2 Exits, 1 Mission: How Building Investor Relations Companies Created Mavericks

Intro 0:06  

Welcome to the Growth + Exit podcast, where owners of privately held middle market companies talk about founding, scaling, and exiting their businesses successfully. Learn how to maximize and monetize your business on your own terms. Let’s get started.

Heather Bennett  0:30  

Hello, I’m Heather Bennett, your host for the Growth + Exit podcast, featuring middle market business owners and experts talking about founding, growing, scaling, and exiting their businesses on their own terms. Past guests have included Julie Castro Abrams, founder and CEO of How Women Lead; Allison Cummins, founder and CEO of Blue Outcomes; and Aneesa Muthana, CEO of Pioneer Services and M&M Quality Grinding. This episode is brought to you by Newport LLC, a team of seasoned executives who help CEOs of privately held companies grow, de-risk, scale, and exit their businesses successfully. Newport LLC is a winner of the prestigious Inc. magazine Power Partner Award, a list of elite B2B companies from across the globe to see the entire list, visit inc.com/powerpartnerawards to learn more about Newport. Visit us at Newportllc.com or of course find us on LinkedIn. Before introducing today’s guests, I would like to thank Susan Kearney for introducing me. You can find Susan on LinkedIn or the Newport website. Today’s guest is Beth Mazza. Elizabeth Beth Mazza is a seasoned marketing and communication strategist with a distinguished track record of founding and scaling advisory firms that help leaders communicate with clarity and purpose. As a co-founder of both Ashton Partners and Clermont Partners, Beth played a central role in building respected firms focused on investor relations, corporate communications, and strategic messaging. With deep expertise in executive level communication, Beth has advised founders, boards, and leadership teams across industries. I’m most excited to talk about what Beth is working on right now, which is she is about to launch her book that she’s co-authored, Entrepreneur Like a Mother. So we will definitely get to talk about that a little bit later. Beth, welcome to the show. 

Beth Mazza  2:35  

Oh, thank you so much, Heather. I’m so happy to be talking to you.

Heather Bennett  2:39  

So let’s get right into you as a founder. Tell me about the businesses you founded, how the ideas came up, and and how you decided to become an entrepreneur.

Beth Mazza  2:51  

Look, I always think about that. I started my first business when I was 27, and I’m 57 now. And I just thought, who was that brash woman that was like, sure, I could start a business where clients must be public companies and they must be public company CEOs and CFOs for sure. I’m just the right person, so I have no answer on that except for I came from an entrepreneurial family. I have two brothers who are entrepreneurs. My dad, my grandfather, everyone was. So I think I grew up just assuming that’s what you did, and so because of it, I was always kind of searching for something. And I love investor relations because you can be extremely financial, but you can also be that other mix of communications. And so the thought that you could be talking to really smart public CEOs about like good meaty problems, and then help them kind of translate it for the investment community. I mean, I really like that. So a combination of history, genetics, and just like I don’t know brashness and probably stupidity, it worked. So then I did it again. But like I, I mean, I look back at that now because I have kids in their 20s, and I think if they came to me and said, “I’m starting a business. I would think you are nuts, but I’m going to try and be supportive.

Heather Bennett  4:07  

It’s and it’s so it’s so fun to to see that transition to to the next generation. So let’s talk about those early years. I always find interesting to hear about the the beginning of the company and and what you were thinking, and some of the hard decisions you had to make while starting those companies.

