LauraAura

By the time that we’re witnessing someone success, it can often be perceived that it came kind of out of nowhere, as if the success just fell into their lap. Oh, they’re lucky. Oh, I wish I had what they had already. But here’s the truth. We’re only witnessing a chapter of their story. What we’ve missed are the encyclopedia sized chapters leading up to the climax of their life and career that we’re now experiencing. Comparing your life’s chapter to someone else’s is not only unhealthy, it’s extremely discouraging. Someone else’s success does not stop you from achieving yours. And in fact, watching other succeed can, quite frankly, be a beacon of hope, something that you can grab onto and say, You know what? If they did it, so can I.

Today I have Francine Shaw, founder and CEO of Savvy Food Safety, a well respected industry thought leader. She travels the globe speaking, educating and inspiring people not only in the food safety industry but in business in general. She’s kind of amazing because she’s been featured in numerous media outlets, including BBC World Series Radio, the Dr Oz Show, Huffington Post, I Heart Radio and so many more. It’s an honor to have her here with you today. Francine, Welcome to the gutsy podcast.

Francine

Thank you are for having me.

LauraAura

Absolutely. So Francine and I go way back. She is one of my mentors. A really amazing friend of mine and a client at Worx. We’ve had the pleasure of watching her business grow over the years. So it’s just really an honored to have you on the show.

So how did you get into the food safety world? And what exactly does that entail?

Francine

Okay, well, um, honestly getting into the food safety world was quite accidental. I never intended to own my own business. And I listened to one of your podcasts the other day, and I heard somebody else say that. I was in the business. This the food service industry for a number of years. Well, over 20 years, I started out as an operator. I worked my way up to executive management, and then, after 20 plus years, decided that I wanted to do something different. So I left the industry and for a short period of time, was doing something quite different. And then an opportunity kind of fell into my lap, and it was in the food safety arena, and I found that I loved it. I absolutely loved what I was doing. So after helping build a small company into quite a large company, I thought, you know, if I can help somebody else do this, why couldn’t I do it for myself? And that’s what I did. I left that company, and within about six months, I started my own business.

Um, I thought it was gonna be much easier than it was… turns out you know what? It wasn’t as easy as I thought it was gonna be. I’ll never forget my first class. I started out, I was gonna be a training company. That was my goal. I want to be a very successful training company. And my very first class I was driving home. I’ll never forget it. I was driving home from a class that I had taught, and typically you have 20 to 35 people in your class. I had two people that day. Two people. And I had rented a meeting room. I had put all this money into the marketing and the whole way home I kept thinking about the money that I lost. I lost so much money on that class.

And when I quit my previous job, I quit without a backup plan, which I don’t recommend and, I can remember. Honestly, I’m just gonna be very, very, very honest here because I don’t think enough people are honest about how difficult this is. I cried the whole way home. I just I cried the whole way home about the amount of money that I lost. I mean, I lost a tremendous amount of money and I was thinking, What the hell did I do? I’ve just lost a tremendous amount of money, and I’m really going to be able to do this, and I’m gonna make it gonna be able to make it work? And what’s it gonna cost me to do that? So anyway in a nutshell? That’s how I ended up in the food safety industry. I discovered by accident that I liked it. And I’m gonna start my own business. I’m gonna do this. You know, If other people do it, why can’t I?

LauraAura

That’s the true story. And, you know, I I always love and admire the You know, I’m looking at everyone else and you know, I got this. I know how to do this. I can do this in my sleep, and then you get into it, realize that there’s a whole nother level of focus and resiliency and time that goes into not just working in the business, but now actually being the person that’s in charge of it.

Francine

Well, and you know, I ran somebody else’s company for, you know, over 20 years, and I did it quite successfully. I operated. I was promoted in a very young age at the age of 24 I was operating a restaurant that was doing well over a $1,000,000 a year and that’s young for that amount of responsibility. And you, you put it in perspective. But that was over 30 years ago. That was a lot of money. I had a staff of over 50 people, and, you know, I did this for an extended period of time, and I did it quite successfully. So you know in my naïveté, I’m thinking I got this. I can do this, you know, again, wasn’t quite as easy as I thought it was gonna be. I didn’t. You know, I was a middle aged woman. Um, at this point, who because of some circumstances, you know, was flat ass broke, and I was gonna do this and again, I have no backup plan it. It had to work. I didn’t have a choice. I had to make this work.

