Episode 24: Looking for "Me" In Others: Utilizing The Power Of Mentors To Help You Get To The Next Level With Madeline Pratt
Though strides have been made to empower women in different industries across the board, women leaders are still often underestimated. Even in positions of power, women are treated differently, but they never stop carving out spaces for themselves wherever they are. Amy Vetter interviews Madeline Pratt, the CEO and Founder of Womxn Talk Money, a network designed to elevate womxn entrepreneurs and financial experts to connect them with opportunities and each other. Supportive spaces are always conducive for utilizing the power of mentors and empowering people to continue to be their best. Madeline shows you how a space like Womxn Talk Money has proved beneficial for the people taking part in it.
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Looking for "Me" In Others: Utilizing The Power Of Mentors To Help You Get To The Next Level With Madeline Pratt
Welcome to this episode where I interview Madeline Pratt, CEO and Founder of Womxn Talk Money. She has built her career with the unique intersection between technology, sales enablement and channel development. As a business development leader and creative consultant, she works with thousands of accounting firms from around the globe to assist them with technology, branding, and sales. After spending eight years leading sales for tech companies in the accounting space, Madeline decided to focus her attention directly on helping firms grow. She offers online education programs and community groups through firm forums and Womxn Talk Money that are designed to help firms innovate into the new area. In our discussion, we talk about her journey from being a dancer to going to college for premed and then taking a job in the technology space. Through her life lessons, she has found that creating space for women to find other women that model leadership will help more women to be seen and create a community to support their success.
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In this episode, I'm with Madeline Pratt. Madeline, would you like to give a little background on yourself to get started?
I'm Madeline Pratt and I do some pretty interesting work these days. I’ve spent my career primarily working in this very amazing and unique space between accounting professionals and technology. It's the world that we met in and creating space for education. That was where my career took me. I originally was on the marketing, sales and business development side of the house. I was lucky enough to be at the forefront of a lot of technology that was so new that education was required. People didn't know what the cloud was and if they could trust it. They didn't know what it meant to be an advisor and why it mattered or how to leverage analytics as part of your practice. Those were all conversations that I started to lean into my career and in that, I discovered a deep love of education and being able to teach and bring life to people in ways that they didn't think was possible.
In my work, I have a company called Fearless in Training. We offer what we call immersive educational experiences for accounting practitioners. We work with entrepreneurial firms that are looking to grow, transform and scale successfully. That's where people come to us. They're like, "I’ve tried other things but I'm not quite making it stick. I want to figure out those foundations I need to grow." We also work with tech companies that are looking to speak into that space that has a great product but maybe don't understand the needs or the nuances of the accounting profession. We work with them to help them align their messaging with the market.
That's where you are now. I would love to go backward and to hear a little more about how you even got to where you are. When you were little, what do you want to be when you grew up?
This varied a lot. When I was 5, 6, 7, I wanted to be an elite athlete. I have an inner athlete that’s so strong. When I got dressed for my first day of kindergarten, I came downstairs and I had a 221 and a football helmet. I was like pure contrast. I was too little to know that girls didn't play football at that level. I discovered soccer and I got into Mia Hamm and it was the best team. I was doing their first big Olympic questions. I was like, "I want to be Mia Hamm." I had all the books and all the posters. I went down on a pretty artistic path. My mom is an artist herself. She runs an art publication here in the Pacific Northwest. She was passionate about sending my brother and me to a private school particularly to get access to the arts.
In middle school, I got into dance. I wanted to be a dancer. I wanted to go in that direction and bring that to life. Around that middle school time, that's also where the rational world starts coming on. I want to be a dancer, but I also know that there's a thing called money and people have jobs. I was smart enough to see that the dance teachers, while I love my dance teachers, they were not having that kind of lifestyle that I wanted for myself. You dance to a certain point and then your body can't do it anymore. I got into science. I have a pretty analytical mind. At around that time as well, my beautiful beloved little cousin had been diagnosed with leukemia and over the course of a couple of years, she passed away.
That lit this fire that I was like, "I'm going to become a research scientist. I'm going to become a pediatric oncologist. I want to go to med school. I want to solve this." I pursued that vision through high school. I took hard courses. I got into the University of Washington. I was premed and ready to go the whole hog in that direction. I was working on research. They recommend that if you want to go down in the med school rep that you get a research job as soon as possible. I was working at Fred Hutchinson in Seattle doing prostate cancer research as a bench scientist. Around the age of nineteen, I fell in love with a guy and my beautiful primal brain was like, "This is your mate."
