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You are listening to the Grow youw Local Business podcast where local marketing expert and life coach Leslie Presnol shares the strategies and the mindset to help you reach more people in your city and bring in a steady stream of clients. All right, let's dive in.
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Hello. Welcome to episode 150. Today is a celebration episode. We are celebrating 150 episodes of the Grow youw Local Business podcast. My original plan was to do an Ask Me Anything episode. I wanted to do rapid fire questions and answer all the things that you guys have been dying to know about me, about growing your business, anything. And when I put it out there on social media in an email asking you guys what you wanted to know, I, I was overwhelmed and just honestly touched by the number of questions that I got about me and just wanting to know my story. So instead of trying to answer all the questions, Q and A style and it being random and not connected, I thought I would just turn this 150th episode into an episode about my story. And I do think this is a special and significant moment and something you can learn from because when I first launched this podcast 150 episodes ago, I didn't think that people wanted to know me. One of the questions that was submitted is somebody wanted to know what I get coaching on when I'm coaching with my coach. And it's always been like some sort of flavor of this that people don't want to know about me. People don't necessarily care about me. They just want to know, like what I can teach them. So I'm gonna tell you my story today and you are gonna hear how I was a blogger for over a decade. Like I used to over share my life on the Internet. That used to be very easy for me. But when I became a coach and I started marketing myself as this expert, something happened in my brain where I was like, okay, you have to show up like very professional and no one cares about your life anymore. You're not a blogger anymore. So you just have to jump like straight into the strategy. You know, it's like you go when you want a recipe on a food blogger's website and you have to read and scroll through their whole story before you get to the recipe. That's what I felt like. I was like, they don't want my story, they don't want me. They don't care what I did over the weekend. So over 150 episodes I have worked on that belief. But it's also like, I just got in this routine of recording an episode and jumping straight in to the content and. And not sharing much about my personal life. And I can see as a coach, as a marketer, as a business owner, how that creates disconnect, how it's the opposite of relationship building, and it's the opposite of what I teach, because I teach you how to be that local, go to person in your city. And that requires people knowing you, like seeing your face, knowing your story. So on one hand, I did that for years and years, over a decade, as a local business owner. And it is what I teach. But. But I could see how I wasn't bringing it here to the podcast as a coach, to a scalable worldwide audience. So this is me doing that. And what I also know is the more information you give people, the more value you provide. The more you put out there, the more people keep coming back and wanting more. And they do want to know you. They want to know what you're doing on the weekend. They want to know how you met your husband. They want to know where you're going on vacation. They want to know, like, all the personal things with, like, about you. So that food blogger that you just randomly visited for the first time to get some random recipe, they have an audience that loves them, who is reading that entire story, who may care more about that story than the recipe. And that's true for your audience, too. So let this also be a lesson and a takeaway for you today that your people want to know you. And I learned that from all the questions that came in about me. I was just so honored and touched. Now, I did get a lot of questions about marketing, too, and I have so many podcast ideas. So I don't even want to do an and ask me an ask me anything episode anymore. I just don't think it would do the questions justice. So some of the marketing questions are just going to get their own episodes. Some may end up being webinars. Some of my students inside the LocalPreneur Academy sent in really good questions that I'm going to turn into bonus trainings inside the Academy or even live workshops for them. I'm just, like, overflowing with with ideas right now. Uh, and I do want to say, if you have a question, like a burning question about growing your business and you don't want to wait for a podcast to possibly come out about it, come join us inside the LocalPreneur Academy. This is where you get that question answered today and then your next question answered tomorrow and then the next one the next day. You don't have to sit and wait on a podcast episode to hopefully apply to you or a podcast episode to hopefully be about the thing that you need help with. Like, we get to create your super tailored, customized experience inside the local Preneur Academy to make sure you're getting exactly what you need right now to grow your business and bring in clients. All right, so let's dive in to my story. I have to say, this feels overwhelming. Like I could create content from scratch, but creating my story or telling my story, I was like, where do I start? Like, do I start on the day of my birth? I was like, okay. Well, I was born in a small town in north Louisiana. I lived there for 17 years until I moved to Baton Rouge, Louisiana to go to college at lsu. Go Tigers. So from a very young age, I remember always wanting to play school, like, to play teacher. I had baby dolls who were my students. My parents worked for the school system, so somehow I ended up with an overhead