Interview of Gabrielle Mills

Episode Summary:

Episode Summary:

In this special first-ever video episode of the InPowered Women Podcast, Sharon Lee sits down with entrepreneur, speaker, and fellow Iron Forums member Gabrielle Mills, Founder & President of Sourced.

Gabrielle went from corporate marketing at brands like IHG and the PGA Tour to launching a company from her mother’s basement — and building it into a multi-award-winning, recession-resistant firm. But this episode goes much deeper than business strategy.
Gabrielle shares the real story: the grind, the tears, the moments of doubt, the “Year That Must Not Be Named,” and the faith that kept her going even when the odds said “quit.”

From scaling lessons to mental toughness to the importance of getting in rooms that stretch you, Gabrielle’s story is equal parts practical and powerful. If you’re an entrepreneur, a builder, or a business leader pushing toward that next level — this conversation will leave you energized and ready to move.

Insights from this episode:

• You don’t fail unless you quit — everything else is learning
• Scaling requires structure: Systems, processes, and the right talent
• Your “why” must be big enough to hold you through the hard days
• Recession resistance is real — if your business is built intentionally
• Mentorship matters: you can’t reach your full potential in isolation
• Success is rarely a straight line — sometimes it’s Audis after a crisis
• Entrepreneurship requires mental toughness and a willingness to pivot
  

Quotes from the show:

• “Your why has to be big enough to sustain you from all you’re having to go through.” — Gabrielle Mills, InPowered Women Podcast
• “You don’t ever fail unless you give up. Failure isn’t real… it’s a construct. You win or you learn something.” — Gabrielle Mills, InPowered Women Podcast
• “I’m a huge proponent of mentorship. You can’t fully unlock your potential without someone who has walked the path in front of you.” — Gabrielle Mills, InPowered Women Podcast
• “When God closes a door, it’s because He’s pushing you somewhere else — even when you don’t know where ‘somewhere else’ is yet.” — Gabrielle Mills, InPowered Women Podcast

Episode Transcript:

Sharon Lee

Welcome to the InPowered Women’s podcast, where we tell the stories of Unstoppable Female Leaders who Excel, Uplift, and Secure a clearer Path for Female Leaders in the Future. And I’m your host, Sharon Lee. Hello, and welcome to our next episode of the InPowered Women podcast. I am Sharon Lee, your host, Principal of Pinnacle Strategic and I am so excited about today’s episode.

Sharon Lee: Hi, and welcome to the InPowered Women Podcast. I am Sharon Lee, your host with Pinnacle Strategic Advisors, and before we get to my fabulous guest, I would like to thank today’s sponsor. I would like to give a big thank you to Jambo’s. They’re bringing brand new pajamas to kids in foster care across Georgia, partnering with local communities to collect and share thousands of cozy pairs.

Supporting their mission gives these kids a little extra comfort, care, and love. It’s just the kind of work that makes your heart smile. You can donate at jambosdonates.org. And with that, Gabrielle Mills, how are you?

Gabrielle Mills: Hi, Sharon, it’s so great to be here. Thanks for having me.

Sharon Lee: Oh, I am thrilled to have you. It is so funny, I think that we met, what, 2 years ago?

Gabrielle Mills: About 2 years.

Sharon Lee: Okay, okay. Well, we are both a part of a fabulous, organization called Iron Forums, and that is a Christian

Sharon Lee: I wouldn’t say networking group, but it is just a fantastic community of CEOs and, female business leaders around the Northeast Georgia, well.

Sharon Lee: It’s farther than Northeast Georgia, but for the women’s groups, it is. But you are the founder and CEO of Sourced, and so before we kind of get into everything, tell us a little bit about what Sourced is.

Gabrielle Mills: So, Sourced is a back-office services firm. We have two different sides of our business. We have a fractional side, where we… the easiest way to describe it is put a box together and throw an accounting firm in the box, a marketing agency in the box, a virtual assistant company in the box, and an HR consultancy in the box.

Gabrielle Mills: That’s the fractional side of our business. We do all of those services in-house, full service.

Gabrielle Mills: full scale. And then on the other side of our business, we do, talent acquisition for direct hire placements for professional roles. So…

Gabrielle Mills: We are the people company, you come to us with a back office need, and, we figure out a way to be able to create a customized solution to get you the help that you need in your business.

Sharon Lee: Okay, and how long has Sourced been around?

Gabrielle Mills: We are going into our 10th year.

Sharon Lee: Wow!

Gabrielle Mills: God willing.

Sharon Lee: Nice big celebration!

Gabrielle Mills: We haven’t gotten there, you know? We are in a very, we’re coming out of a slow season, and we are in a very busy season right now, which is fabulous. Where I think any business owner or entrepreneur can, attest to.

Gabrielle Mills: After the slow season, after the rain comes a lot of sunshine, and we’re in a lot of sunshine, which is lovely. I can’t even think about what I’m doing this weekend, nonetheless what I’m doing next… next June. But I, I’m… we’re gonna do something. Of course we’re gonna do something. I don’t know what that is, though.

Sharon Lee: All right, well, I’m excited to hear about it. Although, before we get into more about Source and what you’re doing there, let’s talk about, kind of.

