010: How to Carry Your Business Baby to Term!

Hey Modern CEO. I'm your host, Amber McHugh and I am so glad you are here. This workshop style podcast is designed to inspire you to run a better business. Because a better business means a better life. Our goal with each episode is that you find a new strategy you can take away, make your own and implement to fall even more in love with your life. Let's dive into today's episode. It welcome to the Modern CEO podcast. I'm your host Amber McHugh and I have worked with thousands of women to help them scale and grow their business with ease. And I am here to help you achieve financial freedom without all of the torture. If you are down with that, all you have to do is decide right now that you can overcome any obstacle that comes your way and birth your own baby, even if it is a business baby. In fact, I'm in the middle of the birthing process right now. Actually, I can't say I'm in the middle of the birthing process. I feel like I'm just getting pregnant and I am so early on in this pregnancy with this new business idea, this new direction that I may be taking with my business that I don't even know if it's a boy or a girl yet. So, you know, business babies are much like actual babies and actual pregnancies. And it reminds me of the pregnancy that I had first, my first daughter back in 1998. Let me set the stage for you. At the time I was living in a small town of 500 in Illinois surrounded by cornfields. And this town was so small it didn't even have a gas station. It didn't even have a grocery store. We had a super small Main street that if you blinked while you were driving through it, you might very well miss Main Street. And on Main street you'd find a very small post office and you would find a bar and grill and another restaurant where they would serve breakfast and close up shop at about three in the afternoon. I did indeed work at that restaurant called Nana and Pops at the time and loved every minute of it. I love working there on the weekends waitressing. And it was a dream when I would walk out on a Sunday morning when my shift would wrap up with $80 tips in my pocket. That was always a win. I didn't spend my whole time growing up in that small town. I did leave for about five years. I lived abroad and lived in Saudi Arabia and got to travel a lot, got to see a lot of the world. Super, super fortunate to have traveled so much with but then I came back to that small town right smack dab in the middle of middle school. And, guys, middle school is hard enough, isn't it? But then to come back as a strange student from living abroad. I lived in Saudi Arabia. And not only did people think that, like, oh, oh, you lived in Saudi Arabia? Are you from Saudi Arabia? No, I don't speak Arabic. I don't. It was just. There was so much confusion around it and so much awkwardness. There was this girl. I'm not even gonna say her name because all is forgiven. But every time I would walk down the hallway, she would circle her finger around her head like, you know, I'm beginning to think that this is directed at me. What is she doing? What is this all about? And, you know, I would try to avoid her in the hallways, but, you guys, it was a small town. There were no hallways to avoid her in. There was just one main hallway in this school. So I couldn't even avoid her. And she. I found out later she was circling her finger around her head to say, amber thinks the world revolves around her. Yeah, you can imagine how heartbroken and how devastated I was that this is what people were saying about me. So it was a hard, hard road. And this is the vibe of, right small town America and growing up middle school, where everybody's talking about you. Everybody knows everything. So you can imagine what it felt like when I took that pregnancy test in the Walmart parking lot at a very young age. The sheer panic that came over me. Honestly, I can't even remember a lot that was going on in that particular situation when I found out I was pregnant, because I was in such shock. You know, can I do this? I'm going to college. I'm going to college in the fall. What am I going to do? I have dreams. I have goals. I'm not giving up on those. But I'm having a baby. I am having a baby. What am I going to do with my life? My. No, no, no. And my family was so unbelievably supportive. You know, they were there for me, whatever was going to happen. Amber, you can go to community college. You have choices. We're here for you. We're going to help you. And there was a turning point moment that helped me get a lot of clarity and helped me make a very strong decision. My uncle said to me, there is no one who's going to take better care of this baby than you are. You're going to be an incredible mother. There are families out there in a lot worse situations than you are. You've got this. And in that moment, he didn't tell me to go to school. He didn't tell me to keep doing my thing and follow through with my dreams and my plans and take my baby to school with me. But that's what I knew I needed to do when he said those things, when he told me and he instilled that faith in me. And in that moment I knew I was still going to go away to my four year university as planned in the fall and I was going to go away pregnant and I was going to have that baby at Christmas break freshman year of college and I was going to go back to school in the spring semester and I was going to make it all work somehow because I decided that in that moment that I was going to overcome any obstacle that was thrown my way. I was going to overcome those small town statistics, I was going to overcome those single mom statistics because they are dire. If you look up statistics of single mom or children of single parents, they are not good. And we are beating all of those statistics because we made a decision. I didn't know