projector. Do you remember those? From, like, the 90s? My aunt was also a first grade teacher, so she would give me all of her transparencies. She would give me worksheets, bulletin board stuff. My playroom as a child was a classroom. Like, I wanted to be a teacher. I had a marker board, like a whiteboard. I had a chalkboard, a full classroom. Like, I had it all, you name it. I spent my childhood teaching baby dolls, and everyone around me was in education. Like I said, my parents worked for the school system. My mom was an accountant. My dad hired all the maids and custodians for all the schools, and we had around 40 schools in the district. My aunt was a librarian. My other aunt was a first grade teacher. My uncle was an electrician for the school board. My other uncle was a professor at a local university. One of my grandmothers was a teacher's aide. And my other grandmother, I'm really not sure what she did. I should probably ask. But she worked for the school system since, like, the 1940s. And there was a time that my grandmother, my mom, my dad, me. I'll tell you about that in a minute. But we were all working for the school system at the same time, and we were the longest reigning family in the school system. So it is in my blood to be an educator. However, in middle school, I discovered magazines. I found a Cosmo girl one day at my grandmother's house, and I was like, this is it. This is my future. I knew right then. Blink182 was on the COVID And I remember like, opening that magazine and reading all the job titles on the inside. There was, like, editor in chief, photographer, all the designers. And I looked at the name of the top editor in chief, and I was like, that's me. That is what I am gonna do. So from there on out, I was gonna move to New York and work for a fashion magazine. I knew that from middle school on. So throughout high school, I worked, you know, in journalism for the school paper. I was the editor, of course. I did, like, multimedia, video broadcasting stuff in high school. Like, anything I could get my hands on like that. And then in college at lsu, I majored in mass communication with a focus in print journalism, which now looking back, this was around. This was like in the recession when literally all print media was dying. But here I am, print journalism major with a minor in fashion. So it was textiles, apparel, and merchandising is what it was called. But at the time, I was like, with a degree in journalism and a minor in fashion, that is how I'm going to work for a fashion magazine. So I started college in 2006. So this was right around the time that Facebook had just become a thing. Social media wasn't huge yet. And within a year or so into college, I started working for the Daily Reveille, which was our college newspaper at lsu. Now there's, like, national champions in football and sports and all of that in college. And at this time, the Daily Reveille, our college newspaper, was the number one college newspaper in the country because of their multimedia use. So we were incorporating Twitter, video, any sort of, like, multimedia, where, like, we were just ahead of a lot of people at the time, which was pretty cool. We were being trained. Like, I was learning so much more in my college newspaper than I was in classes. Like, we were being trained to be one man. Shows to where at the time it was still very common, to where it's like, you're like, either the writer or you're the videographer, or you're the photographer or you're. And eventually maybe the social media person. But we were being trained to be able to do all of it, and I'm so grateful for that now eventually. Now I think people are kind of all of it, but at the time, that just was kind of unheard of. So I am so grateful for that because I did get to learn all of it. I got to learn video, I got to learn the social media. I got to learn photography and the writing. So I started off as a features writer. So I got to write on all the fun Stuff like, I wrote on the fashion. I wrote about squirrels on campus. Like any like, fluffy, fun thing versus, and I'm not kidding about squirrels. Like, I really wrote articles about squirrels versus, like, hard hitting news. Just the hard hitting news stuff wasn't my thing. It wasn't fun. But after a couple of years, I became news editor. So I was running the entire news staff and the entertainment staff and I was planning what was going to go in the paper that week. I was managing everyone. And that. That was the best. That was like the time of my life. But I was missing a ton of class. I. Y'. All. I still have nightmares to this day that I am failing classes because I'm missing tests. Like, I. This is so. This is true. Like, I would have to go meet with professors because I would miss exams. Like, exams that I didn't even know were happening. And I was a good student. Like, I had a high gpa and so I would just have to go beg. Like, can I please just retake this test? And I would tell them what I was doing. I'd be like, I would. I was convinced I was like, saving the world. So I would tell them I was like, listen, like, I'm getting real life experience. Like, I'm. I'm the editor of, like, the paper and blah, blah, blah. So. And they're like, listen, whatever, like, go study and come back and do this. So it all worked out. I graduated. It was great. We did these mock interviews before graduation. And, like, within the school of mass communication, our local newspaper here in Baton Rouge came and like, set up. They were just fake interviews that we did. And they actually offered me a real job on the spot, but I declined it. And they created the job because I was like a features fluffy writer. And I was like, oh, yeah, I really want to do fashion writing and blah, blah, blah, like all these things. And they're like, wait, we don't have anybody like that. And they created a job on the spot in the middle of a recession where