Hello and welcome to the Real Women Real Business Podcast. I'm your host, Shauna Lynn Simon, and today I'm thrilled to be welcoming Gabrielle Tongol also known online as Gabs, and she is a self-employed entrepreneur since 2014. She actually evolved from fitness coach to influencer and now serves as the CEO and founder of Assist Her Agency, which is a powerhouse team that supports overwhelmed entrepreneurs in reclaiming their time and, most importantly, their mental real estate.

So with over a decade of experience building and scaling businesses, Gab's actually now leads a team of eight while also mentoring aspiring agency owners, proving that you can build a thriving business without sacrificing your wellbeing. And I think her mission really perfectly aligns with what we talk about here on the podcast, which is sustainable growth that doesn't come at the cost of, your entire life, basically. So Gabrielle, thank you so much for joining me.

Thank you for having me. think it's going to be so great to talk about all the different things today, just given the history that I've had. And like you said, it aligns so well with your podcast. So I'm very excited and thank you for having me. Yeah. And I mean, so, okay, so take us back. We started in 2014. That's when you started as a fitness coach. Did I get that correct? Yes. So was a little bit of a hodgepodge of all the things. I was in college at the time and I had started as a social media manager, actually.

Hello and welcome to the Real Women Real Business podcast. I am your host, Shauna Lynn Simon. And if you're juggling like 17 different super urgent tasks right now and wondering how everything in your life seems to be a total priority and how the heck you're going to get it all done, this episode is for you. OK, so tell me this sounds familiar. It's like a Tuesday afternoon at, around two o'clock, which is kind of when I'm recording this episode. You've got like forty seven browser tabs open on your computer. Your phone is

going nuts off the hook with urgent requests and you're staring at your to-do list that somehow has grown three times longer than it was this morning. Is this sounding familiar at all to you? If you're drowning in a sea of important tasks and every single thing feels like it just needs to happen today or better yet, like yesterday, ⁓ then you're going to love today's episode. So if you're nodding along thinking,

You know, is she like in the room right now? How is she understanding my life this way? And there are a few of you that I know are religious listeners to this podcast that take me everywhere that you go. And that's right. I'm speaking directly to you right now. And I know you're nodding along saying like, yep, she's definitely getting me. You're in the right place ⁓ because today we're going to talk about the exact system that successful entrepreneurs are using to cut through all of that noise and focus on what truly moves the needle. You've probably.

looked at other businesses and thought, my goodness, like how are they managing to continually move forward and excel? And it seems like they're doing so much. You know, they are balancing the family life and the work life and they're going to these extravagant galas and they're doing all these different vacations and trips. You're thinking, I don't even know how I'm going to take off a couple of hours tonight just to read a book…

Hello and welcome to the Real Women Real Business podcast. I am your host, Shauna Lynn Simon. And today's guest is Amanda Kaufman. And she is the founder of The Coaches Plaza host of The Amanda Kaufman Show. Amanda has generated over $2 million in revenue through her coaching and her courses. But what makes her story really so valuable is her willingness to share the real journey, which includes the challenges that even successful entrepreneurs face.

So with over 18 years of business consulting experience, Amanda has made the leap from corporate to coaching, building her business from just eight names, eight names, and quitting her job in four months. She's incredibly passionate about helping coaches to build authentic and profitable businesses without the social media overwhelm that so many of us struggle with. So I cannot say how excited I am to have you on the show, Amanda. Thank you so much for joining us.

I'm so excited to be here. So we had some off-camera conversations and we could not be more aligned in some of our thought processes and some of our journeys for that matter because there are so many similarities I think to the entrepreneurial journey but not everyone always talks about them. So let's start off with, okay, you built a successful coaching business from eight names. Let's talk about this for a moment.

Hello and welcome to the Real Women Real Business podcast today. I am super excited to welcome our guest, Stacey Brown Randall to the podcast. She is a multi award winning author of Generating Business Referrals Without Asking, as well as the upcoming book, The Referrable Client Experience, which is set to release in October of 2025. She's also the host of one of my favorite podcasts, the Roadmap to Referrals Podcast.

