Stephanie Sammons is Founder and CEO of WiredAdvisor.com, a digital leadership platform that is primarily focused on the financial services industry and professional services. Stephanie also consults on how to excel at digital leadership, building online influence and trust, and growing digital equity in the age of social media.
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Resource Mentioned:
- Your Big Idea: Successful Entrepreneurs have One Big Idea. Follow JLD’s FREE training & you’ll discover Your Big Idea in less than an hour!
Success Quote
- “Success is peace of mind which is a direct result of self-satisfaction in knowing you did your best to become the best you are capable of becoming.” – John Wooden.
Business Failure
- Stephanie did all the right things at Morgan Stanley, including giving up her revenue stream to climb the corporate ladder. When it all crashed down, she had to look in the mirror and make a gut decision. Listen to how she pulled herself out of this hole.
Entrepreneurial AHA Moment
- Stephanie did not experience the big bang of an AHA moment, but rather had a pile of small ones propel her smoothly along to the current success she is experiencing today.
Current Business
- Wired Advisor is a great place to go for Financial Advisors. Find out how Stephanie built her niche and how you can build yours.
Lightning Round
- We should call this the thunder round; Stephanie rolls out some incredible insights in that sweet southern drawl.
Best Business Book
- Platform by Michael Hyatt.
Interview Links
- Stephanie’s site (Sorry! This link was active when this episode was first published in 2012. This site is no longer available.)
Killer Resources!
1) The Common Path to Uncommon Success: JLD’s 1st traditionally published book! Over 3000 interviews with the world’s most successful Entrepreneurs compiled into a 17-step roadmap to financial freedom and fulfillment!
2) Free Podcast Course: Learn from JLD how to create and launch your podcast!
3) Podcasters’ Paradise: The #1 podcasting community in the world!
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Full Transcript
John Dumas: Hire Fire Nation and thank you for joining me for another episode of EntrepreneurOnFire.com, your daily dose of inspiration. If you enjoy this free podcast, please show your support by leaving a rating and review here at iTunes. I will make sure to give you a shout out on an upcoming showing to thank you!
John Lee Dumas: Okay. Let’s get started. I am simply delighted to introduce my guest today, Stephanie Sammons. Stephanie, are you prepared to ignite?
Stephanie Sammons: John, let’s make it happen.
John Lee Dumas: Alright! Stephanie is the founder and CEO of WiredAdvisor.com, a digital leadership platform that is primarily focused on the financial services industry and professional services companies. Stephanie also consults with business professionals and professional service companies on how to excel at digital leadership, building online influence and trust and growing digital equity in the age of social media.
I’ve given Fire Nation a little overview, Stephanie, but why don’t you take a minute. Tell us about you personally – where you’re from, etcetera, and then take another minute to tell us an overview of your business.
Stephanie Sammons: Okay. Well, thank you so much, John. I’m delighted to be on your show. I am down here in Dallas, Texas, so every once in a while I will say “y’all,” and that will completely give it away. I started my career as a high school business teacher and girls’ basketball coach right out of college. So I always had this burning passion to build a business and I come from a family of entrepreneurs and I really hated being on a bill schedule, which is what it’s like when you’re a school teacher these days and back then. So I had a business degree. I had actually majored in Economics in college and I met a Merrill Lynch financial advisor who came in as a guest speaker to talk to my kids, my class. I was just fascinated by his career, and I ultimately went to work for the company, for Merrill Lynch, in 1995 at the ripe old age of 24. I think I had just turned 25. I had to beg my boss to hire me because there were very few women in that industry at the time and I was very young. He said, “Stephanie, you know I love your personality, your passion, your drive, but how in the world are you going to get retired millionaires to trust you with their nest egg?” I said, “You know, I don’t know, but I will figure it out. I will not let you down if you give me this chance.”
