The Fierce Business Babe Podcast Ep 129: Growing Boldly With Emily Ley
Today I am sitting down with a very special guest, Emily Ley. Emily is a successful business owner who started her business on Etsy as a creative outlet and side hustle and now has products in many big box stores such as Target and Office Depot. She also has a new book called Growing Boldly: Dare To Build a Life You Love and she is here today to share her story and talk about how you can build the life you love too!
Growing Boldly with Emily Ley
By: Melissa Lin
Today, I have a very special guest with me, Emily Ley. Emily is an entrepreneur that grew her company from an Etsy side hustle that she founded 12 years ago when she felt stuck in her day job and wanted a creative outlet. Today, her award-winning, well-known, super successful company employs a team of eight and has products in big box retailers including Target and Office Depot. Her brand new book, Growing Boldly: Dare To Build A Life You Love empowers women to chase their dreams one hard thing at a time until fear gets in the backseat, even during uncertainty. She created a life she loved and now she's on a mission to help other women do the same. Emily is literally a woman on a mission.
I am so excited to have you here with us. Big, big welcome Emily!
Thank you so much for having me. I'm so glad to be here.
I know I'm so excited. I can't wait to dive into your story and all of the things because you're literally doing everything. Mom of three, wife, sister, how do you do it all? I can’t wait to dive in! Can you start with talking us through how you got started and how you got to where you are today? It's absolutely incredible. Can't wait.
Yeah. Well, I got started 12 years ago. I was climbing the corporate ladder and had a masters degree in nonprofit management and was doing all the things I felt like I was supposed to do, checking all the boxes, and I just felt really stuck. I had moved to Tampa, Florida after my husband and I got married. To be honest, I just felt quite miserable. The job that I had was a fantastic job. I was helping to run a women in leadership and philanthropy program at a large state university. I really just felt like I was ready to start a family and I couldn't imagine having such a time demanding job with a time demanding family as well. So to be totally transparent, I just started my company so I could have flexibility as a future mom. That was the first and foremost thing that I wanted. My own mom has been a teacher for many, many years and so I wanted a similar schedule to what she had. I started by watching YouTube videos and teaching myself how to use Microsoft Publisher, which is a terrible program to use for graphic design, but it was all that I could afford. I worked at my full-time job for about 2 years, a little over 2 years while I got my company off the ground, and that enabled me to start a debt-free company and continue to run a debt free company for 12 years. So, got it off the ground that way, I was doing wedding invitation design, logos for businesses, just anything that I could really get my hands on. Once I had enough capital, I started to create products like notepads and stationary and that sort of thing. Then, when my son was born in 2011, that was when I found myself really thirsty for a tool that would help me have the kind of life that I wanted to have. I wanted to be a working mom and I wanted to be able to manage all the things, as we all do. So I will never forget walking the aisles of Target and being really frustrated with the fact that I didn't find the solution to my life problems in their aisles because that's where all solutions are found. Every planner that I found was really complicated. They had a whole lot of boxes to check and things to fill in about how much water you drank that day and how much money you spent that day, and just so many things that made me feel like even more of a failure. I really just wanted something that was very, very, very simple and made me feel capable of achieving the kind of life I wanted to have. So, not for anybody’s purpose other than my own, I went home and took a Sharpie and a binder and started mocking up what this planner would look like for me, and once I found how useful it was I decided to take everything I had in my business savings account and produce our very first planners and that kick-started a career that is what it is today.
I left out a lot of mistakes that I made along the way. It has been a very crazy, crazy Journey, but I have enjoyed it so much. Now I'm an author and I run Simplified and I just love what I do and I really just love being able to connect with other women who are trying to do life well also.
Yeah, thank you so much for sharing that. I love your story because so many can relate to it so much. Did you have any kind of role model in entrepreneurship? How did you know that this was a path that was possible for you?
Good question. I didn’t actually and it's funny looking back. In 2008, when I got started, Etsy was new and it was kind of a weird concept to like go out on your own or start something on your own. I had two friends, one from college, one from high school, and one of them started a company making aprons and nightgowns and then another one started a company as a photographer and her husband was in the military. So she needed the ability to travel and kind of keep her role. I thought what they were doing was really cool, and I thought if anything I'll just create a little business. The idea came to me because our wedding was in 2008 and I wanted crane wedding invitations so bad I could taste it, but we couldn’t afford them. So I made my own wedding invitations and just had so much fun doing it that I thought I can do paper products at home. I can use my home printer and our home computer and you know this new platform called Etsy is out there. So I'll just see what happens and maybe I can produce a little bit of income so I have a little bit of a side thing, you know, no matter what my career looks like and I really honestly didn't know that it would have truly become my career, my calling, but I worked at it and the longer I worked at it, the more I wanted it.
