Obstacles to Opportunities
When faced with life's obstacles, let's channel that negative energy into positivity and forge opportunities. Throughout the nation, business owners will share their experiences of triumphing over daunting challenges in their careers and lives, illustrating how they've harnessed these experiences for growth opportunities.
Obstacles to Opportunities
Heather Fernstrom Border: Overcoming Challenges with Courage and Determination
Welcome to "Obstacles to Opportunities," the podcast where we delve into the journeys of remarkable individuals who have turned life's challenges into triumphant victories. In this episode, join us as we sit down with Heather Fernstrom Border, the Co-founder & Managing Partner of Alliance Global Advisors, a trailblazing force in the world of developing strategic growth solutions for real asset investment managers.
Heather's upbringing was unlike most, as she was raised by entrepreneurs who instilled in her a spirit of resilience and determination. We explore how her childhood experiences paved the way for her tenacity in the business arena.
But Heather's journey was not without its share of hardships. Through tragedy, she gained unique insights at an early age, shaping her perspective and approach to both life and business. Join us as Heather shares how she transformed personal trials into remarkable business successes.
In this captivating conversation, we uncover the powerful lessons Heather has learned along her path, offering inspiration and practical wisdom for anyone facing obstacles in their own journey. Tune in to "Obstacles to Opportunities" and discover how adversity can be the catalyst for unparalleled growth and achievement.
Welcome to the obstacles opportunities podcast.
Speaker 2:I'm your host, Jess Powell, and I'm your co-host, Heather Kane, and we are so excited to have a special guest with us today. Her name is Heather for Stromborter and she is with the Alliance Global Advisors. But that's the business side.
Speaker 2:Let's talk personal for a hot second. So I'm at Heather she was a neighbor of mine and you know, when you see someone and you're like wow, like she's a badass, like the girl is like sprinting, she's running, she's doing the beach, she's got like three kids, like she puts on incredible parties, she always is smiling, she always has this incredible positive energy, and you know, when you see someone, you're like I think I need to know her Right. And so I didn't even know. On the business side, I just thought she was an incredible mom. And then I realized not only is she an incredible mom, but she's also an incredible entrepreneur, a business woman. This girl can juggle like nobody's business. So welcome Heather.
Speaker 3:Oh, thank you so much for having me and I, Heather. I absolutely feel the same way about you, so it's very grateful for the time that we got to live close to one another and watch our kids thrive in that environment.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think it's very nice to meet you today. Were you pregnant at the time, I wonder?
Speaker 3:say thank you, I was like always, pregnant for five years straight Pregnant.
Speaker 2:So I feel like you either had just had your daughter, no, no, no, you hadn't, because I remember you saying oh no, like this was not planned Right, she was your oopsie.
Speaker 3:Right, total surprise, total blessing. So I think when you and I had met, I had just had Harrison, which is my middle one, and because we had moved in the neighborhood about six years ago now, yeah, and then I had Madeline shortly after, like a solid 16 months after.
Speaker 2:So surprise blessing, of course, yeah, but you got your girl, I got my girl and she's your mini me.
Speaker 3:She's totally boss lady, that's lady of the house, but just fun.
Speaker 2:She's rolling those boys all around the house, right, she asked you to keep up.
Speaker 3:We have two more boys in the cul-de-sac, so it's like Madeline and like her four boys that are just like running the, running the cul-de-sac, running the neighborhood.
Speaker 2:So, heather, one thing this is all about obstacles to opportunities, and you know to be as driven as you are and to lead an incredible team Did you say 13 advisors? You know what is it that you felt growing up that made you have that tenacity, that ambition, that and the vision to create what you have today?
Speaker 3:Yeah, well, you know I'll try to give you like the short answer, but or more condensed in nature. But I think a lot of it I mean look, a lot of it stands from childhood, right? So I had two and have two very driven parents who were self-made individually and I think just the culmination of watching their you know hard work, ethic, watching their drive being part of it my dad owned a hotel here in Naples, florida. We grew up in Naples, florida and have very fond memories of Naples back when it was not as crazy, not a hotel.
Speaker 1:Yeah, what hotel so?
Speaker 3:today it's the Bella Sara. And it used to be the Howard Johnson, so I was like the stand in front.
Speaker 1:desk manager when I was like 10 years old.
