Hey friend, I'm Tracy Strader, and welcome to Beyond the Brand. I'm all about real conversations, fresh perspectives, and those little aha moments that help us grow in business or life. Over the years, I've built a multi six figure online community by doing one simple thing. Bringing people together through open, honest storytelling.
I've been coaching and mentoring entrepreneurs for nearly three decades. My passion is helping others find direction, balance, and healing, and creating spaces where people feel safe enough to just be real. Each week, I'll sit down with entrepreneurs, community leaders. And everyday dreamers who are out there living boldly and inspiring others to do the same.
My personal stories, business knowledge, and life experiences will be woven into this podcast as well. So grab your coffee, get comfy, and let's go beyond the brand together.
Good morning. Thank you for joining me. I'm so excited that you're here. I have to be honest, this project has been in the making for a couple of years, and when I say a couple of years, I don't mean like just in the last 24 months, it's probably been in the making longer than that, but. The reality is when it came to creating this podcast, my nerves were shook, and I have been procrastinating.
I have been putting this off, and it all boils down to me finding my voice. Finding my voice has been part of my journey for. The last 40 years, basically since I left home is at 17 years old. Growing up in my house, it was interesting. It was we didn't really have a voice. When we asked questions, it was more perceived as disobedient or rocking the cart and disrespectful.
There wasn't any level of curiosity. Oh, I wonder why she might be thinking that, or, oh, that makes sense, that she would want more information on that. It was just one way. And that was it. There was no room for anything. Black and white. After leaving home at 17, I had to really learn how to use my voice and it didn't come easy.
In fact, it came with a lot of hard knocks trying to figure it out and I guess really. Back in 2000, after going through a terrible divorce, being a single mom with three kids is when I really started to establish I need to use my voice and I need to find it, and I need to dig deep. And throughout that journey, I had some successes and I had some failures.
I had setbacks and now here I am today and I wanted to start here because I feel like if you're gonna listen to this Beyond the Brand podcast, it might be nice for me to connect the dots for you on my life throughout this journey and finding my voice. Is really where it started. In fact, I launched the everything brevard.com website back in 2011, and I really wanted it to be a place for people to go to find all their information.
I didn't want my website to be business or health or. Just seniors. I really wanted anybody who landed on the site to feel welcome and like the messaging that we delivered was a fit for them no matter their age, their race, their upbringing, their career, their level of financial wealth. Like I really wanted it to be for everybody.
And that's where. It all started when I launched my business 15 years ago. I launched it with 27 featured businesses and an idea that I would grow this to a platform that everybody would know, like, and trust. I'm happy to say that after 15 years. We've actually accomplished that last month on the Everything brevard.com website.
I actually had over 61,000 unique visitors on the site, and that has been a big undertaking. It required a lot of consistency and ugh. Lots of teamwork and hiring the right people to help me do things that I wasn't the best at. So let me backtrack a little bit. We started in March of 2011. In January of 2016, I was diagnosed with Type one diabetes.
I was in ICU for three days with diabetic ketoacidosis, and once I got better, the doctor told me if I wouldn't have gone in when I did, I would've actually died. So that's where my journey started, and I remember that summer of 2016, my husband and I had gone on vacation and I thought to myself, maybe I should just sell my business.
Maybe I really need to focus on taking care of myself, making that the priority and not trying to build some kind of the empire or career. Uh, just focus on my WellCare. And then we stayed at a hotel up in Ocala, and when we checked in on the coffee table, there was a magazine called Ocala Style. And at that very moment, God put it on my heart to do an everything brevard.com magazine.
I came home and I asked my team, who at the time happened to be all females, what they thought about doing in everything. brevard.com magazine to help us establish a positive voice within the community. And everybody loved it. From that moment on, it took me six weeks to launch and print the first everything.
brevard.com magazine that came out in I, it came out October 1st, 2016 and we launched as a quarterly publication and it was so well received that in 2018 we went to buy monthly. And we were cruising right along. Everything was going great and one of the big things that happened for me in April of 2017 was I had met our current managing editor, Lee Ssel, at a business event.
And she had asked me about becoming the editor of the magazine and I thought to myself, there's no way I can afford somebody like her with all of her experience and stuff. And uh, she said to me, she said, how about I do the first one for free? And I said, I'll take you up on that idea. That sounds like a brilliant idea.
