Finding Your Businesses Key Differentiator with Luba Tolkachyov

Co-founder and head of New Media Development of Findr Interactive – Luba Tolkachyov

Luba is a Russian Immigrant, and used her background to her advantage. She set herself apart from the hundreds of other digital firms out there by focusing on her asset, ethnicity and diversity. She also dives deep into how she can run her three companies with her very young children, and stay sane!

Resources Mentioned in the Podcast:

• Yenta

Go to FindrGroup.com for more info or e-mail Luba at [email protected]!

Thanks so much for listening!

Transcript:

Jaime: You've been asking for it - I keep getting e-mails over and over and over again from women asking for more women on the show. Let me tell you, it's a little hard to find, even with my network and reaching out. Thankfully, I was introduced to Luba. She's going to be on the show today - she's a mom, an amazingly successful entrepreneur, an immigrant from Russia - I know you'll enjoy her story.

Announcer: Welcome to the Eventual Millionaire podcast - with your host, Jaime Tardy. Real talk and real advice from real millionaires, with a sharp focus on you - the Eventual Millionaire.

Jaime: Welcome to Eventual Millionaire. I'm Jaime Tardy and I'm super excited to have Luba Tolkachyov on the show. She's a serial entrepreneur, she's amazing - she's got a whole group called Finder group, which is digital marketing agencies. She's done so much and I'm so excited to have a woman on the show, especially from a different country. We were just talking about your last name. I never ask this, but first spell your last name for me and tell me how you actually say it.

Luba: Thank you, Jaime. It's very nice to be here with you. My last name is Tolkachyov and the story that I just shared with you was simply that when we were doing our immigration back in the late '80s it was really up to the immigration agents to make a decision on how to spell your name, so when they were translating it from the Russian alphabet to the English alphabet we were lucky to be there but unlucky in the sense that our name got a bit longer and a bit more difficult to pronounce and write. It's a bit easier to say than it is to read from paper.

Jaime: I think it's hilarious that someone can make up the spelling of your name, especially when it comes to branding and things like that. They just made it up and you have to live with it.

Luba: Absolutely. People have different names, your first names will be spelleddifferently and so forth, but it's okay, because, honestly, at that point, all you really care about is "I am in America and I am going to start a new life." It's amazing. You could call me anything and it wouldn't matter.

Jaime: So did you actually used to live there or was it your family that came over?

Luba: I was young. I was seven years old when we came to the country. We left the former Soviet Union as refugees, so it was before the breakup of the Soviet Union. Jews were being moved out of the country and the objective was to leave quickly, without leaving much of a trace, so you didn't tell anybody that you were leaving, you didn't really say goodbye to the people that were close to you - the closet, yes, but not people in your wider circle - you kind of left in the middle of the night and got on a train, went to Vienna, from Vienna you went to Italy, spent six months in Italy selling things at the local markets to have money in your pocket and that was probably my first experience, selling Russian memorabilia to tourists at the Italian markets. Ultimately, you waited for your chance to enter the United States and when I did, like I said, it did not matter what they called me - you're there and you're thrilled to be able to live the American dream.

Jaime: I love that. You were seven years old - I have a seven year old and I can't imagine. What was that like for you?

Luba: When you're seven, everything is amazing, so as long as you're having fun with things and you have kids your own age around and your parents love you and care about you, it doesn't matter where you are. I don't have anything negative or even slightly dark to say about that time, it was fun. That's what kids did - we were at the market where we were selling Russian memorabilia. It was fun.

Jaime: That's amazing, especially the outlook that a kid would have on something like that, whereas you put an adult in that sort of situation and things could go wrong.

Luba: The adults were having nervous breakdowns, we just didn't know that they were having them.

Jaime: It's crazy what outlook does!

Luba: It's also a job well done on the part of the parents in the sense that they shielded us very well from all of the hard stuff.

Jaime: What did they do? When they get to America they have no job, do they even speak English?