And one of things that I think makes Stacey especially unique is her contrarian approach to referrals because she teaches business owners how to generate these naturally without manipulating, without incentivizing, without even asking. And her work has been featured in major publications like Entrepreneur Magazine, Forbes, and Investor Business Daily. And so I want to just explain a little bit about how I originally met Stacey because we actually collaborated as co-authors on a book with LuAnn Nigara

who's also been featured on this podcast. And I will be honest, when I first learned that her whole premise to everything that she does is all about referrals, I was a little skeptical. I'm like, how on earth are you building an entire business around referral strategies? That sounds like a portion of your business plan. And she makes it basically your whole world. And you'll see why when we get to talking about this.

And after listening to her speak about it, seeing the results that her clients have achieved, I got to say, I am absolutely 100 % a true believer.

Hello and welcome to the Real Women Real Business podcast. I am your host, Shauna Lynn Simon. And today we're going to be diving into a topic on something that's really been bothering me a lot lately. What I've found is that when I'm looking for women-owned businesses to support, especially when it comes to a high level in those sort of specialized services, they're incredibly hard to find. And it kind of got me wondering, why is that? So I dug a little bit into this.

And I'm going to share some of my insights that I've discovered and some incredible facts about this that are going to help you to understand, of all, why this is. And then the next thing we're going to tackle is how do we overcome that and how do we as women continue to rise and to raise each other up? So I'll back this up a little bit and explain that I recently I needed some support navigating a new business development opportunity.

And so there were some specialized people that I needed to speak to at a fairly high level. We're talking sort of legal, CPA, ⁓ valuators, different ⁓ types of businesses that were at fairly high levels. And so a colleague of mine, she introduced me to the first person to speak to, which was a lawyer. ⁓ And he was lovely. But of course, it's a man, an older gentleman, and very knowledgeable.

really supported me well overall, I would say. And he then said, you know, I have someone else I'd like you to speak to. I think that you need to speak to this type of person. Let me refer someone. Of course, it was another man. And that person then referred to me to yet another person. And again, it was another man. Now, throughout this process, I did a little bit of searching on my own behind the scenes to see if I could find someone who is doing a similar job at a similar level to these guys just to get a second opinion on things.

Hello and welcome to the Real Women Real Business podcast. I'm your host, Shauna Lynn Simon, and today's guest is someone who's going to completely change how you think about growing your business. I've got Melissa Snow with me. She is a business relationship strategist and the founder of the powerful women rising community. So after building and scaling two successful businesses of her own, Melissa discovered something that most entrepreneurs miss, and that is that the most sustainable way to grow your business isn't through

complicated marketing funnels or expensive ad campaigns, but through, get this, authentic, real human connections. I know, shocking. So she's now on a mission to revolutionize networking by teaching women how to build genuine relationships that fuel business growth without the whole, you know, sleazy, pushy tactics that we've all experienced. And she calls it networking like a human, not a salesy weirdo, which I absolutely love. And trust me, if you've ever felt uncomfortable with traditional networking, this conversation is going to be a game changer for you.

And I should also mention that she's also the host of the popular Powerful Women Rising podcast. And she lives in Colorado with a couple of dogs, cat, and any number of foster kittens, which as of the recording of this episode apparently is six. Of course, we've already talked about that because she is our kind of people. So, Melissa, welcome. Hi, thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to talk to you and your cats.

Hello and welcome to the Real Women Real Business podcast. I am your host, Shauna Lynn Simon. And today I'm excited to welcome Victoria Gallagher, also known as the Law of attraction hypnotist. She's a worldwide leader in hypnotherapy and a bestselling author. She's got over 20 years of experience specializing in helping business owners to rewire their subconscious for success and shift their money mindset to create sustainable wealth.

So if you've ever found yourself undercharging, because I know you have, we all have, or feeling guilty about profit, again, welcome to the club, or knowing that you should scale, but somehow you feel like you're just sabotaging your own success, this conversation is for you. Victoria's gonna help us break down what's causing your money blocks and help to give us some practical tools to help to overcome them. So Victoria, welcome.

