The Lessons of Entrepreneurship

Sara Lohse [00:00:00]:
And I pitch him as he is an expert in all of these financial things. He’s been doing this for 20 years, all of these different designation certifications. And the host looks at me and says, yeah, that’s great. I don’t want someone that’s an expert. I want someone with a cool story.

Priscilla Shumba [00:00:30]:
Welcome to the lessons of entrepreneurship, the journey of reinvention. As always, I have a special guest for you today. I have Sara Lohse, the storyteller, marketer, and brand architect. Sara, please tell us who you are and what’s your mission.

Sara Lohse [00:00:46]:
Thank you so much for having me. I am Sara Lohse, president of Favorite Daughter Media. And I love helping people and businesses tell their stories and use those stories to build their brands.

Priscilla Shumba [00:00:58]:
I just realized that you got the pink earphones. You got the pink, like, pink brand. And then when you said daughter, it just all says the same thing.

Sara Lohse [00:01:06]:
Everything is pink. My keyboard’s pink. Everything in my life is pink. Always stay on brand.

Priscilla Shumba [00:01:11]:
You are branded. That’s awesome. Our audience is quintile entrepreneurs. And today people have personal brands and you may feel like how much of yourself do you put into that personal brand and how much of it is okay for the market? Let’s start with how we define a personal brand. Let’s start this. What are they even talking about? Let’s let’s build it up.

Sara Lohse [00:01:32]:
Sure. I feel like in marketing, everything means something different to everybody. For me, a personal brand is someone who wants to turn their skills and their passions into a business. And to build your personal brand, you’re almost turning yourself into that business because you are everything that you’re putting forward. There’s a lot of misconceptions with a brand because people associate a brand with things like a logo and a tagline and everything like that. But you really have to look past that logo and into who you are and what you’re trying to do in order to really become an actionable and impactful brand.

Priscilla Shumba [00:02:13]:
I like that. We often think about brand colors, logos, and you think about company, the traditional idea of a company when you think about branding. It’s important that it has to do with making that first impression. It’s funny that I just noticed right now, 5 minutes later, that you’re everything pink, and that’s the first impression that I have. I would forget that now. For our audience who’s listening, and they’re thinking, I have lived a very ordinary life. I don’t think that there’s anything particularly interesting that I can say about my personal life. But But I do have a skill that I wanna turn into a business and a personal branding.

Priscilla Shumba [00:02:49]:
You can tell me if this is correct or not. Personal branding is the best way to do it as a person starting out in business. And I don’t have much of a story or anything really exciting to tell. What do I do?

Sara Lohse [00:02:58]:
You stop thinking that you don’t have a story to tell. That is the biggest thing, and that’s the biggest mistake I think people make just when it comes to not starting and not really going after thought leadership, not putting their ideas out there, is people think that they don’t have a story. I get told that all the time. I work with people 1 on 1 to help them craft their story. Every single time, the first thing they say is I don’t have a story. What they’re really saying is my story doesn’t have value. And that’s so untrue. My mission at this point is just getting people to realize that every single person has a story, and everyone’s story is worth telling.

Sara Lohse [00:03:40]:
I started down this road with a really just stupid story that I only would ever tell in a bar to get a laugh. And the way that I was actually walked through telling the same story on a massive platform, found all of these little key pieces of value. So I learned really quickly that any story can have value if you tell it well. So it’s not that you don’t have a story. You just don’t know how to tell it.

Priscilla Shumba [00:04:11]:
And I’m really intrigued in that to know how it is that you got started. And what is this joke that got you to a massive platform?

Sara Lohse [00:04:18]:
I got a really embarrassing tattoo when I was in my early twenties. I was at a podcast conference years later. I’d already had it covered up, and I was trying to get the host of a podcast I was producing on this really big finance podcast. And the host, he’s one of the biggest podcasters in that space. He’s an amazing person. I stalked him for 3 days trying to get him alone because he’s a celebrity there. You can’t find this man without a just flock of people. So I finally get to meet him, and I pitch the host of my show to him to be a guest.

Sara Lohse [00:04:56]:
And I pitch him as he is an expert in all of these financial things. He’s been doing this for 20 years, all of these different designation certifications. And the host looks at me and says, yeah, that’s great. I don’t want someone that’s an expert. I want someone with a cool story. I didn’t know what to say at that point. I just came out with, do you wanna hear an embarrassing story about a tattoo? And he said, yes. I told him that story.