Beth Mazza  4:27  

I mean, I think that I was given this amazing advice by my dad, who also gave me a little bit of money to start the business. I I really loved investor relations, and I had some okay relationships. And I thought at the time, there were so many initial public offerings entering the markets, and everybody thought they needed investor relations. And so, I knew the market was growing big enough that I bet I could get some of it. So, I wrote what I think I found it actually, and I think it was quite good. It was the plan for the business, and it still really made sense. And I built everything. So. I gave it to my dad, and I said, “Dad, I I need some money, and like you’re the only one that’s going to give it to me. And he said, “I will, but not without an execution plan. What you’ve written is very theoretical and it’s smart, but it doesn’t tell me what you’re going to do on day one, day 30, day 60, day 90. And and he ultimately he was right, so he helped me just force me into it. Like I don’t even think he looked at it when I did it. I think he just knew that I had to do it, and so because of it, I didn’t start on day one wondering how it was going to hit my revenue number. I had very specific sales, marketing, growth, occupancy, everything, and I just kind of followed a playbook that I had written, 75% of it was right, 25% of it was like ungodly wrong. So I always give now people who come to me the advice on what a wonderful business idea you have now. How are you going to do it, and like how much is it going to cost you, and do you have to raise money, and at what point do you have a a break moment if you don’t have revenue, and so just to go through all that, so you part of it is just you have an execution plan, and the second part of it for me, and I know this sounds so woo woo, but the second part of it was I I was visualizing it, and so every day I was visualizing month six when I hit 500,000 in revenue, which I did not. I hit 354. I’ll never forget it, but I did hit close, so I was constantly visualizing six months from now, one year from now, and my kids now would say I’m. I was manifesting it. I mean, maybe, but I constantly have, and any of those mindset things that we all have as women, because I was like, well, I got to get through my playbook first, so then I’ll have my breakdown.

Heather Bennett  6:39  

Exactly. Well, and and that’s the thing is, so there’s a couple things when you start building a business, who who did you decide to hire, and what were you looking for in those key? I have found that that’s one of the most important things with the business owners I work with is who are those key strategic people you bring on during that early growth stage.

Beth Mazza  7:00  

Yeah. Okay. So I brought on two people, and I don’t even know how I thought I could afford them, but I did. One was a research person, which is super random, right? Because I’m in a communications function. Why research? Well, I had a theory, which which thank goodness turned out right, which is there were big players in my space, but they were too big and they weren’t particularly thoughtful. So this research person, all they were doing was coming up with what makes a stock price move. What is it? A timing of when you announce something good or bad. All these different pieces to be able to say, “Hey, Ashton Partners has a study that says if you put out X news before market, not after market, there was always this perception that you should hide the bad news after market, and so we did the study that basically said no, you want to put it out well before the market so that people could trade on it. You’d end with a better closing price, and so we would put out really good research that at least the CEO or CFO would be like, I don’t know who they are, but like I want to read that study, and so then I would reach out and say, Okay, I’m the one who this is my team. Do you want to hear more about it? So that turned out to be really like an expensive hire, but super smart, and that person ended up to be a really important part of the team, and then the second thing is, I mean, I’m like a one person firm at this point, okay. And now I’ve got a research guy who is not billing, not client facing. My second was a sales guy, and I mean like a big sales guy, like a guy who was used to selling big engagements and who was super expensive, but we were able to cut a deal, and what was incredibly helpful there is that I didn’t know the dynamics of like how to sell. I didn’t know there were procurement people. I didn’t know that if we were minority status, we might get into certain companies. I just didn’t know any of that. And this really great guy was able to kind of open the doors on that, and so from month three, we never didn’t have a six figure pipeline, and so I mean that grew and grew and grew. But like that is something very unique that I’m talking to people right now, and they are selling, delivering, and when this client looks like it’s going to end, they’re selling again, and I just always tell them like, you got to have the machine. You have to make sure the machine is authentic to you, but you have to have the machine. So those were two hires. I was still with my partner at the time. I was still. We were doing all the client service. We were you know 90 hours a week, and we weren’t speaking in full sentences. But that was how we immediately came out of the box and were growing. And because of those two things, and we were growing, we had enough money to then hire really great client teams.

Heather Bennett  9:50  

And and what at what point were you like, oh, we’ve got a business here. We’ve got a healthy, growing, good business here. Where because when you’re starting out, it’s it’s very nerve wracking and. Scary, and what’s going to happen? At what point were you like, oh well, this is actually working?

