255: Ignite Your Passion in Your Business 

Michele Williams: Hello, my name is Michele, and you're listening to Profit is a Choice. With me, on the podcast today is Jacqueline Green of Behind the Design company. Jacqueline is a coach, and she helps people move from a hobby into the business that they want that can be profitable. We're going to have a very robust conversation today on how to identify areas that we're passionate about and how to give ourselves the freedom to move from one direction to another, not to stay stuck. I hope you enjoy the podcast.

Every day, empowered entrepreneurs are taking ownership of their company financial health and enjoying the rewards of reduced stress and more creativity. With my background as a financial software developer, owner of multiple businesses in the interior design industry, educator, and speaker, I coach women in the interior design industry to increase their profits, regain ownership of their bottom line, and to have fun again in their business. Welcome to Profit is a Choice.

Hey, Jacqueline, welcome to the podcast.

Jacqueline Green: Hi. Thank you for having me. I'm so excited to be here.

Michele Williams: Oh, it's going to be an awesome conversation. I love it. So, one of the things that we've talked about, Jacqueline, that we were going to explore today is how maybe someone can take their passion and move it into a profitable business. Like how to move either from a hobby into a business, I'm even going to suggest if they've been in the industry for a long time and some other dream or some other passion has arisen out of that, even twisting, turning, and pivoting their business. It's not just that I've never been in design. It could be I've been in it for a long time, and I want to do something different, and that's kind of the trajectory of our exploration. I'd love to start, though, with you sharing a little bit about your background and how you got to the point that you are today.

Jacqueline Green: Absolutely. I started in marketing right out of college, and I was in corporate marketing for about 15 years and did marketing consulting for about seven years. I just kind of lost my passion, to be honest, and I wanted to try something else. So, I talked my husband into hey, let me take a class over at the university on interior design. I was really interested, and like a lot of us that get into that career, we're thinking I'm good at this and people come and compliment my house. I love putting things together. So, I went and took a class and that class ended up three years later with a degree. During that time, I started working for architecture firms and found that what I thought, I went into it thinking I was going to love residential design, but I ended up loving commercial design. It was totally different from what I thought. Speaking of thinking about what you're going to do and what you're not going to do, eventually, I decided to go out on my own after working for three different firms. I wanted to help other people. I was teaching at the time at the design school, and I wanted to help designers who were out there who were struggling with their business. They were struggling to really get it off the ground, move it from a hobby to a profitable business, and scale. So that's kind of where we got now and so Behind the Design was born, and we help other designers get off the ground and get their business going in the right direction.

Michele Williams: You know what's so interesting? We made the comment right before we got on about how our passions can change. I remember when I was a little girl, I wanted to be a teacher. My mom was a teacher, I wanted to be a teacher. We used to line up our teddy bears in the front yard, and we even had, like, a little desk out there, and sometimes my poor little sister, I would sit her down with all of her little friends, and we would pretend to teach, and we would rotate. Who got to be a teacher and all the things anyway? At some point, I gave that up for a multitude of reasons and I went into software. Well, I did software for ten years, development. Then I came home, and while I was doing software, I was taking classes at night at the local community college for interior design, which is so funny that you were saying that you were doing one thing and taking classes, but I also had a newborn child. I had a second one on the way. I'm working all day and then leaving and running over to the school to take these classes on interiors. It really wasn't the right time for me to do anything. Then I lost my job. I came home, I'm raising my kids, and I started a window treatment company and started making custom window treatments. Then as I got into that, I realized there's a big need for education around financials. So, I start teaching while I'm doing it right. Then I realized that there was a school that needed assistance. So, I jump into a partnership agreement and start managing and running a school while I'm doing these other things and teaching. Then I turn around and all of that stops, and I have a health crisis and I'm like, I think I'll start coaching because people are calling me, asking me for some of the same things. But what's been so interesting is I am now in a position from the time that I started, which would have been in the year 2000, and we're in 2024. So, I'm 24 years into this. I'm working on my 25th year in business in this particular industry and what I find fascinating is what I am doing right now pulls me all the way back. I am constantly teaching. We've created a software company, and so now software for financials that the interior design community is using. I don't do custom window treatments anymore. I don't do design anymore. But I am neck deep in all of it because I'm still in the middle of it. It's just the passion that led my path to move and I think it's so important to recognize that where you start is not where you have to finish. It could be if you love it. But if you don't love it, there are so many ways that our paths can move and grow and develop to allow these different ideas to express themselves in our lives.