I got into all of this medical anthropology stuff and now I know your brain is hardwired for caveman-era, so I had a baby. The best thing that ever happened to me was the birth of my son. There's something about having kids that hit the focus. It brings you into such a dialed-in focus. The baby was the perfect thing. The person I was with was not and he was somebody who over the next couple of years struggled deeply with addiction. During that time period, you’re still that primal brain, that mom's survival brain. I busted my butt to get through finish school. During that time, I shifted my major because I was all premed and I had taken a ton of science courses. Something about having my own child made me realize that being in pediatrics would have been hard for me.
I don't know that my conscience could live with being with sick kids all day and then come home, holding my child. I would be worried all the time. I shifted to this cool program that they have at UDaB called MAG, Medical Anthropology and Global Health. I had to make use of the science credits so I was taking all my chem and my bio and all those things. I'm making use of them and then getting into this study of people. I was interested particularly in studying inequality and inequality as it affects women. Right around that time, I was interested in infant and maternal mortality and how the ways that we have different systems of healthcare and systems of privilege influence the outcomes of moms and babies around the world.
I was doing a little research work for the Midwives Association of our state, helping them in some of the studies they were doing and doing some lobbying work with them and then school ended. My son was one when I went back. He was an almost two-year-old baby at that time. I’ve got a partner who's totally struggling with his well-being. In that, struggling to make ends meet. I was in poverty and the student loans hit too. It’s this moment where you're supposed to be like, "I did it." That was not my situation. I was like, "I got to get a job. I got to pay for this kid I have. I’ve got to set myself up."
As fate would have it, my former high school Physics teacher who knew me super well and she was one of my big encouragers who pushed me towards going to UDaB. She was like, "I’ve started to do this interesting job at a company called Avalara." Here's where the hounding industry starts to make sense. She was working in Avalara and they were on Bainbridge Island, which is where I grow up. I was wanting to be closer to my family, particularly because of the tumultuous time in my life and needing help with childcare. I got a job there on their inside sales team. It was the bottom of the totem pole. You're cold calling people who have gone to TaxRates.com and gotten the tax table. You're calling them and trying to be like, "I know you’ve got that tax table but did you know you can automate this?"
It was great because the anthropologist myth in me loves people and loves studying people and understanding what makes them tick and it makes for a good sales rep turns out. I got good at it quickly. Not only that, the job was commission-based. The better I was, the more I was able to provide for my son. I’ve worked my way up quickly. In that process, I recognized that certain leads were more valuable than others. The ones that were most valuable were one to many opportunities. In particular, these were accounting practices that weren't looking to do sales tax for one business but they might have many.
I got good at talking to accounting practices. Around that time, a friend and mentor. At that time, I didn't even know the guy. Brandon Houk is a guy that I grew up in. There was a new business development hire who was a CPA himself who had decided not to go into practice. He'd been hired to start a new team to guide how we work with the accounting industry. This fledgling team was formed and they wanted somebody to help them who understood talking to accountants. They plucked me out of the basement and then all of a sudden, I was sitting on the executive floor in the business development group.
I stayed there for another year and a half working with starting to build relationships with firms. Around that same time, Intuit was starting to build a secondary team to better connect accountants with their cloud products. I got offered an opportunity to move there. I went and joined there. I learned all about Intuit life hard and fast. I was responsible for working with firms that were wanting to understand all of this new technology. That was when I first started doing product training. Before it was all theory, but I was like, "I’ve got to be technical." From there, I happened on a phone call one day reviewing a piece of software that a firm that I was working with wanted to implement.
I had been through the demo and I thought I was on a call with a sales rep. I was like, "Your software is great but you've got an Australian accent. How am I going to know that my American accounting firms are going to be supportive?" He chuckled and was like, "It's funny you ask that. We're looking to hire somebody to start a team in America." It turns out it was the founder of the company. That's the thing, I didn't quite understand the world of start-ups. Some of these companies are small and agile. That company was Fathom and I was their first hire in America. I spent the next three and a half years building their business development strategy, building their North American team, bringing the product to market and leading up to a big partnership that we ended up doing with Intuit. Some amazing work and the ability to have the freedom to grow and create something from scratch for the first time, which was super cool and learning about leading teams.
I am starting to see a theme in your journey. Even going back, you have found people that mentor or you admire in order to reach the next step. Am I correct?
Power Of Mentors: A lot of affluent people struggle to make the leap from the world of the uplands to the world of earning and providing for themselves.
Yes.
