Interview of Laure Hoffman, Leadership Coach at Southwestern Consulting and Founder of Work As Worship

Thank you to this episode’s sponsor, Franklin County Industrial Building Authority: www.thinkfranklin.com.

Episode Summary:

In the latest episode of the InPowered Women’s Podcast, host Sharon Lee interviews Laure Hoffman. In this vibrant and inspiring episode with Laure Hoffman, a dynamic sales and leadership coach at Southwestern Consulting and founder of Work As Worship. Laure shares her journey in business coaching, leadership development, and her involvement in uplifting women through groups like Iron Forums for Women. With insights from her personal life, including her 22-year marriage, role as a bonus mom, and experiences as a grandmother, Laure offers a unique perspective on balancing professional success with meaningful personal connections. Tune in for practical advice, heartwarming stories, and empowering insights from an extraordinary woman!

Insights from this episode:

• Laure introduces herself and shares her journey as a sales and leadership coach for Southwestern Consulting, a leadership development program leader on the West Coast, and a business consultant. Her small business, Work As Worship, encompasses these diverse roles, making her a powerhouse of knowledge and experience.
• Importance of aligning personal values with business goals to create a cohesive and motivated team is highlighted.
• Laure opens up about her personal life, sharing her 22-year marriage to Philip Hoffman and her role as a bonus mom to his three children. She talks about the joys and challenges of blending families and the pride she feels as a grandmother to seven grandchildren.
• Emphasis on the role of continuous learning and professional development in maintaining a competitive edge in the market.
• Discussion surrounding her involvement in various women’s groups, including Iron Forums for Women, where she supports and uplifts women of faith in their business endeavors.
• Insightful tips on business and leadership coaching shared.
• Explanations surrounding the value of servant leadership are provided alongside how leading by example can inspire and empower team members to perform at their best.
  
  

Quotes from the Show:

Resources Mentioned:

• Leaders Eat Last by Simon Sinek
• Servant Leadership Institute
• Iron Forums for Women

Episode Transcript:

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. I’m your host, Sharon Lee. Hi, this is Sharon Lee, Principal of Pinnacle Strategic Advisors, and your host of today’s InPowered Women podcast. But before we to dive into our conversation, I want to extend a heartfelt thank you to our sponsor, the Franklin County Industrial Building Authority. They work tirelessly to promote economic development and support businesses in our community. Their commitment to fostering growth and opportunity aligns perfectly with our mission to empower and celebrate women in leadership roles. So thank you, Franklin County Industrial Building Authority, for your invaluable support. And with that, I would like to introduce today’s guest, Ms. Laure Hoffman. Hi, Laure. Hi, Sharon.

It’s so fun to be here with you today. Thank you for having me on your show, InPowered Women.

Oh, my goodness. I am so excited. From the moment that we met, we have clicked and we have had high energy conversations, and I just know that this is going to be another one of them. So I’m really excited. But before we get started, tell me a little bit about what you do, who you work for, what you got going on.

Let me just give it to you high level. I am here in Metro Atlanta. I have a small business called Work as Worship. And under Work as Worship, I have four business verticals that I steward. I’m a sales and leadership coach for Southwestern Consulting, which is out of Nashville. And I also run a leadership development and coaching program that’s more West Coast. It’s called the Master’s Program for Women. I’m involved with a small business owners group for women of faith called Iron Forums for Women. And I do a little bit of business consulting and business development work for some clients. So I’m very I’m busy.

You took the words out of my mouth. No wonder we joked about you having 75 emails, which you don’t really. I’m just glad that we were able to find this time today. Before we get into how you got here, what’s your home life? You’re married?

I am married to a wonderful man, Philip Hoffman. We’ve been together for 22 years, and we are both divorced. This is a second marriage for both of us. I never had my own children, but when I married Philip 22 years ago, his children were 9, 11, and 14, and so I became a stepmom or a bonus mom. I heard it called, and I love that term. I’ve been a bonus mom for these last 22 years. We have seven grandchildren, three children, and of course, they’re all married, and then seven grandchildren.