Jacqueline Green: Absolutely. It's so funny, when I was younger, I thought, okay, I'm going to start with this career, and maybe I'm going to move to this career. At the time I was growing up, it was kind of starting to look like you just don't stay with one company for your whole life. That's what my father did, he worked for two companies his entire career. When my generation came up, it started looking like we didn't have to stay at the company. We didn't have to go to work necessarily for something we didn't want to do. There were other opportunities. Now fast forward, you can do anything, and I tell my children that, but when I'm telling my children that, I have to remember the same thing goes for me. So, whether I was unhappy with where I was at the time with marketing when I was looking at making that change and going into interior design, I wanted a new challenge. I wanted something else I was excited about, still creative, still interesting. It was just a time in my life in the middle, kind of, I think I'd hit 40, and I was like, okay, what are we going to do the rest of our lives? But where I've evolved, even from there and bringing my marketing experience into running a business and now providing marketing services for other design companies and architecture firms helping them, it all kind of evolved. As you build wisdom, as you build your knowledge base, what was important to me in my 20s versus what's important to me in my 50s is completely different. That's what's so unique and fun, is really seeing what could this really be. And getting out of whatever mindset that we were kind of stuck in from our past.

Michele Williams: I think that is interesting because I'm in the latter part of my 50s and I think that I remember when I was a young girl, I mean, many of these jobs that we have now, they weren't even a thing, right? They've developed. I would have never thought that I would have a podcast, because there were no podcasts, like, you couldn't even dream of it at that point, right? I was just coming up, I was in that section of the age group where our parents stayed at the businesses for life. Like, they retired from there, they got their 30-year pension, and this is what they did. Both of my parents did that, and my husband's parents did. That's just what they did.

Jacqueline Green: Absolutely, and same here.

Michele Williams: But when I started, I was in the. When everybody at the end of the year was cutting their budgets, cutting their teams to make budgets. You know, that's how they kind of found that their profitability worked, is we'll just fire everybody in November and December, and then it looks like we did great. Or that third or the fourth quarter, rather, we just constantly were having reductions. I laughed that I'd only been at the company for ten years, but I had survived 13 layoffs because it was every year. There was a layoff every year. Every year. Every year. When that started happening, that whole.com bubble, right? When all of that started happening, it started changing the way that we now interact with work, where people started going, well, if the company is not going to hold on to us, then we're not going to hold on to it. I think even just that particular change made us, back in the early 90s, start going, wait a minute, we have to protect ourselves as well. So, if I got to protect myself, what do I want to do? What are my dreams? Where do I want to go? Versus this is my company I've chosen, and I'll just pour my heart and life into it, you know what I mean? That's kind of when, to me, I see that shift starting to occur.

Jacqueline Green: Absolutely. I think that what happens for a generation coming up, we were told, hey, you work for this company, you're loyal to them, you work really hard. And then when they're not loyal to you, and I'm the same way, I used to joke, you got to make sure you're in the middle of the pack. You don't want to be at the very top. You don't want to be at the very bottom. The top and the bottom always get cut every year at the end of the year when they decide to cut.

Michele Williams: You make too much money and you're not doing enough, and you're not doing whatever.

Jacqueline Green: So, if you just stayed level in the middle, then you were safe, and you can make it through and that's ridiculous. I'm going to work every day. I'm spending all this time and energy on somebody else to only think I'm a number in the middle.

Michele Williams: Or how to hold myself back to be in the middle.

Jacqueline Green: Right. And I needed to make sure I was adding value and then when you think about it, why am I not doing that for myself? Why am I not bringing those skills out to help other people that are similar? And we have such a unique opportunity these days to be able to do anything and to have that access. Even the women before me, I come from a long line of women who were successful within the realm of their generations, which opened up doors for me. So, by no means. When I was in college, entrepreneurship wasn't even an option for college. Right?