Sharon Lee: how this even concept came around. Like, why… what was your background before? So let’s kind of start early on, and, like, what was the evolution of this coming together?

Gabrielle Mills: It’s a hilarious story, Sharon. So the common questions are,

Gabrielle Mills: What made you come up with this idea?

Gabrielle Mills: what were you doing before? Why did you choose this business? And the answer to all of those questions were, we had no flippin’ idea, we did not know, and no, we did not do anything that we were doing now. So if…

Gabrielle Mills: I love to speak to people that are… have a desire to be entrepreneurs, because I understand that the feeling of, I don’t know what I should do, I don’t know how to make money, I just wanna… that was very much where my business partner and I started. And my business partner, for those listening, is my mom. I call her Chrissy.

Gabrielle Mills: At work. And, so I was in a corporate job, at IHG Hotels, in the marketing and branding department, so I am a marketer by trade.

Gabrielle Mills: She is an operations and saleswoman. She was in leadership at some small to mid-market companies. Actually, she did big companies, too, so she’s got a breadth of experience in just business.

Gabrielle Mills: And we just decided we wanted to have one. And so our bride idea, which people have since praised us for, but I assure you it was not this brilliant concoction. It was really us having no idea what we were doing. We knew we wanted to be B2B, so our best

Gabrielle Mills: idea was to go to business owners and just say, hey, we want to start a business, what do you need?

Gabrielle Mills: And we asked them what they… if they were to do it all over again, what would they do? Where they were underserved, how could we support them? And we have a whiteboard in our office down the hall that was in the bedroom of my mom’s basement where I moved into, to build this company. We, put all their answers up on the whiteboard, and we just said, how many of these problems can we solve?

Gabrielle Mills: Without being everything to everybody.

Gabrielle Mills: And that’s how Source came about. So, I love talking to the people that don’t have a flippin’ clue, because I didn’t have a flippin’ clue. And I know what that was like, and we… if you have the right hustle and grit, you can make something of it, like we did.

Sharon Lee: Well, and I love… we were talking at one point about you even trying to figure out, even while you were in college, what you were going to try to do, and and one of your little roadblocks was math, and I can completely understand that, I can… I can relate, and so…

Sharon Lee: Tell me a little bit of… tell everybody a little bit about… about that, and.

Gabrielle Mills: Yeah.

Sharon Lee: Even got out of there.

Gabrielle Mills: So, people… and I’m not trying to toot my own horn here, I’m actually just… I’m trying to do quite the opposite. People love to walk in our office and see what we’ve built, and look at the infrastructure that we have, and be like, God, you made it! Like, how did you do this?

Gabrielle Mills: I’m not good at a lot of things, and I’m very honest about what that is. So, to say math is…

Gabrielle Mills: a weakness is a vast understatement. Like, my husband laughs at me because he’s like, you can’t do basic arithmetic. And I’m like, I know, it’s just, I can’t. So I went into college.

Gabrielle Mills: Not knowing what I wanted to do, so my mom and my dad, gave me some really great advice, and they said, you don’t know what you want to do, go be a business… business major. So I go and… granted, I am not a morning person, I’m still not a morning person, I’m trying very hard, but my first class was at 8.30 in the morning, Econ 101.

Sharon Lee: Having looked back on my life, that should be the easiest.

Gabrielle Mills: concepts to understand, but I could not understand, because it required the left brain, and I am a right brain person. So, then I… after, like, being in econ, which I just… I wrestled through.

Gabrielle Mills: the thought of taking accounting, Sharon, I was like, I can’t… I can’t take account… like, I will not make a business major, because I can’t do accounting. Like, I… I have to avoid this class.

Gabrielle Mills: And so I did. I changed my major to marketing. And then I realized that the marketing school was in the business school, which meant I still had to take accounting, and I was still scared of accounting, so I actually got a journalism degree, trying to be a marketing degree, trying to be a business degree.

Gabrielle Mills: All to avoid accounting. And then here we are.

Gabrielle Mills: I am not only a business owner, but I’m a business owner whose main service is accounting. And that’s, like, the great comedy of my life.

Sharon Lee: Oh my gosh, that is so hilarious. Well, and you know, one of the things that I love is that person that, again, sees you from the outside looking in, that just sees you as a success. They have no idea where that might fall, as far as, you know.

Sharon Lee: math being an issue, or where your background was. So, I want to talk a little bit about success, because, you know, I’m guessing you launched this business, you knew exactly what you were going to do, you got the whiteboard, and everything was just roses, right? You’re kicking back, you’re eating bonbons at this point, right?

Gabrielle Mills: Actually, it kind of was.

Gabrielle Mills: It took a lot of hard work, but our first year was, like, a dream. It was… it was… we won an award after 10 months of being in business, we had… we had clients.

Gabrielle Mills: I wouldn’t say they were the greatest clients, but from going from zero to, I think we ended the year at, like, $150,000 our first year, like, that’s awesome. Like, it was a dream first year.

Gabrielle Mills: It was year 2 and year 3.

