Breaking Barriers: Elevating Women to Seven-Figure Success

Paula: [00:00:00] Well, hello everyone to another episode of Chatting with Experts TV show hosted by none other than me, Paula Okonneh, in which I bring to you amazing women, professional and entrepreneurial women who share the same mission with me, which is to inspire, to educate and empower women globally. Today, I am going to be talking about Enhanced Strategies for Elevated Success with an amazing guest of mine, Betty Hines. I’ll tell you a little bit about her. Betty shares powerful strategies to help women break barriers and achieve seven figures success and achievement reached by fewer than 4 percent of women. She’s a seasoned business strategist. She’s a connector and she’s a certified [00:01:00] advanced facilitator specializing in supporting women led businesses. I could say a lot more about her because there’s so much more to say about her, but why don’t I do this? Let me have her do it. So with that, I want to welcome Betty Hines to Chatting With the Experts.
Betty: Hello, Paula. Thank you so much for giving me the opportunity to share my story and my journey.
Paula: Absolutely. When I said a teeny bit about you, I mean, your bio blew me out of the water. So can you just say a little bit more about you? Because if I had to continue reading your bio, we’d be here for the next hour.
Betty: Sure. Let me give you a short version. And people can certainly go on the website and LinkedIn and read more about it as well. But I’ve been working in different spaces. I come out of corporate America. And from corporate America, I became an entrepreneur in partnership with my husband. [00:02:00] And from there, I became a consultant. So I have the full gamut in terms of working with businesses. I’m very passionate about having women reach their full potential. And what I have learned, having come out of both those spaces, and this is what I try to impart with Women Elevating Women, or what we affectionately refer to it as WEW, is that I try to impart on them that we can all be significant. But it’s important to be impactful and I heard you spoke about it. And this is what our organization is about.
So I took part of my journey, having been in this space for decades, is that I’ve taken very key successful characteristics of women entrepreneurs and women executives and I blended them together. And from that I pulled out what I call the five tenets or the five pillars of success. And so that’s about me. So, I work with women who have run multi million, billion dollar companies, and I want to take that knowledge and transfer it into those individuals, those women, [00:03:00] who are trying to scale their businesses to the next level. At least to some of them want to go to seven figures, some of them want to go any higher. But just want to share my gifts.
Paula: And that’s why you are here, to share your gifts. So, the title of the show is Enhanced Strategies for Elevated Success. Can you share at least two strategies for this elevated success because I’m so excited just hearing you talk about elevated success impact. Those are my words. So…
Betty: Well, I think when the people talk about elevating, they feel they have to go along, and they don’t have to go along. And there’s a saying that from one of the organizations that I work with called Women Presidents Organization, and it says, It’s lonely at the top. It is particularly for women who want to be in business and they want to be entrepreneurs, but it doesn’t need to be. So one of my strategies for success is for everybody. I don’t [00:04:00] care what business that you’re in. If you’re looking in the business mode, find yourself a peer advisory group. I’m a huge proponent of a peer advisory group. It’s always good. It’s a partnership, no different than it is in a religious organization, regardless of what your religion, your beliefs are, find you a home because as they say, if two or more come together.
So I believe in that whole process, process of methodology and mentality. So I would say the first strategy is to find yourself a peer advisory group. Now, having said that first, I feel it’s important, but the number one thing. It’s to sign what you want to do. What do you feel you want to offer to the community? What do you feel you want to offer to your ecosystem? You have to know where you want to, who you want to be before you know where you want to go. And so, that is a combination of you putting together a business plan. It can be a single [00:05:00] page business plan. If you’re just starting out, it can be far more detailed if you’re a bigger organization or you’ve grown to that size, but you must have a strategic plan and a business plan and you need to understand the difference. So those are two pieces of advice I would give.
Paula: I love that you said that business plan because a lot of women are afraid to do that. Not just women, business owners are afraid about that business plan, you know, because it exposes sometimes the cracks in the business. I mean, sometimes people just don’t want to face the truth. You know?
Betty: That’s right. Mm hmm.
Paula: I’m happy that you said that, you pointed that out. Yeah. And so, you know, so you I know you when you and I spoke off camera, you talked about creating an ecosystem for breaking barriers. What exactly is that?
