#45 - The Price of Success: A Tech Leader's Shockingly Honest Truth About The Triumphs and Cost of Her Ambition with Jill Rowley
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Welcome back to the InBloom podcast. I'm Ella, and today's episode is going to be so special. We are talking with a legend in the SaaS technology world, a woman who has achieved the success that so many dream of. Imagine joining Salesforce when they were a $5 million company, then becoming their top sales performer and watching them grow to over $300 billion.

Then imagine going on to pioneer social selling, becoming a sought-after tech advisor to companies, and building such a powerful personal brand that you become known as the queen of social selling. That is Jill Rowley's story. And trust me, it's about to get even better. Here's why I wanted to bring this conversation to you. When most people share their success stories, they give you a highlight reel, not Jill. Jill is incredible.

She is so honest and open about everything from how she strategically built her career from day one to how she negotiated her way past obstacles to, and most importantly, the real costs and trade-offs of being in her words, allergic to average. This is the kind of honest conversation that we rarely get to hear from someone who's actually been there. For those of us who want the stellar career, the impact, the fulfillment, this conversation is gold.

Jill today helps us to define success for ourselves because we're not just looking to have a good career. We're looking to build something extraordinary and it's not something that just comes. Today's episode is not about slowing down your ambitions or settling for less. It's about being strategic with your drive so that you can actually achieve more in the long run.

Think of today's episode as your playbook for building a life that is as impressive in reality as it looks on paper. Today, we're going to dive into how Jill engineered her rapid rise in tech sales, the mindset shifts that set her apart from her peers, her strategies for building genuine influence and connections, how to negotiate your worth and set boundaries, and smart ways to think about success when you're playing the long game. What I love most about this conversation is that it goes beyond the usual career advice. Jill is not just successful.

She's allergic to average. She is extraordinarily successful. And she's someone who recognizes the importance of playing a different game than everyone else, winning on your own terms, defining success in your own way. And she's incredibly candid about this whole journey. I'm very, very, very excited for you to listen to this episode and very appreciative to Jill for being so open and honest with her story. Let's get into the episode.

So we're talking a little bit and I want to hear your story. How did you get into tech sales? Because once you got started in tech sales, like, whoa, that that ramped up really quickly. Yeah, that was my my unstoppable journey.

a point. And really it comes down to passion. I graduated UVA in 1994 with an undergraduate degree in business. So first and foremost, I'm a businesswoman who majored in customer, know thy customer, minored in go-to-market. Nice.

My first job out of college was in consulting, and I thought that I would make partner faster than any other woman in the firm. And that was a goal, an aspiration, I should say, and fairly quickly realized that being a partner in a consulting firm was not going to be what lit me up.

was a means to earn really good money at the time. And my real need in life was to be financially independent and never have to rely on anyone, certainly not have to rely on my parents because they didn't have the money or have to get married to support a lifestyle that I wanted to live. And so for me, making money was really important. And I've always been

really wired that way. I cleaned houses when I was 12, 13 years old. I bussed tables, waited tables, stuffed envelopes at my mom's real estate office. I've always been a workaholic. And so anyways, fast forward to, I'm in San Francisco in the Bay Area. This is 2000 and I needed to get out of consulting. I needed to find what was next.

I didn't know what tech or software and premise, I didn't know what those things were. I was in a room at a networking event, a friend's like, you know, just get together and get some smart people in the room at his apartment in San Francisco and having conversation. And there's a guy named Drew Seacrest in the room. And he said with this startup company and we're hiring salespeople. I think it'd be great.

And so he was at Salesforce. He was in the first probably 50 employees at Salesforce. And so I had to get a resume that demonstrated my transferable skills from consulting. And then through the interview process, overcome the objections of me being six years into my career with quota carrying experience, sales experience. Yeah.

And what I had done to prepare at that time, Google was the trusted source. Now, really, it's like I go to chat GPT. I don't Google it. I chat GPT. I go ask Sage. I named her Sage. So anyways, I overcome the objections and I land the job. And without any formal sales training, I make President's Club. The first year I'm there, the second year I was the number one mid-market account executive.

And I was known inside the company across product marketing. We didn't have customer success then. We did have like the beginnings of business development partnerships. And this was back in 2002. In fact, I was actually championing a partnership with Salesforce and Eloqua. Eloqua was one of my customers back.

Look what I had less than 10 employees at the time. And for people who don't know the CRM or the MarTech or the RepTech ecosystem, the names might not be terribly familiar. Everyone knows Salesforce. But I was very early in my career thinking about how systems and data fit together. So I was also very early tapped to speak with our new hire team.

I'm warning. I had an infectious energy for what we were doing because to me, it made all the sense in the world. And why wouldn't a company want to access software via a web browser rather than having to have their own servers and data rooms and

The whole maintenance and upgrade of versions of software, just a horrendous, horrible...

draining, time-consuming and ineffective way to use software. So it all just made perfect sense to me. And as a businesswoman, I knew that it was a value to the customer. And so what was the process of earning the attention of those buyers, of those customers? What was the process? How do we earn the attention? Then how do we earn the right to educate them and sell internally? Because back then selling...