Sara Lohse [00:05:24]:
He looked at me and said, you’re on the show, which was not the intention. I’d so now I have this just embarrassing tattoo story that I got the tattoo on a bar crawl in Ireland on a solo trip. And he has to find the money story in it because he has a money podcast. So he had to basically guide me to tell the story in a way that would pull out these money lines in it and pull out these lessons that I learned that I didn’t even realize I learned. He was so genius about the way he guided me through this story that it changed the way that I’ll tell it, and it changed the way that I’ve told stories from that point on.

Priscilla Shumba [00:06:07]:
That’s amazing. It’s interesting that he wasn’t after expertise, which when you think about thought leadership coming out of working a traditional job, you think what you should put forward is that you’re an expert or at least when you think what will distinguish you from other people. Right? That value prop is gonna be that you are an expert. Mhmm. But it’s about the story. Let’s dive into the idea of telling the story. How would somebody start? Like I said, somebody saying, oh, I’ve got nothing unique, and you’re like, no. You actually have something really valuable, but you’ve got to know how to tell it.

Sara Lohse [00:06:44]:
Mhmm. And how

Priscilla Shumba [00:06:45]:
would I know how to tell it when I already didn’t think I had a story?

Sara Lohse [00:06:48]:
The first step is just figuring out what it is you’re trying to say. When you’re coming up on this journey of thought leadership and you’re wanting to put these ideas out, why? Figure out what your why is. And when you figure out that why and what your message is, what it is you’re trying to change people’s minds about, what it is you’re trying to tell people, you’re going to have this one key lesson, basically, that you learned and that you’re trying to help others learn. Your story is just how you learned it. Every story just comes down to our experiences. When it comes to storytelling, the reason that we tell stories is because we’re trying to connect with other people, and humans crave those connections. Storytelling dates back to before language when the cavemen were drawing pictures on the walls. Those were their way of telling stories.

Sara Lohse [00:07:44]:
These stories are what connect us, and our brains are wired to really take in a story and connect with it. Even when you hear a story, the way that your brain fires neurons is the same way as the person that experienced the story itself. So our brains really just are created for stories. When you tell your experiences, there’s so many people in this world that have gone through similar things. And when they hear you talk about an experience that they have been through in some way, they feel connected to you because they’ve shared that experience. So people, when they say I don’t have a story, it’s really because we live in this 247 news cycle. And we think that stories have to be headline worthy. They have to be dramatic, traumatic, or sensational.

Sara Lohse [00:08:40]:
And And sometimes honestly, that value can just be making somebody laugh. And that’s all the value I thought my story had to begin with. I was just able to find more. But when you look at it, not from a, what is going to make a headline, but you look at it as what is going to connect with these people that I’m talking to, it’s gonna be a lot easier to hone in on what that story is.

Priscilla Shumba [00:09:04]:
Maybe you’ll have to speak to this a little bit when you’re online and people are sharing their story. How can you make sure that it doesn’t become like me talking about what’s happening in my life all the time and actually connecting that with marketing myself as a thought leader. And I’ve got a business, and I’m trying to get clients. And it’s not just me talking about what happened today and then to tomorrow. I’m telling you what happened tomorrow. People are lost in the okay. Where is this going? Thank you so much for choosing to listen in to the lessons of entrepreneurship, the journey of reinvention podcast. I’m so excited to have you here, and I’m really, really excited about the quality of guests that we’re getting and the information that we are learning from them to help us on this journey of entrepreneurship, this journey of reinvention.

Priscilla Shumba [00:10:03]:
If this podcast is helping you, I humbly ask, please share the podcast episode with someone you know on this entrepreneurship journey with us. Thank you, and please keep listening in.

Sara Lohse [00:10:23]:
There is a mistake that some people make where they want to turn thought leadership into a 24 hour reality show about them. And that’s really not the goal. I think the personal stories are supposed to have a purpose. For some people, those everyday get ready with me stories and a day in the life stories, those do serve a purpose. People who are online influencers, who really sell their image. Those kinds of stories are going to be great. But when it comes to a more of a business purpose, we don’t need to know what you had for breakfast. We wanna know what you do that impacts your career and that impacts what you do, and that does prove that expertise.