Thank you. Thank you so much for having me. I love that intro and I love this topic. So we could have talked about anything today and that this happens to be one of one of my specialties. Well, I think one of the reasons why this topic always intrigues me and why I really wanted to cover it is because I'm constantly having this conversation. I specifically work with predominantly women entrepreneurs and women find these conversations around money.

Hello and welcome to the Real Women Real Business podcast. I am your host, Shauna Lynn Simon. And if you're working harder than ever, but you're finding that your bank account just not reflecting that you can't seem to keep up with all of your expenses, you might actually be caught in a pricing trap that so many women entrepreneurs find themselves stuck in and it keeps them just spinning their wheels. So today I want to cover the four invisible traps that are keeping you stuck in a cycle of under earning, overworking and

Honestly, feeling pretty frustrated about the whole thing. So grab your coffee or tea or beverage of choice and let's dive into the pricing trap that's keeping you well broke. And more importantly, we're going to talk about how to actually get you out of that as well. Now, before we jump in, I do want to lead with this important reminder. If you don't know what it costs to offer your products, your services, you're going to continue to find yourself struggling when it comes to your pricing.

But when you know what your expenses are and you can account for all of those, then you can price for profit. When you know what it costs to offer your product or service, you make sure that you identify your time, your opportunity cost, all those expenses, all those costs that go into that. You won't sell it for anything less than that. I have worked with numerous entrepreneurs over the years, helped them fix their pricing strategies. But even myself, I need someone to check me out every now and then.

Hello and welcome to the Real Women Real Business podcast. I am your host, Shauna Lynn Simon, and today I've got a great guest joining us. Today's guest is actually living proof that the best business ideas often tend to come from following your passion. So I think this is really going to hit home with my accidental SEOs out there who follow a passion in and really wanted to make a business out of it.

00:01:26:15 - 00:01:50:07

So sometimes it takes a bit of a completely unexpected type of turn, and this guest can certainly attest to that. She's gone from navigating ice roads to navigating the male dominated fishing industry. But Linda Leary has never been afraid to chart her own course. So today, her company, fishing has grown from a small Anchorage, Alaska. That's right.

00:01:50:07 - 00:02:17:04

You heard that correctly. A small Anchorage startup to into a nationally recognized brand that's been revolutionizing women's fishing apparel with bold, functional designs and through fishing. And her other venture, which is women's fly fishing, she's building communities and mentoring the next generation of female entrepreneurs and outdoor enthusiasts. So please welcome to the Real and Real Business Podcast, the founder, president and visionary behind Fishy, Linda Leary.

Hello and welcome to the Real Women Real Business podcast. am your host, Shauna Lynn Simon, and today I am being joined by an award winning, high performance, trauma informed coach and trainer. She's also an Amazon bestselling author, TEDx speaker, and she's joining us today. We're going to be talking about podcasting and how to guest on podcasts. And so I'm going to welcome Kimberly Spencer. Thank you so much for joining me. Thank you so much for having me, Shauna Lynn. I'm so excited.

listening to your episode all on visibility, on visioning before this, like as prep, which is like one of the number one things that I recommend. If you go on a show, just like listen while you're doing your makeup. But I was listening and I was like, oh, we are going to vibe because our coaching styles are like, I'm like visualization. So cool. We're both runners, like love your episodes. Yeah.

I didn't realize you're a runner as well. Yeah. And you know what? It's funny. The visualization episode, I just felt a calling to do it because so many people talk about the whole I'm just seeing so much on Instagram and so much about this whole manifestation. like, manifestation isn't just think about something and it comes to you. So I did the whole episode like you got to have some there's some science to this. This is a very real thing. You got to add some action to it as well. So I wanted to make it a little bit more.

than just the 30 second reel you see on Instagram that shows all the fancy jets and luxury hotels and everything else. So, okay, let's go back to though, because I wanna talk a little bit about you've got a ton of experience in communications and in speaking, and you are the CEO of a company called Communication Queens, where you actually help people with podcast guessing. Am I getting that correct? Yeah, so we started out as doing a done for you agency of the end to end booking and all that.