Yeah, that's so incredible. What's so cool about entrepreneurship these days is you see it everywhere, like just very smart of you. I didn't have any role model, my dad was in Computer software and I got my chemical engineering degree. I was on the path for: college, job, that type of life and I didn’t have any role models for entrepreneurship. It’s so cool these days, so many women can look up to you. Luckily, we've got Shark Tank. I was watching an episode last night with my boyfriend. Now, I know that you walk women through your build philosophy. I want to go into this and it helps them build a life they love. Can you tell us about this philosophy and hypothesis and the five practices that you focus on that’s gonna be so helpful for my audience?
Yeah, you know, I love a good inspirational story and I love all of these books out there telling us that we can do and be everything, but at the end of the day, I'm like, that's all good, but can you tell me how. I need some tactical advice. By trade, I'm an organizer and teach people how to organize their homes. So when I sat down to write this book and dig into my own like grit and gumption and entrepreneurial spirit that made Simplified possible. I thought “I want to leave people who read this book, not just feeling inspired to build a life they loved but actually with the tools to go out and do it.” So that's why I decided to create the book around the concept of the word “Build”. So I love the word build, it's actionable. It's about doing something, and I believe if you want to create a life you love it takes work. It takes moving your feet, actually getting up and doing something. So the book is framed around these five principles. There’s five sections in the book and they are an acronym for the word “build”.
So the B stands for believe in who you are. The U stands for utilize what you have. The I stands for Imagine the life that you love, the L stands for love all people well. Then the D stands for do what matters and forget the rest. Within those five kinds of pillars are the action steps required not just to build a life you love, but to look inward at what it is you really want. I believe that we have to first understand where we are and be able to name where we want to go and then we can chart the path to get there. So I just believe so much in understanding that change, whether it be a fresh start to you know, your days, or creating a whole new life or leaning into this philosophy, it takes work and takes action. So throughout the book, there are a ton of worksheets that kind of guide you through the process of self-discovery and help you map out what your road is going to be and you know what it's actually going to look like.
Yeah. I love the acronym. I love how simplified you made it. I mean that’s the name of your company. But I love it. You made it so simple for all of us busy bodies to actually use. So many principals these days are just so over-the-top and I love how easy this is to remember and just so simple and easy to go. I can't wait to dive into more of it and it really is just so easy for women and entrepreneurs especially, there's so much going on, to lose themselves daily behind their day to day in their business, their responsibilities. What’s a practical way for women to discover or maybe re-discover who they truly are at their core?
That's such a good question. So, I'm almost 38 and I have my business. My career obviously, I’ve been married for twelve years, three kids. So I know exactly what it feels like to sometimes get lost in all the hats that we wear, you know. I think over the past year, especially as we've been forced literally to slow down, I have found it so valuable to just take a step back and allow myself to put myself first and re-discover who I am outside of Brian's wife and these kids mom and Emily Ley, The Emily Ley, like, who I am outside of her. What I recommend when someone feels stuck or feels like they've lost that connection with who they actually are, the most important thing to have is time to yourself and I realize that's a tall order for a lot of people right now who are virtual schooling and trying to deal with Covid and a lot of different things, but even just 10 minutes away from the hustle and bustle, inside your dark closet or sitting outside on your back porch or wherever you need to go to turn down the noise from the rest of the world and just write. You don’t have to be a writer or you don't have to be prolific or anything but just sitting down and putting pen to paper and writing all the things that are in your head.
That's why it was so important for me to put worksheets in this book because it's kind of like having a hand to hold as you do that and you start to peel back the layers of who you are outside of who you are at your core. If you don't know your core, and don't know who you are deep inside. It's so much more difficult to build a life you love because you're building it for all those hats you wear.
When 2021 started. I always choose a word for the year. I started thinking about what my word would be. I’ve used words like wellness and hustle and I decided this year was going to be a year that I focus on me. I had tried the other way of putting everybody else first and I was going to just put Emily at her very first this year. Really, really care for myself the way I care for other people and that has allowed me to connect even better with who I am deep inside.
I love that stuff, And you know, I actually did something very similar too. I want to say every year prior to this my words have always been focused around my business, right, or like, what I wanted to do next for success. I think this is one of the first years where it is truly about me. I chose more than one word. I don’t like to commit to just one, I think play, health and I want to say simplify. I usually always have simplify in there, but just adding things for me. It is so important. We get so lost in everything else going on in the world, so we can definitely give ourselves that time, just 10 minutes every single day. We all have 10 minutes. We can make it fit somewhere.
