A LOT with Audra

Ep01
===

Audra Dinell: [00:00:00] Okay. Welcome to a lot with Audra. I'm so excited that you're here. This podcast has been a podcast that has been in the making for a couple of years. In 2022, my sweet husband brought me a podcast mic for Valentine's Day. And at the time I had just wrapped co hosting a women's small business podcast here in the Midwest with a local small business owner.

And I had the idea to do something of my own, but I wasn't quite sure what I wanted to do yet. And as an [00:01:00] entrepreneur, if you're an entrepreneur and listening, you know, sometimes life and business just take you in a certain way. And all of a sudden you look up and you're like, Oh my gosh, it has been three years since I've had that podcast, my dusty on my desk.

So I'm just so excited that you're here. Thank you for taking the time to being here and listening with me. So you might be wondering. A lot with Audra. Okay. What, what's the gist? What are we going to talk about? Who is this person? Who is this podcast for? And I'll tell you this, this podcast is for women who have been called a lot.

If you're one of those women, you know how it can sometimes feel. It's a little sneaky, underhanded comment that you might've gotten a time or two when people don't really know what to do with you and your magic and your energy and your strengths and everything [00:02:00] you bring to the room. It's about them.

It's not about you. But it just feels a little slimy when you get called a lot, right? It's a way to say something about you without saying something really negative about you. So this podcast is for women who have been called a lot because your a lotness is welcome here. Your a lotness is loved here.

Your a lot ness is the magic that makes you, you. This podcast is also for women who have a dream inside them, but they are not going for it because they don't want to be labeled a lot.

I have been there ever. I know so many women who have been there. I'm sure you might have been there a time or two. You have something you want to do or something that's on your heart or this idea that just like won't stop tugging at you, but you're worried about what others might think about you.

You're worried about being labeled a lot. [00:03:00] So you just go with the flow. You follow the motions day in and day out, and you're just doing what looks good and is acceptable, and you're just still living with this thing inside of you that you want to let out that feels so exciting and purposeful to you.

So this podcast is also for women who are nervous about being called a lot. And. Lastly, y'all, life is a lot. I am a wife and a mom and a small business owner and have family and friends and so much happening in my world. I know you do too. This is 2025. So we're going to talk about how life and business and all of it.

Even when it's so good can be a lot. So let me tell you a little bit about my journey and my story. So [00:04:00] I own a small business in the Midwest. We have been in business for about four years. However, I have not always been an entrepreneur. I married my high school sweetheart and started my life with like a white picket fence in suburbia and had a corporate job and everything was just really great.

Except I felt just a little restless. So we picked up and moved. We moved to a different state. And shortly after I got to that state, I tried entrepreneurship and I had a really great idea. And I do think if I would have had different skill sets and a different understanding of all the entrepreneurship required, I do think I could have created a It is successful business with that idea, but that idea launched.

I left my corporate job, that idea and business. It wasn't just an idea. It was a business. Oh, it failed. It crashed and burned. And it [00:05:00] gave me such a good lesson about how tough entrepreneurship can really be. Luckily, I found work in an agency setting. So marketing was my background and I'd done corporate marketing and now I got the opportunity to work for an ad agency and I loved the work.

I fell in love with the work and then I got pregnant with my first son, fell in love with that sweet boy, ended up taking another job in another market. Rose up to become vice president of an ad agency there and while There I got the opportunity to do A leadership development program just for women.

And while in my past career, both in corporate marketing and agency marketing moving across the country, I had other opportunities to participate in leadership programs, but nothing. That was just for women. And so this program, I [00:06:00] decided to, walk into the room. I look at the list of the women who are, who are involved in this leadership program in this market that I'm working in as a vice president.

And I'm so intimidated. I definitely get imposter syndrome. And it was just then and there where I decided. I'm, I'm done with it. I'm going to take my mask off because I'm going to be me in this room and I'm going to trust that that's enough. And if it's not enough, honestly, I'll go find another room. But I just took my mask off and through that leadership program with this wonderful group of women.

I formed friendships, women poured into me, they called out my strengths. I got the courage to make the leap and try entrepreneurship one time again. However, it's not that clean. Nothing ever is. So I'm giving you the cleanest version of my story today, I guess, and we'll dig into it later as we [00:07:00] continue together.

But I chose after having my second son, who I also fell so in love with, to leave my job, kind of put a nice little bow on my marketing experience and take some time to just figure out what it is I wanted to do next. Because I knew entrepreneurship was tugging at me. That process took about a year.

I was home with my baby. I was working, doing some contract work. My oldest, I was home with him for a little bit and then he was in preschool, but I really did some digging and was looking and trying to figure out what is it that I want to do? Like what makes me come alive? I want to create a business around that.

It was really important to me to have A business that I loved and I knew entrepreneurship was calling me because I wanted to do something I loved and was passionate about. And I could see in my corporate marketing job and even my agency marketing job, people who really got it, people who are so good at their craft.

And I felt like I was okay. I was pretty good. No one [00:08:00] would, would have said I was. You know, bad at my job or anything, but I could just see these people who were doing what they were meant to do. And I wanted to be one of those people. I wanted to figure out what is it that I am meant to do that really lights me up, that sets my soul on fire.

So I took this year and I did all of these different things to try and discover what kind of business do I want to start. So then It is now the year of 2020 and I have been home with my baby for a year and trying to figure out what kind of business I want to start doing some contract work in the meantime.

COVID hits as we all know, and my husband and I started to consider moving back to our hometown in the Midwest. It had been eight years since we'd left, so we had built lives in Colorado and finally in Hawaii, where, where we were when COVID hit, and had two kids along the way, developed so much as people, grown our careers, and we were considering moving [00:09:00] back to the Midwest.

