certification to go through the adoption world, and then got all the way to the point where they were gonna come in and do a home uh I forget what it's called, like a home test or a home evaluation. Yeah, evaluation, and then um learned a little bit more about the process, which was that when you are looking to adopt, they want you to foster first before you adopt.

Kelly 1:03:21

I didn't realize that.

Ashlei 1:03:22

Um for it's it's like a small period of time. Okay, but they want you to do that so that there is um space to make sure that this is something that that works for everyone, right?

Kelly 1:03:36

Yeah.

Ashlei 1:03:36

Um and ultimately during that period, what can happen is the mother I'll just speak with with the mother in mind. So the mother can m change her mind. And if she, you know, gets her act together and is following the process and the paperwork and all of the things that she's supposed to be doing during this time, she can take her kids back.

Kelly 1:04:00

Yeah.

Ashlei 1:04:00

And I was like, I don't know that I would be able to deal with that loss. I have the utmost respect, respect for people who do that. Um, but yeah, to to feel like, you know, I'm I'm welcoming kiddos into my family, and to then have that ripped away from me, it just felt like too too crippling.

Kelly 1:04:22

Yeah.

Ashlei 1:04:22

Um, and so we decided to opt for IVF. Uh, we saw a clinic here in the Twin Cities, CCRM was the clinic that we went with, and they were able to help navigate us through that process, and ultimately um we were able to get several embryos out of our first round of IVF, which is incredible. That's not a story that most people who go through IVF can can share. And so we just felt incredibly grateful that we were able to go through that process, have um several embryos, and then ultimately were able to select one of them that had the highest viability to proceed forward with. And that's how we got my daughter, Rin.

Kelly 1:05:07

I love it. It's something that I keep thinking about too, Ash, is that your husband how do we phrase this? In a sense, was able to experience what so many women during that process of IVF go through. And I I w I'm not wishing that upon anybody, right? But it's the perspective of my best friend love of my life has gone through this experience and now it now the tables have turned, so to speak, and he has a an understanding. Yeah. I it it's so sad to hear that it was to the point of like.

Ashlei 1:06:00

Having those thoughts of and the ironic thing about all of this is that he didn't really want kids at first. It was me who wanted kids. You know, I'm the oldest of seven. I come from a very big family. My mom had me very young. She had me when she was just a couple months past 18. Yeah. And she, I just I knew that I always wanted to be a mom. I had just never found the right person, right? And then after my husband and I met, we joked because when we first started dating, he was like, no babies, no dogs. I had a small five-pound um Yorkie at that time. So I'm like, we are a package deal. Yeah. Like the dog is a thing. And then of course the baby conversation came further down the line. But it's interesting. He went from the space of being like, Yeah, I'll do this because I love you and it's something that you want, to actually like grieving this perceived loss of something that he couldn't have. It's wild. It's like this incredible emotional shift. But now it's something that we we get to share this bond over, right? Like we were there for each other through the highs and the lows and all of the emotions on that spectrum that go with, you know, putting your body through IVF and the process of navigating a pregnancy with each other. And it's like that's that's such a special journey that um not everyone gets to have. And I'm so grateful that we have that experience. Yeah. Um, and also that will be our last. We decided uh two weeks ago we're a one and done family. So I love it. Yeah, which is also such a journey, right? To go from saying, like, you know, I had this idea of like we were always gonna have three kids to then also navigating, you know, the the aspirations that I have in in my career and in just my life in general, the things that I want to experience in life and you know, what does that look like, you know, with a big family or a small family? And um, yeah, that was it felt like a very um healing moment to have clarity around what it is that we want with our family and also being able to pour so much love and joy into the one daughter that we have.

Kelly 1:08:26

How old is she now?

Ashlei 1:08:27

She's two and a half.