LauraAura

I love the resiliency that comes along with entrepreneurship too, because oh, man, it’s just a whole another level of drive. Because when you get your heart and your mind and your passion set on something, you’re like “you can throw all the darts you want at me, but somehow, some way this is gonna work.”

Francine

And you’re right. You know, you have your moments. We all have our moments where, I mean, it’s a roller coaster. You know, you and I have talked about this. You can be at the peak of Mount Everest and within 30 seconds you’re in the depths of hell. Yes, you know, it’s just because the things that you know, circumstances that happen that quickly. It’s like the scariest roller coaster ride you’re ever going to be on and and you just you can’t prepare for that. There’s no way to ever prepare for that. And there are days that you want to throw in the towel. But then you have to back up, put it into perspective. Nothing. No situation lasts forever. You know, It may last a day. It may last a few hours, but if you could just pull yourself out of it and think this isn’t gonna last forever. In my situation, you know I’m responsible for people’s lives because I have employees. If I fall apart, it affects their families, and I take that they’re seriously. So again, I just my mentality is I have to make this work. I don’t have any other options. So regardless of what it takes, I need to figure it out.

LauraAura

I think that’s often something and honestly, that could be a whole nother episode is just the weight sometimes of entrepreneurship, because you hit the nail on the head. You know we are responsible. Whether you have, whether it’s you’re a solopreneur and you’re in charge of your own family or you have one employee or you have 1,000 employees. Like, it’s your responsibility to ensure that the train keeps moving forward and sometimes that can be debilitating. I know the way we’ve talked about before. Like if you think about it too much, it becomes really overwhelming and almost sends you into a panic attack.

Francine

Well it’s down right scary.

I mean, it’s when you stop and think about you know what you’ve accomplished, what you’re responsible for and where you’re going. If you sit and just think about the magnitude, it becomes very scary. I’ve said it many times. I just I can’t truly allow myself to think about it because it you can scare the daylights out of you. Um, and that’s very real. And I think that’s what sometimes stops people, that fear. The fear of the unknown. You know, we talk about the fear of success, and that’s very real, it could become debilitating if you let it.

LauraAura

Yeah, absolutely, I think too, on the flip side. If you can allow yourself to go to that kind of scary, fear based place, you can also allow yourself to go to the “what if”, like possibility place as well. Because if you think about entrepreneurship literally, I know it’s kind of cliche, but literally the sky’s the limit. Like you could literally do whatever you set out to do if you put the work behind it and knowing that you could grow a team, and you could increase their salaries, and you could send people on vacations. And you know, there’s just so many possibilities that you can really enrich people’s lives as well.

Francine

Well, you’re absolutely right, and you know you have to in order to make your business successful. Sometimes you have to do other things to make your own business successful. You know, I did a multitude of things outside the parameter of my own business to make Savvy Food Safety successful. I mean, it wasn’t just, you know, during the day, I would focus on my business, and do what I need to do to drive business to my own business. But I had side hustles going on. You know, I was doing to bring money into my own business. You know, I had, um and I’m very strategic, very, very strategic. And that’s part of what has made me so successful. You know, I had started another business with my husband and, you know, we were flipping houses. And during the housing crisis started in 2008-2009 which it was during the beginning of, you know, me starting my business. I was broke. I didn’t have a lot of money to invest into my business.

So one of the things that we did is we started working with banks on foreclosure properties. So during the evenings, after working all day, there were times that I invited a friend of mine and we would go out in the evenings and we would clean six or seven houses in the evenings. I hired a crew of people to mow laws and they would mow lawns and then the profit that I was making on that company, which, by the way, is still in existence, I would use to help build my company. So there were times when we were managing 50 REO properties, properties that were owned by banks. I was managing that to help support my business and grow my business.

And when I say I was cleaning those properties. I was physically helping my husband grow that business, cleaning toilets, scrubbing floors, taking literally just dumpster loads of trash out of properties on weekends and evenings to help use that money to grow my business. It’s what I had to do to survive, and it didn’t matter to me. Whatever it took, I was willing to do.

