EP 73: The Monsters Under The Bed Are Real
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My name is Joanne Bolt, and I am intent on helping women stop playing small in their businesses, get out of the messy middle, and into profitability.

I'm a Southern mama with a snarky attitude who built a $56 million real estate empire just to prove I could, and now I work from home and run a seven-figure immersive coaching business, all while sipping coffee in my fuzzy slippers. Together, we'll uncover the tried and true tactics to building a business you love while giving you the real deal on how to make them work for you so that you can get out of your way and into action.

Is it all rainbows and unicorns? No way. So put your big girl panties on and get ready because we'll dive into it all from failures to success to money and emotions and everything in between. Think of this as your girlfriend's guide to business. Grab your coffee or pour yourself a punch bowl of wine because this is the B Word Podcast.

Hey friends, thanks for listening in. I'm in the middle of reading Chasing the Bright Side by Jess Ekstrom. And on the cover of the book, it says, embrace optimism, activate your purpose and write your own story.

So today's episode is going to be quite different from anything you've heard me do before. I'm going to dive in and tell you the raw, juicy details of my truth as it's been written throughout the last couple of years. Now I will warn you, this episode could be triggering. And if you have children in the car under the age of 18, I highly recommend you mamas, this may not be the episode you want them to hear. So I give you

permission to hit pause, skip this one. If you are someone who may be triggered, or you do have those small children who could be listening and join me again next week, when we come back to the type of episodes I normally do, but it really is laying heavy on my heart this morning that there's someone out there that needs to hear this story. So let's dive in.

Now you all know by now that I started my career out as a consultant with Accenture Consulting, and that really fueled my heart because it allowed me to pop into people's lives and

help them with one aspect of their business in the consulting world and how you do things. You're never there for a long period of time. You're only there for specific small things that are, you know, you're driving in your lane in essence. And so I never got bored with it until I discovered one day that it just wasn't going to be the career that would allow me to have the family that I wanted to be the wife to Jeff that I wanted. And so I quit right

And on the airplane home from my last project, I knew I had to do something. And I shared with you that I just kind of fell into real estate. It was one of those things that I thought, well, I don't know what I want to do when I grow up. So I'll go be a real estate agent in the meantime while I'm figuring it out.

And 20 some odd years later, I was still in real estate. However, what you don't know about the story is there was a six year gap period. And I'm not talking about that gap period you take in between high school and college. I'm talking about the one that occurred in 2006 when I was named one of Atlanta's top 20 realtors in their twenties. Oh my gosh. Was I so thrilled by that?

I mean, we all would be right. Like you get a major award like that from a magazine and you're in your twenties and you're making all kinds of crazy money and you're super successful as a real estate agent and you have to pat yourself on the back.

The problem was someone else took a look at that magazine and thought, Hey, she makes a lot of money. I mean, let's be honest. They were right. I was making stupid cash at that point, but they decided to take advantage of that. So this part of the story began the first week of April, 2006. I got a call from a potential buyer who claimed that he was a referral from a past client of mine.

Now, full disclaimer, this guy was a con artist. He did not know my past client, although he did name drop that past client. And to this day, I don't know how he figured that piece out because it was 2006 and we didn't quite have as much access on the internet as we do now. But he told me he was a referral and could I meet him to go look at homes? To which I quickly told him, I am so sorry. I don't know you. I am happy to meet you in my office. And

He agreed, we made an appointment and he showed up in the office. Here's where a lot of real estate agents want to immediately assume things went wrong. They assume I met this guy at an open house or an empty house without ever having met him before.

So I want you to take note of the fact that I met him in my office, in the conference room at the Keller Williams Realty. Should have been super safe, right? Oh no, that's where things went wrong. After giving me a fake driver's license, which I did put on the photocopier and make a copy of, after walking me through a fake loan approval and showing me fake bank statements for the cash that he could afford this home that he wanted to go look at,

He said, now can we go see the home? Well, obviously I told him, you know, I loved meeting with him. I loved finding out what his intentions were, his story, what he was looking for in a home, but he wanted to see something well over a million dollars. And that's just not the type of home that you can call at the last minute and go see. So I would need to make an appointment for him. How about the next day at two o'clock? I remember vividly saying this. He pulled a gun out on me at that point.

And said, nope, we are leaving right now. And then he proceeded to tell me that if I made any noise, if I asked for any help, if I alerted anyone to what was going on, he would open fire in the office and kill every real estate agent around me. My heart froze. My brain froze. I didn't know what to do. And that's when instinct just kicked in. And so I got up and I walked out of the office with this man.

Would you have done something different? I don't know. None of you do know because you weren't there. All I can say is I went with my gut and did what I felt was right at the time. It was either walk out of the office and potentially not make it back, or he was probably going to open fire right there in the office.

So we got in my car and we started driving around. He had a eight inch knife, like a hunting knife pressed up against my side. And what really conspired then was he just wanted my cash. He had read about me being one of the top 20 agents in Atlanta in the magazine, and he wanted in on the money. So we drove around for about four and a half hours. Mind you, we visited several ATMs.

I empty bank accounts. I charged on to my credit card to pull money out of the ATM. FYI,

All credit cards have this limit that you can take out at any given time. I think at the time, most of my credit cards had a limit of like $1,500. They do that to protect you from getting robbed. The problem for me was he wanted more than $1,500. And so we kept having to pull out every credit card that I had at the ATMs and call for the pens in order to get the cash out, which is probably why the whole thing took four and a half hours of my life.

