What it really takes to build and launch a startup | Ania Rodriguez

Welcome to the Parallel Entrepreneur, where we dive into the minds of entrepreneurs who push beyond the limits of a single business. Learn how these visionaries invite creative synergies to flow between multiple and oftentimes diverse enterprises simultaneously. Whether you're just starting out or managing multiple ventures, you already think outside the box.

And this podcast will inspire you to recognize and tap into the power of parallel entrepreneurship. Welcome to The Parallel Entrepreneur. I'm Mark Cleveland, where today our conversation is with the founder and CEO of JourneyTrack.io, Anya Rodriguez. She's pioneering a customer's first enterprise-grade SaaS experience management platform.

I know I said a lot, but I love those words, enabling organizations to understand, optimize, and prioritize their customer experience. By way of a brief introduction, the experience she's drawing from, for almost two years, Anya was a human factors engineer at Pratt & Whitney. She spent seven years consulting with IBM on customer experience and branding, and then at the helm of her own consulting company, 16 years ago, she started Key Lime Interactive, where she drove innovation in customer experience research and development.

Now chairwoman of the board, she understands how brands struggle to deliver the seamless journeys that customers demand across physical and digital channels, geographies, demographics, and more. In this episode, our featured parallel entrepreneur, Anya Rodriguez, will share how she recognized the opportunity to start JourneyTrack almost four years ago.

Welcome, Anya, to the parallel entrepreneur. Thank you, Mark. It's great to be here today. You know, I feel most alive when I'm building something new. Give me a sense of what makes you feel most alive and what fuels your passion. I feel most alive when people really have a good experience with whatever product or service.

It just makes me, you know, just feel happy and knowing that they can have a great experience. I also feel most alive when I am selling and beating my competitors. We talked about that earlier. I mean, literally, it felt like I was talking to a gladiator trainer. She was like, I want to get in there and mix it up. Tell me more about that.

You're beating your competitors. How and why? Yeah, we're the newest kid in the block. And, you know, we really relied on, you know, all my years of experience to build this along with a lot of team members here and our customers. We had 15 enterprise customers really work with us to create that at the beginning, right, over four years, five years ago at this point.

And I just feel we now have like something that is amazing. I feel like we are probably the best experience out there. We know we beat our competitors because ours is the easiest one to use. It really fits our mental models. It's really neat to demand. So it feels good to be like the youngest kid and the one that's beating everybody.

Now it's like the first horse in the race, if you will. Yeah. Fastest technology, the greatest user experience, and you're actually coaching your clients in their product design, in their customer delivery on how to serve, meet, and exceed brand expectations that they're trying to develop into their product, right? Yeah, right on. That's exactly right. So yeah, we're doing it really, honestly, not as a consultancy, but really just a value add.

We are highly ranked on G2, the highest against even our competitors. That's where our customers tell you what they think. And it's really around our customer experience that we deliver to our customers and giving them education, giving them help when they need it. Quite frankly, I think that's what makes us most successful.

We listen to our customers more than our competitors. There's a nugget. A common theme in all my interviews with parallel entrepreneurs like yourself is the importance of listening. Tell our listeners a story about how your customer journey mapping system opened the eyes of decision makers. And what was the nugget that they picked up when they were listening to you? Yeah.

Yeah. There's a lot of really neat things. One of the early things that we did, which is we're the only one that has it integrated as we built in a workshopping capability so people can run workshops in the tool instead of running it in other platforms that are more whiteboarding solutions. And what that did for them, it literally saves them about 50% of post-processing of all that workshop.

That really right there saves them about anywhere from 40 to 80 hours, depending on who it is. And that's amazing. At a click of a button, we could just solve that problem. That was the beginning of what we could do easily to help them. More recently, we built this whole like impact feature, which one of the biggest things that happens in customer experience is customer experience can be thought of as like a you know like a feely kind of you know metric it's not really like revenue which is more business outcome the one thing people struggle with is tying it to roi right and this and this whole field and so we've built in a what's called a journey impact

where it can actually trace from when someone gets some insight they've run through customer interview or whatever it is to the point of they actually create change in the organization by doing some whatever fixes actions they're going to do to the actual impact that it has on whatever metrics, whether they're customer experience metrics or revenue metrics, and they can trace that from the beginning to the end.