LauraAura

And in that aligns perfectly with our topic today, which is the perception of overnight success because, you know, if somebody came across your story right now, in this moment where you are in business, they see a very successful, strong, intelligent, seven figure businesswoman rocking at traveling the globe, going to Dubai, like doing all these amazing things. And it would be very easy to say “Oh, look like she’s just there. She made it.” But what I love is really taken like backing up for a hot second and looking at you, you’ve literally, like, rolled up your sleeves and dug out some of the nastiest stuff out of homes just to make sure that your other business could thrive just to keep the doors open.

Francine

I have. The stories that I could tell. I mean. Oh, my God. I’ll never forget one day we were cleaning out this house. And I bent over to pick up these clothes that were on the floor, just a pile of clothes on the floor and literally there was a rats nest under this pile of clothes. And these rats start running around my feet. Oh, my God. I’ll never forgot. I’ll just I’ll never forget that my entire life it was like, Oh, my God, What am I doing? What the hell am I doing?

LauraAura

You know the things that you do. When you’re like when when you are so driven to make your business work. And, you know, I think there’s a difference in pushing something to make it work when it’s not supposed to versus knowing in your gut, in your soul in your blood that this is your path and you have to do everything that you need to do to ensure that it keeps moving forward.

Francine

I would think during the week I’m out and you know I’m out in a business suit and I’m doing these things. And this professional woman that’s out there, you know, doing my thing. I’m speaking to these businesspeople and then on the weekend, here I am, filling dumpsters up with with rats nests with shovels and scraping mold out of refrigerators and I’m thinking, some weekends it was just like, will this end? Will this ever end? And in reality, I knew that it would. I knew that it would, there’s a time, and there’s a place. But you know, if you really want that level of success, you know, unless you know you’ve got a trust fund, there are things that you’ve gotta do.

LauraAura

Which most people don’t, right? I think that sometimes is a common misconception too that once someone sees that you’ve been successful, you were handed something or you inherited something. Or, you know, there’s old money in the family or whatever, and it’s like, No! Ironically, on my way home last night, I was listening to an interview on the radio with Lizzo, who is, you know, just on top of her game right now. And someone made the comment to her that like, Oh, you know, you’ve made it, you’re there. You know, all of a sudden you just bloomed out of nowhere. And in her in her Lizzo voice she’s like, “Bitch. I have been working my ass off since 2012. This did not just happen.” Like these things don’t just come out of the night. It’s a series of events, a series of dedication and sacrificing a lot along the way to the point where when you’re finally realizing, like Lizzo on top of her game or Francine’s and on top of her game, you’re just seeing the end result of a lot of lot of hard work prior to that.

Francine

So many people, you know, if you read their back stories, so many people lived in their cars. I mean, and nobody stops and thinks about, you know, the hardships that they had gone through. Steve Harvey. What he went through to get where he is today. Lizzo I believe, may have lived in her car at one point. You know, and all these people have these very difficult backstories. Oprah didn’t wake up one day and, you know, all of a sudden she was Oprah. I mean she’s been Oprah all of her life, but, you know, she’s a different level of Oprah today. So, you know, all of those people or a lot of those people have, you know, very difficult back stories, and, you know, it’s you know, this again. You know, there was a time, and if my kids listen to this, there just this is something they don’t know. There was a point in time when the electric meter was pulled off the side of my house. You know, not something that I’m proud of but it happened. I was that broke. It’s hard, it is hard.

LauraAura

It really, it really is. I can remember, I’m a huge Steve Harvey fan. I listen to him every day because he just he gets my brain going and, um, you know, he talked about, you know, whatever your beliefs are, whether it’s God, the universe, the trees, you know, whatever your thing is, he says the higher power that you lean on in my case, the universe, the bigger the plans the universe have for you, the bigger the obstacles are going to come into your way. And I just I bank on that sometimes because I looked back or sometimes I look around or I’m knee deep in something. And I think this is one of those scenarios, this shit better be really great on the other side of this because, you know, it’s it can get really intense really quickly, like, kind of out of left field.

Francine

Well, and you know, the bottom line is, you have to believe in you because if you don’t believe in you, how can you expect anybody else to believe in you? And I’m not gonna say that you never waver because we do. We have those moments. But you can’t sit in that space for too long. You just can’t allow yourself to sit in that space for too long because you know, when we do, it becomes habit. You know, you get that starts to become a comfort zone, so you can’t get lost in that pity me. You know, not that we’re not entitled to a few minutes of that on occasion, but you need to put your big girl pants on and get back out there, because if you don’t, you’re gonna get stuck.

