74. Jess Connolly - Staying Focused as a Mission-Driven Entrepreneur

Jess Connolly:

My passion about those things to lead other people and to help other people. And so not a lot in my outside life shifted, but something in my inside life shifted. I realized I don't want to feel stuck forever and ever.

Aaron Ackerman:

From Hogan Taylor, I'm Aaron Ackerman and this is How That Happened, a business and innovation success podcast. On each episode of the show we sit down with business and community leaders behind thriving organizations to learn how business and innovation success actually happens. Well, welcome to another episode of how that happened. Before we get started, I just want to give a huge thank you to our listeners who download and listen to the podcast every other Monday. If you have enjoyed the episodes we would be honored if you would give us a rating and a review on whatever platform you listen to the show, and while you're there, if you haven't already, please subscribe so you don't miss any new episodes. My guest today is Jess Connolly. Jess is not only a bestselling author of at least nine books, I think I've got that number right, including You Are the Girl for the Job and Breaking Free From body Shame, Jess is also a sought after speaker, an entrepreneur, a podcaster, a blogger, a coach, and a church leader, Jess, hi, welcome. Thanks for joining the show.

Jess Connolly:

Absolutely. Thanks for having me. I appreciate it.

Aaron Ackerman:

So first question, after reading that long list, and I didn't even mention wife, mom, I know family's massively important to you. When do you sleep?

Jess Connolly:

It's funny. I feel tired hearing that description, but I will say I do sleep. I live a very boundaried life. I'm not a work all day kind of girl. I like a good seven to eight hours of sleep. It's funny, I think it all sounds like a lot, but in my life it tends to feel a lot more simpler. A lot of it falls under, for me, the umbrella of coaching. And so when I go to work every day, I know that I'm coaching. I know that I'm doing that in some form, but it does take a variety of different genres.

Aaron Ackerman:

Yeah, that's awesome. So I read, I think on your website or somewhere, that you say about yourself that when you were 15 nobody would've voted you most likely to succeed. Our personal interactions together have been very limited, but even in short exposure and just watching you in videos and reading and listening to you, for my listeners, you guys, you don't have to be around Jess for more than about two minutes before you're struck with the fact that, hey, this is a human that's going places. Why do you say that about yourself at 15 and maybe what brought you like out of your shell? Or what's that journey for you?

Jess Connolly:

Yeah, well I will say I'm definitely not exaggerating. I wish sometimes I could carry around a picture or a video and just be like let me show you. Yeah, when I was 15, not only was I actively failing high school, I mean, I really, really... when I say I barely graduated high school, I mean I barely graduated high school. I think in a class of maybe 580, I think I was like number 490 out of my graduating class. I genuinely just struggled in school and was a pretty intense wallflower for some part of my life. I just felt really kind of caged and contained. And the truest story is for me, the first thing that started it is that I found some faith. I genuinely had like a really dramatic shift in my life and in my attitude and my mindset after finding faith in Jesus Christ personally for me.

But more than that, or after that or because of that, I would say I also realized that maybe a lot of the injustices or the heavy or dark things that I saw in the world that really truly maybe I was exposed to at a younger age or saw before, those things had made me feel caged, contained, frightened, I wanted to become smaller. And all of a sudden I felt like, okay, what if I used my passion about those things to lead other people and to help other people? And so not a lot in my outside life shifted, but something in my inside life shifted. And I realized I don't want to feel stuck forever and ever.

And I obviously have gone through periods since turning 15 where I'll like crawl back into the cage and say I want to just play small. I just want to be chill over here and not have anyone expect anything from me. But for the most part, I think I just kind of keep fighting for people who are like me, women who are like me specifically, who just really need encouraging and equipping and someone to say like God's might be in you, let's try this thing. Let's do this thing. Let's see what can happen.

Aaron Ackerman:

Yeah, man, that is awesome. I think I'm kind of reading between the lines, but it sounds like a lot of that is about just overcoming fear, right? Like being able to put yourself out there in a way where you're not afraid to fail or I might embarrass myself or whatever. And I know that's a lot of what you do with coaching and in your writing is you help people sort of overcome that fear. That's real in any realm, men, women, business, it doesn't matter. I think everybody, no matter how famous, rich, successful, or the opposite of those things, we all kind of have those similar fears. Right?