Luba: No, they don't speak English. The way that you were able to leave the Soviet Union, everyone was able to leave, all of the Jews were able to leave, but they were meant to go to Israel unless they had a relative in the United States, and if you had a relative in the United States it was on the relative to vouch for you and basically say "If anything happens to this person, I'm responsible. I'm responsible for their health, their apartment, food, and so forth, until they get on their feet." My uncle was in the States, he's been here since the late '70s, so he vouched for us and basically sent us an invitation and that's why we're in America rather than Israel. My mom went to school - there were a series of programs that were designed for new immigrants to get them up to speed. Both of my parents are chefs but my mom became a bookkeeper because it was an easier degree to tackle and she went to work as a bookkeeper and she continues to do that, it's been 20-plus years, and my dad went into construction, so basically using his hands. It was fun. You know what the best part was? Everyone in your circle was doing the same, so everyone was moving, learning, hustling investments, so you were like "That's what life is. I got this."

Jaime: Totally normal. So you learned how to hustle at a young age?

Luba: You had to. I always tell the story of how I introduced my mom to her best friend when we first came to the country - I used to walk to school by myself, I was seven, we lived in Brooklyn and in Russia kids walked to school by themselves, that was fine, that's what they did, but my mom said "Hey, look, it's a bit of a far walk, it's eight or nine city blocks, so just follow someone. When you're crossing the street, make sure that you're following someone." So I started following this woman and her daughter had a play and she recognized me from the play and she said "This is the girl who's been following us," and one day when my mom walked with me to school I introduced them and they've been best friends ever since. I went off on a tangent there but the point of the story is that you have to be independent, you had to figure out ways to do things for yourself and you had to just make sure that things were okay, because it was up to you to make them okay. People loved you very much and they took care of you but not everyone had the time to be there all the time. It's the same for us now that we've got our own kids and we're growing the company as well.

Jaime: I definitely want to get into how you started your business but I find this really interesting, especially as I'm sure that these traits that you learned so young have helped you a thousand times in business. How do we do that with our kids? I've got a seven year old and we live not that far from school and I'm going "No way are you walking it," even though we live in a really nice area. He's only seven, that doesn't seem that old at all. How do we instill those values, even if we're not sending them off to school alone?

Luba: You ask me that, but I ask myself that question as a parent on a daily basis. When I walked into a store with my parents a slice of pizza was a really big deal. If you got me a slice of pizza for $1.25 I felt like I'd just won the lottery because we didn't have money to spare on eating out - it wasn't about the $1.25, we just didn't spend money on eating out. You had your food at home and you made sure that you were very frugal with your money because you had to pay rent. So when my daughter walks into a store there really isn't a concept of "No," for something that miniscule so I share that story and I know that I'm going to become that parent who says "Well, when we were young?" and I don't care. I'm going to become that parent and I'm going to make sure that that gets into her head. The other part of it is that I make her responsible, even though it's pretend I make sure that she's responsible for her brother. I say "Can you go and get a bottle for your brother - the formula is there and the water is there, can you make it happen?" she'll get frazzled for a second but then she'll try to do it,which is good, and then I'll come in to help her, but that's, in essence, just putting in that "ask" instead of just doing it for her.

Jaime: That's huge.

Luba: It's a very small example but I ask that question of myself and of my husband and many people in my life because I don't know how to give them that same experience, but they should experience it the same way, in essence. So that's the story there.

Jaime: How did that set you up? I get this question all the time - "What's the secret sauce?" and I hear stories like this, "Well, I had to hustle. I knew what hustle was at the age of seven. I knew that I had to take self-responsibility," all of these things that are important, really paying attention as your growing and trying to grow your business. So tell us the story of how you started your very first business and then we'll get into where you are now.

