Welcome to the first episode of Collab with Kiva. 

My journey here hasn’t been a straight line and I’m okay with that. 

Naivete led me to leave politics and launched me on an amazing journey of marriage, motherhood, homeschooling, and searching for the ever-elusive balance.

I began to find balance as a jewelry maker on Etsy and as my kids grew older, I found it helping business owners build solid foundations through my work as a Certified Director of Operations and Online Business Manager. 

As the owner of The 516 Collaborative, I help business owners show up as owners instead of being owned by their businesses.

During this episode, I talk about:

• Lime green interview suits (3:10)

• Working on Capitol Hill (5:53)

• Life coming full circle (6:47)

• Believing in yourself (9:50)

• Don’t lose the little girl inside (11:36)

>> Every good team has a playbook. Does yours? Ready to build out your business playbook to not only take things off of your plate but help your business scale?

Join The Collab: A Community for Female Business Owners on FB: https://www.facebook.com/groups/collabcommunity 

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/kivaslade/ 

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kivaslade/ 

Website: https://www.the516collaborative.com/ 

Podcast Transcript:

00:02

Hello and welcome to Collab with Kiva. I'm your host Kiva, Slade. From the marbled halls of the US Congress to my racing-themed office chair. I've learned that there is no perfect path to the life of your dreams. My journey over the past 20 years has included being a legislative director for a member of Congress, policy director for a nonprofit, stay-at-home mom, homeschooling mom, jewelry biz owner, and now the owner of a service-based business. Whether your journey has been a straight line, or follow zigs and zags. Join me and my guest as we share insights Pope's and lessons learned from our female entrepreneurship journeys. May the collaborative sharing of our stories be the tide that lifts your boat? Let's dive in. 

00:55

Hello, and welcome to the first episode of Collab with Kiva. I am your host, Kiva Slade, and I'm excited. I'm excited that this podcast baby of mine is being launched into the world today. I'm excited that I am seeing the manifestation of a two-year-old dream come to fruition. It is surreal right now. And I am grateful. I am thankful. I am over the moon. And so I'll try to tamp down my excitement just a bit for this episode. But I do want to welcome you as a woman, as a wife as a mom. Yes, my why for this is huge. I've seen life shifts. I recently turned 50. My kids have gone off to college. I am an empty nester. In the midst of that though, I've started on this entrepreneurial journey that has goodness gracious been a journey. Okay. There's a 10-year stint as a product-based business on Etsy and an almost two-year stint as a service-based entrepreneur. And really, sometimes it's hard to be something that you don't see. And I want to share stories not only my own, but those of others, to help inspire and encourage other women to see that there are options. There are people out there who you may resonate with, that you may not actually come across. And I want you to see that and see what's possible for you for your life, for the trajectory that you have placed for yourself in your life. 

02:46

Also, let's be honest, there are a lot of people in different spaces that say a lot of different things that make some of us feel like there are the shoulds and there should not there's like a list of them. And you wonder where this treasure trove list is actually hidden. I want you to know that you can feel confident in choosing your own path, whatever that path is. 

03:10

So let's talk a bit about me. And how I got here. I can go back to grad school. Okay, I remember it very vividly. It was a very exciting time in my life. I have a Master's in Public Administration. I had some amazing internship opportunities. I worked with people who encouraged me, they pushed me to think bigger than what I was thinking. I was able to do things that quite honestly they said other interns hadn't done. And I was a go-getter. Probably to the point of maybe even ruthless at some points it felt like but we'll have that conversation for another day. After grad school though. I remember my first job interview was with our local government and I was going for a budget management analyst position. I showed up in a lime green interview suit. To this day, I still love that suit. It was this dress with a jacket. And yeah, it was lime green. So I'm that gal, the lime green interview gal. Okay, and one of the ladies who I later worked with said to me just like I could not believe you came to an interview in a lime green suit. And I was just like, but why not? I wanted to stand out and I stood out. And that job was great until there was another new hire. And he was a male. He was a white male. And he received $1,000 more.

 04:56

And I know some of you are saying, Kiva $1,000 is not a lot of money. It's not, especially when Uncle Sam takes its share of it. But it was more about the principal, I had more experience. And I asked our deputy director at the time, why? Because you know, when you can wear a lime green suit, you can go ask people the question of why. And he said, Well, he asked for more money. He did? But that's really kind of how I felt. And I said, that was such a game-changing moment for me, not only from the standpoint of Hey, dude, dudette. We need to ask for the things that we want. But also from the standpoint that if you don't ask, people just give you what they think you'll take. And I was like, Oh, my goodness, that's not going to be me. 

 05:53

So needless to say, I started making connections. And I was considered to be aggressive, assertive, and a ladder climber by my superiors. And I left and went to Capitol Hill. And I worked as a legislative director for a Democratic member of Congress from California. I loved my time on the Hill. But when you start to see behind the curtains and see how the sausage is really made, it really messed with my idealistic mind, I'll be honest, I was naive. I was very naive. And it was a very eye-opening experience for me. And I knew that that was something that I couldn't continue to do. 

