Episode 001 - Staci Wright

Get ready for an incredible interview with Staci Wright, a serial entrepreneur who has owned 5 successful businesses over the past 20 years. 

On Model the Master podcast, Christin delves into Staci's remarkable story of resilience after losing her $5 million business, husband, and lifestyle. Listen as Staci shares her journey from starting over as a middle-aged single mom to now having 1 patent, 2 businesses, 3 products, 4 brands, and a philanthropic project. Don't miss out on this inspiring interview about triumph over adversity!

Transcript

Christin G. Gutierrez (00:00):

Welcome to Model the Master Podcast, brought to you by Increpreneur, where we believe the fastest path to personal and professional growth is to model those who have gone before us. I'm your host, Christin Gutierrez. Today I'm speaking with Stacy Wright. She is a serial entrepreneur with over 20 years of experience covering more than 28 patents and five startups. She is the founder and CEO of IP2Market and CEO Essentials. You've actually been through a lot that a lot of our viewers and listeners would resonate with. You've had a lot of setbacks and a lot of challenges, but the difference between someone who succeeds and someone who fails is that you got back up and you kept going. Can you tell us a little bit about these setbacks and challenges that you faced and how you overcame them?

Staci Wright (00:50):

That is an excellent question, and it's really a good one for people to ponder and think about. I was just talking to a friend the other day. I'm like, I've had a lot of those dark nights of the soul, and I had built my dream business from zero to $5 million, and we were living a lifestyle that we dreamt about. It was the cars, and the boats, and the house and the freedom. It was just the freedom that I could walk into any store and buy anything I wanted and not think twice about it. And then we got hit with a lawsuit, and the lawsuit just over the course of a decade, wiped us out. It just went on and on and on, and it never felt like it was going to end. And I ended up walking out of that without my marriage, with my family destroyed, with my business destroyed. The whole thing, just everything lost. And I remember there were days that I literally laid on my bedroom floor and sobbed. It was just such a huge loss, and I'm not going to lie, I thought about suicide. I thought, well, that's better than what I've got here. But I had two little girls and I couldn't do that.

Christin G. Gutierrez (02:08):

Thank God for them.

Staci Wright (02:10):

Yeah. And so I had to keep going. I had to keep getting up. And so if it wasn't for my kids though, I don't think I would've. I just wanted to model for them a better way, a better way to live, a better way to be. And I wanted to show them that when they get knocked down - which we always get knocked down, life knocks us around - that they can get back up and be strong. And so I wanted to model that for them, and that's literally what got me through that.

Christin G. Gutierrez (02:35):

So what was the process like? You lost your business. You built it to five million, and then you got hit with this lawsuit. You wound up going through that for a whole decade. I mean that's, that's got to be completely overwhelming. You made it through that decade alive, but you'd lost your marriage and you'd lost your business. What was the process from that point where you had lost everything and you had considered suicide to where you are today? What was the path that you had to take? What did you have to do to get from that point to where you are now?

Staci Wright (03:11):

I think the decade long was my own fault because I kept clinging onto things. I kept clinging onto what was safe. I kept clinging on trying to hold onto the past, trying to hold onto what felt comfortable and safe and familiar. And in hindsight, if I would've just let go early on in the process, it would've fallen away and I could have rebuilt. But there was a lot of fear, a lot of fear that was going on during that time. And what eventually happened, and this is an interesting part of the story, is that around 2018, I read the book by Michael Singer called The Surrender Experiment. And I highly recommend this book to everybody I talk to and work with because he tells such powerful stories. He was a serial entrepreneur. He had several entrepreneurial ventures that were super successful - 

(04:02):

one even made it to be publicly traded. And his whole life, he lived in a state of surrender. I'm just going to do the next thing that feels right to do, and I'm going to let life bring me what it wants to bring me. And at that point in my life, I had lost everything and I had nothing to lose, nothing more to lose. And I thought, why don't I experiment with this whole surrender thing? Why don't I try this? And so I remember it was right at the beginning of 2019, I said, you know what? I'm going to surrender. I'm going to give this whole thing a whirl. And I remember talking to my friend, and she's also an entrepreneur. I said, I'm just going to surrender. This is what I'm going to do. It feels right for me. She said, well, maybe I should do that too. And I thought, oh, no, no. Let me try it first. Let's see if it works. 

Christin G. Gutierrez (04:49):
We don't need two people surrendering

Staci Wright (04:50):

<laugh>. Right, exactly. I said to her: “You have a lot to lose. I don't have anything to lose. Let me try. I'll sacrifice myself.”