Jess Connolly:

Yeah, absolutely. And I think you're right. I think a lot of it has to do more with fear than I even like led on or talk about in my story. But it's funny, I tell people a lot about fear, I don't know if you remember these commercials from the eighties, but there were all these commercials on in the eighties about the Hair Club for Men. And it would be this guy who would be a spokesperson for the Hair Club for Men, he'd be showing all these before and after pictures of like this man used to be bald and now he has a lot of hair. This man used to be bald and now he has a lot of hair. And then at the end of the commercial, the guy would say, "I'm not just the president of the Hair Club for Men, I'm also a member." And his before and after picture would flash on the screen and then you'd be like, "Oh, he was bald too."

And I said that is me with fear 110%, it's not like I'm not a scared person. I actually don't even believe in the phrase fearless leader, I think if you find a fearless leader you've probably found a sociopath, because if you care about something, if you care about someone, you can access some fear about what's going to go wrong or what's going to happen to them. So I always say I'm not just the president of the Fighting Fear Club, I'm also a member. But it's that passion for wanting other people to kind stay outside of the fear, to fight it, to fight it with truth, to move forward anyways. It does keep me going for sure.

Aaron Ackerman:

Yeah. Wow, that's a great analogy. So talk just for a minute about sort of your journey to entrepreneurship and writing books and speaking. Did you kind of trip into that? Was that always part of your plan? How did you get where you are now?

Jess Connolly:

Yeah, trip into it, it actually sounds even more graceful than it was. I don't know that I tripped into it even. You know how some people fall up the stairs? That's what happened to me and getting into small business. It was really clumsy. It really genuinely, I wish I had a better elevator pitch, it started because I was a mommy blogger. I was in a season of my life where my husband was in ministry and I was at home, I ended up having three kids in three years. I had three kids under three at one point in my life. And so I was just home a lot taking care of these babies and changing diapers and kind of dreaming about, I don't know, my future and what God might be doing. And I started writing a mommy blog, and I would just talk about hair or new hairstyles I wanted to try, but sometimes I'd talk about scriptures.

Sometimes I'd talk about taking my kids to the zoo, and genuinely people kind of just kept watching and paying attention. And for us, interestingly, the actual jump into business came in March 2011, I think. Yeah, March 2011. And my daughter who was three at the time went into the hospital after having a grand mal seizure, and she was diagnosed with a seizure disorder and she was in the ICU for a few days. And again, at the time I was a mommy blogger so I'm blogging about it and people were praying for her and it was so kind and sweet. And then at one point, my husband and I shared a laptop and he had this laptop because he was in seminary, and so I was like, "Hey, can I borrow your laptop?" And I went on his laptop and I started making... I didn't even know what to call it, but I was like I'm going to make this little design in maybe PowerPoint.

And was of a particular verse that people kept giving to us to pray for her, Psalm 46:5, "The Lord is within her. She will not be moved. He will help her when morning comes." And so I went on to PowerPoint and I knew nothing about graphic design, but I was like I'm going to just move some of these letters around and make a little flower. And I decided to print it out and put it on our wall at home. And I just did that a few times with a few different verses until a friend came over and said, "Hey, you should sell these. You should try and sell these." I didn't even know what to call it. I mean, I got them printed at Kinko's because we didn't have a home printer. And so I was like, "Okay, all right.

So I went on Etsy and put up a little JPEG of the design and that became my jump into business. By the end of 2011 we had done $40,000 in sales. And I was like what in the world? I mean, we were a family at the time who was literally on food stamps. And so, well, pre starting the business, so we're like what is happening? We are going from actually living in poverty and struggling and just covered in medical debt to hold on, God's doing something here. And God just kind of kept multiplying those sales year after year. And so I was like hold on, I've got to figure out business, I've got to understand marketing. We need staff. I need to understand leadership. And so one thing just kind of led to another led to another led to another.

From that I ended up starting an online devotional study that now millions of women are participating in called She Reached Truth, and that led to me starting this conference, this gathering of other women who worked online, which then led to one day a publisher came to that conference and took me out to dinner and said, "Have you ever thought about writing books?" And I was like, "I can barely write my name right now, but let's see." And so, one thing just kind of pummeled after the other and I made a million mistakes and of course that's how you learn most of everything anyways. So, it was a wild couple of years where I went from mommy blogger to CEO and published author in really a span of like five or six years.