We start with Mia Hamm. What was it about her? I know she was a star and it was amazing to see a woman soccer player be successful. What particularly about her versus any other woman athlete got to you?
Part of it was visual. I'm a visual person. At age eight, I looked like a mini Mia Hamm. I had a ponytail and my dark hair, but I was a tough little kid. I was gritty. All my best friends were boys, for the most part. A lot of the people that I look to and I aspire to be like is because I saw them and I was like, "Finally, that's me. That's who I am. That's what I want in life."
You're seeking you.
That model is so important because a lot of us weren't told or are starting to be told that you can be that. I grew up in the generation of and this was my mom saying, "You can be anything. You could do anything your brother can do except for walking alone to school." It’s like, "You can do anything, except." You're like, "I can do it but there were still so many categories that you go out and you look around and you are like, “Where is that person who is showing me what it looks like?" I see this in this space of leadership. I'd see so many women wanting to step into a role in the space of leadership. We look around and we're like, "Where's the model?" That's why it's been so critical to look in and find people where I'm like, "That's how I want to do it."
That's a switch going from dancing to medical. When you're talking about lifestyle, did you grow up in an affluent lifestyle? How did you know you wanted a different lifestyle? A lot of people will go whatever they're used to. They're okay with that. Your mom was okay with being creative and so forth.
I grew up in a contrasting world. I grew up on an island called Bainbridge Island which is outside of Seattle. If like Grey's Anatomy when they rent the ferry boat, that's in Bainbridge but were the wealthiest zip code in Washington State. It is a very affluent place but that was not my family. If we lived anywhere else in the world, we would have been solidly middle class. The school that I grew up under because I did go to private school and scholarship was I was surrounded by people who had a lot more. I looked back now and I'm like, "I was such an asshole." I remember being mad because I had friends who were going to Paris for Christmas and I was like, "I’ve never even been out of the United States. Why aren't my parents taking me to Paris?" It’s like when that's what you're surrounded with.
At that time, I hated it. I would always go to my friend's houses. We lived in a condo. I had friends who had these multi-million-dollar homes. I was ashamed of it. What came out of it that was interesting was my parents gauged us as much as they could. They put us into the right schools, we always had clothes on our back, healthy food and all that stuff. If there was anything more, then we had to work for it. If I wanted to wear Ugg boots and designer jeans, my dad was like, "The jeans you got from the Gap are fine. Why do you need designer jeans with bedazzled pockets? If you want those, get a job and pay for them."
I got my first job when I was fourteen because I was like, "If I want something, I’ve got to work for it." At that time, I didn't love that because I saw kids around me getting $100 bills for getting straight-A’s when I'd been getting straight-A’s for my whole life. It turned out that when I look back at my peers, a lot of them struggle to make that leap from that world of uplands into the world of earning and providing for themselves because they have this safety net. Whereas with my parents, it was like, "We got you through college. Now, it's your time. You’ve got to pull yourself up in the world thing."
It's a great way to understand how we shift or become us. I find it interesting too with you being so driven and knowing what you wanted in the medical field and then you let a guy sway you. I understand you fell in love, but how do you shift from being so determined and going another path?
This is the right turn and the story that I’ve danced around for a long time. I'm writing a book right now and it's a memoir. I'm in the middle of this chapter. It's so hard to write though because there's a piece of me that wants to go back and they will be like, "I want to analyze it." There's the scientist in me who's like, "You were a nineteen-year-old with a partially developed frontal lobe. You were not making wise choices." There's also the deeper part of me, which I'm a Yogi. I'm like, “What would the subconscious state?” The subconscious state was one of being lost. I had grown up in private schools that were super small. My class was the biggest class that the school had ever seen. There were eighteen of us. I was thrown into the University of Washington, which my graduating class was 26,000 people.
They are an amazing institution for a lot of things but in terms of connecting you with yourself and being able to find who you are. I don't know that you can do that for 26,000 people. There was a season in my life that was a season of experimentation. I mean that in every sense of the word. I have rebellion because the upbringing I had was so structured. I had been a dancer who danced for six days a week. I had been a straight-A student my whole life and suddenly I was free. I was young. I started college at barely seventeen. I was eager to go out and get off the island and get out of the sheltered space. That led me to make a series of decisions that ultimately have consequences. One of them was having a kid with somebody who I had only known for three months.
It's an important point in your story to highlight because it's the human condition. For me, that break happened when I was 32. There are different times in your life, different reasons or whatever that is where you're going on a course, you have a belief system. You think you know what you want and then all of a sudden, for some reason your body blows apart and fights back at you.