So he did. He hired me, and I spent 15 years in that business. Much of that time, I was a financial advisor and I was working with clients and basically going out and trying to build a business. I moved into leading and coaching and training other financial advisors on how to be successful. And then in 2009, I’m sure you remember as well as everyone else, really at the end of 2008, beginning of 2009, the financial crisis hit this country. So I had a unique opportunity to move on after 15 years, which we’ll talk about, I’m sure. It was really time. So I started my company, Wired Advisor, and it’s really a blend of my high trust relationship marketing experience with my teaching and coaching background, and also I have a bit of a technical software background. I’m a recording musician as a hobby. In my spare time, which I don’t have anymore. Before the days of GarageBand, I learned how to use technical recording software. So my business was really a blend of all of those things, and since I left Merrill Lynch and started this company, I really never looked back.
John Lee Dumas: That is just a phenomenal preview of what’s to come. It’s just great to hear you just have this audio experience and it’s obvious in the quality of your production right now with both how you’re just presenting yourself and just how the audio is coming across. So it’s going to be a very enjoyable interview for Fire Nation as we delve more into your story, Stephanie, as an entrepreneur. But before we do, we’re going to transition to our first major topic, which is our success quote because EntrepreneurOnFire, we really like to get the motivational ball rolling, and there’s no better way to do that and to get the Fire Nation listeners pumped for the content that you have to share with us than a success quote. What is your favorite success quote, Stephanie?
Stephanie Sammons: Gosh, I really struggled with this because I am just a connoisseur of nuggets of wisdom and I have so many that I love. But I’m going to go with a quote that has meant a lot to me for years as a competitive athlete as a basketball player. It is a quote by John Wooden, the legendary UCLA basketball coach. It is “success is peace of mind, which is a direct result of self-satisfaction and knowing you did your best to become the best you are capable of becoming.”
John Lee Dumas: John Wooden has so many great quotes. I love that one specifically. They just have such a ring to them. Kind of a melodious ring, which is just so beautiful to hear over audio. Can you, Stephanie, tell us how you actually apply this quote to the mentality of your life or to your everyday business?
Stephanie Sammons: Sure. So I view this quote as really what the definition of success is, and it’s about giving your best every day. The way that I try to do that is to gut check myself as often as possible to make sure that I’m doing that, that I’m giving 100% because I know I can’t be disappointed in myself, whether I succeed or fail, if I’m giving my best. If I’m not giving my best, I do the gut check and I ask why. Is it because I didn’t get enough sleep the night before? Is it because I really hate what I’m doing? Is it because I’m working with a client who is not fun to work with or what have you? So I’m always trying to ask those questions and uncover what it is that would be keeping me from giving my best. So to me, it’s less about winning and losing and it’s really more about your experience.
John Lee Dumas: That’s just a great way of looking at that quote. Fire Nation is really going to resonate well with that. We’ll use that to transition to our next topic, which is failure. As entrepreneurs, we have failure riddled throughout our journeys. Entrepreneur fail every single day, but it’s how we react to those failures that really define us as people. Can you take us back, Stephanie, in your journey, and really share with Fire Nation a time where you had to overcome an obstacle or face failure or overcome a challenge and share that experience with us.
Stephanie Sammons: Well, John, somehow I knew you were going to ask me about failure.
John Lee Dumas: [Laughs]
Stephanie Sammons: Let me give you a little background. So working for Merrill Lynch for so many years, I think it really prepared me for failure because you really had to fail every day to get one step closer to success and you learn how to deal with rejection. You get a lot of no’s when you’re out there pounding the pavement, trying to build trust with people to get them to trust you with their financial lives, and it’s a very difficult sale, if you will. But I learned that no doesn’t necessarily mean no. It may just mean not right now. I also learned how to get to know faster so that I didn’t waste a lot of time on people who might lead me down a path where I wouldn’t be successful. So additionally, I have played competitive sports all of my life. I was a point guard in college. I played college basketball. I’ve hit a three pointer at the buzzer to win a big game and I have blown a lead with a huge turnover to lose a big game. So that has really taught me to take failures and successes in stride in that they’re temporary situations. So I just wanted to give that background on my perspective of failure.