Aaron Ackerman:

Wow. And so your first kind of business thing was like a product, like a merchandise, yeah.

Jess Connolly:

Yeah, it was.

Aaron Ackerman:

Wow. That's awesome. So you were learning about inventory and order fulfillment and all kinds of stuff, right?

Jess Connolly:

Yes. I was order fulfillment myself for a good two years. It was me and my husband on our sofa. I mean, I think it was probably 18 months in to us getting dozens of orders a week, hundreds of orders a week, and I was probably 18 months in and still writing every address on the front of the envelope because no one told me like, "Hey, you should actually print labels for this." And then another six months later, "You could hire someone to do this." A year later, "You could actually pay a fulfillment company to do this." I'm like, "Oh, okay. Great, great, awesome. Cool."

Aaron Ackerman:

So how do you stay organized? Do you have a system for managing your time, your goals, you've got these sort of multiple businesses and channels that you're working in? How do you, sort of from a personal standpoint, how do you manage all of that?

Jess Connolly:

Well, I'll let you in behind the curtain and I'll tell you. When I show most people my time management system and my planning system, they want to cry or vomit or hide. It's really, really, really intense, but I'm the kind of gal who the more planned out something is the better I function. And so I really, I'm going to try to keep this answer as brief as possible, but I've got an 80 year vision that I revisit every once in a while. Where do I want to be at 80? What do I want life to look like at 80? What do I want to have accomplished? Where do I think I'm headed? So I revisit that every once in a while. From there, I kind of work backwards. I have a 10 year plan, a three year plan and a one year plan.

And I obviously hold all this really loosely, but this is where I think we're headed, this is what I think we're going to do within a year. I am a really big fan of the 12 week year system. I don't know if you're familiar with it, but it's essentially a book about goal setting and it's a system that breaks the year down into quarters with the idea that if you set goals for an entire year you'll really underestimate what you could get done. So I operate in a 12 week year quarter system. I've got personal goals that I set within the 12 week year and business goals that I set within a 12 week year. Our family sets different goals within a 12 week year. I'm revisiting those every single week and kind of evaluating.

And then personal planning wise, if someone took my iPad we would just be in the biggest amount of trouble. So within my iPad I use an app called Good Notes where I keep my week calendar, my month calendar, and then every single day I have an hour plan written out from six to 9:00 PM with what's going to happen, where I'm supposed to be, what I'm wearing, what temperature it's going to be that day, what I'll be eating and what I have to post on social media. So, that's not for everybody but it works for me.

Aaron Ackerman:

No, I love it. I love the... I don't think I've ever talked to anyone that had an 80 year plan, that's amazing. And the quarters, I love that. I've been doing a lot of reading lately about sort of just corporate goal setting and being able to grade, sort of track progress, adjust and pivot, because things change. If you set a year long goal and four or five, six months into the year the world changes, now your goal is meaningless. Right? But if you're looking at it every few weeks or whatever, then you have the opportunity to kind of change. So I do want to ask you another question about goal setting because I've seen, because you put it online, some of your own goals. You're very transparent. And that's probably not all of your goals but you've put some of your goals on your blog that anybody... like I didn't even sign up. I just started searching Jess Connolly I'm like, "Oh, here's her goals. Let's see what she's up to."

So I love that transparency and that's something that I'm really working sort of in my team right now, is trying to be... I'm being transparent, like here's all my goals, everyone in the organization can see all my goals. So I just want to ask you about that. How did you arrive at I'm going to put my goals online and I'm going to talk about them and say, "Oh, I crushed this. Kind of struggling with this one," so that anybody that's following you can just sort of go on that journey with you? Was that scary? Was that a hard decision? How did you come to that? And these are, by the way, goals like some of them are health goals, some of them are spiritual goals, you've got business goals, like those kinds of things. You're just super transparent.

Jess Connolly:

Okay. I'm going to give you the most honest answer. I think that what I'm supposed to say here is something strategic about how I got over it. But I think the most honest answer is, there's something about my personality that that does not feel scary to me. There are times where I'm like, "Well, this is really vulnerable, man, interesting." But really what I'm even feeling then is I think I'm supposed to feel scared of this but I'm not. And I will say, I say that only to share that that feels right for me, but if it was completely terrifying for someone else I would say maybe that's not for you. Now with that said, I'll say I don't do it for accountability and I just think that's helpful because I really do think to some degree we are our best accountability. And me writing down my goals and wanting to be genuine to myself and wanting to honor my own word and to wanting to honor my own accountability, I think really matters more than someone else saying, "I thought you were going to do this. I thought you said you were going to, what about this goal you had?"