I’ve had two of those at this point. I get it and we have to own it now. Years later, I look back and I go, "If it wasn't for this, who would I be?"
That's another important thing to talk about is that there may be points in our life we're not proud of or it doesn't even have to be extreme but where we get off track or we feel lost or whatever. I often hear people when they make decisions to shift out of those things, people go, "I'm so glad I did that and I should have done that years ago." The thing is the way I look at life as if you haven't gone through it, how would you experience what you have? Everything happens at the time it's supposed to happen rather than doubting ourselves or looking at it regretfully. We have to own the bad parts and the good parts. The good part for you is you had this amazing child.
He's the best and suddenly, having that child gave me a huge sense of direction and focus that I was lacking. It gave me a purpose. I say this is not my guilt tribute way but I tell them to this day, so much of the life we have, so much of what I’ve built is because of you. It's because of wanting you to have the best life.
It's amazing how we shift with children or how we open up of realizations that we don't even realize that is happening.
Power Of Mentors: There’s a lot of success to be found in being like a student and having the attitude of “I can figure it out.”
The second shift for me was my second son. There are lots of gaps that we're dancing over here and there'll be a book and people can read it. I got divorced during my time at Avalara, which made me double down on my career so I can make more and provide fully for making it all. A couple of years later, I met somebody and he is my person and I fell deeply in love but also did a lot of qualified bucket list of 1,000 things. If you pass, then we'll talk. We had another child. My son Alder was born. At that time, I was in the thick of my ultimate leadership status I’ve had on. I had been holding all of the balls. I traveled so much during nighttime at the company period but I even traveled a lot while I was pregnant. My last traveling obligation, my doctor was like, "If you go to anything else after this, this is a problem."
The weight of that and then this monumental shift of taking a little bit of time, not a lot. It was roughly eight weeks. One of the first things I did was I went to a conference with my two-week old baby. There is no pressure from the company to do it all. I'm so direct about this. It's a big tech industry conference. You have to buy tickets a year in advance. I felt super guilty about not going. When we had planned it, I have to go a month after the baby was born, but the baby didn't come until two weeks after his due date. In the end, the company was like, "Do you still want to go?" I was like, "I’ve got to be there." That was my mindset.
The whole world's going to fall apart if I'm not there. They accommodated me. They got me a suite. I brought my mom and my other son down with me so the kids could be cared for. I showed up and I'm doing the thing. This is an insane thing to do. The primal brain, fight or flight mode, totally sleep-deprived, but at the same point, there was this moment that happened while I was at the conference. My mom was watching the baby during the day. I would come up and pump and feed them and stuff. By day two, I physically hurt me to be away from him anymore. I put them in the front pack and I started walking around the conference with this baby stuff. He was a newborn, so he was super quiet and we would stand in the back of these sessions and listening to leaders from around the industry and I'm sitting there bouncing.
Some people looked at me like I had seven heads. They were like, "What are you doing with a baby here?" There was this other moment where I was standing in a breakout session and two women saw me. You know when somebody sees you and then they saw the ergo on my chest and they were like, "Is that a baby?" I was like, "Yes." They were like, "That's amazing." I could barely keep it together. I was in such an emotional state that I was like, "Thank you." I hadn't even acknowledged, “Yes, I'm doing this crazy thing and I'm taking my baby to the tech conference at two weeks old. Maybe there's something to be said here.” Maybe there's something of like, "Why can't I bring a two-week-old baby to a tech conference? How am I creating space for other women to be seen in these spaces, particularly tech spaces which are predominantly run by men and orchestrated by men? How does it shift the space to show up and have something that is unapologetically female, a woman with a baby having that space?”
That was when I started evaluating who I was and how I was planning in the tech space and how a lot of it was coming from this masculine idea of what it meant to be a leader in tech. I looked up and I said, “I can see those executive roles and I could see the path of being a VP and then being an executive and all those things.” At the end of the day, it wasn't what I wanted. I wanted to be with my baby. I was like, "I'm here. I’ve made it, but it's not going to accommodate for the things that I need and want at this stage of my life, then I got to go figure that out." That was a year-long process of stretching my leadership style. The organization offered me a great amount of flexibility for me to see if I could make it work.
I did a lot of work from home. There were days because of my husband's firefighting schedule where the baby came into the office and he was there for an hour. I remember a particular morning or the baby like blew out his diaper so bad. We work and I'm carrying a baby this pack of boxes and I'm in a white blouse. Luckily, we have a shower, so I'm showering the baby. You get to a point where you're like, "This doesn't make sense." I'm trying to fit myself into something that no matter how many different ways I try to flex it, it doesn't fit anymore. This isn't who I am anymore. Until that, I started thinking about another shift.
