#122: What To Do When You’re Hit With Challenges with Heather!

Come on this journey with me each week when you join me, we are going to chase down our goals, overcome adversity and set you up for a better tomorrow. I'm ready for my close up. Hi and welcome back. I'm so grateful you are back here with me this week. Okay, so something interesting happened this week which has been a bit of a roller coaster. However, the ending looks really positive, but it didn't start out that way. I want to remind you this week that sometimes some really negative things can occur and in the moment it feels like all hope is lost. But we just have to look for what other ideas or angles or perspectives or partnerships there could be and do a little homework before we start opening up doors that lead to opportunity. That's the moral of the story this week. Okay, so as you know, I self published my first book, Confidence Creator and self publishing is confusing because I had never done it before, right? So I made lots of mistakes. My cover came out wrong the first time it printed. You know, I didn't print enough copies the first time I went to print. I had to defer to the company that I scribe that I work with on so many different things because I had no idea of the ISBN number in the setup. I was a rookie, right? I'd never done it before. I still am a rookie self publisher because I've only done one book, so I wouldn't call that any type of expertise, although I have some experience. But it definitely is far from being an expert in the field. To that end, I have on my credit card every time anything over, I don't know, $300 is, is spent on my credit card, I get a notification on my email and on my text, which I love. If you don't have that feature turned on, turn it on. Because sometimes there's errors that happen and you need to catch them and you wouldn't know otherwise. I'm definitely not the most disciplined person going over my bills each month with a fine tooth comb. However, I wish I was or I just wish I had a full time cpa. Preferably the latter. Okay, so I get a ping on my phone over the last week and it said $500 to Amazon. And I thought that's wrong. There's no way that's right. So I stopped what I was doing, thank goodness, and I tried to get in. Now when you self publish, you have what's called an Amazon seller central account. That's different than your regular, you know, just a shop or on Amazon and you have to have different passwords and different logins and whatever. So I log in first to my Amazon account and I don't see any charges for $500. So I said, oh wow, this must be in and around my self published book confidence creator. Let's go to seller central, find the login. I go in and I'm navigating around. Finally I find the $500 charge was from Amazon was charging me for hosting or holding my hardcover print books in their warehouse. And I'm sitting, I've never seen that before. And so I'm saying what the heck is going on here? I didn't get an email about this. No one notified me they were changing the way that they build self published authors. This doesn't make any sense. So I started digging more and more and I went down the rabbit hole and I found that I had been getting these charges now for the last couple of months, tons of them. It was ridiculous, insane to the point where it didn't make sense for me to keep my hardcover books there anymore. It made no sense. So I reached out to my partner, the company that I self published with and I said I need to get on a call with someone. Now I'm really upset. Why wasn't I notified about this? You know, and at first I wasn't even thinking if this is happening to me, it's happening to other self published authors. I didn't even think of that at first because I was, you know, when you're so focused on being pissed off, I wasn't thinking clearly. I was just so pissed that here I am, a rookie self published author and yet again I have no idea what's happening and I feel like I'm getting taken advantage of. I get on the call with one of the women at Scribe and she hears me out and says, listen, I'm hearing this right now from you for the first time. I don't want to respond. I need to do homework on my end, which is fair. And she said, I'd like to get back to you this week. I said sure. I said, but understand something, I'm not paying these charges. This is crazy. I never agreed to this, nor would I agree to this. No one explained this to me. Not Amazon, not you. This makes no sense. People can't just randomly charge my credit card for whatever dollar amount they want without communication and confirmation that it's okay. She says, let me get back to you. A few days pass, she gets back on a call with me and I'm livid at this point and I'm not thinking of Anything other than what am I gonna do with my hardco now? And am I going to still be able to sell hardcover books on Amazon? And this is a fricking nightmare. I'm supposed to be working on my new book that's coming out. Why am I getting dragged back into these logistics that I thought this was all handled right. This has been working fine for the past couple of years. So I get on a call with her and she explains to me that I'm right, that there have been a number of charges and that she understands no one communicated to me. She said, however, I want to let you know Amazon did change policy at the beginning of this year and they no longer want to, you know, host and hold all of the hardcover books for self published authors because it's taking up too much of their space and they want their space for their own products. Makes perfect sense. Completely. Get it Amazon, I got you. You need to do what's right for you and maximize your revenue. However, I put all of my print hardcover books there because up until now it was, they were fine with it.