Beth Mazza  10:05  

Oh my gosh, because I’m like constantly nervous and crazy. I think that we might have crossed 2 million, and I think I was able to take like 50,000 out, and I had you know I was taking like $1 salary. I think that was the first time where I realized, and it was an accountant that told me that. She was like, you know, you you just leaving that money, and like, don’t you need some money to live off of? I’m like, no, my credit cards will do just fine. So I wasn’t particularly good at that. But in the second business, we knew we had it when we had cash flow, we were able to build up two months’ employee salary as cash, and then take the rest of that and make a decision: were we going to take it? Were you going to invest? And so, I really that number now. When I’m working with people, I’m like, you don’t know if you have a business because of your top line. Like, I wouldn’t even focus on it. You know, if you have a business because your cash flow, and so focus on your cash flow dashboard, and you’ll know if you have a generative business that’s growing, because it’s it’s still so crazy to me how many women say I’m making money, and they’re they’re unprofitable, but they’re making revenue.

Heather Bennett  11:18  

Absolutely, and there is a big difference between cash flow and and and revenue. Okay, so you you you’ve had some big turning points. You know, betting on data, really smart, understanding cash is king. What are what’s another turning point in either business that you felt made a huge difference? Some like decision process that you went through to really change the business.

Beth Mazza  11:44  

I think there were two. One and one is just people ignore it. One is we got a bank line, and you know people think no one’s gonna. We I gotta get angel funding. I gotta get venture funding. If you have cash flow, you can get a bank line, and you don’t have to use your bank line, but then you don’t have to leave two months of expenses in your business or three months of expenses in your business just because you might have a cash crunch. You can manage that better, and the minute you can do that, you can invest. So, I mean, my number one was just an amazing man who the his colleague is still in my life, he’s still managing my money. Right, this great guy who said, “Okay, I can do a no docs of 100k for you. I believe in you, and it was like it changed everything. And by the way, I’d asked 57 other people before he said it, so like this is a process. And then the second was, and we weren’t smart enough to do this until our second business, which was really early on, we had a had a consistent training program of our people. So, of course, if you were hiring, if you were a CEO, you were hiring a really senior person. They wanted to be able to call Victoria or I and our other senior people. Okay, but there was a lot of like tending that just needed to go into communications and work, and we had a way we wanted it done, and that off the cuff training when someone’s sitting next to you was not working. So then we started to use all the tools. Like we did something super cool. We had we recorded with our clients’ benefit. With okay, we recorded our consulting calls around quarterly earnings, and then we took out names, and then we gave it to a firm who helped us basically early, early, early AI, who basically helped us build a training from that because we we had a way that we talked to CEOs, the questions we wanted, the the way we wanted things worded that you that we turned essentially into a training module, and that was a pretty big investment for us at the time. But what it did is two things: one, our clients were happier, our people we could take 10% of our time and spend it on something else, and our more junior people could get us ready, and and they were highly trained. But the second is employees love that. They were like, “Oh, I’m getting trained. Oh, I’m part of a training program. Oh, I’m learning. This is great. So it ended up to be this great retention tool that I I’m not even sure that I I really understood it would be. And some of those people ended up to be partners with us, junior partners in the second business. They stayed with us. They made money. So it really turned out to be a great thing for both sides of that.

Heather Bennett  14:30  

And and you touch on this a few times. When you are a business founder, there’s only one of you physically, and you can’t replicate yourself. So being able to use technology like AI agents to to replicate the ability for you to train the people who work for you. And I love the idea of investing in the people work for you to to keep their engagement up, to advance their career, to really show them that you you believe in them, and you wouldn’t have brought them on. As a hire, if you didn’t believe in them, I mean, services

Beth Mazza  15:03  

businesses are people.