So that's amazing because that starts to show that they, they're like their value of that team, which is something that I think has been missed. And a lot of people talk about it and they're like a lot of the C-suite talks about wanting to have a great customer experience, but they don't do a good job of actually delivering on that or knowing how to really what that means.

And so the tool is actually going to, is basically helping them do that. And we're going to keep adding to it as we progress through that. So let me reflect on that. You're creating a workshop environment, which everybody needs to do more workshops. You make it easy and faster, which means they can listen better. And then you're tying the action steps that fall out of that.

Now they could do that at scale, by the way. They could just do it and do it and do it and do it, right? And then you're tying that back to metrics that can point to the ROI. So there's something that occurs to me. We know that entrepreneurs who've done it more than once, like yourself, become serial entrepreneurs. And in your case, they might do it in more than one company at the same time.

You're a parallel entrepreneur. So I think our listeners are interested in what are some of the greatest lessons on this journey that you've learned? So let's see. When I started thinking about building this journey track, right, I was running the consultancy. and.

I do it differently because the first time I started my first company, I did it just pure, pure sweat and blood. Pure guts and... It was going to be a $500 start, right? And fast forward, that grew into a huge company. But one of the things I kept doing and I thought I could do is I thought I could straddle both companies, right?

And so I held on, I think, a little too long trying to straddle two companies. Whereas if I was to do it again, I would have hired my executive team that I have now running the first company sooner or promoted the folks I was going to promote and started to let go of that vine a lot earlier than I did because I feel that I probably held on too long and I could have, what I realized now is the team is thriving without me.

I thought I had to be there, right? So it's every entrepreneur thinks that we have to do this, have to be here. And so long as I kind of set them up and they've been under me for a while, they've been able to thrive really well. So I probably could have let go of the line much sooner. I would have done that. I probably would have been better off in general because I think I was stressing running two companies.

And it's not impossible to run two companies. You're doing it, but you're doing it through empowerment and you're doing it through recruiting and placing the right people in the right teams. We've had a conversation emerge in this podcast where people are talking about, I've got several plates spinning. One plate is spinning and the other plate's spinning really well, but one of them's a little wobbly.

And your attention goes and you pay it to the wobbly one, spin it back up a little bit, make a culture adjustment, make a recruiting adjustment, make a customer journey map change, whatever that might be in your skillset and your talent. And then you have three plates spinning. You have two plates spinning right now really, really well, and your customers love you.

Now you've got a mature consultancy that's knocking it out of the park and you've got this four-year-old journey track IO. I can tell what made you unique early was this grit and competitive nature you have. How do you scale the second company and make sure that you keep the edge that made you and your business unique?

I think it's about hiring the right team, right? And it's been like, so this time around, I feel I haven't gotten 100% right. Let's just call it for that. But at least I had a really great hire for my head of product and a really great hire for my CMO, which have been my rocks during this whole time, right? And as long as you have two really good people behind you that can really sort of take and operationalize things more than, as a CEO, you're not necessarily an operational person. You're more the visionary.

You're the one that's more salesy or that's typically sort of the reality. And so you need the folks that can execute, that can really pull together. And I have that. And so being able to identify, it's been for both companies. I've always had two people at least that I, that I could really highly count on to help me back me up and just, you know, be there.

Right. And so I have that for both companies and, and then that, you know, obviously I have more than that, but it's just, you at least need, in my head, I think you need at least two people. One would be too little because then it's almost like too much risk, but as long as you have two and they're able to kind of work and divide and kind of, kind of pull, then they're able to then take it to the next level.

So people are key. You are investing in those people. People have invested in you. Tell us who are your mentors and how did they influence you? So I have had, I've had a couple mentors. I find for me, I do a lot of these like, you know, entrepreneur leader groups, if you will, where there's forums and things like that.

So I've had that in different phases of my growth. Early with Key Lime, it was the Golden Stacks, 10,000 Small Businesses. Then I did Women's President's Organization, which was really great at that time locally. So I had a group of women that didn't necessarily have exactly my background, the same type of company, but they had the same issues.