The biggest failure that stands out in my mind was when I hit a dead end with my corporate leadership career. When you do something and you work in an industry for so long, it’s very tough to have that just stripped away from you, and all of a sudden, to be sitting there going, what now? What next? When the financial crisis hit in 2008, my career path – I was on a corporate leadership career path – essentially disappeared. I had given up most of my client base by that time to climb this corporate ladder with the promise of the pot of gold at the end, and that was a huge risk. If you give up your client base, you give up your revenue. I sat there basically having to start over after 15 years. I left the company and I figured if I was going to have to start over anyway, I may as well do something that I really want to do. But as I said, it’s tough. A lot of people have gone through in the last few years, they’ve been a part of a corporate downsizing. They’ve lost their careers and have had to start over, and you become defined by what you do. So I did go through six months of being pretty down in the dumps and was sort of lost. You go through all those phases. You’re angry, you’re in denial. It’s tough, it’s painful to get through, but it’s amazing to get to the other side of it and really reinvent yourself and do what you’re passionate about and be authentic to who you are.
John Lee Dumas: That was great because you really did share a failure that you had and it wasn’t a failure on your part, but specifically, it was a failure of an industry and you were the result of what happened with the financial crisis of 2008 and 2009. I do just love when you initially were talking about how you need to really look at success and failure as something that is going to pass. I always go back to that one quote of “this too shall pass” because that’s such a great quote to look at for both sides of the equation because when you’re being successful and it feels like you’re on a high, but you need to tell yourself, “this too shall pass.” And the same thing with failure because both cases, it’s a fact, they will pass, and it helps you keep that level trajectory instead of having these highs and lows that can really be quite dangerous, especially to entrepreneurs.
Stephanie Sammons: Absolutely. I think you really have to learn not to internalize failure. It’s certainly my fate. It was also because of some decisions that I made. I could have made some different decisions along the way to not have found myself in that situation, if you will. But I sort of trusted in the big corporate story and I placed my hands in the fate of others and I made those decisions. It doesn’t make me a bad person or somebody who can’t accomplish great things. That’s what I mean by you just can’t internalize it. You’ve got to realize it’s going to pass and move on and move forward.
John Lee Dumas: I do love that. Let’s use that to move to the next topic, which is the other end of that spectrum because as entrepreneurs, we are always having these little aha moments every single day that are just inspiring us and moving us forward and we’re learning from them. At some point in every entrepreneur’s journey, we do have that one larger light bulb that just turns on, the clouds part, the sun shines through and we’re just like, “Aha! This is something that is going to resonate so well with my clients.” Now, it may not always pan out, but that aha moment is still there that drives you to do incredible things. Do you have an aha moment along those lines, Stephanie?
Stephanie Sammons: Well, this is a tough one for me because for some reason, I’ve been conditioned not to trust those moments. I don’t want to get too excited if something works and I don’t want to get too discouraged if something doesn’t work. So it’s more about for me, the aha moment is a series of moments. As you realize you’re building momentum with your business, you’re getting up every day, you’re lacing up your shoes and you’re ready to play. Just like you’re doing with this podcast, you’re doing it every day. You’re stringing together these moments and these opportunities. So I just believe slow and steady wins the race and I’m constantly tweaking and changing and trying to improve, and I can’t really say that I’ve had this incredible aha moment that has made me completely change directions with my business. It’s totally been a process.
John Lee Dumas: I definitely hear you. We recently had an entrepreneur on the show. His quote speaks volumes to this level, which was “I am constantly amazed by how clueless I was two weeks ago.” That was literally his quote, and it makes so much sense, especially in my industry and with what I’m doing because it’s incredible how much I learn and improve my business in two weeks. So there’s just these little aha moments that I’m having all the time and that you are alluding to that you are having that were just building to one big success. It wasn’t this one lightning bolt that shot down, which I have been lucky enough to have on some levels at some points of my entrepreneurial journey, and so have others. But for you, it was different. You were having small aha moments that were building to a big success.
