The trust built by partners in business allows them to be successful in business. Erin Rector, the Chief Operating Officer at Hungry for Happiness, talks about how she and her business partner, Samantha Skelly, work together as a team in solving problems and creating solutions. Working with a CEO can be tedious, but Erin has managed to have her own system in keeping up with Samantha as well as setting boundaries on the number of tasks both are handling. Erin dives into the personal relationship dynamics she has with Samantha, showing the solid partnership they built on the foundation of trust and the values she has gained in the trial and error process of running a business with co-workers.
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Hungry For Happiness: Building On The Foundation Of Trust with Erin Rector
Erin Rector is a clinically trained therapist and Chief Operating Officer at Hungry for Happiness, a seven-figure online personal development company aiming to help women all over the world end the fight with food and their body. Erin began her corporate career working in business, and brand development for both the telecom and weight loss industry after realizing that trying to understand the why behind consumer behavior was where her true passion resided. She pursued her Master’s degree in Psychotherapy from the University of San Diego.
Erin trained as a therapist at one of the top research institutes in the country before deciding to combine her love of psychology and wellness with her background in traditional business and consumer branding. She began offering freelance consulting services to some of the wellness industry’s most influential podcasters, authors, life coaches and speakers earning in the six and seven figure range. Erin has a reputation for helping talented visionaries optimize and scale their businesses. At Hungry for Happiness, Erin takes a bold approach to leading her team, building and scaling of value-centric culture and thriving online startup. She’s slated to support the launch of two sister companies in 2019 and looks forward to working behind the scenes of more promising startups with a mission to change the world. Erin, welcome to the Second in Command podcast.
Thanks for having me.
It’s always tough to read through those bio’s without stumbling over the word because I’m more like, “This is good.” I want the rest of the story. I wanted to hop on and hear what you’ve got to say.
Those are very carefully written. They’re right too. I look forward to getting in between the lines a little bit.
First off, tell us about how you and the CEO Samantha met. What do you think it was that she saw in you that would make you the good fit to be the COO for business?
Samantha and I were friends and roommates first. I met her through another female entrepreneur in our inner circle and we were both looking for housing. We were both single at the time. We moved into this entrepreneur think tank house where it was a mixture of living, working, playing, being a hippie and all the fun stuff. She and I just connected on a friend level. That was there first before anything. In hindsight, looking at our relationship as partners and in business, the trust that we built as friends is what allowed us to be successful in business. It started there with that seed of, “I like her. She’s a good person.” We have that feeling about each other.
When it came to her seeing promise in my skill set and what I brought to the table. Me being a trained therapist and my ability to have an understanding of what drives people and be able to translate that intention into something very practical using my business knowledge. I positioned myself even in my consulting work as a good translator. If someone has a good idea, if it’s totally wacky off the cuff, I turn that into something practical. The math of being the visionary that she is and the ability to have these big, huge, massive dreams and goals that she was lacking. The partner to help her integrate that into things that we would work here in the practical business world where we’ve got to think about strategy, budgets, legal. We’ve got to think about all the things that go into creating a thriving venture.
You are sounding like a solid partnership. I love that you started on the foundation of trust as well. That’s one of the areas that a lot of people miss when they’re hiring their second-in-command or promoting one. I almost think that you have to be willing to turn over your bank account information and passwords to everything at day one. Otherwise, why would you be putting them in that position?
It’s like you have to constantly be on the same page. You have to constantly be communicating what’s going on for you as an individual and your role so that you have things that are unspoken. Those things that are unspoken are those things where you’re feeling unclear or there’s tension there. That will directly affect everything from the decisions you made to the morale of your team to the whole bit.
It’s the same as a relationship between two love partners. You can’t have a great relationship without being that open communication, clarity and trust. It’s exactly the same.
It’s a marriage. Samantha and I talk about that all the time. We will make jokes. We got in a little squabble about something this or that business-related where we quickly move through. We were like, “You said that. I said that. I understand why that was miscommunicated.” We were quickly moved through and we’re like, “This is the strongest, most functional marriage I’ve ever been in.” We’re laughing at how smart it is to be in a relationship. It sounds like a lot of energy work together. She and I do energy work to manage our overwhelm, our stress and other things that can affect our business. We do that together in our partnership so that we’re always forced to clearly stay open with each other.
Those are huge lessons. Women are certainly more open to the whole area of spirituality than men are. Men are slowly starting to catch up and get into that space. That’s big for all of the CEO, COO. I call it the yin and yang relationship between the two to truly tap into each other and work on themselves together because it is a partnership. We missed that part.
