Winging It: Stop Waiting And Create The Success You Want Now With Global CEO Emma Isaacs

This is an interview I was excited about because it’s been a little while since I’ve sat down with my good friend, Emma Isaacs. I interviewed her a few years ago on Inspired Living TV, and I have been dying to talk to her since she had her new baby boy. She has six kids under the age of eleven. She wrote an incredible book that I cannot wait to get my hands on. She is the Founder and Global CEO of Business Chicks, which is one of the largest women networking groups in the world. I often ask myself, “Emma, how do you do it all?” In this interview, she shares exactly that. She also talks about what winging it means, and some of the best business advice she has ever received. You are going to love this interview with my good friend, Emma Isaacs.

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Miss Emma, you have no idea how excited I am to have you on the show. I am fascinated with your life, which is hard to believe was so long ago.

It’s been a while. I was pregnant like two pregnancies ago. We’ve got to do this more often. We’ve got to get together more often.

You have six kids under the age of eleven but, Emma, you have been up to some amazing things in your life. You’re someone that when I met, I just instantly fell in love with your charisma, your love for women, and your love for entrepreneurship. Did that come easy for you early on? You started your first business at eighteen. You started investing in property at nineteen. You were a self-made millionaire at 23.

It’s interesting when you look at your childhood. When you were riding the clock and go back and you think about what you’re made to do and what you were good at as a child. I’m the eldest of three kids. If you believe anything about birth order, I was born a leader and I always wanted to do everything first, fastest and the best. I’ve always had that quiet, innately, and competitive spirit but I don’t think I ever had a dream to be an entrepreneur. I didn’t even know what the word meant. When I started my first company, I probably didn’t hear that word for 5 or 6 years into that business journey.

I dropped out of uni first and foremost. I lasted for about six months because it was going far too slowly for me. I met this girl out socially and she had started this tiny recruitment agency. She invited me in for a job interview and the rest is history. I was eighteen years at the time and her business partner left that company. As he was walking out the door, he said to her, “If you were going to offer equity to anyone in this world, you’d offer it to that kid sitting there.” I had some savings and I bought into the business. We took that little company from the four of us when we first started to over 40 people.

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It took me seven years. I was in that business for seven years, but we grew it into a fantastic culture and beautiful little business. That was my first foray into entrepreneurship. I ultimately sold out of that business. I got invited along to a Business Chicks event. I remember my first ever thought was, “I’m not going to anything that calls themselves chicks. That’s so derogatory to women. That’s insulting. I’m a feminist. I’m a real proper entrepreneur. There is no way I’m going to that thing.” She said, “You need to get over yourself and you need to come along and experience what this is all about.” I walked into that room. I remember hearing the music pumping, people were high fiving and hugging, and I fell in love with the concept. Soon after that, I heard it was for sale. I was 25 at the time. I ran up to the lady at the end and I said, “I want to help. How can I make this thing happen?” I ended up buying the business and that’s what I’ve been doing and filling my days with, for the past years.

It’s been a complete labor of love and beautiful experience. We’ve grown it from 200 members to a community that reaches over 500,000 women across the globe. It sounds cliché and a little corny, but I am as excited about the business as I was years ago. That’s as an entrepreneur if you can say that about your business. I feel like I’ve won the lottery. I feel very blessed that I’ve found something that gets me out of bed and still propels me and keeps me interested.

We have to have that. I still feel the same way about Inspired Living and I’m several years in and I love it. I love what we do, but there have been plenty of businesses. I didn’t feel that way or you start getting hit with like a five-year itch. It’s like, “Is this it? There’s got to be something more.” When you still have that excitement, you have to have it because being an entrepreneur is not easy. Business Chicks was based in Australia. You’re now in the US. Tell us a little bit about that. How was that shift and moving your family and everything that you knew? You know from her accent that she’s a true Aussie, which I love Aussies. Tell us a little bit about that transition.