Stephanie Sammons: Yes.
John Lee Dumas: On that note, have you had an I’ve made it moment?
Stephanie Sammons: Definitely not. The same thing. I just try to take everything in stride and I really evaluate whether or not I’m going in the right direction by measuring relationships. Am I developing the right relationships with the right people who believe in what it is I’m providing and who are willing to pay the price? Who are willing to pay my price, if you will. So that’s more of my philosophy about the whole thing. Things change so fast. So by the time you figure something out that is that I’ve made it or that aha moment, the rug can be pulled out from under you. So I just prefer to just keep plodding and keep moving forward and keep improving. Continue to tweak your business model to meet the needs of your clients and to make it fit with your lifestyle, and that’s what I follow.
John Lee Dumas: I do love that model because it resonates so well in so many different ways with so many different entrepreneurs. The thing is is that it’s so important to enjoy the journey that you’re on as an entrepreneur and to appreciate the achievements that you’ve accomplished and kind of take a step back and just say, “Wow! I really have accomplished my recent goal!” It’s not necessarily right or wrong to call that an I’ve made it moment, but it is important to really take a deep breath and say, “Wow! I really have accomplished something special here,” and then set that next goal and drive forward towards that because EntrepreneurOnFire, it’s about the journey, and you as our spotlighted entrepreneur, it’s about your journey. I’m just really glad to hear that you are enjoying your journey along the way while not getting ahead of yourself and just saying, “Wow! I’ve made it! Now, it’s time to rest on my laurels.”
Stephanie Sammons: Right. You make a great point about setting those goals and giving yourself a pat on the back and saying, “Great! I’ve hit this milestone. Now, it’s time for the next one.” I definitely do that. I’m a big believer that you have to reward yourself and pat yourself on the back because especially when you’re an entrepreneur, it can be a lonely position. It’s not like you have people around you necessarily who are giving you rewards or kudos or whatever. You’ve got to do it yourself. You’ve got to give yourself some credit.
John Lee Dumas: You definitely do have to give yourself the credit, and it’s also why it’s so important to surround yourself, when you have the opportunity to, with people who are like-minded, with coaches, with mentors, with masterminds, people that just are in the same situation with you. I’m in a fantastic podcast mastermind, people that are in the same boat as myself. We are there for each other, we support each other, we give each other actionable advice. It’s a great place to be. I’m building a very exciting mastermind community called “Ignite” here at EntrepreneurOnFire for entrepreneurs who are just starting out and need that togetherness feeling that they’re not all alone, but there’s other people out there that are in their same situation. So I could not be a bigger fan of what you’re creating with Wired Advisor. Let’s use this as an opportunity to move into your current business right now. Tell us, Stephanie, what are one or two things that are really exciting you about your current business right now?
Stephanie Sammons: What really excites me about my business is being my own boss. I don’t have to depend on anyone else but myself for my career success or for the decisions that I make with my business. I can decide who I want to work with and who I don’t want to work with. I can decide what products and services I’m going to package together and offer. I can change my mind if I want to, which is very liberating. So that’s what gets me up every day, is I’m in charge. I’m building this awesome opportunity and I’m in charge of it and I’m no longer at the mercy of corporate bosses and a stifling career path where my creativity is shut down. So I’m so grateful everyday just to have the opportunity to continue to build this company that I really started from scratch. I really started with my brain in thinking about how I could serve my market.
John Lee Dumas: Let’s talk about that business a little bit. Let’s take the cover off of Wired Advisor and let Fire Nation peer inside.
Stephanie Sammons: [Laughs] I love that. Let’s take the cover off.