Good for you. And they’re all local? Are they all close by?

No, they are living in other states. So I have a son and his little family are in Eastern Tennessee. I’ve got a daughter and her husband, and they’re three children in Columbia, South Carolina. Then our oldest son and his wife have three children there in St. Louis. So Atlanta puts us in a good position to see all of them. They’re within 5-8 hours.

Right. As a Tennessee girl, I was like, All right, there we go. East Tennessee. Here we go. Here we go. I like it.

It is. You are doing so many different things, but let’s talk about how you got here. What is your work history? Where did that start?

I grew up as an entrepreneur and went to business school and wanted to have my own business. They were just really small businesses, various different things that I did. But as I grew up, I wanted more of the stability that one has from a corporate career or more working for others. I put my own business owner persona on a shelf and just really entered into what most of us spend a lot of our career doing, just the workforce. I did a lot of different things. I was a salesperson, of course. I had my own businesses. I was a custom tailor for men and women. I had my own business doing that. But then I went to work for my father’s company, and he owned a manufacturer’s rep group out in Colorado. The business was really not going well. My dad had bought three businesses and mashed them up, and they just were not thriving. So he brought me into the business to help him do a strategic turnaround. I got some experience in the manufacturer’s rep world. That company did turn around, and it’s still very successful. It’s more of a West Coast-based company. Then I pivoted to being a professional fundraiser for many years.

Before we move on, I need to know, what did you bring to the table as far as helping to turn that around? Why did he say, Laure, you’re the one to do this?

I had been executive director in the nonprofit world. It was a faith-based organization. My dad had seen me build that organization, and we started several locations, and we started many programs, and we just built it really by the favor of God, I guess you could say. He saw that I was integrated. My business background, I have a business degree, and my faith were just like stainless working together. He had become a Christian at age 60, and this business was his first enterprise after that faith commitment, and he did not know how to run a business with an eye towards kingdom impact. So he asked me to come and help him put the business in the right relationship with God. Doing this strategic turnaround was really about just seeking God, trying to figure out where we were weak, where we could leverage our strengths, building partnerships, and taking advantage of opportunities in the marketplace to just really distinguish ourselves, just that competitive advantage that all of us need to be aware of for our businesses. It was a combination, and it took a couple of years, but But ultimately, we did turn that ship around. Like I said, it’s still going really strong. It was very fun to see that.

That’s an important part of your journey right there. I’m glad that we didn’t gloss over that because that really sets your whole direction. Talk about where you went from there. You had gotten that on its feet, and it had become a well-oiled machine, and then you decided to move on.

That’s about the time when my husband entered into the picture, and we were both divorced, and his kids were young. We decided to make a commitment to one another so that his could be raised in a family that was whole, focused on God. We moved back east, and I worked for a manufacturer’s rep group in Atlanta, Georgia. I was a territory rep for many years. Then I decided, What am I doing? I’m on the road all the time. I was on the road four and a half, five days every week, and I had these beautiful children, never had had my own before. I’m like, Wait a minute, reality check. I have responsibilities as a mom. I got a job at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro as a development officer. I was with them for eight years. I was a professional fundraiser. I took my sales skills and I just moved them right on in to fundraising what I call Kingdom investment work. We had a great time. I was there eight years, did a lot of things, of course, raised money, but also was the executive director of their alumni association and ran their $100 million capital campaign.

I got a lot of various opportunities to grow myself professionally. That’s what’s my career had been like. Sharon is just how interesting it’s been that I have this basic degree and I’m the entrepreneurial person. On top of that, God has just orchestrated opportunities and, I guess you could say, assignments for me to just learn a little bit more about this or that. Over the years, I’ve gotten a pretty wide breadth of experiences that I can bring to the work I’m doing now. Does that make sense?

It makes perfect sense. I think that there’s different ways that you can interpret that. There are some people that would do that, and it’s just, Yeah, I’ve done a little this and a little bit of that. Or you can do all of those things with intention, and then you bring those skills, and all of a sudden, you have this value proposition that you’re taking into the world. And I love the fact that you went that direction and you’re taking little components of everything and putting it to work.