Gabrielle Mills: 2 and 3. That, really threw me through a wrench in the plan, and really challenged me. And really, all parts of this business

Gabrielle Mills: has challenged and stretched me. I tell people, if you don’t like pushing yourself, do not become an entrepreneur, because it is… it is the greatest journey of…

Gabrielle Mills: Enlightenment, and humility and learning, and self-awareness that you could possibly put yourself through, besides parenting, I think parenting does the same thing. But yeah, I mean, it kind of was roses that first year, though, but trust me, it caught up with me.

Sharon Lee: Well, so let’s talk about that a little bit, because, I mean, is this a matter of, you know, you had this great year, and then you needed to reinvent your business self, or did… was it just struggle after struggle, and you had to plow through? Or, you know, let’s really talk about what you faced after that.

Gabrielle Mills: Yes, so, I actually believe so passionately about this that I actually speak on it. I have an entire keynote specifically around what went wrong and how other people can avoid it.

Gabrielle Mills: So, the keynote’s called Scale Like You Main It, and it is a framework, S-C-A-L-E, Scale, and what I went through in years 2 and Year 3 is what I… I talk about as the first stage of that framework, which is S,

Gabrielle Mills: for systems. We did not have good systems in our business. We hired people. They were okay, they were good hires. Like, they… I… would I hire them again? Not in this season of life, but were they good for our stage in business? Yes, I think they were. We did not have good enough,

Gabrielle Mills: systems or, like, rubrics of, like, standards of how things needed to be done. We didn’t have good standards of double-checking quality. We did not have good systems for documentation. All we knew, and that what we did at the time, was we said, client meet person.

Gabrielle Mills: Now you guys work together, good luck, and we were out of it.

Gabrielle Mills: Because there’s some very successful businesses that do that. They just matchmake resources. We found very quickly that didn’t work for us because we couldn’t…

Gabrielle Mills: have a standard for quality, we didn’t… we were selling things that then we couldn’t really back up, so it was really surrounding this concept of having systems, framework, organization, infrastructure in the business to make sure that the experience that someone has

Gabrielle Mills: From the first sale all the way to the final invoice is the same, and you…

Gabrielle Mills: Don’t have to keep your eyes on everything as you grow.

Sharon Lee: Nice, nice. And so, how did… so you… you came up with this concept out of that, but, tell me a little bit… we need… we need a little see how the sausage is being made.

Sharon Lee: Tell me a little bit about, like, what you were experiencing, like, because you were on a pretty good high there, so was it a slow crumble because things were chipping away because you didn’t have those systems in place, or… so it wasn’t, like, a plummet?

Gabrielle Mills: It felt like a plummet.

Gabrielle Mills: It took… I mean, it was 2 years, so depending on how fast the plummet is, I don’t know, it sure felt that way.

Sharon Lee: I…

Gabrielle Mills: Here’s how it went down.

Gabrielle Mills: And I’m gonna talk mostly in accounting, because that was most of the business that we had, but it was, across the board. We were doing a lot of marketing, too. It was less applicable administrative support. At this time, we weren’t doing talent acquisition or HR, so these were really only the three services we had, and our biggest problems were in the accounting side, so I’m gonna…

Gabrielle Mills: Talk specifically around accounting.

Gabrielle Mills: We had people, we had clients. We had no way of… we didn’t have a good way. We had a way that we thought would work, and then it turns out that we didn’t.

Gabrielle Mills: A good way of scoping properly and making sure we had a full understanding of what we were committing to. The person was then doing the work. We had no good way of verifying that work was being done properly.

Gabrielle Mills: In some cases, we didn’t have good visibility because of systems and technology. Not at the time. It was there, we just didn’t use it or didn’t know it was there.

Sharon Lee: And then we treated every client differently.

Gabrielle Mills: Because we wanted to be a customized solution. Now, we figured out how to do that over time, so we’re still a customized solution, but everyone was different. They all had different people, they had all different needs, so if you have, like, all of these situations, and then on top of the foundation is all the needs are different, it just all slowly started to blow up at the same time.

Gabrielle Mills: So, we would find… one issue.

Gabrielle Mills: laser focus on fixing that, and while we were fixing that, another issue would come. From a different client, who had different needs, different scope, that was miscoped, that we didn’t verify, we didn’t know how to police quality, so then while we were fixing the first one, and starting the second one, then we would get the third one, and it just blew up.

Gabrielle Mills: And what I feel, it blew up. Like, it took some time, but in 2019, which was my worst year ever in life, it just felt like the whole thing was crumbling in front of us.

Gabrielle Mills: And we had too many problems at the same time that we felt like we couldn’t have time to fix, because we were solving too many things at the same time. And let me remind you, all of this is in the accounting department. So we’re talking about people’s finances, and people’s records, and people’s taxes, and like, it was…

Gabrielle Mills: really bad. We did make a couple of bad hires that we didn’t know, because again, we didn’t quality check our work, so they were cutting corners, and we didn’t know how to

Gabrielle Mills: Find them. Eventually, we learned, but,

Gabrielle Mills: it was really all over the place, it really was, but it all had to do with systems. What we had to do after 2019 is overhaul the whole thing to say, we know what we’re selling, this isn’t a sales problem, this is a fulfillment problem, so we have to overhaul our entire services fulfillment

Gabrielle Mills: In order to make sure that every client’s needs are being met, they’re all coming in relatively the same, that we’re… we understand the scoping, we understand the pricing, we understand how to verify what people are telling us are true.