Kelly 1:08:28

Okay, she's just behind Maddie. Yeah. I shouldn't say behind. She's she's coming up on that three-year mark too, and it's it gets fun and it gets exciting. Yes. Yes. Something I just want to note, and then we can shift gears, is the beauty in what you just spoke to. There's always a union that happens when it comes to marriage, right? And those threads can be loose or they can be super tight. And I feel like what you just spoke to was like the tightening of those threads together as husband and wife, and the union between the two of you because you have been able to experience the depths of despair together. Right. And that doesn't happen very often. I think so many women who have been on this podcast have um experienced some form of postpartum, or to your point, it's it's depression of of sorts and it's the how in sharing that with the spouse and helping them to understand and sort of bringing them along on the ride. And there's a difference between empathy and sympathy, right?

Ashlei 1:09:52

There is. And let's explain that for a second because I did not know the difference between those two words until within the last handful of years. But there is a difference. How do you define the difference between sympathy and empathy?

Kelly 1:10:07

To me, this is how, and I I've spoken to this in this very vein of IVF, right? I can have sympathy for it because it's like that's a process, right? And whether you go through IVF and you're not able to come out on the other end having this joy and fulfillment, right? Or you do come out, there's still this really long process that you go through. I can sympathize to how challenging that is and hard, but I can't empathize because I haven't been in your shoes. I haven't actually gone through it. And so that to me is how I usually explain the difference between empathy and sympathy.

Ashlei 1:10:55

Spot on. That's exactly how I explain it too. It's like empathy is being able to draw from your own experiences and say, Yes, me too. I've gone through this too. I know how it feels because I've gone through the same thing or something similar, right? Yeah. But sympathy is that idea of being able to be compassionate and hold space for somebody else, even though you haven't been through that same thing.

Kelly 1:11:17

Yep. You said it so much more eloquently. I love it.

Ashlei 1:11:22

Girl, I've been talking about this for a long time. I know.

Kelly 1:11:26

I know. Well, share how harmonization has looked like for you. Now you're a mom. You're you're in the depths of it. Like I like to say, there is a period that we go through as mothers, as parents, when we first have our children, we're in the trenches, right? And you've been in the trenches. Like in the trenches. And you're an entrepreneur, you're running a business, you're scaling a business, your business has grown how much over the years?

Ashlei 1:12:05

Yeah, we were just talking before, it's grown 33% compound annual growth rate.

Kelly 1:12:10

Not a lot of women can speak to that, right? So I want to really hone in on what harmonization has looked like for you. I personally, I don't ever love to use the word balance because balance to me means everything is like this. And it's maybe for a split second, you achieve balance. But otherwise it's like this.

Ashlei 1:12:37

I yeah, I I I don't know what balance is. I don't know how people can because balance is like a seesaw, right? It's like, it's like 50 here, 50 there.

Kelly 1:12:47

Yeah.

Ashlei 1:12:48

And that's not life. Yes.

Kelly 1:12:50

So it's like you were in my brain because I literally was envisioning the the seesaw, the teeter-totter. Like I'm like, because once you get here, something has to something like there's enough weight.

Ashlei 1:13:04

The wind blows, you sneeze, like anything can like take that off filter, right? Yep. Uh the word that I use, the the word that I like to use is work life integration. Right? It's tell me more the integration and the ebb and flow of life. And um, I this is a part of our culture in in my business because life and and work life, especially as a parent, and all of my employees are parents, um, it things happen, right? Kids get sick. Um, you know, you feel like energetically burnt out some days, right? Like you have to ebb and flow with where it is that you have energy to be able to show up as your best self. And I don't feel like the the the corporate work world is set up for that. And it's certainly not set up for two working parents. And most families are in that position, right? Unless you're a family where you do have somebody who's an entrepreneur or two entrepreneurs, right? You you tend to have more flexibility to ebb and flow. Yes. But I think about like the traditional work corporate world, and it's like, there is absolutely no way that that would work for my life and for my family.

Kelly 1:14:21

I mean, Ashley, think about the typical nine to five. We talk about this almost weekly because there's something coming up with um schedules with the two boys or with Maddie's schedule, or somebody's getting sick, and I'm like, how you don't have enough PTO days, literally.

unknown 1:14:39

How?

Ashlei 1:14:40

In one year for a parent to be able to be off for you know whatever in-service days daycare has, or you know, the random, you know, weak closures that kids have when they're in the school system.