I don’t think that I started out my career wanting to do what I did. But when I look back, I’m like, okay, it all worked together.

There’s not that many girls sitting around playing with barbies going, I really want to be a manufacturer’s rep.

No. Or, I want to go raise money. Or, I want to save a failing business. But I don’t know how important this is, but something that has been really interesting to me is that, first of all, I came to Atlanta from North Carolina to take a position as the vice president of fundraising for an international faith-based organization. It wasn’t a good fit. I was too entrepreneurial and too innovative. The organization was awesome. The mission was incredible, but they just weren’t ready to change as fast as I was moving. After 10 months, I was asked to leave. Some might call it fired. I was asked to leave. Super painful, of course. But then that opened up a possibility for me to start my own business. That’s how I started Work as Worship in 2016.

So many times you get in a situation like that, and people will say, This is going to be the best thing that’s ever happened to you. Right. And you go, I’m just going to still sit here and eat my ice cream on the couch.

You don’t think about getting fired as the greatest gift. But I do thank God that he used it to redirect my efforts because for so many years, as I’ve already mentioned, I already had an entrepreneurial innovative bend, which I put on the side to really get serious about my career, for the benefits, for the salary opportunities, for the promotions that we all go for in our career. I forgot about that side of me that really loved creating and leading and doing my own thing and being entrepreneurial. When it came back around in 2016, I really, in retrospect, looked back and say, Thank you, God. That was a gift. It was used to really continue to build me up in a lot of different areas of my life.

When you decided that you were going to go out on your own with Work as Worship, what did you see that as as an entity? Tell me how it has evolved now.

As you recall, I was working with my father’s business. He had become a new person of faith. He was trying to figure out how to lead from that paradigm. He was a man of integrity and he was a great businessman, but he never had asked God what God wants to do with his business. In that experience, I began to think about how our work is worship, how God creates each of us to bring value to the world. We don’t have to be in Christian ministry or lead a church, be a pastor or priest. We can just do our work excellence and love the people that we are in relationship with, and that brings glory to God, too. What was in my heart was, how can I support business owners and CEOs who are men and women of faith to help them get more emboldened in living out their faith? Because for me in my career, so much of the time, my faith, I would hide it. I would minimize it because I thought, if people knew how much I love God, they might not give me the opportunity to advance in my career. And you didn’t talk about religion.

Religion and politics were taboo subjects when I was coming up in the business world.

If you had a mentor, that mentor would likely tell you that is not going to gain you business necessarily. I think that what you would normally here. So good for you for going your own way.

Yeah, well, you’re exactly right. I really avoided the subject. But as I got older and I got more committed in my faith journey, I found it to just leave that outside the door of my office or the company. And so when I saw my father’s business really take off and him really become the businessman that God had created him to be, I wanted to do the same thing with other business owners. I aligned myself with a brand out of Texas called the C12 Group, and I became a chair for the C12 Group. That’s a Peer Advisory Board for Christian Business Owners. That’s when I started Work as Worship, and I worked as a chair in Metro Atlanta building CEO round tables and C-suite groups. That was just a really good, great season for me. Unfortunately, at the start of 2020, they terminated my agreement. I had another crash and burn, and it was really horrific in one sense because I thought, Well, this is my end game. This is what I’m going to do for the rest of my life.

Right. I got it. Other plans. Those plans hit you right when everything was shut down with 2020. Yes. You can’t just get out and go networking go out in interview and all of that. That is a double whammy.

It was a double whammy. Because I had equity in my practice, I had some income coming in that year. I was able to really buy myself some time to think about, What do I love? What do I do? What do I do well? Where would I want to contribute value in the marketplace? God was faithful. He brought me great projects to do, some business relationships that I was able to leverage and bring some value to the company.

At this point, you’re still under the Work as Worship umbrella, right?

