362: Why Your Next Big Career Move Starts with Ten Minutes a Day with Jess Ekstrom

Allyship in Action

Jess Ekstrom shares her journey of building two million-dollar businesses while balancing motherhood and leadership, emphasizing sustainable

Key takeaways

• Success doesn't require grand gestures—just ten minutes a day aligned with your values can spark meaningful change.
• Shifting from 'spotlight' to 'lighthouse' speaker mindset transforms communication by focusing on audience needs over personal perception.

Main topics

• Sustainable career growth
• Public speaking empowerment for women

Notable quotes

"The gap can either be a disappointing deficit of what you haven't done yet, or an exciting experiment of possibility of what's to come."

Conclusion

True ambition and present happiness coexist when you reframe your goal

Transcript preview

Speaker 2 (0:00) We Speaker 1 (0:00) have Jess Ekstrom with us today. She's the founder of Mic Drop Workshop, an investor in women, a best-selling author of Making It Without Losing It, and a Forbes top-rated speaker and mom. Welcome, Jess. Speaker 2 (0:17) Hi. I was saying that you might hear my little assistance in the background during this interview. Speaker 2 (0:24) Prepare yourselves. Yeah. Yes. Speaker 1 (0:27) I've heard that there's a yoga workshop going on next door by a three-year-old. Speaker 2 (0:32) By a three-year-old. She is pretty demanding. She herself will not sit still on the yoga mat, but she expects you to. So that's the kind of class she runs. Speaker 1 (0:43) Well, she's light years ahead of me. I found yoga. four years ago and it has been a saving grace in my life. So she's bound to have some nice mindfulness practices. Speaker 2 (0:54) It is really cool. Like the kid yoga and kid videos out there that teach like breathing and I do them with her, but my favorite thing is at the end when they say namaste, she says, Lamaste. Speaker 1 (1:15) Oh, so fun. Well, Jess, you've started not one, but two, maybe more million dollar businesses. You have this amazing workshop, my drop workshop. You have this amazing book, making it without losing it, which is just such a cool title and something that's so easy for me to recommend to my friends that are like, I'm kind of bored or like, I don't know what's next for me. So we'll dig into all that, Jess, but I thought we'd just start with your story because your story is. Really, really inspiring. And just, I think something we can all learn from. Speaker 2 (1:49) Oh, thanks. Yeah. It began, well, I mean, when I was born, but I think when. Things started to get interesting was when I was in college and I was interning for the Make-A-Wish Foundation. And that was when I would see a lot of kids that would lose their hair to chemotherapy and be offered wigs or hats when a lot of them would opt to wear their own headbands. And I just thought it was such a cool gesture of confidence. And no one was providing them. I looked everywhere. I was like, oh, I got to get headbands, you know, for these kids. And that was just a... itch that hadn't been scratched yet. And so I think that that's kind of a moment when you kind of become, come face to face with yourself when you're looking for something that doesn't exist yet. And then you're kind of tasked where am I the one to create this? Or is this just a fleeting thought? And I think I call it the dumbest, smartest moment of my life where I just thought, well, I could create this, you know, being 18, 17 years old. not knowing any idea what I was in for. Sometimes I just want to go back to that moment where I was just like blissfully confident. And so I started a company called Headbands of Hope for every headband sold. We donate one to a child with an illness, spent many years building and growing that. It eventually went on, you know, to do headbands for the NBA, the WNBA teams, sold in Kohl's, donating millions of headbands all over the world. But the thing that I was, I would say one of the secret sauces of how I was able to scale it without investors or really outside funding was through speaking. It started just begging college professors for five minutes of time before class to tell students about what I was doing. Then that turned into 10 minutes of time. And then when I figured out that I cannot just give an elevator pitch about me and what I'm doing, but also the takeaways for other people and what they can learn and what they can pull into their lives, then things started happening on the speaking circuit. I remember the first email I got was from Marshall University asking what my rates were to speak to their students. And I was like, what? You mean people pay for this? This is crazy. So that was how I was able to spread awareness. Well, also fund the business. You know, the money that I would make, which was like $1,000 or $2,000 a gig at the time, I would put it back into the business. Eventually, Headbands Pope got acquired. And I kept speaking. I saw... So many amazing women either not applying for these speaking opportunities or finding out, myself included, what they were getting paid versus what other male speakers were getting paid. And so that began my next venture, which is called Mic Drop Workshop, where we help women land keynote spots. And that's where I am today. Speaker 1 (4:45) That's so cool. And it's such a unique problem. I started my speaking business 12 years ago. Unbeknownst to me, you know, speaker rates are very, very wildly different. And there is a wage gap there, just like there is in corporate America, where men tend to get paid more. And you said this in a recent podcast episode of yours, that you had someone say, what would make me look like a more professional speaker? Speaker 2 (5:15) AI said. Yes, it was this Asian woman in Mic Drop Workshop, and she put a speaking photo of herself into AI and said, what can I change to make me look like more of a professional speaker? And it changed her into a white man. So if that's not the evidence that we need, that something needs to change, I don't know what is. Speaker 1 (5:42) No, it's such a problem. And even Brene Brown has been openly talking about this, how when they hired her to speak, they're like, oh, thank you. You're such a great deal. And then she found out what the male speakers were getting. It's like, holy smokes, I need to charge more. And so what I love about my drug