Gabrielle Mills: From soup to nuts, everything. So it was, it was a big undertaking.

Sharon Lee: And you had a term for that final year, right?

Gabrielle Mills: Oh, God, yes. We call it the year that must not be named.

Gabrielle Mills: 2019.

Gabrielle Mills: Yes.

Sharon Lee: To this day, it is the year that must not be named.

Gabrielle Mills: if I talk about it too much, Sharon, my eye starts to twitch. Like, it’s just… it’s not good. It’s… you know, I have to say, though, I am…

Gabrielle Mills: thankful for that year. I don’t want to be thankful for that year, but,

Gabrielle Mills: I am a better leader because we went through that. I am able to teach people lessons that I never would have known to teach without going through that year. So, you know, they say, like.

Gabrielle Mills: pray for your enemies, and the first thought is like, ugh, why? It’s like, okay, well, I also thank the year that must not be named, because I guess it helped.

Sharon Lee: Right.

Gabrielle Mills: It did suck, I’m not gonna lie, it did suck.

Sharon Lee: Well, and so, I have to ask you, I mean, this is… you’re going through something so catastrophic, I guess is a word, that you.

Gabrielle Mills: I would say that, yeah.

Sharon Lee: Okay, so what made you… I mean, a lot of people would just say, okay, I… I must have made a wrong choice here. I should not have started this business. This business is not what I thought it was going to be. I’m gonna go just hang it up and find a job. What kept you from doing that?

Gabrielle Mills: I kind of dance around this answer, because I never know how people are going to respond to it, and then I’ve… and then I’ve just learned to just say it the way that it is to me, whether it offends people or not.

Gabrielle Mills: God told me.

Gabrielle Mills: So, what happened when I started the business is God told me to start a company. That’s how Chrissy and I started on this journey of, like, okay, well, I just got a calling that I’m meant to be an entrepreneur. There’s a lot… there’s a big story of how the business came about with that. It’s nothing monumental, but that’s really how it started.

Gabrielle Mills: And as I was going through this year and crying almost every day in my shower, crying myself to sleep, like, I would just…

Gabrielle Mills: I’m thinking it’s over. I’m thinking I can’t handle it. I’m thinking I’m not cut out for this. I’m thinking that I just screwed over all of our people, all of our clients, all of the things. And I never was told, I never felt that I was told to stop.

Gabrielle Mills: by God, who I, you know, I just, I follow His lead, and he never told me to quit. So, I didn’t.

Gabrielle Mills: And we have…

Gabrielle Mills: Chrissy and I have a little bit of a phrase, an unofficial phrase in the business of,

Gabrielle Mills: If you can’t quit, if you don’t quit, you can’t fail.

Gabrielle Mills: Now, I think that there are perfect… there are times where you should quit. I think that is a strategic move. I don’t think it should be… there should be shame around quitting if it is strategic and it’s the right move for you, but for us, a lot of times we’re just up against something hard, and we’re like.

Gabrielle Mills: We’re not gonna quit just because it’s hard. We’re just gonna keep on moving. And we’re either gonna learn something from it, or… we’re not, you know.

Sharon Lee: Well, and so, a lot of this framework comes from the fact that you do have a corporate background that we haven’t talked about. And so, it’s not the fact that you got out of college, decided you were going to do something that did not involve math, and you got on your whiteboard and you just started a business. You actually had a corporate background that you could at least

Sharon Lee: you know, you got your toe in the water out there. I did. You know, you have that business experience, so talk a little bit about your background.

Gabrielle Mills: Yeah, so I… God, I loved my job at IHG. I worked with some of the best people, I had the best… oh, it was just such a great environment.

Gabrielle Mills: And I got to live my dream job. What I thought my dream job was, and it turns out this was what I’m doing now was, but I didn’t know that then, was what I was doing. And I was in the branding department of a large corporation that had multiple brands.

Gabrielle Mills: And if it had a logo on it, I had something to do with it. Sometimes it was very small, but sometimes I played a pretty significant role. I mean, I did everything from…

Gabrielle Mills: Design napkins, all the way to managing

Gabrielle Mills: sponsorships and tournaments and things like that. I worked with music artists, and, like, it was so fun! .

Sharon Lee: Right?

Gabrielle Mills: But it… it also…

Gabrielle Mills: It taught me a lot of how business worked, yes. It taught me a lot about professionalism, because I was in a corporate environment.

Gabrielle Mills: But what I didn’t know until after I left was I really struggled to move up in corporate for two reasons that I didn’t know at the time. One, I sucked at the corporate game. I just don’t do the corporate game. Well, I wear my emotions on my sleeve, I don’t…

Gabrielle Mills: I’m the same way to everybody, I don’t play favorites, and so that does come into play in a corporate environment. Even when I was working with the very best people, their hands were tied, there was HR, there was…

Gabrielle Mills: Bureaucracy, there was all sorts of stuff.