SaaS, putting your customer data in the cloud, oh, that was really just such a huge risk, a career-ending risk. So yeah, I just, I thrived in the environment. I loved every minute of it.

and was really freaking good at it. And I came in learning and listening to the best reps and people at Salesforce. And I left being one of the best that others learned from in such an early, only there for two years. And so proud of, of, of being the learner and, and the teacher.

I love that. I'm going to ask you a little bit more to go into the rest of your story because it doesn't end there. Your successes just keep on compounding and they keep on building from there. But were you always somebody that was like, I'm going to be the best? I'm going to be a badass. I'm going to do these things. And then how did you train that in yourself to have that spirit and that like relentless drive? Because it seems like that's honestly what it was. You were learning and listening and just like going. Yeah.

I think you called yourself a workhorse. Like you were just going. Yeah, I was just going. I had to work harder. I hold myself to a really high standard and I'm allergic to average. And hence why it was not my career path to climb the ladder, to aspire to be a manager, a director, a VP, a CRO, whatever.

The CEO where I, where I exhibited leadership and learned my leadership skills was less about an internal team and hiring and developing and firing. It was more about a movement and a market and an ecosystem and really impact at scale, a bigger, broader reach. And the title evangelist didn't exist.

When I was doing early evangelism, I didn't know what it was. Nobody in the industry knew what it was. We weren't calling it that, but that was really who I was. I was an individual contributor creating a category, driving change in an industry and evangelizing, not the way that it had been done, but the way that it needed to be done, the way that it was possible to be done. Interesting. So

Like from that, could you say and agree with the statement you were playing a different game? Like you saw this game that everybody else was playing, which was like, okay, I'm going to be an AE or I'm going to be a CSM or I'm going to be, you know, this person fit into this role and this is the trajectory of my role. And you're like, no, I'm an individual contributor and I identify value and I identify paths to more value. And like that is as simple as it is.

I'll let you say play the game because I did a talk for high school young women on Monday and high schooler who was facilitating the event Inspire Her is the name of the event Inspire Her and I'm the first in her series.

And it was, you know, in a room, which was great. We had pizza and fresca and kombucha and all of that. We prepped. She was so well prepared in the prep of the topics that we wanted to cover. And we were talking about change because I love to drive change and transformation. I love people to see the potential to do something that is actually right, not what's been done.

And she said it great. She's like, so you have to play the game to change the game. And a lot of people don't like the game. They don't like how the game is played. And so they don't get into the game. And for me, if it's a game that I want to get into that isn't being played the way that I believe it should be played or could be played, I have to get into the game to change the game. How did you come to understand this?

I'm 52 years old. You know, it's a lot of marks on my back. I'm very, very comfortable being uncomfortable. And I glorify failure. If you go to my LinkedIn profile, the piece of content that is highlighted is Jill Rowley fired by Oracle. So I glorify it. I want to talk about it.

You know, I'm in the startup world for 24 years and I invest in startups. I am an LP at two different venture capital funds and 90% of startups fail. You know, like there's maybe two or three books, maybe a podcast here or there that talks about why startups fail. We celebrate and put on a pedestal all the success stories.

But what we learn the most from is failure. That's how we learn to do things better, to do things differently, to try a different approach, to pivot, to adapt, to all of those things. So for me, let's talk about failure. I'm going to eat it for breakfast because I'm going to dine on success for dinner. So yeah, that's how I think.

How did you see the game whenever you were early in the trenches? So like you just got into Salesforce. I mean, even let's take it before Salesforce. So like you have this opportunity, right, to get into Salesforce. You have this awesome connection and you're like, OK,

I need to fight some objections. I need to prove why I need to be here. What was that game for you? And why was that so worth playing? Why was it so worth winning at that game? What were you chasing in that moment? Money. I wanted to make money and I knew I could create value. And so why wouldn't I want to be paid for that value? And so for me, I was making money in consulting, but it wasn't fulfilling.

And I knew it wasn't my calling and I wasn't passionate about it. Okay, I could stay and incrementally make, you know, a 20% raise each year and another bigger title and a bigger office and all of that. Or I could take a chance on something that is different that would light me up. And I just truly am very, very fortunate, very lucky that

Six years into my career, I truly found what made me tick. And it also, I'm a connector. My superpower is connecting and deepening connections, not just me to you, but you to the whole external world. It's the, it's the, it's the pattern recognition that I have. It's the seeing around corners that I have. Don't think outside the box because I don't see the box.