Betty: Well, I created ecosystem for a segment. I’m not here to conquer the world. I’m only I’m trying to impact maybe eight to 10 percent of the market. And I’ve worked with [00:06:00] and still work with that barely 3 percent of women who have the revenues that exceed a million dollars or more. Pre COVID it was 4 percent and now that we’re getting through that. I want to call whatever you want to call it a fiasco or getting through the pandemic through that time period. It’s barely 3%. So not everybody’s going to get there nor that everybody wants to get there. But there’s a group of women at least in this country and their statistics and other countries as well. But there’s a group of women in this country, about 8 percent 10 percent that are at six figures, and that’s a good place to be.
To be at six figures because for women business owners I mean their average revenues hover around 27, 000 that’s that’s that’s like a side hustle, but for those of us who are at that six six figures and we want to scale higher to a million. You’d need the infrastructure and you need to be able to get that information from somebody else other than yourself because you’re not going to [00:07:00] have it. So that is the ecosystem that I work with. I take those individuals who are six figures and they just are in a rut. They don’t know how to get to the next level. And so this is the ecosystem that we create because statistics has shown, particularly with women, that women learn experientially. And that’s learning from the experiences of others. So we’ll just imagine when you gather a group of women together. And in my case, we do it in groups of 15 to 20, you grab them together. They share their experiences. You can glean knowledge from that experience and take it to the next level. That is the community, the ecosystem that we’re building with WEW.
Paula: Yes. They always say that if you want to go, I think it’s the African saying, if you want to go fast, go alone. But if you want to go far, go with together.
Betty: That’s right!
Paula: And together, we can make things happen.
Betty: Yes.
Paula: I’m so impacted [00:08:00] by that. So we talked about, you know, creating an ecosystem for breaking barriers. And, you know, that’s particularly, I think, important for women. For many years, we always felt that we couldn’t, you know, we always wanted to be on the back burner and we wanted to put other people in front of us. If it wasn’t for those of us who were married, we put our husbands first and then our children. And even sometimes when our children left, we still put ourselves behind, you know.
Betty: Yes.
Paula: I love what you’re talking about because women we need to hear this.
Betty: Yes.
Paula: We need to hear this. It’s sometimes that’s even part of your self care, self presence.
Betty: Yes.
Paula: You know, knowing that you can.
Betty: In fact, that’s one of my pillars. You and I spoke about this, the courage pillar. It’s the courage to take care of your health, both your mental and physical and the courage to take care of your wealth. Both your personal and your business because those things are what we typically as women who tend to be nurturing. I don’t care if you’re the [00:09:00] CEO. We tend to be nurturing and wanting to take care of others. We do put on the back burner and I’m not going to go into much depth, but we talked about how during COVID, there were women who were businesswomen, entrepreneurs, that they were still finding themselves, even with all the restrictions and constraints rightfully so with the pandemic, they couldn’t bring that housekeeper inside to clean the house.
They maybe had someone come in and preparing the meals. They definitely weren’t schoolteachers. They were sending their kids off to school. Now they found themselves taking on all those additional roles, even if they were a single parent or in a relationship of some type. So it really took a toll on one’s mental health. And even though Covid is more under control, there’s still remnants of that women have mentally and we need to continue. It just heightened the need that we need to take care of our mental health. And so there’s a lot of apps out there. There’s a URA Warriors app, there’s the Better Me. There’s apps out there that help [00:10:00] you take care of your mental health. And we need to do that. We need to do more of that and it’s okay. Give ourselves permission for self care and self love.
Paula: Big part, permission for self care and self love and grace.
Betty: Yes.
Paula: Be graceful to yourself. Forgive yourself. I mean, nobody’s perfect.
Betty: Exactly.
Paula: Our children don’t even want us to be perfect. People don’t want us to be perfect because when you’re perfect, then you put them on a higher pedestal that they’re trying to achieve, which they know within themselves that they can’t. Well, you know, we talked about and you just made reference to that about the five pillars, and you mentioned courage being one of them. What are some of the other ones, the other four?
Betty: Sure, absolutely. Another one of them is communicate. And that’s the branding message. We need to do a both a personal and a business brand. So I’ve just been very fortunate to have a branding expert on our team. She’s our chief creative officer, and [00:11:00] it’s about branding. Some of the messaging that we deliver, particularly for those women that are under a certain revenue level. Even dothat with some who aren’t. There are things that we need to be mindful of. Social media is here. AI is here and I’m not saying you need to be the expert in it, but you need to know that be knowledgeable and understand the importance of being a part of it to some level.