Gabrielle Mills: But also, it just wasn’t an environment that I was meant to be in. I wasn’t flourishing in that environment because I was meant to flourish in small business, and I didn’t know that at the time.

Gabrielle Mills: What I counsel people that, are coming from a corporate environment.

Gabrielle Mills: Yes, it is great to have learned the business world.

Gabrielle Mills: It is absolutely no application in small business. You really think that it does. You really, really do. Every time I talk to somebody, they’re like, I know exact… I mean, I’ve even talked to people that helped small businesses or franchises get off the ground.

Gabrielle Mills: It is truly… we all agree, there is nothing comparable about big business and small business. You take little nuggets here and there, you take the KPIs, and you take the structure a little bit, but when you actually start to move in your own business.

Gabrielle Mills: It’s completely different. So I do, like, when I get asked that question, Sharon, I’m always very careful of, like, yes, I came from a corporate background, and yes, it served me for a foundation, but make no mistake, my experience at corporate did nothing to build my business at all.

Sharon Lee: Well, that actually, sparks something in me, is that one of the things that I have always liked about you and has drawn me to you is the fact that you are transparent. And so it’s funny that that works against you in that

Sharon Lee: corporate space.

Sharon Lee: But it is one of the attributes that I really, really like about you, and I think that that is a good segue into talking about mentorship, and

Sharon Lee: You know, like, what your thoughts are on mentorship and, how that plays into… into what your experience has been and where you’re going.

Gabrielle Mills: I am a huge proponent for mentorship. You don’t know what you don’t know, and I am a big belie… like, I just don’t think that you can untap

Gabrielle Mills: your potential, your true, unfiltered potential, what God created you to be, without somebody that has walked the journey in front of you.

Gabrielle Mills: It doesn’t matter if it’s in business, it doesn’t matter if it’s in parenting, it doesn’t matter if it’s in school. There’s just something about

Gabrielle Mills: Having to go talk to somebody and be like.

Gabrielle Mills: I’m running into this issue. Is this normal? What would you do? Like, I’m running into this, how would you handle this? And having somebody that’s one or two steps ahead.

Gabrielle Mills: Just how… it not only helps your learning, but it helps…

Gabrielle Mills: make you feel validated. It also challenges you, like.

Gabrielle Mills: I’ve had some really good coaches and mentors in the past where I am in my way of thinking, and I am right, and then they just hit me off the side of the head with a question, that I’m like.

Gabrielle Mills: what? Like, some… I wish I had an example for you right now, specifically, but just totally threw me off my axis of what I was thinking, and they were right. You know, and it got my wheels turning, and it made me pivot, or it made me change, or it made me empathize more with somebody, and I think that’s just invaluable. And, while I’m not being… well, one, I was gonna say I’m not being mentored by anybody right now, but I will say that my

Gabrielle Mills: mentor is always and has been my mom. She’s been… she’s actually the CEO of the company, I’m the president of the company.

Gabrielle Mills: And she is, she is…

Gabrielle Mills: mentored me, led me, we’ve mentored each other, we’ve led each other. She’s been the most wonderful mentor anybody could ask for.

Gabrielle Mills: But I’m in a season now where I’m actually, just the other week, I was like, I think I need to find myself a mentor. Because our business is… we have hit the ceiling of what Chrissy and I can do ourselves.

Gabrielle Mills: We are putting together an advisory board of people that are smarter than we are, to be able to serve in that capacity for us, but also, in my speaking journey. It’s a new venture for me. I don’t know what I’m doing. I’ve got coaches, but I would…

Gabrielle Mills: I’ve come across a couple of people that I’d love to have an unofficial

Gabrielle Mills: mentorship with, where I’m like, can you just…

Gabrielle Mills: guide me a little bit, so I think mentor… I mean, that’s a little bit of a soapbox, but I think it’s awesome. I think it’s great, and everyone should have one.

Sharon Lee: Well, and I do want to get into your, your speaking, chapter, if you will, but before we do that, so, you know, you were talking about the accounting side of your business, and… and kind of where you were in…

Sharon Lee: those years, that won’t be named, and that sort of thing. But you did take on other facets, and so we haven’t really talked about what led you, like, how those actually opened up to you, and how you embraced them, and, like, what that experience was.

Gabrielle Mills: You mean our other services?

Gabrielle Mills: Okay, so When we put all those answers on the board.

Gabrielle Mills: of what we can do for people. Bookkeeping was one of them. We started out as bookkeeping, and then we elevated to accounting.

Gabrielle Mills: Once we knew more.

Gabrielle Mills: But we didn’t want to be an accounting firm. We didn’t want to just be a bookkeeping firm. One, I’m terrible at math. Why in the world would I do that? but…

Gabrielle Mills: I also came from marketing, so I’m like, we can do marketing. Marketing is necessary for small business, so we knew it would be bookkeeping and marketing.

Gabrielle Mills: And then we’re like, okay, well, we have all these people that have just, like, administrative tasks that they needed, just a variety of, like, I just need a second in command, kind of. So that’s where office support came in, or administrative support came in. So that’s where the three were we started. And we treated them all the same.