We even went to a jewelry store at one point when he got frustrated with the little amount of cash I actually had availability to pull out. And we walked in him pressing that knife up against my side where no one could really see it. And we bought two Rolexes. I mean, maxed out my credit cards buying these Rolexes. I guess he figured he could just pawn them later.

As we got back into the car and he was pretty much finished getting everything out that he could from me, we started driving back down the interstate and he had a friend who was following behind us in the car and they had been talking on the phone the entire time on speaker so I could hear them. And they were openly talking about killing me and dropping me off on the sidewalk.

I have no idea really if they intended to do that or not. By the grace of God, they decided to drop me off in a CVS parking lot and they told me to count to 100 and then they drove off in my car. I walked a mile and a half from that parking lot back to my realty office in high-heeled shoes with no cell phone, no purse.

No driver's license because he took that. All of my jewelry was gone. The only thing I had was my shoes and the outfit that I was wearing. That's it. And it was like by this point, 8 p.m. at night. So again, by the grace of God, someone was actually at my real estate office. My broker was and I was pounding on the door because I just needed some help at that point. I needed someone to get me home.

And from there, the broker called the police. We called my husband to let him know that I was okay. Cause he was of course worried when I didn't show up at home and a lot of other things conspired after that. Here's where I wanted to really tell my truth. It, that was obviously traumatic. It is one of those one in a million things that you think is never going to happen to you until it does. But here's the truth of it. I came back from that.

Now it took me six years, hence the six year gap. I tried to go back into real estate for, I mean, maybe a hot second of like 30 days. Couldn't mentally do it. Actually ended up working for my sorority in recruitment because 18 year olds going through rush are entertaining and fun. And quite frankly, not scary unless it's three o'clock in the morning and they're all like wired and tired. And then, yeah, it can get scary, but in a completely different and fun way.

But it took six years of a lot of therapy, a lot of growing as a person and a lot of figuring out what I wanted to do in order to be able to come back into real estate.

Now I did come back into real estate in 2014 and I did it mainly to prove to myself that I could not because my husband wanted me to, Oh Lord, did he not want me to, but I did not want the one job I had really loved, which was being a real estate to continue to be taken away from me by one man who decided that he wanted what I had and he was going to take it from me.

It was the last piece of therapy you could say. So in 2014, I came back into real estate. I knew I couldn't show homes. I knew I didn't want to work with buyers unless I really, really, really, really, really knew them. And so I immediately started up my team and I grew it quickly to a $56 million a year producing team with me only writing five or six contracts every year along the way. It worked for a while. The problem was my heart really wasn't in it.

I was doing the real estate team to prove to me that I could still make it work in this industry, that I could come back from a traumatic experience, but it didn't feed my heart anymore and my passion was gone. So last year when I decided to launch this podcast and start my company, Roboss Women, it was really that growing time for me in order to figure out what I wanted to do when I grew up.

And that's the beauty of being an entrepreneur. You can change, you can pivot, you can grow from one style of business to another style of business. And there's really no one telling you that you can't besides yourself. So if you are listening here to this episode and you're thinking, I don't like what I'm doing, maybe I'm working that full-time job. And what I really want to be doing is selling hair bows on Etsy or plexus for healthcare or

or want to open a yoga studio, guess what? It's okay. I promise you one thing.

If I could come back from an experience like being abducted from my own office and still make business work, I promise you can do anything you set your heart to. Now, you may not have a trauma in your life like I do, or you may have a trauma that's just as big as I did. That's okay. There are people that can help you get your close support knit group to help you overcome those mental hurdles as well as any other hurdles you have along the way and move the obstacles and do it.

Do it scared. You will never regret being your own boss. If you're in a role and doing something that you love. Yeah. Some days it's more mundane than others. Some days it's not all rainbows and butterflies. And I don't want to check my email or I don't want to get up and do whatever I need to do for the day.

But now I am so happy because I'm finally doing what I really was meant to do. I think all along, let's go back to that first job out of college, the consulting role. If you think about it now, I'm running a podcast. I get to coach and mentor people.

entrepreneurs along the way. And that really is just consulting. If you think about it, my niche was real estate. So yeah, for the first year or so of the business and the first year or so of the podcast, I focused a lot on real estate agents. What's really been the

heavy on my heart as of late is there are so many women entrepreneurs out there that all have the same issues. They all need the same help. There are foundational pieces of running a business that you guys all need. It's not just all real estate agents. So I'm going to give myself permission again to shift and keep doing what I've been doing a little less in the real estate niche and a little bit more just for y'all.

The girls out there that want to be your own boss that need that cheerleader along the way. I got you friend and know you're meant for more. So tune in, stay with me and let's do the damn thing.

Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Before you go really fast, would you please take a second and go and leave me a review here on the B-Word podcast? It really does make a world of difference to how we show up for new people. And to give you a little thank you, because my mama always taught me that you send a thank you note or something in return for a gift.

We have got a free gift that we are changing every single month here on The B Word. So head on over once you've given your review, grab a screenshot of it, and then go to thebwordpodcast.com forward slash review. Upload it for me and I will send you a free gift immediately. Thanks in advance.