No matter what type of business you have, it boils down typically to money issues, people issues mostly, and then other sort of issues. But typically people are sort of a big conversation wherever you're at. Goes back to what we were just saying, having the right people in the right seats and knowing how to operationalize things.

So what I would say, I didn't have necessarily one mentor in the first sort of journey on this entrepreneur thing. I had a lot of groups of people in different pockets. I was also part of Young Entrepreneurs and this and that. So I had a lot of different versions. The second time around, I've had more though. I've had a different version of this, right?

So I still have those type of networks, but now I have specialized folks who are helping me. This is the first time I raised capital. This is the first time I'm doing sort of like a different playbook. When you're in your venture capital money, it's a totally different thing than when your boss, if you will, right? And no one to be accountable to.

But I actually enjoy that. I actually like being accountable and having folks that I can rely on and lean into because what I find so awesome is each of the different VCs that are part of my cap table, they give me someone that I can play into, that I can lean into, hey, I have questions on this and this and this. And if they don't know it, then they ask one of their other companies or they know somebody.

And that's amazing because they're they're also part of your story so they want to see you succeed so it's very different than when you're with a mentor that they may introduce you to somebody else but here they have like they have a vested interest too, This is, it sounds like you're building a wisdom network. And so tell me, how do you implement and measure mentoring in your companies?

Is there a formal process for that? Yeah. So we do, in fact, and we also do it, we do it internally and then we do it externally as well. So internally we have, in the journey track, it's a much smaller sort of playbook than Key Lime, right? But but we have not only do we have like, you know, sort of depending on who is who's a manager, some mentoring level happening there.

We also have sometimes external consultants like we have a sales consultants that that works with my sales team to help to coach them, to mentor them, to make sure that they're sort of rehearsing and doing, you know, role playing of sorts. And practicing, practicing for the game, right? Practicing for the game. And then and Keyline is the same. And we also give back to the community.

We do like we just did one recently and we basically open it up and we say, hey, do you want to sign up to learn about how to become a researcher or how to become a manager or how to go into consulting? And we have people sign up who really want to learn about the career or like are switching over or looking for things that they come in and they sign up.

We do that, you know, at least once or twice a year. So that's more of a bigger play. And I get people off to do that, to do, to be part of that. So if you're running a startup and you're building, you're actually considered an influencer and a pioneer in this phenomenon where our culture is finally really starting to see really spectacular results from spectacular female leaders.

And you're a part of that trend. It's been a long time coming. Tell me, how do you find your inspiration? That's another expression of your competitive instincts. How are you finding success, getting capital, building this wisdom network, and being the leader that you are? Yeah. Yeah. It's, it's, it's fun. It's different. It's harder than I ever expected. It is.

They say it's hard and they say that 2% of women get it. It feels a lot less, honestly, from where I sit. I was just at an event recently and I had, I had met, I had met this VC one time at a dinner and this is that type of person I am. It's saying this, but it's kind of funny because she, she introduced me like this on this panel.

She's like, I met her at a dinner. She said, hey, if you're ever in New York, call me. I said, okay. When you say that to me, you better be careful because I will find you when I'm in New York. And so I'm in New York, sure enough. And I got there and I said, hey, I'm in New York. Tell me who should I meet? And she was walking in the street. She basically was like, who is this?

I had met her a couple of weeks before. And I was like, yeah, we met at dinner. She's like, oh, okay. So she actually did follow through and set up like a meeting or two for me. But she remembers that because sometimes people will tell you things and they think they're just saying it, you know, passing just to be nice.

And if for me, you say that to me, you better hope that I'm not in New York because if I am, I'm going to take you up on that. And so that's the, I think you need to have that. You need to be, have a little bit of gutsy. If people offer you something, be willing to take them upon it. Yeah. I think people are trying to help each other far more than we know.

Wouldn't that have been a shame had she extended that invitation to you and then your self-talk said, oh, she doesn't really mean it. I'm not going to do that. And And isn't it great that she extended that invitation to you? You seized it, followed up, and then you're in New York and you had a wonderful time. Contrast that with what does a typical day look like for you?