Luba: A lot of the traits that I explained to you just now were kind of innate or taught at an early enough age where they felt that they were innate, but at the same time I did start my business very young. I started my business with my partners when I was 26 years old. I'd just come back from London, I'd just finished my masters in Social and Cultural Psychology, came back, went back to my old job where I had previously met my partners and I was just trying to figure things out. The reason I start the story this way is because at 26 you're still a romantic, so everything that you're taught is great but you still think that you can do anything. The combination of those two things worked really well for us. My partners is about the same age, a year younger or a year older, but we were all kind of in the same boat and the miracle of this, really, is that my other parents are immigrants as well. They came to the States at different points in their lives, some a little bit older, probably I'm the youngest at the age of seven, but they all had what we call an immigrant mentality, like "What do you mean this doesn't work?" You make it work; you figure it out. We weren't afraid to fail, we didn't think we were going to fail, but we weren't afraid to fail because we still had a lot of time to fix it. Does that make sense?

Jaime: It totally makes sense. So you started this group when you were 26 - what did you do before? You said you had a job.

Luba: After I graduated from my bachelors, which was for International Business, I went to work in a marketing company. It was a multi-cultural marketing agency and, fortunately enough, I spent about two years there, working on different projects. This was the early 2000s and the company started spending a lot more money on the multi-cultural consumer, so Hispanic and African American have always been the two ethnicities that kept getting attention - when I say attention, I mean budgets allocated to those markets - but then other ethnicities started to come into it as well, so the Asian, Eastern European and Middle Eastern communities and so forth. So I was at an agency where that was their core business. I spend two years there and then went to domy masters in Social and Cultural Psychology at the London School of Economics. I had my position held for me so I came back and I call that my starting point - everything before that was just experience and taking it all in. it was a natural progression in that everything that I tell you, you should be able to bring back to culture, whether that's culture in terms of ethnicity or how you spend your time or what you do, it's all about really understanding the various things that make up our fiber as people, as consumers, as individuals, as entrepreneurs and that's what I think makes everything work here.

Jaime: I love that. Tell me more about what you guys do as a multicultural digital agency.

Luba: We love to tell this story because it's a very cliche story and we feel like it's a dream and we want to share it - one of my partners was getting married, it was a destination wedding and we were friends at that point so we all went and the day after the wedding everyone's a little hungover, we're at the beach getting another round of cocktails and an adult conversation came up - "What do you want to do with the rest of your life?" Because that's what immigrant kids talk about! "What do you want to do with the rest of your life?" I have four partners and one of them said "I have this idea for a startup." So this was 2008, probably spring 2008, and he said "There's a couple of things happening in the market," - Twitter was just coming up, Facebook was around but when it came to services it was really Craigslist that was the monster. He said "I've been thinking about it and there really is an opportunity to tackle this." So we came up with something called zeLocal on that beach. zeLocal was, in essence, a startup and it was meant to be a grownup version of Craigslist and what that meant to us was that it had a new series of features - you were able to use video chat to connect to other people on the site, you were able to chat and schedule appointments so, for instance, if I'm looking for a babysitter and you're available, our schedules would match up - things that we're now so used to having, six or seven years later, but back then there was still opportunity for them. So we said "Fantastic," left the beach and about a month and a half afterwards we were able to secure some funding for it and we decided that we were going to leave our jobs and take this on full time. We weren't starting an agency, we weren't starting a marketing group, we weren't doing any of that - we had this idea. We rented a room from a production company that we were friends with from the agency days and we built it. Two things happened - we thought "We'll build it and everything is going to be fantastic," but that didn't happen.

Jaime: Wait, what?!