Heather Bennett  15:05  

Yes, if you have a

Beth Mazza  15:06  

product, or you could, I can’t make that argument. I don’t know enough, but services, it’s your people, and we we were very lucky in who we were able to recruit. But we ended up in the second business having a really low turnover ratio, whereas in the first business, we we didn’t know. We were younger. We weren’t training. We just didn’t know enough, and that cost us. And it cost us both in terms of time and energy and recruiting cost, but also we were in a client facing business. We looked bad when we were introducing new people onto clients every three months. So that was a hard fought lesson learned.

Heather Bennett  15:41  

So so you’ve got this health, these healthy growing companies. Talk about the process, and we talked a little bit about capital raise, but talk about the process of exiting those businesses and what it was like. We’ll say before and during.

Beth Mazza  15:58  

Yeah, I think, I think for whatever reason, my mindset was always I was going to exit, and I think I my belief is that you can get to about 10 or 12 million with high touch services businesses, and then it’s really tough. And I do wonder in the age of AI if that number is really 15 or 20 million, but I still believe there’s a number where you cannot replicate what they’ve bought. So I had always sort of started to think who we could sell to, and the two things I think I learned are one, both Victoria and I are just really good at making people talk to us. So we would call like CEOs of much much bigger firms than ours, and I don’t know if it’s because we at the time we were younger woman or we just asked, but we would can we have coffee with you? Can we come over to your office? Do you want to have dinner? Whatever it was, so we had built in both businesses a really good network of potential buyers, and we did that over not months, but we did it over years. And in some cases, we would hand off business because we knew we were too small to deal with it, or we would do something in a partnership so that they we kept front and center with them. So one was just like we were always thinking about the end, and I think we were also always really honest with employees that there was going to be an end to this business, and our job was to maximize our own profitability and make the most money we could, but also to give them a really good landing place, so they had to go along with us on it. And I think the fact that we were transparent with them was really helpful. Then, second was every month we were looking at are our financials pristine enough if we had to hand them over to a buyer right now, and if they’re not, how do we fix them? And if they’re not, because of an investment phase, a we’re recognizing we’re not going to sell our business for the next six months year, and b whoa this investment better be worth it because we just dirtied up some really clean financials, and so we just kind of were always in the discussion of are we talking to the right people so they know who we are opportunistically, and then you know the second is can I make a a credible argument that this is a super cash flow safe business, and can I make it every month? And if I can’t without a whole bunch of footnotes, then I gotta fix something.

Heather Bennett  18:28  

Yeah. And what surprised you about that process? You know, it sounds like you did a great job preparing. Like everything you just said is like like high high praise for recommendations on what to do beforehand and to be prepared even when you don’t think you’re going to exit soon, is having that continuous state of preparedness. I love I love hearing that. But what what surprised you about the exit process?

Beth Mazza  18:51  

I’ll tell you this: I was blown away by the impact private equity firms have on the valuation and the terms of the deal, just blown away by it. So the first business was sold to a much larger consulting firm, and just exactly what you would expect. You you essentially are earning out what they’re paying you, right? So you’re doing it over three. I think that was three years. We had to negotiate hard for some up front. We just ended up getting really lucky, and then our earnout was done after 18 months because we got a mammoth client. It just made everything work, so we just got really lucky. Okay, fast forward to the second. The private equity firms have this like ingredient recipe card, and if you check those boxes, they want to get a deal done fast. They want to get a deal done in a very compressed way. They’re going to pay you the bulk of the money up front, and they’re way less concerned about you staying around. As they are, you not competing, and so, I mean, every single person that comes to me and vilifies private equity, I’m like, I’m not your girl. If you have a small business, you go find a strategic buyer who’s funded by private equity because that’s the magic, right? And a small business is not going to go directly to a private equity firm. They’re not going to buy them, but a strategic firm funded by private equity with these super lofty growth goals, and you you will get a deal done that’s clean and good in 90 days versus our first deal, which took almost a year to accomplish.