The whole feminine piece of women willing to get vulnerable helps us in the business. We have to understand male or female, no matter who you’re communicating with, the team member, a vendor or whatever, that’s still a human being. Human beings at the very core level want to be acknowledged. They want to be heard. As you’re leading or making decisions from a place of ego or having other people feel small, which can sometimes, I’m not saying that’s a masculine trait. I’m saying as a woman that I have a harder time dealing with ego. I sometimes feel more comfortable being like, “What I hear you saying is I can understand why you feel that way.” I’ve resolved a lot of customer service issues that way. I’ll tell you that.
There’s certainly stuff to learn with it. You’ve mentioned a couple of times Sam’s vision and being on the same page with vision. How do you get on the same page with her when it comes to her vision for the company and how do you get her on the same page with you when it comes to your plans and strategy for making the vision come true?
It’s like a constant dance. It’s like a constant compromise. It always starts with us connecting as friends. A perfect example is at the start of 2019, we’d go on a trip. We were in the woods in Idleyld with the intention of having both of us peek your head out of the sand of the day-to-day and look at it like the bigness of what we’re doing. How excited we are about what we’re doing and how much promise it has. With that type of optimism and with that type of energy and momentum, it makes it a lot easier as people who have different styles and thinking. It makes it a lot easier for us to come together without our own agendas barging at the door and listen and understand each other’s gifts.
For Samantha, I want to hear the beauty of the vision because sometimes as the integrator, as the operations gal, I can get too caught up in the details and miss the bigger picture. My gift is she can see the bigger picture, but she has a hard time seeing the little things that go into creating that bigger picture. She comes to me with her vision, I’m like, “That’s amazing. I see the value in that. I see all the ways that can work,” which sometimes requires compromise for me. As the COO, I always want to dive into like, “We have to think through this and this is the reason this wouldn’t work.” That whole jam, which we do plenty of moving around. In that space and in that energy of trust and optimism, she can do her thing, be her and utilize her guess and I could let her be that. She had to chime in and even curtail things without feeling she’s being limited. If I’m like, “Here’s the reason why I would recommend not doing that this time. Here are all the different nuances around that.” She can be like, “I understand that and because I trust you so much, I’m on board with that decision.”
Can you give us a specific example of when that’s happened?
Hungry For Happiness: Things that are unspoken will directly affect everything, from the decisions you make to the morale of your team.
Pause is the new company that we’re launching. We had to make a lot of tough decisions up front about what are we in the business of. Samantha and I have one thing in common where we want to do it all. My job is to take those visions, translate them and be discerning about what keeps us on track with our values. One shift that we’ve made is essentially from what was B2C and B2B and being known for our B2C coaching services into specifically focusing on our B2B audience where we put the majority of our budget, our efforts and our resources into building all our coaching certification program. We collectively from a value standpoint thought we can help more people. If our goal is to help one million people by 2020, we can help more, which I’m sure we may be already have done. The point is we can impact more people if we train the leaders. If we help other women go out and be us in their own way. Giving them the ability to niche down within the personal development space started to have an online business.
We were very clear that we’re in the business of training other wellness professionals, coaches, leaders, therapists, nutritionists to be X. To survive the emotional element in their stuff and help them have a thriving business. With Pause, the initial vision was wanting to create another B2C audience. It was my job to look at the whole strategy and think. If our goal is this, and we know we’re in the business of training leaders because that’s what we’ve gotten good at and that’s what we’ve been putting our resources into. It would be my recommendation to curtail B2C service-based products to support this bigger mission of building B2B. What we know to be true is there will come a time where we can help everyone, but only if we get to a certain level. It’s my job to be that gatekeeper for these big visions and keep us essentially on track with our core values. If we always go back to those, we know that every decision we’re making will be the right one.
I love that you’re pressing Pause on some things that we only have three resources. We’ve got people, time and money. It’s about how do we allocate those three resources to get the highest ROI and get leveraged that we can build off of. For you, how do you allow Sam does to be Sam? She is the prototypical entrepreneur. I would guess she’s bipolar like most of us, including me. I would guess she has attention deficit disorder. Neither of those are disorders. Those are superpowers. She’s probably also a quick start. I don’t know if she’s done a Kolbe profile.
She’s a quick start type of girl.
She would start and plan later.
She’s the quickest of the starters I’ve ever met.
How do you allow her to be that in that zone without starting every project, without ever starting every idea? What system do you use to keep track of her ideas but not start them all because they’re only going to take two minutes?
