VR Small

The best career advice I ever received was to ask for what you want. My mentor a long time ago told me, if you don't ask for what you want, you're never going to get it. People would ask me how I got certain opportunities, like the space for our center or getting people to do things, and I would tell them I simply asked. I remember we wanted to do something here in Dallas, and it was a big deal, and everybody was saying no, it's not going to happen, but then a few months later I found out somebody else was doing exactly what I wanted to do, and you know why? Because they asked. I said never again am I going to let people deter me, because all you can do is get a no, but you could also get a yes. That was a reawakening for me - you have to ask for what you want, don't let people deter you from that. I want to hear that no myself.

Get connected and stay connected. This is not a loner's journey. It's not something you want to do by yourself, it's not something you will have to do by yourself, and it's not something you should do by yourself. There are so many resources out there - find them and use them to their max, because many of them are free, and that's a plus for you if you're starting a business or anything else because you don't have to take something out of your pocket. What I learned personally is you don't know what you don't know. I was in C-suite and multiple organizations, so when I started this nonprofit, which I never ran a nonprofit before, I really kind of felt like I knew what I was doing, that I got it. But budgeting and different things in the nonprofit industry are very odd, and I didn't know that. It didn't match well with what I knew or how I was taught to do things. So you've got to do your due diligence and understand your industry. I preach market research to my clients. Make sure you do your market research, make sure there's a market - that's one of the top 3 reasons why anything fails. There's no market for it. You're trying to offer something nobody needs or wants to buy, or wants to buy at the price you have to sell it at. You have to understand your industry, and then once you understand your industry, get and stay connected. You do not want to take this journey alone.

Right now, I think the biggest challenge and opportunity is to really transform how we do business to be aligned with where the industry is going. Working with AI and using it to its full benefit to maximize our time is crucial. A lot of the things we were tracking, like performance requirements, we were doing manually - we still had to put a lot of that information in. Whereas now, what we're working to do is build out a community where everything is inputted into the system. I can go in real time and see how someone is doing, whether they're on track, how they did on pre-post tests. Our curriculums are broken up into segments so we can see how you do in each segment, and you don't have to go back and do a 2-or-3-hour class, you can just go back and do the segment when you didn't perform well, and AI will tell you that. It also helps us with mentoring because now when I come to you, I can ask you immediately if something is wrong or if you're struggling with a particular section. Really getting in line with where the industry is, because we are a national organization, understanding that this is going to allow us to serve twice, if not three times, as many women. We still have to take into consideration that we do keep our one-on-one mentoring in place, so we're never going to become a checkbox having hundreds of people on a platform just throwing out a lot of information but not really checking the validity of the application of that information, which I think is really what's given us the outcomes that we see with our students - that application is key.

I joined the Navy at 17, and I really did drink the Kool-Aid. So honor, courage, and commitment, and my spiritual values are really important to me. I think those principles really kind of bring meaning to everything. Honor is doing what's right, in my opinion. Courage is doing it even when it's not easy or nobody else supports it. And commitment is staying the course - so many people give up, just bow out. They taught us that in the Navy, and I was young when they were telling me all that, and I thought, hey, that's almost biblical. It kind of aligns with what I believe in my own spiritual belief. I was like, those things make sense to me, and I lived that. Because I think it doesn't matter who it is, you need to be able to do the right thing, even if it's somebody who did you wrong. You gotta do what's right, regardless of what other people do, and sometimes that's extremely hard, but I think it leaves you in a better place. The keyword right there is integrity.