The skills that got you into your business are not the same skills that are going to help you lead in. Today, we're exploring that critical gap between being great at what you do and being great at running the business that actually does the things that you do. Hello and welcome to the Real Women Real Business podcast. I am your host, Shauna Lynn Simon. And today I'm going to be sharing some practical strategies to help you to bridge

the leadership gap without losing you, without losing your authentic voice and without losing the passion that got you started in the first place. In fact, I'm going to help you to actually reignite that passion. We're going to cover four critical mindset shifts that you need to make in order to be a thriving leader and be able to embrace that leadership CEO role to be able to move your business forward. So let me start by just talking briefly about

the accidental CEO because I've spoken about it previously on the show. But if you're just joining us for the first time, I want to make sure that you know exactly what we're talking about when I refer to my accidental CEOs. This is a very endearing term that I like to use for my passion driven entrepreneurs who followed more passion than plan. Here's the thing. You woke up one day, maybe not one day. Maybe this was coming for some time, but essentially you had this passion. You had this drive. You had this calling. You had this thing that you were really, really good at.

and you knew you were great at it and you knew you could help other people. Maybe you're fulfilling a gap that you are seeing in the world today where you're like, you know, no one else is filling this gap and I can serve these people and you followed that passion with so much of who you are with all that you had. But here's the challenge. You don't necessarily have all of the business tools in your tool belt that you actually need in order to ensure that you are moving this business forward.

You love the doing. You love doing the things that you do that you're so great at. But some of the business stuff often ends up getting a little bit lost in in all of this because we've got a lot of passion. You've got a lot of passion for what you do.

Shauna Lynn Simon (00:02)

Hello and welcome to this week's episode of the Real Women Real Business podcast. I am your host, Shauna Lynn Simon. And today I am being joined by Dr. Laura Sicola And you are going to love this woman. Let me tell you, she is all about leadership, communication and influence. And she's a speaker. She's an author. She's hosted her own podcast as well. And she helps to transform executives into confident and inspiring leaders.

And she's actually got a linguistic background. So she comes from the academics of this, but she now applies it to corporate leadership. And she's trained and coach executives at Fortune 500 companies. And she has a TED Talk that you're going to want to check out, a TEDx Talk called Want to Sound Like a Leader? Start by Saying Your Name Right. That has nearly 7 million views. And we're going to dig into that in a little bit as well to find out exactly what that's all about. So Dr. Laura, welcome. Thank you so much, Shauna Lynn. It's great to be here.

I can't wait to dive into some of this stuff because we talked a little bit pre-recording today about ⁓ our audience here and they're what I affectionately call our accidental CEOs who follow more passion than plan. And one of the things that we often find our accidental CEOs are struggling with is sort of this imposter syndrome. And I think a lot of that just comes with not being able to express themselves properly. They started off with this great passion, like I have this amazing thing.

that is going to benefit so many people, but then they lack with the actual communication of it. tell us a little bit about some of the things that you work on with leaders in helping them with their communication skills. What do you find are some of the biggest things that people are struggling with when it comes to communication? It's interesting that you mentioned that the audience, everybody out there, they're accidental CEOs because for the last 17 years or so, I've referred to myself as an accidental entrepreneur and a recovering academic.

Hello and welcome to the Real Women Real Business podcast. I am your host, Shauna Lynn Simon, and I have the incredible Jazzy Luchini joining us today. She is not only is she a virtual assistant who's just like rocking it in the VA world, but she actually is now teaching aspiring VAs how to build this massive business through virtual assistants. And I got to tell you, I've listened to you in the community and I probably with the number one question that I get from this audience is,

How do I get some support with X, Y, or Z? And X, or Z usually falls into VA. And there's a lot of confusion out there, I think, as to what a virtual assistant can and cannot do. So Jazzy is here and she is going to help to clear all of that up for us and probably answer all of your questions and solve all your problems, right? No big deal. Exactly. Exactly. That's what I'm here for. That is pretty much what we expect a virtual assistant to do, though, right? Like that is your goal is to make someone else's life easier.

Am I right? Exactly. I like to say that we're like a business bestie.