Luba: It's okay, I'm really glad it didn't happen because the second thing that happened is that the person who was funding us had a different idea of the direction they wanted it to go in so we had to figure out what was going to happen next. What we did was we said "Let's just put a pin in it and just become an agency for now. We'll figure that out next, but let's focus our startup efforts on starting a digital agency." So that's what we did and it became a little bit easier because we had years of experience and at least we had some network to work within and we knew which doors to knock on to be able to at least have them opened slightly and use whatever tools we had to close contracts and so forth. We were lucky in the sense that we were able to secure one big contract and that enabled us to give back the money that was given to us and set us free to do the work that we wanted to do. So that became Findr Interactive, and Findr Interactive is a digital mobile agency, everything from the development of products to advertising in a digital environment, a mobile environment and so forth, so that became Findr Interactive. What happened next was a lot of fun actually - another agency started called Gravity Media and Gravity Media started as a multicultural agency too, but they tried to change the way that multicultural agencies worked. I don't know if you've ever been exposed to that part of the ad agency, but a lot of agencies were a bit stale and they used cliches and these stereotypical aspects of immigrants and the idea of what an immigrant is, so everything has to be red because an Asian client is going to get mad if you use another color, just these myths and things that were not true. Most importantly, what they were not doing is looking at the new community. The old generation of immigrants would come to the country and those who were young enough would try to learn the language, become as American as possible, whatever that meant for them, and they would let go of their cultural identity and transform into another identity. With the new wave of immigrants, tons of expats living in the States, people embraced both. I am probably the most proud American you'll ever meet, however I do have another culture that is a part of me, and that's not just me, that goes for the millions and millions of new immigrants in the country, and when I say "new" I don't mean those that have been here for just one or two years, I mean 20 years, because things are different now. So when the current state of the multicultural industry was happening it was a case of "Put an ad out in Chinese, put it out in Spanish, that's the only way they'll be able to understand it," but, with this 2.0 or 1.5 generation that we started talking to, we started making it more personal, understanding that, yes, they are African-American or they're Hispanic or Asian or Russian, but they are moms first, brothers first, sports fans first, and we brought the culture of who they are first before their ethnicity and that made all the difference in the world and it really let us see substantial growth in the Gravity side, on the multicultural side. We made Inc. 500 last year - we were 252 of the fastest growing private companies in America. Just to take a step back "we now had two agencies and there was another company that we were starting up and we decided to bring them all together under what we call Findr Group. From that perspective, we now talk as one voice and we move forward as Findr Group. When we try to explain who we are, in a nutshell, we do focus on culture but we try to explain that culture is not ethnicity. We do a lot of work with the military, with veterans, with busy professionals, and those are all cultures, they're just different. It's really become our unique selling point in many conversations.

Jaime: I love that you call it that. We talk about finding your USP but you just hit the nail on the head - "We had a really good USP and that helped us grow exponentially."

Luba: Absolutely. When you stop looking at a consumer as someone who's going to buy your product and you start looking at them as a full person, a full community, a full city or however you want to dissect it, and you understand that these people have human factors, they're not white moms who are earning X - they have human factors, they are earning that money by doing a job, a job that is, in essence, part of them, a job that they have to split with the responsibility of taking care of their children. There are so many aspects to it and when you take a step back and you say "This is who I'm talking to," it becomes a totally different conversation and it works.

Jaime: I think that's so important for anybody who's listening that's in the beginning stages of their business, because what you're saying is you're getting super clear on your target market, but that's also what your agency does, is get super clear on whoever your client's target markets are so that you know them really, really well. How does that help so much in your marketing, in creating those marketing messages?

Luba: I think in most aspects of life, if you know what it is that you going for, that's half the battle. The other part is just working really hard to get there. It's only when you don't have clarity in something that you have the chance of making a mistake because you don't know what your road map is meant to look like. That's true for everything - it's true for your marketing efforts, it's true for choosing a career,choosing a business that you're going to go into, choosing a college - it doesn't matter, because as soon as you know who you want to speak to or what you want to achieve, that's half the battle. In order to know that, you have to be curious - you have to spend time, you have to expose, you have to speak and just be and live and be conscious of it, and I think that's a really big piece of this whole puzzle.

Jaime: That's something I wanted to ask you - because it's one thing for one business person to know what their audience is, but you're knowing the audience of your clients, which is one-removed, so give us some tips that we can implement in our business to really know our audience, our avatar, and who we're marketing to.

Luba: There's really only one way, in my opinion, and that is putting yourself, your person, in the environment to meet whoever it is. One of the ways that we do that here, internally, is that we, as an agency, speak over 20 languages. We have 45 people from all parts of the world, all walks of life, they are professionals in different disciplines, so when we start talking about our key target audience we always make sure to bring that person in as part of the team to make sure that we're making sense of it all. For anyone who is starting a business, in terms of selling a product to a specific audience or providing a service to a specific audience, you have to make sure that they want to buy what you're looking to sell.Sometimes you think "I need to do focus groups for this," but you don't need to do focus groups, you just need to go out and expose, but expose a real person, I don't think that just reading books or reading studies or even reading blog posts or what people are saying that they want online is of 100% value, you have to be in that with your being. I think that, combined with understanding who you're talking with and having a really strong work ethic, is a combination for success.