This has been a trial and error process. There has been some struggle along the way, figuring out a way to catch all of the balls. Here’s my thing, as the integrator, I like the order of structure. My belief is that we’re more productive and we have more room to flow and be creative when our ducks are in a row and when our things are together. It’s like how can I let Sam be Sam without creating chaos because I don’t thrive in that way and we both have to thrive for the company to thrive. We’ve done a lot of like, “I need to set a boundary with you on the number of things we’re launching.” It started out as conversations and setting boundaries. We moved more to processes and where that has us.
All of our employees are incredible, but one of them has a specific ninja skill for project management. I’ve pulled her into a seat where she essentially is one layer added between the visionary and the integrator. It’s where she can help me catch all these balls in the form of a project brief and a launch brief that we created as integrators that says, “Sam, these are all the things that we need to know from you. We also need you to check in on the values of the idea.” Just keeping her alive from a process standpoint and we take that in. We do something with it at that point. We’ve got a process around it. Sam knows in order for these ideas to take flight, I have to follow these processes. Once I followed the processes, I can play and go be me because I am confident that my contracts are in place and I’m confident that my operations are clean and all those things. Everybody wins.
I created a system called the Decision Filter. It’s where I try to allow the entrepreneur to fill out a one-pager that document their thoughts around the process, what the ROI is going to be, what the decision’s going to be, what the ideal outcome looks like, what the potential spend might be on people time and money. That forces them to fill out a fairly easy one-pager, but we’re not allowed to start a project until that’s filled out. We take ten or fifteen of those one-pagers at the same time. We vote on which ones to start, which ones to say, “We’ll do it, but not now,” and which ones to a red light and just kill off.
You have to share that with me. That sounds epic.
I’m a classic entrepreneur but also very operational. When I was the COO at 1-800-GOT-JUNK? I had to have a way to say yes to ideas but not start them all.
I mentioned the topic of urgency because the timing is so important. For me, it’s never a no. When she’s like, “Can we do this?” I’m like, “It’s not a no.” It’s like a not right now.
Which is not yes.
It’s amazing that you have both of those skills because that’s so ninjary. You know that sometimes as a quick starter everything can feel urgent. Everything is now. We can do this in a day then we can surely do this in a month. The timing is so important and my task is to manage the urgency that I sometimes feel from her and also with my tendency to sometimes be too slow. I dragged my feet all day and get caught up in the details. It’s that constant back and forth of those few opposite qualities.
You’re a high fact finder. Do you like to ask lots of questions before you start things?
I like to ask tons of questions, even things like that. She used to vet a lot of contractors on her own. We changed the process so that I’m enrolled in that conversation as well so that we’re asking the right questions.
She won’t vet them. She’ll talk to them and go, “I like them. They’re great. Let’s use them,” which she doesn’t know anything about them. She just loves their personality.
Hungry For Happiness: We’re more productive and have more room to flow and be creative when our ducks are in a row and when our things are together.
I use her for that and just go because Sam has great intuition. Sometimes I’m more caught up in the qualifications, the facts, the testimonials and the data. She’s a lot more like how does a person feel? Both are equally important.
She’s not questioning. You’ve mentioned the visionary and the integrator a few times. Is that from Rocket Fuel or EOS Traction?
It’s from Rocket Fuel but Sam and I have adopted that as our personal archetypes because we’re so spot on that.
It’s classic for entrepreneurs. Have you ever done any personality profiles and compared yourselves to each other?
No, we haven’t. We keep meaning too. We actually enrolled in Tony Robbins, the Platinum Partnership. I know that personality testing is a big part of that program, so we’re excited to dive into each other a little bit more.
Take a look at doing a disc profile, a Kolbe A profile, and do your love languages. It’s weird that I would say love languages at work, but honest to God when you understand each other’s love languages. There’s also one called the Apology Languages, which is powerful. It’s understanding how the other person likes to receive an apology.
I’m super familiar with the love languages because of my therapy background. I know mine and I know hers, but they’re super relevant. We’ve had our whole team do that in a spreadsheet because we have appreciation and having our teams feel loved and empowered is like pretty much get it.
What are your love languages?
Mine is physical touch, which is a little hard for me from a work perspective, although I love getting hugs from my team when we’re all the same.
Is it hugs or a pat on the back?
