00:00:02 – Jess Ekstrom

Welcome to amplify with Jess Ekstrom, a show designed to help women get out of their head and into their zone of influence. Okay, so amplify is a lot about amplifying women’s voices, how to get started in the speaking industry, and how to share your story, which I think it’s time that you watch me do mine. So today’s episode, I want to show you one of my talks that I did at Inman Connect. It was one of the bigger speaking gigs I’ve done, and it was for the real estate industry. And you can see some of the practices and principles I talk about on this show put into real life.

00:00:39 – Jess Ekstrom

In this talk, my story begins in Disney World, but I don’t want to get started on the wrong foot. I’m not one of those, like, crazy, you know, Disney people. On a scale from one to Never Neverland, I’m probably like a two or three. But when I was in college, I got the chance to be a photopass photographer. So if you’ve ever been to Disney World, show of hands, any Disney world people in here? Okay, so you know those really obnoxious people that are in those safari outfits that want to take your picture all the time? That was me.

00:01:11 – Jess Ekstrom

And when I was there, I absolutely loved it. But my favorite thing that I got to do was I got to take pictures of kids that were there on their wish for the Make A Wish foundation. So if you’re unfamiliar, make a wish is an amazing organization that grants wishes to kids with life threatening illnesses. So going to Disney World was the most popular wish among makewish kids. So I got to be the one taking their pictures, seeing the castle for the first time, or meeting their favorite princess. And I just fell in love with this organization. So I got back to school my sophomore year at NC State, and I applied for an internship at Makewish.

00:01:55 – Jess Ekstrom

And when I was there, I wasn’t doing the most glamorous things. I wasn’t organizing these huge galas or calling Taylor Swift or doing things that you think maybe you might be doing in turning for make a wish. I was doing a lot of behind the scenes work, a lot of medical release forms, or licking envelopes until I couldn’t taste anything anymore. Cold calling people for money and getting hung up on. It was the first time in my life where it didn’t matter what I was doing in that moment, because I was so clearly connected to why I was doing it. Every single thing I did at make a wish, I could draw a straight line to helping make a wish come true.

00:02:41 – Jess Ekstrom

So I started to have this 19 year old revelation, and I was like, maybe our lives and these careers that we choose for ourselves doesn’t have to be something where we just clock in, clock out, get a paycheck every few weeks. It can be something where every day when our alarm goes off, we know that it matters that we’re there.

00:03:04 – Jess Ekstrom

Like, Ryan was talking about this before, it’s that we’re building something bigger than us. And so it’s towards the end of this internship, and they decided they were going to give me a little bit more responsibility to round out the summer, and they assigned me a wish child, and so I got to be the coordinator of her wish. I got to plan and do everything. And her name was Renee. And she wanted to go to Disney World, but specifically, she wanted to go to Disney World to meet Sleeping Beauty. She was very clear about the terms of this agreement. She was like, sleeping beauty or bust. So I planned this going away party for her and all of her friends that was princess themed. I coordinated with the Disney parks to make sure that Sleeping Beauty could be there for all of their meals. And I made her an appointment at the Bibbidi boppity boutique because that’s a thing there. And everything started to come together for her wish. And unfortunately, about a week before she was scheduled to go to Orlando, she started to have some symptoms flare up.

00:04:09 – Jess Ekstrom

And so they took her to the hospital and they did a scan. She had a brain tumor, and she had been in this new, new trial that they were working on. And they did a scan and realized that there was something that they had missed and that her tumor had started to grow back and that she was going to be too sick to go on her wish because she wasn’t well enough to fly or drive to Orlando.

00:04:38 – Jess Ekstrom

And the worst part was they sent her home to focus on quality of life. And I remember thinking like, this can’t be the story, because we have these experiences in our life that are these tangible life events that we can’t control. We can’t control what the weather is outside. We can’t control if our flight gets in on time. We can’t control if our neighbor’s dog is barking at three in the morning. Those are our experiences. But our story is how we internalize and respond to our experiences. So although we can’t always control our life like a chessboard and move every piece just like we want to, we can control what the meaning is in what we do next.

00:05:19 – Jess Ekstrom

So I decided that I was going to go onto Google, I looked up local costume shops, and a few hours later, I arrived on her doorstep dressed as sleeping beauty and tried to make her wish come true that day. And I brought her this matching dress and a crown that said Princess Renee and read her the story of Sleeping Beauty and spent the whole day with her and her family in character.

