The Vicki Kotris Podcast

Episode 49: The Vicki Kotris Podcast: This is A Story of a Corporate Girlie to Creative Strategist

• Vicki Kotris • Season 3 • Episode 1

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What drives a person to leave behind the security of a corporate tech sales job for the uncertain path of entrepreneurship? This episode of the Vicki Kotris podcast shares my personal journey from burnout to the revitalizing world of entrepreneurial adventures. Discover how my husband and I turned a food truck into a catering enterprise, and eventually an ice cream brand—all while navigating the unforeseen challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic. I unravel the lessons learned along the way, highlighting the profound impact of creativity, healing, and rethinking career paths in an ever-evolving work culture. This transformation reshaped my understanding of what it means to have a fulfilling career, beyond just titles and paychecks.

In a world that often equates success with position and salary, I invite you to reconsider these measures. This episode dives into the art of aligning work with personal values and strengths, underscoring how essential it is to identify what truly drives us. Exploring marketing through storytelling and the strategic use of AI tools, I reveal how these elements can build genuine connections with customers. Intentional marketing isn't just a strategy; it's a way to harness your unique talents for greater impact. Tune in to learn how to take command of your career path, embrace your individuality, and make meaningful contributions to both your personal and professional life.

Thank you again for tuning into another episode of the Vicki Kotris Podcast! I want to support you, cheer you on a HYPE you up!! If you're celebrating anything (and I mean ANYTHING), send me a DM and let me highlight you on a recent episode.

If you're looking for support in building a social media content strategy, I'm your girl! Send me an email to vkkotris@gmail.com and we can set up a FREE account audit.

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Speaker 1:

That's right. You heard it here first, folks. The Confetti Filled Life podcast has rebranded into the Vicki Kotris podcast, something that I have been thinking about here and there over the past six months or so, and if you've listened to any of the mini episodes that have been launched over the past few months, you might say it doesn't sound quite the same. I did some no-frills episodes more stream of consciousness, things that were on my mind, things that I hoped you could connect to would help provide some insight or inspiration based on anything that's going on in your own life, and as I did that, I was in a exploratory mode myself. So if you have been tuning in since 2018, or this is the first episode that you have ever listened to let me catch you up to speed just a little bit. One in 2018, I was feeling very burnt out from my corporate job in tech sales and woke up at 30 and really thought there has to be something different. There has to be something more. I can't take 30 more years of this kind of cubicle life and I say that loosely because, for all intents and purposes, I am talking from a very privileged space.

Speaker 1:

I worked for a great company on seemingly on the outside. They supported thousands and thousands of people and families. Um, I worked from home, so I had some flexibility at the time. I worked for somebody that I had respected and liked and I knew that actually that was. My biggest issue is that if I have all of these great things I have a flexible job schedule, I have nice benefits, I really liked the salary and the money If I have all these things and I'm not happy, well, that is a big indicator that it is something else. It is something else that is not filling my cup and I started to feel a lot of angst with what I was doing. I didn't feel connected to the mission. I didn't feel connected to the job. I felt like I was having a lot of meaningless conversations. I was in B2B sales, so the product that I was selling, I felt like I couldn't see a direct impact to the person who I was working with. And I think, from a big picture standpoint, it's hard to believe that we affect change when we are such a small cog in a wheel and when we sell products that affect, you know, teams or maybe one team member in an organization. We don't really get to see this kind of massive impact, and I truly look back and think that's what I was craving is that I wanted more of a connection that I could see in a transactional way. So if you know my story, then you know where we're going with this.

Speaker 1:

My husband and I were both feeling the same. He had been a CPA for some years and we both, over a couple of beers one night, threw out ideas. Of all of the business ideas that we could potentially start, and one that we kept coming back to was in food and Bev, because it has such a low barrier to entry. I mean, you could bake cookies today, take them to a farmer's market tomorrow and sell all your cookies. There is an easy path to get started. And we also knew that we weren't ready to leave our corporate jobs, so we needed something that was a nights and weekends venture, that kind of satisfied that thirst that we had for being creative and doing something new but wasn't going to take all of our time. If you're an entrepreneur or a business person, you have to know how asinine that turns out to be, because anytime you start a business, anytime you decide to do something different or start something for yourself, it takes all your time and it takes all your energy and it a lot of times pushes you to limits that you feel like you're going to curl up in a ball and die, and I have been there. So if that has ever been you, then I feel you, I see you, I respect you, and that's exactly what was happening.

Speaker 1:

So we launched our business in 2018. It started as a food truck. It's primarily now a catering company and then, in 2020, we opened up a brick and mortar ice cream brand. That, at the time, was my dream vision for franchising and growing a multi-unit business that I was so, so, so excited for. And then COVID hits and it changed the dream that I had. It changed the vision that I had and it changed me as a person.

Speaker 1:

Maybe you could relate to that, maybe you can't, but I think as a society, it's changed us all and sadly, I think a lot of the things that made us human four and a half years ago are the things that are being forgotten more now. So it's kind of crazy to see how we as a world came together and said okay, how are we going to keep each other safe? How are we going to follow some of these new rules that you know again we're new to everybody and respect people a little bit more, give people a little bit more grace. And I'm seeing a little reverting back to that, especially as in corporate America, a lot of companies are forcing return to work. If you're not returning to work, then you are no longer a valuable team member. They will be replacing you or eliminating your position. So all's to say that corporate America is the power wheel that will continue to turn, will continue to focus on profits, some more than others. Some have really started reinventing overall work culture, which I think is fantastic.