I have this naivete and this real lack of fear of walking into a room and standing out, not blending in. And so I would, many women would never do what I did. I would walk into a restaurant, a private room, and I would see a sign and I would know that

It was a, you know, a room full of VCs and it basically probably 98, 99% white men. I had no problem walking into that room and standing out and people being like,

who is she and why is she here and figuring out where the friendly face was and connecting with that friendly face. Maybe I knew one of the people in the room, probably because I had to know that there probably wasn't a sign actually. But that's the whole thing is, is what, what are they going to, I could be embarrassed and they can be like, who the hell are you and call security and get you out. But that's a, that's a, that's a short back then. No one was going to get a video and catch it on Instagram and post it. Yeah. That's crazy. Yeah.

Well, this is honestly so interesting to me because like you say that you were chasing money and obviously money was a large driver. But on the other side of it, you're like, I'm not fulfilled in this consultant role. Like I'm going to take a chance on the fact that

this other thing might make me tick more. And like the fact that you are willing to do that, I think it's so easy, especially whenever you're chasing money to just get locked into the idea of like, okay, I'm in a spot and I can guess exactly what my trajectory is. What made you so willing to take that chance for finding something that would make you tick? Or like, was it just honestly your frustration and hatred of like,

the state of life that you were living because you hated what you were doing? Or I don't know if you hated it, but like it didn't light you up. I didn't hate it because I optimized during that period for lifestyle and travel. I was able to, for five of the six years I was in consulting, to be staffed on out-of-town projects that were long-term enough that...

I packed up my stuff in my apartment and put it in storage, sold my car, had corporate housing and a free plane ticket every weekend to go wherever I wanted to go up to the cost that it would be to fly, quote, home to D.C., which is where I was based at the time. Okay.

So I optimized for the experience and had a daily per diem car service. The work that I did in Chicago was very painful. And the work that I did in Hawaii, I was there for a year. It was less painful, but it was boring. And

But I lived in this beautiful, on this beautiful island with these beautiful people and these beautiful, rich experiences. And I trained for the marathon and I ran Diamond Head five days a week. And I, the hours usually in consulting on an out of town project, you are working your butt off.

That wasn't the lifestyle of this project. I would go in at nine and I'd be done at 430 and I'd take a lunch. And that was like expected. It wasn't because I was being lazy. That was the Hawaiian culture. And so I didn't hate it. I wasn't fulfilled. And that wasn't what I was going to do for the rest of my life. So I am a businesswoman. And once I realized I wasn't going to stay in Hawaii and, you know,

do all of that and get back to the mainland was, okay, it's time to really think about what I want to do now. And then I would say that the, one of the things I, I, I, I was so driven yes, by making money, but I was more obsessed with saving money. So you want to make it clear that it's not, I didn't need money to go buy fancy things. I always say I can be done because I don't need to fly private.

not only do I not need to fly private, I don't really want to fly private. I don't like sit in middle seats, but I don't have to sit in first class. I'd love to sit in first class if I got the miles or the delta between coach and first isn't that big, but it doesn't make me feel more important to sit in first class. It doesn't make me feel superior to anybody else to sit in first class. I will say that these are things that

That happened over time. For a good chunk, I had a lot of narcissistic characteristics. And the reality is that in the startup world, the higher you are, in particular the earlier days, you do have something, right? Most do have something off. And because it takes an incredible amount of sacrifice and a relentless drive and this shield of...

I can run through walls. I can get knocked down. I can defy all odds. But I would say it used to give me so much joy to go into the CRM system and take an opportunity from commit to closed one. I just love that. The whole like ringing the bell, the gong, celebrating the win. Loved it. What I really enjoyed more than that was our annual customer awards and

One year reading the 176 submissions from our customers for the various award categories of the great work that they were able to do after we closed the deal. I think a big differentiator of me in sales was really, really painting the picture of life after you sign the contract, what it will look like. Resources, timelines, interdependencies, budget, everything.

Points of failure, 10 things I wish I would have known before I signed on the dotted line, all of those things. And so that was more rewarding was celebrating our customer's success. And it really was trophy cases full. And how do I help my peers, not just my customers, but my peers and my partners? How do I help them fill their trophy cases?

And that became way more rewarding than me going into the CRM system and taking a deal at a closed one. Yeah. Yeah. And I think this is something that's been so apparent to me watching you just help so many people and mentor so many people in this space over time. You're driven like that is who you are. You're driven. You're relentless. You're good.

And you care about both the doing the thing, like I'm going to succeed because I actually really, really like accomplishing my goals. And I like having goals like I like having something that I'm striving after, like that's a part of who you are. But then on the other side of it, you care a lot about seeing the success.

have an actual human impact. And that's been really, really impactful for me to watch. It's just like, you're not just capable of hitting goals. You're not just capable of, you know, hitting metrics and blowing them out of the water. You are capable of making change for people's lives. When did that become important? And then how did you figure out how to do that best? Like, at what point were you starting to say, okay, like,

I'm really capable. Now I want to make sure that I'm making change in these people's lives. Were you asking tons of questions? How are you making sure that what you were doing was actually impacting humans? Thank you for all of that. I say I'm a talent spotter and I've already told you I'm allergic to average. So I invest my time in those who are also allergic to average. Just I would rather pour...

a lot more into those who have high potential and are willing to do what they need to do to invest in themselves and invest in others to realize that. So,

If I'm helping you, oftentimes, most often, that's because you are high potential talent. And you are. And I know that. I've really enjoyed watching you grow and will continue to support you in your growth. It's tough. There's not a moment in time where I went from, hey, I want to do this whole individual quota carrying sales rep. I want to do this.