Gabrielle Mills: So, the three services that we started with were bookkeeping, marketing, and administrative support. And the model was we hired people, we got clients, we put an account manager in the middle, and there you go.

Gabrielle Mills: And we did those at the same time.

Gabrielle Mills: We had to learn, again, we didn’t have proper systems, so the structure of our company was very, minimal, as… not… it was just minimal.

Gabrielle Mills: So, we figured out faster, because we had more clients in the bookkeeping at the time side, than we did the marketing and administrative support side, how that structure should be built. And then we… we couldn’t really apply it to account, marketing and administrative support, because there were different services.

Gabrielle Mills: So, what we learned through that was every service that we have in our business, and we have 5 business units.

Gabrielle Mills: is… in the infrastructure of the company, the model is different for each service. That’s…

Sharon Lee: We, in that period of time, in those first 3 to 4 years.

Gabrielle Mills: We learned that we could not apply the same methodology of accounting to marketing and marketing to office assistants.

Gabrielle Mills: So they’re all… they’re all very different.

Sharon Lee: Okay, okay. So, if you are going to onboard a new client, you have 5 different avenues, I guess, that they could take, or I guess they could take any of them, or they could take all of them. So, with your systems approach, do you…

Sharon Lee: slow roll that, so they start with your one type of service, like a bookkeeping, and then that broadens into

Sharon Lee: You know, other types of services, or how does that work so that you are systems-oriented?

Gabrielle Mills: We follow the needs of the customer. Usually the customer wants to.

Gabrielle Mills: bite off one thing at a time. We do not have to. We try to encourage them not to, because they are different teams. We can move faster, get them help faster, if we can bring them on at the same time.

Gabrielle Mills: But that, understandably, can be a little overwhelming for the client, because they are biting off more than they can chew. They do not have whole teams to help them, right? That’s where we’re coming in.

Gabrielle Mills: So usually they come in in either talent acquisition, or accounting, or sometimes marketing, but then they’ll jump around to each of the services. It just depends on what they need.

Sharon Lee: Right, right, okay. Well, I do want to dive into, your speaking, because I am so fascinated, you know, just…

Sharon Lee: I just feel like, you come off so personally, so I feel like you’ve got a lot to say, you’ve, you know, it’s all coming from a good foundation, and I just feel like your presence and how you do it, it just makes so much sense for you to be out there speaking, and so I am, like, your biggest cheerleader over here. But let’s talk about this. So you started because of some of the stuff that you went through.

Sharon Lee: you’ve got your scale, what was it called again? Scale…

Gabrielle Mills: It’s a scale framework.

Sharon Lee: scale framework, thank you. So, obviously, I want someone to hear this, so we don’t want to tell the whole, you know, presentation and that sort of thing, but I do want to talk a little bit about, you know, the… the… who… who this is really meant for. What… what is a perfect audience for your message?

Gabrielle Mills: So, I got… I did not grow up wanting to be a public speaker. I did grow up wanting to be an actress, which is really funny, because then I look at my life, and I was like, oh, of course, those skills can apply. It’s just, you know, when you look at your life hindsight, it’s funny how it all interconnects, right?

Gabrielle Mills: I didn’t realize I wanted to go into this industry, the speaking industry, until 2019, November, when I was at a conference, and I saw Rachel Hollis, who is a motivational speaker, entrepreneur, fellow woman entrepreneur.

Gabrielle Mills: on stage, teaching women how to build their businesses. But teaching women who haven’t started, and teaching women who are already there.

Gabrielle Mills: And she really spoke to me when I was in my lowest, lowest moment, and I just, you know, I felt called. I was like, that is what I’m supposed to do. I… I am a huge believer that when you have…

Gabrielle Mills: Negative events in your life, and negative experiences that…

Gabrielle Mills: The best use of those experiences to teach other people how to either avoid it or navigate through it.

Gabrielle Mills: And I wanted what I did to mean something. I wanted it to mean something beyond just, well, that was a really crappy time in my life.

Gabrielle Mills: And I saw a woman that was doing that, and I felt like I could do that, and I felt really called to that. So that’s where my desire to speak came from. And I’ve wanted to do it ever since, but very recently, I’ve, you know.

Gabrielle Mills: we’ve built the business, we added a new service in 2020, that new… that next year, we did two and a half times revenue, we’ve been very, very busy hiring people, doing things that I… it wasn’t the right time, and I… I say it wasn’t the right time carefully, because some people use that as an excuse, but I also believe that

Gabrielle Mills: You do have to listen to…

Gabrielle Mills: The vibrations of the world, of, is it truly your time?

Sharon Lee: Right.

Gabrielle Mills: And at the beginning of the year, it felt like it was time. So I got into a program and speakers who do this on a really big scale, because I believe that the messages that I have

Gabrielle Mills: should go to the masses. There are people that do really well in small groups and one-on-one settings. I happen to do really well with large settings.

Gabrielle Mills: And so I want to do two things.

Gabrielle Mills: My audience is entrepreneurs and leaders, so I think what I know is

Gabrielle Mills: applicable to people who are entrepreneurs, but also applicable to people who support entrepreneurs, that maybe are in that mid-market sector, or, I mean, even corporate, not so much, but, like, a team is a… a department is an ecosystem, right? It’s all…

Gabrielle Mills: the same.