Yeah and it makes you so much better for all the other things that you've been putting first. So in a way it's a very full circle.
Yeah definitely. You get to fill your cup and give yourself that time before you can go and put on all those other hats. Now, I know that you're a big believer in heart over hustle. I love that so much, I connect with that so much. You also acknowledge that change doesn't happen without hard work, without getting dirty. Can you talk to us about that balance and what it looks like to put in the work to build a life that you do love?
You know, over the years my husband and I lasted, I’m on a three year cycle, so every three years, I kind of burn myself out a little bit. We all as entrepreneurs know what it's like to hit a wall where we suddenly feel uninspired. We feel just drained of everything and it's often because we've poured out more than we have inside. I only know this from the very first hand experience and so I like to share this story of something that happened to me back in 2017. I just published my first book and was working on my second. Our twins were tiny and they were under 2 years old, we have six year old twins now and the 10-year old, and our company, the simplified planner was being sold in 800 stores around the world which sounds fantastic but felt miserable. I was just really, really overwhelmed and I was doing everything in the name of being successful. I was saying yes to everything because more yeses meant more checks in the boxes, more growth, more revenue. I felt like that's what I had to do cuz everybody else was, but what I realized was being on 48 airplanes the year that I had, you know, tiny twins at home and a four-year-old maybe wasn't the best idea for my mental health and the true health of my company and so very long story short. After crashing and burning, crying many tears, we crunched a lot of important numbers and made a very strategic decision to cut the wholesale program of our company, that was to cut 40% of our revenue and it's terrifying because we have a multimillion-dollar company. We were doing all the right things. We had won best new products picture show. I was in Forbes magazine that year, like all sorts of fantastic things were happening. But looking back at that core of who I am, who I wanted to be and why in the world I started simplified in the first place. It was to have flexibility is a mom. That was it and I didnt have that and neither did my team, we were all overworked. So we knew that we could focus if you think about that 80/20 rule of 80% of your energy on 20% of your customers, if you will, and how they are producing 80% of your revenue. We looked at “what is it we love to do?”. In my heart of hearts for this company is connecting with women who are living complex, sometimes overwhelming lives and helping them simplify things to achieve a fresh start. So remembering that, remembering why we did it in the first place, we knew that we could cut that program and focus on our online store and somehow things would grow. We just knew if we focused our attention there, it would grow, and it did. In the next year, we doubled our revenue from the year prior even cutting 40% of our known income and that was a crazy learning experience for me because it reminded me that I better trust my gut, that I built this thing in the first place off of gut instinct and being connected to my core and then when I get away from that, and I believe it for all entrepreneurs, and we get away from the core of the heart of what were doing, when we hustle just to achieve “Success” or “Lines on a resume”, it doesn't lead us anywhere good. So making that decision was one of the most pivotal, smart things I ever did. Actually closing that door opened the door for me to eventually partner with At-A-Glance and have our products in Walmart, Target, Office Depot, Staples and still reach more women, but reach them in a way that didn't add tons and tons and tons of work to my plate.
That's so amazing so far. I know There's so much more coming and I can't wait and you know, sometimes it is the thing where you've got to take two steps back to jump three steps forward and I can imagine how scary that was in the moment. Thank you for sharing that with us. Now, I know my listeners would love to hear this answer. I know so many of us tell ourselves so many lies that really hold us back from getting what we want. So what would you say are the lies that you believe most often keep us from chasing our dreams and creating a life that we love?
I think we feed ourselves a steady diet of Lies. I think that social media has made it even worse because its just so easy for us to find people who are doing everything perfectly and doing things well, and it's hard to remember that we're watching someone's highlight reel when it comes to that kind of thing. So I think, we tell ourselves obvious lies like; “I’m not educated enough” or “I’m not talented and not interesting enough.” Those hold us back, obviously. We also tell ourselves lies like “I’m not pretty enough.” “I’m not skinny enough” “I don't pay attention to my kids enough to be a good mom.” “I'm not hard working enough” and “I’m not lucky enough”. There are so many lies that we tell ourselves,not just professionally, but personally, that hinder us in every area, you know, and I think what's so important is to realize that no mistake was made in the making of who you are, not at all. Where you are right now and your greatness comes not just from the wins that you had in your life or your assets or the positive things about you, but from all the hard stuff. I had the absolute honor of interviewing multiple women for this book and it was the new right way of writing for me because this book isn't just my story. This is the story of many, many, women who have gone up against impossible things. Sometimes tragic things, to build lives they are truly thriving in and so I think what's really cool about reading those stories is it reminds you that greatness, lives we love aren't just built in the sunshine. Like they are also built in the shadows in some of the hardest of times, you know releasing a book like this in what is hopefully the tail end of a global pandemic is interesting. I was really nervous to begin the editing process because I turned the book in 4 weeks before Covid shut everything down. It came out last February and what’s cool is realizing that the whole book, the whole concept is built on truths that don't change and the biggest one for me is that you can bloom in the driest of Seasons. It does not have to be always sunshine for you to build a life you love.