The startup, you know, I wouldn't call you a startup. I'd call you an upstart at four years old and you're beating everybody. But what does a typical day look like for you as the CEO of JourneyTry? I spend a lot of time now just working on partnerships, meeting all their agencies and folks, maybe top level executives sometimes, but just really having conversations with leaders, trying to align with them, understand what they're doing.

And then just, I'm still involved in some levels, certain sales. We have some pretty large fortune hundred, if you will, that we're working with. Those types of things sometimes involve a C-suite executive. So I'm in those conversations, but yeah, I'm, I think for me, I'm just really focused right now on, And, you know, I think a better way to, certain ways to grow is to find people who are in your field, who are thought leaders and just kind of keep aligning with those.

There's at least 25 in my field that I need to know. And so I've been working through getting to know all 25. And that's not just one conversation. That's usually talking to them at least once a month. And that takes some of my time. I'm curious, you're operating at a high level of energetic expression. When you feel depleted, how do you restore your energy?

Have three younger kids and so I spend time with them I have a cute little seven-year-old who is just what's with eight and he's he always tells me mom it's the best day ever and that kind of stuff just he's such a positive energy I just got to go sit with him for five minutes and I'm like yay it's the best thing ever but um and then my middle child is just like super creative I just enjoy them and my 16 year old this is now becoming her own person and you know I just spend time with them.

And then I like to cycle, ride my bike. I like to do Pilates and things like that. And it helps me kind of center a little bit. And then I've been starting some meditation practices with my husband and that's just newer to us. But, you know, they always say to do that. I was one of those that didn't think too much of that, except now I feel like as, you know, just all the stressors come to life, you kind of need a little bit of that.

And so we've been starting to do some practices there. Fantastic. I find that the meditative practice helps me calm my mind and then my mind solves problems without the gibberish. I do yoga with my wife, hot yoga every day. And it has been such a blessing. It's a moving meditation and it helps me find inspiration. Do you find inspiration?

It sounds like you find inspiration in your kids and inspiration in your team, increasingly perhaps in a meditative practice. How does inspiration, how does that come to you? Yeah, I love when I'm with people. I think for me, it's people. Recently, we just met up as a team we're all remote and and so we met up and it's just those moments that i'm just like together i think i find i find energy with people i'm i'm definitely an extrovert although i can be an end of virtue like that's why i think i like selling too because i love the connection i feel like you know selling is just about building connections not about really selling it's just about people like really

getting to know you and then they buy because it not because they like you because they want they want to be you know part of what you're doing so you uh You're building a momentum in JourneyTrack, and you're building a team, but you're also describing the capital raise as that was a challenge. Tell us a little bit about your advisors in this growth, capital growth process, and how do they play in assisting you, putting the right other investors together? other.

We always know that toxic investors are a problem. That's obvious. But great investors could lead to other great investors. How has that played out for you, Anya? When I first started, that's interesting. One of the powerhouse women who sold over a hundred million dollar company, who is one of my mentors and one of those group of women, she basically sat me down.

She's like, oh, so you're thinking of doing this, this raising. And I'm like, yeah, she's like, she's like, maybe, you know, maybe you should have, quite frankly, maybe you should have a guy do this, you know, just because it's seeing what she had seen right in her version of it. I think that was her lesson to me. And she's like, maybe you should have, my husband's a Wharton grad, you know, he's a CFO.

So, you know, maybe you should have Alex, my husband, do it. And while I love my husband and he's my partner in crime, for me, I was like, no way. I'm not doing that. I'll tell you this. I've had many other women, even VCs tell me that they would agree with that statement. And I think there's certain levels that I think I would have raised a lot sooner, quicker, but I feel like when I found Nitin, it was just perfect.

I think he was the perfect partner to find for that, to like ease all those anxieties that I had with doing pitches with a lot of VCs that were just like, if you looked at the companies they invested, it was just purely men, men, men. And you see that and you think there's no way that is really happening. It is so stacked against you, you know, as a woman.