LauraAura

Do you have any tactics or things that you like to do? You know, you’ve had rats running around your feet. You’ve had the meter pulled off your house. I mean, let’s talk about, you know, feeling rock bottom. What are some things that you do to help keep yourself focused or get refocused in some of those situations?

Francine

I think, I myself have an ability and honest. I attribute a lot of this to my childhood because I had a very, very difficult childhood. I mean I came from a really tough space, and I think that I have an ability to put things into buckets. And I think that that is very unique. But I’m able to separate things out, and I don’t know that everybody’s gonna understand this, but I can just take that problem and move it aside and start to focus on the things that are good, you know? Okay, this is this is really shitty. And this sucks quite frankly. But, these are the good things that are going on. And I need to focus on the good things because if I sit down and I write out all the good things and these are the things that I have accomplished and okay, so today I I had rats running around.

That’s not so good. But, this is where I’ve come from, and these are the positive things that have happened. If I can focus on these things instead of that one thing and just move that aside, life’s good. Life’s good. You know, the electric’s gonna come back on. You know, it’s temporary. All of these things are temporary. Nothing lasts forever. It’s all temporary, and that’s what we need to focus on. It’s all temporary. None of it lasts forever.

LauraAura

I know how, I mean, I know firsthand how overwhelming some of those situations could be, and in those moments it feels like it’s the see all, be all, end all, like it feels like this is your new reality. This is forever, and I love, you know, switching the mindset of focusing on that it’s temporary like, “Yeah, it’s right here. It’s right now in this sucks and that’s okay. I’m gonna give it the space to suck for a hot minute.” But it’s not going to be like that forever. Like this isn’t the end of your story. This isn’t a period at the end of your sentence. You know, it’s a chapter of the story that we’re writing.

Francine

Well, even if you have to write those things down, you know? Okay, so these are the bad things, and these are the good things. We’ll find that there’s way more good than there is bad in most cases. There’s there’s a lot more good than we’ve done than there is bad and the good things, so out, in the capacity of the good things, so outweigh the bad. I mean, you know, it’s not taken me that long to go from those two people in one class to over a $1,000,000 company were still growing. There’s a lot more good than there is bad, and the weight of the good outweighs those bad days, you know? And you know I’ve had bad days that last bad weeks. But again, you just have to figure out how you’re gonna get out of that, create a plan, and you usually it works. You just have to back away and look from the outside in.

LauraAura

And that’s the thing, when you’re so immersed in some of those challenging situations, the worst thing that you can do is stay head down and tune out the rest of the world. And sometimes you literally like, even physically, like getting up and moving your body. Like, I know sometimes when I’m feeling like the world’s caving in on me, it tells me that I haven’t just stopped and looked around me for a while. You know, I love, especially when it’s quiet in my office and there’s, you know, the girls have gone home or they haven’t come in for the day yet, or I’ve been working late, one of my favorite things to do is just to sit in one of the couches in the corner and look around because even in the face of adversity, looking around at what you have built and what you have created is nothing short of a of a blessing of a miracle like you have done things and you have to sometimes get your head out of the sand, so to speak and just look around and say, “You know, look at what I have done. Yeah, this may suck right now, but gosh, look at everything that I’ve accomplished in my journey.”

Francine

We’ll and to be grateful for that. You know, not everybody. Not everybody has the ability. Yeah, what we’ve done, you know. So we need to be grateful that we have the ability to create what we’ve created. That in itself is amazing. And then to work ourselves out of whatever problems existed any given time. And as an entrepreneur, there are always gonna be problems. It’s just they’re always gonna be there, the size of his goals, I think get bigger as we grow. But we’re always gonna have obstacles. And it’s just a matter of navigating those obstacles, choosing how you’re gonna navigate those obstacles. And sometimes you need to be creative.

LauraAura

People are a lot more creative than they give themselves credit for. And when I say creative, it’s not, you know, I know how to paint or I know how to draw. It’s like no, sometimes in your brain, you get locked and you know there’s one highway and you’re either like on the road or off the road. No, there’s a lot of exits along the way that you can hop off and do what you need to do and get back on the highway. Like there’s always a solution. I have figured that out. There is always a way. It’s just sometimes you got to get a little bit more creative than you allow yourself to be.