Jaime: So many people are scared of just going and talking to the people that they are going to be selling to, so that's huge.

Luba: You have to; it's a must. One of the things we talk about internally is that money is always a factor. As a company, you always look at the figures that you want to hit, financial goals that you set for yourself, and so forth, and we do that every single year. We're very transparent and we're very good about sharing that with our company, everyone knows the dollar figures that we have to hit and so forth, but everyone knows that that is goal number two. Goal number one is the fact that you have to have a purpose - you have to be doing this for another reason, outside of money, because if you are only doing it to get financial reward, and by "it" I mean running a business. If you're really dedicating yourself to something for only financial gain you're not going to be successful because you're not necessarily thinking about the person who is in receipt of your service or your product, and it can't be like that, you have to have a higher purpose. I'm very comfortable with financial goals being a tie, a one/two tie with that purpose, but it has to be a combo, it can't just be one or the other.

Jaime: I love that you said that. Yes, it's about the need in the market and all that other stuff, but you need to have that reason why. So even your employees have a purpose.

Luba: Yes, they all have a reason why. If I talk to you a little bit about the clients and the campaigns that we work on, I won't mention names just to make sure that we're within NDAs, but for one military organization within the United States we were responsible for recruiting language specialists into the US army. Language specialists from Afghanistan, so people who spoke Dari, Farsi and Pashto, Americans who spoke Dari, Farsi and Pashto - that is a needle in a haystack, but the reason we were tasked with this, which was absolutely mission critical, is because our men on the ground were in danger because they were relying on locals for their translations and for cultural guidance and they didn't always have the best intent. Most people did, but there were instances in which our country had to protect our soldiers and, in essence, we were responsible for bringing on Afghan-Americans into this branch of the military to be able to help the efforts of freedom abroad. Amazing! Who gets to do that?

Jaime: No kidding, that's huge! "I thought I was a digital marketing agency. Wait, I'm helping our troops in Afghanistan." That's insane!

Luba: There I am. When you think about that, the flip side is that you can't just go ahead and go into an Afghan neighborhood and say "Hey, listen, mom and dad who just left as refugees, running from a war-torn country who wants to have nothing to do with you, please give us your first born and he'll become part of the military and go back there." They're frightened, the message is wrong. We spent the first year trying to figure out who the centers of influence were, speaking to professors, speaking to religious leaders, speaking to moms and dads, making sure that we explained what the efforts were and why they were being done and what the benefits for everyone where, and only then could we come in with what we would consider a proper form of advertising. It was an amazing mission, two and a half years in the making, and it was ultimately greatly successful. It was amazing. We actually got to help freedom efforts - that's cool.

Jaime: That's purpose in itself. You're like "I am a proud American!" That's amazing.

Luba: And that's why people are here, I think. It's not necessarily about ethnicities. We work with many companies that service veterans. Veterans is a culture, it's a community, it's something that you have to treat very, very differently than just going out with a general message because there are so many values that are near and dear to them and you have to respect those, and when you respect them it works.

Jaime: I want to talk more about this but I also need to get into you being a mom. I get asked all the time to have more women on my show, especially women who are mothers who are doing amazing things, because apparently they are few and far between. So, since you're here, I have to ask you - how do you balance all of this? How can you be the amazing, strong business woman that you were before you had kids and do everything else as a mom too?

