Lessons - Her Journey to Become a Leading Voice for Women | Elena Cardone, Investor & Entrepreneur

Welcome to Lessons Episodes of Success Story, part of the HubSpot Podcast Network. These lessons episodes will be shorter conversations with past guests, valued members of the success story community, and myself. They'll be focused on teaching you actionable, insightful takeaways that you can use to upscale your personal and professional life. Of course, there's incredible women, female entrepreneurs, but, for example, if you're a woman you want to have a family, and you want to raise a successful family, maybe you have stuck in your head that's going to be hard to do while you build a business. Or maybe you have it stuck in your head that's going to be hard to do while you rise through the ranks in a company. And that's really what I was alluding to, you're literally doing it. And that's to think the message is very important too for women that haven't taken that jump or that leap. And I'm assuming that's part of what you're teaching over in your actual, in your content and in the, in the conference you're having as well. Million percent. Sometimes the thought of, oh, if I have kids or get married it's going to be a set back. But actually if you get with the right partner and they're pushing you toward a heightened level of success, you can reach it faster. And yeah, it's not going to be easy, you know, probably for anyone doing anything because we live on planet earth. So the woman that thinks, oh, I can't do that and have kids, you just have to let go of the idea that anything's really going to be easy or doesn't have to be figured out. Like it has to be figured out, nothing's going to be easy. Which side of that do you want to be on? Easy with a family that actually, you know, inspires you and motivates you and expands who you are and who you had to become in order to get there. Or not. Yeah. I love that. So let's talk about what you're doing with 10x ladies and the reason I want to go into this in a bigger way is because you're so focused on it now. And I believe there's not a lot of resources that are marketed towards teaching women about finance, about entrepreneurship. I mean, we can talk about everything with glass ceiling, gender pay gaps, all this different thing. I mean, I know my backgrounds and startups women are massively underfunded compared to men. There's a whole bunch of issues. What are you specifically teaching over to women? How are you helping them? What are the problems that you're seeing they have when they're starting a business trying to take it to the next level, sort of, you know, without being silly, like 10xing themselves, right? Right. The problems that they're having are probably a little bit what you're talking about, the kind of the lack of know how or confidence or feeling that they have to be something already in order to be able to do something for the confidence or the know how or the resources. But over at 10x ladies, what I'm trying to do is provide a platform in a community where like-minded women can get together and support each other and really hold them accountable and be the woman behind the group, behind the masses. And supporting showing active interest in the success of them. Now, if you want to be a woman in business, you are going to have to take certain steps. You're going to have to understand what the target is. What do I have to learn? What do I have to learn about this in my business or money or finances or how do you make sales? You know, if you make sales in your entrepreneurial business and you can show this is what we've done and you go to an investor and they don't care whether you're a male or a female. You've got to produce the stats. You've got to show the return of investment and then they want to do business with you. So at 10x ladies, we really curate that community and then start with providing the right information so that people can function. There's the concept of being the four pillars of being a 10x woman. There's the being 10x in mindset, 10x in money, your relationships and your health and wellness. Like how to design your life. So and the concept is you can't be 10x in health and have your money failing. And you can't be 10x in money and your relationships are failing. And look beyond just the relationship with your partner. I mean, relationships, if you want to build an empire, no empire has been built alone. Whether you're in bed with someone or not, you need relationships to expand, to grow, to delegate out. You forced to grow an empire. It doesn't happen with one person. Never has in the history of the world so far. So it's how to educate and power women on these areas so that they can actually own their power. And the power means the capacity or the ability to influence the behavior of others. It doesn't say you have to be a CEO, a millionaire, a billionaire. It says you've done the capacity or the ability to influence the behavior of others. So what does that mean? How do I become empowered myself? How do I live up to my full potential? How do I educate myself on my little entrepreneurial business so that then when I go and pitch it to somebody and investor, I can have the power to influence your decision to want to invest with me. That's power. It goes to that big level to something small. If I smile to someone on the street and I'm like this and they smile back and I influence them, that's a smile. It's about really owning your power as a woman, growing it to the point where then you can then bring it home to your families, expand out to the families, influence the families to reach a heightened level of success. Then beyond that, your communities to your group and how well can your group do around you? And then if you want to go even bigger than that and you've grown, then you go, OK, how do I go global? How do I go to all of mankind? So that's what 10X Ladies is, is really about empowering women to take responsibility for their role, for making a difference for the better, for helping to change the trajectory of this planet to make a difference for the better. I love this. And tell me some of the issues that women have when they're trying to build their business. What are the main stories that you hear from some of the women that come to you? Well, I mean, a lot of women, they want to, a lot of women have, and I'm not saying this doesn't occur, but a lot of women get pressed with instead of, you're going to have a hard time being a female in this industry. You're not going to get taken seriously, males, you know, outperform and out, you have more financial gain than you. And rather than focusing the energy on how victimized you can be and the me too movement, and you're never, like, I'm not, again, I don't want to be taken out of context because I know some things are real, and we have to handle that, but as a, as a generality, I feel like that is so focused on rather than, why am I spending the energy to see how hard I'm going to have to make it to go upstream? Why don't I focus the energy on how do I self-enhanced? How do I make myself have the stats that show up in any office that can stand up against any man? Because, not that I'm competing against them, but you are for a position or a job or whatever, but how do you hold your own and then some? Because a business owner is not going to get want to eliminate you or let you go if you are providing value and you're an asset to the company, like become so invaluable to the company or to your company or to the organization that when you go and ask them for a pay raise or you're in thinking of leaving because of they throw money at you to get you to...