It's a truly is a gradually and then suddenly. And gets to the point where when you then see, you see the future, you see what could be next. You feel that this is clarity on what it is that you've been doing that you didn't have a name for that now really can be done.

and that the industry will recognize it and reward it, that's when it's go time. And I remember social selling as an example. I was doing social selling when it wasn't called social selling. And I unintentionally built a personal brand, not because I knew what the heck it was and not because I read a book or a podcast or took a course,

on building my personal brand was what I was doing inherently, intuitively, and then it had a name for it. Then it was like, gee, here's a personal brand. And I absolutely had a big part of curating that personal brand. But as I say all the time, your brand is not what you put on your LinkedIn profile. Your brand is what other people say about you. That is your brand.

And so I can do all these things to make my profile look so perfect. But if then people don't say those things about me and validate, then my brand is I'm, you know, a snake oil salesperson. Yeah, that's that's big. It's it's the whole and I think this actually answers the question. It's the whole.

You help people by being capable of helping people and then you earn a reputation for helping people. And then like that is exactly what you did. And then people would introduce you to more people or people would bring you along to things because you had built that trust that only comes through doing the hard things for other people.

Your network is your net worth is one of my common, I say it all the time. It's actually have a two page career advice, just word document, bullet points. And at the top is your network is your net worth. So ABC always be connecting, not necessarily with everyone, be deliberate and intentional about building your network and watering and growing and enhancing your network.

And I realized that your network is your net worth and your network contributes to other people's net worth. And there is this real shift at some point that it's not me, it's we. And it's with, not against. And it isn't a zero-sum game. I can still be number one on the leaderboard while also, I've also always felt like an owner, not just an employee, right?

And so as an owner, I have a responsibility for the overall health of the business, not just me crushing my quota and being number one sales rep of the year. One of the proudest accomplishments in my career

is, and I have it right here, is this trophy. And this is actually the trophy that we would give to the Eloqua customers who won the annual customer awards. And these, this is like five pounds. It's, why do you think I have, like, look at these guns right here, right? That's remotely this trophy. Anyways, I'm teasing. This is employee of the year as a salesperson doesn't happen because this is,

An award given to one person, but it is absolutely an award that's not won alone. And this symbolizes, this is 2011 Employee of the Year. I had been at Eloqua since 2002. And at the year before ceremony, there's a long unveiling of who's going to be the winner.

And I'm listening to this person be described and all the things that this person did for our customers, for our partners, for our team. And I'm getting the chills and I'm like, I want to be that. I want to be. I want to be recognized for that because that's so much more important than President's Club, number one sales rep. And

I quietly and didn't share that that is what I wanted. That was my goal. He was sitting in the room and he unveiling just the feeling of, oh my gosh, that's me. It was just so fulfilling.

Wow. Wow. That's a very fascinating decision and just awareness that you had, even at that point. You said employee of the year as a salesperson just does not happen. And that's so true. It doesn't because, you know, usually salespeople are so focused on their role, right? How is the company defining their role? How is the company defining, you know, these are the lines that you walk inside of.

And salespeople are concerned with the metrics that they're assigned, not always the customer. And that's something that you've always been incredibly good at is just being a customer champion. Why? Why do you think? What about your character makes you care so much about the customer? It's the right thing. It's never a wrong time to do the right thing. And I know that if I do right by the customer, I will win. And so...

I am able to balance short-term versus long-term. Pretty good at balancing those two things, creating harmony between those two things. Not always at the same time, but again, I'm a businesswoman and I know how to build a healthy business. And it's on the backs of customer success and value to them because your best salespeople aren't on your payroll. Your best salespeople are your customer advocates.

Because they're the ones who have the trust of the people you want to earn as customers. And so if you know these things, I'm not always perfect at executing on all of these things. But if you have these values and this belief system, then your beliefs lead to your behaviors. And your behaviors become habits. And really think the mindset...

And then what are the skills I need? And then what are the enabling tools that will help me do the thing I'm trying to do in that order? And when Simon Sinek, we all know, most of us know, start with why. And there are things that I hear for the first time and I get the chills and the goosebumps. And I think many people have watched him either via a video, a TED Talk or seen him live and

And I've been able to do both. And I remember sitting in the room at HubSpot inbound and it was a speaker breakout. This was probably 2014, so 10 years ago. And he was in the room and I had just recently been fired by Oracle. And I shared that in the room. And I was so proud because my why was different from why of Oracle.