So when I found and he opened his sort of folks in, I was able to find another VC that came into the deal. Once I had him locked in, another one came in as well. You know, it was hard to find the first one, right? The lead investor, right? And then there you find those that were really just, you know, there was a couple of VCs that are like, yeah, yeah, when you come and find your lead, we'll come back and we'll be, we're interested.

And you sort of mark them as a soft yes. But as soon as I did. And they're like, well, maybe not. And then it goes back to the same things. I was just like, wow, this is so interesting. And what was really frustrating for me is I'm used to closing multimillion dollar deals, right? That's not crazy for me, right? And so I thought it was going to be similar to just winning a multimillion dollar account.

I thought, well, this is just like what I've done in the past. And raising was about 3 million. It was tough. It was tough. I was raising during a time where everything slowed down, right? Everybody stopped raising at the same speed like I had. I had done it in 21, 22 when I first formed the company. Um i would have been in a better position but back then i thought oh i put about a million dollars of our own money into this right and i thought i want to hold on to as long i already had like big clients like google using the platform so i thought i wanted to hold on as long as i could to go have a really strong seat but what happened in 23 20 you know when 22 23 if you will

is that you know everything shifted right and so that made it really hard i think especially to raise during that time. And now it's even probably worse because everybody's struggling with raising, even the VCs are struggling to raise capital right now. What a terrific answer. This is almost a teaser for one of our future episodes with Nitin Ray, the CEO and founder of Elevate Capital.

And as I was reflecting on my earlier comment about him, he likes his thesis. And it's fascinating is I like to find underestimated entrepreneurs. And you were one of those. And we'll talk to it and soon. In the meantime, clearly you have built a team with advisors and investors around these principles. Talk to us about your North Star. What would you say is Tanya Rodriguez's North Star and your principles around which you are building and maintaining multiple organizations at the same time?

So for this company, the North Star is really, it goes back to that whole ROI of CX perspective, right? And providing value. The North Star for the other company is to really humanized customer experience and get research and that perspective, um, back to customers and understanding of their customers. To me, the North star of it all, right.

Is, um, it's really to, to build, um, to build, to build impact. I think when I first was a younger entrepreneur, I was about, I think it was more about like, can I do this? And then I was like, can I get to 5 million and not, you know, can I get to 10 and whatever that version of it was. Now it's about building impact building something that really shifts and really helps uh people you know connect and be together because if you think about what the platform at its very core does it allows teams to connect to to to visualize together to humanize what that you know end-to-end experience is supposed to be like and i think that that's probably my north star right there it's it's about humanizing the experience it's about

it's about creating like change and building the next cloud for us to experience. Yeah. So the big SWOT is listening and participating in the little things like what are you committed to doing a little bit less of right now or just a little bit more of? I find that those little course corrections as you gain wisdom and insight and experience with your business, what are you trying to do a little bit more of or a little bit less of right now?

More of strategic setting. I think now we're over getting initial 50 customers. It's been a while that flew over for that. But now let me step back a little bit here. So in my world, this is a brand new category of tools called journey management. There is what they call journey analytics, and then there's journey orchestration.

And then there's a very basic customer journey mapping. So it's almost like four tiers, the different types of software. What I did, which is good for listeners to know is I found the wedge into this world, right? There was still a little bit of a white space because there was competitors, but they weren't doing a great job as is, right?

They were really not meeting enterprise needs. So I found an area of, you know, this sort of ecosystem where it was easy for me to come in as a new player, right? And it wasn't crowded just yet and really sort of set pace and just focus on really building a great, you know, user interface and customer experience within the app.

So it would be super easy to use and they would sort of push it. Right. And so as I'm wedged in into this sort of ecosystem, there is, there's now like layering of different types of information my customers want me to create in. And what's really neat but what's happening is in the U.S. Especially we're not as mature in our practices for customer experience whereas Europe and other areas of the world now I see that there are a lot more in certain ways so what it what the software is doing it's exact I'm meeting them exactly where they're at right now but it gives me enough runway where I can build in the other layers because when people think that they want journey analytics do they think oh

we want something that is able to anticipate what I want next step, right? The reality is, is. People haven't even figured out what they're currently doing and what they want it to look like. So saying that you want to just have something be super personalized, they're not there yet from like an internal strategy alignment perspective.