Right.

So here's the thing. When I launched my book, we went to a traditional printer, printed whatever it was, 10,000 for the first run, 10,000 for the second run, however many runs it was. And then the printer would ship direct to Amazon that lot of 10,000 books. And then as Amazon gets orders, Amazon goes into the warehouse, pulls the books up and ships them out. It's worked amazing. Love it. Come to find out, Amazon now has moved to what's called a print on demand strategy, which means if you purchase a book from Amazon from a self published author, they don't keep hardcover books on hand anymore. They don't want to be a warehouse for self publishers. They then execute however it works that they print on demand. So your one order will be printed the day that you actually pay for it and ordered on Amazon. No longer will they house and hold all these books. So here's what happened. This is what I'm seeing. There was an agreed upon strategy, process and procedure in place. I had signed off, Amazon signed off, Scribe signed off and scribe recommended it to me. Right. Because it was a great option for the last couple of years. Now Amazon has decided to change their model, which is their decision. Makes sense for them. I get it. But now I'm sitting on a stack of a few thousand books still from the last run, which I was told at the time was still the right strategy, made sense to do it again and we ran off more books. Well, now I'M supposed to be moving to this print on demand strategy, so I shouldn't be having a couple thousand books sitting in a warehouse, but we do. It's that time of year again.

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So I'm hearing the woman out. I let her empty her glass, tell me all of her opinions, give me all of the facts on her end and then I ask again, so what is the solution? I am not paying for these charges. Number one, I never authorize them. I understand Amazon changed their model. However, this was the model you recommended to me as a company, not that woman in particular but you advised me of and it's been working great for the last couple years. Seems like we've got a challenge now. How? What solution do you have to offer me? She said, I'm going to have to get back to you. Well, when I hung up that day with her, I realized something in my mind. I thought, okay, Amazon changed their entire model. Which means Amazon's impacting thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of self published authors. So I started thinking the company that I work with is great. They're a huge company. They must be having calls like this with tons of people. Anyone that has a self published book that was self published before 2020, right, because that new policy kicked in at the end of 2020. So I start thinking to myself, hmm, this is a much bigger problem than just the conversation with me. I need to be aware that they're probably coming up with a few different solutions right now and I want to make sure my situations taken care of. She schedules a call for me a few days later. We get on the call and she explains, okay, we are going to credit you back the money that you were billed. We agree with you, that was not your fault. We did advise you to set up for this. So they were great partners and took care of it. And I was so grateful for them to do that. It was the right thing to do. But then they go on to tell me, well, for an option now we think you should go to print to demand, which is fine, that's great. But what do we do with the couple thousand or three thousand books that are sitting in Amazon's warehouse? We need to move them somewhere. So she says, I can ship them to you. Well, I live in a two bedroom condo in Miami Beach. That's not gonna fly, right? I'm not gonna move 2,000 or 2,500 books into my apartment. Besides, shipping them as a nightmare, I just know not happening. So I said, well, that's not gonna work. So what other options do you have? And she said, well, you know, we really don't have a lot. There's one other possible solution, but it's gonna be costly and that would be to move the books from Amazon to their warehouse to my store self publishing partner's warehouse and have them sell them from their website. I said, well, that seems to make sense. And that's when I brought up also, I'm realizing I'm not the only author that you're having this problem with. You're having this problem with every single author you've worked with over the last decade that didn't launch a book in 2020 or 2021. So to that end, what are the solutions that you're presenting to those authors? Crickets. She was silent. And then she said, well, we're actually customizing solutions for different people because different people have different problems, Heather. And she explained, some people are happy to take the books back to their house or whatever. I thought that doesn't sit right with me. So I just said, listen, here's the thing. I'm sure I'm not going to be the only one that doesn't want the books at their own home and doesn't want to be a distribution center. I'm sure you're running into other people that want you guys to take this on. Why can't you extend me the same deal that you originally gave me with Amazon, but now you offer it from your warehouse and this