Sara Lohse [00:11:14]:
So in those instances, we wanna lean into more of the professional stories. We wanna lean into things like case studies and the insight stories about what you’ve accomplished for a client or for yourself, what you’ve learned. If you’ve gone to conferences lately, what you took away from them. Things that really do hone in on the business purpose. But then you do want to have some personal in there because people don’t want to interact with a business. They want to interact with a person. So when I tell a story that’s personal, I always make sure that there’s a reason that I’m telling it And that it ties to a lesson that I’m trying to teach that relates to the mission of my company. So I’ll tell the story of what happened when my dad and I moved me down to Texas.

Sara Lohse [00:12:02]:
And that’s just a story that I like to tell because I like to talk about my dad. He’s my favorite person. But when I look at it, that’s also the story that helped me decide on my company name. So you’re able to make those connections. As long as the story that you’re telling connects in some way to a point, basically, there is a point to me telling this, then go ahead and tell it.

Priscilla Shumba [00:12:24]:
Now I wanna hear the story about your dad, CTU Tech, because I’ve heard the company name, and I just wanna connect. Okay. What does this look like when it’s being done correctly? Sometimes you’re like, do I share this? Do share this? And then how does it connect? Will it be obvious to the people who are reading where the connection is and all that kind of stuff?

Sara Lohse [00:12:43]:
I never thought I was gonna start a business. That was never in the cards. It was not on my bingo sheet. Did not ever plan on doing this. So when I did decide, I think this is something I wanna do, I had to pick a name. I did not know how to do that because I’d never done it. So I googled how to name a business. There was blogs and all of this stuff about how to name a business, and they said to ask the people in your life three adjectives to describe you, and think about your childhood nicknames, and all of these different things that you can do.

Sara Lohse [00:13:18]:
I did all of them. My childhood nickname is Bub. It’s not a good business name. I’m sorry if anyone out there is Bub LLC, but it wasn’t for me. I asked people to describe me, and it definitely was a mood booster. People had nice things to say, but none of them really resonated with what I was going for. Instead, I thought about the things that were most important to me. My brain kept going to my dad.

Sara Lohse [00:13:44]:
Yes. He’s one of my favorite people in the world, but he also is the person that has supported me exactly the way that I needed him to my entire life. When I say that, I mean, I am very impatient. I am very, just don’t think about it, just do it, ask for forgiveness, not permission kind of person. And I had decided when I was 23 that I was going to quit my job, up and leave, and move to Texas. I didn’t care that I’d never been here. I didn’t know anybody. I didn’t have a job.

Sara Lohse [00:14:18]:
I had job security in Maryland where I was, but none of that mattered to me. I was just like, Hey dad, I’m going to move to Texas. And I think this was April of 2019. I tell him I’m going to move to Texas. I’m going to be living there by August 1st. And he says, no, you are not. Because that is not a good idea. You have job security.

Sara Lohse [00:14:40]:
You have all of this lined up. You have a lease on your apartment. Everything is set for you, where you are. There’s nothing there. You don’t have a job. You’re not walking into anything. You don’t know anybody. If you find a job there and you have it set up that you have the same support and everything that you have in Maryland, you find it in Texas, I will drive the moving truck.

Sara Lohse [00:15:03]:
So he didn’t say no. He made me slow down, and he made me do it in a way that would have me be more safe because I’ve never been one for safety. I take risks. I take solo trips where I get lost in the middle of a country I’ve never been to. That’s fun for me, which terrifies them. But he slowed me down and made sure that I did things in a way that set me up for success and set me up for comfort and for safety. And on July 25th, he and I got in my car, had everything packed up, and we drove for 3 days to Texas. I was here on 29th.

Sara Lohse [00:15:43]:
I beat my deadline by 2 days, and I started my job a week later.

Priscilla Shumba [00:15:47]:
That’s amazing. He didn’t instruct you. He helped you to instruct yourself.

Sara Lohse [00:15:52]:
He has long since stopped trying to convince himself he can tell me what to do, but he does put a lot of effort into making sure that what I tell him I’m going to do works out the way I want it to. So when I had to come up with a name for my company, I called it favorite daughter, but it’s really not named for me. It’s because I named it for my favorite relationship, which is with my dad.