Christin G. Gutierrez (04:56):

I volunteer “as tribute”.

Staci Wright (04:58):

Yes, yes, exactly. <laugh> Exactly. And from that moment forward, things just started falling into place and my life started falling back together again. And I learned so much over the next few years through that experience.

Christin G. Gutierrez (05:13):

So this surrendering process, is this basically taking the next step, even though you're afraid, even though you don't know what it is, it's just continuous movement, or what is the surrendering process?

Staci Wright (05:26):

 That's a good question. It was the surrender experiment with learning about my human design. I don't know if you've heard about human design, but human design is an energetic blueprint for how you're designed to make decisions, how you're designed to interact with life. And it's based on your time, place, and date of birth. And so I got my human design chart given to me right before that time. And so according to my human design, I was designed to make decisions with my gut. If we make decisions with our mind, our mind contains all the conditioning of the society we live in. And especially as entrepreneurs, we're given desires and visions of something that's not been done yet. And so if we're using our mind that's been conditioned with all the things of the past to make decisions going forward, it wouldn't really make sense.

(06:21):

We could lose a lot of opportunities. And so that's what I started doing is just making decisions with my gut, based on my gut instinct, what felt right. And I moved toward that end… even if it was scary, there were times it was scary. There were times that the decisions I was making made no logical sense. And then they would just work out. And I'll give you one example early on that happened. I had lost everything and I hadn't rebuilt yet. I hadn't replaced my income. I hadn't solidified anything in my life as far as my career pathway went or my business. I knew I wanted to own another business. There was never a question about that. I just didn't know what it would look like. And I got an invitation in the email to join this National Entrepreneur's Club, and it was a $10,000 membership fee.

(07:10):

And my gut was lit up about it. My gut said, yes, do it. I mean, super lit up. And I was like, my mind was arguing so hard, saying “it doesn't make sense.” You need to save that money for later. You don't need to be spending money to join a club. You don't even have a business. But I was in an experiment and I thought, I'm going to surrender. I've already lost millions of dollars. What's 10,000? So I wrote the check, went to the first meeting, met some cool people, and came back home. The next month there was another meeting. I went to the meeting, but that one I wasn't lit up about after. I was no longer lit up about this club, but I still forced myself to go because my mind said, “you paid $10,000, you better go”.

(07:53):

So I went, and nothing extraordinary happened. And I came back home and I kept trying to force myself to go to the meetings of this group, but it was just draining me. It felt exhausting to me, and my gut was just not lit up about it. And so I stopped going to the meetings and I thought, well, that was an interesting experiment of $10,000. And just chalked it up to, okay, it was just an experiment. Well, a year later when I actually started a new company, we were doing new inventions. So we needed a patent attorney, and we didn't have money. We were bootstrapping it. So we needed a patent attorney to actually do the patent work for this new company. And this new company is just an invention machine, we're just spitting out new inventions over and over and over. So, we needed a patent attorney that would join our vision and see where we were going and do patent work for free, basically in exchange for ownership in the company.

(08:48):

And it just so happened that the very first person I sat next to at the first meeting I went to was an entrepreneurial patent attorney, and we had hit it off famously, and he looks just like my brother. And I remember we had a connection. So I called him up and I said, “Hey, do you want to be a part of this? It's a new venture, lots of risk, no guarantee but we'll give you equity in the company.” And he said, “Yeah, absolutely. Let's do it.” And so he came on board, and since that time, he has written way more than $10,000 worth of patent work for us. So that's just one example of what happened over and over and over again when I was listening to my gut making decisions versus my head.

Christin G. Gutierrez (09:29):

Right. That's amazing. And it's also a testament of proximity because proximity is so important whenever you're trying to launch a new business or take your existing business to the next level -  you were able to get in proximity to someone who had the skills that you needed. And had you not listened to your gut and joined that group, whether you wound up continuing on in that group or not, then you wouldn't have been able to meet that patent attorney. Exactly. Yeah, that's an amazing example of that. So tell me a little bit about your business right now. The first one, though you have two businesses. 

Staci Wright (10:07):

I have two businesses, yes. So IP2Market is the company I was just talking about. It’s a company that brings new inventions to life, and we handle everything from A to Z. So patenting, engineering, design, manufacturing, sales and distribution. The bigger picture of that, the whole reason I started that company was to make a social impact. Have a social impact. So at this phase of my life or this season of life it's about more of creating the business to make a social impact versus just to make the money. So that is that company. We started this in 2020, so it's barely a baby. It's a baby company, and -

Christin G. Gutierrez (10:47):

In the middle of the pandemic

Staci Wright (10:49):

<laugh> in the middle of the pandemic. And we already have three products, four brands, one patent issued and one patent pending. So there's a lot happening in a short amount of time.