So I tell them, you know, when you have your LinkedIn profile, just spend a little money. Get a professional photographer so you can have your post and now you can do it artificial intelligence, but the little the snapshot the selfie that just does not because that’s a reflection of who you are in your business. So that’s just one piece of it, but it’s also the messaging in terms of being consistent with your messaging. And there’s a whole piece of training and understanding that our brand expert provides to these women about know your archetype. You’re not going to get along with everybody. And you, there’s a certain [00:12:00] personality that you have, and you need to understand who are the women you want to attract in your business. What is your archetype? So that is what we mean by communicate. And when you communicate effectively, people will listen.
Paula: So that was?
Betty: That’s one. Another one is called collaborate. I am huge in collaboration. And that’s back to what you’re saying about trying to do it alone. And when we collaborate we’ve not, and people might disagree with me, but in my experience, both in corporate and in entrepreneurship, I’m seeing a shift. I’m seeing a change that women need to learn how to collaborate. And what I mean by collaborate, that’s me going into this with the intention of working together, not going into a negotiation thinking, well, what can I get out of this? You know, what can I take away? But to both put in the same amount of effort and concentration so that you both will be better.
It’s the collaboration. You will find successful [00:13:00] entrepreneurs. And successful executives know collaboration is the art of negotiation, the art of collaboration, because I tell the women this all the time. There really is enough out there for all of us. So the scarcity mentality, learn how to collaborate, learn how to share your information because you know what they say about a closed fist. Nothing can get in. So learn how to collaborate. And the other one that I talk about is the cultivate pillar. The cultivate pillar is learning how to reach back. Again, you take a look at the profile of successful executives of successful entrepreneurs. They’re always giving back. There’s a joy. There’s a self fulfilling prophecy when you’re giving back and cultivating other others, you can do it in a lot of different ways.
I’m an usher. I love to usher. You can do it in terms of mentoring and coaching other people. What we do in our organization, we like to take those groups of [00:14:00] individuals, particularly nonprofits and bring them into our organization and help them scale. We also believe in working with the young entrepreneurs, we take those women who are in revenues around half of the 100, 000 to a half a million, and we put them through a nine month course called a cohort program that is led by my COO, CFO Tianli Gong. She runs that operation because we find that they need a little bit more business acumen and then we pair them with a mentor. Accountability partner. We pair them with a mentor, someone who has had the successes, who have had revenues over a million or more, because sometimes they just need a listening ear.
So we believe in cultivation. We all have an opportunity or have the need to grow bigger and stronger. And that is with someone being a mentor, a partner. I have a mentor. I have a coach and we try to give that back to our organization. And the last one is called the [00:15:00] connect pillar.
Paula: Connect. I’m taking notes. That’s why you see me looking down. Taking notes.
Betty: Connect. Connect pillar is so vitally important. It is those strategic introductions. I still go on and will testify that there’s so many opportunities for you to go out and network. There’s events every week, every night of the week, two or three different events. But you need to select the right ones that are in alignment with your org with your business, your organization, and your values. So the connect pillar are those strategic introductions. So what do I mean by strategic introductions? Maybe you want to meet somebody and you don’t know who they are, and sometimes, you know, some people are willing just to come up and say, Hey Betty, I wanna meet you. And, but you got to take it to find the right time for those introductions.
Not every time is a good time. And first off, you don’t even know if I’m going to be a good alignment with you. So if I come to you, Paul, and say, you know, Paul, and I think we were talking beforehand. I know some people that [00:16:00] when you come to Philadelphia that I want you to meet, I think they’ll be a good leverage point for you in terms of scaling who you bring on to your show. So what does that mean? The very fact that I’m introducing you to, let’s say Sue. If I introduce you to her, you’ve been in some regards vetted. Of course, she’s going to do her own vetting, but it’s those strategic introductions and you can have all the alphabets behind your name. You can have all the certifications and that’s all well and good, but there’s a lot of knocking on those corporations doors.
Are knocking on the doors of others. So it’s that making those connections. And that’s what we do within our ecosystem within our WEW crews. We call them WEW Crews. I can’t take credit for the word Crew that came up for one of our members of Rita Ross. She said, let’s call ourselves the Crews. I don’t want to be called a chapter. So with our WEW Crews, we do those sort of things. We make those introductions. We have our meetings together and networking. We said, Oh, you’re in this line of business. Well, I know someone here. [00:17:00] That can be a value to you. So these are the five pillars that I deem will help you if you master those or even engage into them to some extent, will help you scale.