if her father was going to be supportive or not, but he said, I am in this, I am in this with you. So as it turned out, we were actually going to the same university together and we were there for a little while together and he made a decision second semester through. We made the decision together that he was going to go off to the army. He was not ready at the time to be at university. And I don't honestly think that our, you know, that everybody should go away to college right away. And I'm so glad that gap years are becoming more and more common now. My daughter actually just so 18 years later, we are over 18 years past this time when I made that decision to go away to my four year university pregnant. You can imagine the looks and the stares that I got walking around college campus with my big old belly. And guys, it was a very big belly. I gained a lot of weight and not just in my belly. Oh my gosh, I was such a marshmallow with that pregnancy. I puffed right up. And so you can imagine the looks and the stares that I got and how difficult that was. But, but he wasn't ready for it. It was a lot and not everybody is ready for it. And my daughter actually now just did a gap year and I'm so glad gap years are becoming more and more common because not everybody is ready at the time. Like he wasn't ready, wasn't into it. And he had a lot going on, right? He was there for me. His mom had actually died in a car accident a couple of years before he. We were, we were going to university, we were going to college. And so there was a lot going on. So he went away. So I was fully single mom at college without him being there. And I still finished school in four years because I made a decision and I was committed to that. I was working a part time job. She was in daycare on campus. They actually had daycare at the university and on campus. And it was reserved for students of the university and workers. Employees at the university, first and foremost, fortunately got in before others. So that was such a gift. Such a gift. But it was a difficult time and we were overcoming, overcoming obstacle after obstacle after obstacle. And my husband and I were on and off and on. Oh, my now husband, I spilled the beans on that one. My now husband and I were on and off and on and off. Because he was away in the army, I was doing something completely different. I was carrying the weight of what felt like the world on my shoulders. And he would come home on his breaks and visit us and it was stressful. He would go out with his friends, he would come back and visit. And I remember a couple of very distinct bites where in one particular instance, he came back and broke up with me. Like, yeah, I'm not really down with that right now. I happened to have a pizza pocket in my hand and I threw it across the room at him. And then in another particular instance, I had his jeep tire handy and he came through the front door. And I was mad at him for I don't know what he was doing. It was of course, something obnoxious. So I pushed his jeep tire out the front door at him onto the front porch and it bounced down, down, down the stairs, across the street, down the road. I don't know how far it went, but it was quite a sight and it was unbelievably difficult. But we made the decision to stay together not for the sake of. Right. The circumstances, not for the sake of being together because we have to be together, but because we truly wanted to be together. So at the end of a senior year, we actually got engaged. And his dad said, I don't believe you. I don't believe that you are actually getting married until you pick a date. I'm like, oh my gosh, we are getting married. We're engaged. I have a ring on my finger. It's like, I don't believe it. I don't believe it until you set a date. So I actually called my husband, who was living in another state, and said, your dad doesn't believe it. It's like, all right, why doesn't he believe it? He wants us to set a date. So we picked a date on the phone in this random conversation. And we did ultimately get married about six months later in a courthouse. We just got married in a gorgeous courthouse in Annapolis, Maryland. And I didn't even care if we had a reception or not, but my husband was really into that, and my dad actually really wanted to throw a party. So we threw a party back in Illinois at a gorgeous place, the Rialto Theater, for anyone who's from the area. And we didn't even have to decorate it much because the Rialto Theater is decorated beautifully. At Christmas time, we had a Christmas party and my daughter. Christmas, we've got a thing about Christmas. My daughter was born right around Christmas, four years prior to that. And it was a wild ride getting there. But at each step in the way, we're challenged with obstacles. And again and again, we are making a decision to overcome. We're making a decision to pivot and adjust, and we're making a decision to stay in the game. And we're keeping our eyes on the most important things for ourselves individually, for our babies, business babies, real babies, and for us as individuals. And then after we got married, I was actually in corporate, and I was really loving what I was doing. Actually, I'd work until 2 in the morning. I was, you know, spending all hours. And I was addicted to the busy. I was addicted to. Addicted to the work and the fun and the giving and the serving and the connection and the work that we were doing for people and for companies. But it got to be a lot. And I started getting a chest pain and a chest pressure, and I'm like, oh, my gosh, I am way too young to have chest pressure. I'm way too young to die of a heart attack. Guys, it was under 30. I couldn't do it. I couldn't do it. So I totally adjusted my plans for my career. I always knew I wanted to start a business, so I totally adjusted and started to