North Star Success: How to Cut Through the Noise & Grow Faster with Alicia Moore | 010

Welcome to the Profit Connections podcast. We are so excited. You know, I'm excited every single time I turn on my microphone. I think that that is like my spirit animal. I think a microphone must be my spirit animal because we are here with Alicia Moore, and you are going to just get so much value out of what she has to share with us today, she's coming at us from multiple perspectives, from where you are, where she's been and and creating the future for our young people. So I am so excited, and I am going to give Alicia the floor so that she can more adequately introduce herself. Alicia. Go ahead.

Hi, Sharon, thank you so much for having me on the show. I'm super excited to be here. My background, I've worked in the Silicon Valley with pre money through billion dollar plus companies, helping people, teams, companies and boards of directors set and achieve strategic goals and succeed. And I'm now starting my own company. So I've now got a little bit of experience in the entrepreneurial sort of startup world from a different lens as well. And so that's my background.

Awesome. And tell us a little bit about your other your other side. I want people to get the full picture of you. We're going to talk about business ownership and that stuff, and I want them to hear about crushing it in college.

Okay, well, so as I said, you know, my my background, I started out in the legal lane, and then took over HR functions, and then corporate business development functions. And I managed teams from M A, integrating them, all of those sort of things. A lot of it had to do with pivots, either for personal people, you know, for people that are either pivoting in or pivoting up or, you know, changing the dynamics of their career all the way through, you know, businesses doing the same, and I've expanded my lane now to college kids, because that's when they're stepping into their independence. And many of the tools that we bring to bear to sort of assess and analyze help people work their way through the challenges that they have later in their career, they could forestall some of it if they had those tools on the front end. So

yes, yes. Just speaking my language. It's like, you know you don't have to reinvent the wheel, but we've been there. We know, like, let's, let's give them a little step up, a little step in. And not just college students. It's people who want to start businesses, who are transitioning out of corporate, who come into some money, or come into some passion, and they now want to have this new thing that they're doing, and they think they gotta figure it out for themselves that, you know, pull myself up by my bootstraps, and, wow, yeah, talk about that. Like, what that that mentality of, I have to do it myself. Like, what's the better path?

Well, so I don't know of a successful CEO that doesn't have a mentor and or a coach, or maybe more than one coach to guide them along the way. You would no longer know more, you know, throw a piano at a person and say, okay, you know, do your concerto. You'd have a piano teacher. You wouldn't, you know, you have somebody help you with your golf swing. You have all the way through. And what's really ironic is, for people that are young, you know, their parents get them the coaches all the way, all the way up until they get into college, and then after that, it's a little bit like, you know, whatever, right? And then big corporations, bigger corporations that have the money to spend and the foresight to realize they need to develop their people. They may get, you know, career coaches for people along the way, but oftentime, the individuals don't necessarily think about that. When we're adults, we don't necessarily think about, hey, you know this coach will help me get here faster, see around corners, avoid problems, you know, guide me, support me in a way. Those that have that have such a competitive advantage, they

really do. I like that point that you just made, because a lot of people are when they're running their businesses as, oh, I'll just go to every free thing and figure it out. And that is a path, and that is a hard path, and that is wearing all of the hats all the same time, and trying to become an expert at every hat at the same time. And it's just not possible. And so having a coach. Having that me, I'm about systems, right? You should not be doing it all of your all yourself when you start out, you might have to, and let's put those systems in place so that eventually you can pass that along to someone else. And I find that that's, it seems to be a thought process that people are well, I'll just, I'll just do it a little bit at a time. Or my favorite, did you hear that sarcasm? My favorite? Oh, the shiny object syndrome. Oh, well, Alicia's doing this, and Sharon's doing that, and Mary's doing this, and Paul's doing that, and, well, I have to do all those things, because everybody else is successful with all those things. I worked with a client one time, and I said, Why do you want to do this thing that he wanted to do? And his answer was, well, because other people are making money at it. I'm like, Does it fit your business model? Is this actually where you want to go? And then as we went back and deconstructed it, it wasn't what he wanted at all. It was a shiny

object. Well, so, and that's one of the things that I think actually ties college kids get their first taste of it when they first step out of the the hard walls that were built for them about, okay, this is, these are the courses you have to take, and this is what you need. This is the path. And, you know, here's the competitive environment. This is where you go go, right? And then the high performers go, and they get to the end, then they go to college, and all of a sudden there is this plethora of choices. It isn't that clear cut and how you spend your time, how you choose your path, you know how intentionally you are about how you approach this is so important to accelerate to that end goal. And one of the things that I always laugh about, I laugh about it for me too, because it's so easy to get caught up into, oh so many choices. What should I do? And it becomes the map. You know, for entrepreneurs, for college kids, for entrepreneurs, and for people, even in the middle, in the middle of their career, there are so many paths and so many choices to make. And if you don't have a clear north star about where you want to go, then you don't have that measuring stick to say there are many paths up the mountain. Which one should you choose, and when do you stay the course? And when do you jump on another horse? That kind of, you know, those kind of decisions. If you don't have a framework to make those decisions, to assess them, to look at them after the fact, then you know, you can really easily just fall into a spin, and so much wasted effort and so much wasted precious, precious time, right? Gets lost.