Francine

Well, and you know, if you had a plan and I believe that sometimes people have a plan, and when that plan fails, there’s a struggle to create another plan right away because this was my plan. I can’t change my plan, but we have to be very quick to react because the time that we lose in reacting is time lost in building your business. So if we’re not quick to change our plan, that’s very detrimental to our business. And if you stick with the same plan that you had when you started your business, our business evolve, and not just our businesses. But, you know, my industry evolves very quickly and if I don’t change the way that I operate my business, my company would fail. Because of the way our industry evolves. So I have to constantly look at the industry that I’m in, how it’s evolving and how am I gonna have to change my business to the way that the industry’s evolving? Because if I was still operating today the way that I was when I first open my doors, I wouldn’t still be in existence. Yeah, I would have had to close.

LauraAura

I just told somebody the other day… The only thing that I can predict is that everything is going to be unpredictable. You know, it’s, um, you know, it’s getting used to, like dodging and pivoting and making decisions, you know, kind of in the moment sometimes, and knowing that knowing when you need to change course, I think, really pays a tribute to a lot of success, you know, not hanging on to something for so long because one that’s what you’ve always done. Or two. That’s what you’ve always known, or three like it’s gonna be so much work if we do something differently, like sometimes you literally just have to pivot in the moments and create a new course.

Francine

Well, and, you know, running your business by saying, because this is the way we’ve always done it, is the biggest mistake you could ever make.
I mean, you just can’t. We can’t continue to do business this way because this is the way we’ve always done it. And if you’re not willing to change, it’s gonna present significant issues. You know, you’ve got to be willing to evolve. You’ve got to be willing to change. And in some industries, it’s non stop. You know that some industries, they change very rapidly.

LauraAura

You had mentioned one of the big fears that you know you and a lot of other people have had is you know that it’s impossible to succeed because of who you are, or maybe even who you are not So you mentioned earlier, and I’d love to dig a little bit further into you know, you had to become a resilient woman from a very early age. So take me back to, you know, growing up in rural Pennsylvania and some of those adversities that you were faced with and and how you overcame them.

We’re gonna go back in the vault for a minute.

Francine

It’s a vault I don’t like opens very frequently. Um, yeah. So I grew up in a very chaotic household. I was the oldest of four children. I was basically the care giver of the youngest three children. It’s funny because I hear my sister sometimes talk about my mom and don’t misunderstand me. I love my mother, but I hear them talk about my mom and I recently said to one of them, “Were we raised by the same woman?” What you remember and what I remember are two very different things. You know, in the mornings, I was four years older than my youngest younger brother. And, you know, I’d get up and get them ready for school, at night I would make them dinner.

We grew up on welfare. Um, you know, at the age of 10 I can remember walking to the grocery store with my brother and my sister. They were for five years younger than I am. So we were children. We were babies. And buying the groceries with the food stamps and having to hurry home to beat the delivery truck there so that I could be there to put the groceries away. Um, this is an awful lot of responsibility, and I can remember I don’t know why this sticks in my mind, but spaghettios were for 10 a $10. I’m sorry. Not 10 to 10, 10 for $1. And I remember that vividly. And you know, those types of things. Can you imagine a child doing that today?

LauraAura

How old were How old were you when you were doing that? 10 years old. I mean, my son is 12 and I can’t even imagine him in that situation.

Francine

I have a granddaughter the same age. There’s just no way. No way, just no way and this grocery store was like, I’m gonna guess it was probably half a mile, 3/4 of a mile from our house. It wasn’t down on the corner and, you know, to step back a little bit further. My mom, I never knew my biological father. Uh, my step dad is the only dad I’ve ever known. So there was, and at this point my mother and my step dad were divorced. She obviously, you know, she had married my dad, they we’re married very briefly, and then they were divorced, and then she married my step dad, and they ultimately divorced as well. So there was a lot of drama there, and it was bad.

It was very, very traumatic childhood. And the welfare situation wasn’t good. I got made fun of in school because we got free lunches. I was not an attractive child, you know? I had buck teeth, I wore the welfare glasses and I got made fun of for my appearance. I wasn’t athletic. Today they call this bullying. We called it getting picked on. I just said that to somebody the other day. My mother, for some reason, you know, she didn’t have time to spend with us, but for some reasons, she thought she needed, she thought she wanted to have foster children. So, you know, there were these foster children that were in and out of our houses, which sometimes we’re the extreme. The juvenile delinquency, there’s just no way easy way to say this. They were children that got in trouble a lot.