Michele Williams: Same.

Jacqueline Green: Yeah. I've had journalism. Now, that is actually one of the biggest areas at colleges is entrepreneurship and I've encouraged both of my kids when they went to college to take business classes, be an entrepreneur, and run your own business. You have those options today. So, I think that's a really important thing.

Michele Williams: One of the final courses that we had to take I have a business degree. Our senior year, it was kind of like the Capstone project was a course called policy. And it did not hit me until years later that it was actually an entrepreneurial class, because what they did was, they broke us into groups. We had to invent a product. We had to have it created. We had to market it. We had to write out all the funding. We had to build the whole business and plan for it, and then we had to present the whole thing. I mean, it was literally ground up, build a business. We even had to sign NDAs. We had to sign all kinds of things in case our product got picked up and turned into something. So, it was really a big deal. And that class shifted my way of thinking. It helped that I was president of the company. That was always fun. But I think what it had me think about, and this is one of the things that caught my attention in your story, was how you even went into design thinking that you were going to be doing it more residential and then found out you love commercial. I see a lot, even in the opposite direction. I went into commercial and then realized I like residential. I did some speaking for a while at a local community college that has a design program and I would go in every year and talk to them about financials and that kind of thing. And I would always kind of ask the question, how many of you are thinking that you want to move into commercial? How many of you were thinking that you were going to move into residential? I will tell you, most said commercial because the program was geared towards commercial. There were always a few that said residential, but there was a big cohort that was just like, we don't even know, don't even know what we know, and we don't know what we're going to like and what we're not going to like. We're just trying to get the basic skills. So, I love that they even knew that they could articulate, I don't know what my passion is, if you will, within this industry. I just know this is kind of the area, and this is the playground I want to be in, and now I'm going to figure out what toy I want to play with in the sandbox.

Jacqueline Green: That's exactly it. So, when I was teaching at our local design, I would ask. I taught commercial design, professional practice, and then a couple of different software, Revit and SketchUp. I would ask, what do you think you want to do? What area do you want to specialize in? And the number of students said, oh, they started in residential and now I'm leaning more towards commercial or commercial and now towards residential. That's the whole point of school, getting out there and trying different things to see what you like. But even beyond that, I had one student who wanted to go work at Disney and develop the backsets for a lot of their amusements and their entertainment. That was her dream. I had another student who wanted to go work on green rooms. So, concert venues have these amazing green rooms, we think it's just all green and it's not. They're actually luxury suites. So, when somebody comes in as a star, they're treated like a star. So, to think outside of that, and I also had students that wanted to do the drafting, the technical side of the business and that was kind of why I went into commercial. I like the technical aspect of it. It made sense to me. Whereas residential is more picking out the beautiful products and yeah, there's a technical aspect of it, but I was actually wanting to know how was it constructed. How is this going to be built? How are we going to make this idea real? And so, I think that school gives you that opportunity, but even beyond that, doing internships.

I always recommend trying an internship. I know it's hard. A lot of my students were students that were working at least one job, sometimes two jobs, and going to school or they were taking care of a family and going to school and so that's really hard. But internships are such a huge value because you can kind of test out and try different things and see, oh, I like this about this, or I don't like this. You can really evaluate the pros and cons of different ideas. I think that helps you shape more quickly what you can do. Even as you get into your career, just like in marketing. I loved marketing, absolutely loved it for 20-plus years, and then all of a sudden, I didn’t. I had to reinvent myself. I had to go find something else that made me excited again. Now it turns out that I kind of circled back around and gathered all of that into one. But that's what we do. We talk about, we have opportunities where you can evolve as a person, as a professional, and as a designer. It's funny, if you look at what were design trends in ten years ago versus now, you'd be like, oh, I would never put that in my house. Same with hairstyle. I would never wear that hairstyle again. We evolve as people and that's what's fun. That's what keeps it exciting, that's what keeps you wanting to learn, you want to build more skills.