Kelly 1:14:53

Like you literally don't have it's I feel like it's it has gotten worse, isn't the right word to use. It just feels like there's more days now that they're taking for um training purposes, or we've got a it's I'm like, what is happening? Right. These boys are here more than it they're at school sometimes, it feels like on a weekly basis. Right. What just happened? And then we've got spring break happening in a few weeks. It's like what is happening?

Ashlei 1:15:28

Well, and you think about it from just like a health and wellness standpoint, right? From an employee standpoint, whether you're a mom or a dad or primary caregiver. And if all of your days from a PTO perspective are spent caregiving for other people, when do you get a break?

Kelly 1:15:46

Amen.

Ashlei 1:15:47

When do you get to fill your cup?

Kelly 1:15:49

Right.

Ashlei 1:15:50

On the weekends at 5 a.m. before you start the runaround and you're doing different sports or activities or whatever. Like there's just no break.

Kelly 1:15:59

The answer could be yes, as you're literally speaking to my soul, and like five o'clock in the morning is when I can have a little bit of alone time.

Ashlei 1:16:08

Right. As you're praying, like tiptoeing around the house and praying that the kids aren't going to come out of the room because they hear you and you're like, I just want my hour to read my book or to make my coffee or my tea. Yeah. And so um, we have a really big focus focus on that in our company where we have an incredible amount of flexibility. Like get your stuff done throughout the week. I don't care if you're doing it at 10 p.m. or 5 a.m. Or if you need to take a break for two hours and go to the gym, don't care. Yeah. Like take care of yourself. Because if you're not filling up your cup and if you're not feeling like um you're able to be a whole person, you're gonna continue to show up at work on you know, half speed. Um, and so I like that concept of work-life integration and and figuring out, you know, yes, we still have to get our things done, but it might be at an atypical time, and that's okay. They still get done at the end of the week. So who cares what time you do it, right?

Kelly 1:17:07

Yeah.

Ashlei 1:17:07

But the world isn't built for that level of flexibility traditionally.

Dark Valleys Then Real Healing Work

Kelly 1:17:12

And this is where we go. We're incredibly grateful to be able to have the opportunity to be in this world of entrepreneurship. And this is where it pays off. Like the the challenging days that we experience. The I'm literally soaking in the tub and I'm ready to burn the ship. Like burn the ships around me and go and get that nine to five. But then you realize on the other end of it, oh yeah, I can I'll give you a prime example. A talent show popped up on our calendar for our oldest because he decided he wanted to do that. And it was literally last minute on a Friday morning at 8 30. Probably gonna get out of there about 9 45. And we had the flexibility to be able to do that. Right. What a gift. I know. Seriously, what a gift. I want to talk through, you have shared some incredibly challenging moments that you or you and your spouse have experienced. Are one of those that dark valley? There's always a dark, dark moment. And there could be multiple experiences, but I always like to highlight this because that is the case, and how we work through and out of that valley can be really important for other people to hear as well.

Ashlei 1:18:51

There's two moments that come to my mind. Um, I'll start with the first one first. This uh precedes my husband. Um, but I was in a position where I was in a very abusive uh relationship with a boyfriend. Um, I had lived in California, he had lived in California with me at that time, moved home. I loved him. And so I got back together with him back in Minnesota, and it was just, it was very, very um physically abusive, mentally abusive, verbally abusive. Like I'm lucky that I'm not dead in a ditch. And that was one of my, I don't want to say like my first dark moment, because there's been a a lot of trauma throughout my life that I've had to navigate and figure out how to heal from. And also I wouldn't change any of those experiences. I believe that my soul chose those experiences for me to teach me something or to um point me down a path that I wouldn't have gone through, gone, gone down without those experiences. And I started seeing my life coach at that time. So I've now been seeing her for 12 years, maybe a little bit longer than that. Um, and she really helped me with figuring out how do I move forward from that place, right? Yeah. How do I pick myself back up, um, pull myself up by my bootstraps and navigate a path forward where I'm finding joy, taking care of myself, pulling myself out of those positions that I was in that were just dangerous. Um, and being able to lean on somebody for support and helping navigate that was really critical. The second moment would be when I left my corporate career. Uh, I spoke about this a bit earlier, just this loss of identity and this figuring out of like, who am I beyond my my my title? Who am I beyond? But the work that I've been doing? Like, what does this next phase look like for me? And that was really challenging because I didn't really have hobbies. The thing that I spent, you know, 90% of my week on was now gone. And yes, it was exciting that I was building this agency. But if I'm being honest, I I didn't really know what I was doing. You know, I had this experience that I could draw on, but there was no map that said, here's the next five steps you need to do. Like there was none of that. I had to create that. And um, it's also really isolating being in a position where you're running your business, you know, you can't talk to certain things, you can't talk about certain things to your spouse because there's just a threshold limit as far as, you know, what is appropriate and appropriate from your relationship standpoint, right? Like my husband doesn't want to hear about the 50 things that I do every single day, piece by piece. He wants the like two-minute highlight reel. Tell me the highs and the lows, and then let's move on with our life.