Speaker 1:

But for me, what happened for me when I was talking about earlier that something inside of me wanted more? What I know now to be true is that what I needed was not just a creative outlet. It was not just a creative outlet. What I needed was to heal a part of myself that allowed me to express and be curious and create something in a world that I felt like. I wasn't given the means or the resources to do that, and so so many things have changed. I look at the idea of work differently, of a career differently. I used to think that there was only one career path, and now I'm so open to the ideas of how to make money and making money support your lifestyle, however that looks to you.

Speaker 1:

I have taken ego out of a lot of that because I think many of my peers have higher titles. They are getting bigger salaries with bigger responsibilities, and where we all once started, as you know lonely sales execs or sales assistants or whatever are now in the senior management roles, and there is a certain ego that goes with that. You feel like you are deserving of those roles and if you leave a company, you want to go to another role that's exactly the same or a higher, because that's where you've kind of come from, and I say that as it's not everyone, but it's. Something that I have learned is that the roles and the salaries mean nothing if the work that you're doing is not reflective of what makes you tick as a human being. I have co-workers that I've worked with who are amazing at sales, who are incredible hunters, who have really strategic visions and conversations, and their jobs feed that part of them.

Speaker 1:

Mine didn't, and what I've learned from being a business owner is there are so many ways to feed that part of ourselves and it is our responsibility to find that for ourselves and it might be in your corporate position today to raise your hand and say there's more that I'd want to do, or it might be your responsibility to take a look and say, if I want to start something for myself, if I want more freedom to express my creativity, I want to do it, or I want to make additional income, or I want flexibility in my schedule, that I have to take ownership of that and figure out how I'm going to do it. And that's really what I did, and so I have taken the past six months to evaluate what it is that I love about being an entrepreneur and how that relates to what this new act in my life could look like, and the same thing may be true for you. I had my first baby last year, which completely changed my psyche forever and what I value and how I value it and how it compares to other things in my life, and so it's made me more open to what the possibilities could look like in my own life, and as a part of that, I've taken these past six months to figure out what that looks like, and what it looks like for me is helping and serving others. So I took an audit and maybe this part will help you. But I sat down and started getting very, very clear on what were the things that I was good at, what are my talents and where, what are the things that I, what kind of services can I provide and how can I provide them.

Speaker 1:

I didn't lean in and say what is my passion, and I recently heard someone talk about this I think it was Scott Galloway on a podcast about your passion means nothing, because you can be passionate about so many things. I am passionate about the Real Housewives of Salt Lake City, but that does not mean I want to turn that into a service that I'd like to offer and make money from. I love gabbing about it with my friends, but it's not something that I will look to and turn into a business model for myself, and I think that's what's really important. And something that I got wrong is I thought I had to be super passionate about the work that I was doing, when, in fact, I don't believe that anymore. I think passion is amazing if you have it. I think you need some kind of passion to get you started to create momentum, but ultimately, what I think that you need is you need an assessment of the talents that you bring to the table, so what you do really well, how you can do them and then getting a little clearer on how you will offer them to people. And that goes for anyone who has ever thought about starting a business and that is a big part of what it's been for me Always.

Speaker 1:

The guiding light as I've started each individual business is how can I bring my talents to the table and make this idea stronger and make this business stronger and help this business grow? And so, as of recently, what I realized is I love marketing, I love building, I love branding. I think it's all rooted in the idea of storytelling and how can you connect your product, your service, your brand to the general market or so it feels so intimate that it connects with an individual consumer and they feel like they have absolutely no choice but to buy your product because you are creating such a compelling story through marketing to help connect that product to that individual. How incredible is that? I mean that is so wonderful.

Speaker 1:

And I think back and what I've loved so much about building my food and beverage brands, which is being part of special events for our customers, and to me that was always a, the biggest, the biggest kind of business hug I could ever have, is someone who says I am celebrating something in my life and I want you to be part of it, because that creates a memory. When you get older, you might tell your friends hey, we had a cookie dough food truck at our birthday party or in my summer birthday, I took all my best friends to remix ice cream and we shared a scoop together and it was one of my best birthdays that I'll ever remember. I have a passion for that, for impact, for memories, for nostalgia. I love that and I really try to embed it into everything that I do or everything that I create. So, as a platform, I want to come back to this podcast and start telling more of those stories, more of the ways that I've used marketing in my business, talk about some of the ways that I should have used different marketing strategies but failed, and how I'm helping business owners today grow their digital marketing footprint through storytelling, through AI tools, automate things so that they become more ingrained in an everyday practice, so that they can find those customers who need their services or products so badly. And that's what we forget that marketing is not bragging. Marketing is not just sending out something for no reason, but it is putting intent behind it so that our customers can find us, who need us so badly, and they need us because we are the only ones who can provide this wonderful product or service to them. So my goal with this podcast revision is to share more of those stories with you.

Speaker 1:

I would love for you to tune in every week. Please share feedback on any episode that resonates with you. If you are starting a business, I support you, I respect you. I'm sending you so much love. If you are currently running a business, I feel you, I know you, I am there. If there is anything that I can do to individually support you, provide direct marketing strategies, just kind of come up with something that could work for you Would love to chat, so please make sure that you check out the episode info so you can contact me directly. Enjoy the rest of your week, sending so much light and love, and I will talk to you next week.