I am 100% behind you with that North Star. I say, you know, if I told you to come to visit me at my house at the beach, what would be the first of information you would need? And that's the address like you can get there, you could get close, but finding me exactly. So I am 100% behind that. If you do not know where you're going, how can you possibly get there, right?

Yeah, exactly. Well, and if you don't know where you're going, there are tools that can help you get there, recognizing that different tools work for different people for different reasons. They're going to be things that you're good at, they're going to be things that you're not so good at. There are going to be things that are easy for you to do and not so much. Let's use time management as an example, right? Some people, everybody knows they have to manage their time. But do you use the Pomodoro effort? Do you use the time blocking thing? Do you do it through journaling? Do you do it through? You know, 12 week year, there are so many tools, and what happens is people, to your point, you know, so many free tools as well. People will go and they'll gather a tool, and they'll break their head against it. It it doesn't work for them, and they'll throw it away or then stop, and then stop. Yes, exactly. So having clarity around yourself first and notionally what you want. If you don't know what your North Star is, then there are things that you can do to make progress moving forward, that acquire skills that you will use regardless of what your North Star is. Are you a good communicator? Are you you know? Are you good at organizing? How clear are you about what you don't want? So you cut those things out ruthlessly, right? Do you have a decision making matrix? What is it that you use for that? And all of that also values, where are you in in the phase of your business, and what it needs next? If you don't know what the North Star is, then what it needs next is going to be funding. Money. Yeah, finding funding, funding, funding, and how you spend your money. For a startup that's going to be where it is for a college kid, it's going to be time, time, time, time. And how do I use my time? So, yeah, so

yeah. Well, these are these. I am, like, in lockstep with everything that you said, and I love how you are able to bridge that across and as with a lot of things we talk about on this podcast, these ideas are go across the board. They're not just business ideas, they're not just college student ideas. They're not just employee you know, moving from transitioning from one place to another. These are universal ideas and understanding where you are and what's what you need, and especially, what is that thing that you need to get to. My husband and I have always had, I call them next level goals. For some reason, we have just sort of naturally falling in, fallen into this next level goal until this stage of our life, and suddenly we've achieved everything that we wanted to, and there's no next level goal. And so he and I have been going back and forth to try to create that. What's that next thing that we want for ourselves? What do we want in the next, you know, year, five years, 10 years, and having the conversations to get really clear about that, and this is just our personal lives, has really enabled me to be more purposeful and deliberate about building the business that I'm building. Because now I'm like, okay, because his answer was, I'm going to retire and work at Home Depot or Lowe's. And I'm like, that's great, but that's not a next level goal, babe. So we've actually had that conversation, and we are working towards what what we want the next 10 years to look like. And I find so much comfort in that, because while we might take several different paths to get there, we know where we're going.

Yes, yes, and, and the beautiful thing about this, Sharon, did you find that once you've achieved you know your next level goals as they were defined, when you start to look at what the possibilities are for the other thing, there are possibilities everywhere. I mean, it's just when we have on the business blinders, or the student blinders or or, you know, this is just how it is, because this is how it's been blinders, then all of the opportunities that are around us, we're blind to them. They're there, but we're blind to them. And so part of the work that I do with people is, you know, I sort of have a four step process about dream it. You gotta dream it, then you gotta see it, because there's a path for for getting there. Then you've gotta believe it. You gotta believe that you can do it. So it's not the Doom scroll on Facebook where people are in front of their Maseratis and throwing money everywhere, right? You know the it's not the Insta, the Insta, whatever celebrity, whatever it's recognizing that you can do, if you're willing to put in the work and plan it, you can do. You can achieve pretty much anything that you want to do. So believing that you can do that is a really key component, particularly, you know, by the time you've hit midlife, you're not really sure that you can do it right. That's where the imposter syndrome and all of this other stuff come comes into play for CEOs. It's, uh, you know, I've never run a company that size. Can I really do it? Will the board keep me on board? What are the skills that I need to up level to get there, right? So there's, there's the believe it piece, and then there's the take the action, achieve it piece, right? Can't just, you can't just dream about it. You've got to actually, you know, put some skin effort and elbow grease into into the game anyway. So that's,

that's actually a quote from my my training. Nothing changes until you move. You must be in action. So, yes, really, really, this has been a wonderful conversation. And podcaster club Alicia. Alicia has a gift for you, and we will put that in the podcaster club community. It is podcaster dot club. We'll make sure that her gift is connected there, along with her information and how you can reach out to her. And thank you so much, Alicia, for being here on the profit connections podcast. Thank you for being here. We really appreciate it. Some really great nuggets, and I trust that you have taken a lot of this to heart, and you're going to move your business to that next level. I thank you for being here. Alicia,

Thank you, Sharon, thank you to your audience as well.