Before we get to that shift, a second area here that's important, which leads to your shift. Your story is about taking advantage of the opportunity. A lot of times, these opportunities come by especially women because it's all research. We'll say, "I'm not ready or I can't do that. I don't have all the skills yet to do that." For each role that you got, you didn't have the skills to do it but you took the opportunity. That is something that men are more apt to do is take opportunities even when they're not completely ready because they know that will get them ready for them to the next role and the next role. We all do work with women but a lot of the issues are the fact that if we don't take that next role, then the next role is not going to have a woman either. We have to stretch ourselves and realize we're not going to be perfect. Go through your process a little of how you were okay to not be perfect.
There are 3 or 4 factors that come to mind and I'll try and unpack them here because they're equally critical. I think a lot about this because I'm like, "Why didn't I struggle? Why didn't I question it?" One straight up comes down to confidence. I joke because of my first son, he's like me on steroids when it comes to competence. If I have half the competence of him, but I inherently was a competent person. I was lucky enough to grow up in a time where people were finally validating women's abilities beyond their looks. I had people tell me, "You are smart and you're great at this." That built that confidence. Competence extended to a belief in my abilities. I grew up in an academic environment that pushed me to do great things. I knew that I had a brain that was strong enough to get me. If I didn't know the answer, I can find the answer. A big part of my success has been from being this student and having this attitude of, “I can figure it out.”
That's what we need to own as women are that we are such amazing researchers and we have such intuitive knowledge within us that if we could believe, “I don't know that now but I can know it. Look at all the things you know now that you didn't know last year,” kind of thing. That ability to lean in and then believe in my brain but also believe in my ability to research. That comes out of my science background too. A big part of my learning process in the sciences is learning, discovering and refining. There isn't perfection in science. It's all discovery. It's all creation. That's the other thing that comes to mind is that in being creative at my core and growing up in the world of dance and having a mom who's creative, I recognize that there's this beauty and iterating and making. That's where I totally get my eye from the making and then you've got to refine from there. That's the skill that I'm working on getting better at.
The last is the performance. A big part of being able to show up and speak on a stage, a big part of being able to lead a meeting, a big part of any of these roles where we're going beyond ourselves is being able to perform at that level. I started with soccer and becoming a select soccer player. I grew into the world of dance where I was on stage. I did drama and theater in my high school and it was mandatory. Every year, you gave this hour-long presentation to a board at the school. I had all these opportunities to perform in that way. I didn't recognize this until later on because I didn't realize it was something that people struggled with. When I got into the world of doing more public speaking or doing more training and presenting, I have friends who were also good at it and realized they had some of those common things in their background, particularly theater and stuff like that. I was like, "We were trained to do this."
I’ve often said the same thing because I grew up playing violin and viola. People will always say like, "How are you not nervous on stage?" I'm like, "If you've ever played violin by yourself in front of a crowd, that was way worse if you hit the wrong notes and there are no frets." The way you'd have to prepare and rehearse, it didn't build into music but it built into something else in my life. It's that discipline.
This is when I still struggle with but I'm getting better at. You're also putting yourself in situations where you're listening to feedback. This is the one where I will say this is a thing I'm great at. I can look at big picture situations as they unfold and connect the dots whether that's a market pattern, the trajectory that technology is going, sending that's happening inside the audience I serve in my business. I can connect those dots and I can also accept the feedback. When you're in a situation where you've been criticized, they said, "You suck at this, get better practice." You're more comfortable with getting large amounts of feedback. If you're going to play at that level, you're going to get feedback. That's something that I'm still working on.
This is what this podcast is about is breaking these belief systems and what creates it. A lot of what gets in the way of technology implementation is people's fears, their habits, what creates that? It's interesting that you say that because I would say my own weakness is that I grew up in a more physically abusive place or where you were constantly having everyday show again that you could achieve. Even though I take feedback as a musician to fix it, it still rings something internally immediately like, "I'm not good enough." With your parents being this creative space giving you that flexibility, it changes that perception and everyone's got this unique mix that starts making who you are internally hard to break as you become an adult. The most important thing is that you identify what those things are for you and where you get triggered. You know what tools to use so that you can show up in the way that you want to show up.
