The Ultimate Time Juggler

Meet Judy. She is 45 and has 3 kids. Scott 5, Justin 9, and Joy 16. She works as a marketing executive for a fortune 500 company on the upper east side New York on Madison Avenue.

She had always dreamed of owning her own business. Probably from seeing her immigrant father start a tailoring business from the ground up and build it to a million dollar empire. She had a natural flair for marketing and a deep passion for helping small businesses succeed. However, with a demanding full-time job and three young children to care for, her dream felt further away than ever.

Her days were a whirlwind of activity. She woke up early each morning to prepare breakfast for her family, drop her kids off at school, and make it to work on time. Her job as a marketing executive was challenging, meeting deadlines, creating campaigns, looking at the analytics and managing a large creative team of designers and copywriters.

Despite of the demands, she loved the creative freedom it afforded her. Still, every day, the nagging feeling that she wasn't truly free, that she was not living up to her true potential, and the guilt of letting her father down by not working for him, lingered at the back of her mind.

When she returned home in the evenings, it was another round of activities, from cooking dinner to helping her kids with their homework, tucking them into bed and catching up with Tim, her anesthesiologist husband who she had been married to for 27 years, she had little time to focus on her business. Exhausted, with barely enough energy to brainstorm business ideas, let alone start working on them, she often found herself dosing off on her home office workstation with the computer on.

She knew that she needed to make a change. She needed to take control of her life and her career. She needed to find a way to launch her own business, without sacrificing the things that mattered most to her - her family and her own sanity.

One day, while scrolling through her social media feeds, she stumbled upon an article that caught her attention. The article was about a group of career women who had come together to launch their own businesses, while also supporting each other through the journey. They shared resources, advice, and even babysitting services and deep down she felt like she needed to be part of this group.

She did some more research and found that not only were they located right in the neck of her woods, a couple of blocks from where she lived but that they had also helped so many women in New York start their own businesses while finally finding the courage to transition from corporate to business. 

The group didn't just let anyone in. There was a HEFTY price for admission. The good thing is that it wasn't monetary however Judy knew that that would have been way too easy as during her career she had seen many dilemmas disappear just by throwing money at them. This one was different. The women knew if they had charged a huge amount only the ones with resources would enroll and if they made it free for everyone, they would attract the wrong women to the group. So to be able to help the right women, they forged an article of admission. 

In the articles of admission, the group had listed 5 key things(pins) that they would use to evaluate each applicant during a LIVE panel where members would vote for admission in to the group. Here are the five pins.

This was going to be "easy peasy" "walk in central park" endeavor. For 15 years that's all she did. She had lived breathed marketing. It was in her DNA. Even her parenting style was one major marketing campaign. She knew exactly what the expectation was and exactly how to execute it. she was up for the challenge.

After her tucking her kids to bed and catching up with Tim, she brewed a hot cup of carté noír French coffee and settled in to her home office to start the challenge. She was clear on her business idea. Train and help more women earn executive marketing roles in fortune 500 companies.

As she started concocting a plan, she reminisced her own journey. Pregnant with Joy, living in New York while Tim was going through Med school and they were barely surviving with 40K/ year salary. Her dad encouraged her to follow her passion yet she was intimidated by the male dominated industry that rejected her applications on several occasions secretly because she was a woman. The vow she had made to never allow a fellow woman go through what she went through while climbing the ranks to be where she is.

That reflection gave her a deeper sense of why!!! It was the best epiphany she had experienced. No robotic spreadsheets with unrealistic projections, no click bait marketing attracting the wrong clients. Just a "woman to woman" deep inner desire to liberate women through the field of marketing. Simple, easy to comprehend, easy to communicate.

Now that she was energized with a solid reason why she wanted to launch this business her next step was to formulate the how she would package this idea to present it to the group for admission.

Having done this for 15 years for both mid sized and huge companies she realized she had a problem. A huge problem which she was knee deep in. She knew exactly how to solve other people's marketing problems but struggled formulating a marketing plan for her own ideas. She procrastinated, suffered imposter syndrome and often times felt like she was probably over stretching her boundaries and should probably be thankful for the position she has. These thoughts were happening more frequently the clearer she was on what she ought to do next.

She then realized exactly what was missing and how she would silence those hijacking dream crushing thoughts. She needed a system. A system for each one of the 5 pins. She deeply believed that was exactly what would gain her the admission to the group she so badly needed to stay accountable and committed to launching this idea.

It was no longer about her anymore. Too many women needed her help. Too many women would suffer just like she had and if she did nothing about it those women would continue to suffer. It wasn't a business idea anymore. It was a mission. It was a calling!!!

To start off, she went back to each and every successful campaign she had launched and looked at the attributes. 

Finally after looking over the data, Judy finally found 5 patterns that kept on repeating over and over again in every single successful campaign. Funny they all started with the letter S so it was a no brainer what she would call her framework. Judy's 5-S system.
It covered where to start, It covered what to focus on. It covered how to market even when there are budget constraints. It covered market validation and the most important of them all, it hedged against those interruptive discouraging voices that have stopped soooo many women from launching their ideas to the world.