would be amazing. It actually for me would be better than ever because then when companies want to buy books directly from me in bulk, I would be able to offer a deal. Amazon, I can't do that. It just, they go through Amazon deal with Amazon Direct. There's no deal cutting or bulk offers. But now if I was doing this with my partner, they would be able to work with me on that. So I was actually. This terrible situation was beginning to give me a glimmer of hope. She said, I can't promise that. Give me a couple more days. Let me have some more meetings, and I'll come back. So in that window of time, I thought, okay, worst case scenario, I have 2,500 or whatever it is books sitting on Amazon's warehouse. They're going somewhere, and if my partner doesn't take them on, I have to send them somewhere, and they are not coming to my house. And then all of a sudden, I thought, wait a minute. I've been thinking with my new book, Overcome youe Villains, that I wanted to offer a charity component. I wanted to have something where every time you purchase Overcome youe Villains, blah, blah, blah, is delivered to a charity, whether it be my online video course, it's worth 299. Do one of those is given to charity. Or whether it be Confidence Creator, one of my original books is given. Somehow I want people to know that when you purchase my book, I'm gonna go out into the world and do good and help a charity. As I'm sitting there, it came to me. I thought, okay, well, suddenly I have 2,500 books. Maybe I contact the charity now, see if I can move the books to the charity, a charity that it would benefit them to have the books, and maybe we can start that partnership now ahead of Overcome your Villains coming out. It's worth a conversation, and it's to do good in the world. Okay, start dialing. So I started. I sat down with a blank piece of paper, and I thought, what are the charities I would want to work with for Overcoming youg Villains? And of course, just like I'm sure you would do, I go right to the people I know and the charities I've already served on. People go to what they know. And so I was on the board of City Year Miami for almost a decade. So I immediately think of them. And then I thought of a couple of other charities in Miami, specifically that I had worked with over the past few years, specific to when Confidence Creator came out. I went and did speeches for them. I hosted Big Brother, Big Sister event. I was the emcee of the event. So I'm writing all these things down, all these people that I already know, that I can reach out to that have already worked with. Then I stopped myself, and I thought, you know what? I'm not an expert in charities and nonprofits, but one of the women who's in my group coaching program is. So I decided to contact. I sent an email to Natalie, who's in my group coach coaching program, and I just said, listen, this is your expertise. It certainly is not mine. If there's any chance I could get five minutes on the phone with you one night this week, I'd super appreciate it. I want to run by my idea, by you, to see if you think that it has legs and if I'm looking at it the right way. I'm not an expert in nonprofits. I have no idea if my concept would even fly. Well, thank goodness I did this. I got on a call with her, and she's worked with hundreds of charities all around the country. The first thing she said was, I was looking at the absolute wrong partners, and she knows them all. She said, this is not the right situation. She said, I'm going to give you two names. And she gave me two names. And she said, one of these two will be the right partner for you. She said, trust me. And I do trust her. And she's an expert. I said, okay, got it. And they're both, you know, phenomenal organizations. Then she said, here's the one I'm leaning towards. And she had me pull up the site. We were on the phone, and she was pulling up a site on her end. She's like, look at the CEO of this company. She's amazing. She went to Harvard. She's overcome so much. God, she's so successful. And as we're looking at the page, I see one of the board of directors is a friend of mine. And I had no idea my friend Kate was on the board of this charity, huge charity. And I thought, oh, my gosh. So I said, natalie, that's my friend right there. I can call her. She said, okay, well, let's go through what that conversation would look like. And we role played. And it was so incredibly helpful. While I know business, while I know, you know, marketing and sales, I don't know nonprofits. And she told me, she gave me all of the elements that are really important to a nonprofit. And then conversely, she said, here's how you can get value out of them. They can put an email blast out to all their donors suggesting that the donors companies purchase your book. She went on and on. She gave me five or ten ideas on both sides, what I could offer the charity, which was no financial impact to me, and what the charity could offer me, which was no financial impact to them. A true partnership where we both would benefit and do good in the world. So I was so grateful to her, so appreciative. And that next day, I called my friend Kate and I said, listen, I told her everything that was going on, and I said, I would love it if you