Paula: I love it. You know, as I said, I was taking notes. So that’s, let me recount that. Courage, communication, collaborate, cultivate, which is reaching back, and connect. You know, these are things that we need. We hear, but sometimes we just need someone to be there to, you know, to make it happen, make it come alive, especially you talked about the connect color, which is strategic introduction. Many a time, you know, we just need, as you say, that warm introduction someone.
Betty: Yes.
Paula: Thank you and say, I know this person. And therefore, I mean, take a break from all the barriers and the awkwardness and just, you know, creates a quick and [00:18:00] easy way of you getting to know someone else, even if it’s even if no business comes out of it, but at least you know that you can give and introduced to someone else.
Betty: Yes, and we need to do more of that.
Paula: As women.
Betty: Yes.
Paula: Yes, you know, you and I spoke about, you know, how men meet in the golf course. And that’s where a lot of business takes place. And we are like, women need to have a space, a safe space where they can do that. So I like what you’re doing, the WEW Crew, right?
Betty: Yes. WEW Crew.
Paula: Women elevating women.
Betty: Yes.
Paula: Okay. So I know you have a conference coming up.
Betty: Yes, I do.
Paula: Tell us a bit about that because I know that’s a great place for the connect color for the warm introductions, strategic introductions to take place. Let’s talk a bit about that.
Betty: I’m very excited and we’re like about five weeks out. So it’s like, yes. Yes. At the [00:19:00] Women Elevating Women Conference. It’s going to be held in Philadelphia and it’s September 11th through the 13th. You can get the details on our website, which is WEWcrew. com. It begins with the first evening. We have what is called a Entrepreneurial Woman of Impact awards dinner. So if you’re registered, then you’ll be able to attend that dinner. And that is a collaboration, with Women Presidents Organization, which I am a chair and I do full disclosure, and I do sit on the board of directors. It’s a collaboration with Thelm and WEW, and it is generously sponsored by JPMorgan Chase.
We recognize women in the North America, eight women who have revenues between a half a million to a million, eight who have revenues, a million to 10 million, and eight who have revenues from 10 million and above. And after that beautiful celebration, that first thing in the morning, we are going to be honored with a dynamite keynote speaker by the name of Bershan Shaw, and she is the [00:20:00] creator, developer of the warrior app. She has a beautiful story where she’s a two time breast cancer survivor. She had breast cancer at a very young age. I think it was 25 and she was determined to fight it. She says, I’m not going out like this.
And so rather than going to get her chemotherapy with the the sweatsuits and looking doom and gloom, she would put her makeup on, wear her stilettos, and she would come in ready to fight. And so through this, she’s a global speaker. Highly motivational speaker, and she will be our opening key keynote speaker and talking about the mental health, the mental at how to keep strong mentally. So I’m excited to hear for Shan, and then from there, we will move into on the 12th, our luncheon. These are our luncheon awards. We call them the WEW Pillar Awards. We are honoring five women under the five categories I spoke about under communicate, collaborate, connect, cultivate, and I’m missing one.
Paula: Courage.
Betty: Courage.
Paula: Yeah.
Betty: So we’re interviewing, [00:21:00] we are honoring five women across the country, the world, globally, five women in those categories. And we are also, honoring 12 visionary men. These are men who have supported, who support women in their own discipline. They support women and women initiatives. So that’s the luncheon. And before the luncheon, we’re going to have a speaker. His name is Tal Thompson. He’s our other speaker. He is a celebrated elementary math teacher. And he’s like, they, he goes by Tal Thompson, but they call him Tall. He’s like 6’8. And can you imagine the 6’8 teacher, working with these 4th and 5th graders that probably come to his waistline and they gives them encouragement.
And that’s part of our cultivate. He is cultivating the youth for tomorrow. And so he’s going to give a dynamite speech presentation about cultivation and we’re going to have breakout sessions, but our final keynote speaker is going to be the very next [00:22:00] day. And her name is Jade Simmons. Jade Simmons is a concert pianist, and she again speaks all over the world, and she is going to integrate about encouragement and purpose. She talks about purpose, and she’ll talk, tell her story about how she became a concert pianist, and now she’s running a multi million dollar business, and she’s also doing coaching. We will also have an opportunity, what we call fireside chats.