everyone was being laid off, papers are being shut down. They offered me a job right then and there. Hadn't even walked across the stage yet. But I declined it because it had always been my dream to go to New York and work for a magazine. So that is what I did. Very briefly, I will say New York City is one of my favorite places on the planet. I loved it. Again, time of my life, I lived on the Upper west side, right across from the park. I had my little chihuahua at the time. And, you know, we'd go Walk in the park in the snow for hours. I mean, I just loved it. I loved living there. But working for a magazine in New York is exactly what you would think it would be. Like, based on movies like the Devil Wears Prada. Like, I worked in a closet. I fed my editor's cat. I got dry cleaning. Now there were really cool experiences too, like playing with all the products. I got to interview the Real Housewives of New Jersey. Just getting to see my name printed in a magazine, like, it was amazing. And also, I missed a boy. I had been dating a guy from college for about two years at the time, and I moved to New York and he did not. He had a family owned business in another small town in North Louisiana that he knew he wanted to run for the rest of his life. And I knew that if I wanted to be with him, that I would have to go move there and basically be a teacher. So I moved home. I called my dad and I also miss Louisiana. It was the middle of Mardi Gras and it was so cold in New York. It was a huge snowstorm. We had been inside for like over a week at that point. Like, you couldn't even walk outside. And I just, I was so miserable. I was alone. I called them. I'm like 21 years old at the time. So I called my parents. My dad drove a U haul through the middle of Times Square to come pick me up. So I moved home mostly for a boy. And when I got there, he had different plans but did not involve me since I had moved to New York without him. So it made sense. But we broke up literally the day I moved home for him. So I was in this super weird place of like, what? Like, what do I do now? Like, whatever, you know? And I did what every. Was that 21 or 22 at the time? I'm not sure around there. But I did what every post grad does. I moved in with my parents and I went to grad school to be a teacher now. And I did rent my own place. I was in my hometown now. And here's the thing that I have left out. I had started a blog about a year before. So in 2010, right before it was my last semester of college, I had started a blog on the floor of my apartment. And I had been keeping up with it even in New York. So I kept doing it even through grad school, having a broken heart, being a brand new teacher. So I did get a job even without being like, having a degree in education yet. I got a job at A really low income school where they let you teach on a temporary certification for two years as long as you were working towards your master's. So it was one of the hardest things I've ever done. I was commuting back and forth after teaching sixth graders all day long, not knowing how. And I'm 20, in my early 20s, and I would drive to another town like 30 miles away for three hour night classes. I would not get home until bedtime and then I would have to grade papers. Lesson plan. And I still managed to keep up with my blog throughout the week and on weekends. I was not making any money yet, but this was also like the early days of blogging and I did have readers, I did have people paying attention. And I was blogging about fashion, lifestyle things. And when I did graduate grad school, I decided I wanted to move back to Baton Rouge. Like, I was so ready to get out of my hometown. It was never my intention to end up back there. So I think I was around 23 years old now. I moved to Baton Rouge and bought my first home. And I got another job teaching here, now seventh grade English, which I would continue to do for the next five years. And I was much better at it now. I was, I was actually a really great teacher. And I was excited to move back to Baton Rouge because it was a bigger city and it's not a big city by any means, but it was a bigger city. And there was a blogger community here and there were other people blogging and I had moved. The problem was I had moved back to this city now that I had been gone from for a few years. And I had only known the college part of this town. I didn't know anybody here anymore. So it really did feel like I was starting over. Everybody I knew, mostly from college, had moved away from. There was this sense of starting over in a new town. There was only like one or two people here that I knew, and I was on a side of town now that I didn't even know existed in college. So it really did all feel new. And with my blog, I quickly knew that I had to pivot because I was just like everyone else. Like, we were all writing on fashion, we were all riding on lifestyle, we were all talking about the latest Nordstrom sale items and the. The new J. Crew scarf. I just always felt behind. Like I was just kind of on the coattails of everybody else. Like I was just waiting to see what the new thing was so I could hurry up and write about it and keep up and be Relevant. And I knew if I stayed in that niche that I would just continue to blend in and be that way. And there were also just other really big fashion bloggers at the time that weren't in my city, but just really big fashion bloggers that we were all looking up to. And I just looked around and I noticed that no one in my city was blogging about local things. And Again, this was 13 years ago. Literally Instagram had just become a thing. So no one was talking about local businesses, local fashion, or things to do. So I decided that I was going to be the local go to girl and I started calling myself that. I no longer blogged about general fashion trends. Like, I would go to the local boutiques here and I would share