00:05:45 – Jess Ekstrom

She totally bought it. And it was the clearest before and after moment of my life. And sometimes when we want to do something good, when we want to give back, when we want to make a difference, we think about the upside. We think about all of the good, the big fat checks, the things that we can donate, and all the smiles.

00:06:04 – Jess Ekstrom

But what we have to remember is, a lot of times, the good things in the world start with something hard. Because hard times give us a choice. They can be the excuse as to why we do less, or they can be the reason as to why we do more. One single experience can write two completely different, different stories. My favorite analogy is that boiling water can soften a potato, but harden an egg. So it’s not as much about the circumstance as it is about the subject, as it is about who we are. And I knew that I didn’t want this time with Renee to be the excuse as to why I didn’t want to do something hard again or emotionally challenging. I wanted her to be the reason. I wanted to be able to look back and say, because of her, I did this.

00:07:02 – Jess Ekstrom

So one of the things I had noticed was girls like Renee, who would lose their hair to chemotherapy, would immediately be offered a wig or they’d be given a hat. And a lot of them weren’t really concerned with covering up their heads. They just wanted something to feel like a kid again. So I would see them coming into the offices and going on their wishes, wearing these colorful floral headbands. And I thought it was just the most amazing gesture of confidence that they just wanted to feel good about themselves. So this was my spark. I was going to start a company called Headbands of Hope. And for every headband sold, we’re going to donate one to a child with an illness. So I was a junior in college at the time, studying communications. Couldn’t even spell entrepreneur. Still can’t really spell it. I’m not going to lie to you guys. I’m going to keep it real up here.

00:07:50 – Jess Ekstrom

So I decided to just look at what I had. I decided I needed a logo. So I went over to the graphic design school, waited for a class to get out that I was not in, and went in and I introduced myself to the teacher. I told her what I was doing, and then I was like, hey, just spitball in here. But you know what would be a great idea is if for your next class assignment, everyone had to make me a logo and I got to pick the best one.

00:08:23 – Jess Ekstrom

Doesn’t that sound like fun? That was how I got my first logo. When I needed to build a business plan, I went in the school directory. Any professor that was smiling, business professor that was smiling in their photo, I asked them for 15 minutes of their time. I’m like, ok, what are taxes? Should I be concerned about them? When I needed a website, I went over to the graphic design school and I asked students to teach me Photoshop and Shopify to build my e commerce platform. And I so generously paid them in Chipotle burritos. I call it burrito strapping. My business, trademark pending.

00:09:03 – Jess Ekstrom

But when the last thing I had to do was I had to find a manufacturer, someone to actually make the headbands. Small detail. I know. So I found this database of us manufacturers and I started going down the line, emailing them, calling them. In hindsight, I’m like, look, I know I’m coming at you from a email address with probably comic sans font or something super embarrassing, but just hoping that someone would just take a chance on me. Months of radio silence. No one would get back to me. Finally, this factory in Kansas emailed me back and they wanted to get on a call, and I was like, great, it’s my first business meeting. I’m going to do this. And so I have my notes, everything that I’m going to say, get on a call with them, tell them about headbands of hope. They love it. They’re like, we want to help you. We got you. We’re going to make your headbands.

00:09:54 – Jess Ekstrom

So for about two more months, we talk about once a week, we go through what we want the designs to look like, materials, all that. Finally, they send me a picture and a sample of a headband that I’m good to go with, and I’m like, okay, let’s do it. Let’s make this headband. So they send me over the invoice and it’s for $10,000. And I’m like, I probably should have asked this before.

00:10:27 – Jess Ekstrom

And I was in a pickle because this was about $9,500 more than what I had in my bank account at the time. And so I went onto GooglE. I remember literally saying, how do I get $10,000 to start my business? And two ways came up. I could get a loan from the bank, or I could get an investor, like Shark TAnK giveaway equity. I was talking to my dad, who’s also an entrepreneur, and telling him about these two options. I’m like, what should I do? Should I try to get a loan from the bank, even though I don’t really. I don’t even know if I have a credit score or should I try to get an investment? And he was like, look, when I started my business, one of the things that I did wrong was I gave away too much equity too early, and I don’t want you to have to do the same thing.

00:11:16 – Jess Ekstrom

So I’m going to front you the $10,000 as your first investor, and you can pay me back as the business starts to make money. And this was like hearing my dog speak English. I mean, don’t get me wrong. My dad is great, but, like, our childhood was never like, oh, you want a pony? You get a pony.