Christin G. Gutierrez (11:00):

Yes, that is. And what would you attribute that momentum to?

Staci Wright (11:06):

Surrender, and following the answer to: “What is correct for me, being who I am?” See, I believe we all have a seed of the future planted inside of us, and our job is to stay out of the way and allow that seed to grow and to flourish. And when I surrendered and said, okay, I'm willing to, I want to bring my potential to life. I didn't even know what my full potential was, but I said, I want to bring whatever, whatever I'm here to bring, I want to bring it. I want to bring it with power and sustainability. And when I let go of the control and trying to navigate and make it the way I thought it should look, and I let it be what it was, it literally happens at quantum speed. And it's not a constant, it's not constantly just going up like this. What happens is it goes along and then all of a sudden there's a quantum jump, and then it just goes along. And then all of a sudden there's a quantum jump where there's just like this miracle that happens and this new idea comes and it happens in no way that it's hard to explain in the logical mind.

Christin G. Gutierrez (12:10):

Right. Nice. All right. Well, let's say that you're talking to someone who has wanted to start a business, but they just didn't know what to do. They haven't taken that step yet. Or maybe they have tried and it just didn't work out the way that they had hoped, and they're ready to try again. What would be your number one tip for them or suggestion?

Staci Wright (12:34):

My number one tip is to find out what your human design is and then have an experiment with that. Really align with who you are meant to be, what you were meant to do here, align with that, how you're designed to interact and to make decisions and move forward within that space. This would be a good time to introduce my other business: CEO Essentials. It’s for people, entrepreneurs, who are going from solo entrepreneur into more hiring people, and scaling their business. It's focused on becoming a ceo. So I have a CEO Essentials mastermind for female entrepreneurs. During 2020, the pandemic, we were meeting once a month, still doing what we were doing, and at that point I wasn't teaching anything. I was just facilitating time, making sure everybody had equal time. But about midway through that year, as my life's falling back together, and they're all looking at this going, they began asking “how are you doing what you're doing?” And I said, “I don't have a clue. It's just happening. I don't know how this is happening.” One day I was out walking and out in the woods, which is what I do every day. It's part of my coping mechanism that I learned when I was going through the hell that I was going through after I had realized that drinking wine every night was not a sustainable solution.

Christin G. Gutierrez (13:53):

Probably not a good idea.

Staci Wright (13:54):

Right. So I developed that habit of walking out in nature every day. While I was out walking in nature one day all of a sudden I received what I call a download. It was just information given to me. And by the end of the walk, I had words to articulate exactly what was happening and how it was happening. And then I had the compulsion to share it. So I went and shared it with the group, and each month, another piece of the puzzle would fall into place and I would teach it to them. And over this course of the next six months, everybody was changed as a result of this information. And what it came out to is the creation formula. So it's actually a formula for how creations happen. We had these visions and these ideas of what we want to bring to the world, and then five years later, three years later, it's there.

(14:42):

So what is that process and how does that work? And so the creation formula breaks it down in a way that's a little bit easier to understand and tells us precisely what our role is in the process. We think it's our role to make it happen and to go out there and create it with our work ethic and with our grit and determination and all of those things. And not saying that grit and determination is not something you need because you do need it, but it's not applying it where we typically apply it. The creation formula tells us that grit and determination, if we apply it in the right place in the equation, the rest happens quite naturally. And so that's the creation formula that came through in 2020 as all of this is falling back together. And so now I teach this to other entrepreneurs and it's actually on my website. You can go see it for free. I've got a webinar up there for free. But it gives the actual equation of how a vision comes to life and what our role is in that.

Christin G. Gutierrez (15:48):

So is it almost like a math equation

Staci Wright (15:53):

Almost? I guess it's like a math equation, but there are no numbers involved - just the formula of what's involved in the process. So it's the life force energy, which is the energy that's bringing things to life all around us all the time. You look at nature, the way grass just grows over and over and over. It's this life force energy that's primary purpose is to bring things to life. So understanding that, and working with that, is important. Then the next one is we have our DNA: our structure of who we are as people. We have this mind, body, and soul that allows us to play with the life force energy. So we have plants that have DNA and structure, and the life force energy brings it to life. And then you have people, though we have something more than plants, plants and animals. We have mind, body, and soul. So if we utilize our mind, body, and soul in the way it was designed to be used, the life force energy will quite naturally bring our potential to life in reality. So that's how our visions become a reality. It is a process that the life force energy brings through our job. Where we want to apply our grit and determination is to let go of the limiting beliefs that live in our mind

(17:14):

And to take care of our bodies and to align our work with our soul's purpose. So if we do those three things, then life or synergy does the rest.