Luba: I have two children. My daughter is three and a half and my son is ten months. When I was pregnant with my daughter I had no answers. I didn't know how it was going to go down, she was going to have to come and she's going to have to figure it out, she has to get a sense of independence and I'm going to beg for help from any place possible and hope to make it work. I am very fortunate in the sense that I have a very strong family nearby who are able to help us raise our kids. We don't have a nanny or a babysitter or a maid or anything like that, we have their grandparents and our parents come in on certain days, but that's irrelevant, that's just what happens when we're not there during the day. The other piece of it is that I have a policy of not working on weekends unless I absolutely have to, unless there is some kind of emergency like somebody is going to get hurt or something is really not going to get done. On those days I have to be all in - there's no phone, no internet, you're with your kids for those days because that's all you've got. On any other day you could be home early, you could be home late, you could be on a trip that requires you to be out of town for days in a row. The other piece of that is that I make sure that I bring my daughter, because she's older, into the office - she needs to see it. So when mommy goes to work, she needs to understand that mommy goes into an office and she does work and she has people around her and they're good people and they're seen to be having a good time together, so mommy is in this good place, not that she cares whether I'm in a good place or a bad place, but I think this is really important for her now and as she gets older, to be exposed to this, because this is normal, it's a good place to be. I also have a really good husband, he's amazing.

Jaime: That's always good, too! So what does he do? Does he work also?

Luba: My husband's a designer and when we were starting our business we weren't financially stable and we had ups and downs that we really couldn't control so he said "I'm in it, I'm going to make sure that I'm doing everything possible," so he would work full time and he would freelance to make sure that things were working appropriately. Last year, when Findr Group's situation got into a more stable place, we actually made a pact where I said "You don't have to go into the office full time anymore if you don't want to. Go ahead and start exploring the other projects that you've been working on." So he's a little bit more flex-time now. The conversation, at this moment, works. I hope it works for a long time, I don't know, but he's a great dad and our kids adore him and they cherish the time that they have together, so basically he's in a good place, he's able to do the work that he loves without having a rigid schedule and being able to see our children grow up. But that really happened when my youngest was born, because at that point you have to make a decision.

Jaime: With two it starts going a little crazy, especially with a baby, definitely. That's why I wanted to ask, because I love what you said at the very beginning, you have the immigrant mindset - "I'm going to figure it out," like "I'm pregnant with this baby, we're going to figure it out," because there's only so much that you can do.

Luba: You have to. What are your options?

Jaime: Exactly. How do you deal with mommy guilt? Do you ever feel guilty when you?re in the office or working late? Do you have any tips for the moms who are going through that?

Luba: I hate to call it a tip, I can just say what I do, because some people might think this is totally impossible and crazy, selfish and so forth, but I think it's important to be honest. People ask me that question all the time, like the baby's a couple of months old and I have to go on a shoot or something what I do is, if I know I have to be somewhere, I make sure I'm tuned in to that specific thing and I don't allow myself to feel any guilt for that moment. It's not going to do anyone any good. It's not going to do me any good because I'm going to feel horrible and not do my job as well as I should, it's not going to do my kids any good when mommy's crying on the phone because she can't see them, it's going to make my husband feel miserable because maybe we should be doing this differently and I should be the one at home, so I try to focus really hard on the task at hand, make sure it gets done on time and make sure that it gets done well so that I can get back to being with the family. Then the love and the guilt and everything else that comes with it, I allow that to pour in. As I said, that can seem selfish, it can seem impossible, but that's the way I handle it, to make sure that I'm 100% in that moment, wherever that is, whether I'm at my work or with my kids, because if it was half and half it would be no good.

Jaime: You would go insane. You'd drive yourself crazy.

Luba: And everyone around me, yes, and it's not fair.

Jaime: Definitely. I really, really appreciate that, and I know that the people who are moms appreciate just hearing the honesty of whatever it is you do. I think we definitely need to share a lot more, I know everyone tries to be supermom, and don't get me wrong, I try to be supermom too, but nobody can and therefore we all fail and that sucks, so just be honest about what we can do.

Luba: I think that's the most important part. I think the honesty has to come with yourself first and then your kids understand. Your kids love you, they don't care. As long as you're there when you are there, and you have to be there. So that's point number one - you have to be there, it's just a matter of making sure that you're setting that time to be there, versus always worrying about not being there. You just have to make sure that you dedicate the time. For me, it's weekends that I'm there but the other five days of the week I just have to do other things and I'm okay with that and I know they'll be okay with that as well, once they can understand that better.