Michele Williams: So, I've had a practice at the end of each year and the beginning of a new year of sitting down and going through all of the offerings that I have, for a while there, I had all types of speaking topics. Here are all the topics that I'll talk about, and then I would start cutting the ones that I thought “If I even have to get up there and talk about that again, I think I'm going to pull my hair out”. I can do that topic, but it doesn't bring me joy, it doesn't light me up. People can tell when you are excited about something and when you're not or when one needs to be retired. I've got a better new one over here. I have gone through it with my coaching programs. What do I want to offer? What do I not want to offer? What's working? What's not working? How do I tweak it? Where do we move it? Do we need an extra meeting? Do we need less meetings because we're meeting heavy? What does even the outline of everything look like?

I think because my career has shifted from software to stay-at-home mom, to window treatments, to education, to running a school and putting out a magazine, and to coaching, I have given myself the freedom to shift and to pivot and to move because most of the time when I'm doing it well, every time I've done it, it's because, number one, I've thought about it. It wasn't just spur of the moment. I've prayed about it. I've planned for it. I've set a path ahead so that it's not, yes, it's risky, but it's not an unfounded risk. Right? It's a planned risk of what I'm going to do and how I'm going to do it. I cut out 80% of my coaching at one point because I was going to shift the entire direction of what I was doing and how I was doing it, but I did it knowing that I was leaning more into what I loved and what I was great at and what I wanted to be known for, as opposed to being more of a generalist. I was becoming more of a specialist. So, I've done these things over the years, and it's always, how do I say it? I want to say it's hard, but it's not hard. There are pieces of it that are taxing or that are difficult or that are challenging, but I always look for, do I have a spark of excitement about this? Am I doing this because I'm interested, and it won't go away? The thought keeps coming to me, or there's a reverberation of idea that I just can't let go of. I quite often ask the question, am I going to, at the end of my day or the end of my time here, or whatever it is I'm looking at, am I going to be more upset that I didn't try it or that I did try it and it didn't work? Which one will bother me the most? And then I use that to make a decision. But recently I was introduced to this book, Jacqueline, I don't know if you've heard about it. We're actually getting ready to do it. I'm trying to remember when this podcast will come out. I’m getting ready in February to have a book club on this book, and it's called Necessary Endings.

Jacqueline Green: Oh, yes. I have not read it yet. I know Dr. Cloud

Michele Williams: Dr. Cloud. So, I'm in it already, but the title is Necessary Endings by Dr. Henry Cloud. It says the employees, businesses, and relationships that all of us have to give up in order to move forward. I think that's really the conversation that we're having today, right? As people, we are looking to have. As Carol Dweck says in her book Growth Mindset, we're looking to grow as people, not to stay stagnant. And so to have an idea of that growth mindset means we are changing and evolving and discovering. The hardest part Ceil DiGuglielmo and I have talked about this on another podcast where she had started one business and had a business and was trying to figure out the tension of when do I let this one go and spend more time over here. Right? That tension.

Jacqueline Green: Absolutely.

Michele Williams: We all kind of have to run the parallels of just kind of realizing there is a pruning, which is what Dr. Claude talks about. There's a pruning, there's a letting go and he kind of says there, it's one of those things about like, you're pruning a rose bush. Well, if you don't know what the rose bush needs to look like, you may not prune it properly. Like, we're not pruning carnations over here, we're pruning a rose bush. So, really looking at what's working, what's not working, and honestly, what's working but is an enemy of best, where does good become the enemy of best? Giving ourselves the freedom to even go through that discovery process, I think is really what you're inviting us to here, is to not feel that we have to be stuck, no matter how far we're in business, no matter where we are. What is it that we love to do? Where are our passions calling and leading us and then doing the exploration around that?