This is a life-long process. The big one that I wrestle with all the time, she's there. It's like the voice and they had that it's some combination of your failing or you're letting other people down. There's a third one that goes in with that, which you can't rely on anybody. You’ve got to do it yourself. You don't have any help or support. That wasn't like, "I know where you came from." I went through a phase of single motherhood. I felt like I dry myself. Anytime that one comes up I'm like, "I need to be asking for help." These ones are an interesting one because It is such a weird shadow and it texts when I'm already in a depressed state or I have had a shitty day. It’s like, "You're vulnerable. We're going to bring this bullshit in." This one is one where you have to put people or things around you that are going to force you to look and be like, "That's not true." Part of the reason I want to come on this podcast or I want to do things that make me be a little bit more reflexive because I said I'm addicted to the creation, but I don't take enough moments to look back and be like, "Years ago, I was a single mom on food stamps."
There are moments of celebration that we don't give ourselves. When we're children, we're constantly being praised for a good job but when we become adults, we don't get that praise anymore. If we don't give ourselves that praise for those little things and take those pauses to go back and look at the story and go, "Look at how far I’ve come." There are always ways to go because that's life. That's what makes life interesting is learning about yourself. I love from the researcher's perspective of trying to observe. In yoga, we talk a lot in meditation about being the observer and not the judger. It's the same thing with your voices in your head. You could judge that you've got those voices in your head or you can step back and research. That's interesting that I say that to myself and what could I do to turn that around?
My lens is always like, "What do I know to be true?" If the voice is saying I'm always letting other people down or I'm failing somebody then I'd say, "What do I know to be true? Who in my life has said that?" I look around and I'm like, "There's someone here." It’s like, "We know that's not true." You have to do it again.
This is a universal thing. Some things we talked about, a lot of women do but I have found through my yoga studios, with the talks that I do that this is universal. Men go through the same thing. They're not always talking about it like women do or might feel more shame for that happening and it's a human condition thing. If we listen to our voice in our head, would we be friends with it.
Power Of Mentors: The one actual difference between women and men is the space you're given to talk about the experience of it.
The one difference I would say between women and men is the spaces and outlets for us to talk about it. Granted that there's a whole spectrum of emotional depth and emotional conversations you're able to have in your peer group. I do think there are fewer spaces for women to be tooting their own horn, I hate that term. I still even as I say, some of these things that I’ve done and accomplished feel that little discomfort of like, "Am I being braggy?" I want women to brag more and I want us to get comfortable. I want us to create spaces and communities where we can come together to say, "I hit my revenue goal and that was badass."
I was talking about it with a friend. You know Emily from Red River and she was talking about her EO group and how men will get up and be like, "I'm going to do $100 million this year." Even if the number is ridiculous, they feel like that's a bold thing and it's not bragging at all. When a woman did it, she was a successful tech entrepreneur and she was like, "We're going to do $50 million this year." The leader in the room was like, "Are you sure about that?" She was like, “Why aren't you questioning him?” She was. Even for Emily witnessing that, she was like, "This is a little uncomfortable to watch a woman stated her power like that." One of those things we have to uproot a little bit is the more that we do it, the more other women will take up space to do it as well.
I want to do two more things with you. One is the shift to what you're doing now and why it's purpose-driven. Why did you decide to start your company and drive toward helping women?
It had to do with the unfolding that happened in terms of after having my first son and realizing that no matter where I looked, I didn't see a place for myself still in a company working for somebody else. There have been a lot of organizations that have been started by women where I'm like, "I would work with them." It also started to build this belief in me that I can build something like that. I think that there's something powerful having been a part of a start-up and being a part of that scrappiness where you're like, "I can do this." I had reached the point where I had helped the company grow its revenues tremendously. I had this voice in the back of my brain that was like, "If you can do that for somebody else, you can do that for yourself."
The most important part was, "I know I can build a company, but what does that company going to do? What is the purpose?" At the end of the day, if it's going to resonate, if it's going to be something I wake up and care about every single day. Even if it's not putting money into my bank account, it's got to come from something that means so much more to me. It came out with a lot of different pieces. This belief in terms of leveling the playing field through education was where it came from first and foremost. I had a lot of female friends at that time who were starting their own small businesses and they felt lost when it came to technology and operational structure. A lot of the courses and materials they were seeing out there were not made with women in mind. I saw that parallel of feeling lost with a similar space that a lot of the accounting professionals I'd been historically working with, that was a common ground.