Jaime: Definitely. I think it's hilarious how we were talking about you being seven years old, walking to school by yourself, and you're worried about having to be here for a short period of time or something like that. It's funny how we evolve and we just want to do everything, in general, but back then it was "You gotta do what you gotta do," and it's the same now.

Luba: You have to. The other piece is, and again, it doesn't work for all, but I always look at my kids as really smart, independent children and people. Yes, of course they're babies and I understand their limitations but at the same time my conversations with them are never cuddly and gooey, it's always "Hey, this is what's happening. Can you please go and get your own drink, mommy's tired right now," or "Mommy needs a glass of water, can you hook that up, please?"

Jaime: Exactly. They can do stuff for us, too - we should be happy!

Luba: Sometimes it works, sometimes she comes back with water on her head and that?s okay, I guess, although you have to clean it up, but it is a philosophy that I try to follow - my kids are capable, they?re able, they?re smart. Yes, they?re young, but you need to instill independence in them as early and as much as possible.

Jaime: And that?s an asset. It?s not bad, it?s an asset, it?s something that will set them up for the future, not just give you a break. It will do both. Why isn?t everybody doing this all the time, right?

Luba: The other piece of that is that I come from a mindset where no one owes you anything, it's more you owe it to yourself, you owe things to your family, to your community and so forth, but no one has to do anything for you. It's fortune, it's luck, when you come into collaborations with people who want to do the same things as you. There can't be a sense of entitlement because if there is a sense of entitlement and somebody doesn't do what you want them to do, you're disappointed. No one owes you anything - you owe things to yourself and you use hard work and you use your intelligence and you use whatever else you've got to make sure that you achieve those things and I think that's really important for them to understand also. "Mommy loves you very much but mommy does not owe you a candy bar. It's earned, and if you did well you can probably have it and if not, then not." It sucks.

Jaime: That's real life and setting our kids up for real life is only going to help them in the future.

Luba: I think people are going to think I'm a very strict mother and I hope no one calls child services!

Jaime: It's funny, I really think that we need to pull that back. I'm more of a lax mother, well, not lax, but you know what I mean - my husband's more of a disciplinarian and it causes so many issues. If I was a disciplinarian they would probably listen a lot better to me over my husband. It's so funny the way it is - don't get me wrong, my children are amazing and awesome, but the issues that you do have are like "That was me. That's my faulty, not yours. You're acting crazy but that's because I let you last time," so I'm setting myself up, so that personal responsibility, which is what you're trying to instill in your children, is so important as we grow up, and I really appreciate this. We usually talk very solely about business but I had to talk about this side of things.

Luba: That's the other part, our kids have our hearts. Work has our hearts and our kids and family have our hearts and it's important that you realize that, because if you don't, you start ignoring it. I appreciate this.

Jaime: Just like you said, it's a culture - you have to see everybody as a whole person so now we can get a better picture of you as a whole person, not just an amazing business woman who's on the Inc. 500, you're also a mom and a wife and all that other stuff too, which is very important. Let me ask you the last question and then we can get into Findr Group a little bit more, so what's one action that listeners can take this week to help move them forward towards their goal of $1 million?

Luba: I thought I was ready for that question but I feel like I already covered it.

Jaime: You can reiterate if you need to.

Luba: I only say this again because I really do believe this with every fiber of my being - I think if you know what it is that you're looking for, you're able to get there. So I think the one thing really needs to be to identify, whether it is for that week or that month or that year, the things that you want to achieve. It can be "I want to make sure that I hit the gym three times this week", "I want to make sure that I take my kids to soccer practice," whatever it is, as soon as you identify it, you know what you're working for. Sometimes I send myself an e-mail, "Things to do today," or whatever it is. On certain days I'll send an e-mail that says "Good things that happened today," or "Bad things that happened today," but I need to identify them because then I can achieve them. I think that's a really big piece of being, I hate to use the word successful, but just moving yourself forward towards whatever it is that you're trying to achieve. Call it out and then proceed to get there.