reset the trajectory that we were going and started to set new goals and redefine right and align. We were going to have new babies, new business babies, new goals, and start to make new decisions about what we were going to do, new commitments. Now, I later realized that that chest pressure was just an allergy to garlic, but it worked out because I listened to those signs, and it set us off on a great trajectory. You know, you got to listen to those signs, whatever they are. They might be setting you off on a solid path, even if it is just an allergy to garlic. But it ultimately set me off on this path. I did take another job. I started an MBA program and by chance, I started my photography business. I was in that MBA program, I was working my new job, and I was looking for a creative outlet. So I started taking pictures again. And at the same time, I was learning about booth boudoir photography. And my husband was overseas at the time working for. It was maybe six to nine months, a six to nine month trip that he was away. And I wanted to take pictures for him. So I got my former Playboy model friend. Yes, that is a nice friend to have when you're looking to take pictures for your husband. And I got my photographer friend and we took pictures and sent them to him. And we realized when friends started asking for for pictures for their significant others and family members started asking for pictures for their significant others, that we might be on to something. So we turned this into a business. And then we realized that, hey, we are creating an incredible experience for people. And we created not only a photography business, but we created a business that was changing people's lives. People walked out of their photo shoots knowing that this wasn't just a gift for someone else, but they just did something incredible for themselves. So it was so incredibly fulfilling to have that experience with people. So, yes, right? We started with, whoa, whoa, the panic, what am I going to do? And we made that decision, made that decision to have this incredible, gorgeous baby. And yes, there were obstacles with that. Yes, there were challenges that came up throughout this journey, right, from throwing out my husband's Jeep tire, to throwing pizza pockets at him, to being crazy scared, going through college and garlic allergies, not chest pressure, but fake outs, fake out heart attacks. And now, fast forward 18 years later, married with three kids to the baby daddy, right? The original baby Daddy. Married for 15 years, having not only one business, but two businesses, having achieved that financial freedom and independence and having lots of Runway for growth. And it didn't necessarily come fast. It's been a slow and steady series of decisions that we make over and over and over again that we commit to over and over and over and over again. And all you have to do if you want to jump on this train is decide right now that you can overcome any obstacle and birth your own baby. Now, they may not be the same obstacles, right? But no matter what you are going through, whether you're at the startup phase or you're in the middle of running a business or you're in the middle of. Of growing a business, every new level is going to have that new devil. New level, new devil. And you're going to face those obstacles. And it's scary, it's overwhelming. I freeze up sometimes. I still sometimes have overwhelming anxiety and I wonder, did someone put garlic in my. In my pasta? And there are days when I want to cry and watch Netflix all day, but I recommit. And I know what you are thinking, am I ready to have this baby? I don't know. I had different plans or I don't know if I can do this. I'm a baby myself. I would never want to be in the Walmart parking lot. I would never find myself in a Walmart parking lot. But right, babies grow up and they those baby steps add up wherever you find yourself. If you make the decision now and you take the smallest of smallest steps, this will get you to your ultimate goal. You are totally ready. If you see the potential, if you see that there is more out there for you, this is your call to go and get it. Decide right now that you can overcome any obstacle and birth your own baby. So how are you going to do this? When you get in the midst of it all and you overcome your own obstacles and you birth your own baby, what are you going to do? What are you going to do? So if you want to birth your own baby right, don't use a condom. Just kidding. Just kidding. We're not talking about that kind of baby. Just first step, decide. Decide that you're committed. Throw away that massive to do list. Throw it away and just identify one thing that will move the needle a little bit because it will get the momentum going. Then take action on that one thing right now. Don't just do the planning. Don't just think about it. But I want you to go and I want you to take action. All right, guys, so here we go. You ready to get in action? You have made the decision. Am I right? Now you're going to throw away that massive to do list. You've got your one thing that you're going to do to move the needle just a little bit because it's going to get that momentum going. You're going to take action on it right now. You're going to get off this podcast and you're going to take action on that one thing and then let me know how it goes. Even if you feel fear as you move through it, Let me know any update that you have got. Did it work out? Did it not work? Workout? Did you fall flat on your face? Whatever it is, we are in this together and I want to know how it goes. Decide right now that you are in this and you can overcome any obstacle that's coming your way to birth your own baby. And you will. I can't wait to hear from you. Thank you so much for listening to the Modern CEO podcast. I'll catch you in the next episode.