And I was so proud to share the willingness to be fired, the expectation to be fired. I knew. I just didn't know when it was going to happen. I wasn't trying to get fired, but I knew the things that I was doing would ultimately blow up in my face. And that was okay. I was having fun doing it. I empowered a lot of people, the right people. And I was doing the right thing, but it wasn't the thing that Oracle believed in.

That's okay. It's all right. I wouldn't be where I am right now had I not taken that path. That's one of my favorite articles. That was one of the first things that I ever read about you before I actually met you. And I was like, oh, this is awesome. Just because somebody who's so willing to stand for their value system and to not compromise and to say, okay, like this is what I believe. And I believe it so fervently and so relentlessly and so passionately that I will fight for it. Like having people on your team that are like that.

It's very difficult to ask because you have to be willing to risk things. But on the other side, you reap a lot of rewards. And that's very apparent in your life. So I want to do a little bit of a quick change and kind of go macro, right?

you've accomplished a ton of things, right? How has your definition of success changed over time as you've accomplished more and more things? So I thought a lot about how I define success. And again, I was never the chaser of the title. I wasn't worried about going to UVA reunion without a vice president, senior vice president, chief officer title. I wasn't. That didn't

The FOPO for me is lower than most. So the fear of people's opinions is lower than most. At this point, I kind of give zero fucks. It isn't entirely true because I do for the right things. And I'm human. And I fight it because it is human nature to measure ourselves differently.

by what other people think about us. Do not measure myself by the size of my bank account. And I am fortunate that I have enough. I have enough for me that I'm very comfortable. And so I'm not measuring myself. A lot of people have a number, a lot of men especially. And it could be, it starts with 10 million and then they get to 10 and they're, oh, this is absolutely, I can get to 20.

And then they get to 20, like just one more crack at the, you know, one more, one more, one more truck, one more game again. And that, that one, that one, they, they, they don't get a home run. They get to first base. And so then it's like, Oh, I'm going to end their career on first base. Like they're going to go back and try to get that, that, that, that home run again. So anyways, that doesn't, that, that isn't, that doesn't control me. The definition of success for me is like,

realizing my full potential and helping others recognize theirs, right? To be able to have them believe in themselves and believe that they are capable of achieving whatever X is to them. What is your fullest potential? You have to figure that out and be willing to take the risk to play the game

to play the game and change the game while you're playing the game. That's what success is to me. In your experience, why has playing the game been so valuable? Why has, you know, using this life to try and realize your full potential, why has that been something that's so worth it? I don't know if I've been asked that question. I need to have a meaningful contribution. I do. I do. Actually, I was talking about this the other day.

Because at my age, you start to think about your funeral or your celebration of life and the eulogy that someone's going to write. And you start thinking about these things. And I do think about, I, this is a hard one, I don't actually have many friends. And I'll look at these wedding photos and I'll see a wedding party of eight people or ten people. And I look at it and I say, I don't even have eight people who...

I would ask to be in my wedding party. I don't have right now eight people, friends, like outside of work. I don't have eight people right now that I could call or text and say, hey, I'm having a rough day. Let's go grab dinner. And I'm in this place in my life where I realize that that is important for me to figure that out. And I don't do things that I'm not great at.

But I'm not going to be great at it or even really good at it if I don't get in the game. And it's not a game. Making friends isn't a game. But I have to start prioritizing friendship, even over what I do so incredibly well, which is...

in a professional, in life, but not French. That's what's missing. It's missing in my life. And it's not that I want a lot of people at my funeral or my celebration of life or, but let's assume I'm, let's just be generous and let's assume I'm in my 80s when I die. Who in my B2B sex community is going to be there, right?

So I don't want to die alone. And I'm being dramatic and I'm being very like overly emotional right now. I'm in this really introspective point in my life where I'm looking deeply at what's important and how I want to live the time I have left. Absolutely, family is so much more important to me than it was during the height of my career and growing.

It's so much more important to have a seat at the dinner table than in the boardroom. I miss a lot of time at the dinner table in trade-off to the boardroom. Yeah. I think this makes so much sense in whenever you ask, like, what does success mean? Realizing your full potential. And in the beginning, right, of your career, it was like, okay, I want to see how far I can go

in my career, but recognizing at some point that full potential is more than just career. It's more than just work that you as an as an integrated full human, full potential means everything from life, relationships, work, hobbies, like all of those things. That is your full potential. Like who could you possibly become?

And like, who is Jill lighted up fully alive, right? In all of these areas and they're all rising together. One person that I really have admired and liked listening to is Arthur Brooks. Do you know who he is? Strength to Strength. And I love that book. It really, tell me why I interrupted you. Tell me why that book is so, it's hitting home when you're so young. Because I think of it as a book for like a 50 year old.

Yeah. So he's one of my favorite people of all time. And I love listening to him. And I love how he grounds me in just what life is all about. Because I get caught up, like, I love the idea of chasing. I love the idea of being relentless and just like putting everything into something.