Speaker 3:And it was connected to. There was a restaurant connected to it. So if the hostess didn't show up, my 10 year old self, I was the hostess too.
Speaker 1:It's amazing.
Speaker 3:You just get like thrown into adrohership early, absolutely, and you just you watch your parents figure it out right. So I watched my dad my dad's been in real estate in the South West Florida area his whole life and I watched him kind of unravel some very difficult situations by just kind of leaning in and getting it done and leaning on his relationships. I watched my mom create, you know, a decent amount of wealth for herself and watch her build her own team and build her empire from the ground up. She's a financial advisor. She recently retired.
Speaker 3:So I think, having that embedded in your childhood and watching and experiencing your parents tried to kind of work through the hardship of the, you know, get it all done and raise the family, I just think that that's a big, big piece of me. But you know I also for those of you don't know me well I had a brother growing up as well and I bring him up because he passed away in 2005 and tomorrow is his 19 year anniversary of him not being with us. But you know he was such a big piece of my story as well because you know I grew up with. You know he was the other half of me.
Speaker 3:It was my you know, my only sibling, and so, when he passed away in 2005, I was, you know, 21 years old and at that moment in time, you know, I got to wake up one day and my life was never the same. And so then, going, you know, into my 20s and 30s, it's like I just I had this experience that what I felt was others in my peer group did not have, and it just it gave me a different level of perspective, obviously extremely humbling, obviously, you know, extremely, you know, heartbreaking and heart opening at the same time. And so I just try to, you know, use his passion, my parents' passion and dedication as I live my life day to day and, you know, continue to build my team and my brand and my family all at once.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you know it's. It's interesting because I feel like anytime we have something that hits us like that, right, we realize that, freaking, go for it. Because why not? Cause tomorrow is not guaranteed. Right, and I you know, to use what happened with your brother, which is devastating, to grow and build what you do today. I mean, he's looking down on you and just freaking, giving you this big old warm hug, right, he's so proud of you. And so now, as far as your business, like you know, you explained a little bit earlier to us but what made you want to go and become an entrepreneur, since you saw the hardships with your parents and you saw the roller coasters and I love it because I think about that with my kids, right, you know, my husband and I, you know, we didn't come from entrepreneurship and we built everything. We built from the ground up and you pray that your kids are seeing that and will do the same.
Speaker 1:It's instilling something in them, Even though it is hard right. I get a lot of why, mom, like, why, and I'm like well, you know, this is what it takes, like this is what it takes. So you learned that at like an early age. So take us to now. Like you're, you know, you graduated and you're ready to like hit the ground running professionally. So what kind of spurred you on to take on your own thing?
Speaker 3:I would say that when I think about the days where my kids are watching, the days that I love most when they watch are the days when I fail, and I think that's where a piece is. It's so important to allow your children to watch you fail and to watch you pick it back up, and that's what my parents did really well. They didn't. They never hit it from me, right. They shared it with me, they spoke with me about it, and so I have this piece within me that says you know all right, so failure is going to happen, no matter what. It's how you overcome it and how you move through it.
Speaker 3:So my career, my career journey, really started when I was an advisor's to several pension funds during the global financial crisis, and very early on in my career I had to report, or I would say I was given the opportunity to report the results coming out of the global financial crisis and as I was reporting, I was reporting to very large pension funds think of the state of Florida, calstrs, et cetera where you're watching, you're in the boardroom and you're presenting, and it almost, for me, turned to be like an out of body experience, because you're presenting the fact that their portfolio and their retirement funds had just decreased. You know 60, 70, sometimes 80%, and you're seeing the tears of these. You know these beneficiaries, these pensions, you know and you're feeling the energetically what's going on in the boardroom. And so, from then on, I knew that I was going to be very, very passionate about the institutional real estate industry, and I knew that that's where I would land and that's probably where I'll stay for some time.
Speaker 3:So, that being said, just using that experience, my business partner, jennifer Stevens, and I decided to create a firm called Alliance Global Advisors and we launched in 2020. And, really, the breadth and depth of our firm is to help investment managers better serve the investors and so that those investors don't have the type of experience that we witnessed in the global financial crisis the GFC, as I commonly refer to it as and so we've since, you know, been very grateful for the amount of growth that we've had within our organization. The investment managers show up and they really do want to do better by the investors, which I encourage us to keep growing and keep, you know, promoting our business and keep leaning into our business model, and the investors have turned back and been very grateful for what we brought to the industry as well.