what they had in store and I would interview the owners and I would let them help me put outfits together. I would create these massive list of things to do every single day here in Baton Rouge. With things going on around town, places to go eat, happy hours to go to. People would literally come to me to decide what they were going to do for fun that day, that weekend. I would interview people doing cool things, events going on around town. Everything was just now local focused. And that is when things started to take off. That is when I started to get known because my content wasn't generic anymore. It was really meant for people here and it started to mean something to people here. So I started getting featured on the local news and in our magazines. I was being asked to even be editors of magazines here and to put on photo shoots, which was super cool. And I was invited to be judges of fashion shows. I got to go into LSU's annual fashion show for their seniors and judge their, their end of year fashion show like the school I had just graduated from. And then I started hosting my own events and I started with really small pop ups at breweries and restaurants and I would ask a few boutiques if they wanted to pop up. And it was put on through my blog like it was branded through my blog. And at first, like, nobody really came, like, except a few. Except a few people, you know, like I had loyal people, but we just kept learning and making them bigger and better until they just grew and took off. And. And then one day a boutique owner came to me and she asked me if I had ever thought about doing a blowout sale where boutiques could all get together and put everything on sale and just host this huge sale. And I was like, no, I haven't ever thought of that, but I totally can do that. So I rented a ballroom. I got 20 boutiques together. Actually, I'm not sure. I know I had space for 20, but I don't think I filled all 20 spots. Um, and I gave away a ton of tickets, and I sold a couple. But we hosted our very first boutique blowout sale, and I believe that was in 2017. And it went okay. There were times that the ballroom was completely empty with no shoppers, and I would totally panic. I would take it personally. I would feel bad for the vendors. I would think they all for sure hated me. And. And I cried on the ballroom floor. But I picked myself up, and I was like, okay, let's do it again. So I did it two times a year for the next seven years. And let me tell you, from repping it out, from evaluating, from learning as much as I can, I turned that one ballroom into three ballrooms. I turned that empty ballroom into a line wrapped around the building with people waiting hours to get in. It turned more into a strategy of how can I get people in and out as fast as possible? So I sold tickets year after year like clockwork. I had a wait list of vendors twice as long as I had spots available. I was squeezing vendors into every corner I could get them in. I had vendors from Texas, Mississippi, Tennessee, like, all asking if they could come to this event. I had event sponsors. We had the news here. We had security. That event grew to one of the biggest things I've ever done. Like thousands of shoppers, we put millions back into our local economy through sale items, like things that probably would have never gotten purchased. Local people were discovering new local boutiques. It was great. It was one of the best things I've ever done, and it's what helped me create what I now teach. I teach how to sell out local events inside the academy. This is how I was able to build that. That course. And during the same time, I also built up a local networking group. It was called the Happy Hour Club. And basically, I knew there were a ton of women just like me in my town who struggled to make friends or who had just moved back and didn't know anybody or just moved here and didn't know anybody. And I wanted to do something more casual. I didn't want to have to do, like, official membership or anything with a lot of obligations. So basically, Happy Hour Club was a community where we met once a month for drinks. We would do other things too, like workout classes. It ended up evolving. We would do workout classes or floral classes. We did all sorts of stuff, but it really Started out as just once a month we'd meet for drinks, we'd pick a restaurant or a bar that would give us a drink special. They even created cocktails for us. So if you have never had a cocktail named after you, I highly recommend recommend it. But we ended up growing that community to over a thousand women and it was just so much fun. And here's the thing, I am still full time teaching during all of this. But other it gets wilder. Other business owners started asking for my help. They were like, how are you doing this? How are you creating so much demand? How are you getting people to come to your events? How are you having so much fun on social media? Like tell me about this email marketing thing. Tell me about Instagram. Like give me all your tips, please help. So I started taking on social media clients while still full time teaching. So I was a blogger doing all these events with this local networking club, putting on these large scale events. Like I didn't even talk about this. I used to do something called Fall Fashion Fest, which was a festival that I would put on. But I was also taking on like social media clients. I was teaching full time. Eventually something did have to give. So in 2018, I left teaching. I have an entire episode about my decision and thought process on leaving my full time job and creating safety to do that. I'm going to link that in the show notes because like I said, I came from a family of educators. There were no entrepreneurs in my family. None. So it basically came down to this question of what's the worst thing that can happen? And the worst thing that can happen is that I just