She Lost Millions and Found Her True Calling: Amy Shippy

Warwick Fairfax:
Welcome to Beyond the Crucible. I’m Warwick Fairfax, the founder of Beyond the Crucible.

Amy Shippy:
When we lost our furniture business during the recession in 2012, I guess is when we ended up losing the business, we had held on for quite a while, hoping the recession was going to end, and it didn’t. I remember at that point being very angry. I was angry it had failed. We were very successful. We had three children when it failed, versus when we started, we had none. We were dating. And I remember being very angry and I remember just feeling broken. I felt so utterly shattered.

Gary Schneeberger:
Broken and shattered…familiar emotions after a crucible, especially one that forces you to start over after losing a multi-million dollar business. But start over is exactly what our guest this week, Amy Shippy, did and continues to do. She started four new businesses, including the one she says in her true calling to a life of significance, Lady BizWiz, where she helps female entrepeneurs tackel the unique challenges professional women face.

Warwick Fairfax:
So, Amy, it’s so wonderful to have you on the podcast. I love learning a bit about you and all of the things you’ve got going on. You’ve got the Lady BizWiz coaching, mentoring, consulting businesses, as well as a book that you wrote, The Lady Biz Quick Launch Guidebook: Taking Your Business from Concept to Market. Great idea. But you also are an entrepreneur, so you’ve got several businesses, which we’ll get into. Lottiebelle’s, Blue Poppy Designs, and Marche de Macarons, something?

Amy Shippy:
Perfect, yes.

Warwick Fairfax:
I did do a bit of French-

Amy Shippy:
You passed.

Warwick Fairfax:
… many moons ago in high school.
Which is wonderful, but before we get to that, I’d love to hear a bit about the backstory because you’ve been an entrepreneur probably your whole life. I think I read somewhere you grew up in Hilton Head but live in Savannah, so talk a bit about growing up. And were there seeds of that entrepreneurial spirit as you were growing up that led to who you are?

Amy Shippy:
Yeah, so I have been an entrepreneur my entire life. I grew up with entrepreneur parents and entrepreneur grandparents, so I would say that I’m a third-generation entrepreneur. I remember talking to my mom when I was about 12 years old to help me get together a lemonade stand that I could sell lemonade on the golf course in Palmetto Dunes.
Entrepreneurship is just something I’ve always done. I started my first real business, I would say, at 21 years old and went from there. And for the past 30-plus years, I have been basically an entrepreneur. So, I love creating something from nothing, which I think is really the defining definition of being an entrepreneur. You have an idea, and then how do you pull all the parts and pieces together to get something launched? Which really becomes the inspiration of my book that we talked about.
But Hilton Head is, especially in the ’80s, I’m going to date myself pretty easily, so the ’70s and ’80s, Hilton Head was a very small, mainly tourist-driven island. And so you got to meet a new group of people every week as they came in. And so I think that really honed a lot of the entrepreneurial spirit of being able just to talk to strangers, get to know people. My mom said I was the welcome wagon at five years old walking down the Hilton Head Beach and would greet every person on a towel and welcome them to the island, so I guess my whole life I’ve been a person who likes to engage with people. And that is part of, I think, a lot of what has made me successful as an entrepreneur.

Warwick Fairfax:
What’s interesting is some people grow up in families in which get a safe job. Many decades ago, IBM or whatever it was, General Electric gets one job, never leave. And if the kid said, “I’m thinking about starting a business,” they say, “Don’t. It could fail.” So, a lot of people are told, “Don’t even think about it.” But yet I’m sensing in your family, you didn’t get that message. It was like, it feels like entrepreneurial spirit was encouraged, because in many families, it’s try to scratch it out of you and, “Be sane. Don’t be a risk-taker because risky is not safe.” So, it sounds like you grew up in a very supportive environment in some ways.