I love that. That is such a beautiful reminder that it gets to happen in all seasons, not just the sunny ones. Speaking of that, we are so excited to dive into your new book that releases March 23rd everybody, Growing Boldly. What do you hope that women will learn from this book? What is that big takeaway you’re hoping everyones going to get?
You know, my big hope is that women read this book and they shut the last page and they think you know what “I'm worthy,I am worthy of this life that I want. There's absolutely no reason that I don't deserve this and I am ready and willing and feel supported by someone who's in my corner and who's going to cheer me on as I go out and do.”
I love that, that is absolutely beautiful. I'm so excited to get my hands on this Book. I love that because, you know, people don't hear or see that message often enough. It’s 2021 and there are still So many women who don't feel these things. Emily you're the source of transformation and I am so excited for you to continue to grow this and I cannot wait, you already know it's going to be a five star book for me.
Thank you so much. It's my heart and it's in a bright yellow book.
I love it. I love ending my episodes with some fun favorites. My audience is getting to know some fun things about you and so it'll be just quickfire. The first thing that comes to mind. Are you ready for it, favorite book?
Oh my goodness. My favorite book. This is so hard. I love The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah and I just finished Be The Bridge by Latasha Morrison. You have to read it slowly because for me, like I just wanted to absorb every word, but there's a fiction and a nonfiction.
Favorite TV Show?
Speaking of Kristin Hannah. I just finished Firefly Lane on Netflix from Kristin Hannah and it was so great. Easy binge-watch.
Oh my goodness, I’m like halfway through. It’s so good so far. I love it. Favorite artist or band?
Oh my gosh, this is so hard, favorite artist or band. Okay, so I was just telling my husband yesterday that my favorite song ever is November Rain by Guns N Roses, I love Pearl Jam too.
Okay, Favorite Travel Destination, like pre-covid?
So my family’s absolute favorite place and it's not very far from me is at Lake Oconee in Georgia. It is just a big beautiful Lake. There's a resort right there that we love to go to and it's just, we just feel so disconnected there. It's just such a fun place that we try to go every year in summertime. It's full of lots of good memories for our family.
I love that, places where you can just get away, you don’t hear the highway and it’s so quiet. Those are the best. I love it. Last fun favorite, your favorite self care?
Two things, so I love audio books and I love listening to audiobooks particularly in terms of self-care. I love fiction audiobooks because they kind of help my brain escape from the day today and then I love a good bubble bath. It sounds so cliche, but I love to take a bath, I take one every single day. I just love a piping hot bath, it helps my brain to just relax and take a deep breath.
That sounds so good, I can’t wait for my next one. So, Emily, how can I get my audience to get in touch with you? I know they're going to go crazy and want to get in touch.
Well, they can find me at EmilyLey.com on all the social media places @EmilyLeyatsimplified. The book is available at all the book places and then I am releasing a podcast, My own podcast will be here soon. So it’s called The Simplified Podcast and it's going to be available at all the podcast places.
Amazing! We will have all of those links in the show notes for you so you can go and grab that now. Thank you so much for being with us today Emily and dropping all of those great nuggets with us.
Thank you so much! This was so fun. I so appreciate you having me on!
Thank you for hanging out with me today. I'm always going to be your biggest cheerleader. So you taking time out of your day to hang with me truly means the world to me. I’ll see you next time.
Topics we cover include:
The Five Principles To Build A Life You Love
Re-Discovering Yourself
Putting In The Work
The Lies We Tell Ourselves
And so much more!
Times to check out:
(8:55) The Five Principles To Build A Life You Love
(12:13) Re-Discovering Yourself
(16:29) Putting In The Work
(21:32) The Lies We Tell Ourselves
GET IN TOUCH WITH EMILY:
Emily’s Instagram:
https://www.instagram.com/emilyley/
Simplified Instagram:
https://www.instagram.com/Simplified/
Website:
Growing Boldly:
https://www.amazon.com/Growing-Boldly-Dare-Build-Life/dp/140021131X/
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