But again, it's interesting. Even back to the beginning of our conversation, what drives me to do it is wondering if there's a woman at home, or you, or a male... listen, equal opportunity... who's like I wonder if I could do more or I wonder how I could organize my goals better, or I wonder if anybody else struggles with getting it done or shifting or pivoting when things don't go their way? And so that kind of drives me to if this would encourage anybody else, I might as well put it up. It's not going to hurt me. Even if somebody has an opinion about it, it's probably still not going to hurt me and that makes me feel a little bit more free to do it. But the honest answer is it doesn't make me feel nervous to share.

Aaron Ackerman:

No, I like that. Yeah, I wonder if there's something maybe just about you inherently or the fact that just the experiences you've had, whatever you've been through, makes you feel sort of anti fragile in those circumstances. And I'm like you, it was not a big deal for me. It was pretty easy to say here's some goals, and these were business goals. I think I would be a little more hesitant to share like I want to lose weight or I want to stop this bad habit or whatever. Some of those are a little more personal. But I liked the thought of sort of being anti fragile. And usually when people are vulnerable, the fear of being vulnerable is, in my experience, always worse than it actually comes out. Right?

I would guess, Jess, that you have more people that look at your goals, even if you've got one that you're off track, and they're going to be encouraging you or say, "Hey, I've found this great tool that helped me with a similar goal," or like, "Rock on and keep going. You can do it." As opposed to, "Well, Jess, that was kind of an unrealistic goal. I can't believe you set that." Or, "I knew you were going to fail." You probably get almost a hundred percent of the first and not the second.

Jess Connolly:

Yes, and it's interesting, even in noting that, I was able to say I'm honestly not scared about sharing my personal goals. I would say I'm the exact opposite. And if you have many women in leadership listening, they may resonate with this, it's a lot easier for me to share personal goals than it is for me to share business goals. And I will say it is a lot easier for me to be vulnerable and transparent about failure than it is for me to celebrate wins publicly, because I've just had enough people say like, "Oh, aren't you ambitious?" And people often don't mean harm by it or they don't even know that they mean harm by it, but even I'll have other women say like, "Oh my gosh, how do you get all of that done?"

And then inherently for me there's kind of this voice of shame of like, "Well, what am I not doing? What am I not handling well that I am getting all this done?" Or women who will say like, "How in the world do you have time to take care of your family?" And all of a sudden I'm like, "Well maybe I'm not taking care of my family well enough," when in reality no one knows my private life, no one knows how I'm shepherding my family and my relationships and all those things. But it's interesting. I would be a lot more nervous to share some of my more inside business goals and I think I'd be way more nervous to share when I reach them.

Aaron Ackerman:

Yeah, that's interesting. I think that principal that you brought up, it just reminded me even recently with my team here at the firm, we went through Clifton's Strengths Builder Program. I don't know if you're familiar with that?

Jess Connolly:

Yes.

Aaron Ackerman:

We had these exercise exercises where we would sort of talk about the strengths that we have from our assessment. And then on the flip side talk about not even weaknesses, but what are blind spots that might go along with that strength? Well, people could fill up pages of why that strength might have some hard edge to it somewhere, but then when you're just trying to brag on yourself, no one wants to talk. There's just that tendency to beat ourselves up more or focus on negative as opposed to celebrate how awesome you are.

Jess Connolly:

Yes, yeah. Or how you're able to serve other people or how you're able to help them, yeah, absolutely.

Aaron Ackerman:

Yeah, totally. No, that's really cool. Well, thanks for the transparency on those goals, that was inspiring. And you had some kind of health related goals about running, or I can't remember what it was, going to the gym or things like that. I think I've heard you talk before about kind of self care and in order to be a good leader you can't neglect yourself, which is mind, body, spirit, like everything, but sometimes that's hard, right? This servant/leader concept, which is real and I totally buy into it. That doesn't mean you completely neglect yourself. I think in order to help others we have to kind of take care of our own house first. Would you agree with that?