and I could have a conversation around what it would look like, me partnering with Overcome youe Villains with you and the charity you're on the board of. And she said, can I stop you right there for a minute? I said, yeah, of course. She said, here's the thing, Heather. And she explained a very famous person who I know. She said, this person came to me a month ago with nearly a very similar conversation that you're having. And I connected her to the CEO, and it went very poorly. It didn't go well. So I asked her, I said, why? Why is that? Why did it not go well? And she said, you know, she had some demands on her end. And immediately I felt so grateful. I had talked to Natalie because Natalie told me I couldn't make demands. I could have an ask, but she told me, here's the things they'll be able to give to you and deliver, and here's the things you should be able to give and deliver to them. So I heard Kate out. I listened to her, and then I. I reminded her. I said, I'm not that person. I said, and in fact, I. I had a really helpful phone call with a very good friend of mine who's a senior leader, has worked at so many nonprofits, and she advised me what she thought a really amicable partnership could look like. Can I run it by you right now? She said, yes, I ran it by her. My friend loved it. She said, this is exactly the kind of collaborative partnerships we love to have. Thank you, Natalie. So I was so grateful that I took the time to have that phone call and that I had this resource accessible to me. So she went ahead and scheduled a meeting for me with the CEO, which is going to happen later this month. And suddenly, this awful situation about Amazon charging me thousands of dollars to. To keep my books in their warehouse has now turned into a potential partnership that I wouldn't have been exploring yet. I wouldn't have even started exploring this partnership till probably it was too late, right? I probably would have waited till October right before the book was gonna come out. And thankfully, this prompted me to take action and try to create this relationship now instead of delay. And luckily, in my group program, I have an expert in nonprofits who was able to advise me and help me. So even though the Amazon situation has been a headache and Definitely not something I'm excited about. It has now created a further opportunity for me, my business and moving forward that could be much greater that I would have never come up with on my own. So I'm super, super excited about that. And I'll keep you up to date on how my meeting goes with the CEO. But I have a very good feeling it's gonna go well because I did my homework. So to that end, I have a very dear friend who's just started getting into the speaking business. And I saw that there was a speaking opportunity in. In her. Her. In her market that they weren't paying speakers. They had reached out to me and I declined the opportunity. But when you're first starting out and speaking, you need to speak for free first. And it was right in her backyard. So I sent all the info to her. I said, I think you should apply for this. Now, mind you, this was a month ago. And I sent it to her. I said, listen, I think you should apply for this. I think it's a great fit for you. You'll do an amazing job. Then you'll have testimonials from them, then you'll have video from them. You know, it's easy. It's in your backyard. You can sleep in your own house and just, you know, show up for the day. I think this is great. She says, okay, great. Thank you so much. She said, if I have questions, can I come back to you? Of course. Well, here's the kicker. She waits to the day before she's going to submit. The deadline was upon her and she sends me a text, I need your help. And of course, I wasn't home. I was heading to meeting and I just jumped on the phone with her quick and I said, what's going on? She said, that deadline's tomorrow. I said, why did you wait until right now? I'm driving. I can't even see what you're trying to send me. I said, just, you know, tell me what it is. And she told me and she had made it. When you send a pitch in to speak at something, your submission, if chosen, will end up, you know, populating on the actual schedule and planner. So she made it all about her podcast and really kind of push her podcast. Here's why that's the wrong approach. You want to make it about them, make it about the words they use, choose, and are supporting. So for me, if I was applying for this, I would have gone to their website, I would have gone to their past events so I could see their past schedule. Past descriptions. I would use the words that they're using in promoting this upcoming event so that they could see my message aligns with them, that we're in unison approaching things the same way. And by doing your homework and really digging into the past events and past descriptions with the current themes and current words they're using, you're almost guaranteed to nail it. But unfortunately, we didn't have enough time. I did explain to her my methodology and how I really encouraged her to do the same. So we'll have to wait and see if she ends up getting it. Hopefully the changes were made in time because if she does speak in their words, in their terms, and