06:47

Long story short, fast forward, I met a guy, we got married, like within six months of knowing each other. That's a whole episode in and of itself. I'm pregnant. And our daughter had some health challenges. And it's so interesting to me how life can sometimes come full circle because one of my internships in graduate school was with the office, the Governor's Office of Children, Youth, and Families. And that was when brain research and really exploded for zero to three and zero to five-year-olds. And I was like, Oh, my goodness, I want to be a stay-at-home mom until my child is five. At that point, I didn't even have a boyfriend. So it was just a thought. But honestly, when our daughter was sick, and I was like, Okay, I'm literally, I'm home, I'm gonna be home. And it was gonna be home till she was five, because hey, that was what the brain research said. 

 07:40

Needless to say, that didn't happen. I wound up homeschooling both of our children, our son who came later, all the way to high school, and then they graduated high school. So, you know, as a mom, though, you're always doing all the things to support the kids to support your family. So there were co-ops, there was speech and debate. I was a state representative, like all of the things because there was always that level of involvement in I'm a constant learner. So I was always figuring out ways to help I was the most techie. So it's like, Hey, you're in here and the tabulation room to calculate all the things and fix the things that don't go right. 

08:20

And along that journey, though, I really felt that I was missing something. Something was just not right. I didn't feel like I had a balance. And I took a jewelry-making course from a local Etsy shop owner, and it was her and her mom. And I took a course and we, we melted silver, and we hammered things and playing with flames and tools was so exciting. And that's what started my jewelry business. It was always still secondary though, to my life as a wife and a mom. But it was fulfilling that need for me for something that just really felt like I needed a bit more balance. 

 09:02

So I share all that to say that your journey doesn't have to be a straight path. I know the shortest distance between two points is a straight line. However, your line may look a little different. Like mine, it may have some zigs, some zags, it might stop moving, it feels like at some point, like the pencil is just at a pause point. You know, and then it starts to move again. The big thing here that I want you to know is that it's your line. It's your line to draw as you choose. It may have loops, it may have circles, it may have squiggly lines. It may have points where the pencils just digging into the paper, almost to the point of tearing a hole.

09:50

Whatever it is, I want you to know it's yours. And you can choose how it is drawn, how it continues, you can take a point and look back and see what it looks like. And if you want to continue that way or a different way, you know, as someone who's always been a big thinker, my parents have always inspired me to say, hey, like, there's nothing you can't do. Now, let's be honest, there are some things that I probably cannot do. I don't know what they are yet. I remember one time, my dad knew how to sew, like my mom could sew too. But my dad was like this amazing sew. And I was like, oh, I need a dress to wear to my cousin's wedding. I can sew this, I literally did not use a pattern. I used a slip that I had from Victoria's Secrets because I like the shape of it. And I made my own pattern for this dress. The point I'm neglecting to tell you is that I had this idea on a Saturday morning. The wedding was Saturday afternoon. So I went to Cloth World grew up in New Jersey, there was a big Cloth World long before Joanne's. I picked out the fabric and got everything. I had this whole dress made except for the zipper. It's like, dad, I need help with a zipper. And, like literally, I wore the dress to the wedding received a ton of compliments. And that's what happens. Sometimes it's women who were big thinkers. You know, like, hey, let's do a dress in the morning. Why not? You know, why not? becomes that question that we should always ask ourselves, why not? 

11:36

Don't lose the little girl who was inside of you. She was a big dreamer. She was probably a bold thinker. She wears lime green suits to interviews, okay. It's not too late to pursue those dreams, to go after them with a fervent passion that can only come from the wisdom that you have now gained. And why not? So when you tune in to this podcast, there'll be times that you hear guests. And the goal is always to inspire you, to encourage you to have yourself ask but why not? Why not? Why not? 

12:23

So as you go forward in your day, and you come to those points where you feel like, I don't know if I can do that. I want you to ask yourself, why not? Because I know that you can. And I think that the little girl inside of you, she knows that you can as well. Thanks for tuning in. I look forward to sharing more with you as we journey together on Collab with Kiva. 

12:51

Thanks for tuning in to this episode of Collab with Kiva. I hope you were feeling inspired and motivated to keep being your amazing self. Make sure to subscribe so you don't miss out on any future episodes. Also, your reviews on Apple are greatly appreciated. They will help other women know that their path is unique to them. If you're interested in being or finding a partner for this journey that you can collab with, join us in The Collab a community of female business owners on Facebook. See you next time.

Meet Kiva Slade - the Founder and CEO of The 516 Collaborative. With a unique background in high-power politics on Capitol Hill and sixteen years as a homeschooling mama, Kiva found her calling in the online business world as a trusted guide for entrepreneurs looking to build the business of their dreams.

Kiva's work began behind the scenes, orchestrating the back end of businesses and managing teams. But her inner data diva couldn't help but notice that small businesses needed help harnessing the power of data for growth. So she and her team set out to uncover and tidy up the data required to enable clients to grow their businesses confidently and easily.