Kelly 1:21:59

Well, and in some cases, they're just they're not equipped to be able to navigate through a lot of the stuff that entrepreneurs are navigating through, right? If they're not in an entrepreneurial set, right? Totally. Right. And that's also not fair for them either. So yeah, I I completely understand that.

Ashlei 1:22:25

So for me, like the big shift when I was in like that that dark place was figuring out like who do I want to be? How do I want to show up? And um actually uh a big part of my like aha moments happened last year in April. I went on a retreat at Miraville Resorts in Austin, Texas. And I went because I knew that I needed to be a part of women, uh, a group of women that would inspire me. And also I needed some rest at that point, too. Yeah. Um, and I wanted to be in a room with really expansive thinkers that could challenge like my mindset and how I'm showing up. And I needed that moment of self-reflection. And I remember sitting on a hammock in the like foothills of Austin, Texas, looking over the trees and just thinking, um, you know, what is it that I want to bring to this world? What is the type of impact that I want to make? And I brought the um book, uh, what's it called? Something about like Discover Your Why by Simon Sinek. Why? I can picture the book and it has why on the top. I literally, it's it's uh we're sure that's another one that you have.

Kelly 1:23:37

Well, I've it's not in here. Um, I have many books in here. We have books out in the living room, books in, I mean, we've got books galore, but yeah, I think it's just start with why. Start with why. That's that's the title.

Ashlei 1:23:48

Yeah. So I was reading this book, and then I was also journaling in that moment. And I'm like, I had lots of thoughts around self-reflection, like started journaling. What are my personal values? You know, let's start there, let's figure out what are the things that are most important to me. And then from there, I was able to, with the help of paging through the book, with the help of, of course, my AI tool on my phone, I was able to start to brainstorm like what feels good in my body, what is the type of impact that I want to make in the world? And if I think about, you know, if I think about what is the impact that I want to make 50 years from now, what are the things that people are saying, you know, potentially at my funeral? You know, what are the the moments like, and it's not just like the achievement piece. It's not about that at all. It's not about like, here's the awards that I want to win. I want to be on the Inc. 5000 list and yada, yada, yada.

Kelly 1:24:43

Yeah.