But when you sit back and he's reminding you about all the different aspects of life and all the different aspects of a human potential and like their personhood and just like small things like people chase happiness, but it's really about satisfaction, right? Or like,

He talks about why it's so important to have meaningless friends. He's like, most business people especially have friends of value, but they don't have meaningless friends, which is like people that just are there and that's it. And they just live very close to you. And like, I can put myself into other people's shoes.

And I have a really vivid imagination and a very, very realistic way of looking at my life in the world. And so recognizing that, okay, I know that I am the person that could double down and say, hey, I'm going to go all in on this business thing and work my butt off.

I wanted, especially this past year, to recognize and be aware of the costs that would be associated. And so listening to people like him really grounded me in just the question of, okay, what am I willing to give up? And answering that fully for myself. Like, what am I actually willing to bear the cost of to achieve the things that I want to achieve? And that's why he's really, really impactful to me.

I'm so happy that you're listening to him now so that you can live a fuller life where the full potential isn't just your career accomplishments and it's more broadly your contributions to your community, to family, to friendships. Hopefully you will avoid what I never thought would happen to me, which was burnout.

And a really crippling depression that it was so dark. And I really, I really don't think I've ever fully recovered. Never been able to get back to the mental acuity. I don't know if that's the right word. I'd have to acuity that I was pre burnout at the end of 2014. Wow. Yeah.

at 10 years. And you know how much, Ella, I struggle to write. Part of that is I don't have what I had. And even listening to Arthur Brooks, Strength to Strength, and understanding the brain and as we age, what happens. I feel like I'm on an accelerated path of that brain confusion. And therefore, writing is very challenging for me. It's easy for me to get on a call, jump on a web meeting, get on a stage.

But that writing is really challenging for me. So, yeah, I think if you're listening or watching, Arthur Brooks is great. Clay Christensen is also great. And he's crossing the chasm, but his last piece of work was, I have it printed. Something about, how will I, I'm going to have to look it up on ChatGPT. Clay Christensen books. I met Clay and...

He wrote The Innovator's Dilemma, The Innovator's Solution, How Will You Measure Your Life? And it was about creating a fulfilling career into life and not, and I think he even talked about the end of life and being remembered for. And look, what is more important than being remembered by the B2B SaaS ecosystem is my children and my family. And admittedly,

I haven't played the game the way that of time. You can't undo the past. You can only today and every day forward make the decisions that will create those more meaningful relationships with my kids and be a better example beyond the fact that I have had an incredible career and

set an example for them professionally. Yeah. You mentioned friends. What else do you wish that you had spent more time on? And looking back, I mean, like, especially if you were to give advice to young women, like,

The reason that you went so far so fast is because of the time that you put into it. Would you have slowed down and done it in a longer period of time? Like, okay, I'm going to invest time into these places and I won't get there as fast, but I'll get there more fully. Or like, what would you recommend? If I could know what I know then, what I know now, but you can't. You can read books, listen to podcasts, hear it from other people.

And you need to take from that and think really hard, not just, oh, that sounds great, but what are the things I have to do? What are the changes? I'm a change agent, but I wasn't willing to change. I'm a change agent, but I wasn't really willing to change where all of my, most of my energy and time and passion went.

So even after meeting Arianna Huffington, who talked about when she passed out and her head's bleeding, and I even thought then that it would never happen to me. And so I would, I would encourage take very seriously. And I think this generation is much better than my generation. There isn't just a window of opportunity. The opportunity, it

You create your opportunity and there isn't just this one window of opportunity. I always felt like there's this window of opportunity to get the category created in life. To get ahead of, from a revenue growth, the competition to this window of opportunity to build my brand or become the biggest known person in social selling or whatever it may be. So I would encourage you

prioritizing. I really didn't have many hobbies and fitness is really, really important to me, especially right now. I think I'm in better physical shape than I've ever been in my entire life. And a lot of that is because of my habit, because I have made the time to, I can get up just about every morning and go to Orange Theory and

and do my orange theory workout and can go for a bike ride i can take my dogs for a walk i like have that time and it's the habit of doing it so create these other habits of being willing to do something you're not great at try sports or arts or book club or whatever it may be uh be willing to to even

music or these things that make you just a more well-rounded person. I am now 52 trying to figure out what are my hobbies going to be besides Orange Theory. I freaking love working out. It's probably one of my favorite things in the whole world and definitely a hobby.

And I think it's a really good and easy place to start. You mentioned community, and that was also something that I started to emphasize more toward because I literally let it go for like probably three years plus. Three years plus. I was just like, screw everybody. And that sounds terrible, but it was basically like, screw everybody. I'm just going to see how far I can go. And similarly...

I kept on fighting burnout. Like I would push myself so hard and then keep on fighting the fact that my body and my brain and my heart and the passion inside of me was just like, this is not enough. It is exciting at moments. There are moments that make it worth it. There are moments that get you excited, but this is not enough. What was burnout like for you? It was so bad. It was so dark. Um,

Really, like I had failed my family and I could see the decisions I had made, the bad ones I had made. And I wanted to get off of social media, social networks, really LinkedIn. It wasn't a Facebook thing. It was Snapchat didn't exist.