Gabrielle Mills: And so, I have learned how to build something from the ground up, from $0 to multiple millions of dollars, which is what everybody wants to do. And so, I teach this framework of how you do that, so how do you scale your business from X place

Gabrielle Mills: to Y place, and you want to go to Z.

Gabrielle Mills: I primarily do that for people that already have existing companies, existing teams, existing infrastructures, and they want to scale. They are ready to grow. They don’t want to have their business just be a lifestyle. They actually see a big future for it.

Gabrielle Mills: But I… I… my heart can’t help helping people that are aspiring entrepreneurs. I just… I… I love to talk to those early-stage entrepreneurs, too. So it’s really any… entrepreneurs at any stage, but I…

Gabrielle Mills: Where I really love to do work is the entrepreneurs and organization leaders, team leaders who are looking to scale.

Sharon Lee: So your message is not just one-fold. You could do a keynote type of speech. You could tailor it to a very segmented audience, depending on what is out there. I guess you could also serve as a panelist, if that were.

Gabrielle Mills: And how…

Sharon Lee: Okay, okay. So yeah, let’s talk about, about just different tailored messages and, and where you, where you go. Where, where do you, where do you get your.

Gabrielle Mills: Where do I go?

Sharon Lee: Where do you go?

Gabrielle Mills: Oh! So, I have some…

Gabrielle Mills: topics that I… that I tend to, like, get asked about a lot. Like, my content comes from…

Gabrielle Mills: people want to hear about something, like my story, right? And so there’s content, so I’ve developed content around

Gabrielle Mills: my story and how I was able to build this business, that’s where the scale framework comes from. But then there are other people that are like, okay, I just want to know how to do

Gabrielle Mills: How do you do this… how did you do the sales piece? So I talk about the sales piece, or I struggle with imposter syndrome, so I talk about confidence and clarity and leadership. Like, so that there are different… I tailor messages to rooms.

Gabrielle Mills: And that has given me a little bit of a… a menu of topics that I start with.

Gabrielle Mills: But I really start with what people need. Like, usually, people come to me and they’re like.

Gabrielle Mills: I have a panel you’d like… I’d like you to sit on. I have a breakout session that I’d like you to do. I have a conference that I’m putting on, I’d like you to be one of the keynotes. Like, so they come to me, and then I look at the event, and I say, who are the people in the room? What… I interview. I interview the meeting planners every time.

Gabrielle Mills: Who are the people in the room? Why are you putting on this conference? What do you want your audience to walk away with? And I take either something that I’ve already developed and tweak it to make sense for that event, or I just create something new.

Sharon Lee: I love this. I mean, I absolutely love this. And so, you’re kind of getting started on this chapter. You’re still going to stay with Sourced and continue with what you’re doing there, but, speaking

Sharon Lee: I guess even all around the country. I mean, it doesn’t matter with the geography, it’s really more about who’s in the room, what do they need to hear, and what is that message that makes sense for you to fit within that agenda that’s going on.

Gabrielle Mills: Here’s what makes me really passionate, Sharon, is I know what it’s like

Gabrielle Mills: to be in that messy middle, that… and that messy middle is a dangerous place to be. It… you tie… you don’t mean to, but you tie up your identity and work, you… your family life can struggle, your mental health struggles, you…

Gabrielle Mills: start to reconsider who you even are. Like, I know this. I know how this is so interwoven in the best ways and the worst ways, and of your business, or your department, or your job, or your career not being successful. And I have a huge passion for people that have

Gabrielle Mills: The very best intentions to do good in the world, to create jobs, to create good families, to create good lives for themselves.

Gabrielle Mills: And they are just…

Gabrielle Mills: stuck in the pit. And I have been in that pit, and I know what it’s like, and so I am extremely passionate of…

Gabrielle Mills: I want to be a motivational speaker to get people out of it, I want them to feel good, but I want them to know how to get out. I want them to have… every time that they hear me talk, they have one thing that they can take away, that it’s like, this is one step out of this…

Gabrielle Mills: season of life, or if they’re out of that season of life, one step farther away from the pit, so maybe I never have to go back there again.

Sharon Lee: Right, because sometimes you’re just too close to it, and that can be a problem. You can’t even see.

Sharon Lee: And that makes me… okay, so I said I didn’t want to get into what your whole spiel was, because I do want people to be curious about it, but let’s talk about that. Let’s close up this little segment on if you were to give a nugget, a takeaway, if somebody is out there, and they are a business owner, and they’re watching this podcast right now, what’s one small business, maybe around systems.

Sharon Lee: That you might throw out to someone.

Gabrielle Mills: Yeah, I always start with systems, because that’s where I messed up the worst. You can mess up in the worst in a lot of different areas of the framework, but that’s where I messed up, and people are like, if you could do… if you could teach people one thing.

Gabrielle Mills: and even in my talk, Sharon, I’m like, listen! You don’t have to hear anything else I’m saying, but listen here on your system. So that’s…

Gabrielle Mills: 100%, I want people to identify the systems in their business. Now, let me define what systems is.