Hello and welcome to the Real Women Real Business podcast. I am your host, Shauna Lynn Simon. I am so happy that you are hearing that you're joining me today. Have you ever caught yourself saying, I'll believe it when I see it? Well, what if I told you that science actually says you've got it backwards? It's a matter of you'll actually see it when you believe it. I hear a lot of things and I've had a lot of conversations that's come up on some of my podcasts in, you know, with some of my recent guests. And we've talked about something that

kind of comes across a little bit woo woo for lack of a better term for it. And that is things like visualization and manifestation. And I want you to stick with me on this one because I want to dive into this a little bit. There is actually a great deal of science behind this. And if you know me, you know that I am all about data driven insights and data driven ⁓ ideologies and theories. And I'm not into things that are necessarily a little bit too abstract to be

to be tangible. And so this is something that is backed up by science. And I want to explain sort of the difference between the woo woo part of it and the actual science part of it. So stick with me in this episode. We're going to dive into this a little bit. But first, I want to talk about how a softball game when I was visiting my nieces inspired today's episode because it kind of shifted my perspective a little bit when I was thinking about, you know, how we think about and

and talk about and visualize our business success and why some of the world's top performers, know, Olympic athletes, professional athletes, Fortune 500 CEOs, why do they swear by this visualization of manifestation type of practices? So let me bring you back to the softball game. I was visiting with my nieces out in California and I was at a softball game and I'm listening to the coaches as each batter is going up to hit the coaches saying saying their name.

Hello and welcome to the Real Women Real Business podcast. I am your host, Shauna Lynn Simon. And today I am being joined by Tamika Carlton. She is a powerhouse entrepreneur. She's a relationship expert and she's actually the host of the Real Connect podcast. And she is on a mission to transform the way that people are building meaningful connections, both personally and professionally.

And as the CEO and founder of Couples Experience, she's changing lives through inclusive and luxurious retreats and a thriving community that's dedicated to strengthening connections. She's been featured on the Oprah Winfrey Show, on the Hello7 podcast, the Success Journey podcast, Authority magazine. I mean, this woman knows her stuff. So I'm going to stop talking about her and say welcome to Tamika. Thank you so much. I'm happy to be here.

I'm so excited to have you on here. You know, I talk about relationships often and anytime I speak with, especially any of my clients when they're struggling a little bit in terms of getting new clients, I'm often saying, well, what are you doing? Well, I'm posting on social media. Well, what else are you doing? Well, I'm doing, you know, they're doing all these things. Like, well, have you done any direct outreach? What does that mean? Right. Yeah. No joke.

Hello and welcome to the Real Women Real Business Podcast. I am your host, Shauna Lynn Simon, and today I've got a super fun conversation. I am being joined by Amber Briggle and she is the CEO of B-Well Enterprises, which is also the home to Soma Massage Therapy and incredible massage therapy businesses she has built. And she is working now towards bringing a new level of massage therapy across the globe in a franchise way.

She is the epitome of the accidental CEOs that we talk about on this show. And so I really wanted to welcome her on here to be able to share her story because it's powerful. You're going to love it. And we're to be digging into, you know, how some challenges can turn into these growth opportunities, which is exactly what she's done. And you're going to be blown away when you hear what she has done with everything that she's been thrown at, that's been thrown at her. So, Amber, welcome. Shauna Lynn, I'm really excited about this conversation. Thanks so much for having me.

I am super excited about this as well because you just have such a fabulous and unique story. And so in our pre-interview, we did talk a little bit about how, you know, we're all over talking about COVID, but you said something that I really wanted to repeat here because it was so profound. And you said, you know, as much as we all want to just move on and forget about COVID, small businesses have not forgotten. And I, and I love that. So tell me a little bit about your

your journey. We've talked about you're you are an accidental CEO yourself. And so tell us a little bit about what's brought you to where you are today. Yeah, absolutely. I will try and keep this very brief because it all happened over two decades ago. But I did go to a really fancy four year school and basically graduated with a degree where I had no clue how to use it. And I'm sure a lot of your listeners can probably relate to. I ended up kind of bouncing around, working at a dead end job.