Maybe someone rubs my shoulders when I have a stressful week and words of affirmation. That’s easy for somebody like Sam because she’s very expressive at anyway and she’s like, “I appreciate you. I love you so much. I wouldn’t want to be doing this with anyone else.” She loves the words to work constantly just giving each other the love. Even when times are tough, we’re like, “I love you. I know we’re going to get through this.”
It’s powerful once you understand that stuff. Mine is the same. It’s physical touch and words of affirmation in that order as well. It’s pretty amazing how people will do other things. That doesn’t grab me but a simple, “You did a great job.” That’s why I’m a speaker is because words of affirmation are so powerful. I get off stage and I get filled with it.
It makes perfect sense. It shouldn’t be a business tool that people use to understand our employees better.
We have everybody who’s a member of the COO Alliance. We started the only network of its kind in the world for seconds-in-command because there are many masterminds for entrepreneurs, but there was nowhere for the COO to go. All of our members have done their love languages and they’ve all done their Kolbe A profiles. They’ve all done their DISC profiles. What we do is share them with each other to learn how to understand the other person and compliment them. It’s worth bringing it into your company for sure. Where are your staff? Are your staff all remote or some of them based in the physical space?
No, everybody is remote, but we’ve got women all over. We’ve got Pamela over in Pennsylvania. She’s our marketing, copywriting ninja and our new project management ninja. Brittany is in LA. She will come down with us. She’s like our ops and optimizes our customer journey. She’s the boss. They’re both gifts to us. Sam and I value our team so much. They’re everything to us because without them, especially as a virtual company, without the people, you’re nothing. We are all over. It’s all our energy, momentum, our brains, and our hearts feeling the ship. We’ve got three women in Canada. That always takes a little bit of snap view on our HR and all of our tax and financial planning having people across the border. They’re so good.
There are no men working for you?
We have an agency that does our pay. They are all men and they’re amazing. Internally, no, we don’t. Sam and I have talked about wanting to bring in a little bit of male energy.
There’s a fun agency that I did a lot of work with. Everyone who works in their agency was a female or gay male. I’m like, “Bias against the straight guy.” I get it. It’s a great mix. The energy was amazing. The positivity was amazing, the communication was great.
Hungry For Happiness: A virtual company is nothing without the people.
We know the importance of balance in every single area including masculine and feminine. It will be great to eventually bring that, especially for a man who can deal with all this estrogen to have a good time with us.
Good luck with that. Tell me about how you divide up your strategy and roles. How do you decide who does what in the organization? What business areas would fall to each of you?
Initially, because we started so small and scaled quickly, to be honest, we’re still in the game of figuring out who sits in what seat long-term? What we’re clear on is two important concepts, which is number one. People have to be in their zone of genius. Number two, we have to mitigate the things that drain them. Number three, there needs to be an element of challenge. Challenge because we know that leads to fulfillment, stimulation and empowerment. People having the experience of trying things that they think are hard, and succeeding and feeling that on the other end. That’s what keeps employees stoked on their job is feeling like, “I’m doing important things. Good for me. Go me.” There’s that piece. We try to keep people in the seats where, “We know this person has a special skill to X. How do we create a role around that?”
How about for you and Sam specifically though? How do you know what she’s going to work on and what you’re going to work on?
The same would apply in a sense that for Sammy, we know that her genius is in the area of relationship building, partnership building, networking. She’s pretty much out of the day-to-day when it comes to operations. At this point, I go to her for high-level financial decisions, high-level strategy decisions. We do a lot of annual planning, quarterly planning together. In terms of how we delegate, she’s doing the relationship building, all those are her for video assets like, “I need you to promote X. I need this audio recorded.” Her biggest role, which will always remain is content creation.
We know when she has a new mission and new vision, she’s the one that’s creating that meat. “This is what I want to create, this is what I want to come through as a visionary,” and passing it off to me. My role is managing the team. I’m hiring three people simultaneously. I’m technically HR as well. I’m wearing a lot of different hats. On the day-to-day, I’m managing a lot of legal stuff. Obviously, being in the personal development industry and me having also experienced in mental health. It’s like I understand a lot of some of the potential risks of being in this space. One of my big intentions for 2019 was to go back and look at everything from the way that we’re filing our taxes to the way that we’re running our team.
IRS compliance-wise from the way that all of our contracts are set up, our terms and conditions for every single one of our programs. Just wanting the ability to have everything be so clean so that we can move through the world like super unapologetically with everything that we do and know that our business is clean. There’s a lot of integrity that’s important to me. I always want our customers to know what they’re getting involved in. That’s been that combo of looking at our legal assets. It’s also pretty much doing the high-level audit of everything operational from the way that we build to the way that we communicate about billing, to the way that we communicate what we do down to even our paid advertising. I bring on an audit mode, to be honest. It’s a lot of going back and making sure that the visionary has a platform that is scalable, that is thriving, that is practical for a long-term.