That’s right. Then I was part of a leadership development coaching program, and I graduated from that three-year program in 2021. The coach for the Atlanta market was having some health issues, and so I was asked to step in as the coach for that program, and I just really loved it. I loved the women I was serving. I was not serving so much businesswomen, Sharon, but more high-impact women of faith who were trying to to figure out their passion, their purpose, and their calling for the season of life in which they found themselves. We are women. We are unique. What makes us unique is that we throw our heart and soul into everything we do. And what we do in the earlier part of our career or when we’re raising our families or when we’re trying to get them ready to adult, and then when we’re having our grandkids and we’re taking care of aging parents, we’re constantly changing and evolving. What I found was women really needed folks to come alongside them in those seasons of transition to try to figure out what’s next. Where can I bring all that I am to the next season of my life?

And that just was a really great opportunity for me to serve women in that way.

I always come back to the fact that, well, two things. Number one, we’re collaborators. We’re not on an island. So when you’re talking about women, we’re together. You see this, you’re able to capitalize on it in a certain way, but you’re also really adding that value. But at the same time, this is a really good time to talk a little bit about mentorship, maybe as well. You are in this leadership role, and you are coaching and really helping people find their way. So what is that mentor-mentee relationship, and how do you see that?

I have been really fortunate to have great mentors in my life, and one of them was my father. He was a very good businessman. He was very committed to us as children, and he always taught me how important it was to be true to myself. He believed in me, which is huge. A lot of us, growing up, we don’t have parents that believe in us. That’s so tragic. God gave me a dad who really believed in me, and so he was a great sounding board for a lot of my career. Most of my direct reports were men and women who were very grateful to be where they were. They found that they had gotten the successful place that they were, and they really felt it was part of their duty to reach back and help those under their care, under their leadership. Without exception, really, maybe in one or two small cases, I had direct reports that were so incredibly supportive and helpful. They invested in me professionally, and they taught me the value of never stopping learning. Then as I got later in my career, I invested in coaching, and I’ve done many coaching programs because I want to be the best person.

This is something, Sharon, I don’t know if you found this or this would resonate with your listeners, but a lot of times, women invest in themselves last. They are so nurturing and so committed sacrificially to the others in their lives that they don’t think about putting their own oxygen mask on first. I don’t know what was different about me. I hope it wasn’t that I was selfish or anything, but in a way, I knew that in order to be the best that I could be, to help others be the best that they could be, I had to be investing in myself. I just took opportunities along the way to get with people that were smarter than me, that I did coaching. I paid a lot of money for that so that I could grow professionally.

Sometimes You’re going through your day, you’re doing your thing, you’re putting one foot in front of the other and that thing. But you really don’t think about, Could I be doing this better? Therefore, it’s good for you going out. I don’t think it’s a selfish thing. I think it’s a smart thing to go out and get coaching. But when you were saying that a lot of times you think of yourself last, I had a prospect recently that was concerned about sales ability and that thing. I took her to listen to a live podcast taping, and it was all about sales training. It’s like, maybe that would give her that opportunity. It was fun for me, and we had a great time, but they had this challenge. And so I looked at her and I was like, If you want to do that challenge, I’ll do it with you. And I thought, This is just going to help her along. This will give her some accountability and that thing. But I signed up for that. And I haven’t been to a sales training in a couple of years. The first day, I’m like, I can put that in the works.

All of a sudden, it’s just reframing things that you’re doing anyway. It’s those little tweaks. You have to invest in yourself. That’s a great message.

You do. Something else that’s so critical is that if we do everything that we can do, a lot of times, don’t do anything well. We have to ask ourselves, What do we? What do I, Laure? What do you, Sharon? What’s something that only you and I can do? Anything else that we’re doing that we can delegate or eliminate or perhaps automate, we should get off our plate because women need margin in their lives to even be creative and think outside of what they’re doing right now. When we fully live our lives with no margin, we miss opportunities to step into things that really bring beauty to the world and bring value to people. I feel like a lot of times we just say yes to a lot of things that aren’t really our best yes.