Jess Connolly:

Yes, I would. It's interesting. This again may be more a phrase that some women resonate with more than men, but I don't know, you might find it helpful. I had a friend who, when she talked about self care, she liked to redefine it and call it mothering herself. I like that because I think a lot of us get tripped up on this idea of self care that it's like fancy or it's extra or I can't do that if I'm actually going to be a good leader. And so she would say mothering yourself is saying like, "I'm going to make sure I have plenty of food and water and rest and my physical needs are taken care of and that my mind is clear." And all of those things, not only show myself some dignity and worth, which I would absolutely want to encourage anyone who is following me would do the same, but it also makes me a better leader.

It makes me a more capable leader to come into a meeting not famished or to have the physical stamina to make it through a day of intense coaching sessions, et cetera. And so, that's really helped me kind of reframe that idea of self care that it's less this privileged, special, fancy thing and it's more just like I'm going to actually take care of myself. I'm going to mother myself the same way I would encourage my kids. Hey, you've got to take care of your physical needs. You've got to eat, you've got to water, you've got to get some sunlight, and you need some rest to do well, to do what you're called to do well.

Aaron Ackerman:

Yeah, yeah, totally. We've had a consultant here at the firm in years past that's a neuroscientist and he talks about being on and he kind of makes an analogy of you wouldn't want your airplane pilot or your surgeon to be undernourished, to be tired because he stayed up all night, to be groggy, to be frustrated because of something else in his life, you're expecting totally on from that person. And writing and speaking or doing accounting or whatever we do, may not be life and death, but it's accountability to self like you said earlier. And people are paying Jess to come speak at their event, or we have clients that pay us, that's money that we need to honor. And just because nobody dies if I make a mistake really doesn't let me off the hook of being totally on for my family, for my coworkers, my clients, et cetera.

Jess Connolly:

Yeah, absolutely.

Aaron Ackerman:

Well, we're kind of winding down. I want to ask a question about just like mission driven business and I know you are not apologetic about needing to make money and pay employees and all of that as you shouldn't be. A lot of our listeners are nonprofit leaders. They're leading businesses. If we just take the assertion that every business to some extent is mission driven, like my mission might be I need to make this product as fast as I can and charge as much as I can to create shareholder wealth. That's a mission. I might have a mission to create the best customer experience possible. Other organizations may have more, like a nonprofit may have a mission about serving communities that are underserved, whatever, it doesn't matter to an extent. But what I want to ask you about as far as being mission driven is, in today's world there are just so many distractions and I know you interviewed Bob Goff not too long ago about his book Undistracted. And I love Bob Goff, he's amazing.

There's just so many shiny objects that can take us off of our mission, whatever our mission is, and maybe these distractions are good like a new business opportunity that seems lucrative, a new relationship, a new volunteer opportunity. What would be your advice to a leader as far as how to stay focused on the important things, stay true to first principles and stay on mission, because it's so easy to fall off that?

Jess Connolly:

So it's a really good, I mean, I think that's a really great question. I think my top tip is you've got to have regular rhythms of revisiting your own mission and why it matters. So this cannot be a foregone conclusion. It can't be something we take for granted and just say like, "Oh no, I know my mission. I could say it easily." I would say regular rhythms of really deep thinking about why this matters. Even just a small example of how we do this at Go + Tell Gals is every single week our team does what we call a who exercise. And so every single week, every one of our team members has to take five to 10 minutes to journal about a particular one of our customers. So for example, tomorrow we're launching a new Bible study so this week everyone has to write just a few questions about this Bible study customer. We have to say what is she feeling right now? What are her pain points? What would we tell her? How can we serve her this week?

So I would say like that's just a small example of like five to 10 minutes of regularly going back. That could look different for everybody else. I know actually, I think Donald Miller, I've heard him say not only does he revisit his own personal values every day, he reads his obituary every day that he's written himself. I think that's a great way to say, all right, where am I headed in my life? So that's worth noting, but I actually have three tips that I think most people really don't do. So my first tip is you need to expect to say no a lot. And I think we're just in such a season of opportunity, there's just so much we could be doing that if we anticipate saying yes and we don't anticipate saying no, we'll be setting ourselves up for failure. So I would say number one, expect to say no a lot.

would personally say, and especially this is how it feels in my season, I would expect to say no more than I say yes. To just acknowledge there's going to be more opportunities that are going to distract me from my very clear mission than there are going to be opportunities to grow that mission, because nobody else in the world is thinking about my mission but me. They're thinking about their mission, rightfully so. And so I need to be ready to really say no potentially even more than I say yes. And then lastly, I would say remember that a no for now is not a no for later. And so that often helps me to know that I think sometimes even when we talk about saying no we think about saying no to opportunities that might seem beneath us, or that might like seem distracting, but a lot of times I have to say no to opportunities that actually seem very lucrative, that even might be financially profitable, but that don't actually move me towards the mission that I have, that I need to drive towards and that I need to focus on.