This is the stuff that an entrepreneur would never do nor would even think about it.
It wasn’t done. Skelly had this incredible ability to generate money. I came on to an organization where the hard part for me was done in the sense that the client acquisition, putting herself out there. You know every person in the industry. That’s so Skelly to the core. She was lucky and protected that nothing ever came about that would have required her to have a lot of this stuff in place. Now that she wants to grow, scale and change the world, it’s time to have those measures revamped and optimized.
I don’t remember where she and I met. We might’ve met at an event called Metabridge in Kelowna, but I can’t remember. It’s weird.
That girl, she knows a bunch of stuff.
I’ve known her forever, but I don’t know from where. You joined the Tony Robbins’ Platinum Program. That’s a huge investment. That’s a $60,000 or $75,000 investment, isn’t it?
It’s like an $85,000. The first part went up. It’s a big investment.
When you think about that, why are you doing it? What are you planning to get out of it? What do you think the ROI is going to be on your time and money and what do you hope to gain from it?
At the core level, what we’re looking for are empowerment and inspiration. Skelly and I know that what we’re doing is one of a kind and the first of its kind in a lot of ways. We’re always very careful not to take every piece of advice that we get because a lot of people have advice and it doesn’t always apply to your business or work with your value system. That’s the one I learned along the way. At the same time, when we look at somebody like Tony and what he’s built, that’s similar to the scale and product offering that we’re looking to offer someday. Is it going to be the same mission? No. Is it the same values? Maybe, I don’t know. There is something about being in the energy of people who have touched to build an empire that big. We learn from those people. Have them tell us, “This is working, keep doing that.” Slap other things out of our hands and say, “Try this.” It’s some mentorship. At the end of the day, Skelly and I are both young. Neither of us has ever run a startup before of this size. It’s all new. We’re eager to learn and we’re excited to learn.
You’re going to rip off and duplicate. It’s good and smart. I heard a saying that if you’re the smartest person in the room, you’re in the wrong room. It’s always about putting ourselves into these other rooms. Far too often, companies don’t invest in themselves or their team. If you grow your leaders, you grow your company. The more that we grow people into stronger leaders, the more we grow their skill set, the more that the company scales.
Every single company is made up of its individual parts. You’re only as strong as your weakest member. Even at the coordinator level, as we grow, we want to have personal development and investing in yourself, your growth and your leadership skills as part of our compensation package. As part of what our culture stands for because it’s what we stand for as a brand. We always think you have to be walking the walk. We don’t think that personal development is separate of anything in your life, relationships, work or whatever. We’re excited to infuse that more into our culture as we grow.
You’re obviously a self-starter and a self-learner. Tell me about a scenario that you failed at in the business where you did learn and what did you learn from it. Give us a specific like you screwed this up.
Hungry For Happiness: Every single company is made up of its individual parts. You’re only as strong as your weakest member.
A good one for me is I tend to bite off more than I can chew. I can do everything personally. Even if I’m overwhelmed, I’ll still take it on because I’ve always been that person. You mix that in with my overachiever and my tendency to run high strong when I have a lot going on. What I’ll do is I’ll forward tasks and things will become a bottleneck. Instead of asking for help, balls are being dropped because I’m not taking the time to slow down and say, “What do I need support with? What could I stand and what would benefit the company for me to offload?” Me developing this new role for our director of marketing where we’re going to move her out of the marketing seat and more into high-level project management and helping be that visionary integrator go-between and a manager. She takes something off my plate that I had been needing to take off my plate. It took me breaking down and feeling overwhelmed for me to get to that place of like, “There is a fundamental function here that is missing, making us less productive and making me less balanced in my goal.”
It’s an area that companies are not spending anywhere near enough time on is that activity inventory. Looking at what each of their employees is working on during the course of a month and breaking it down to all the tasks they do and stopping a bunch of them. Even before we delegate it to somebody, often stuff that we do can be stopped. It can be optimized, automated or outsourced.
I always tell my team, “Take a curious standpoint. Anything that I asked you to do, anything Skelly asked you to do, always ask.” Can I get clear on why we’re doing this? The why behind this, the intention behind this. We do a lot of things that are pointless. We do a lot of stuff that takes the time or doesn’t add to the bottom line or sucks resources or energy. Always asking, going back to the why everything that you hear from your visionary, everything that you hear from your boss, it’s so important.