Priscilla Shumba [00:16:19]:
It’s a beautiful relationship. You’re very lucky.

Sara Lohse [00:16:22]:
I know.

Priscilla Shumba [00:16:23]:
Thank you for sharing that with us because I think

Sara Lohse [00:16:25]:
Yeah.

Priscilla Shumba [00:16:25]:
We get it now. For the people that are listening, storytelling, holding a brand, you can share something that’s authentic, that’s trustworthy, and still get your business message across.

Sara Lohse [00:16:38]:
Absolutely. And I love that you said authentic. Authenticity has to be at the forefront.

Priscilla Shumba [00:16:43]:
Sara, go on a deep dive with us. For those who are coaches, who are trying to build personal brand, brand, thought leadership, brand identity in this world where it almost seems like everybody’s a coach. I like that you led us with how to find your story. Maybe you can give us some more exercises that will help somebody to think through how to really set apart their brand. I hate actually to say brand because I think for some people, it becomes this big thing. But, anyway, I’ll let you go into that.

Sara Lohse [00:17:14]:
No. It is a brand. I almost use my brand name and my name interchangeably at this point. I mean, I refer to myself as the favorite daughter. My clients refer to me as favorite daughter. When I bring in a new client, I welcome them to the family. If you look at the testimonials on my website, it’s love notes from happy parents. I am my brand, and that’s what you want.

Sara Lohse [00:17:33]:
You don’t wanna have a separation if you are the person representing it. If it’s a big company where there’s other people involved, you have partners, you have employees, then there is going to be some separation that’s necessary. But in cases like entrepreneurship and solopreneurship, you are your brand and that’s okay because you want people to want to work with you. You don’t want people who just wanna work with a logo. That’s how you’re gonna get the clients that become friends, that become lifelong clients, that refer other people to you. It’s because they’re working with Sara. It’s not because they’re working with a company called Favorite Daughter Media. So starting there, that is the first thing is just don’t feel like you have to separate that out.

Sara Lohse [00:18:15]:
One of the first things that I really encourage people to do, I said before, find your why and figure out what that why is. But also go through the same type of branding steps that a big company would go through. There’s 8 components to a brand that I usually focus on. The most important one when you’re building a personal brand is your brand values. What are the things that really mean a lot to you? And when you have those brand values set, they’re going to lead to you being able to go into what you’re doing with a purpose, and that purpose is what’s gonna set you apart.

Priscilla Shumba [00:18:56]:
You’ve really shifted the way that I because I’ve oh, gosh. I hate using the word brand. And I’m glad you came at me with that because that really changed how I thought about it because I don’t think I’ve seen it done so well. Mhmm. I think that’s the problem. And now speaking to you and seeing how you move, first impression, you get that, and then you get the story of how the company started, and then you get your energy. It’s all aligned. Mhmm.

Priscilla Shumba [00:19:23]:
Sometimes you don’t get it because things are not really working together. Maybe you can speak to the common mistakes people make. Like I said, I haven’t seen it done so well. I also needed to have that mind shift about it. I’m so glad you’re here, Sara, because you’re helping me, and I hope the audience too. So thanks for that.

Sara Lohse [00:19:43]:
That’s what I’m here for. One of the biggest mistakes I’ll say is that people focus on the wrong things. All of the energy, all of the thought goes into the logo and making sure that the colors are right and the website is perfect. And we put all of this money into building a really great website. Those things are necessary, but you have to lay the foundation first. My logo was, I want to say 12.99 on Etsy that I just found a designer that did $12 logos and said, make it something pretty. That was it. Because I didn’t care because I got the name that really resonated with me, and the name of my business makes me happy every single day.

Sara Lohse [00:20:33]:
And every time I get to tell the story behind it, it makes me happy. That was what mattered to me. The logo is just a logo and the logos are the things that change the most often when people rebrand, they change their logo. Don’t put all of that focus on those external factors. Focus on yourself. Make sure that you know who you are and what it is that you want to do and why it is you want to do it. And then also make sure that you know who you’re doing it for. You need to know who your audience is.