Amy Shippy:
I do really truly feel that way. And it is, entrepreneurship is very risk-based. If you are very risk-averse, entrepreneurship is going to obviously be a hard peg to put into a square hole type of thing. But because my grandfather on my mom’s side, my grandfather on my dad’s side, my dad and my mom and my stepdad were all entrepreneurs, it was just always something that I watched people do that. So, it did not feel very risky. Did my parents always think every idea I had for a business was great? Well, they might poke holes. And they did.
My parents poke holes in everything I do, so don’t get the idea that they’re like, “Great, just go for it.” They would really put me a little bit through the wringer to make sure I had thought out the process, which I think is really, really important in the entrepreneurial path, is that you have somebody that’s just not telling you, “Go for it,” but really, with a discerning idea, wants you to look at that concept from multiple facets because that’s not traditionally what it is.
And then I met my boyfriend, who became my husband. We’ve been married for 26 years. And he did not really come from an entrepreneurial background at all. His parents were both school teachers, but he had this entrepreneurial spirit as well. And so he’s always super supportive of everything that I’ve done, and so we’ve been in many businesses together.
I had a lot of, I guess, affirmation and a lot of encouragement, and always have in being an entrepreneur. Not that they always thought it was great. When we went into our furniture business, my dad still ran credit cards on a machine and took his deposits up to the bank, and he’s like, “This World Wide Web thing is not going to go, Amy. That’s just got to be a flash in the pan. I don’t know what you mean taking credit cards over the phone. This is not going to work out.” And he was wrong. But anyway, it stuck around.

Warwick Fairfax:
That is so wonderful.
Talk about that first business, FurnitureBiz.com, because it was very successful, but yet it was challenging. That feels like a lot of what you do now comes out of the lessons learned and that experience, so talk about that journey. How did you found it? What made you think of doing that?

Amy Shippy:
So, it was really my second business. My husband, like I said, he was my boyfriend at the time, and my father had a furniture business in Alabama, so furniture was in a space that he really did understand outside of the whole World Wide Web thing, which he didn’t quite get at all. He really understood furniture. And I had worked at a furniture business right out of college selling sofas. That business had come up for sale. I was going to buy it, and then at the 11th hour, he ended up selling it to somebody else.
And then my husband, like I said, my boyfriend at the time, he was working at Havertys Furniture and we were truly on our way to where my dad had a vacation home in Florida and we had about eight hours drive. And Rob said, he goes, “Amy,” he goes, “I like the furniture idea. Your dad will get behind that. From a financing standpoint, he’ll help guarantee some of the funds for that.” Because he had already told me that he was going to guarantee the funds for the furniture business I ended up not buying. And that eliminated an obstacle because I didn’t have to really sell my dad on a concept that he wasn’t really familiar with.
And my husband’s like, “This ready-to-assemble furniture, it sells really great at Havertys.” It’s not really what Havertys sells, which is where he was working at the time, but they had another section that sold it. He’s like, “I think we could build a whole business out of selling ready-to-assemble furniture.” And so we talked it through on the eight-hour drive, and when we got down there, we pitched it to my dad, and he’s like, “I like that idea.”
And I was actually… One of the only two jobs I’ve ever had that have not been entrepreneurial at that time was working at Gulfstream Aerospace as a data analyst in engineering, and it was a pretty nice little job. And we got back from that and my dad’s like, “I think that’s great.” And a month later, I went to the bank and they wrote me a check. And I never thought funding could be so easy. And my dad’s like, “Yeah, funding’s only easy because it’s on me if you fail. And you’re coming to Alabama to work in my furniture store if you don’t make it.” And so huge incentive to make it work.
And so we took $50,000 and bought a bunch of ready-to-assemble furniture and hired actually a church youth group that was trying to raise money for a big mission trip they were going on. And so we had all these high school kids come in and assemble all of this furniture for us, and it helped fund 18 kids to go on this mission trip from what we paid them. And really, 30 days later, we were in the furniture business with the store.
And it was ups and downs, as all businesses do. And the fact that, like I said, he was my boyfriend at the time, there were those obstacles to overcome, and how did that work being my business? Because my dad had guaranteed it. We weren’t married, and what did that look like? And then working with your significant other is not always the easiest thing to do. But really, we started as a furniture store. It was a brick and mortar furniture store. It was 1997 when we started, and so the internet was really, really brand new. Amazon was coming online around that time. We really were not thinking about an internet business, but within a year, we did. It was a lot of work, but a lot of fun. I love the idea of working hard but seeing that payoff.