Ashlei 1:24:43

It wasn't about that. It was about how do I want people to, how do I want people to feel when I'm not here? What is that impact? What is the legacy that I want to make, that I want to leave in this world? And that really started my personal growth journey and um also just an incredible amount of healing. So at one point after this retreat, let me tie an ice bow on this quick. So I'm sitting in the hammock, I'm journaling about my values, I'm able to now articulate my personal values. I also wrote my business why and my personal why. Those two pieces combined, like my whys plus my values, those are my North Star. Those need to be true for everything that I do in life. Um, and so having that as an anchor point to be able to reflect and say, um, is this thing that I want to pursue? Is this me living into my why? How does this work with my personal values system? And being able to actually go back home after that trip and talk about that with my husband too, and to say, like, here's the things that are important to me as a person and here's my why in this world, allowed him to understand what are the things that how how I want to show up and what are the things that he can do to help support me with my personal mission. And after that uh retreat, I was brave enough. I'm so thankful that I did this. I was brave enough to call on, I think at one point during the summer, I had five different um coaches, therapists, um, healer, energy healers, et cetera, that were kind of on my bench. And so I was doing things like EMDR, EMDR on horseback, um, ketamine therapy. I did three sessions of that. Okay. Um, like literally sitting in a teepe in a horse pasture. It was beautiful. Um, I saw a somatic experiencer and I was seeing my life coach because I knew that um I wanted to clear out any of the residual pieces of my past childhood trauma so that I could show up and be a better leader, that I could be a better partner, that I could be a better mom. And I knew that if I didn't do the work to address those things, this cycle of generational trauma would continue. And so it was just an incredible amount of work. I'm still very much on that path. I'm not seeing five people at one time right now. I was a little bit intense. Um, but it just opened up my mind to all the possibilities and have all the possibilities around healing, right? And like making ourselves a whole person and being able to show up as my fullest, most authentic self. And that was incredible for me personally. And I started to see that ripple effect in my business as well. And so we incorporate, we now incorporate a lot of those pieces um into communications that we have with each other. We're looking at things like our human design, we're looking at our Colby, our Enneagram, and we're incorporating these different modalities that can. Sometimes be viewed as a bit taboo into a business that is technical, HVAC. We're working with engineers, we're working with manufacturers. And even just this week, I was so I was in Costa Rica last week. Um, Sunday through Tuesday, I was in North Carolina visiting a customer. And we've started to incorporate meditation into our on-site strategies sessions. So we're sitting there with executive leadership teams that are very left brain, um, mostly not in touch with their feelings, like that's an uncomfortable area for them to sit within. And we're holding the space to center and focus. And um it's less about positioning it as woo activities and more about just mindfulness, right? Like being able to be centered and to be focused. And um, that's that's what a lot of this comes down to is just you know, slowing down the pace and pausing and being able to be in the moment and present.

Kelly 1:29:05

I think I've shared this with you. I think we talked a lot about this um when we first sat down for coffee and mentioned it before we hit record, how important faith is for me as like literally everything that I do now moving forward is centered around my faith. My testimony is very different from other people's testimony. I've always been a believer. And when I had my daughter, something shifted in me pretty dramatically to this understanding that there was a bigger purpose out there. There was something bigger happening which created this ripple effect for me personally, right? I'm very curious what faith, because you're talking so much in this space, and I'm very curious about how that all plays a role for you. Talk to me about it.

Ashlei 1:30:05

Yeah. So um I so growing up, I was uh baptized as a Lutheran. I was then converted to Catholicism. Um, my mom married a uh gentleman who is Mexican and had a big big like, if you know anything about religion, like Mexican Catholics are like a just a different breed.

Kelly 1:30:26

Yeah.

Ashlei 1:30:27

And so like got really entrenched in that uh denomination.

Speaker 3 1:30:32

Yeah.

Ashlei 1:30:33

And then through my own kind of discovering, um, took some religious classes in college and learned a little bit more about like the politics of religion. And um, for me personally, that was just a a little bit of a turn off. And I knew that I need I knew that I needed something in my life to be able to believe in that's bigger than me, right? Yeah. And so for me, I found spirituality. And there's a lot of things that that I talk about where I I have many friends that are very devout in their faith. And we are believing in, in my opinion, we're believing in the same things. There's something that we can't see, touch, or feel that we believe in that is giving us faith and perspective and guidance. And um for me, it's it's more about uh the spirituality aspect of it. So I'm very big into astrology and tarot cards and um human design and just being self-aware enough of myself and and everyone around me. Um, I've recently gotten introduced to Kabbalah, which is like, I can't tell you anything about it because I'm still very new to it. Okay.

Kelly 1:31:50

Like, I don't want to speak to it.

Ashlei 1:31:51

Yeah, no, there's a gentleman called uh David Guillaume. And before I went on this retreat in Costa Rica, they had us watch this video. It's called Infinite Soul, and it's a like a three-hour class.

Kelly 1:32:04

Yes, yep. Um, I think I've I think I know what you're talking about. Yeah. I I think I stumbled. No, somebody had recommended I listen to one of his. Yeah.