We moved to the States years ago. We live in Los Angeles. Half of my kids have complete American accents and the other ones are still little Aussies. The reason we wanted to move was because I feel that it’s my responsibility as a leader of a women’s community to walk my walk and talk my talk. I’m always encouraging our members to reach for the stars and play a bigger game. Put yourself in uncertainty and put yourself out there and get in discomfort. If I can’t do that for myself, then what’s it all about. We decided to pack up the family and move here years ago.

The first few years were completely impossible. I suffered huge amounts of failure. Were very much underfunded when we tried to get the business off the ground. The first time I know my Australian business was still very successful. I moved to the States to try and get it off the ground here, but I was bleeding that business of cash. It takes so much money to start up in another country. Coupled with the fact that I had the four young kids at that time and wasn’t sleeping and it was stressful. I had to take a moment and pause. The way I talk about this time, and I talk about it in the book as well as like, as entrepreneurs, you spend your whole life like climbing a mountain ride and it’s up and it feels like it’s uphill the whole time. It takes a huge amount of exertion and energy. You have to lift yourself every single day.

I carry it all doesn’t mean it’s not heavy, just because I carry it well, doesn’t mean it’s not heavy. It was a heavy time. My coach helped me say that, “Whilst you’re climbing this huge mountain of entrepreneurship. It is absolutely okay to rest and take stock and acclimate at base camp.” For the first couple of years of being here in America, I don’t know what I’m doing. That’s been a massive failure. I’m going to take a deep breath. I’m going to rest a little. I’m going to figure out what’s next. For me, I feel that I’m living the entrepreneur’s dream in a lot of ways. I always say to anyone that I work with, “The ultimate aim of any entrepreneur is to make themselves redundant in their business.”

A business needs to run with that. We are the visionaries. We are the faces of our business. We are the drivers, but your business should be able to take over and do well without you being there every single day, day in and day out. I have that with my Australian business. I have a wonderful CEO. I have a wonderful leadership team. It does not need me. It probably doesn’t grow as fast as I’d like it to if I don’t go in and inject some of my energy and enthusiasm from time to time.

Which is very neat because you are the visionary. You’re still holding that space for people.

I’m unique and in amazing position that my business does run without me. It pays me and it does well. That’s freed me up to think about what I want to explore creatively. That’s led me to write this amazing book that we’re going to talk about, do a lot more speaking, and also be around for my six young kiddos as well, which is a new thing for me.

How is that? I have a 6-month-old at home and my 5-year-old. We don’t have help this week. Here I am with two thinking we live in a jungle and a madhouse. How do you do it with six? Share some tips and strategies because I know I’m not the only one.

We are all wondering. Mine range from 11, 9, 7, 5, 3 and a little new guy, three months old. I can tell you after I had him months ago, I remember sitting up in my bed googling how to survive the newborn phase. I thought I was not going to get through this. I had to slap myself around the face. You’ve been here five times before. You know what you’re doing. You will survive this. I will tell you that having six is absolutely a high contact sport and it’s not for everyone. Our brand of doing it is very much about being calm always. It’s about having a heck of a lot of fun. It’s about not taking ourselves too seriously. It’s about not aiming for perfection.

If you want to have a bunch of kids, whether it’s 2, 3, 4 or 6 like I have, you’re going to need to give up something. For me, the way I’ve been able to do it is to be able to give up this notion of control, like controlling everything and having to have everything. That’s been my learning. It’s about I do not know what’s coming on any given day. I do not know if there are going to be three tantrums. I had four kids crying at one point. I was like, “What is going on?” That is an extraordinary amount of stress. It is only 10:00 AM but pass the wine. There are no huge secrets. We are quite organized. It’s pragmatic, not dramatic about things. That’s probably quite the Aussie way, is to be calm and chilled. I’m lucky that I chose my partner reasonably well, Rowan.

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You are a good match for each other. You travel, from what I know it seems he loves also supporting and that’s important. The reason why you’re bringing up the six kids, that is amazing, because women are always hard on themselves and they think, “I can’t have this if I want this. I need to wait until this is perfect before I start thinking of growing my family or start writing my book or start growing my business.” One of the traits of being an entrepreneur is that we are a little cray-cray but we dive in and we figure it out as we go.