Jacqueline Green: Absolutely. You have to look at when you're planning and starting a business, whether you're growing a business, where do you want to go with that business. So, as entrepreneurs, I always joke that what makes us great also is our worst enemy, and that's our ideas. We have these great ideas, right? Oh, I'm going to do this. Look. And it's what, the shiny object syndrome? Oh, this is great. I'll run over here, and I'll run over here, and I'll do this and I'll do that. But you really have to look at it in a very systematic way of your business and look at, okay, where am I going to focus my energy and my attention? And where I focus my energy and attention, that passion that I have for that is going to shine through. But where do I want this business to look for? Look at the long-term, is this something that is going to be a legacy for my family? Is this something I'm going to sell and move on to another idea? If you look that way, then you're not just jumping from one shiny object to another shiny object. It doesn't mean that you don't evolve the business or look at the business. Exactly what you're saying, be very meticulous about what products are working, what's not working, what marketing is working, and what marketing is not working. But we want to look at that and say, okay, I need to spend my energy here. Also, you mentioned it earlier when you were discussing how you evolved. Having small children at home is a lot different than having someone like me who's my youngest is 18 now. What an 18-year-old needs and what an 18-month-old needs are totally different from what they need from me. So, understanding where you're at in your life season as well, I talk about it in seasons. What does your season look like? We go through different seasons in life and grab on and find how to maximize and enjoy that season. But I really think as business owners, as designers, there are so many designers out there that are solopreneurs, you really do have to have a passion for what you're doing and really love it because it's hard. It's hard to run a business. It's hard to run a business and your life, it's hard to do so many different things that you just have to love it.

Michele Williams: I encourage people not to build a business that they hate.

Jacqueline Green: Yeah, you really will absolutely hate it. You'll hate getting up in the morning. You're not going to like to go in.

Michele Williams: It's so funny because when I say it like that, we're like, duh. Of course, you wouldn't build a business that you don't love. But we can find ourselves pleasing others, doing things that at the end of the day we wake up and we go, I don't even love this business. I don't like it anymore. What is the monster that I have somehow created or that has evolved around me because I maybe wasn't as intentional in some areas as I now want to be? I know I've done that where I was like, I like what I do, but I don't like the way this is working. Something's got to shift and give. I guess that's the important piece here, too, this evolution that we're talking about, this chasing your passion. It could be in really big things, like a complete wild pivot from one to the other, or it could be a small pivot, like, I'm not going to offer this anymore. It's still the same thought process of what is working for me and for my team, for the company that I'm building now and into the future, and what is not.

You call it seasons, I like to use the phrase for now. So, when a lot of people call me, and I just recently, in the last few months, spoke to someone who called me for coaching, and we were talking about the business that she was building and she was sharing with me, this is what I'm doing as a mom, and this is the business that I'm trying to create. They were not intersecting well, right, because of the season and the age of the children and just the family responsibilities. I said to her, well, why are you feeling this compulsion to build this big thing? It was almost like, well, because I've achieved this. I feel like that's the next step. Okay, it might be the next step, but in your for now, do you really need to go to that step now? In your for now, can you stay at the level that you're at and do, like maybe a year or two of refinement and then take the next step so that you can get your kids to a certain point so that you can move your resources and your energy? She was like, wow, I can't believe, number one, that you're telling me not to hire these things. I'm giving her permission not to hire me for now because everything that I was going to suggest to her to do to get to that next level was going to be in direct opposition to the life she was telling me she wanted. I don't want to work with somebody that every single thing I'm telling them is in opposition to what their heart is craving in the for now. My kids now are 26 and 28.

I look at the business that I have. There is absolutely no way that I could run the business at the level that I run it today as compared to like you said, when they were two and four, when I started, it's not possible. I think to myself quite often, we are empty nesters. My husband works from home. Things are really kind of calm and chill here, and we can work like we want to work, meaning we don't have a lot of restrictions on time. I'm sitting here thinking to myself, never. I would have had to be there after the bus. I would have had to make sure we had dinner. We were at football practice, baseball practice, band practice, or Boy Scouts. We were always going and doing something. My energy and my time were very different in that for now. But the one I have at this point looks different. I'm also saying in the next five to seven years, my for now is going to look different because I'm hoping that I'll have grandchildren and different loving demands on my time, energy, and attention. Just giving ourselves the freedom to ask the questions. Why have you found, maybe you found this, why do we not, in your experience, ask ourselves or give ourselves permission to ask or to even recognize that our passion has changed? I think sometimes we don't want to recognize that our passion has shifted.