So we were exposed to that at a very early age. Um, and it was just utter, utter chaos in our home. And I had an aunt that was married to a doctor and thank God for this woman because I knew there was another way of life. And if it hadn’t been for her, I honestly don’t know what might have happened to me, because she gave me my perspective on a different life. I started working very young, you know, at the age of 15, I was baby sitting five boys overnight, from the hours of 11 to 7 while their mother worked the overnight shift at Dunkin Donuts and I would go to work in the morning. I would get up and go to school in the morning after working all night.

I did this until her boyfriend showed up one night in the middle of the night and said that she said it was okay basically, if he had his way with me. I left very promptly and walked home at like two o’clock in the morning, and that was the last time I stayed the night there baby sitting those children. I was I was raped at 17. Um, just you know, it was and I never told anybody because it was, I was sure it was my fault. It wasn’t. I know today it wasn’t my fault. I didn’t do anything wrong. When I think back now and think about what I have accomplished coming out of that environment, it’s nothing short of a miracle. And I grew up. I grew up knowing, and my mother told this to me many times. Your father told me that alcohol killed sperm cells and you were born nine months later on April Fool’s Day.

LauraAura

And I am certain that that has been woven in and throughout your life like that’s always running in the back of your head.

Francine

Well I’m over 50 years old and I still hear that. I still hear that.

LauraAura

These are all, like, you know, enormous adversities. And what some people might use as the reason why they can’t or shouldn’t make anything of themselves. And, you know, you and I talk about imposter syndrome a lot. And looking at where you are now, and the success that you have now, compared to the roots of where you know, life started you, imposter syndrome probably is a reoccurring thing that you have to talk yourself out off.

Francine

Absolutely it is. Yes, absolutely it is. I’m much better about it than I used to be. Through therapy.

LauraAura

Girl. Therapy has saved my life a handful of times. So I feel you.

Francine

You know, yeah, therapy is all I can say you know. Therapy. You know, I got married you know, when I was 19. Was married for over 20 years, and I don’t want to get in that, that wasn’t the best of situations. So yeah, I’m not ashamed to say that, you know, it’s taken some significant therapy to help me through a lot of that, because you grow up with, thinking that you’re less than deserving of a lot of things, your self esteem certainly is not existent. Somehow through it all I can remember I can remember in my mind always thinking, “I’m gonna be somebody someday.” And I don’t know if you guys remember that song or not. And I don’t even remember when that song came out. But there was a song called “I’m Gonna Be Somebody Someday” and I can remember that just like became my motto. I’m gonna be somebody someday.

LauraAura

It gives me chills to think that even in some of the worst of the worst situations that’s still running in the back of your head. You’re still telling yourself, or you’re walking home or you’re making dinner or you know, cleaning up rats. You’re thinking and humming the song in the back of your mind ,I’m gonna be somebody someday. Like where do you think that that stems from?

Francine

Oh, my God. Because of, I could write a book about where that stuff. I mean, let’s go back, to you know what my mother said to me. You know, people are told that they’re conceived out of love, you know? But let’s talk about that, you know, I was an April Fools Day joke. That’s very real. Um, there’s just there’s so many things, you know. Oh, my, you know, picked on in school like I never went to a prom. I was never asked to a prom. And this isn’t a pity me. I don’t want anybody listen.

LauraAura

Well, no, but this is the purpose of this of this episode is to talk about like, Okay, look at where you are now. But you know, what most people are seeing is just is this moment of your life and showing that, you know, once someone has maybe, you know, “arrived” or made it. It didn’t just start today. It didn’t just start yesterday. Like you have built an entire life building up to where you are in your career right now. And even more importantly, where you’re headed because heaven knows that you’re not even remotely close to being done. But even in those moments where you were feeling. You were being picked on and you were being put down and all this stuff I just find it really fascinating that in the back of your mind you’re humming the song knowing that you’re going to be somebody someday.