Hello and welcome to the Real Women Real Business Podcast. I am your host, Shauna Lynn Simon, and in today's episode, I'm going to be sharing with you my proven system for helping you to manage your clients' expectations. This is something that has transformed my own businesses from that constant stress to more predictable success. And I've had various guests on this podcast over the last year and a bit that I've talked about how important

client expectations and managing those expectations is to the success of that experience, that overall client experience. So stay tuned until the end of this as well, because I'm going to be sharing with you a framework that you can actually implement immediately. OK, so early on in my home staging business, I worked with a contractor and I want to say that in my opinion, he was out to get me. I really thought that he was

constantly just trying to find ways to make up his own policies. He had no respect for me. And I don't think I'm entirely wrong in that thinking. However, as I started working through this project with him, and once the project was completed, he said something to me that had me rethinking my entire outlook on him the entire time. So let me recap this for you a little bit. So he was an investor and he was flipping a property.

and brought my company in to stage it for him. And we would show up the day before the staging to kind of check things out and things as simple as like there weren't any mirrors hung up in the bathroom. The place was a mess. And so of course I contacted him and said, you know, just want to make sure that you understand it needs to be stage ready. And here's what that looks like. And he assured me, yep, absolutely. It's going to be stage ready, no problem. And sure enough, the next day I showed up with my crew and

Hello and welcome to the Real Women Real Business podcast. I am your host, Shauna Lynn Simon, and I am here with a fantastic and entertaining guest today. So Holly Oldham, or also known as Holly Oldham, not Newham. And she is with Pause Reflect Move Forward, and she is a freelance writer and author, comedic poet, a solopreneur. She is a mom of four. She is a grandparent. She has lived a life, let me tell you, and she has done it all.

And a big part of this has been actually centered around having a cleaning business. And that's one of the reasons why I'm so excited to bring her on here because she has such a unique story to tell. And I can't wait for her to share it with you all today. So Holly, welcome. Hi, Hi, Sean and Lynn. Thank you so much for having me. Just like we were talking about earlier, just past daylight savings time and we have extra daylight and

One of the things that I like to do is I'm a daily beach cleaner for the last four and a half years. So when it was darker in the evening, because I'm not going, I'm in Florida, so I'm not going to be in direct sunlight. So I'm either there first thing in the morning or the latter part of the day. And now I get to, you know, we had this extra hour or so of daylight. So should I run later on jobs or if I have other things going on, I can still go to the beach and, you know, keep it here. So when you guys come down and visit, it's nice and clean.

Hello and welcome to the Real Women Real Business podcast. And today we've got a lovely Earth Day episode for you because we're to be talking about sustainability. I've got Cailyn Poschner from Habitat Design Co. She's an architectural designer in Canada and she's going to be talking about sustainable design and architecture. And she's got an architectural design firm that actually focuses on creating those beautiful and functional homes that are also sustainable. And

She's got a lot of great knowledge that she can really dig into for us about what qualifies as sustainability, how to incorporate that into your design. think a lot of people think they've got to compromise function and style in order to get that sustainability. And she's here to prove that that is absolutely not true. So Kaylin, welcome. Thank you so much for having me, Shauna I'm really excited to be here today. I am super excited to dive into this because you have...

white the resume in all honesty about like the different certifications that you have in your just your level of understanding about design and sustainability. And it's something that I've always been very interested in. But I'll admit as an interior designer myself as well, it's not something that I'm overly comfortable. My clients come to me and they say like, I want to incorporate sustainability. I'm like, okay. Like I know some basics about, you know, obviously like we've all heard about paints and VOCs and things like that. but

That's kind of where it ends.

Hello and welcome to the Real Women Real Business podcast. I am your host, Shauna Lynn Simon, and thank you so much for joining me today. I have a very fun conversation for us today. And fun might not be the first thing you think of based on what I'm going to start off with here. But the reason why I say this is fun is because this is going to change your business today. So if you ever thought that maybe your business looks successful on paper, but feel a little bit like it's crushing you.

Because I hear this from entrepreneurs all the time. And in fact, I would say that in my initial coaching assessment calls that I do with clients, this is one of the biggest things that I hear from them is that they're saying, you know, everything just feels heavy. Everything feels hard. I'm overwhelmed. I'm overworked. You so let's say you're hitting your revenue goals. Clients are absolutely loving your work. I think that's one of the biggest things. They're like, listen, like, I know I'm good at what I do because the client's absolutely like are singing your praises about it.