Christin G. Gutierrez (17:26):

Definitely. Well, that totally makes sense. You go on your nature walks, and I wind up getting my downloads in my shower office.

Staci Wright (17:38):

Heard that before.

Christin G. Gutierrez (17:40):

Yeah. That's my most productive place. That's where I get the best ideas. I actually have a waterproof notebook that I have in the shower. I get so many downloads in there, and before I was just using my cell phone, getting it all wet, and I finally searched on Google, where can I find a waterproof notebook? Tried a couple different ones and found the one that works best for me. And now I'm constantly using that every single day.

Staci Wright (18:10):

Fantastic. I didn't even know they made those things.

Christin G. Gutierrez (18:13):

Yes. It's amazing.

Staci Wright (18:14):

Wow. Okay.

Christin G. Gutierrez (18:16):

I'll get you the link for that because they're worth their weight in gold, I'm telling you. Just the ability to not - have you ever tried to tell yourself, “I need to remember this, I need to remember this. I need to remember this.” What's the first thing that happens? You forget it.

Staci Wright (18:33):

Yes. Yes. And it sounds like you have a lot of ideas happening all the time, being a serial.

Christin G. Gutierrez (18:38):

I do. I'm a serial entrepreneur, so I've had plenty of ideas throughout my life, very successful ones, and I like to document them all. We can't do them all, but I definitely like to document them all. So the shower is the best place for me.

Staci Wright (18:59):

That's awesome. I've heard that before. People say that. That's cool. That's awesome.

Christin G. Gutierrez (19:04):

Yeah. Well, we've reached the point in the show where we have our segment called, ‘Would You Rather?’I came up with this segment because my husband and I play this game with our grandchildren. We have eight beautiful grandchildren, and this is the game that they love. The Would You Rather question for you is, would you rather earn more money than you could ever spend, but you had to do something that you didn't really enjoy every single day for the rest of your life? Or would you rather make just enough money to live a comfortable life, but you could do something that really lit you up every day for the rest of your life?

Staci Wright (19:44):

No question. I need to be lit up every day. The money is secondary.

Christin G. Gutierrez (19:50):

That's a great answer.

Staci Wright (19:50):

The money is much less. It pales in comparison to what happens when I'm lit up and what the feeling is when I'm lit up. Yeah. Now, if you had asked me that 30 years ago, it would've been the money <laugh>

Christin G. Gutierrez (20:06):

Right? I think life experience has a way of making us see our true priorities, right? Definitely. Absolutely. Yeah. I've made a lot of money doing things that I didn't really enjoy, and I would tell you that I would 100% give all of those companies up and make just enough to survive if it meant that I could enjoy what I was doing and that I could be passionate about it and I could make a difference in the world. I remember that I had a law firm and a real estate brokerage once, and we were doing short sales, and even though we really were making a difference in these people's lives, we were helping them to get out of homes that were underwater and preventing them from having hundreds of thousands of dollars in deficiency balances, it just didn't feel that way to them. They were losing their homes and they were losing the equity that they had put down on the properties, and there were just a whole bunch of really miserable, unhappy people who didn't buy you what we were doing for them. And we were making a lot of money, but we were just miserable. And I used to dream I would give it all away if I could just love what I was doing, and thank God I’m to the point where I love what I'm doing. So I love your answer. 

Staci Wright (21:26):

Absolutely. I agree with you on that there. There's many positions that I had prior to owning my own business where I was miserable, but I was making a lot of money. But I always thought that was what would bring happiness - and then I had  all the money and no happiness. Then I realized, okay, this isn't working for me. And I would go and drive around different neighborhoods, and I would see poor neighborhoods, walk through poor neighbors and see the people in their front yards laughing and having fun and enjoying each other. And I longed for that, and I thought, that's what I really want. It's not the money, and then just scratched it all and started all over again. Yeah.

Christin G. Gutierrez (22:10):

Yeah, definitely. Well, I really enjoyed our conversation today. I really appreciate your time, and I look forward to getting together with you and doing this again in the future.

Staci Wright (22:23):

Awesome. Thank you, Christin. I appreciate you having this show. I appreciate you having me on it.

Christin G. Gutierrez (22:29):

You've been listening to Model the Master Podcast, brought to you by Increpreneur. If you found value, please remember to subscribe and leave us a review, until next time. Remember: Take the next step.