He built the plane while it’s flying and that’s certainly been the philosophy of my life yet. That’s what I found with my husband. He is very supportive. It’s not by any means a perfect union. There is no union that is perfect. He will say that as well. That whole Sheryl Sandberg advice of picking your partner wisely is a really sad one. If anyone young out there or perhaps considering remarrying, take that time.

One of the best most important business decisions you’ll ever make if you decide to marry and be with. I’ve had the wonderful opportunity to see you try to build Business Chicks here. I know what a great success it is in the US. You have amazing speakers like sir Richard Branson, Arianna Huffington and Diane von Furstenberg. Someone would look at you and go, “She must have had this all planned out. She has these amazing speakers, incredible company and her family.” Going back to that inner critic and that inner voice in all of us that says, “I will do this when.” Tell us about winging it. Tell me about how planned you’ve been in growing your life, your business, and what we can expect from the book?

What I’d say is that for the past years of building Business Chicks. I’ve been in a unique position to be able to talk to hundreds, if not thousands of women, and been able to dive into what holds them back and what propels them forward. It led me to write this book because the collective wisdom of those women is sacred. Unfortunately, there are still women who are plagued with a unique set of challenges. We wait to be asked. We wait to be tapped on the shoulder for opportunities. We wait until our kids are old enough before they are gone to college, or we have enough money or we have enough time. I always talk about the old example of a job advertisement. A woman will see a job advertisement and think, “If I’ve only got 7 or 8 of the qualifying criteria.” A guy will say, “I’ve got 3 or 4 of the qualifying criteria. I’m going to jump in and apply.”

Where the woman probably wouldn’t apply at all.

They decided, “I don’t have 100%. I’m not ready. I don’t have it so I’m not going to apply.” That led me to think about my philosophies of life. My philosophy in both business and having run my own companies for years has been about the philosophies of saying yes and figuring it out later, backing myself into situations, putting myself in places where I felt like the least intelligent person in the room because that’s ultimately where the growth happens. When I wrote this book, it’s a funny little story of how it all came about. I wrote the book and submitted the manuscript, but the day before I submitted the manuscript, I didn’t have a working title. I was throwing around all these different ideas.

Back before I even started, the first two words I wrote when I opened up a Word document and write the book, Winging It, by Emma Isaacs. I took myself out of that title because it didn’t seem serious and professional enough and the whole thing. The day before I went to submit the manuscript, there’s a good friend of mine and I was like, “What am I going to call this book?” She’s like, “You’ve got to go back to what felt right and what you initially said. You are the master of winging it, so just call it that.” I pitched to the publisher and they loved it. It’s a combination of my years of being in business, also the study of the people that I have been able to meet and spend meaningful time with.

I’m sad to see some themes coming up for successful people. It’s like everyone thinks you look at Richard Branson or Arianna Huffington or Diane von Furstenberg. You think that they’ve got it all worked out and I’m here to tell you that they did not what they have. That’s not to discount and to downplay their success, they’re immensely successful people. They’ve achieved incredible fates that you and I probably can only dream about. I’m not downplaying or minimizing how successful they are, but at some point, they did not know what they were doing.

They didn’t write out their 5-year plan or 10-year plan.

If you want to look at Branson as a study, he started a student magazine when he was fifteen years old, then he started a record label without knowing what he was doing. He started an airline without knowing what he was doing. Then he’s going to space with a space flight. He doesn’t know what he’s doing. He’s working it out. The point is, we look at successful people and we think, “They have the plan, the model, the formula, and the recipe.” They did not. What they have though, is the confidence to try and figure it out and the grit to stay it out. That’s what I would want to encourage people to do. Step forward, put one foot in front of another, explore, and discover. Honestly, if you can continue to back yourself into situations like that, the whole world does appear.

I love that so much because I feel in my experience of working with entrepreneurs for so many years, especially women, we get stuck in that inner critic of, “I’m not ready. I don’t have enough. I don’t know enough.” You’ve had an incredibly tremendous career and will continue to have, and you’ve surrounded yourself with amazing people. Let’s go back to that because I have to agree with you. One of the things that have been a huge pillar in my own success is the women like you that I know, that I learned from. How important has mentorship and community bend to you in building your business?