TikTok didn't exist. It was all from a professional business, social networking perspective, but I was doing professional speaking. And so December 1st of 2014, I knew I didn't have a speech for six weeks. It had been a, it was coming. I could see this thing coming. I didn't know what it was. And it was when I knew that it was six weeks before I had to be on stage again, it all just came done.

And it was a really long process of discovery therapy. I gave up alcohol. And I found through research a doctor, Dr. Sherry Turkle. And she has been studying the impact that technology has on humans for decades out of MIT. And at that time, believe it or not, she had written a book, Alone Together.

And it's a, the book covers a picture of, actually, I think one of them is her daughter and friends in a room. They're in the room together and they're all on their devices. And so they're alone together. And my therapist at the time, she wanted to diagnose me like as an alcoholic. And I absolutely really had, really had struggles with alcohol and was way over the top.

And, but I knew that there was something, something else. And I knew it was really, my speeches, my keynote speeches, I would, my, my keynote speech, I would get up and I would say, I have a confession. I'm over 40.

I'm married. I kissed a lot of frogs before I met my prince. I have four children. I'm a social networking nit. I have X number of connections on LinkedIn, X number of followers on Twitter, X number of friends on Facebook. I was addicted to likes, comments, favorites, retweets. And I was addicted to those things because it meant that what I was putting out in the world was valuable.

to others. That was my speech. And lo and behold, I was a social networking app. Making that connection was important to me. What was the cost of that? What do you feel like you gave up? And would you, like you mentioned that more than just a window of opportunity, right? And to see your life as more than just that small little moment to say yes to. And it also sounds like

burnout was the result of lesser boundaries than you probably should have had. But like, yeah, what are the things that you look back on and you're just like, I wish I could go back and do them again. I know I can't. So like, there's no, there's no reason to regret, but like, these are the areas of my life that now matter most to me. Be a mom. Be a mom who shows up and looks up. And so it is, it is very much

The mom and the, the being, being so focused on impact at scale rather than building up my own children and investing in listening to podcasts about being a mom of a teenager, listening to podcasts about how to manage social media for your kids, being a, you know, why didn't I become insatiably curious and become best at being a mom? Hmm.

really spending more time being the one who, this is going to be way too graphic, but instead of having my older daughter teach my younger daughter how to put a tampon in, why wasn't I the one to teach my younger daughter how to put a tampon in? Those are the kinds of things

that wish I would have shown up for. Yeah, I mentioned this before, but I appreciate how real you are. Because there are so few people that would be willing to actually say the things that you say. And I mean, that's probably true throughout your life. One question that I have for you, and then I'll hit you with some rapid fire questions is, you know, on this other side, it's that some people give up themselves, right? On the full potential side of things, it's like,

I'm going to chase all these other aspects of my life. Like I'll have a community, I'll have my family, but then like, I'm not going to see how far I can go, how far I can take, you know, this career thing or business or passions or whatever it is. So it's like, it's really hard because on the side of

making sure that you are a fully alive human, there are multiple ways to go wrong, right? And I've definitely seen in my life the opposite happen, where there are people in my life who gave up so much of themselves to do the opposite, and they are not fulfilled either. What would your advice be to somebody trying to figure out the balance of that? It's like, okay, well, I know that I want to go into...

I know that I want to fill myself up in that way. I know that I want to have a family. I know that I want to be balanced community-wise and passion-wise. I definitely have many women who chose the stay-home mom and that their identity is their kids' accomplishments because that was their job. In fact, one who got her brilliant and got into really some great schools and

but didn't get into all of the schools that the mom wanted her to get into. And he ended up picking a school that's not well-known, very, very reputable in terms of a great school and the best school for what she wants to do, the daughter. And I remember vividly being on a walk with the mom and the mom saying that she failed the one job she had, which was to get her daughter into college.

all of these grade schools. And I said, whoa, that is the opposite end of the spectrum of what I, how I lived my life as I'm not that my failure is my failure is my daughter's failure, which isn't actually her daughter's failure because her daughter didn't really care about getting into all of those schools. Her daughter picked the college that was right for her. And so, and now I,

with you my youngest is now a sophomore in college so there's there are moms who now don't know who they are because they've done everything as a mom and a wife the kids are gone are getting ready to go and now what do they do who are they and we talk about balance but it's it's more of a blend and it's more of a harmony rather than a balance and it's also I think more of a flow and

Balance is really hard because how do you get it right on that scale? And it's not always going to be balanced. And I say it with my kids, too. This just made me think of something. Well, fair doesn't mean equal. So fair doesn't mean equal, meaning if Jack goes to ASU and it costs $60,000 and Lily Kate goes to Stanford and it costs $90,000,

I don't owe Jack 30,000. Fair isn't equal. And we paid Jennifer's rent for a couple of years after college. Didn't do that for Jack. Well, that's not fair to Jack. That's not actually, no, equal isn't fair. Fair isn't equal. Oh, and I also tell women on a different note, you don't get what you deserve. You get what you negotiate. I love that.