Sara Lohse [00:21:04]:
If you say your audience is everybody, then your audience is gonna be nobody. You have to niche. They say like the riches are in the niches, which I hate that saying just because I say niche and I hate having to say niche. But it really is true. You have to hone down on a specific audience so that you can speak their language, and you can put forward what they want and what they’re looking for. Because if you try to be everything to everybody, it’s not gonna resonate with anyone.

Priscilla Shumba [00:21:32]:
Immediately when you said that, I got it. I got why I haven’t seen it done well, and I get why I haven’t done it well either. Because I realized that coming from traditional work, there’s a part of you that tries to blend in. A part of you that tried to be acceptable to everyone because in a traditional work environment, you’re trying to be whatever the company culture is. Right? So you’re trying to be acceptable to everyone. And so you’re not really yourself. And then to go into personal brand, you can’t be authentic if you’re not really being yourself. And then in order to be yourself, you have to be able to narrow down, like, who it is.

Priscilla Shumba [00:22:09]:
Because you can’t be yourself to everybody. You end up trying to shape yourself in certain ways that doesn’t connect, but that’s a scary thing.

Sara Lohse [00:22:18]:
Just the vulnerability piece of it. Like you’re saying, it’s scary to actually put yourself out. I worked in finance before I launched my company and I am not a financial professional. I loved the job. I still work with them. They’re one of my clients. I adore the people. I love what I do with them.

Sara Lohse [00:22:40]:
But every day for 2 years, I was surrounded by khaki pants and tucked in polo shirts in neutral tones on casual Friday. If I dyed my hair pink just because I felt like it, I got reprimanded, and I was expected to conduct myself a certain way and not speak the way that I speak. And I was speaking at a conference and was asked if I’m gonna cover up my tattoos. It was just day after day of being expected to be somebody that I wasn’t. And it’s like the square pegs don’t fit in round holes, so I was trying to shave down the corners to make myself fit, and it just never worked. And I finally realized it, that it was a losing game, basically. I’m never going to be this financial professional. I am a financial professional in that I’m an accredited financial counselor.

Sara Lohse [00:23:36]:
And I know finance. I could teach you finance. I can handle your finances, whatever it is. I got it. But I’m not built for that industry. So when I made the decision to leave, I did it to give myself permission to be myself again. It was terrifying, but also the most freeing feeling I’ve ever had. I went all in because I had been surrounded by the blues and greens that every financial company has for their brand colors.

Sara Lohse [00:24:04]:
So now, like you said, everything is pink. Everything. I am in my Barbie era, and I am never getting out of it. Everything is pink. Everything is written in my voice. My book just came out in April, and people ask me, did you make a conscious decision to write it in the voice you wrote it in? Because everyone that reads it tells me, I can hear you telling your stories. Like I can hear you in the pages because I wrote it exactly the way I’d say it. And no, it wasn’t a conscious decision.

Sara Lohse [00:24:37]:
It would have had to be a conscious decision to do it any other way. I did it the way I know it. Now that I’ve done this and I’ve gone all in and I’ve basically had my reintroduction into the world. There’s no going back, which is a little scary. Like I can’t close Pandora’s box. This is me. I’m here. But I have found the audience that resonates with me, and I have found the clients that do become my friends, and I found the business partners that I wanna work with.

Sara Lohse [00:25:09]:
And I have found the audiences that aren’t for me. I found the rooms that make me feel that I don’t belong in it and that I need to be someone different figure

Priscilla Shumba [00:25:20]:
out

Sara Lohse [00:25:23]:
that there are a lot of rooms and there are a lot of tables. Figure out that there are a lot of rooms and there are a lot of tables. I’m just going to go find one that I feel comfortable in and that I feel like I could be myself in. I don’t need to be in that room.

Priscilla Shumba [00:25:36]:
I love everything you said because many people hate their jobs. They feel like 4, 5 days a week, 8 hours or more a day, they have to pretend to be someone else. And they’re dying for the weekend where they get to be themselves. I love that you not only found the rooms, you created the table. And we’re here enjoying all the barbie ness about you, and it’s awesome to experience. For my audience that is listening, that’s like, Sara is just everything is in alignment. Okay? They’re like, this is working. For myself, I’m gonna think through how to make a story, methods of crafting personal stories for thought leadership.