I wanted to be thinking about, how can we connect people and create resources and educational materials that are inspiring and meaningful? Don't downplay if you're at a starting place. You're starting from here but this is how we're going to grow this thing. A lot of the content we created, a lot of the educational courses and programs that we were building are all around meeting people where they're at and not putting any shame or negativity around it but saying, “This is where we're running. This is where we're going. Let's do it together.”
The other piece where I started to lean more and more into working with women was because nobody else was doing it. I did not expect this to be a differentiator. I even was told when I was starting my business like, "You shouldn't focus on women because that's limiting you." I was like, "It's 50% of the population are women." It gave us a focus and it also gave this great qualifying lens because I'm a super passionate feminist. If somebody is not going to be cool with that, they're not a fit for me in my work and that's okay.
In terms of the clients I attract on the higher end and on the consulting side, is it a deflector for anybody who's not going to align with my values by putting out work into the world that has a lens that's focused on women. In our copy and content, we say she and we've got stock images of women. That lens also suddenly in the same way being at the tech conference holding the baby, it suddenly created a space for women to start coming forward and saying, "I want space for this and I want to talk to other women." The full circle for me was this past November 2019 being at QuickBooks Connect, they did all these things called braindate.
A braindate was a mini-session where you get to pick somebody's brain. All of mine were under this pretense building a brand-new lab. Every single conversation I had was a woman who was like, "I'm thinking about this thing." Suddenly it was like, "I want to restructure my business. I want to be focused on helping women entrepreneurs." I was like, "Whatever we're doing to create a space where women can step forward, I was running a general practice, but now I want to be supporting female hairdressers because they don't understand their monies, their model or their margin. I want to do that because I'm passionate about it. I was like, "We're doing something if we're creating space for that to happen."
That's awesome. You and I can talk forever, I'm sure. I do end every podcast with some rapid-fire questions. Pick a category. Family, friends, money, spiritual or health?
We'll do money.
Things or actions I don't have that I want?
I have a dream to have a house in Hawaii. We live in the Northwest because my husband is a firefighter here. If we didn't, we would live in Hawaii. That's my five-year thing. If I can go there particularly this time of year where it's raining all day. I want a tiny house that I can farm all day long.
Things or actions I do have that I want with the money?
I’ve got great investments. This was something that my family did not teach me that elevates you into this next level of earning is investing in yourself and in your future. Part of this was brought to me because I worked for companies that had 401(k) plans. I started squirreling money away and now I'm the ultimate money squirrel. At one point, I sit down with my husband and be like, "These are all the places money is put, so that you understand because all of that money is making money for me." I'm growing a business but I also know that I can choose at some point not to work anymore because I'm making those investments and started doing it so early too.
Things or actions I don't have that I don't want
I'm not a big person for stuff. We bought our house and it's been this concept battle because when you buy 2,500 square-foot of space, it's very easy in our culture to fill it up with stuff. A big exception as I'm a book hoarder. I'm very Marie Kondo about things. I have no attachment to things. For me, one of my big things is I go through and I purge. I'm trying to put our life through this secondary lens. We have a lot of purchasing impulse in our culture at this point where it's so easy on Instagram or on Amazon to buy something in two seconds. I'm trying to be conscious in this next season about what am I bringing into my home and why and do I need it? If the answer is no, then I'm trying to reward myself with putting that money into a vacation fund or into an investment fund or something else that I do want and feel I need more than more stuff.
The last question is things or actions that I do have that I don't want.
Can I say every toy that my children ever had? This is a great one. I'm a little crunchy and my big mission has been to rid our life with plastic. I have a pretty healthy and environmentally-conscious perspective on the world. I see how plastic has become this predominant thing. I watch a lot of documentaries about the impacts of it. It's a process. If you think you're doing it well and then you discover all your clothes are made out of plastic and then you keep going. That's been the big thing is replacing things in our home that we throw away one purchase items and bringing in things that maybe costs a little bit more, but we are re-using. Getting reusable cups and to-go mugs and bento boxes, fruit instead of getting takeout containers and all these things so that we can get rid of plastic has been my big mission.
I posted my son's TED Talk. Did you see it?
No, you have to send it to me.
His name is Jagger Vetter. His high school asked me to emcee their TEDx event. I immediately was like, "Jagger, you've got to do this." He did it about the things that you can do in your daily life to make the environment better. He's an Environmental Engineering and it's such a passion of his, but you'd love it because it's these little household things that anyone can do. It was a proud mama moment.
That's the thing that's so amazing is we're bringing up these kids who for our kids, it's not going to be optional. I'm in a position right now where I have the resources to make those changes and teach them to my kids so that that's the norm for them. We're the weird hippies. You bring your own bags and even our own produce bags to the grocery store. I was like, "Watch, soon this will be cool."