So our software meets them and allows them to do that piece of work, which is giving me enough of that runway so that as we continue to layer and build in some more integrations and analytics, that will meet them as they sort of move up that maturity. Now, even the more mature companies, they still need this because they're still trying to realign and things like that.

So it's a really perfect spot to be in as we're evolving in this sort of ecosystem. Interesting. And you can't have a conversation about technology these days without referencing AI in some way. And I've had some conversations with AI experts in my routine practices with clients, and they're telling me about some of the things that AI can do and can't do.

And yet what I'm hearing you say there might be, regardless of what the tool would do, if you haven't done your strategic homework, if you haven't really understood where you are and where your customers are and really where your customers want to be taken, it's difficult to sort of just, you can't throw technology at a human problem.

You have to have processes, right? Speak a little bit to me about how you see AI serving that role today or how it's on your bench for executing that next level of strategic analysis and how do you bring those things together? So we're using AI to help accelerate certain tasks that might be time intensive, that reality as machines can do better.

I think the strategic thinking still has to be thought through by humans. So I think there's like a human AI sort of version of where things are. What's interesting, one of our customers, Google, has a case study, which we have on our website, that talks about how they're using our platform to help them determine internally when they're going to use AI or not.

So they're building their internal employee journeys, right? Because it's not just customer journeys, it could be employee journeys. And, you know, trying to be really delicate about when they're going to be using AI to replace the process. That's part of people's change management and workforce kind of day to day. So it's just part of your job that you are holding on to.

And all of a sudden, AI takes over. It's super scary for people. And so the way that they've done this is they kind of laid out what the employees, what they do on certain tasks, and then really identify areas that just is not part of their or day-to-day that they can use AI, but they've used a tool to sort of identify those areas, right?

And then as they build that, they sort of still measure through time how employee. Engagement, employee satisfaction, et cetera, et cetera, to see if it's really sort of really looking at it from a holistic perspective. Because I think often people just jump and say, well, we could just take over with this with AI, but there's just so much impact that it could great to just your culture, to your customer base.

And so you kind of have to balance this. And I think the folks who are taking a real thoughtful approach to doing this are going to be in a better place than those that just throw in everything they can just because they can. It's an easy tool to grab. It's a difficult tool to trust. And it's an incredibly difficult tool to deploy currently.

Yeah. So your experience back as a human factors engineer at Pratt & Whitney, I just find that curious. I want to resist going and asking lots of questions about what a human factors engineer is at Pratt & Whitney. But I noticed from our conversations, you saw synergies and opportunities, and then you did the research and you started selling research.

You're in the customer experience research business today. And then now you're in the applied solutions business and you're seeing those synergies play out. And now what I just heard is you've got customers experimenting and communicating with you in what their experimentation looks like. And I have this sort of question that I always want to ask is how do you stay agile and open to experimentation?

And yet it seems to me like that's the world you live in. And is it a constant world of experimentation? Do I have that right? Yeah, you got it exactly right. I love it. I thrive in that. I think I follow that shiny object, if you will, but I thrive in just exploring where there's opportunities. And I'm always just thinking ahead a little bit of the curve, right? I can see things a little bit better in certain ways.

I'm not scared about trying new things. I'm very technology forward. It's in that perspective. And I think that's what's given us in both companies. and edge, right? It goes back to the earlier point. We listen and then we figure out how we can solve that quickly, right? For our customers. If you do that right, which is, I think, what's helped us a lot through the years, it helps your customers.

Because at the end, I always say this, you know, if you think about there's a whole jobs to be done framework and people are like, they have one job at the end as a consultancy, as a technology company, your job is to basically make your customer look really great to their bosses, right? And so as long as you do some version of that.

You're good. And as long as you do it better than they do somewhere else, you're, you're better off, you know, for me, as long as you're like three or four pages ahead, your competitors are maybe one page ahead, you got to be three or four. And as long as you're figuring out what's next step and being very mindful, you're usually seen and trusted. And as long as you're successful, you can't just be like running around and muck either.