Don't be afraid to negotiate because I will tell you, men are not afraid to negotiate. And men are not afraid to apply to jobs that they don't have the skills for. And so you don't get what you deserve. You get what you negotiate. And also good things don't come to those who wait. Good things come to those who do the work. Mic drop. Okay, let's hit our rapid fire questions really quick. So I want to hit back on the thing that you just said, negotiation.

What are some tips that you would give women for negotiating better? And I mean, even back to the burnout conversation, negotiating boundaries with yourself and saying like, okay, this is yes, this is no. This is what I'm worth. This is what I'm not standing for. Yeah. Yeah. The know when to walk away is really important. What are your non-negotiables and are they really non-negotiables? I've negotiated my non-negotiables before.

then they're not non-negotiables. And every time you go back on your non-negotiables, you lose a little piece of yourself. And I would say that a great negotiation is one where nobody loses. Everybody gives something, but nobody loses. And so knowing what the person on the other side of the negotiation is,

what's a win for them, what they value, what's important. And it may not even be monetary. It could be, you know, a term, a timeframe, a number of other things. It doesn't have to be the number. And so know what's a win for them. Know what's a win for you. Know what your non-negotiables are. What would require you to sacrifice your values? Are you more valuable than that?

Or are you not sacrificing your values? Your value. Don't negotiate. Negotiate away your value. That makes sense. Yeah, that does. And I think you have to train yourself to think like this. I've been working on this as well because I have people in my life that are incredible at boundaries and negotiation. But what they do is, and what they've done is, they've trained themselves to think, what is the value this person's getting? What is the value of the thing that I'm creating, offering, whatever? What...

where do I actually have room and then what am I and am I not willing to compromise on because like really understanding the value that you provide something might be worth x to me I mean I was just talking to somebody about a project that I was doing and they were like you could have charged me more than that and afterwards I thought to myself and I was like I never asked myself the question how valuable is this to them and like that should be a question that I start with which is how much are you going to charge me I have a rate and then also

How valuable is this to you? Okay, now once I have like an anchor point, then we can talk. Worst case, they say no, how about this? But like, you're right, as a woman, I do not think like that. And I was talking to a friend and she was like, talking about a job opportunity. And she was saying, you know, they've said six years of experience. I don't have that. I don't know if I can even apply. I'm

I'm like, forget where I heard the statistic, but men don't do that. Like women will apply 30% of the time. I think it was something like this. 30% of the time to jobs are not qualified for by the bullet pointed list. Men will apply like 70 or 80%, which is insane. Yeah, it is. And realistically, someone, an employer expects you to hit everything on the qualification list. Then you're coming in too low. Meaning like...

You can already do everything on the job description. Then where's the growth? Don't you want to grow? Where's the growth in that? Yep. There's one thing you were saying that really triggered, and I can't recall, so we'll move on so I don't struggle with it. Rapid fire question. That was a good example. Oh, even me. So I get asked to speak a lot.

Not as much anymore because I'm not putting it out there. And so someone came to me and she tells me about the event and she wants me to speak and I asked for all the questions about the audience and all these things. And then it's kind of like silence. And so my question is, what is your speaker budget? Because that's saying it's putting it out there that I have a speaker fee. And what is your budget?

And then I'll know right away whether they have a budget or not, whether she was thinking or he was thinking I will do this. But I put it out there. What's your speaker budget? You hadn't thought about that. Well, then why are you doing an event? Are you going to have speakers that you pay? Oh, those are, that's just like you, that little thing that someone taught me. What is your speaker budget? I love that. All right. Onto our next rapid fire. Number two, um,

Given this whole conversation and probably more conversations that you've had with your daughter, what advice would you give her today about living the most fulfilling life possible? Being your whole self. Being your authentic self. Yeah. Being your whole authentic self. Know your values. Know your value. It isn't the grades. She wanted to tell me how proud she was that she pulled her GPA up. And I told her, I'm not concerned about your GPA. Are you learning? And...

Are you growing? Are you happy? Are you happier? Are you happier because you have a higher GPA or are you happier because you're living a more fulfilled, you're having a more fulfilling college experience? That performance, we live in a performance-based culture, but really, what is our purpose? And guide our decisions based on the purpose, know your purpose, rather than being on the performance-based treadmill.

Hamster wheel treadmill, whatever it is. Yeah, I love that last question. What is one? similarity commonality that you have found and or seen in all the best leaders in All the best women leaders in business in life in anything curiosity courage conviction I'm sure that sounds familiar. We see you willing to compromise and

Empathy, empowerment, empowering others, empowering themselves, purpose and passion and perseverance, respect, responsibility and resilience, ownership, opportunity, with, against. Yeah, that's incredible. This has been such an impactful conversation and I hope that people got so much out of it. I'm looking forward to our next episode. Cheers. We all want to help one another. Human beings are like that.