It’s everything you alluded to it before. The journey of an entrepreneur is such a bumpy one and we cannot go it alone. To me, being able to work out how to build a powerful network around me of people who have power, but also people who perhaps are there when I need to have a vent or have a cry. That’s certainly been something that I’ve worked hard on throughout my entire career. Building relationships with people, being kind to people, doing favors for other people, and reaching out when there’s no reason to reach out. That has been one of the key elements.

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That’s important to reach out when there’s no reason to reach out whether it’s your clients, friends, and customers. That’s how you build loyalty in any relationship.

It’s like what Dr. Lois Frankel says, “When you need a relationship, it’s too late to build one.” What that tells me is that we should be continuously investing in our relationships, and continuously checking in with other people. Relationships are like a bank account, you’ve got to keep making little deposits along the way. At some point in your life, you’re going to need to withdraw some cash from that bank account. It’s that discipline and the rigor of continuously being kind to others and doing favors for others that will set you up for success. I’d say, it’s everything. What is important that you talked about a little bit before but it’s working on the inner critic or that inner voice.

What we can tend to do, I know a lot about your readers and I’m one of them, what we can tend to do is look too far outwards. Run around asking for advice from everyone and everywhere. The problem with doing that is that it can catch you off guard and you need to course correct. I believe that we all have the answers to the questions that we’re asking. If we only sat still for a moment and questioned what we want from our lives. That’s something very powerful with a stillness. We all run around being busy and filling our days and thinking that everyone else has got it sorted out and asking for advice. If you were to sit still if I put you in a forest and not the jungle of your home and you sat there for two weeks, you would be able to figure out exactly what you wanted for your life, exactly the vision that you wanted to accomplish. The community is everything. Your network is everything. Your relationships are everything. The relationship you have with yourself and the monologue you have with yourself about what’s possible for your life is just as important.

When I was pregnant with Lauren, I was a single mom on my own. I remember I met an incredible spiritual mentor, who I had no idea that I needed. Dayna Decker, who was a speaker at Brilliant the same year you were introduced us. I remember her telling me, you don’t have a spiritual practice. Here I am thinking I’m very spiritual. I believe in God and all of these things. She’s like, “I want you every day before you do anything to breathe for twenty minutes, to set your intentions. When you feel a disconnect to ask the question and wait for the answer.” I feel like I missed that practice. I’ve gotten out of it. Every time I go back to it, my day is different.

I show up differently in my business. I think I’m a much better leader. I feel like as entrepreneurs, we are always seeking validation or someone to like our idea or, “Is this the right thing?” We are visionaries and we do have a lot of great ideas and we’re seeking approval instead of going inward and figuring out, “Is the timing right? Is this the right thing for me to do? Is this the title of my book?” We forget that. I love that you bring that up because I’ve personally experienced that. It makes a huge difference. We all have five, ten minutes a day where we can just sit and breathe.

I need that reminder as well.

My producer, who was helping me with the show notes, not that I needed them, but she was reading through everything and reading about Winging It. She’s like, “I cannot wait to read this book.” We’re all very excited here in the US to get our hands on this book. I know it’s been a huge success for you in Australia and other places in the world. What does it mean to you to get it published here? What are your hopes for the book?

It’s an exciting time for me. As you said, the book sold well in Australia when it was released there.

You’re a big deal there. You’re a big thing. Not that you’re not a big thing here.

I’m not, let’s be honest. I’m just a little fish in a big pond here and it’s a beautifully humbling experience. There’s no shame in that. It’s been wonderful to have a beginner’s mind and to work it out. It’s not been without a tremendous amount of failure, but certainly rejection. When I went to publish the book in Australia, there was a bidding war from the top five publishers and everyone was falling over themselves to get the rights, which we’ve said, “This is nice.”