Let me clarify that. But I think if you, as long as you are strategic enough to think of all perspectives really quickly, and then think of all the risks involved and kind of weigh those risks and say, okay, we can shift out this way. You know, you mentioned that there was some lessons in, had you gone to the market earlier to raise capital in your startup journey, you might have had a different experience.

I spent a lot of time in the M&A growth advisory space, and we are always asked a similar question on the other side of that. Someone will say, hey, Mark, when is it time to sell the business? And my answer is whenever someone needs it or wants it worse than I do. And here you are penetrating a new industry, but with established players and you raised your capital.

You have, I'm sure, an exit plan or you are working toward goals. So what lessons did you learn on the way to this moment that inform how you decide when it's time to exit and how will you see those signals? Yeah, that's a really great question, Mark. from. If you have a successful business, you're always going to be seeked, especially like investors, private equity, especially the consultancy.

And because it's like the older business. And so I'm like way above where I thought I was going to exit. How about that? When I first started that consultancy, I thought, oh, I want to get to five. I want to get to 10. Way above that. Right. So like, what do you do then? Right. I realized as I matured as an entrepreneur, for me, the things that have to happen, if I was going to sell that business, I would have to find, like what I felt would need, I would find the right person, if you will, because it's not about necessarily needing to sell.

We're in a really good position. So we're not in that combination. We're like, oh my God, we have to sell and now we're in trouble. But I would have to find someone who I felt could really take it to the next level, right? I think that's where it's at, right? Or my people would be really taken care of. That would be sort of.

To that decision for me, for either company, right? And for neither company at this point, I'm exactly there just yet, right? And so for me, I'm still building, especially the second company. I'm very much at the beginning of the building phase, it feels like. And so it would have to be, if I was to do anything there, it would have to be a strategic kind of pull to like create something even bigger, together align, because I do want to, I want to ring the bell.

Let's just call it for one another. So how do I get there? Sometimes it is a lot about, you know, having the right merge acquisition or some version of that to get there sooner, right? Than the longer playbook. We'll see. I'm still figuring it out. I wonder such a high degree of competence and confidence. You know, it may not be related to time. I think that's a big piece of my own personal lesson.

I've spent longer in business A than I should have. I got out of business B sooner than I should have. I didn't ever really have a time horizon to say, by this date, I'm going to have done that thing. I do think that might be a pretty typical mistake that people make is putting artificial deadlines on objectives and outcomes.

And when you recognize it, you know you're there, but you're not in any time crunch to get anything done. And I love what I'm learning from you about just this sense of I'm here, I'm innovating, I'm teaching my people, I'm mentoring my people. We've got a charitable organization. I enjoy leading that and then recruiting people to set me free to go take on my next adventure.

So if you could talk to your younger self with this wisdom of today on you, what's the first thing you'd say to your younger self? I would have started the second company sooner, for sure. I would have done that way earlier in that entrepreneurial journey. In fact, year two, I could have. I had an idea. I just, I just didn't know how to raise capital. I didn't know any of that.

Right. I think that's what stopped me because I, um, I wasn't there financially yet to, to do that, to, to get, to sort of start my own sort of first million in, if you will. But I would have educated myself on how to raise capital earlier. And a younger version of me would have taken that play a lot sooner because the, um, the reality is if you do it just, you know, old school, the way that I built the other business, we had like, well, frankly, we haven't done any mini activity at all.

So it's all organic growth takes 15, 16 years, you know, to get to a good number, right? I think about what, you know, journey track is already doing in year four. It's basically equal to the other one, you know, from a valuation perspective. So net, net, you, you think to yourself, what, you know, why did I burn 15, 16 years when I could have done, why did I burn so many years, right? Just trying to do this.

And granted, yes, I own 95% of that other company, you know, that's down, right? 97, but I'm about to give somebody a couple of shares. But 95, let's just say of that other company. And if I sell, that's all my money, not other folks, right? But I think I could have done it quicker and exited and come out and come in and all that jazz.