Jacqueline Green: I think that's exactly what you were saying earlier, especially with women. And I find the women around me are very much like this, where we want to please people, we want to make everybody in our life happy. We forget to really look at ourselves and make ourselves happy because we feel an obligation. You feel that I need to take care of the kids, be home when the bus is there, be at every single game, and every practice, be the mom that brings the best snacks, and make sure dinner is ready. On top of I also need to run this multimillion-dollar business that makes no sense.

Michele Williams: Mhm.

Jacqueline Green: We put that pressure on ourselves and then we end up burning out. That's such a big thing with women. We do it to ourselves because no one's given us permission. But we really do have to give ourselves permission to understand. Several years ago, my son got really sick, and I had to step away from my business. That was a really hard thing. And I had all this shame built up that why couldn't I keep it all together? Why couldn't I run the business and help him while he's going through this really traumatic episode in his life? Well, that's not realistic. Eventually, once I worked through that and said, okay, it is okay that I couldn't do it all, it really is. Our life continued, and the business is back and up. It was what needed to be done. I should not feel that shame for it. I think as women, that we put everyone else before us and we don't necessarily think about ourselves, but it's just like they say on the airplane, the mask. Put your mask on before you put on your child's mask. I always thought, well, no, I'm going to do that to my child. Well, think about it, though. If you put your child's mask on and you don't get the oxygen, then you can't continue to help your child. So, you need to put your mask on first.

It's the same thing here. As we grow, as our lives, the different seasons, what's going on now is looking at that you have to take care of yourself and also find what drives you, or you're going to burn out, and then you're going to feel like, I'm not doing anything right. I'm not feeling successful in any part of my life. I'm failing at this. I'm failing at that. That is actually a horrible feeling to feel. We just beat ourselves up. I think it's okay. We don't have to be super-mom. We don't have to be the super-entrepreneur, the super designer, the super this, super that, super wife, whatever, spouse partner. It's giving yourself permission to put yourself first on occasion to really look at what you really want in life and how you are going to get there. Me, knowing how short a time span it was to raise my children, I am so grateful that I was able to be at those games. I was so grateful that I was able to do some of the things because I worked for myself, that I could go do that flexible thing because that time goes so fast. Then they're grown up and you're like.

Michele Williams: Where did that go?

Jacqueline Green: Where did that go? Like, what happened? I remember cuddling them, and now all of a sudden, they're just bigger than me.

Michele Williams: Yeah, we were looking at some pictures the other day. We've been in our house 25 years, and we have pictures of when it was being built, and we were looking to make some changes in our family space and one of the people was asking us, well, what's behind this wall? Well, I remembered that I had pictures from behind the wall, behind the sheetrock, because we came in and took pictures, like, every two days of everything. Anyway, so I have this notebook that for 25 years, this little photo album, and when I pulled it out, there were pictures of our kids who were one and three. We have pictures of them choosing their bedrooms. Well, the three-year-old chose his. The one-year-old got what was left over, but they were choosing their bedrooms and there's little tiny people and there's, like, me 25 years earlier, looking back at me in the same house, in those same locations and it just hit me, the life that has been lived here, and it has gone so quickly that it almost feels like a different person. It almost feels like a blur.

Even though I have snippets of memories and things, there's so much life that in those 25 years that my brain can't hold all the space of all of it at one time. I think that's the same thing with our businesses, by the time we start and by the time we're done, when I started this business in 2000, I didn't know what I was doing. I was just trying to get started and the way it looks right now compared to the way it looked then, night and day, I could not have even dreamt that this is what it would look like at that point. Because a lot of the things that we're doing and offering now weren't even things back in 2000. We were all just on the Internet at the very beginning of things. I think, from my experience, what has been awesome in this particular industry, if we were just kind of to narrow it down to the interior design industry, is there are so many different ways to have a business. You can go commercial, you can go residential, and you can choose a niche within either of those. You can then even choose an aesthetic within a niche within that. You can go down to highlight the technical. I just want to do Sketchup and AutoCAD and Revit and Chief Architect. I just want to draw. You can come in and say, I just want to redecorate. I want to do renovations. There are so many ways. I only want to do the design. I don't want to do procurement. I would love to offer just procurement services. You can choose a piece or a part or the entire thing and create a business out of it. If there is ever an industry where we should not be stuck in finding a piece and part of something that we love and building a business around it, this is it. I see one thousand opportunities within this industry to build a business, doing the parts that we always have, parts we don't love, but focusing on what you love.