take a look and consider what's worked in the past, you have such a better chance of nailing it for this one. Okay, and then the final story I wanted to share with you from my group coaching is I have amazing people in this program, all from really different backgrounds. One woman is just the ultimate connector. She knows everyone and connects everyone without a second guess. I mean, she's constantly connecting me to companies, opening up doors. It's phenomenal. And she's just such a giving person. Her name's Lauren. Well, we were all on our team call this week, and one of our team members has a company that. It's a multilevel marketing company where she's. She's trying to, number one, attract a team of people to work with her on selling the products. And then she's directly trying to sell products to people. And as we were talking about what she's doing, I asked everyone to pause for a minute and I asked Lauren, I said, lauren, can you lend some fresh eyes on her business right now? Because sometimes I find it really helpful to have someone in a different industry take a look at the model that you're running with, because they'll be able to see holes or opportunities that you can't see because they're looking through it through a totally different business lens. So the first thing she said is, I don't like the idea of one to one. How can you scale if your business strategy is to connect with people on a one on one basis? She said, conversely, what I would do is one to many. She said, let's take a look at how you could partner with different groups, different companies, businesses or associations that would have a need for the product and services you sell, but you'd be able to go one to a thousand or one to five thousand instead of one to one and scale your business so much quicker. And it was such an eye opening moment for everyone on the call is so often we just get in the rut of how we're doing business, right? For me it's how am I selling books or how am I getting podcast downloads or how am I getting speeches? Where is the opportunity for one to many instead of one to one? So I challenge you to look at your business that same way. How can you see it through a different lens and tap people in different industries and have a conversation with how they would reimagine it? It's all about accessing people in different marketplaces, different industries and starting to be collaborative to help you and your business and them and theirs. Hold tight. We'll be right back.

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Okay, so this was interesting. I received an email to my website this week that I. It's. It's kind of big, but we're gonna have to get into it. Okay. Hey, I've never reached out to someone like this before. I love the Q and A section of your podcast.

Thank you.

And I'd like some advice. I have been listening to your podcast and your book is next on my list. Thank you. You're gonna love Confidence Creator. Okay, I resonate with your story, especially some of the events that have occurred while you're in corporate America. I'm a mom with three little kids and okay, here's the situation. It looks like she was getting fired or let go or furloughed or whatever. And they offered her her the same type of deal that I was offered. And what this is is it's essentially a non disclosure. So in corporate America, when you're laid off or fired or whatever, parting ways with a company, the company always wants to protect their rights, their entity, their team members, their leadership team, their board members, whatever. They want to protect the information that's gone on while you're there, the information that you have that's relevant to the company, the employees or whoever. So they ask you to sign a non disclosure, non disparaging, which means you will never speak badly about the company. You will disclose no information about any experience you had with the company or any of its partners or anyone that worked there for the entire duration of your time at the company. And in lieu of that, you receive a check so they pay you. However, I had seen that movie play out badly so many times as I had been an executive at that company for fun 14 years. And one of the themes I saw is someone would get a check. And these aren't like million dollar checks, right? These are oftentimes. I mean, it's different for everybody. But maybe for some it's 20,000. Maybe for some it's a lot less. It's not something that you're going to retire off of. If mine had been retire worthy, I probably would have taken it. But I, in that moment, for me, I had to say, am I going to take some B rate check right now to basically force me to put a muzzle on about what I've gone through, or am I going to roll the dice on me and just go for it? And I, as you know, chose option B. Well, this woman and everyone has to choose what's right for them in the moment. Right. So at the time I chose not to take the check and not to sign, I was 43 years old. I was pretty confident in myself and I was pissed that they had treated me so poorly. And that kind of fueled me as well. I don't know this woman's situation, but it's different because she decided to take the check. Which by the way, 95 or 99% of people do in my experience anyways.