John Lee Dumas: [Laughs]
Stephanie Sammons: What it is in a nutshell is it’s a digital leadership platform for financial advisors and financial professionals. So I decided to stick with a niche that I had been a part of for so many years because I think it’s very powerful when you have sat in the shoes of the clients who you work with and it brings a certain level of credibility and trust to the table. So what I do, and what my company does, is we help financial advisors and professionals build online influence through a digital platform, digital tools, and really a trust-based digital marketing strategy. It combines some technology tools, it combines coaching support, and then a little bit of what I call amplification, helping these clients grow their online visibility and their influence maybe more so than they could do on their own by being a part of our system. So that’s what it is.
John Lee Dumas: That’s inspiring. Now do you have a running podcast?
Stephanie Sammons: I do. So I did a podcast. It’s been almost two years ago. I ran it for a year with a colleague of mine who was actually based in Israel and he’s also in the financial services space, but very forward-thinking in social media and digital. The industry is changing so fast because of what’s going on with social media. So we ran a podcast together, a weekly podcast, and it was very niched and narrow in targeting the financial community. The financial industry is very slow to adapt, and so we didn’t really build a lot of traction with that podcast and we decided to put it on hold, but what it did for me is really give me the experience in podcasting. I love audio and sound. I’m a huge fan of it because you can multitask while you’re listening versus sitting and watching a video or something like that.
So I’m a big fan of the medium and I launched my own podcast probably six months ago and I haven’t really gotten it up to speed where I want it to be. But I’m doing some interviews, I’m doing some insights and tips and a leadership commentary. Those kinds of things as it applies to building online influence in digital marketing.
John Lee Dumas: It is an exciting medium, Stephanie, because like you just said, you just really do have this audience that can be multitasking, but in a good way as far as when they’re driving, they want to be consuming something. So they’re focused on driving, but they can totally be consuming the content that you’re giving. Or when they’re going on a jog or working out at the gym, they’re multitasking but it’s not like they’re reading a blog post and listening to a podcast. They’re actually doing things that are kind of mechanical so they’re really just consuming this content in a very powerful way. And you’re so right that at this day and age with social media, financial advising is changing so quickly, and I’m speaking to this being an advisor of old from John Hancock back in my Boston days.
Stephanie Sammons: Oh cool!
John Lee Dumas: I love the financial industry. It’s a very powerful place. I have great memories from it. I can just picture myself utilizing so much, driving in to work every day and having – which I did not have – but having a podcast that was speaking about the latest tips and trends. It would have been very powerful. With the explosion of smartphones and tablets, podcasting would be a very powerful way for you to build a weekly following of financial advisors who need that powerful information when they’re driving to appointments and they need that just little nudge of encouragement, or when they’re driving in to work and they might need that little inspiration plug to really get them going in the morning. I think it’s a great niche. I know it’s not being utilized because I monitor the New & Noteworthy, I monitor the What’s Hot. There’s not one out there that’s really killing it. There’s Dave Ramsey. He’s doing great things with his advice, but it’s not specific to the niche of financial advisors.
So this is a great example to all the listeners out there, when you have an absolute monopoly on information like Stephanie has on financial advising because of her career, there’s a huge opportunity to go out there and apply that information to a specific niche. And I’m telling you, in this day and age, it is incredible how people use iTunes as a search engine, just like they use YouTube as a search engine for vidoes. EntrepreneurOnFire, we’re getting over 100,000 individual downloads every single month, and growing. So it’s incredible how much organic traffic is going through there. It’s a great opportunity for anybody. So Stephanie, I would definitely recommend that and I’d love to be of assistance if you’re moving forward in that area.
Stephanie Sammons: Well, you’ve had some amazing success with it, so I need to obviously get some tips from you [Laughs].
John Lee Dumas: [Laughs]
Stephanie Sammons: My deal is the Build Online Influence podcast that I’ve launched. I just need to be more consistent with it and get on a schedule. That’s really what creates the momentum, as you know. I did launch this podcast with a more broad audience in mind because I’m doing more and more speaking to just businesspeople in general and professionals, including financial advisors, but my Build Online Influence podcast is more inclusive, I guess I could say, with regard to who it would be relevant for.