Is there anything you want to make sure before we close out the message or that you want to make sure everyone knows as we close out?
I think we touched on it all.
Thank you so much for being a guest and for sharing your story. A lot of people aren't going to get some great takeaways from this.
Thanks for having me.
-—
It's time for our Mindful Moments with the discussion that I had with Madeline. There's a number of takeaways here for us to step back and reflect on. Number one is the importance of mentors. Mentors come in so many forms. They can be someone we talk to or they can be someone far away that has no idea who we are but we look up to them. The most important thing is that we find people that we can model ourselves after so that we know what we want in the long-term vision and can figure out the traits that we either need to learn or enhance that we already have in order to achieve that long-term vision. She had examples of that. Mia Hamm, someone that she never knew, was a mentor to her as far as looking at a successful athlete that was feminine and that she can relate to.
That's what I'm talking about that it doesn't necessarily need to be someone we know. She's also used to other people as well to inspire her to keep moving forward whether it was her mother giving her the freedom to have a creative lifestyle and that she could do anything. Following her passions in school but not only going for a purpose-driven purpose of helping other children with cancer as her cousin had died of. It’s trying to understand things from a human perspective and how that helps people medically. That drove her to success in other arenas in her life as well. Through that research, she learned how people tick.
One of those shifts in moments was that she had kept relationships for a long time. That's an important thing when she's going back to her high school physics teacher and was able to utilize that relationship in order to make a shift in her own career. To do that, we have to nurture relationships along the way, not forget people as we move forward. Reaching out to people, you never know when there is something with somebody that you know that can help you in your current situation. Taking those mentors and when she got into that tech company, she started looking for people to strive to understand how they became successful. That came back to her research-driven brain.
Studying what makes people tick not looking at it as picking up the phone and how many times you pick up the phone to make a sale but looking at what's the human behavior and what matters to the people that you're selling to so that you can make an impact which then led her to be successful in multiple tech companies to take over a team in the US for an Australian company. With that, human behavior was an extremely important piece of it. It's important for us as leaders to think about when we're trying to move something forward or we're moving the initiative forward like go-to-market. Are we looking at the human impacts and behaviors and how we create a better outcome by the things that we are doing, whether that's sales or marketing or any other work that we do to ensure that we are serving that customer in the right way?
When we step back and be that observer, it's important to understand how we tick, how our customers tick and then how to create success from that. The other thing that was a big shift in her life was growing up in a very wealthy area and it being a small town, when you shift into a larger population. This could go any direction or be a myriad of things for anybody. When we start getting out of our comfort zone, which is what this is about, how do we go about making those little changes so that we can get comfortable with the uncomfortable? Rather than looking at a situation and being so uncomfortable that we go off the beaten path because of it?
That could also be when technology is coming into your life and it's going to be a major shift, whether that be at work or with your communities around you. You start creating fear of that major shifts and having behavioral activities that would, in essence, get in the way of things that you want. It's important that we take those moments to understand what is creating that fear within us. How do we take it in baby steps without creating something that we don't want in our life? In her case, even though it took her in a different direction, there were so many positives of how it created to focus in her life and created the shift that was important for her and her future success.
We talked about during this podcast of not looking back at decisions we made and being disappointed that we are happy. That our life has unfolded the way that it has. Maybe it hasn't been perfect or we're not appreciative of every experience that we've had, but because of those experiences, they've all added up to create the life that we have now or the life that we want in the future. There were three areas that are important to leave off with that are important for anyone that wants to be a leader but specifically, she was talking around women. Number one, having confidence in our abilities and not feeding into the self-talk and making sure that you've got people around you to boost you up when you might be falling down.
The second one was the creative side of being open to research and opportunity. Having that ability to look at what's going on around us and not think that things have to be perfect every day, but how we can go about making change and learning from the process as we go along that path. The third thing was the performance. This is an important thing that we often will look at performing in a corporate as a political thing. It's not that we need to understand how we show up when we lead a meeting, how we show up when we speak to others or even speak to a larger audience. We are prepared, we've rehearsed and we understand our objectives for each of these things so that we can create successful outcomes for ourselves. In order to do that, we have to take feedback along the way in order to course-correct, to be honest with ourselves and create the energy that we want for the people around us.
Important Links:
Jagger Vetter – TED Talk
@MadelineKPratt - Twitter
@MadelineKPratt - Instagram
Madeline Pratt - LinkedIn
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