I probably could have had at least a hundred million dollar consultancy. Now I had have done it differently. If I didn't, I went the slower one, right? I did everything organically. I don't know. But then there was pros and cons to that too, right? You learn along the way and. Yeah, I find living in the rearview mirror isn't a whole lot of help because, you know, you could not, you could have your eyes on the rearview mirror and not in the front windshield.

And, you know, the rearview mirror, it sort of informs you that you celebrate that you're still on the road, you're driving between the lines, you're still headed in your direction. I think that what I'm hearing that is just motivating the heck out of me, the whole reason that we put together this parallel entrepreneur vision was that it's important to recognize that we humans are incredibly creative and you are incredibly creative.

And now with hindsight, you know, you can say to your younger self, I could have done this five times, but the world seems to tell entrepreneurs, stop, wait, focus, grow organic. I think that there are some artificial guardrails around most entrepreneurs that are, I don't know, maybe an investor is saying, focus, focus, focus, or the last book that you read is saying, focus, focus, focus.

All these great business thought leadership books that we have available to us, and they're all putting guardrails on our creativity. And what you've said earlier today, one of the points that I just can't help but emphasize is that you're recruiting people. You're mentoring those people. You're building a human organization.

You're listening. You can go do it again. Isn't that exciting? It's amazing. I love it. I have lots of big tools. Every time it gets bigger and bigger. So watch out. So watch out. Isn't that great? So, all right. Speaking of books, this is the rapid fire section. What's the last book you read? I read more of the business books I've read, Living, what's it called? Oh, my goodness.

It's about Living in the Void or something. Living Untethered? Well, no, not Living Untethered. I've read that one. But no, no, it's the one that talks about, like, we all live in this, like, as entrepreneurs, you're always in the gap. It's like the gaps. In the gap. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. And so I it talks about how, you know, I'm always foot of foot of should of school. I'm living back in the rear rear and eating myself up about what I'm not doing or, you know, thinking about that instead of celebrating that moment saying, wow, this is all the things I've accomplished.

And so it's that book. And I was a that entrepreneur. Now I'm trying to blank his name and I don't have it in front of me, but he he's read a series of books. And I thought that was probably the most impactful of the ones I've read. Sure. Those are great books. We'll put those in the show notes. What book do you want to read next what's on your nightstand i am going through a little bit of a health kick right now so so i'm reading uh books on like understanding my body and just uh, um you know uh you know figuring taking care of yourself taking care of myself yeah so i have the the tony robbins book for like the reversing like you know just about all the things he talks about I have that on my stand and then I

have one around, I have a heart disease in my family. So just making sure I don't have any of that. I have one called reversal heart disease. It's good. Yeah. I think we as entrepreneurs, at least it's true for me, I neglected my health in pursuit of performance, in pursuit of excellence, and I just neglected myself. So it's good to hear you are focused on that.

I want to ask you this. One of my favorite questions is what's the best gift that you've ever given? Given? I think I gave my husband a dog. I love dogs. I gave him a dog. That goes forever, right? Gift of unconditional love from a dog. Perfect. Wow. Oh, my God. That's just fine. What's the best gift you've ever received?

Oh, I'm simple. I actually like the little gifts. I don't like the big things. So my husband gave me this, which I were symbolic of our like little things that, you know, I kind of it's a little hard for our listeners. What is it? It's one of these little hard hands and I like metal little thing. I've also had stuff he's made me.

I don't need the big stuff. I just like the stuff that's meaningful to you also. Something that has heart in it. Well, Anya, this has been a great journey. I'm the father of two daughters, so I personally am thrilled to hear your story of success, your pursuit of your creative gifts, your journey to focus on your personal health and your exploration of meditation and reflection.

And those, I think, are going to be your superpowers as you develop them. It's just such a pleasure to get to know you and to feature what you're doing in the Parallel Entrepreneur journey. Thank you for joining us today. Thank you so much for having me. Hey, thanks for listening to another episode of the Parallel Entrepreneur.

And thank you to our sponsors, partners, and the special team behind the scenes that make it all possible. Be sure to like, follow, or subscribe to our podcast and get the latest updates. And to learn more about this growing community of entrepreneurs, our mastermind and companion program for your Parallel Entrepreneur journey, visit parallelentrepreneur.com.

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