Gary Schneeberger:
It’s interesting to hear you talk, Amy, about having all the ups and downs because you said something that you’ve had all the ups and downs, but you said you’ve recovered from both. It’s an interesting perspective because at Beyond the Crucible, we talk all the time about recovering from crucibles, but it’s true, you can be successful, and there’s a little bit of recovery you have to do from that too, right?

Amy Shippy:
There is. When we launched our furniture business during the recession in 2012, I guess is when we ended up losing the business, we had held on for quite a while, hoping the recession was going to end, and it didn’t. And I remember at that point being very angry. I was angry it had failed. We were very successful. We had three children when it failed, versus when we started, we had none. We were dating. And I remember being very angry and I remember just feeling broken. I felt so utterly shattered.
And I remember I actually… Oddly enough, and I really do believe this was totally predestined and really how you don’t always have to overcome obstacles by yourself. These were obstacles that were overcome, and healing is not always something that happens because I wanted to be healed, because I always don’t know where that healing is going to come from. But about six months before our business failed, my in-laws had actually gone to a retreat. And it was a retreat that my husband and I had been invited on several times over the past probably six or seven years. We had always declined it because I was having a baby or it was just really not an opportune time to go.
My in-laws were really adamant when they got back, and so they actually signed us up for this retreat and paid for it and everything. They’re like, “You’re going. There’s no choice.” And our business goes out of business in August and the retreat is actually early October. And I spent most of September, to be honest with you, in the bed. I was just shattered. I was as shattered as you could be. And my husband went the previous weekend, and then I went. And I’m like, “Okay, well, I can go along to get along. They paid for it. I’ll go and do my thing.”
As you mentioned, I do have a background in religion and I’m very faith-based, but at this point, I was really not having much of it. And I’m there and I remember, and there was a moment that I think the Lord spoke to me and I said, “I’m not interested, really not interested in what You have to say. You have shattered me. I don’t have any interest. I’m hurt, I’m broken. I don’t know what to do.” And there was a moment in that conversation as I’m arguing, I’m arguing, I’m literally arguing with the Lord, and I said, “I don’t know what to do. You have thrown me and shattered me as far as the east is from the west, and I don’t know how to put myself back together.” And He said to my soul, He goes, “But I do. I know how to put you back together.” And I said, “I don’t believe you. I really don’t believe you. It doesn’t feel like you’ve got my best interest at heart.” And He goes, “But I know the plans I have.” And I’m like, “Yeah, great. Go sell that to somebody else.”
And there was that moment in that conversation of me being really defiant and not wanting to listen that He said, “If you will just lay your crown back at my feet, I will take care of this.” And it was so overwhelming to me that the next day I was at lunch, and still at this retreat thing that I’m going through the motions, and a gentleman sits next to me. And it’s really a fully women’s retreat, except for four men that are there as the spiritual leaders. And I’m sitting at this table and this gentleman sits next to me and he says, “Tell me your story.” And I’m like, “I don’t have any story to tell. I’m just here. My mother-in-law bought this and I’m here.” And he is like, “Well, I think you have a story because I’ve been watching your answers. You have more knowledge. Tell me your story.”
I’m like, “I really, dude, have no story. Thank you for sitting next to me. I’m sorry, I’m probably not the best. I’m just not in a good place.” And he says, “Well, let me tell you my story.” And he proceeds to tell me a story, and he turns out to be the chaplain of a hospital in Savannah. And he says, “I would love you to come and volunteer as a chaplain.” And I’m like, “Well, okay, great.” I’m going to go home from this, we all say things at retreats. I don’t know. I’m like, “Not really interested, but thank you so much.” And he says, “No, here’s my card. I want you to come.” It took me about two weeks when I got back from that retreat. And it was uplifting, but your world goes back to the world when you get home. Nothing had really changed.
And so two weeks I drive around in my car and the Lord keeps saying, “Make the call, Amy. Make the call.” I’m not interested? Really? What if it was just platitudes? Really couldn’t take any rejection right now. And He says, “Make the call.” And I made the call and he says, “What’s taken you so long? It’s taken you two weeks. We’ve been waiting for your call.” And three days later, I started as a chaplain. And what I got to see in that time is I had this obstacle, this brokenness, and it was real. It was a real true brokenness as anybody suffering brokenness has. It’s a real brokenness. And it really doesn’t matter if that brokenness is financial or that brokenness is in death or loss of a loved one. Loss is loss and brokenness is brokenness.
And I started volunteering at the hospital. It was a job I had. I had no job. I had nothing. And I got to sit with people facing other obstacles that were much more unrecoverable than mine, because I sat there when they turned life support off on loved ones. And those are not recoverable. Those people have gone and they’re not coming back. And I got to see over the eight months that I did that, the obstacle that I had, which was a real loss, was an obstacle that I believed that I could overcome. And so what it showed me is that obstacles happen and recovery is necessary. And for me, submitting was necessary.
But when I got on the other side and opened my macaron business, which was nine months later from the time that I lost my business I opened my macaron business, it wasn’t a long time, that what He said was true. “I’ll put you back together.” And He put me back together one patient at a time in a hospital while I sat in the gap of some really devastating losses. And it was an honor to sit in that gap. And a lot of that gap was built in silence. There were no words. There are no words that will help people in pain a lot of times. But what it showed me is that I wasn’t a one-trick pony in the business world. The things that were part of me generationally or who I was didn’t die with that business. It was there for me to take and grab ahold of if I was willing to take the risk again.