00:11:43 – Jess Ekstrom

And I shook his hand. I was just so glad to have his support. And I ran to the bank. It was a Friday afternoon, and I went in there with my wiring instructions. I wired them $10,000, and I never heard from them again. Yeah, I had some other words that I won’t say here, but I felt like maybe this is a sign.

00:12:10 – Jess Ekstrom

Maybe this is just a sign that I shouldn’t be here, that I shouldn’t be doing this. But sometimes when we want something, we plug it into this internal gps in our head. This is what we want to do. This is where we want to go. This is the route to how you get there. And so you start going down that way. You start following the directions left, right, and then all of a sudden, that way doesn’t work. So you think the whole thing doesn’t work. But there will always be another way to get to where you want to go if you believe in that end destination enough. No one would sign Jay Z when he first started putting his music out there. So he created his own record label and signed himself. Probably not the most direct way, but it was a way. So I remember going to bed a couple nights after this happened, you know, closing my eyes, and if you’re looking for a really good lullaby, just run through all your biggest life’s mistakes. That’s what I do every night to go to bed. And I was thinking, I’m like, this isn’t about the embarrassment of failure.

00:13:13 – Jess Ekstrom

You know, I feel like I could stomach that this is about an itch not being scratched, and that’s where good ideas and good work comes from is when you so badly want to solve a problem. I call it inspiration from frustration. That’s where the best stuff happens, is when you’re frustrated about something and you create something to make it better. So I got up. I went to my school of entrepreneurship. They were giving away $300 grants to students who were starting companies.

00:13:40 – Jess Ekstrom

I got that $300. I bought two different types of headbands from the supplier on Etsy in Bismarck, North Dakota. Put them up on my website. April 25, 2012. Almost ten years to the day. My first order was from my mom. My second order was from my grandpa. But now we’ve been on the Today show, good Morning America, the View. You can catch me on QVC almost every week. We are in 2000 stores. We just did a deal with the NBA and the WNBA, so you can find our team headbands. We even have some celebrities that wear headbands, like Lauren Conrad or even the Kardashians, which that can be either good news or bad news, depending on where you are on the Kardashian spectrum. But my favorite thing is that we have been able to donate to every single children’s hospital in America, in 22 countries now. Thank you. And actually, can I get some help? Can I get a drum roll for this one? I paid my dad back. Thank you. Thank you. I said, I wrote him a check for $10,001. I was like, there’s some interest. Pleasure doing business, sir. But for the longest time, I thought that successful people never made mistakes.

00:15:06 – Jess Ekstrom

But the reality is, we think success is the absence of bumps. But really, it’s just the navigation of them. It’s just the navigation of them. In fact, at headbands of hope, we don’t even call mistakes and failures by their name. We call them research, because at the end of the day, when you mess up, you have more information than you did before. Which is why I live by this mantra that failure will always feel better than regret, period. I remember one time I was at this trade show.

00:15:45 – Jess Ekstrom

I dumped my entire savings when I was starting headbands of hope to be at this trade show, and I was making no sales. But I saw the buyer of Ulta in the distance, and I thought I could either stay here and continue making no sales, or I could go for it. And I ran down the escalators chasing after this Ulta buyer. I’m surprised security didn’t get called on me. And finally, I made it there. I gave my pitch. I think I literally even knelt down and gave the headband off my head. I’m like, your majesty, I want you to have this. Please. She didn’t want anything to do with me. But four years later, we launched an all thousand ulta stores. And I think about that. Thank you.

00:16:28 – Jess Ekstrom

I think about that time, like, when you feel that cement feet, but your heart is telling you to go, that failure will always feel better than regret. But let’s be real here, that we are all ambitious, highly motivated people in this room. And sometimes it gets hard. And if I hear one more person say, if you love what you do, you never have to work a day in your life.

00:16:52 – Jess Ekstrom

I’m calling B’s because there’s two types of work. We have our assigned work, which is the tangible tasks in our job description. But meaningful work is these purpose driven tasks that we do because we know that we’re building something bigger than us. There was a study at Yale. They interviewed hospital custodians. They interviewed one pool of people that were really unhappy in their jobs, and they said, okay, what do you do every day? I clean the floors, I change the sheets, and I sweep.