That multiplies too, there’s an escalating negative impact as a company scales. If you’ve got ten employees and you get to twenty, it’s worst. When you get to 40, it gets incrementally worse, more communication, more bureaucracy, more red tape and also, a lot less visibility. What are we working on?
Pretty soon you’re filling out a bunch of admin forums and you’re like, “What am I working on again?”
You’re hiring more people because we seemed busier, we need more people. What are they doing? That’s $50,000 a year going out the door.
It keeps people in the hustle, which all the time people being overworked and overwhelmed means less productivity. When people are taking breaks, they’re less productive. When people are stepping away, they’re less productive.
How many hours a day do you work?
Here’s the thing, I’ve been trying to reduce my meetings over here because of your girls on too many meetings.
I mean how many hours a week do you put in running this business?
I would definitely say over 40. I don’t work a traditional schedule. I’m very much of the mind. I love to wake up at 6:00 AM crush through a couple of hours of emails, be offline for a couple of hours during the morning and be able to grab lunch with my boyfriend or go on a walk. I need the space and flexibility to be able to say, “This is the day where I can sit in front of a computer for five hours. This is a day where I can’t do that.” I like to follow my inner rhythms because if I’m being too militant with myself, I’ll quickly get burned out because I have the ability to work 8 to 6 and not even look up.
It’s one of the massive benefits of working from home as well. You don’t end up having to answer those questions to the rest of the team. It’s like, “Where is she? Why is she gone in the middle of the day?” No one’s counting hours because we need to when it’s normal. Tell us about some of the technology you guys use to run a business that’s remote. What are some of your favorite technology tools?
We love Slack, specifically the gifts of functionality where we can send each other opinions. Slack is important for us. We like to have a lot of categories of channels. We use Trello. We are probably going to be moving into something a little more robust from a project management standpoint. Right now something like Trello combined with Google Suite, which is like our holy grail and Zoom, which is our other holy grail. That’s is meeting all our needs with the size of our team.
It’s interesting how with Zoom alone over a video that you can build a relationship with people too. You don’t need the face to face. You can have that real connection quick. I don’t know if you use video with your customers yet or suppliers, but it’s powerful when you’re using it with your banker, your lawyer or your suppliers somewhere, and printing companies. It’s amazing how they have Zoom already or they’ll use FaceTime. You can just hop on something quick. It’s powerful stuff.
Humanness is always a lot more preferable.
Tell us the one big lesson that you wish you’d known in your career when you were starting out, either in this role or even earlier in leadership. What’s the lesson that you know for sure that you’ve learned from your own trial and error, and successes that you wish you’d known earlier?
I would say two big lessons come to mind. The first one is, always be a human first. Remember that even in the hustle, even in the work setting, we’re all as humans after the same thing. On a fundamental level, we want security. We want to feel we belong. We want to feel heard. You approach every relationship that way and people know that you value them as a person in addition to valuing them as an employer, a vendor. Not only will your relationship and your productivity within that relationship go up further, but there will be a lot of other unforeseen benefits. Knowing that so much of why we get where we get is because of who we know is important how we treat people.
Number two, I wish I had been less attached to how and the cleanliness of my path to get here. I wish I trusted that I was going to end up where I was supposed to because I did. If I trusted that more when I was switching careers and not knowing how they were all going to blend together to work out and put me in a seat that was perfect for me. If I just trusted that more, my experience along the way would have been a lot more fun. Skelly and I say all the time, “We’re playing the game.” If the game of life is to enjoy your time while you’re here, even the mode in which you work should reflect that in some way.
Hungry For Happiness: So much of why we get where we get is because of who we know is important and how we treat people.
Those are great lessons. I love the fact just trust and almost surrender to the path that we’re on because it is going in the right direction for us.
As we know, there are no guarantees in the business. If you can be okay and comfortable with the uncertainty along the way, whenever you get to that business you’re going to run or what team you’re going to lead. That discomfort with that ability to withstand the, “I don’t know how it’s going to work out,” is what’s going to make you successful at the end of the day.
Erin Rector, Chief Operating Officer for Hungry for Happiness. Thanks for joining us on the Second In Command podcast and giving us the rest of the story.
Thanks for having me. That was a lot of fun.
I appreciate it.
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About Erin Rector
Erin blends her training in clinical psychology with her background in start-up operations and management to support the strategic growth of forward-thinking businesses who want to better the world.