Yes, my husband. I will never forget this. We had not been married long at all. Even when we were dating, he’s known me a long time, and I’ve always been the go, go, go, go, go He’s like, You are capable of saying no. I was like, Oh, yeah, I guess. Okay. All right. I guess I can.

When we get clarity around what we really love doing and what we’re really good at doing, then we can say no to all the things that are distractions that are not our best value. During COVID, and when I got terminated from this business consulting opportunity, again, when you put margin, then you can start saying, Well, what am I going to do next? And what would I want to do next? And what would that look like? And we can dream a bit because right now we’re so pressed, especially in these years when we’re raising children, we have so little time for ourselves that we don’t even think that there might be another way to do life. Right. Another way to do life.

Yeah. Hold on. Let’s think about where we are in your journey. You are still with Work as Worship. You were getting some coaching and that thing, but you ended up with four different organizations that you’re a part of. So fill in those gaps there.

Work as Worship I had a lot of things going on and I was doing good work. But then over time, Sharon I felt, I’m spreading myself too thin. I felt, I need to think about where I want to put my energy. I decided two things. First and foremost was Southwestern Consulting. I’d heard about this company. They’re a Nashville-based company. They are the oldest direct sales company in the country, and they do something pretty unique. They do one-on-one sales coaching, which was very unique. There’s a lot of folks doing fractional sales leadership, training. There’s a lot of speaking that you can learn from sales experts, but they take an individual person in sales, and they really customize that sales coaching in a way that I really found attractive. I pulled the trigger and became aligned with their brand. So I’m building my sales coaching business. The other thing is something that is very near and dear to my heart. There was an organization in Metro Atlanta called Iron Forums, and they were serving men who were business owners and who were strong faith, people of faith really, really well. I was making a lot of referrals to Iron Forums.

I’d meet men who had small businesses and they were strong in their faith, and I’d be like, Hey, have you heard of Iron Forums? You need to go check them out. Well, anyway, as I was sitting with the Lord about a year and a half ago, I was just like, God, what do you want me to do? I’m going to get this client or that client, but what do you want me to do in 2023? And he said, Laure, go talk to Iron Forums about starting a woman’s forum. I was like, Well, that’s weird. They don’t serve women. They serve men. And God, go talk to them about starting one for women. I talked to the leadership. They were just super excited. They’re like, Well, of course we want this. And so we’ll support you.

Which is how we met. I know. That was crazy. I had coffee with Greg Harper, who is part of the Iron Forums for Men, and he does a fractional VP of Sales position. Yes. And we ended up co-founding a group of fractional business leaders that we lead, refer, and that sort of thing. We were talking, I don’t know. We’ve been there an hour out of the blue. He’s like, This may sound random, but do you go to church? I do, as a matter of fact. And then he tells me about your leadership and your branching out of the Iron Forums to the women’s group. Then we got on the call, and I have absolutely loved, loved, loved being a part of that group.

Well, we’ve enjoyed having you a part of the group, too, Sheron, you brought a whole new conversation to the table, haven’t you?

Oh, my goodness. Yeah, we get to tease a little bit here because we got some new announcements coming up down the road. But I guess I’ll use this shout out for the women CEOs out there that might be looking for a place to explore their faith. Iron Forums is a great, great organization to be a part of. It’s great from a business side of things where we can talk about having this holistic community and this holistic approach to business. It’s just fantastic.

It’s very unique.

Okay, so you align with Southwestern. Let’s talk a little bit about their approach. How are they different?

What I loved about Southwestern Consulting is that they are the oldest direct sales company in the country. They’ve been in business since 1855. A lot of the sales skills, best practices, sales habits and mindsets and systems, they brought into the professional sales arena. And 17 years ago started Southwestern Consulting. We get paired up with men and women around the country who are sales professionals or leaders who really want to grow their business. What’s been interesting to me, Sharon, is that you and I are extroverts and we’ve never met a stranger. But what I found is that there are a lot of people in sales who have great skills in building relationships, but they’re not necessarily comfortable in asking for referrals, in prospecting, and really asking good questions. Getting to the pain of what people feel, which is what drives them to need the service or product that other people are selling. A lot of my time has been spent really understanding where people’s habits and skills and mindset need to change in order to get good in these really simple areas, but they’re profoundly impactful when it comes to our careers and really building our businesses, expanding our network and being the best that we can be. Does that make sense?