Jaime: I think that's wholly important. It's so funny how we don't realize how vague things are until you start to realize you're not achieving what you want to achieve. It's the same thing with me - you have to reassess after a while. It sounds like what you're doing - "I'm reassessing. What do I really want right now'"

Luba: Well you wrote a book. I think that's the best exercise of trying to make your lists and make sure that you're doing it, because it's one of those exercises that you could spend three months doing or you could spend five years doing and you have to keep yourself in check.

Jaime: Definitely. It was a chapter a week, no matter what.

Luba: That was you identifying your goal; that's fantastic.

Jaime: That's so easy to be able to put into numbers and the hard thing is, for anyone listening, when things are a little more intangible and not so easy to break down. The book was actually pretty easy because you know how many words you need to write, how many chapters you need to write, the date you need it by, but for most other things it's a little harder so I love that you e-mail yourself to remind yourself about stuff like that. I think that's really important. So where can we find out more about Findr Group and what types of people do you work with and work for, so that we get a good idea of that too?

Luba: The other piece of Findr Group, we didn't get to talk too much about it, is the digital agency portion of things. As part of the digital agency we started an incubator in which we kind of went back to the root of the original idea of starting a proper digital startup and we have an incubator internally where we produce ideas that come up. The most recent one was the app that we were talking about earlier and it's called Yenta. Yenta has a funny tagline, which is "'Find your JewBoo." It's a location-based mobile phone application that connects Jewish singles near each other, so you can log on and see who's Jewish and single in your area. It's really quirky and fun. It's an idea that came from the team here so that set the ground for the incubator here. One of the things that we're thing to do is open it up to the greater public, with other entrepreneurs who have immigrant backgrounds, wherever they're from, it doesn't matter, but people who don't have a very wide network here in the States or didn't have the parents to coach them on how to start a business or didn't have the ability to show them, through their actions, what it means, because they were hustling, cleaning apartments or working in stores or doing whatever they had to do to get by. We're looking to open up our office and create office hours and spend a lot more time with this sector of our entrepreneur community to just talk and discuss and hopefully we'll get that to a better place. But, yes, you can more at findrgroup.com and there's information about all of our properties, our agencies and projects. I am very, very happy that we've had a chance to speak. It's important to have an honest conversation and for people to hear what actually happens versus the romantic story.

Jaime: "Everything was amazing. Sunshine and roses. The prince swept her off her feet."

Luba: Yes.

Jaime: I really appreciate that. You just gave me chills. You're giving back to immigrants who can't necessarily do it themselves. Where can they contact you about that? Is that also on the website?

Luba: They can actually contact me directly because wheels are in motion but the branding around it hasn't happened yet so it doesn't have a proper site and the application process hasn't been set up fully. We need to figure out our internal resources that we need to dedicate and then need to make a project around it, but people are more than welcome, I'd love to have this conversation and they can e-mail me directly at luba@findrinterative.com. Maybe we can put it in the description or something.

Jaime: We'll put it in the show notes so that way everyone can take a look. I really appreciate finally connecting with you. I hope to meet you in person at some point really soon.

Luba: Yes, me too. Thank you, I appreciate it.

Jaime: Thanks.

Jaime: Luba has an incredible story so I hope everybody that's suggesting I look for more women really enjoyed that. Plus, she introduced me to a whole bunch of other amazing women that we're going to have on the show, so I'm really excited about that. We talked about target markets and how to go ahead and find out really who that is, so if you haven't started your business yet, go ahead and make today the day. I actually have a program called Millionaire Start - it's a four week program to go from no idea, or if you have too many ideas, to your very first customer in four weeks. So make sure you check that out at millionairestart.com. Hope you have an amazing day.

Announcer: Thanks for listening. You can find out more great information like this on EventualMillionaire.com.

 

Tags: Business Growth, Family, Luba Tolkachyov, millionaire interview, Parenting, Work Life Balance

Categories: All, Business, Business Model, Entrepreneurship, Giving, Goals, Millionaire Interviews

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