Francine

Right? You know, it was, you know, the foster children she had, you know, they picked on me. I can remember my cousin’s one time tying me, tying me to a fence outside the front of our house. My cousin and his friend tied me, hog tied me, to a fence outside our house in the rain. My mother coming home. Oh, my God. She’s was furious. But I was hog tied to this fence outside in the rain. Um, I can remember I was outside and there’s an ally beside our house. And I can remember there were these boys walking home from school. I had a jump up and they beat my back. I obviously had a shirt on. They beat my back with this jump rope until I had welts on it for no reason other than I was the child that was very easy to pick on because I had no sense of self worth.

I was very shy, believe it or not. I was very backward. You know the foster children she had at times picked on me. She never believed me. She always believed what they would tell her. And they lied. And I can remember one time there was somebody that said, and they had confused me and this young lady. I don’t know why, but they did. We didn’t look anything alike. And they said that they saw me. We were teenagers. We were old enough to be in a bar. But they said that they saw me at this bar. And I’m like, I was no where near a bar. And this young lady lied and said that it wasn’t her and it was me and my mother called me a liar and slapped me across the face with a red French belt. I wasn’t lying. It wasn’t me. It was her. But she didn’t believe me. You know, when I was. Boy, this is getting personal. When I was when I was raped, I’m gonna cry.

LauraAura

You’re in a safe place.

Francine

My mom came into the bathroom, and I had these bruises on the back of my neck. And they were from being wrapped around the back of my neck, and I was washing my hair, and I can remember vividly her coming in there and making a snide comment about these bruises that she thought were hickeys on the back of my neck and ripping me out of that bathtub. And she sold Stanley products. I don’t know if you know what they are or not, but she had brown hair brush with black bristles but she ripped me out of that bathtub by my hair and beat me with that brown hairbrush because she thought I was being promiscuous. She never knew until the day she died that I’ve been raped. So there are just so many stories. I mean, you know, I had a brother that ended up dying of a drug overdose. We all turned out so very differently because we dealt with things in our childhood a very different way.

LauraAura

I mean you just have stories for days, and it’s again, I just I have just the utmost respect for you and who you are. And it just absolutely fascinates me that even with all of these reasons, all these people telling you that you’re not supposed to be seen. You are not supposed to be heard. You are not supposed to be successful. Like basically, just sit down, shut up and do your thing. Here you are on the other side of that, and I’m just curious, like what goes through your head. Or how did you turn all of those negative situations into power to be the woman that you are today?

Francine

I want to just one more thing. I’m sorry, teachers and the impact that teachers can have on on children. I had an 11th grade teacher. I had done an extensive report on the Ming Dynasty. And he handed it back to me and I had an A on this report and he said to me, my maiden name was King, he said to me “King, you’re never gonna amount to anything,” and had it report. Wow. Yeah, it was a physiology class.

LauraAura

Your whole life everyone has told you that you are nothing, essentially.

Francine

It went on for you know, the 1st 40 some years of my life, 40 years of my life, you know, it just continued. It just continued. You know, I didn’t start my business until I was 50. Um, so yeah, there are dozens and dozens and dozens of the stories that you know, and I just had that determination. Just there was something within me that, I think there was a period of time where truly, deep inside it had been squelched. But deep inside, I always knew that I had the ability. I’ve always known that I am smart regardless of what anybody told me. And there were things that I had to do. I can remember telling a boss one time that during the conversation I don’t care if I shovel shit. I will do it as well or better than the person that’s next to me. Regardless of what I need to do, I’m going to do it as well or better than the person that’s next to me.

LauraAura

And that’s just I think, sometimes, honestly, I think sometimes that’s just deep rooted within, like it’s just a matter of if you allow that voice to come out. You know, I look at it as intuition and just kind of your inner compass. It’s like it’s really hard to explain when you know something so deeply and intently that it’s almost indescribable. Like you just know because your intuition is guiding you.

Francine

Well, little did I know that one day I would be doing that, you know?

LauraAura

Well, you’ve got to be careful what you ask the universe for, because the universe listens to details.

Francine

But yes, I agree with you and we know we’re capable off. So even though we may have to put that aside for a period of time, for whatever reason that maybe, we know we’re capable of, you just have to listen.

LauraAura

You know what you’re capable of. You just have to listen. And that’s really beautiful advice. I know that there’s a handful of people listening either, you know, relating to your story in some form or fashion, or maybe are kind of in the depths of their own story right now. So I’m curious. What advice would you give to people that may be facing challenges that are trying to keep them from succeeding?