Okay.

Early on, my time in the company, they had made me a shareholder and thanked me for my extra efforts. At the time I didn't realize there was no outclause. And it was really just a way to prevent me from leaving. Major life lesson learned. Declining to leave was a legal battle. They did pay out my shares. I did sign the NDA as a breadwinner for my family. The buyout was, you know, the bridge play. And I totally get it. You felt you had to do it. I understand that bridge play gave her the ability to start her own business. Here's the complication. They're paying me out over time. Yeah, that makes it way harder. And she has to play nice because of certain people who work at the company who are still in her circle. Here's my ask. I feel stuck with my NDA. That, that sucks. I'm just going to say it right now. That sucks. There's certain decisions we make in life that we look back on and we say, oh, I would have done it differently. I will tell you this. For me, that day when I got fired, I thought to myself, this sucks. I wish I had quit five or 10 years ago. I really feel like that had I known what the future held, I would have left years ago and taken that time and effort. Instead of building that woman's company, I would have been building my own company. Right? But these are the moments you have to say, I'm gonna learn from this in this moment and apply this knowledge to the future version of me, because I can't do anything about the past one. So it sucks. I feel you on that. And we are with the NDA, but you are now on your own and you are building your company, which is super exciting. Okay? I feel like they still have the power over me, and I totally get that. That's why I didn't sign it. I totally get it. Because they will not allow you to tell your story to. To speak about what's happened. How do I navigate building a successful business and showing up authentically while honoring my NDA? That's confusing to me. You absolutely can show up as a real version of you. You just can't tell the story of that business. That's fine. You have other stories in your life that wasn't your whole entire life. I tell a lot of stories of my business today and lessons I'm learning today and less about what happened when I was at that company. So the first further you distance yourself from that time, the more time that lapses, the more stories you have. So you don't have to just focus on that one window of working at that company. And also during that time, you have other stories you can share and tell that happened outside of work that aren't part of your NDA. So I. I wouldn't get so laser focused on that. I challenge yourself to see what's outside of that in your life. And it's a full life. You have three kids, right? You totally have other stories outside of just that. When you work together at that company without some of the context and backstory, I feel my experience is less credible. I completely disagree with that. Your experience is only less credible if you say it is. Right. You can come to market and you can go to social media and position yourself on your website or podcast or whatever it is you do that you are exceptionally credible. And here's why. And here's what my clients say about me. Right? Testimonials and experiences working with someone are so incredible. Powerful. I would leverage those. That's not you telling your story. That's somebody else speaking up and telling it. And that's a really powerful credibility point for you. And you don't, again, need to be talking about the other company. You just need to get creative in how you do it. And you need to believe in yourself that you are credible whether you can speak about something or not. And you absolutely are. So she doesn't feel like she's going to be taken seriously. And I totally disagree. And I challenge you, if you're listening right now, to see that differently and to have that conversation with yourself. Tell yourself a different story first. Tell yourself I signed an NDA. It gave me the bridge play to start my own company. For that, I'm super grateful. Now I'm challenged to find a way to tell my story without being disparaging to the company that I work for. And I'm going to make that happen and it's going to work better than anything else. Get really clear and intentional about what you're going to do and challenge yourself to do it. Just remember I was so upset a week ago when I saw all these charges from Amazon and thinking yet again, a complete debacle and something I can't figure out. And now that seems just a week later, that it could potentially be opening up some very major partnerships for me, opportunities for me and things that would have never occurred had I not been faced with that challenge. Stay focused on the solution. Challenge yourself to find the solution and the obstacles will not stop you. Okay, if you can, please subscribe, rate and review the show when you share this on social media, I always repost tag you. Super appreciate. If you haven't left a review yet, it would mean the world to me. Please leave me a review. It helps so much. Until next week, I'll be creating confidence and I know you will too. I decided to change that dynamic. I couldn't be more excited for what you're going to hear. So start learning and growing. Inevitably something will happen. No one succeeds alone. You don't stop and look around once in a while. You could miss it. Come on this journey with me.