have to come back and get a teaching job. So I was living my worst case scenario already. And I believed, I, I knew that if I could have that time every day, those eight hours a day, that I could put out enough value into the world to bring in the revenue that I needed to live without being a teacher. So I didn't even have like massive dreams yet. I just wanted to replace my teaching salary. So this was also the same time that I found life coaching because it was scary, it was hard. There were so many obstacles and I had so much mental drama. Especially now that I was taking on clients. I had pricing drama again. I didn't have anything to base this off of. I didn't really know any other entrepreneurs. I didn't like to charge people. I didn't have client boundaries. I was working around the clock for people. I was people pleasing. I would, if clients were asking me something, I'd be Like, yeah, I can do that. I totally could not do it, but I was telling them I could. So I would get coaching on my mindset every single week. I joined a coaching program so I could just keep learning. And I had invested in other programs along the way just to grow my business. But I was really starting to see how important the mindset piece was, especially since this was, like, serious now. Like, this was my full time job. I was single, I had a mortgage. So I was like, I'm gonna make this work. Then in 2019, my husband and I started dating. We dated for six months and got engaged. Not very long, like a few months. And we got engaged in January of 2020. So you may be thinking, wow, that's fast. But I left out this whole story. We had known each other for, like, a decade at that point. We had known each other since college, since 2008 is when I met him. Actually, I here. It's crazy, y'. All. I met my husband the night before I started dating my college boyfriend. Like the one I followed home from New York. Yep. I met Michael the night before I started dating that guy. I met Michael at a friend's apartment. He was, like, a friend of a friend. And then I met the other guy the very next night and started dating him and then moved all over. But anyway, so I was still friends and in touch with Michael's friends. I didn't really know Michael that well until I moved back to Baton rouge and in 2013. So he was one of the few people that I was like, okay, I know that guy. But that was still six years before we started dating. So we just always, through those years, stayed friends, and there was, like, something there. But I would never date him because we were friends, and we became really good friends, and I didn't want to ruin the friendship. And I had dated other guys. And there was another guy that I had gotten pretty serious with, and we had dated for about three years. He was a great guy, amazing guy. And. And we were all friends. He was friends with Michael, too. But he was always like, why do you always ask about Michael? Anytime we go somewhere, he's like, he's. He was like the first thing. Anytime we go out, you're always like, where's Michael? And I'm like, oh, do I do that? Like, that's weird. I don't think I do that. But long story short, we broke up, and I started dating Michael, and we. We had a serious conversation before we started dating. And I was like, listen, if we start dating, we are Getting married. Like, we have been best friends for too long. Like, this is it. So he knew I was serious. I was like, if we're dating, we are getting married. This is no, like, we're not gonna see if this is gonna work thing. Like, we. This is it. Like, we're done. So we did. And we used to joke we'd be like, oh, like, if we're still single at whatever age, we'll get married. We're like, why? Why? Like, let's just get married. So we did. So we got engaged right before COVID and. And we bought our house the day the world shut down. We bought this house because it has a pool house. And when we came and looked at it, we walked in and I was like, this is my office. Like, I just knew as soon as I saw it and walked in, I could feel it. I was like, this is it. This is where I'm going to grow my business. So at the time, I'm still a social media manager and a blogger and all the things, but I just walked in, I was like, this is it. Like, this is my space. So we bought it. We moved in on March 13, 2020, and that's the day the world shut down. We didn't know it. We did not know. And at the time, Michael was going to work in an office and he never went back again. And our lives forever changed that day because we went from, you know, I had been living on my own for however many years, since I was 17 years old, and now I'm living with my future husband. And we moved into a house, and now we're also co workers for eternity, for the rest of our lives. So we turned another bedroom into his office. And yeah, we've been working from home together for six years now. And this is also the same time in 2020 that I was still doing social media. I was still blogging, still doing events best I could during COVID you know, lots of rescheduling, mass mandates, everything being like, spread apart, spacing, all the things. But we did make it work. And I was fully booked with social media clients, and there was this insane demand for business owners to get online and to build up their online presence because the world was shut down and everything was changing. Especially, like, in the online landscape. Everything was just changing so quickly. So I decided I would take everything I knew about growing a local business, growing a local audience, creating demand, getting well known, selling, marketing. I would take everything that I had done for myself for over a decade, everything I had been doing for my clients. And I would teach it. So I put everything together in a course which is now the LocalPreneur Academy. And I started showing up every single week on coaching calls to coach my clients through the