Julie Perez

I think my family, honestly. I think my family, I think the support they've given me, like, what they've shown me. My parents were immigrants from Cuba, and they came at different ages. My mom came at 13 months, she doesn't remember anything about Cuba, but my dad does. He came when he was older. The struggle and seeing your parents just leave everything behind and literally just go with nothing, just the clothes on their back, maybe a couple of personal items in a bag. They had to leave everything, their cars, their houses, everything, because they had to flee communism and come to a country that was going to give them freedom and their right to work, which is all they wanted. Watching them work so hard, two, three jobs, like, my grandparents would be like, nope, we're not taking WIC benefits, SNAP benefits, we're not taking welfare, like, there's people that need it. There's people that need it, and we can work. So we're not taking it, and none of them took it. They should have, because they could have had help, but no, they said, no, God will provide, we have food on the table, let's work. As long as we can work, we work. Seeing that, like, how am I supposed to honor that? So my thing was, well, I'm just gonna work my ass off, too, and do the most I can. Thankfully, I'm the first lawyer in my family.

I would say, you know, start with your network first, and networking doesn't have to be a cheesy message on LinkedIn. Networking can be, who do I know? Who are my top 5 girls that I talk to all the time, because maybe one of them's great at family law, and the other one's really techy, and she knows all the cool stuff to use? Like, who are the people that you reach out to? Those people, start talking to them about their business. Start talking to them about what they're using, and have these meetings where you can say, wow, I've never thought of that. Get their perspective, because we all need to support each other, and we are all born with different gifts and talents. And if we can combine them together, we just make each other better every single time. So I think it's not having fear to reach out to your current network. We have such big networks, but we just don't sit and think about it. Let's not start with strangers, let's start with the people that you know. Because the people that you know have their own network, and now you have 5 networks sitting all together at a lunch meeting. Networking is so important, and you can start from the people that you know. I think that's my number one piece of advice.

The biggest challenge I would say is the fear of the technological changes. There's a lot of misinformation, like, for example, people think that AI is gonna steal all of our jobs, and that's kind of not correct. Do I think that AI will replace some jobs? Yes. But what you can do is keep that person and show them how to do higher-level things. Train that person to be a paralegal. Train them to research case law. It's not that AI is going to replace people, it's that attorneys or even business owners, the ones that use AI, are going to replace the ones that don't. I think that's the better thing to say. The fear comes from the ignorance, so a lot of what we do is really educating. I'm learning every single day, like, whatever I know now is probably going to change in 30 days. That's how quick AI is moving. On the opportunity side, I would say AI too. It's kind of weird to have the same answer twice, but the great opportunity about having AI is the fact that you can help a business owner at any point of their business journey. The technology and AI is advancing so quickly, we can help a lot of people do things with less money than they thought to expand their business. It offers so many opportunities of things that people, I don't even think they're thinking of. You can go on vacation for a month, and your business will not suffer if you've got it set up correctly. Technology is really evolving with us and as the world changes.

I think it's honesty. I think it's integrity and loyalty. I think those things are so huge, because, you know, if you can't trust someone, how can you work with them? Or how can you have a relationship with them if you don't know what they're saying is true or not? That goes back to why in the world am I even good in sales. I think people can trust right away, like, I'm not BSing you, like, this is what it is, and at the end of the day, it's your choice. I think that if you're just honest with people, and you just have that integrity where, like, hey, I told you I was gonna email, and I did. I told you I didn't have the answer, but here it is, because I asked somebody who knows more. There's nothing wrong with that. You're not supposed to be know-it-alls in this world. I respect that in people, so I really, really try to do my best to portray that to others. I just think it's the best way to live.