John Lee Dumas: Yes. That’s one of my first items that I always discuss when I’m consulting with people who are just starting out podcasting, and that is consistency. Fire Nation knows that every single day, there’s a fresh podcast waiting for them when they wake up in the morning. They can download it, drive to work, and they know it’s a new, fresh show with a new interviewee. And they know that if they can’t consume it every single day, that there’s going to be five waiting for them Sunday night just to get for the entire week. So it’s that consistency that’s really built that strong following, and when you’re consistent, that’s when people really are going to jump on and just make it a habit themselves. I’d love to keep talking about this because it’s obviously a passion of mine. It’s obviously a great opportunity for you. You already have the voice, the equipment, the skills to do it. So I’m really excited to see where you take that. But let’s move into the Lightning Round because this is where I get to ask you a series of questions and you get to come back and provide Fire Nation with amazing and mind-blowing answers. Does that sound like a plan?
Stephanie Sammons: That sounds great.
John Lee Dumas: [Laughs] What was holding you back from becoming an entrepreneur?
Stephanie Sammons: In my career in building a financial practice, although I worked for a large company, it was still my baby, my business. So I had all the makings of becoming an entrepreneur, but really, it was the promise of the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow in climbing that corporate ladder that kept me from – I think it caused me to make decisions that weren’t authentic to me and it kept me from really discovering what I was meant to do and being authentic. So it was just the promise of something that really wasn’t there.
John Lee Dumas: What is the best business advice you ever received?
Stephanie Sammons: That’s hard too. My dad has always given me awesome advice. He’s been a successful entrepreneur over and over with companies that he’s created and sold. But the best advice I received from a mentor of mine in my career path actually was a coach. Like you, I’m a big believer in hiring coaches and getting help. It is to value yourself. One thing I learned in working for a company for so many years that was not the low cost provider, it was a premium firm. And so we could never compete on price, ever. So I just learned that value is everything. It’s not about price. It’s about the experience that you provide to your customers and to your clients. If you go to a great football game – I recently went to a Dallas Cowboys football game, which was awesome, but they didn’t play well. You’re willing to pay that $20 for the nachos. I had veggie nachos [Laughs].
John Lee Dumas: [Laughs]
Stephanie Sammons: And a beer that would normally cost you $5 or $7. You’re willing to do that because you’re at the Cowboy game. It’s the experience. It’s the big game. You can’t possibly not have that beer and those nachos or hotdog or whatever it is that you want and pay the premium price.
John Lee Dumas: Now Stephanie, be honest with me real quick. Did you watch the actual players on the field or were you watching the jumbotron?
Stephanie Sammons: You cannot help but watch the jumbotron.
John Lee Dumas: [Laughs]
Stephanie Sammons: It is so in your face, but it’s really cool.
John Lee Dumas: It is cool.
Stephanie Sammons: I was way up in the nosebleed section so the players looked like ants on the field. So I watched the jumbotron.
John Lee Dumas: Of course.
Stephanie Sammons: It was awesome though. That place is amazing. So I see so many people price their value so low, and I’ve had people who have inquired with me not in the financial industry but in the digital marketing space, agencies about working with them, and I quote my rate and I’ve had people turn their nose up at that. It’s not even that it’s that high. It’s that I’ve just learned to value myself. I know I have niche expertise, I know I’m good at what I do, I know I could be of value in the situation, and so it doesn’t bother me. You have to keep searching for the right clients who really believe in your value and the right partnerships. I see a lot of entrepreneurs, especially women, who just don’t value who they are and what they bring to the table in the marketplace. So I’m very grateful that I learned that lesson early on in my career, and it has served me very well as an entrepreneur today.
John Lee Dumas: Stephanie, all we have is time. We can either spend that time working with the wrong people or spend that time finding the right people to fill up our calendars.