strategy and customizing it to them and helping them through the mindset piece so they could implement it. And I had also just seen the power and the effects of getting coaching and life coaching for myself. And I also decided that I want to be a coach. So I decided to go through life coach school, become a certified life coach. And we've been going ever since. So now hundreds of business owners have now been through the local localpreneur Academy and in all types of industries, some just starting out, getting their very first clients all the way to getting fully booked. And that. So when I launched the academy in 2020, that is when I let all of my social media clients go. And I had a team at the time, so it was a tough decision, but I knew that this was the direction I wanted to go. I knew that if I wanted to build it, this is where my focus would need to go, that I couldn't be spl. So I rebuilt everything from the ground up and I let all of that income go from all of my social media clients and I just let it all go and built the academy up from scratch. And my very first launch, five people joined. So I made $10,000. I launched again a few months later, five more people joined, I made another $10,000. I launched Again a few months later and three people joined. And I was like, oh, this is bad. Like this is supposed to be going up. Like, you see everybody there, they launch and they're making like six figure launches. And I'm like, wait, I just made 6K and I've been making 10. Why is it going backwards? So 2021 and beyond was really me figuring out and learning the new skill sets of marketing beyond local and scaling beyond local, because that was beyond my skillset. Everything I knew was local. And so I had to learn how to now go beyond my city and to be someone that people knew and trusted beyond my city. And that is an entirely different thing. And it's still something I work on every single day and something I will always continue to work on. And I will just never stop investing in myself. I will never stop investing in my skills, in my brain, in my, in my business to keep growing. So I did reach a point, you know, now I had dropped the social media clients, but I did still reach a point where I felt like I was still living this split Life, because I still had my blog and that entire brand with events and the networking group. So I was this girl, like, out and about in the community, but also I was online trying to show up as this expert and help people grow their business. So I just felt split every day. I was like, who am I? Like, I felt like. Like Jekyll and is it Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde? Like, that's how I felt. I was like, who am I? I don't know. And I just felt like I was putting so much effort in different places, and I was like, this is not what's gonna help me scale to multiple six figures and eventually a million and beyond. I just knew I couldn't continue to do both. And I could just tell that after 13 years of blogging, that I was outgrowing it, that this was a business that I had started in my college apartment, and that as the localpreneur academy grew, I was like, this is going to be the one that supports my family and grows with us. So I let my blog go, and it took a while. It really did feel like a part of me died. Like, it really did. Like, it felt like I was losing a part of myself, like my identity. And I took time to mourn that, and it took longer than I thought. It was about a two year process, but, you know, it took me a while to even shut down the website and all of that, but I let it all go. Um, I stopped blogging in 2023, and this was around the same time that I got pregnant with my daughter. So I hosted my very last boutique blowout sale in the spring of 2024, one month after she was born. DO NOT RECOMMEND But I went out on top. And I loved walking away from the business when I was winning. You know, it was a great event, and I handed it off to someone else so they could continue to grow it and evolve it. And I doubled down on my clients and on my audience full of business owners. And I knew it was the right thing because the revenue I would make from one boutique blowout sale, selling all the tickets, booking up over 40 vendor spots, and then, you know, promoting it for months, all the work that goes into that, you know, like, say six months of work. I made more than that the very next month just in my coaching business alone. So I knew that I had just. So basically I did in 30 days what would take me in six months. So I knew I had made the right decision and that that came from constraint, it came from focus, it came from doubling down But I also know that that is what got me here. Like, that event is what got me here. Because now I get to teach it. Like, there wouldn't be me here without any of the previous versions of me in the past. Any past experiences I have. Like, nothing I teach is theory. Everything I teach is from real experience. Like, any little failure I've had, any obstacle, like, all of it got me here. And my clients are able to make money so much faster because I did it the hard way. I can see things coming a mile away, and I'm like, no, no, no, no. Let's not do that. Trust me, I learned the hard way. So I went from blogger to teacher to social media manager, event planner. Like, there were so many other random jobs in there that we didn't even cover. But now I am just 100% local marketing coach, helping my students get fully booked inside the LocalPreneur Academy. And I would love to be part of your story. So come join us inside and I will talk to you next week. Hey, if you enjoyed today's episode, I want to invite you to check out my program, the LocalPreneur Academy. This is the only program for small business owners who want to become the local go to in their industry with a steady stream of clients. You can find more information@lesleypressnell.com and I'll see you ins.