Francine

I think it’s important for people to realize that you don’t have to be a 25 year old with an IVY League education and a trust fund to start a successful business. I was a flat ass broke, middle aged woman with a lot of friends and family, who that I was going through a midlife crisis and it lost my ever loving mind. That was over seven years ago. Since then, I traveled around the world, written over 100 articles for all of the industry’s national trade magazines, been on TV, radio, and I own a company that’s currently doing over a $1,000,000 in sales annually and it’s still growing.

You know, we may double that this year, which is just completely blowing my mind. I’m not going to pretend for a second that any of that has been easy because it’s not, Um, it’s been the craziest roller coaster ride that I’ve ever been on. I mean like I said, you know, the top of Mount Everest to the depths of hell in a matter of seconds. And let’s be honest. I’ve cried a river of tears. But it’s been worth it. I would do it all again. And I think it’s important that people look behind the scenes and they listen to what we’re saying. Not all entrepreneurs are transparent about what it takes. It’s worth it. But it’s hard.

LauraAura

It’s a whole level of life that is indescribable until you get into it. It’s, you know, I often compare entrepreneurship to parenthood, and you can read all the books and all the articles and take all the classes and hang out with all your friends. But until until you’re the one up at 2:30 in the morning with something that screaming at you, it’s really hard to explain.

Francine

And you can’t prepare for it. You can’t prepare for it.

LauraAura

And so I think the beauty in this entire story is, you know, even though there were so many challenges, look at what you have accomplished and that’s where you know it again. It may be easy to think and look at your story right now and think that you’re an overnight success, but its success is a series of taking action and not giving up like falling down and getting up and falling down and getting up, and it’s you have to believe it in, like, literally in the veins of your body that you are worthy of it, that you can achieve it and surround yourself with people that are lifting you up and pushing you forward, not pulling you back. That is essential, like 100% essential.

And dare I say I’m gonna throw this right back at you. You’re somebody. Like you’re not. It’s not someday, Francine, like you are somebody right now and that makes me a little bit weepy just thinking about it because, um, yeah, I just you’re a huge inspiration to me. But every other woman that’s walking this planet like you, you’ve done it, and I’m really proud of you. You’re welcome.

So as we round out this beautiful in depth story and episode here today, what’s the biggest piece of advice that you would give to listeners today?

Francine

For me, and this was a hard lesson to learn. It’s having the courage to walk away from situations when they’re no longer healthy or serving their purpose. Personally I believe that many times we stay in relationships whether they’re personal or professional simply because it’s easier than ending them. In many times, that’s to our own detriment. We need to know when it’s time to end those relationships, not only for our own good, but maybe for the benefit of the other individuals involved as well.

WHAT DOES GUTSY MEAN TO YOU?

Francine

Well, I think that in a nutshell, you know, it takes a lot of courage to do what I just said. You know, having the courage to end those relationships is hard. It takes a lot of guts to be able to do that. Um, just having the guts to know when it’s time, not only know when it’s time to do that, but to actually do it because it’s so much easier to stay in bad situations that are no longer beneficial. And I don’t mean financially beneficial. That’s not at all what I’m saying. I mean psychological beneficial.

Because sometimes, you know, we stay in situations that we may not even realize are harming us emotionally just because it’s what we’re used to. It’s what’s become our comfort zone, and it’s hard to know when to pull that plug. And it takes a lot of guts to know when to do that and went to make it happen. It is, it’s difficult. It’s very, very difficult. And I had to do that in both my personal and my professional life. And I spent time crying. You know, sometimes when I’ve had to do that, it just in order to grow. There are times when there are relationships that we’ve just out grown. And it’s hard and it takes a lot, takes a lot of gutsy? You know, when it’s time.

LauraAura

It sure does. So guys use your gusty today by just kind of taking an inventory of your relationships. You know, if people are trying to put out your fire instead of throwing logs on to help you rise and burn strong and bright. You know, this is really a time for you to get serious on who you are and where you’re headed, and knowing that you have to lock arms with amazing people that are willing to fight that battle with you. Not against you. Francine. This has been an incredible talk I can’t thank you enough for being so gutsy. You know, just really open up your doors and let us into, you know, just even a small fraction of your life. So I’m certain that people are gonna want to stay in touch. So what is the best way for our listeners to get in touch and stay in touch with you?