Stephanie Sammons: Absolutely.
John Lee Dumas: What is something that’s working for you or your business, Wired Advisor, right now?
Stephanie Sammons: What’s working for me right now is I am finally getting to a place where I’ve got the right model, and the model is a journey, as we talked about earlier. And so I’ve had to figure out over the last three years what are the true needs and concerns and goals of the individuals and the companies that I’m working with, and as I have learned over time, sometimes it’s not what you think. It takes the experience of working with clients to figure out, “Oh wow! This is really what they need help with, yet my business is offering this, which may or may not be relevant.” So after three years of doing this, I’m figuring out what are those specific needs of my target market and how can I package and price my services to where I’m truly adding value and helping these professionals to build online influence and find success in transforming their business models into the digital age.
John Lee Dumas: Stephanie, what’s the best business book you’ve ever read?
Stephanie Sammons: Michael Hyatt, you may have heard of Michael Hyatt. He’s at MichaelHyatt.com.
John Lee Dumas: Episode number 26. He was incredible.
Stephanie Sammons: Oh, cool. Oh, awesome. So his book is “Platform.” What Michael did was articulate so well what I’ve been trying to teach and articulate for the last three years in my business to the financial community. Michael just has a great way of laying everything out. You can read that book word for word and know exactly how to go out and claim your space in this personal digital revolution and be extremely successful. Now it’s a lot of work and a big commitment, as we both know, but Michael, I loved his book, and Michael inspired me into leadership again, into believing in leadership again. He just recharged my leadership battery because I had been really burnt out about that entire topic and concept with my corporate experience in corporate leadership and management and all of that stuff. It’s just not exciting to me anymore. So Michael reignited that, that passion in me, and I love him for that. So his book was great and I highly recommend it.
John Lee Dumas: And he’s a big believer in podcasting. Do you subscribe to his podcast?
Stephanie Sammons: I do. I subscribe to a ton of podcasts, but yes. Any time I see one about leadership or something along those lines in his catalogue, I’m there. I’m on it.
John Lee Dumas: That’s wonderful, Stephanie. We’re going to move to the last question, which is my favorite. It’s kind of a tricky one, so just digest it, have some fun with it and come back with an answer. If you woke up tomorrow morning in a brand new world, this world is identical to earth but you didn’t know anybody. You still have all the experience and knowledge that you currently have, but only $500 in your pocket and a computer with Internet access. Your food and shelter is all taken care of, but what would you do in the next seven days?
Stephanie Sammons: Well, I would go for a long run and clear my head.
John Lee Dumas: [Laughs] That’s a good start.
Stephanie Sammons: But I would do exactly what I’m doing right now. I would start with a blog. I would just start writing and just start publishing my thought leadership insights and lessons learned and nuggets of wisdom and pointing people to, in my industry, to reputable sources of information. I believe in the process so much of sharing your thought leadership and positioning yourself as a leader in this digital age, that there’s so much opportunity to build a business from that. So I’d just start all over.
John Lee Dumas: Stephanie, that was actionable advice, and this entire interview, you have peppered Fire Nation with actionable advice, and we are all better for it. Give us one parting piece of guidance, and then give yourself a plug, and then we’ll say goodbye.
Stephanie Sammons: My one piece of guidance would be to follow your heart. Life is short. We don’t know when our last day on earth is going to be and things can change on a dime. It’s so important to just live your life with passion and follow your heart. So that’s my advice. What was the other question?
John Lee Dumas: Give yourself a plug.
Stephanie Sammons: Oh, give myself a plug. Okay. Well, you can find me at StephanieSammons.com. That is really my personal blog where I share a lot of personal insights and thought leadership. You can follow me on Twitter @stephsammons.
John Lee Dumas: Wonderful!
Stephanie Sammons: So come connect with me!
John Lee Dumas: I will link all of that up in the show notes. Fire Nation, we salute you, Stephanie. Thank you so much for your time.
