Freedom Focused Success with Amber McCue

Her Empire Builder. Today I have for you my wonderful friend, Amber McHugh. Amber and I first met a few years ago. We were in, we are in a mastermind together based in the US and she was one of those people. I walked in and instantly was attracted to her magnetic energy. You will hear in this episode. She's just so enthusiastic, so kind, so thoughtful and so passionate about what she does. So Amber is an incredible entrepreneur. She's a strategist, she's a founder of ember mchugh.com and she's so inspiring. She became a Single mom at 18 and then went to owning three different companies, allowing her to work from anywhere in the world from Ethiopia to Chicago to California. Absolutely incredible. She has a background in corporate consulting, an MBA in organizational development from Johns Hopkins, and combines that big business strategy with real world entrepreneurial experience for women who are wanting to be the CEO of their business, their life and have that freedom and flexibility that we get. So she's talking about in this episode how she grew from zero to several multimillion dollar companies, how she purchased her first online education company, and how she's right now running the modern CEO method, which is a framework for building businesses that are scalable, sustainable and importantly don't require you to be always on. So we're talking about how you actually get that freedom and flexibility instead of just dreaming about it, what things you can delegate, what mindset shifts we need to get over and how Amber has done that for such a long time in her life. So inspiring, so incredible. I know you're gonna love this conversation. Let's go. Alrighty, gorgeous Amber, welcome to her Empire Builder Show.

Oh, thank you so much. I'm so happy to see you and be here.

Oh, I'm happy to see you too. It's been like while, like six months since I've seen your face.

Yeah. At least.

Yeah, yeah, it's been a while. So I am very excited to have you on because the first time I met you and you know, so we met in a mastermind, which talked a little bit about in your, in your intro, but when I walk into the room and you know, you walk into a mastermind room and you're kind of sussing everyone out. You're like, you know, am I going to be friends with this person and am I not going to be friends with this person? And you were this loud, wonderful American and then started going, you've just flown over from Africa where you're doing this and you're doing that and you were jet setting around the world. And I'm like, I think we're friends now.

I love it. Mine was a different experience. I was connecting with you and stalking you on Instagram first. It was like, all right, who are we gonna meet? Who are we gonna meet? And that is where I felt your incredible energy. And that would have been the smarter thing to do. Yeah.

I could have known already. So you are in a place starting. How do you say, the place that you're. You're in right now?

I am currently in Abidjan, Cote d'. Ivoire.

I keep thinking it's called aubergine. Like the American version of an eggplant.

Yeah, that works.

I'm like, no, it's not aubergine. That's an eggplant, Tina.

I hear everything. My family, we've lived here for almost a full three years now. And everybody's got, like, a slightly different way of saying it. It's all right. I'm okay with it. Others may. Okay.

So usually I would say, like, how did your business start? But I want to first ask, how did you end up in the place that's not called aubergine? How did you end up in Africa?

I love it. Well, actually, this is the second location we've lived in Africa. We went to Ethiopia first, then we popped back to Chicago during the COVID wind, and now we're back in Abidjan. And it's all for my husband's job. So we knew, actually, when I was setting up businesses that we wanted to design them in a way that would allow us to work from anywhere. And we didn't know what exactly it was going to be for my husband at the time or what would take us abroad, but that was a goal of ours. And so when he decided he wanted to change career paths, like, well, this is perfect. Let's go. And then it worked out well.

And so he's not in Africa.

He's not right now. He is working in another country and left us here for the year, which I'm so grateful that that all worked out, because the idea of moving to the States just for one year while he works in this location that we're not. Families are not able to accompany him.

So I love how diplomatic you are about it. He is in another country. Families cannot go. We can work out what he does.

I love it. Yeah. And it's a. He's. He's in the foreign service in the State Department. And so. Yes. Yeah, there you go.

So you are left there. And. But for you, I think it's like, you could be anywhere in the world and you've, you've chosen Africa, which I know for a lot of your business, like you're working in the online space, which you can serve people around the world. But how does it go with timelines, time zones?

Oh, yeah, okay. That is the biggest struggle. So Abidjan, I've been so lucky. It's four hours from the U.S. east Coast.

Yeah.

Five, you know, so I can do this. Or when time zone shift, it's five hours, that's not so bad. But in Ethiopia and then where we're going next, Croatia, it is going to be seven hours. And I'm like, oh, this gets a little bit hard. Tina. The upside is that I enjoy a whole day now. I have like about four to five hours to myself. I work out, I have beautiful conversations with people, I have coffee with friends, I volunteer, I hang out in the pool, I do my thing and then I get to work. But that seven hour time difference, I mean, you know, when you start to like, get it, it pushes it a little bit. So I'm not too keen on starting my days at like. But I don't know what that is. Even 3:00pm, 5:00pm and then working, you know, and I don't work full eight hour days. So I've made adjustments to my schedule that way. But still.

Yeah, yeah, it's, it's tricky. But I mean, that's the benefit. And I like the same thing. Like when I'm traveling in America, I always, like, I wake up in the morning and most people I work with are still asleep. So you like this beautiful freedom where you can email people and people aren't emailing back. It's just like so nice and lovely. And then you can condense all your work into the one like couple hour window, which is perfect.

Yeah, it's.

Yeah.

Well, that's the thing. I find I was, I realized that my hours and my time was kind of all over and I started to sit down and think, no, you want a block of time for whatever.

Yeah, you got to be more disciplined with it. Otherwise your workday, instead of being condensed, will just extend and be like a full 15 hour day.