It does make sense, but it sounds easier said than done.

Yes, it is. I was just working with one of my clients recently, and she had a goal of three million. Here we are about halfway through, and she’s almost hit that goal. She’s changed her goal to 5 million. She says, I can’t believe how much this coaching is doing for me. Let’s be honest, these are smart people. We’re all very smart people. It’s not that we don’t know what we need to do, but having an accountability partner and really leading into being open to change, personal change and be committed and coachable, those little differences can really make a big impact.

I know that it was a process. I know she probably made a lot of tweaks and changes and that sort of thing, but are there some things that you would attribute her success to?

Well, just being more consistent in the work that she’s doing. Consistency, again, it’s not that she doesn’t know how to prospect, how to get referrals, how to go to networking events, how to make calls. But there’s a lack of consistency that will play with our emotions, and we will end up not doing the things that we really need to do to build our business. When we really set goals and we work towards those goals, we find that we move the needle really fast. That’s been a cool thing. A lot of people are like, Well, I don’t really like making phone calls. I like prospecting. I don’t like asking for referrals. As we talk about how to do that, we build a script around how to ask for a referral. Then she actually starts asking for a referral, and all of a sudden, she might get one referral a year. Now she’s getting three referrals per person she talks to. Warm referrals, not cold prospects. Now she’s able to shorten her sales cycle and turn her relationships into sales. Of course, sales are about serving people. If we don’t have a servant mindset, then we are not bringing value to the world.

Sales is just helping people get what they already want. Having that servant’s heart, that’s very powerful.

All right. I’m going to ask you an out-of-the-blue question. This is free coaching for everybody out there. Putting it out there. If you had someone like this woman that you’re speaking with, and she is not comfortable in a networking setting. I have my certain little tricks that probably if I have run into this person, they would see me doing the exact same thing, and that’s all right. But if you were to say, all right, you’re going to be going into this setting. There’s going to be 200 people in this room, and before you sit down with your plate of food, you need to go talk to some people. What would be some pieces of advice that you might give her to make her comfortable to start some conversations?

I would, first of all, ask her to remember that this is not about her. This is about other people. I find that when we’re focused on serving other people, then we forget about ourselves. We usually work on having three to five open-ended questions that you can ask somebody, Well, how did you learn about this organization? How long have you been a part of it? And get them talking about themselves. Oh, by the way, what do you do? How did you get into that? That’s very interesting. What does that mean? And so by actually asking good questions, then all of a sudden you’re finding that you’re not thinking about yourself. I don’t really prefer, and I don’t know how other people do this, but I don’t really like having a deep conversation in a networking event. I’d rather get their contact information and set up a time later. When you go a little deeper, Tell me more about your life. What things bring you joy? That way, it’s a one-on-one conversations, and many of us are very comfortable with one-on-one conversations, a lot more so than if we had to speak to a whole group of people, or we’re in a room full of people that we don’t know.

I was getting ready to say the same thing. That one-on-one, whether you’re in a networking session or not, it’s always so much more comfortable. There are realistic expectations, too. There may be 100 people in the room, and today just may not be your day, and that’s okay. But if you are warmed with some of those things, like what you said, three open-ended questions and asking about the thing everybody likes to talk about them.

Well, they do. They’re just as uncomfortable, many of these folks, as you are. One of the things that we found is by coaching around how to build our businesses through referrals and prospecting and creating a buying atmosphere, those are things that we can use in so many different areas of our business life and our professional or our personal life, right, Sharon? We’re just seeing that a lot of people are gaining great value from this coaching and not just for their professional life, but how they show up for their family and for their children, their marriages, and other people.