Jacqueline Green: Yeah, absolutely.

Michele Williams: I don't know that there are other industries that are this broad to be able to do that.

Jacqueline Green: It's such a creative field and such a great opportunity to take that creativity and that business and logic and add them together and according to whatever season you're in, to make it as big or small as you want. Just like you were giving advice to the woman who wanted this big, huge dream. But right now, her dream is with her younger kids. It's having the family. It's okay if you spend that time raising them, being a part of that, making your business a fraction of that, and then when they're grown and they don't need you anymore, they do, but they won't admit it. You can go in and you can make it even bigger, or you can expand it, or new opportunities are going to come up. I always hated that question when I was interviewing for corporate. Where do you see yourself in five years? Where do you see yourself in ten years? I don't know. Because if I look back at everything I've accomplished in my entire career, I would never have guessed. Just like you said, I would never have guessed. I would have gone the directions and this turn versus that turn. Yeah. I see myself being successful, driven, and happy. But to sit there and say, oh, I'm just going to be doing this in five or ten years, that would be doing a disservice to myself and to whoever I was helping out there.

Michele Williams: Yeah, I love it. So, Jacqueline, if people want to find you and want to connect with you and be able to talk more about how to follow their passion, and maybe they want to make a pivot, or maybe they are listening because they're just interested in, can I make money in design? What does this look like? And they want to speak with you. How do they find you?

Jacqueline Green: They can find me through our website. It's behindthedesignco.com and on there, we have a quiz from hobby to profitability that really helps you narrow down and see that business that you have started and dreamed of and how are you building that into a profitable business. And then there's a mini course that goes with that, that's completely free.

Michele Williams: That's amazing. Thank you so much for coming today and just being involved in the conversation of following our passion and even being able to give ourselves the freedom to think about it.

Jacqueline Green: Yeah, absolutely. And it's been such a pleasure to speak with you and talk about that. I hope someone will take this discussion and really put that into practice and find something that really makes their heart sing.

Michele Williams: I love it. Thank you so much.

Jacqueline Green: Yeah, thank you.

Michele Williams: Jacqueline, thank you so much for joining us on the podcast today. I constantly ask myself, “What lights my fire”? What makes my heart sing, what makes me happy, and what is my team really great at so that we can do more of that and not be afraid to change and to shift and to take some well-calculated risks? So, I thank you for having that conversation with us. I encourage everybody to go to Jacqueline's website at behindthedesignco.com and check out the free quiz.

If you are an established business and you are looking for ways to grow, to scale, and to keep up with your financials, we have a couple of offers here for you at Scarlett Thread and I just want to mention those to you. One, we have our coaching program that is yearlong in duration, and we really help you dig into every aspect of your business, but also really help you understand how all of those fit into your financials. You can find out more about that a scarletthreadconsulting.com on the work with me page you can sign up for a discovery call.

We also have Metrique Solutions, which is the financial dashboard that we have created for small businesses. I would love for you to check that out at metriquesolutions.com. That's a very quick way to really be able to take the strategic plan and the financial plan, see the intersection, create some metrics, and make sure that you're doing what you want to do to be able to make the goals that you want to make.

Then lastly, we have our bridge program. It's called CFO to go. You can find out more about that at scarletthreadconsulting.com/CFO. In that program, what we do is we help you pull together your financials, create a financial plan, create budgets that support that plan, create your KPIs that support the budgets and the plan, get you into Metrique Solutions, and help make sure that you have a monitoring plan so that you go all the way through. It is ideal if you want to really understand in a very short amount of time how to pull your numbers together.

We would love to help you with that. All of these are offers because we believe that your being financially astute and profitable is what's going to keep you passionate about the work that you're doing. We would love to support you in one of those ways. As always, choose to be profitable because profit doesn't happen by accident. Profit is a Choice is proud to be part of thedesignnetwork.org where you can discover more design media reaching creative listeners. Thanks for listening and stay creative and business-minded.