Heather Bennett  20:37  

Absolutely believable. Both both of those numbers that make a lot of sense. Okay, so you’ve exited successfully from these two businesses. Congratulations! And right now, tell me about the work you’re doing with Female Mavericks.

Beth Mazza  20:54  

So I’m I’m so blessed and grateful that it is 100% mission Driven, my partner and I were really lucky that we had each other, both moms, both understanding what it was like, but also it’s it became really offensive to us when either we weren’t treated right in the marketplace by some men, but that was actually less and less. But really, when women, we would talk to women who were thinking about starting their business and thought they couldn’t do it as moms, and there was an absolute belief that you are a lesser mom if you are work are working in your own firm than corporate, and I just like even now, it just makes me so angry. Like we are mission driven. We wrote this book, which will come out in September. So if the only thing you can do is listen to an audio book or read a book to get you thinking about how you might start a business as a mom, because I think it is very fair to say our models are very different than men’s models, and so we wrote the book. Listen to the audio book if that’s all you got, but it will give you a great how-to, you know, for 20 bucks on how to do it. And then we do a lot of work one-on-one, just nonprofit mentoring women because we, you know, it just kind of blows our mind that people don’t see what we saw, and for sure, what you see, Heather. Right? Like, you can be ambitious. Your your kids, my kids, are resilient. They’re super resourceful. They’re very accepting of like different ways of living, and they’re my biggest cheerleader to this day. So, you know, I think our goal was how can we get so much flood the zone with information for women who are moms or wanna be moms who are ambitious. Let them feel accepted and let them have a strategy. And one of the things, and it’s all over the our newsletter, which is free, and the book, which is not. But the beginning section is all about picking your model correctly as a mom, and and there’s a matrix in there, and it really helps you understand return versus sort of mayhem into your own life. And the amazing thing is, we did not get offered a significant funding opportunity until we had a $10 million business and 35% margins, and every competitor wanted to be in our space, and they were trying to buy us. And then this growth capital firm comes along and is like, “We might be able to get you, you know, 30 million, whatever the number was. We were like, “Where were you? Okay. So our model very much was that we would able to bootstrap and get boot bank loans. We did not think we had a model that would grow fast enough for the life we would be forced to lead if we accepted growth capital, so we didn’t.

Heather Bennett  24:06  

So okay, and I love that you’re leading this this mission driven goal to help female founders succeed in what can be a difficult environment. So tell me about some of your proudest moments in the last couple of years.

Beth Mazza  24:22  

Okay, so I I’ve really had so much fun because you know when you take the profit element out of it, my mindset became different, and I never had that before. So a couple proudest moments. One, I work with this amazing woman who had a great, really good, very specific coaching strategy, and the absolute wrong buyer. And like the second she told me her story, and she was actually making a half a million a year. She was top line was half a million. She was doing great. I’m like you’re too good for this. Here’s another strategy. So together we helped her pivot. She had two new buying personas. She couldn’t quite let go of the third until the first two really kicked in. And I mean, remember her calling me one day, and I was on vacation, but I couldn’t help but take the call. And she said, “Overnight, my pipeline is bigger than it ever was, and my expenses are way down because I’m so much smarter on how I target people. So, I mean, I think that’s one. I also have a really, really wonderful person who started a CFP business, and and this is not a happy moment, I don’t think, but started a CFB business, very very successful muffin business, and in the end, pivoted completely to a different kind of business, which I worked with her on because, in order for her to get to the next stage, she was getting all the funding offers, and she had to look through and say, “Wait, I’m a mom. I want to be a mom of more than I am. I don’t think I can run for the next 18 months as hard as the VC guys want me to at the time that I’m raising this little kid, pregnant again, et cetera. And it was just a good. She’s going to be super successful in her next business, which is more rational. But it sort of helped me stress test the mommy mayhem matrix, which is in the book, to say if we could all have thought of this before we, you know, we jump off and just go after a business that makes sense to us. I mean, I’ll tell you this overall, and you must see the same thing. Women are so crafty, and they are so smart. And sometimes when they’re really ambitious, they’re like apologetically ambitious. And just to be able to get women in a group to be like that’s amazing. She had something similar. Look where she is right now. And you asked me early on about it. Was such a good question. Who’d you hire first? Brilliant women with brilliant ideas that are scared to over hire. I’m like, you are making a 60 day decision. You are not like marrying the person you’re about to hire. You got 60 days. That’s a fair commitment to make to this person. Make it. And now I’ve seen plenty of women that I’ve mentored did one, hired him as a contractor, now an employee, now a second. So those are really gratifying because we both know, like, you aren’t scaling a service business. You aren’t getting the financial freedom unless you hire bodies, there you have no. There is no other model until AI comes in and takes over all of us. But that’s it.