Warwick Fairfax:
So, Amy, talk a bit about that brokenness because that whole Furniture Biz, it seems like it’s a great idea and you’ve got Ikea and a whole bunch of others now that are ready-to-assemble furniture and they look pretty good. And certainly back in the day, I’ve assembled a lot of Ikea and some other things, as we all have. So, it sounds like there was maybe frustration, maybe anger, so talk a bit about that brokenness. I don’t know if there was identity wrapped in there, but before we talk about how you came back from it and maybe how the Lord helped heal you, put you back together again, talk a bit about that brokenness and why you felt… Anybody’s going to feel bad if a business fails, but everybody’s different. Why was it so bad for you? Or what are the elements of brokenness that you felt you had to deal with?

Amy Shippy:
Well, there was a lot of pride in that. We had started this business with $50,000 and we had grown it to about $14 million a year in sales. I was a multimillionaire by the time I turned 30. There was a lifestyle that we had built. We had plans that we were raising our children with these ideas and these resources. And I took a lot of pride in what we did. I took a lot of pride in our success. There was a lot of pride about that.
And so to a lot of degree, I identified a lot with the business. And when the recession came, I had actually been staying at home for a number of years. Like I said, I had three children. And so my husband really ran the day-to-day business and I oversaw the finances and oversaw the trends and things like that. And then when my husband said, “The recession is hitting us. You need to come back and you need to put your brain behind this and see if you can save this.” And so I went back to work, and I did it for two years and I lost about 40 pounds in the process. I felt like I lost half my hair. Just the stress of it all. I was up at 4:00 in the morning.
And so I had fought. I had fought for two years, and I would think that I was going to get on the other side of it. I remember thinking at the time that if I ever do write a book about this, and I do feel like that one day will happen, it’s called Holding My Breath. I felt like I would be pushed under and I would be held there until I was about out of oxygen and I would just have enough reprieve, like I was going to fix this, to get a big gulp of oxygen only to be shoved back down again. And furniture was just very much tied to lending and housing. And people weren’t moving. They weren’t opening offices. So, those are a lot of what we saw, and so it just wasn’t going away.
So, I was beat up pretty good by the time that I said I couldn’t fix it. And I remember my husband walking in the bedroom about three weeks and he’s like, “You’ve had three weeks. Get over this. We’ve got to get back into it. You’ve got children. We’ve got a world. You’re done. You’ve had enough time to sulk about it.” And I didn’t feel like there was enough time. I didn’t think it was quite enough time.
But in the end, I think when you are suffering with brokenness or devastation or these things that cause you pain, I do think, at least for me, it was helpful to have a spouse that said, “You know what? We’re not being defined by this. You’re not going to be defined anymore by your successes, and you’re going to be defined by your failures, Amy. You’re defined by who you are intrinsically you, and you’re going to have successes and you’re going to have failures, but if we measure who you are based on either of those things, then I think you’re really limiting who you are.”

Warwick Fairfax:
What was some of those key early lessons in which you rewired your brain and psyche to think differently next time you’re going to launch a business?