And so she got everything set up for me and she would start editing these Google docs. And right before my eyes I could see the transformation and. I knew that I had to figure out a way to have her on the team full-time, and we were able to come to terms, you know, with an agreement. And so she became our full-time editor.
Well, along with that, because I didn't have a level of confidence in my writing, in my. Voice. I was really nervous and intimidated to give her my work, and what I found is once I got past that, there wasn't a whole lot that she wanted me to change it. It was quite simple. And then she was really good at also.
Asking me more questions and over time my writing style developed and evolved, and my level of confidence also improved. Well, when it came to creating this podcast Now here in 2025. Roughly 14 years ago from when we launched the magazine, or, well, not when we launched the magazine, but we came out with the magazine in 2016.
So nine years ago it would've been
here we are. And I'm just like blown away at what we've been able to accomplish. But as we talked about this podcast, my nerves got really rattled. And for good reason. It was linked to a childhood story that has been repeating itself in my head, going on and on for decades. And when I was a little girl, I had a set of headphones and I had a stereo in my bedroom and I was a teenager.
I was, you know, sixth grade, seventh grade, something like that. And we lived in a two story house. And my parents had got me the headphones 'cause they didn't wanna hear my music and I had the headphones on and I am singing. Of course, nobody can hear the music. I am thinking I'm home alone. And. When I got done and I went upstairs, my parents were laughing, ridiculously laughing at me, and really crushed my heart that I.
I could not sing. I couldn't carry a tune in a bucket if I had to. And they just kept on and on and it really shut me down. And the thing of it is I love music so much. And instead of saying, we see how passionate you are about this, Tracy, let's get you some lessons, or let's figure out how we can lean into this.
Desire of yours to sing and to use your voice. There was none of that in my faith, and I don't blame them. I don't blame them at all. But it was my reality and therefore I've been terrified. To speak in front of large groups. I've been afraid to, uh, do the podcast and, you know, most of the time I just kind of play it safe, if you will.
Okay. And I figured that now is the time to do this. And the reason that I feel like this is the time to do this is that as I approach my 15 years in business, and I've been here on the Space Coast for the last 41 years, I want to go beyond. Not just beyond the brand, but beyond the Space Coast. I want to start exploring the world and I feel like the podcast is a way to do it, and I'm envisioning myself and my travels meeting people even before I get to a destination.
I can meet people, I can interview them. Because I'm very passionate about the stories and I wanna be the person to bring you those stories, ask the people that I'm interviewing, the hard questions. And normally what happens when I'm having these conversations with people. There's this level of safety and non-judgment that I bring to a room and it allows people to share the inner most private details of their lives and, they don't even know why. I definitely don't know why but they do. And it happens. And I think that through storytelling we can enrich each other's lives. A short story probably about 20 years ago I was doing a sales presentation and I had been. I've been in this line of work for a couple of years.
I had worked for a trade and barter company and I had gotten a hold of the owner of a flooring store, and I asked him if I could come in and kind of explain to him what I do and see if we would be a good fit to work together. And he said, sure, come on in. So right in the middle of the showroom, I was telling him a little bit about what I do and I began to ask him some questions about what he does.
And the next thing I know, he's telling me how his wife had ran off with our personal trainer and how he missed his children so much and he was just. Bearing his heart and soul to me. And about 20 minutes in he says to me, he's like, I don't even know why I just told you that stuff, Tracy. He said, I don't even know you.
Why did I just tell you all of that stuff? And I just looked at him and I said, you just needed somebody to hear you. And it's okay. And then I went on about my presentation and he became a client and everything just worked out amazingly. But I wanna be able to do that on a grander scale. And although I love print and it's in near and dear to my heart.
I want to explore this next chapter of podcasting and see how that goes for me. So I appreciate you being here. I hope that you will continue to listen. Tune in weekly next week. I wanna talk to you about. This season, the fall season is a time for reflection and I wanna dive into that as it pertains to entrepreneurship that's what I got for you this week. Thank you for joining me. If there is anything about this episode that resonated with you, please do me a favor and take a screenshot of this podcast and post it on your stories and tag me at Tracy Strader. I would love to connect with you. So thank you in advance and I appreciate you.
I'll see you next week.