Heather Bennett  27:27  

And and there’s still so many things. I was at an AI conference in quantum conference yesterday morning, and there’s so many things that we still cannot hand off and won’t probably ever be handed off. So there is a there is a place, and I do think women have that ability to find those opportunities and to be agile enough to see where. Okay, well, if that’s not something I need to do anymore, I can have you know an agent do that. Well, what can I do? We’re the best pivoters,

Beth Mazza  27:55  

right? We’re like I’ve got four kids in four different places that all have to be picked up at 515. Okay, all right, I’m going to come up with an idea. Like that’s what we do really well

Heather Bennett  28:04  

from experience. Yes. Yeah. I agree with you on that one. So let’s talk about what what you’re working on next. But first, I want to talk about your co author. Tell me about your co author and and your journey with her.

Beth Mazza  28:19  

Okay. So my co author is like my sister, my best friend. I we have been partners for over 20 years, and I hired her at my first business, and she remembers it all. I remember nothing. She remembers when she first met me. I was pregnant with my twins, who are who just turned 21, and she remembers. You know, I was like eight months pregnant with twins, trying to run a business, so I probably was not that friendly. And she, her story is that she was like, “I’m going to get to know this woman. This woman is going to like me. And of course, like if you meet her, you’ll see within a second she’s brilliant. So I think she is. You know, we try when we talk in groups together, we always talk about the need for a partner as a mom because what we had was, first of all, we understood like, oh my God, Ali’s in the nurse’s office. Okay, you go deal with that, and I’ll get on your call. Or we would towards the end when we were getting really big, very, very, you know, we thought very important engagements. We would really sit there and assess, like, can we do what they’re going to ask us to do from a time frame standpoint? Like, are we willing to give up the next 90 days of stuff happening with our kids to get like a really big engagement? And we would have those discussions. So, she is a mama five. Her kids are from age six to 14, she was, you know, always had one or two nannies. So since selling the business, even as as when we were writing the book, she’s taken over all everything. She just won’t let anyone do a carpool. She just she’s she admitted to me the other day. She’s like, I’m so overcorrecting. I don’t even know what to do with this, but. So she’s like she is. She’ll be on the circuit, but she won’t be on the circuit until closer to the book. The my message on our relationship is we are like she’s all Greek, I’m all Italian. Like we will go at each other just so hard and so emotional because that’s who we are. But I think because we’re women and we’re moms, we would have like the biggest fight strategically about what to do, and I mean, we would go at it. I would walk out of the office and I’d be like, “I love you, I love you too. See ya. I mean, we just would never sort of end up having those really serious fights. We weren’t positioned, so I think because we were both super ambitious, and we were not going to break up. Like, because I know a lot of partnerships break up. Like, we figured it out, and we figured out to this day. But I, but when I talk to other women, especially moms who feel so alone, they’re building this business and they’re successful, but they feel so alone. If you can’t bring in a business partner, it’s why we talk so much about the kitchen cabinet. You know, connectors, cheerleaders, compensators, and there’s good stuff out there on that. But you got to have someone that you can call and either lose it because you just had the world’s stupidest day, or like someone who who’s been where you are and can say, yeah, this is a really bad week, and one week from now it is going to be better. But you are going to wallow in how bad this week is right now. Your kid failed the test. You lost a client. The bank’s yelling at you like this is your bad week, but next week will be better. So Victoria is just she’s incredibly empathetic. She she’s a never say die person and is literally the greatest business partner around. Thank you, thank you for sharing. I I I I know how hard it is to have a partnership and to be able to work together that long, and then to be able to to create something like a book together is really it’s amazing. It’s very inspiring.