Speaker 2:But okay, you just mentioned a pivotal point 2020,. You launched a company. Well, a lot of things hit the fan.
Speaker 1:Yes, right at that time. We just kind of skipped over that part.
Speaker 2:So what I love that you just said is you weren't as scared of failure, because I think the reason why most people don't enter into entrepreneurship is because of their afraid to fail right, and they're afraid to visibly fail. You know, one of the things that I love to do is I speak out what's going to happen when it hasn't happened yet, so that that way I'm held accountable to it. So if I fail, that means I gotta pick my pants back up and try again until I succeed right Power of manifestation Power of manifestation.
Speaker 2:So, because you weren't afraid to fail, you were okay with launching when a pandemic happened. So tell us how that worked.
Speaker 3:Well, my business partner and I, we joke about this story quite often, but we had prepared for our launch for several months.
Speaker 3:We had scheduled our launch mid-March, in 2020.
Speaker 3:And then, as we all know, the world shut down mid-March and we were trying to kind of culminate our thoughts and figure out, you know, do we go, do we wait?
Speaker 3:And you know, what we came to is that there was really gonna be no good time to launch. But what we didn't wanna come across is that we weren't being, you know, mindful of the hardships that the world was going through at that moment in time. So we tried to, you know, humbly, launch intentionally, launch with the intent to really, you know, do better and change the industry. And if it was a slow start, we were gonna be okay with that. So we figured, you know why not April 1st? So off we went and I'll say my favorite moment of that day there were many favorite moments of that day, but my favorite moment of the day was when I received an email and the email said I've never met you, I have no idea who you are or what you do, but any person that has the balls to launch in this type of environment, I want them to be my forever partner.
Speaker 2:I love it.
Speaker 3:And that was our first client.
Speaker 2:Amazing. Do you have that phrase?
Speaker 3:I know we're at work yeah absolutely Some people frame their first checks. Some people frame their first tax return, whatever it may be, but that is the email that Jen and I will forever be grateful for. Well, it shows that you I hate to say this that you've got.
Speaker 2:You know you've got some.
Speaker 3:I won't say the word but you know what I mean, yeah.
Speaker 2:You've got tenacity to go after and do that, and that's especially in the financial world. That's who you want to be aligned with, absolutely Right. So how do you juggle it all, heather? I mean to see, I mean, you're three beautiful kids. Before you came here, you said you were a chapel with your kiddos, like running an empire, and how do you do it all?
Speaker 3:Yeah, I think you know I will say most days it doesn't feel like I'm doing it all at, you know well, but it's once again you just you show people who you are and you show up as you are and I don't try to sugarcoat anything. So you know my teammates will call and I say, oh hey, I'm just. You know, I'm having a little bit of rough day today. Or let me call you back in 30 minutes when I, you know, drop the kid off at school or whatever it needs to be. And I think that that piece of what you know 2020 and this like exposure to humanity, that happened post 2020, I am very, very grateful as a mom and I'm very, very grateful as a business owner, because I will say, if I look back, as I was raising my children when they were very little, I don't think that transparency was as accepted as it is today.
Speaker 2:I agree, because we all got to see each other working at home.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it was great, everyone had a camera into your home through Zoom and so they saw it absolutely. I mean, whether you wanted them to or not. I mean your kids are popping up on the screen and interrupting things. I mean yeah.
Speaker 2:Before we figured out how you can have a virtual thing and find it too Right.
Speaker 1:Oh my kids would have figured out how to get through the virtual back, or sometimes you see the hand through the virtual back. That's always my favorite. Exactly, exactly.
Speaker 3:The little hand. That's a good point, though, yeah, so I think that's the piece where it just. It changed for me is that I was able to stop, or I just made a decision to stop. You know, hiding the mess right, and the mess and the chaos is just, you know, part of the life, and you know, I allow my partners to see it, I allow my teammates to see it, my business partner, jennifer Stevens. She's also a working mom, and so we just, you know, we talk through it and we talk through the voice. Is she local? She spends part of her time in Naples and then part of her time in Columbus, ohio. Okay, awesome.
Speaker 2:So how did you? Because partnerships are tough, right, I coach a lot of our agents that you know are interested in becoming a partner or our partnerships. So how did you guys find each other?