00:17:21 – Jess Ekstrom

Okay, why do you do it? I need to get paid. I need benefits. What’s your job title? Janitor, maintenance worker, custodian. They interviewed another pool of people that had this exact same assigned work, same title, loved their jobs, and they said, okay, well, what is it that you do every day? One of them worked in hospice care. She would shuffle around the artwork from room to room so her patients would have something different to look at. Another person carried around a notepad. She would tally which rooms got visitors and which rooms that didn’t, so she could make it a point to spend more time in the rooms that didn’t get visitors that day. When asked what their job titles were, one person described himself as an ambassador for the hospital. Another person described herself as a healer. All these people had the exact same assigned work, but the people who were truly fulfilled chose not to look at their job as a job, but as a service to humanity. So who do you serve? You all give people roots. You put roofs above their heads. You have such meaningful work. Who do you serve, and how can you serve them better? So I’ll close with one story that’s a little bit harder to tell.

00:18:38 – Jess Ekstrom

When I felt like in the beginning of headbands of hope, I got it. I’m like, this is what I do, and this is why I do it. All of a sudden, as headbands of hope started to get more successful, there was more layers in between what I was doing. And why I was doing it. You know, I have payroll, I have staff. Got to keep the lights on. And so I went to UNC children’s hospital, where I met this girl named Taylor.

00:19:01 – Jess Ekstrom

And she had a little bit of hair left on the top of her head, so she dyed it into a mohawk to match her headband, which I thought was awesome. And she told me that she was feeling kind of down because everyone that she was seeing was going to prom, and prom was not in the works for her.

00:19:16 – Jess Ekstrom

She was in the hospital for two years at that point. And I said, I’m going to go to this trade show this weekend, but when I come back, I’ll come back and we’ll have our own prom. We’ll get dressed up. It’ll be great. So she adds me on Facebook. We’re talking about what we’re going to wear. We’re talking about who we’re going to invite. She starts putting together a Spotify playlist. I’m at this trade show. If you’ve ever had a moment that’s so meaningful to you that when you think about it, all your senses come back to you. I remember I was on the phone with this tag company at this trade show because I had ordered these tags to go along with the headbands. They were lost in the mail somewhere. And it was like the biggest problem that I could possibly have were these tags not being there. And I’m at the top of this escalator on the phone with this tag company, trying to get them rerouted. And I get called waiting from an unknown number. And I think to myself, who could be calling me at a time like this? I switch over the line and it’s Taylor’s mom.

00:20:17 – Jess Ekstrom

And she was calling to tell me that Taylor passed away the night before and that she wanted those same headbands that you saw in that picture right there for every female in her family to wear to her service the next day. And, you know, that’s when I just froze. And I felt my feet on the ground, and I didn’t even realize how far I had been floating, because here was my narrative. I thought, you know, once I can get on a big network television show, then I’ll made it. Once I can do a million dollars. Two, three, four. Once I can give a Ted talk. Once I can get a book deal, once I can be on the COVID of a magazine, once I can get on one of those swanky 30 under 30 lists, then I’ll know I’ve made it. But all those things happened, and they would just come and go. And that’s when I learned all those things I listed are what we classify as achievements.

00:21:06 – Jess Ekstrom

The appearance of winning. These tangible milestones that you can measure, you can see, you can feel they’re great, but they’re not our final destination. Success is a legacy. It’s something that can’t be measured. It can only be felt. And I used to think that we would feel fulfillment when we’ve reached the destination, when we’ve retired, when we’ve hit a certain milestone.

00:21:32 – Jess Ekstrom

But what I have learned over the past ten years running this business is that fulfillment is not a destination that we hit one day. It’s a choice to how we live today. And success is something that only you can define for yourself. Because so many things we classify as success, when we reach them, we realize it isn’t. It’s a false summit. And so what does success feel like to you? Thinking about waking up tomorrow, the next day? What is going to make you feel excited to walk outside those doors? Because success is not what it looks like to others. It’s only what it feels like to you.

00:22:20 – Jess Ekstrom

Thanks for listening to amplify. If you are a fan of the show, show us some podcast love by giving us a rating and review, and give us a follow iikedrop workshop and essextrum coming up on amplify.

00:22:33 – Chelsea Williams

If that feels icky to send the email initially, get out of your home. Yeah, get to social events that are happening. Jess and I are in the same city, so we’re going to chamber events, we’re going to women’s empowerment conferences, we’re going to things that naturally are exciting. And when we’re there, we’re showing up and we’re saying to ourself our little pep talk in the way in. I want to make three connections that feel values aligned in this opportunity. And then we’re following up after.

00:23:00 – Jess Ekstrom

This episode was edited and produced by Earfluence. And I’m Jess Ekstrom, your host. Remember that you deserve the biggest stage, so let’s find out how to get you there. I’ll see you again soon.