Ashlei 1:32:18

But he how he talks about it is so beautiful because he says, you know, he talks about this concept of something greater than you, whether it's God, whether you call it universe, whether you call it, you know, Mother Earth, you know, whatever your terminology is, it it's something bigger than yourself that is giving you inspiration and faith. And I think that's the important piece, right? Is that we have something that is outside ourselves that's helping us, helping guide ourselves and um giving us inspiration and courage and uh something to believe in that's beyond what we can touch, feel, see, and hear.

Books Podcasts Home And Fail Forward

Kelly 1:33:01

The very definition of faith. The very definition. We have covered a lot of ground, and this has been super beautiful. I love your story. Thank you. We're not quite done yet. Yeah. We're gonna start to land the plane. I've got just a few more questions for you. I'm curious, is there a favorite book or podcast that you are listening to right now that you're like obsessed with? We'll go a little, uh Yeah.

Ashlei 1:33:39

Okay, so the book I'm currently listening to is called The Alchemist. Let me guess, you have it on your bookshelf.

Kelly 1:33:47

It I do. It is my favorite book. Favorite, favorite, favorite.

Ashlei 1:33:54

It is so good. So my word for the year. Um, I know the listeners can't see me, but I have my little words project bracelet. My word is alchemist. So for me, this is really beautiful. Yeah, so I picked this, not knowing about the book, The Alchemist. And then, of course, as I'm wearing this word on my wrist, I've gotten so many times stopped, and people have said, Have you read the book? And I'm like, No, I haven't. So I started it when I was in Costa Rica and I'm almost done. I think I'm on like chapter 28 out of what 40 or something.

Kelly 1:34:28

Yeah, it's a it's a quick one.

Ashlei 1:34:30

Yeah, it yeah, it's quick. I think overall it was it's for sure less than four hours. It might be closer to like three and a half. Um, but do you do audible? Are you an audible person? I do because um mostly because I've just been on planes so much recently, and reading while you're in motion gets me a little sick, so it's a little easier to just listen. I'm with you. But typically when I'm reading a book, it's a text version of the book, and I'm like reading it like a college textbook. I'm highlighting it, I'm dog earing the pages because then when I go back to it, I can kind of just like skim through and read through the things that stuck out. So that is that's one book that I'm currently listening to.

Kelly 1:35:11

Okay.

Ashlei 1:35:11

From the podcast perspective, um, one of my oldies and goodies is uh by Rachel Brayton. She has a podcast called Yoga Girl.

Kelly 1:35:22

I've heard of this one.

Ashlei 1:35:23

Yeah, so she is just phenomenal. She uh I started following her when I was in the early stages of getting into my yoga practice myself. She lived in Aruba at the time, has since moved to Sweden. But I've followed her on this journey from being a prominent yoga figure to being a mom, and we were like actually pregnant at the same time. So her podcast was talking about pregnancy and all of that, which was just really relevant to the phase of life I was in. I think she was actually like, you know what? She probably was pregnant the same time as you were with Maddie. Cause I think she was like uh six months ahead of me. So it was great because then I got a preview into like what's coming next, which was ironic. Um, and now she has a brand that's more focused on like she has a a farm out in Sweden, um, and she's very into gardening and nature and all the things. So it's been really fun to kind of follow her on this evolution. Tell you what, I would love to do that. Yeah. Um, another I'll I'll do a shout out to uh one of my girlfriends, Brie Johnson. She has a podcast called How Good Can It Get? And she is just she's just a phenomenal powerhouse woman. She just spoke at the TEDx uh conference in Duluth. Beautiful. Um, hers is really good too. She comes from a background, she was uh in the legal world for quite some time, was part of a practice, left the practice, and now she has her own business. And she is all around, she talks all about like work wounds and how to heal from those. And um, the work that she's doing is just really profound, and she'd be another really great one to follow if I literally could you see my eyes?

Kelly 1:37:08

I was like, she probably should be on the podcast. She probably should.

Ashlei 1:37:11

Yes, I'd be happy to make an intro.

Kelly 1:37:14

I am in business with my husband, as you know. We're in real estate, and I have been in a very subtle way like collecting data. And the data is around favorite room in the house. What's the favorite room in the house and why?