Speaker 3:Well, we had a similar experience at the consultant firm that I spoke with earlier. So we both started our careers there, so we had a very similar experience going into the little financial crisis and coming out of it. And then she stayed at Townsend for 17 years and then, when I started working in this capacity, I essentially kind of soft launched on my own and then thought, all right, who's the best and the brightest in the industry? And there was no doubt in my mind that it was Jennifer Stevens. And so I had several, you know, conversations with her and I definitely, you know, I did my best not to push, but I did all my manifestations and tried to attract the best talent. And that's when we came together and culminated Alliance Global Advisors. So, you know, we continue to work on our partnership. It's, you know, it's always a work of process.
Speaker 2:It's like a marriage right.
Speaker 3:It's a complete marriage. I have the utmost respect for her and I'm extremely grateful to work alongside her daily and she's I mean, she's truly just like an inspiring individual.
Speaker 2:So you know there's. You just said the most important thing you respect the heck out of her right. I feel like with any partnership, that's really it's opposite strengths and respect, because without those two things, nothing can come of it, right? What would you say, you know, in a partnership environment? What would you say are your strengths versus her strengths, ooh, or do you just combine together and conquer?
Speaker 3:Yeah, I would say we up and flow a little bit, you know, and one of the things I think we've learned from one another that has been really kind of changing and for me at least, is that I think it's so important to when you find yourself at a, you know, a challenging moment where we don't agree because we're two very different individuals but our values are very much aligned, yeah, we like come at it from a different angle, right, which is good yeah that's good.
Speaker 3:Whenever I find that we're kind of come at it across in the road, it's like I just have to sit back and take my time and think about, okay, her perception of the situation or how she's coming across it, and not try to, like egoically, go after it right, like just sit back and think, okay, well, this is how she's thinking about it, this is how I'm thinking about it, and try to find a way and find your common ground. And then, nine times out of 10, we just have a conversation and we get there pretty quickly.
Speaker 2:You know it's funny, our last episode was all about forgiveness and we talked about some of our strengths and our weaknesses, and one of my weaknesses is, you know, I'm an all in or all out person, right, and I like push and yeah and so, but going into this year that's one of the things that I've worked so hard on is just biting my tongue, looking at someone else's perspective and not just immediately shutting it down. Right, cause I'm gonna shut it down, move on, shut it down, move on. Which, at the end of the day, let's chat about that, cause that was something that I actually in my devotions this morning and made me reflect on the success that we have. Are you the type of person that honors the success or do you go done, move on to the next?
Speaker 3:I'm trying to get better at honoring right. It's hard right, I'm trying to get better at sitting at it. I mean, I do believe I have a lot of strength in the gratitude practice right, and that to me is honoring.
Speaker 2:Well, you're a yogi, aren't you?
Speaker 3:I'm a total yogi. I've been, you know, deep in my meditation practice lately. Um, I think the piece that that I have been trying to to change, that is not in my DNA, is like just this, this piece of attraction versus push, so like especially, you know, I talked about my childhood and it's like I was always told like you can have whatever you want, just go get it right.
Speaker 3:So you're doing and you go and you do, and you do when you do, and you on and on and on, um, and so the, the, the change that I'm allowing myself to experience, is more of just like the sitting back and receiving and attracting, and I've seen a vast difference in my life since I've kind of made that change. But if I um, don't think about it or don't honor it, I go back into the doing, doing doing pushing, pushing, pushing, pushing Right.
Speaker 1:So it is, it's awesome for others too, I think at some point. I mean, I would say a lot of successful people would say they like the checklist, they like doing there. There is something in like, inherent in in successful people, that that that likes the accomplishment and the moving forward and the caught. You know all that. So I think it is it is important to think about. Like you said, stop, reflect, let's think back at what we've done. Yeah, let's appreciate that. And then what you said, maybe even stop stop the pushing so much.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean the doing. It is I mean because you're always all right. I did that. Okay, great what's?
Speaker 1:next yeah.
Speaker 3:You know what I mean, like what's next versus this.
Speaker 2:It reflect gratitude and grow Cause I feel like the second. We show our gratitude and we digest it. Then we grow a little bit more as a person. But if we don't, if we just keep pushing, where's the growth opportunity? And so I I've been like trying really, really hard to you, and one of the things we talked about too is in the last episode is when you reflect and you forgive or you let go of things, it opens the door to receive.
