#1: Rejected by Clown School, Laid Off After Baby #2: How I Built a 10-Year Business Anyway

Welcome to The Chaos Eliminator, where small business chaos comes to die.

In this first episode, host Lana Sanderson shares the real story behind GalsCC. It starts with applying to every school imaginable (including actual clown school) and getting in nowhere. It continues through seven years in consulting being told to "just do your job." Then came a layoff right after the birth of her second child.

The next day, with a baby on her lap, Lana wrote a business plan, updated her LinkedIn, and landed her first client that same weekend. 

Ten years later, GalsCC is a team of women consultants supporting small business owners across the U.S. and Canada, despite everyone who said it wouldn't last.

Real business. Real systems. No fluff.

Timestamps

• 0:00 Intro
• 0:45 Welcome to The Chaos Eliminator
• 1:19 Applying everywhere, including clown school
• 1:35 Business school and the big-picture brain
• 2:02 Seven years in consulting, and being told to sit down
• 2:41 The layoff after baby #2
• 2:49 Baby on lap, business plan, first client that weekend
• 3:05 The 10-year mark, for everyone who doubted it
• 3:32 Why GalsCC: building a flexible home for women in business
• 4:19 Today: a team of 5 or 6, serving clients across the U.S. and Canada
• 4:43 Why there's no one-size-fits-all solution
• 5:30 What this podcast is all about

🎙 Want to be a guest? Apply at galscc.ca
🔗 Connect with Lana Sanderson on LinkedIn 

Transcript

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SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome to the chaos eliminator. I'm Lana Status and the founder of L C. Okay. Well, it's called the Chaos Coordinator. And that. Somewhere along the way, I realized coordinating that. So that's what the show is about. And the moment you figure out how to eliminate the chaos, it's just and you have to adapt. No polish, no pretending, it's easy. It's just the real stuff.

SPEAKER_01 0:46

Thank you so much for joining me today. This is my first episode. I'm very excited to share some things with you. My initial story, how did we get here? How originated Gauss Coordination Consulting. So my name is Lana Sanderson. I am the host, and here is my story. So I finished, well, first of all, let's dial it back a little bit. I didn't know what I was going to do right after, you know, finishing high school. So many choices. I literally applied for everything, all types of universities, colleges, anywhere from business to, you know, being a clown. I seriously applied for a clown to be a clown. It's an actual clown school. Anyways, I was not accepted anywhere. I didn't understand how to apply for schools. Anyways, that's another time for a different story. Um, and uh basically I ended up in Calgary, Alberta, in uh DeVraye, a business school. I always wanted to have a business of my own, so I just I love kind of the bigger picture things. Um, I don't like to be pigeonholed, so I love the program. It was very fast-paced. Fast forward to a couple of nine to fives and operations um project administration, project coordination, proposal coordination at a consulting firm, which really taught me a lot of things at seven years in there. But um, I kind of really wanted to still see the bigger picture. And I was told to like sit down, just do your job. You don't need to do it all. Um, I find it very restrictive. So while I sat there in um as if you know, consulting it goes up and down. Um, in the quieter times, I kind of put together um what do I want to do as my own business. Um anyways, nothing really happened until I got the final push. Um, the consulting firm I was working at, no names mentioned, um, laid me after I had my second child, which was devastating. Um, anyways, the next day I just, you know, put my head up. I had a baby on my lap. I did a business plan, I updated my LinkedIn, and that same weekend I had my first client and I never looked back. And actually, 10 years and three months ago is well, is when I started my business. So 10-year anniversary. So here it is, 10-year anniversary. I've made it. For all of you haters that I wouldn't, I did. Um, including, of course, some of my um people in my own family and life said you can't fast, like once your first contract is over, you will never book another client. So there you have a 10-year, 10-year mark in your face. Um, so yeah, I started Gauss Coordination Consulting. The whole reason behind Gauss Coordination Consulting is there's a huge statistic for women after age of 35. They can't keep them um working. And what does that happen? They have kids, you have to be flexible, kids are sick, you gotta take them to appointments. So I figured I'm gonna, you know, start with me and eventually grow my team, and we will be women helping small business owners. I didn't know it was gonna be small business owners at first, actually, it was a um nonprofit, so I dabbled a little bit in nonprofits. Um, but I'm happy to say that we're a team of uh five or six different consultants and we work together under one roof. Primarily, all clients are in US, 99% of them. We would love to work in different um other countries. Right now we're in Canada and US. Um, so technically international, we'd love to grow more. Passion is to help really business owners to stop wearing so many different hats, to do what they love best, and just stop focusing on the chaos. And there is not one size fits all with all the software, AI, integrations. It doesn't work with every personality, and each and every person that owns a business is different. So that's why there's so many different solutions. So you really have to get to know people, it's very relationship-based. Um, we like to keep clients for a very long time, and of course, we understand if things don't work out and you no longer have clients or your business has changed so much that you no longer do what you do. Anyway, so we're pretty flexible, we're taking on new clients. Make sure that you uh check out our LinkedIn website, galcc.ca, and this is our first episode. Um, idea of this podcast is to get small business owners to come to the podcast. We interview them, ask them questions, have really cool, interesting conversations, no fluff, no um no cutting and pasting. We are live. So whatever is said is said. So I uh really wanted to keep it really raw and really real. And uh thank you so much for everyone who's on board and will be subscribing to this podcast. I can't wait. This is gonna be quite a ride. Thanks.