Beth Mazza  31:58  

And the the part about the book to me that was so interesting is that, you know, I would write a chapter that was like super emotional, and I was like, “Okay, I’m going to send this to you, and I don’t think you’re going to have much edits. She would send it back to me with like more edits than you can imagine, and I would initially be like, “What is she editing my work for? And then I would read it, and I’d be like, “Oh yeah, that’s way better. Oh yeah, that happened. So I really think the book is like all the better for it because we both riffed off each other so much, and we each have different memories, and you know, and and neither of us have any ego built into how we were as moms. Like we just we knew how terrible we could be sometimes, and how we messed up. So, you know, that’s kind of all over in the book. So that you might read it and think, okay, maybe me forgetting to pick up my kid at soccer yesterday isn’t gonna isn’t gonna end it for them. Maybe they maybe they will live to see another day.

Heather Bennett  32:56  

They’ll survive. They’ll get jobs. It’ll all work out. Absolutely, absolutely. Okay, so let’s talk about the book. Where do you get the idea? What What was the impetus to say? Okay, we need. We should write a book.

Beth Mazza  33:09  

I think the impetus was we were, you know, kind of having our round of we’re leaving and the firm that we had sold into, and we really loved our the people that work for us, and and they are all still there, like thriving, right? Which is the coolest thing that you ever want to see. And so I think we just started to tell stories, and people were like, “That’s a ridiculous story. Like they wouldn’t have known that, you know. I was in this like super important meeting with the largest newspaper in the world, the entire board, and like I kept getting calls, kept getting calls, kept getting calls. I walked out. The nurse from my kids’ high school was like, “Your daughter has period cramps. I was like, “Okay, well, why don’t you give her Advil? I can’t because you didn’t sign the form. I’m like, “Could you sign, send it to me electronically? No, we don’t do that. So I’m like, “Put Ave on the phone. You know, Ava, go in the bathroom right now. Take the anvil in your backpack. They told me I can. You can. I really gotta go. You know. There’s all these stories like that. So we people were sort of saying like someone that was with me in that meeting was like, “Oh my God, that’s what you went out of the meeting to do. I’m like, “That’s what I went out of the meeting to do. And she said, “It looked like you had another really important client call. I was like, “Yeah, no, it was Avis period. So I think when we started talking to people that we knew about those stories, they were like, “You got to figure out how to get those in a book. And we thought, “Well, we’re never writing a memoir. That’s the dumbest thing, and no one will buy it. Well, some publishers were like, “Can’t you turn this into a how-to and you just kind of pepper it with these stories, so that’s how we ended up. And the funny thing, Heather, is is that we sat down. We’re like, okay, if we really had to give someone a how to, what would the steps be? It took us like seven seconds, and we had the power moves. We were like, this is exactly what they would do. So I think once we did that together, we’re like, okay, there’s something good here, and and. Maybe a something that we grew up in really entrepreneurial families, so like we were always surrounded by this, and so we our audience very much was a super smart woman who was a mom, but hadn’t grown up the way that we did and didn’t have each other, and so we wrote really to that ICP, you’re really smart, but you don’t know some of the basics about you know how do you find your total addressable market before you decide if you’re going to start a business? So it it the the goal of it was it just flowed once we started talking about that.