We didn’t go with the highest offer at all. We went with the one that felt the best and who we had the most chemistry with. The experience of trying to shop it around in the States was very different. The rejection was hard to take. Everything in life, you land where you need to, and we have found a home with the amazing publishers that sounds true. They’ve been such a joy to work with. It’s been frictionless and just beautiful. It’s my hope that the book will do well here. I feel it’s jam-packed with practical advice. I feel it’s got some great stories and anecdotes from successful people. There’s lots of stuff in it about my philosophies on parenting, creating wealth, making money, running, starting and scaling businesses. I hope that it resonates here and we’re getting some great feedback from all the reviews. I want to get it into the hands of as many people as possible.

I’m going to help you do that. We’re going to get it in everyone’s hand, especially if you are looking to grow and scale your business because often we think we need to have it all figured out. Quite frankly, none of us do. You think the next step, you surround yourself with people that are smarter than you, and you breathe when you can’t drink a little wine. I have a question for you too, kind of off-topic here but you decided to talk about video. You decided to go live with your childbirth and thousands of people are tuning it. Here I am looking at you and it’s water birth. You’re at home. First of all, I want to know what pulled you to make that decision? Why did you want to share it? What was the result of doing that?

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The story with that is I’ve always been terrified of childbirth since I was a young kid. My mom would tell me stories of her births that were traumatic. My whole childhood like, “I’m never having kids.” As you do, I fell in love. I met Rowan, we got married and we fell pregnant quickly afterwards. As my tummy started to grow, I became acutely aware that I was going to have to get this thing out of me. I started an intense process of education. I watched every single video documentary. I read every single book. I went to birthing classes, and then retrained, reeducated, and relearned what I had learned about childbirth.

It led me down this path of thinking I could have a natural birth. I did that for my first. I had a beautiful birth at home, and that was lovely. I did that for the subsequent next four. On my fifth birth with Piper, that was the most incredible experience. There were angels in the room, it was a beautiful evening. I wanted to share that experience. I remember beforehand everyone talking me out of it and saying, “What if something goes wrong?” It was a big lesson for me because I knew I wanted to do it. I knew it was the right thing to do, but I got myself talked out of it. We have to take our own advice at times.

When I became pregnant with my sixth, I was like, “I’m going to share this.” What ended up happening that was lovely is, we’re in the middle of a global pandemic. Everyone is at home. We’re used to being on Zoom calls, and we’re used to digesting our content digitally which is what we’re doing. He was born on the first day of summer. It was at the height of the Black Lives Matter protests. As I was birthing him, there were helicopters literally above the house. We were a few blocks away from the LMS, so we’re right in it. It’s an intense moment in time, all of us under curfew, all of us locked-down from the pandemic. I’d never been sure that we could all do with a little bit of joy or positivity in that time. While it was happening, I didn’t know what was happening. We had a camera. It was all very PG. It wasn’t up close.

I wasn’t worried about what the camera was doing, it was over there in the living room. After the birth, I did watch back a little bit of the footage and it was so beautiful to see everyone chiming in with their messages of support and people saying, “I’m in tears, I needed this, I had terrible births, but that was healing for me or unexpecting, that’s given me confidence or just one more push.” The sisterhood on steroids, it was the most beautiful experience for me to relieve that a few days later. I have not stopped fielding emails and text messages saying, “Thank you for sharing that. It was quite profound for me. The added bonus was, all of my family are in Australia. They got to share in it as well. It was a beautiful moment. It makes me want to have a seventh, so I could do it again.

You are such a wonderful walking example of what it means to give life not only to your six beautiful kids but to women, their dreams, to Business Chicks, and what you’ve built. It’s one of the largest women networks in the world. You help people give birth, give life to their dreams, and to what’s possible. Looking at you, writing a book in the middle of the kids, the travel, and everything that you’ve gone through, and addressing the failures too. I think that so often we hit some road bump and we take that as a sign that we shouldn’t keep moving. You’re a beautiful example of what it means to feel the road bump and reassess. Take a pause and then figure out where you need to keep going.

It’s like with the book, getting it rejected many times, trying to launch Business Chicks here in the US and not being the success, you moved your whole family here for that. Being a part of that, I saw what you were creating. I was hungry and excited to have something like that here because we need it. It’s interesting how we can know how great our product or service could be for someone, yet for some reason, the marketplace isn’t ready for it. When that happened, did you say, “I’m not going to pursue this anymore?” Did you decide to put it on pause? How did you figure out? What did you decide to do when you weren’t seeing the result that you were hoping for when you had such incredible success in Australia?