I think that there’s a lot that can come out of things like that, such as confidence. I tell you what, you bring confidence in your work life, you’re going to take that into every aspect of your life. That’s something I hadn’t really thought about as far as coaching goes, but that hits the nail on the head right there. Mic drop, baby.

Right. Boom!

I know we’ve been talking for a little while. Tell me a little bit about what you like to do when you are not in all four of your businesses and when you’re doing nonprofit work and everything else. Tell me what you like to do for fun.

I guess you could say I’m in that season, and I know that your listeners will appreciate this, because if you’re not raising family, you’re taking care of parents, right? I have a mom in Alabama that I spend a lot of time with because she’s 86, and I’m really trying to spend as much time as possible before the end of her life, and that’s been a really big privilege. Also, my husband and I have these children in different states, and so trying to get to see them every couple of months, once a quarter, three of these kids, to see our grandchildren, we travel quite a bit. But when I’m at home, I love to read. I’m a bit of a news junkie. I love to read a lot of different types of books. I love watching a lot of British TV. Oh. Yes. My husband and I, which I’m very thankful to have a husband that doesn’t mind the Downton Abbey’s and shows like that. We just recently had this incredible experience. Our kids got us movie tickets to the Lord of the Rings that were back in the movie theaters. We got to spend three nights in the movie theater watching the extended versions of Lord of the Rings, which we loved. They’re 21 and 22 years old.

That’s amazing.

Yeah, because I’ve read Lord of the Rings. I’ve read The Hobbit. It’s really fun to see those. My husband and I really enjoy doing that together. Of course, we have a boat. We spend a lot of time on the lake. That’s really fun for us. Then just really with my friends like you, Sharon, I love hanging out with my current friends. Yes. Just really learning from them and really being encouraged by them and what God’s doing in their lives. That’s a little bit about me.

I love the fact that your free time is exhausting. It just like this work.

I know. It’s really funny, but I do have margin there. I build a lot of time in for myself. I like to get my nails done. I like to have massages. I like to have my girlfriend lunches and my retail therapy. There are definitely things that I do that are not income-producing activities. There you go.

There you go. Good. You’re not a machine.

I am. I am a real person.

You are a real person. Well, I tell you what, tell me how if someone is interested in hearing about your coaching or hearing about the Iron Forums Group or any of the aspects of your life, how would they get in touch with you?

Well, the best way is either text or call me at 336-202-836. Texting or calling is a great way, but email is a good way, too. My email is alhoffman, H-O-F-F-M-A-M, @southwesternconsulting, all one word, dot com. Perfect.

We will link to that in the description below so people can easily see all that.

You and I both love to get connected to people. LinkedIn is my favorite social media website or tool. I just invite anybody that hears this podcast to connect with me and you. Yes. And we are connected on LinkedIn. We are. We follow you.

So we’re officially friends now that we’re connected online. Right?

We really weren’t friends before that, and now we are.

Now we are. There we go. There we go. Well, this has been an absolute pleasure. I have loved hearing about your journey and the ups and downs and just the trajectory that you’ve come out of some of those downs with just some really interesting. So this has been a great conversation. So I really appreciate you being a part of this today.

Well, you’re a breath of fresh air, too. I love InPowered Women. I love you as the host and anything I can do to serve you or your amazing listeners, I would be so thrilled to do so.

Thank you again. I look forward to seeing you at many of our little networking groups. And stay in touch.

Yes.

Thank you, Sharon. All right. Thank you. Thank you for listening to InPowered Women. If you like what you heard, please give us a five-star review and subscribe to the show wherever you listen to your podcasts and share with those you think can benefit from this information. Please email all questions, suggestions, and compliments to Sharon@pinnaclestrategicadvisors.net. The InPowered Women podcast is produced by the Podcast Laundry Production Company and executive produced by Sharon Lee.

This episode was produced and managed by Podcast Laundry.

Thank you to this episode’s sponsor, Franklin County Industrial Building Authority: www.thinkfranklin.com.