Heather Bennett  35:29  

I love hearing that and and you know the state of flow when when you’re a writer is just amazing. I when I was writing my book, there was one day I was sitting at a kitchen counter on a stool. It was not exactly comfortable, but I put my head down, started typing because I was trying to get through a chapter, and put my head up when I finished and looked over. And I’d been writing for five hours and no idea. Wow! And

Beth Mazza  35:54  

that is like that’s gold, right? Especially because you have four kids, so that’s gold that you got into flow, and everything in the world didn’t end too.

Heather Bennett  36:03  

Right, right. I found that cross country trips on airplanes great times to write. Okay,

Beth Mazza  36:09  

you will love this. That was what I wrote so many of the books because at the time I was living in Chicago and I have a house out here in San Francisco and Sonoma. This you are going to love this. So last weekend I was I spent a weekend with my best girlfriends and coming back to San Francisco, I went through Denver to go home on a plane with my best girlfriend because we could get three hours of unadulterated chatting, and we did. I mean, that’s probably not how they should advertise air travel, but you are right. It is like unadulterated something. You can get it

Heather Bennett  36:41  

done. No interruptions. That’s great. That’s great. I you know this has been fantastic, Beth. I do have one last question, but before I ask it, actually, there’s two questions I want to ask. One, who is this book intended for? Who, like, if you were to say someone like this, so that when people hear you say it, they’ll be like, “Oh, I know someone who should read this book.

Beth Mazza  37:06  

Yeah, you’re a mom or an aspiring mom. You’ve been in corporate for a couple years. You’ve got an idea and an ambition, and you’re not sure what to do next, or you have an amazing side hustle, and you need the push forward to turn that side hustle into that seven-figure business. Just, just your your your mind is open enough to read

Heather Bennett  37:35  

1. Awesome. Okay, that’s very helpful. So, my last question, and before I ask it, I want to point people to your website@femalemaververicks.com, which will have all the information on the book and and where it’s at, or of course to reach out to you on LinkedIn. So my final question is: What is a hard lesson that you learned while starting and growing your companies that you would like other CEOs to avoid through your advice.

Beth Mazza  38:08  

Make you yourself being wrong standard practice every day. I’m wrong, and this me being wrong is either a micro pivot or a macro pivot, but I’m wrong all the time. Feels to me like you know I didn’t have any problems with that because I made so many mistakes. But it feels like when I talk to really smart women, top of their class, they moved up the corporate ladder so fast. They they don’t want to be wrong. They look at it as weakness. I look at it as the minute you identify you’re wrong, you’re strong, you’re fine, and honestly, if you can’t do that, I don’t think you can be an entrepreneur. I think that people always ask our entrepreneurs hardwired. I don’t think they are unwillingness to say, “Oh my God, I’m wrong. I got a macro pivot right now. I think that’s probably what makes a winning entrepreneur.

Heather Bennett  39:04  

I would agree with that. I think you need to have that ability to take failure as a learning moment and move on. and And that’s an entrepreneur is just go for

Beth Mazza  39:15  

1. And like, just you’re you’re agile. You’re just moving. Okay. Well, I’ll think about how dumb that mistake was later because I gotta fix it now,

Heather Bennett  39:23  

and definitely having that that energy to to go for it. Yeah, just right, right, great. I’ve been talking with Beth Mazza, founder, newsletter editor of the Founders File, and co author of Entrepreneur Like a Mother, which is such a great title, Beth. Thank you so much for sharing your story and experience. I look forward to our next conversation.

Beth Mazza  39:49  

Me too. Thank you so much, Heather. I really enjoyed it.

Outro 39:57  

Thank you for listening to the Growth + Exit Podcast, sponsored by Newport, a unique national business advisory firm. If you enjoy this show, be sure to share, like, and subscribe for future episodes.