And I wondered, what am I going to do in the Midwest? And then I remembered that I had this great experience that changed the course of my life, gave me the courage to take a risk. And I started digging and wondering, what does the Midwest have to offer for women in leadership? And I found what I thought was a hole.

So I did what any normal person with ADHD would do and I sold 90 percent of what I owned and bought four one way tickets plus a pet ticket back on a red eye flight from Honolulu to my hometown in the Midwest and rented an Airbnb and started setting up shop, going to work to build this business that I have now.

So. As you're hearing this, I am recording this right before Christmas in 2024. We hit our four year mark this summer. In 2025, we'll celebrate five years in business. So this has been five years in the making [00:10:00] and man, it was a risk, but I was so passionate about This idea and what I was wanting to do for my hometown community, that it, it was worth it.

And I worked so hard for the first two to three years in business, just head down, grind, hustle. I built my team of people who are absolutely amazing. And then this year in 2024, I got a different kind of year. I got a year where I could take a breath and where I could look at the foundation of the company that I built and fill in some cracks that had happened along the way as we were going so fast.

And that's why now feels like the great time to start this podcast that has been a dream of mine for years, because we're at a place where we can do that. It wasn't easy. So I kind of fast forwarded through that journey, but that's one of the thing, things we're going to talk about on this podcast. We're going to talk about how to build a [00:11:00] business.

We're going to talk about entrepreneurship because while I am not an expert at everything, that's for sure. I do have real life experience building a business from the ground up. I have learned so much along the way from the first Two to three years of just straight hustle to this last, foundational year in business, to building a team, to getting to work with over 200 women in the Midwest region and hear about their challenges and their successes, I've gotten to do it.

And I'm just so excited to get to share not only some of my learnings with you, but also I'll bring in my team and you'll get to meet them. And we'll also do some interviews. And we will talk about designing a world, a business, a life that feels really good to you on the inside. Because that's one of the biggest lessons I've learned along the way.

When you go into entrepreneurship, there are so many books and so many people to tell you how to do things. And [00:12:00] that is hugely, hugely valuable. I have many mentors in business, some that know me intimately and some who I've never met that I just listened to on podcasts or read their books. What I discovered along the way is it's not one size fits all.

And for me to feel successful, I have to be in charge of the definition of what success means to me. So I know when I started a business, I cared about being passionate about what I did. I cared about having the time autonomy that I craved as I had little babies in my house and a growing family. And I cared about Helping build my family's financial foundation.

Those were my three big whys. And I've gotten to work with other women who have different values and different whys. And it's just so uniquely up to each one of us, but it also takes a lot of work to figure out like, what is success? What does that mean to [00:13:00] me? Because I'll tell you something, your family has a definition of success.

I mean, your family of origin. Our society has a definition of success, your neighborhood, your friends. There are plenty of people out there who are going to tell you what success looks like. And you have to have a really strong inner compass and voice and knowing of yourself and your strengths and your wants so that you can define what success looks like for yourself.

So we will be talking about that. We're going to be talking about how does it, how to design a life in a business that. is successful to you, how to build that, how to live that. When I started my business in 2020 that year, I made $7,500 and I was so excited. I wouldn't touch any of that money. I left it in the bank account because I was like, I don't know if my business is actually going to stand up.

This is just an idea. And I [00:14:00] hope it provides value to people, but I wasn't sure yet. I hadn't proven My hole in the market. I hadn't proven that this was, you know, a valuable business yet. So the second year I'm starting to get traction, I'm offering. My services and people are starting to respond and I'm feeling like, okay, oh my gosh, this might actually work.

We almost hit six figures my first full year in business. The next three years, we've consecutively hit multiple six figures and are growing. And I'm excited to share with you what I've learned on my journey, doing it my own way. My own way might not be your way. But I will tell you, I have written my own playbook.

Every step along the way, I've gotten off course, I've made mistakes, I've had big failures. I've also had lots of wins and successes, [00:15:00] according to me. I think the biggest thing is having this business has helped me just become more of who I am. In business and in life, it has been such a gift. So I'm excited to get to walk with you all through some of that work.

We're going to talk a lot about values because I believe that knowing our values is greatly, greatly important to everything we're doing in life. One of my biggest values that is also a value of my business is growth. Anyone who knows me well would say that I care about growth, that the lens I look at things are how can I, how can I grow them?

And it's not just about scaling and hustling and making more money and growing the following and, you know, growing, you know, into a bigger house. It's not just about that. It's so much about like the inner growth and the work that we each do to grow ourselves.

We're going to talk about building business. We're going [00:16:00] to talk about creating a culture for your team. I have a team of four. So it's myself and three women, and we have a truly unique culture. So I'm going to bring my team on and we're going to talk about how we built that brick by brick, because it started with me and it started with my vision.

But it continued based on every team member we've brought on board. So I'm so excited to introduce you to my team. I'm a mom. I've got two boys, they're eight and five. So we're going to talk about motherhood. We're going to talk about entrepreneurship and designing a life that feels good to you and motherhood and all things growth.

And we're going to do this every Monday. So I'm going to show up in your ears every Monday this year, hopefully giving you something to think about, something to potentially shift your perspective on. Maybe it's a nugget or a tool to help you grow in your business. Maybe it's just a Conversation that you're just like, [00:17:00] yes, you just put into words for me, something that I have been feeling.

So I am so grateful that you're here and thank you for listening to our intro episode. I'm excited to get started with y'all and a lot with Audra this year in 2025. Really grateful you're here. If you are here and anything I have said today resonates with you, I'd ask that you would please subscribe.

This is a brand new podcast and it takes a lot to get it up and running. So your hitting that subscribe button truly means the world. Thank you all so much and I look forward to talking to you next Monday.