Ashlei 1:37:42

Okay. Um my favorite room in the house would be we have two living rooms in our house, and one of them is in front of our fireplace. And we have this couch that is like the perfect like caramel color. And I just I love that couch. It's like this, yeah, just like caramel-y color. And I love that room so much because we completely redid the room. Like it has a brick wall. Um, the whole fireplace wall is like a brick wall, and I have the mantle like perfectly decorated according to my Joanna Gaines inspiration book. It's on the coffee table. But it's like we whitewashed the wall, we stripped it, like we just put so much love and care into that room. And I love the fireplace in that room because it's a place to gather, it's a place where you know we don't have well, up until a couple months ago when my husband moved a TV into that room. We did not have a TV in that room, and so it was the place to like go and read and just like reset. Um, I really love that that place. I also really like the view from our bedroom. Okay. So if you ran my human design chart, you would see that my favorite place or my most like inspired place is mountains. Okay. For me, what that means is the higher that I can get elevation-wise, the better perspective I have.

Kelly 1:39:08

Fascinating.

Ashlei 1:39:08

And so I love that that that view from that window in particular because it's in our bedroom, it's the highest point in the house. I can see out over the whole backyard, like into the pool and the deck areas. And it just, yeah, it gives me that like sense of like exhale.

Kelly 1:39:26

Yeah.

Ashlei 1:39:27

Um, so yeah, anytime I can get to like the highest point of elevation, I feel my body just exhale and reset. And um, it just gives me the needed perspective in that moment.

Kelly 1:39:40

That was really interesting and beautiful. Thank you. I love that last little bit about your bedroom view. That's really cool. Something for me to keep in mind too, as I'm like out showing houses and stuff. I'm like, oh, maybe keep this in mind as you're looking through. And um, but I just I love that question because it it's it requires you to think like, why? Why do I love this room so much? More oftentimes than not, it's always about the gathering. People, and my favorite part of that living room space is the amount of love that you have put into it. You can tell when you go into a house if there's love in the house or not.

Ashlei 1:40:24

Oh, you can tell. Absolutely. You can totally tell. In our other living room, it's like, eh, it's not decorated the way that I want. It doesn't have like the aesthetic. Maybe coming down the pipe. Yeah, coming down the pipeline, right? Like, um, and that's that's the story of our house. It's like room by room, we've perfected it to be the exact environment that we want. Yeah.

Kelly 1:40:45

What's a piece of advice you would give a younger version of yourself, knowing all that you know now?

Ashlei 1:40:52

I think it goes back to what I mentioned earlier. Like, don't be afraid to fail forward and fail fast. It doesn't mean that you're a failure. It means that you're experimenting in life. And through all of those experiments is a lesson.

Kelly 1:41:04

Is that the same advice you would give a woman listening who is an entrepreneur, she's a mom, she's looking to scale her business.

Ashlei 1:41:13

That would be exactly the advice that I would give. Like, don't be afraid to try things. Like, just because you try something and it doesn't work out the way that you planned, it doesn't mean that you can't pivot. We've talked a lot about pivots today, right? And it's like you, some people, me especially, I'm wired to experiment, put myself in those that position, and then see how does my body feel? But it's like paying attention to that. And I've spent so many years neglecting how my body feels because my body hasn't felt safe. And I'm now at a place in my life where I'm actively working on creating that sense of safety for myself. And and through that work, I'm able to feel into my body more. And once you can get to that place of pausing and asking yourself, like, how do I feel? I just did something new. How do I feel? Do I like that? Do I not like that? Your body knows there's a book, another book, your body keeps the score.

Kelly 1:42:13

I can't even count. Is that what I'm saying? A number of times that this has been referenced in this podcast. Yeah. And I haven't, I have not ordered it. I haven't read it yet.

Ashlei 1:42:26

Okay, I don't I have not ordered it, and I have not read it, but it's came up in multiple conversations.