Speaker 3:Absolutely, I have it. I think you can add on to it, as well as the fact that it's important to be mindful of you were, not, you are. You are a completely different person today, then you were yesterday. So so often we want to come from it at like the angle of we've always came from it, whereas you know, once we move through something we're, we're, we're completely different, um. So I think that opens and allows kind of more receiving um than your previous version of yourself too.
Speaker 2:A hundred percent agree. So you shared with us earlier kind of like what made you become this entrepreneur, right? Having these entrepreneurial parents and then the devastation of your brother and honoring him and pushing through Would you say right now that there's any other obstacles that you could say like? This point in my life shifted my mindset to get me to where I am today, and how did you overcome that Cause? That's what listeners are really like. You know they're in someone in it, right?
Speaker 1:now, yeah, what would you say to them? You know, like what has been helpful for you.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I mean, I guess I could just go back to my experience and like being a woman, especially in the real estate business, um, it's not, you know, that's a. It's a very male driven industry and I believe, you know, as women, we've done a great job um showing up, um, but it's still fairly male dominated, at least in my space and the institutional space as well. And so I think there are moments in my career where, you know, I just um would show up at the table and it was really interesting to me because a lot of times it was the women at the table that were not there to show up for one another. And so I think, if I, if I like, look back at my career and I think of these like pivotal moments, I think of, okay, like, from here on out, I just want to create a space to like lift one another up right, and not, um, you know, just like not not shut ideas down. And so that's where, if I kind of go back to my business, it's um, jen and I have like been really devoted to create diversity of thought within our organization, um, to create a platform for the individuals of growth, um, and I was listening to a woman speaker the other day at a conference and and one of the um audience members asked like okay, how do we like it?
Speaker 3:How do we promote our women within the industry? And she said, you know, like give them the pedestal, like give them a foundation, give them the microphone. And I think that's so important because, as women, we sometimes just kind of like allow one another to keep going, or she's got it. You know, I don't have to take care of her, whatever it may be. And I think, as you know, you grow your team and you think about how to do things differently than how they were done in the past and you talk about these like pivotal moments. These are just moments that I remember within my career and I remember thinking like I just want to do it differently. If I get the option to do it differently, I want to make sure that I'm giving them a path forward, I want to make sure that I'm handing off the microphone, I want to make sure that they see Leaders, community leaders.
Speaker 3:Yeah, absolutely yeah. And then that's, you know, that foundation then creates a larger foundation within your organization. Yeah, it's so important, yeah.
Speaker 2:I love that, you know. It brings me back to, you know, when I became a real estate broker in Naples, florida, you have to join a board, right. And I remember walking into that board and you know I don't really know anyone here. I had been a broker in Texas for, you know, 10 years and I built an incredible business there. But I'm walking into like a brand new space, right, and I walk into that room and I said, oh, you know, I'm here to be. You know you have to get ignited as a broker. And so I walk in and they said, oh honey, you are. The sales associates are meeting down the hall. And I said, no, no, no, I'm a broker. And they're like, yes, the broker associates are down the hall.
Speaker 3:And then they kind of moved to a little bit of a a little bit of like that condescending where you kind of make feel a little inferior.
Speaker 2:And then I said no, no, no, like I'm the big broker, like I'm the, I'm actually starting my own brokerage. And they literally looked at me and like giggled and laughed. And I remember sitting at a table all by myself in a very male dominated room and I made the choice in that moment that I was going to dominate, I was going to take that energy that they were giving me and prove them wrong, right, and I feel like those are those moments where you, you have a choice. You know you have a choice of whether or not you push and you go. And I had to put my big girl undies on, even though I was terrified and I knew I was going to fail, and I have failed multiple times. But I wouldn't be where I am today without all those failures. Right, and I hope my kids are watching and seeing us, you know, because my husband, I both fail all the time, but without failure you don't have growth, and so you know you have to do that. Well, we are so grateful that you joined us today.
Speaker 1:Thank you, this has been so great.
Speaker 2:So good, so good, so good. I appreciate you sharing with us and I'm so excited to watch the journey of your company just take over and help so many people and feel your passion. I appreciate it. Thank you, thank you, thanks, ladies, bye, bye, bye, bye.
Speaker 3:Bye, bye, bye, bye. Thanks for watching.