Amy Shippy:
I really can’t really give myself credit for rewiring anything. I think when I had that moment where I was just defying God, I just was truly just saying no. I have a degree in religion, so I know all of the things. And that’s what He kept saying to me. He goes, “You know all the things. You know all the words. You could quote them back to me.” And He goes, “They’re all in your head.” He goes, “But somehow they’re just not in your heart anymore.” And I said, “I get it.” I really was utterly argumentative and was equally mad at him, if not more mad at him than anybody else. I felt like he had…
And so I tried to bargain. I did. I did a bargaining plan with him and I said, “God,” I said, “I’ll believe You if You’ll light the path and give me stadium lighting with all… So I see that there’s no bumps in the road. And if You’ll do all of this for me, I will do what You’re asking.” And He’s like, “I’m not going to.” He goes, “I’ll give you a light before the next step.” He goes, “I’ll let you know that the next step is solid.” He goes, “But I’m not going to do that.” And I’m like, “But that’s not what I’m asking.” He said, “But I’m not doing that.” He goes, “But I will fix it.” And it’s not fixed. I really wish He’d fix it in the same success that I’d had prior. It’s been a much slower build. I make a good living out of what I do. It’s not the living that I made before. But He was true.
And so what I really learned was I like having all the answers. I do. But I don’t. And I sometimes just have to trust Him that the process is going to be the process. And I’ve been equipped with the skills and knowledge that I have, and if I just sometimes let the process do, it works out. And so when I’m having a bad day, and I still have days that I don’t… I’m busy, and 90% feels like it falls my way. I’m going, it’s like 90% falls in line, and then 10% doesn’t. And sometimes that 10% doesn’t, and I get in my car and I talk about this with a lot of women business owners, I said, “I get in my car and I cry.” And I’m not a crier. If I start crying in front of my husband, he’s going to buy me flowers. It’s really [inaudible 00:24:53]. He’s like, “I don’t know what to do with you. You don’t cry, so what’s going on?” He gets very scared.
And I said, “Well, I don’t cry. I don’t cry really in front of people.” And I said, “But sometimes I cry, and I get in my car and I drive and cry and drive and cry and drive and cry.” And then eventually, I get to the end of that road of how many tears I can shed, and then I turn the car around. And when I turn the car around, it’s time to get back to business. And so what I tell myself all the way back, depending on how long I’ve driven, all the way back, I tell myself, “You know what, Amy? You hit it pretty much 90% of the time. That’s a good average. You win more than you lose.” And I reaffirm myself on the way back that says, “You know what? You have this. You’ve gone down failure, you’ve survived it, you’ve reinvented. You’ve got this.”
But I also very much am a strategic planner. So, for my business, I set goals usually from mid-December to mid-January. I go through my goals for the next year. I set yearly goals and I break that down. And when I work with women in business or really anyone in business, I do talk about setting very achievable goals because I believe if you set a goals that you can achieve in quick succession, it creates a dopamine drop that keeps you building a momentum. And that momentum does take you through.
So, I’m not that ethereal. I really do have… And I keep them on my phone. My cell phone, in the notes I have, “I want to make X amount of dollars. How many tumblers is that? How much is that going to make me? How many do I need to do?” So, I’m really very, very strategic about that because I’m really, at the end of the day as a business person, I want to make a profit. I’m very, very intentional. And when something doesn’t work, I think we can blame a lot of people for a lot of things, but I don’t think we have real change until we look in the mirror and see what we added to the pot that created what we create.

Warwick Fairfax:
Yeah, that’s so well said. Talk a bit about how that’s led you to do what you do now. And you have a lot of interesting businesses, Lottiebelle’s, Blue Poppy Designs, Marche de Macarons. And maybe one of the things that’s really on your heart is working with women in business, Lady BizWiz. How did that all end up there? Because it seems like you have so many lessons, life lessons that yet you’ve got to do the blocking and tackling of goals and metrics and numbers, as we do at Beyond the Crucible, but then not tie your identity to what you do because inevitably there’ll be obstacles you couldn’t possibly have foreseen. And maybe-

Amy Shippy:
There are.

Warwick Fairfax:
… there’ll be obstacles you should have seen and didn’t. Maybe that’s the 10%, is like, man, how could I have missed that one? I guess I must’ve been asleep that day. So, stuff’s going to happen.