I’ve always been someone in the business that lets the numbers do the talking. When I talk about business and think about it. I have quite an old-fashioned view about business and it’s simply this, we have to make more money than we’re spending. It gets back to this notion of we can all be busy and we can all fill our days with getting busy, but unless you’re right in the depths of your business, and unless you understand the mechanics of how you make money, the levers in which you have to pull to make money, those decisions get made for you. It was a terrible decision to make from my heart and for my soul. It felt awful, but the numbers are telling me, we simply could not go on.

It’s interesting as we get a little bit older, our appetite for risk, from my experience, decreases a little bit, and there’s more on the line now. I have the family, I have about 40 people I’m employing in Australia and their livelihoods depend on me. I had to be mature about it and let the numbers speak for themselves. It’s certainly something that was humbling and I learned a lot from it, but I don’t believe it’s the end at all. It’s just the beginning. Not to get woo-woo on you, but I do believe in the timing of the universe. I do believe that we can’t have this completely charmed experience, and to be honest with you up until that point, things have been pretty good. I had smaller failures and I had a million road bumps but generally, it had been good. I’d launched businesses, they’d made money, I’d worked out how to extract value from the businesses, so I could build my own wealth foundation. It was all going well. It was a beautiful failure. Whilst it hurts so much at the time, it’s propelled me on to do so many other things to appreciate it. Don’t worry, we’ve got to get it back and you’re going to be there, it’s going to be amazing and it’s happening.

There’s our time. There’s me time, and sometimes the universe and our time is not all the same.

It teaches us patience, resilience and perseverance, all good qualities.

Give us the best advice you’ve ever received.

Given that we are on the parenting theme a little bit and a lot of your readers are moms, the best advice I’ve ever received has to do with guilt because we all experience it. I know your whole audience, you are always up to something. You’re always striving for more. You’re always curious about what’s next. The best advice I ever received was from a mentor when I had my first child and she taught me about dealing with guilt as a mom. She said, “As much as when that little bubba comes out, you look down into its eyes and you start to extrapolate out into their future and imagine what they’re going to make of their lives, what they’re going to become, what they’re going to do with their lives. As much as you’re thinking about that for them, they are looking up at you looking in your eyes and asking the same thing.” It’s like, “Mom, what are you going to get up to? What impact are you going to make? What are you going to create?” That’s always calmed me if I’ve ever felt a sense of guilt because I believe that my purpose of being on the planet is to be a role model, not only for women but for my kids as well. I always revert back to that advice whenever I’m feeling a little bit of guilt creeping in.

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I’m going to remember that too because it’s true. We’re always looking and growing and wanting to achieve new heights in our career and our vision. Sometimes you can’t be everywhere at once and you’ve got to let go and let them know that you’re a role model. That they see hope in you, as you see hope for your future too. Thank you for that. I’m going to take that with me. It is so wonderful to catch up with you. We need to do this more. What does inspired living mean to you?

Inspired living for me is all about choices. It’s about having the resources to be able to make the choices you need to make. That’s in your family and your business. For me, it’s about designing a life where you have choices to make and making those decisions well.

Thank you for being with us. Thank you for showing us what we’re all capable of through winging it and stop waiting for this need to get it right and to be perfect. I appreciate you and how you show up for women and everyone who knows you. You’re truly a bright light. Thank you so much. I can’t wait to get my hands on Winging It. Please get your hands on this book, read this book. I know it’s going to be brilliant because I know Emma and she is that and so much more, and then share it with someone. I truly believe when you’re inspired, you inspire others and we need to give more women permission to stop waiting for it to be “the time” and say, “My time is now.” I can’t wait to get that launch date on the books here.

Thank you so much for your time.

Bye.

Important Links:

• Business Chicks
• Emma Isaacs
• https://BusinessChicks.com/wingingit/
• https://www.EmmaIsaacs.com/business-chicks
• @EmmaIsaacs – Instagram

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• https://inspiredliving.tv/podcast

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