Exactly. And so I decided, like, I'm not working more than 20 to 24 hours a week. Usually it's actually even less than that because when you compress it, you're like, this is what I need to do. Sit down, do it. Step away. So 24 or less hour work week.

Yeah, that's perfect. We're going to talk more about that after. But before we go there, how did you choose Croatia as your next destination? Because I love. I just love the whole theory behind it.

Oh, my gosh. It's a total negotiating process, basically, with my husband. So how this works is he receives a list of potential places. He puts in his name, and there's discussions with people. It's like a whole new interview process each time, each location. So he brings me a list, and I look at the list. And first of all, for the kids, the first thing I do is double check school sizes because there's some, you.

Know, how old are your kids now?

The we. I have three girls. One is 26, so she's taken care of, but the other two are 14 and 11. So I check schools and I give them the clear or no clear and then go, no go. And then we sort of. Okay. Then we look at life. Like, where do we. Where would we want to live? I have some, like, I really don't want to be in a super cold location.

Yes.

Definitely need the Internet to work consistently, which, you know, that's been a thing in Ethiopia. And even here, I'm at a better location in Abidjan, but in Ethiopia, I had three, three or four levels of backup for Internet. So we find our way. It doesn't have to be perfect Internet because, you know, there are solutions, but those. And then he. Then he officially puts in his name.

Amazing. Well, Croatia is one of my favorite countries in the world, so I'm going to be very jealous, and I'm going to be looking at every picture, and I'm just going to keep asking you to send me a photo of the water because we were talking about this before we hit record, but Croatia blue is my favorite color. I have so many photos of the water there where I would just look over the side and go look at that color and just take a photo of the water. So dreamy.

Everybody I've talked to has. Nobody has said, oh, you're going to be, oh, why Croatia, everybody. It's amazing.

It's amazing.

It's amazing. Yeah.

Yeah. It's so dreamy. So for you with, like, where did entrepreneurship come for you? Did you decide, I want to be an entrepreneur and you would have done that anyway, or did that come out of knowing that your husband was going to be moving around and going, I need something adaptable. Maybe this will be the path.

That's so funny. So I always wanted to do something, start something of my own, Build, create. Ideas were always flowing, but it really came about, actually. Two, two Interesting ways. I was working in corporate and the online world started to really pick up online consulting courses, online education. And I was looking at what I was doing in corporate and I was like, I think I can build something around this. Simultaneously I'm in an MBA program realizing, wow, I love this, but I think I wanted to go the life path. And then I was like, but I really love business. So I was teetering on that front. While I'm in the a pro, the MBA program, still working in corporate. I started picking up a camera again. Like started. So I did photography in high school. I'm like, you know, I really enjoyed that. Let me grab a creative outlet that turned into a photography company and that grew beautifully as a side hustle that it became a full time thing, you know, full time within the 24 hour, a week thing. And then you're so the type of.

Person to go, whoop, that escalated quickly.

So fun and surprising and like not the path. And so often business, like, you want something but it's not going to be the path you necessarily expect. Much like that. And then I was sitting talking to a friend, so I still had like, I love business coaching, consulting, something. And I was talking to a friend, building photography company, MBA program, full time job. And a friend said, don't you ever just wish you could clone yourself? I was like, I know how to do this. This is the only way that I'm able to do all the things I am doing. And I. The first online education group experience I built for business owners was how to clone yourself, which is all about teams training. So all of these things are kind of coming together. And in that process, that's when Matt and I were having conversations about what do we want in life? Yeah, like, you know, we don't really want to live in this place forever. Maybe we want to live abroad. I lived abroad as a kid. I lived in Saudi Arabia with my family for, oh wow, five, four years. And so I'm like, yeah, that was a great experience. And Matt was like, yes, let's figure this out. That's when he decided to change career paths. So I'm building, thinking, we're having conversation, thinking maybe we want to take this somewhere else. So that's when I got super intentional about how to clone yourself and not being the one in the weeds. And also Tina, there was a very distinct moment in our photography company when I was taking the photos, my business partner was coaching our client through the shoot. And I realized, oh my gosh, I'm gonna be miserable if this because it became so systematized and I was seeing every step in my head. I'm like, oh no, I don't need to be in this moment anymore. This is not my zone of genius. If I stay here, my energy is going to deplete complete. I need to create the system so we can serve more people and have this again. Cloning myself, replicating this, this impact. And so I had a really heart to heart with my business partner at that time too. So all of these things are kind of unfolding that led us to being able to work for many.

And when was that? What year was that that that all happened?

Okay, so the photography company started in 2009. Ish. Really 2010 and it was probably 2012, so about three years in.

You've been running online programs for a long time?

Yes.

Yeah, yeah, that's like pre Instagram, right?

Yeah. And so, yeah, the first how to clone yourself was 2011. And before that I did like when I was thinking, okay, is this life? I did run a small group like test life thing. Like not yet. It's. It's more business. Didn't know what it was. Yeah.

Because I got onto online 2017 and I feel like I was still early enough. Like I feel like, you know, still hadn't quite taken off yet. So you, you were like pioneer days.

Wow, that's so weird to think about.

Yeah. Yeah. So how has it morphed since then for you? What do you think now is harder and what do you think is easier in the online space now than when you started?

Yeah, when I. Well, now there's so much more of.

Everything which has its positives and negatives.

Exactly, exactly. So there's more familiarity with it. Like the first, the second business program I launched was called CEO School.