Kelly 1:42:32

Okay, how many signs do you need, Kelly? Like, that's probably a really good idea. I just want to make a quick note because I I wanted to say this and then I got I completely went off on a tangent for a different direction with this interview. But when you had mentioned the the trauma that your body experienced with the physically abusive relationship, the importance of and I'm emphasizing that because it's like for somebody who's listening right now, that does it doesn't feel right. Your body is holding on to something and it's likely trauma. And it's figuring out how you're gonna work through that and get that out so that you can clear way. And I love how you vulnerably share that so that somebody who is listening can go, yep. And maybe they haven't, maybe their experience is not the same, but they there's just something that their body is holding on to to understand the importance of working on yourself to clear the space. What I didn't know I repeated myself, but I'm emphasizing.

Ashlei 1:43:52

Yeah, no, what I didn't know that I wish I would have known all those years back then is that um you don't need to re-traumatize yourself by going to therapy. Talk therapy is not the only option. Um, I found somatic experiencing about a year ago, and I kid you not, the first time I did it, I lost a pant size. Wow. I'm not saying that that's gonna happen for everyone, but that's how much my body was holding on to. And what I released was feelings around my corporate environment and the stress that I put on myself. And um, there was just so much, and it was just it was really profound, and um, I'm still seeing her, and that work that you do, somatic experiencing is a little bit uh different. Most of the time, you're not talking about like the thing that gave you the trigger, you're talking about your feelings and how your body feels, and the practitioner is like watching micro movements like your toe twitching or your finger moving or how you're breathing, like how your body is showing up.

Kelly 1:44:57

That's fascinating.

Ashlei 1:44:58

But um, you go in, you do your appointment, you do the work, and you leave and you let it all integrate. But it doesn't have to be, you know, resurfacing the trauma. Yeah, and it's working at the subconscious level. So you're not actually having to like work with your cognitive mind and like figure out the puzzle, but you're able to just let the work integrate, and it's so powerful. There's a lot that your subconscious mind holds.

Where To Find Ashley And Closing Ask

Kelly 1:45:25

That's so fascinating. I'm like mentally thinking through things in my past, like life, as I like to say. Well, Ashley, this has been such a a pleasure. I adore you. Thank you, guys. I like want to be your best friend. Yeah, we will all be. But how can how can women get connected to you?

Ashlei 1:45:44

Um, LinkedIn is a really great avenue. You can look up my name. It's spelt as h L E I Roloff is my last name. R-O-L-L-O-F-F. If you connect with me there, just drop a note so that I know to accept your request. Um, I'm on Instagram as well, same handle, Ashley Roloff. Um, yeah, and if anyone is navigating through IVF challenges, um, domestic violence challenges, scaling a business, being a woman in a predominantly male field, like all of those are things that I'm open to um answering questions on, or just being a cheerleader and a support system. You're such a gem.

unknown 1:46:27

Thank you.

Kelly 1:46:28

Truly such a diamond. I loved this. I loved all that you shared. Your story is phenomenal. Yeah.

Ashlei 1:46:34

And thank you for creating this container for women to be able to show up and be authentic and share because this is that community that compounds. This is you also being an expander and being able to hold the space for all of the depth that we went through. And with other guests that I've listened to, like you just do such a phenomenal job of creating this container for all of us.

Kelly 1:46:55

Thank you. I'm gonna accept it. I need to be better about accepting the compliments. I appreciate it. And that's that's the ultimate goal. Like it fills my cup up so much to be able to have this exchange, this experience. And then if it if it even just helps one person. Absolutely. And by the way, I'll do this for free. Right. And that's I'll do this for free alignment, right? So like I love that you had mentioned that. Like, I would have continued, I would have done this for free if I needed to. So that's also something for listeners to keep in mind is like if you're going down this path and you're passionate, and I'm air quoting like passionate about something, ask yourself that question. Would you continue doing this if you weren't compensated at all? And if the answer is yes, go for the goal. Yes, love it. I hope you have a great rest of the day. Thank you. You thanks for listening. And if you enjoyed this episode and know of any inspiring mamas who are powerhouse entrepreneurs, please help connect them with myself and the show. It would mean so much if you would help spread this message, mission, and vision for other Mompreneurs. It takes 30 seconds to rate and review, then share this episode with your friends. Until the next episode, cheers to reclaiming your hue.