Priscilla Shumba [00:26:20]:
Because I’m really thinking of those who are coaches, and we’d really like the audience to know that Sara Lohse gave them some coaching on this particular thing that they can go and make sure that their thought leadership and brand identity begins to align?

Sara Lohse [00:26:36]:
I would say, beware of forced vulnerability. When people start saying, okay. I’m gonna start telling stories. For some reason, they automatically go to I don’t wanna say, like, sob story, but they always go to that place. They go to the worst thing that’s happened to them or the underdog part of their story, and they want to have this big, profound impact that makes everybody cry. And we all have something like that. We’ve all been through something difficult, but what I see so often is people tell these very vulnerable stories, and then they connect it to the lesson at the end, and it does not connect. It just feels so disjointed.

Sara Lohse [00:27:28]:
And, okay, you told me this really personal, really tear inducing story, but why? What you’re trying to get me to understand has nothing to do with it. And I see it happen every single day. It It always makes me think of like American Idol. I know you’re not in America, but I’m sure you’ve heard of it. Every single contestant has a sob story. I can know you’re a great singer without knowing about it. But the reason that they do it is because they’re trying to connect. They have to stand out.

Sara Lohse [00:27:57]:
They want to tug at those heartstrings so that you vote for them. But when you’re in a conference room, when you’re in an office, you don’t need that. You can rely on the stories that aren’t that. You can go with the stories that are the case studies. You can talk about your experiences at your job. You can talk about the struggles that you have professionally. What is the worst thing that happened to you in your career? It doesn’t have to be in your childhood. That also makes it easier.

Sara Lohse [00:28:28]:
It makes it less scary because the most scary part of the idea of thought leadership and telling your story is feeling like you have to open yourself up to the world and tell things that you’ve only ever told a therapist, or you probably should tell a therapist. And it really doesn’t have to be like that. You don’t have to go to that place. Talk about your biggest successes. Talk about the wins. Talk about your favorite clients and what you’ve done for them. Talk about the events that you’ve gone to and what you learned from an internship that you’ve really honed in on and used in your career. Talk about the things that matter, make sure that it has that connection.

Sara Lohse [00:29:13]:
And like I said before, when you think about what that message is, all you really need to do is think about how you learned that lesson. What was the circumstances around you figuring out this thing you want other people to know? Because that’s your story right there.

Priscilla Shumba [00:29:31]:
Thank you so much, I’ve read some things online, and I feel like I shouldn’t have because you don’t know what to say after that. Someone just told you something deeply personal, and you don’t know them in that way. And I want them to know even that I saw that.

Sara Lohse [00:29:46]:
We wanna connect. We don’t have the trauma bond. Yes. Yes. We don’t need to trauma bond, and that is okay.

Priscilla Shumba [00:29:54]:
That’s all I said. Sara, if there’s one message you want people to remember from Sara Losi, storyteller, marketer, brand architect, what is it?

Sara Lohse [00:30:04]:
You do have a story, and your story matters.

Priscilla Shumba [00:30:07]:
Thank you for that. Tell audience that you could please go to ww.openethisbook.com. Sara, please tell them what’s there.

Sara Lohse [00:30:16]:
Yeah. .Com. That is where you’ll find my book. It is called Open This Book, The Art of Storytelling for Aspiring Thought Leaders. And if you go to open this journal .com, I have a free journal. It is all of the writing exercises that are in my book that those I give away for free. So it’s all journal prompts, writing, and thinking exercises that will help you figure out what your story is and how you can tell it.

Priscilla Shumba [00:30:40]:
Beautiful. It couldn’t get any better than this. Thank you so much, Sara. And to the audience, please make use of that and make sure that you do stand out for your unique story. That’s gonna help you get the message that you’re trying to get out there. Thank you, Sara.

Sara Lohse [00:30:56]:
Thank you for having me.

Priscilla Shumba [00:30:57]:
I hope you got something from this episode that you are excited to go and execute on right away. But before you go, I wanted to let you know about our latest offer. If you’re a coach, if you’re a consultant, if you own a small business, running your content yourself, get your hands on this guide to social media success on our website at www.reinventingperspectives.com. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Social Media Success, strategies for consultants and small business owners. So once again, have an amazing week, and see you soon.