You’ll have the opportunity to hear from my advisors, advisors to the CEO. I told you I have coaches and I have advisors. So my advisors will be there and we’ll have a fireside chat. I will also have a fireside chat with the visionary men. Five or six visionary men. I’ll have a conversation with them. We have breakout sessions. We’ll be talking about the AI, the use of AI. We’ll talk about how to use it in your business. We’ll also talk about some of the warning signs, some of the protections you need to have [00:23:00] legally in the AI space.
We’ll have conversations on health. That is huge again for me. I have Dr. Angela Marshall, who’s renowned, world renowned. She also had, was on a TV show with Dr. Fauci. She’s here in the Maryland area. Someone else I want you to get to know Dr. Angela Marshall. She’s moderating that session and she’ll be talking with a functional health doctor, Dr. Jeanette Linder who’s also radiation oncology. We’ll be talking with doctors in the field of women’s health and That will be a conversation about taking care of your health.
We also have our CFO, COO, Tian Ligon, who is handling a session on finances. What do we do with finances? So she’s got the CPAs, this, that, and the other in terms of looking at your business. She is very strong on the fundamentals of taking care of your business, knowing your numbers. It’s about knowing your numbers to scale. And so we have those type of breakout sessions that will be on the main stage where people… the other piece, [00:24:00] the other part that I will have on the main stage, it’s doing business globally. I have flying in from Canada. She is the president and CEO of Kansi, which is the Canadian aboriginal minority supplier council Cassandra Dorrington.
She’s going to talk about doing business globally, like in Canada. I have Jenny Zhu who is a huge business owner, Jenny Jing Zhu. She’ll talk about how she came over to this country homeless, and now she’s running a nine million dollar, you know, global business. And then I will have my, another one of my advisors on there who will either facilitate or she’ll be a panelist, and that’s Camille Burns from Women Presidents Organization. They have 149 chapters around the globe. So all of our breakout sessions will be Senator Brown, the five pillars of success, and I’m just so excited.
Paula: Oh my gosh, I am so excited just listening to you speak about this conference that I know that [00:25:00] many of my viewers and listeners will have so many questions for you, which of course you’ll answer during the Q& A session. But for those who are not able to join us, at the Q and A session after this live stream, where can people find you online, Betty? Because I mean, you have excited me. You have made me so happy that I met you. Happy that I can share you with my listeners and my viewers, because I know that not everyone is going to join us today. Where can people find you online?
Betty: Well, you know where they can find me because we do have at least three times a year, we have open sessions where we have zoom. But they can so if you want to find me, find me on wewcrew.com. That’s w e w c r e w dot com. And they can also if they get on that website, they can click on my LinkedIn profile. That’s my personal LinkedIn profile, which you’ll see a lot of where I’ve been what I’ve done the awards and recognitions. They can click on that and also [00:26:00] on Facebook. It’s wewcrew.com. That’s what we keep to get. We have a lot of women in our group that have been receiving honors. And we’re just so proud.
I am their biggest, I should be the chief cheerleader because that’s something we don’t do well as women in essence of accepting or telling our stories and our honors. So I’m just very excited about having that opportunity to share my gifts, share the gifts of the women in our ecosystem with anyone, anyone who could attend the conference. We still have tickets that are available, or if they just want to catch up with us and follow along the way, go to our website.
Paula: I love it. And because I can see the energy that’s coming from you and I’m feeling it. What is one parting word that you can leave with any woman listening into it unbanned? Because we, you, I mean, I have men on the show. And I know that you have, what did you call them? Empowering men?
Betty: I called it visionary men.
Paula: [00:27:00] Visionary men. Yes.
Betty: Yeah. I think the one message that I would leave for individuals is that it’s important, I mean, all of us want to be successful, but it’s not just being successful. It’s being significant and also know that being significant, what is your impact? So significance and impact are the words that I would leave for them.
Paula: Significance and impact. Ooh, those are two powerful words, indeed. So folks, as I always promise you to bring on not just women just to talk, not just women just to be a guest, but women who will inspire you. I know I’ve been inspired by Betty. And if you would like to be a guest on my show, please just reach out to me on my website, which is chattingwiththeexperts. com. I’m also on LinkedIn as Paula Okonneh. I’m on [00:28:00] Instagram. My handle there is at chat_experts_podcast. And I am on Facebook and I hesitated there because that’s place that I’m just getting more and more familiar with. I’m also on Facebook as Paula Okonneh. Betty, thank you.
Betty: Thank you.
Paula: This has been, words are failing me. So I’ll end with your words, your two words, which were significant and
Betty: Impact.
Paula: Impactful. Thank you.
Betty: Keep elevating.