Sharon Lee: It’s any…

Gabrielle Mills: Standard instruction, how to do something in your business. It needs to be identified, and it needs to be documented so it can be replicat- replicatable, okay? So, anything in your business, any job, any function, will take sales, for instance.

Gabrielle Mills: You’ve got a discovery call.

Gabrielle Mills: You need to have a framework of how that meeting happens, how it comes in, and how it goes out the door, and what happens afterward. So, you have to… this is an example of a system.

Gabrielle Mills: of how are you going to book the meeting? On what platform, what’s the calendar invite going to say? What’s your discovery meeting agenda? Is there a form? Are you filling out the form? Is someone else filling out the form? What happens to the data of the form? Does it then go to a scope of work? Do you send it to the client afterward? Like, all of these things, like, have to be thought about.

Gabrielle Mills: If they’re not already in existence, and this could be done with machinery, it could be done with accounting, it can be done with coaching, it can be done with anything. You have to get that granular on all the pieces of your business when you’re strategizing it.

Gabrielle Mills: And why that’s so important is because the end goal is for you not to do it. Like, unless you want this to be your business, you want to eventually hire somebody to take this function, or hire another person to do it with you.

Gabrielle Mills: So you have to, one, identify it, and then you have to document it so you can train and do performance management on it.

Gabrielle Mills: So, when you’ve got somebody’s role fully systematized, fully documented, it makes the hiring process easier, it makes the performance measurement easier, it makes the firing easier, it makes the…

Gabrielle Mills: somebody else training on this, so you’re not the one training? I mean, it’s the answer to everything, and one that I will never stop screaming from the mountaintops.

Sharon Lee: Well, and that person walking into that role, I mean, think about your first day on the job, or you’re already on the job, but you’re going into a new role. I mean, how much confidence does that add for you, as well? I mean, that is… that is… that makes sense in… in that whole

Sharon Lee: ecosystem that.

Gabrielle Mills: And everything. And some people are like, you know, it’s… some people get it like this. I did not. I was told this by Chrissy, my mom, for a year and a half, and yet I still messed it up.

Gabrielle Mills: So some people get it, and then some people are like me, and they have to learn it. And any role can be

Gabrielle Mills: can be systematized, and, like, it seems really archaic to, like, have a job… a manual for your job, but the amount of freedom that you get by being able to do that, and be able to say, this is my job… for instance, I went on maternity leave.

Gabrielle Mills: If I… I had to document the crap out of what I did so other people could do it while I was on maternity leave. So the amount of freedom that you get by putting in the work and systematizing every role, every function, every task, every everything.

Gabrielle Mills: allows… it gives you the foundation for your business to truly scale. You can’t really do anything else in the framework until your infrastructure is built in such a way that you can scale.

Sharon Lee: Well, it’s funny that you mentioned, maternity leave, because, I mean, the same applies, because you said, you could… this could be a coach, this could be a business, this could be anything.

Sharon Lee: this is a newborn. I mean, think about that. If you do not have them on a sleep schedule, you have no life. So it’s the same thing. You put that system in place at home. I mean, it applies everywhere. I mean, look at you. You’re brilliant. This is fantastic, so…

Gabrielle Mills: I’m not brilliant, I just made a bunch of mistakes, and I’m very passionate about it, so I speak very passionately about it.

Sharon Lee: Well, and there’s that transparency again, which makes you a fantastic speaker, because you can bring out the dirty and somehow show that, look, you don’t have to be in that dirty place that I was at. And I mean, I think that there’s just so much to learn from what you have done and all this, and I cannot thank you enough for being here today and sharing your story, and I’m so excited to see your name up in lights on all kinds of, keynote addresses in the future.

Sharon Lee: This is, like, this is such an exciting time for you.

Gabrielle Mills: Well, me too, girl, and I am so happy that, and honored that you had me on your show. I think this is the first one with video, so, like, thank you! And, your mouth to God’s ears, you know? I’m just trying to faithfully walk where I’m supposed to walk, and…

Gabrielle Mills: I… no problem sharing my dirty laundry, because otherwise, then people don’t… people think that there’s a big secret when… the secret is, is everyone’s winging it.

Sharon Lee: Right, everyone’s winging it, 100%, fake it till you make it. Well, so, if somebody does want to reach out to you, whether they’re an event planner and they’re thinking about speaking, whether it is something where they are in a small business scenario and they want to look at some of your services, that sort of thing, how would they reach out to you?

Gabrielle Mills: So they… everyone can find me on any social media platform under Gabrielle Mills Speaks.

Gabrielle Mills: Which, just Google Gabrielle Mills Speaks, any spelling, and I think it will, it will come up. I’m most active on LinkedIn and Instagram, and they can also find me at GabrielleMills.com.

Sharon Lee: Fantastic. Or, they can find me, and I will put them in touch with you.

Gabrielle Mills: Right.

Sharon Lee: Well, thank you again for today. This has been a fun conversation, as always, and I cannot tell you how much I wish you the best, and I’m so excited to see where all this goes.

Gabrielle Mills: Thank you, my friend.

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This episode was produced and managed by Sharon Lee.