And so it helps me to say a no for now is not a no for later. I can revisit this in a different season and it might be the right time then. So those are just my three tips about saying no. I want to really coach women and men to get better at saying no politely and kindly and graciously, but I think we just need to get better at it.

Aaron Ackerman:

Yeah, that's brilliant. Real quick, just to go back to you said you were talking about thinking about the person, the lady that's going to be sitting there with the Bible study, that's solid gold because a lot of times we get busy doing whatever we do and we forget to sort of connect to who's really on the other side of this and what's the why, why are we doing this all day every day? I love that. And it doesn't matter if you're producing widgets or Bible studies or something else, just connecting with the person on the other end of that transaction, love it. And then great stuff on your three tips, it's so good. The thing about saying no is you're giving yourself permission to be intentional about that. When you say yes, you're also saying no, right, because there's only 24 hours in every day. So if you say yes, maybe you don't even know what you're saying no to. So a yes is also a no, we just sometimes brush that under the carpet. So I like really being diligent and intentional about the no, those are great tips.

Well, Jess, thank you so much. Before we wrap up, I just want to give you a chance to sort of tell people if they want to get your books, engage with you online, find out more about Jess Connolly, Go + Tell Gals, all the other things you're doing. Where can people go find you?

Jess Connolly:

Absolutely, yeah. I'm Jess A. Connolly on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram. I don't hang out on Twitter a lot so I'll give you that warning. I don't think I've logged in the last year. And my website is jessconnolly.com and my business is Go + Tell Gals and so it's goandtellgals.com. It's also Go + Tell Gals on Facebook and Instagram.

Aaron Ackerman:

Awesome. And podcast, I guess your podcast Go + Tell Gals is everywhere. Right?

Jess Connolly:

It's everywhere.

Aaron Ackerman:

Awesome. Okay. So as we wrap up here, I've got, this may be a surprise for you, I've got five sort of rapid fire questions we ask all of our guests. And so I'm just going to hit you with those now if you're ready.

Jess Connolly:

I'm ready.

Aaron Ackerman:

What was the first way you ever made money?

Jess Connolly:

Selling prints.

Aaron Ackerman:

Okay, cool.

Jess Connolly:

I mean, for myself. My first job was working at Atlanta Bread Company.

Aaron Ackerman:

Okay, yeah. No, we get a lot of mowing lawns, we've gotten some interesting stuff. So if you had gone in a totally different direction, if you weren't in this career, what other path might you have taken?

Jess Connolly:

I would've been a birth coach.

Aaron Ackerman:

Oh, wow. Okay, awesome. What would you like to go back and tell your 20 year old self?

Jess Connolly:

It's going to be more fun than you think.

Aaron Ackerman:

I like it. So you are a great writer. You've got all these books out. So this is a little unfair, because a lot of times we ask people what's the name of your book and they've never written a book. So it's a fun question. So I'm going to ask you, what is the title of your autobiography?

Jess Connolly:

Ooh, what is the title... A Bee in My Bonnet.

Aaron Ackerman:

Okay, we'll just have to wait for that to come out someday. A Bee in My Bonnet, I love it. What is the best advice you've ever received?

Jess Connolly:

You don't have to make it, you just have to make it happen.

Aaron Ackerman:

Oh, I like it.

Jess Connolly:

That's my mom's, all the time, she's the world's best. You don't have to make it, you've just got to make it happen.

Aaron Ackerman:

Good stuff. Well, Jess, thank you so much for your time and for everything you're doing, I know that your focus is on empowering women and you come from a faith based perspective, which I appreciate. I also would just tell our listeners check out the podcast and the books because I've learned a lot from Jess. Don't think that she only has great advice and wisdom for women. It's good for everybody. So thank you so much and congrats on all the success and looking forward to what else you've got in the future.

Jess Connolly:

Thank you so much for having me. I'm so grateful.

Aaron Ackerman:

You're welcome. Thanks so much.

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