Amy Shippy:
Stuff always happens. To answer that question, I’m very fortunate that I have a group of women entrepreneurs that I will go to. If this is a problem I can’t solve it, I don’t know why I can’t solve it, and I’ll call. And they’re like, “Well, have you thought about it this way?” And I’m like, “Nope, never thought about it that way.” And I’m like, “But that’s all a really good way to think about it.”
Sometimes you just can’t see the forest through the trees. That saying is true because you’re so ground in to what you want to do and how you saw it happening. So, that, I think, is what has inspired my passion to working with women in business is because they want to be at the five-year mark in their business image-wise, branding, look, feel, sales, but they don’t want to go through month one. They want to get to year five. And I’m like, “Do you know how many times I’ve changed my logo over the years? Do you know how many times I’ve changed my packaging over the years?” I couldn’t afford the packaging I have now when I first started. I wanted to make a profit and I didn’t want to have a lot of debt. When you look at me in the five-year market, that is not what it looked like at the one-month mark.
And so people get hung up on this vision that they want to have, and I’m like, “Well, let’s make it the vision of actually becoming profitable. So, let’s look at what your startup costs are. How many of your widget do we need to sell till you break even? And then how many of those widgets do we need to sell a month broken down by the week so your business funds sell?” And I said, “And maybe we can’t afford the marketing that we want right now, but what are some marketing options that we can do that are free? And you can’t afford the packaging that you eventually want, but what can we package in now that gets you off to the races?”
I do have multiple businesses. They were not started at the same time. That’s the other thing people think, they’re like, “Well, you just started three businesses.” And I’m like, “No, I didn’t have triplets.” No. I said, “I waited for each one to be potty-trained before I got to the next one.” I have triplets. My husband will take me on vacation for a week and I’ll come up with five businesses, and then that’s how I am. Most of those do not come to fruition, but I love business ideas and breaking it down and solving the puzzle.
But the macarons came out of my time as a chaplain. I was working as a chaplain. I thought I was actually going to go back and apply to get my Masters of Divinity, and I really felt like the Lord was calling me to be a chaplain. I was like, okay, well, here You are. You destroyed me, put me back together again, and I’m going to be a chaplain. Because it was just an amazing opportunity and I felt so successful at doing it. I don’t know if that’s even a right word to use with chaplaincy, but I felt like it was just so intrinsically part of who I was to be able to sit in this gap with people. And so I really thought that’s what I was going to do. Yay, I’m not going to be an entrepreneur anymore. I’m going to go get a job and I’m going to go be a chaplain.
And six months into that, my best friend wanted to do a cookie swap party, and she’s like, “What cookie are you going to make?” I’m like, “I don’t know.” I’m like, “I think I’ll do this.” And then truly three days before the event, I hadn’t made any of the cookies. I decided to make French macarons because I found them on a food blog and whipped up, didn’t really know that you really can’t whip up macarons, but I did. I whipped up 200 of them. Didn’t know that was challenging. I now have failed every which way possible to making macarons, but my first 200 French macarons turned out beautifully. Didn’t know that there was any trouble in making them, and there’s all kinds of problems in making them. And everybody at this cookie swap party wanted to know about these silly little cookies. And the irony is, I don’t even think I had one. I don’t actually eat sweets. I have no sweet tooth really whatsoever.
But 90 days later, my best friend’s, like, “I think we could do a cookie business.” 90 days later, we were in the cookie business. With $800. We started that whole business with $800. And we found there was just some, I think, divine opportunities that opened up. And that’s another thing I talk about with women and really anybody, not necessarily just in business, but overall, is are you looking for opportunities? You would be amazed on how many opportunities present themselves that you’re not even aware of them being an opportunity because you’re scared to say yes to an opportunity.
And so this opportunity came up and we opened the business. And I took that $800, and inside of three years, we were at $350,000 in sales, which is a lot of $2 cookies. That’s a lot of cookies. And it just reaffirmed that the knowledge and the skills that I had were not built around that business that had failed. They still were with me. I think if you’re a writer, which I’m not, I think if you’re a writer and you have a book that doesn’t do well, it doesn’t mean that you’re not a great writer. It just maybe means that it just wasn’t the right timing for the book or whatever. So, if you’re good at something and you feel passionate about it, I think you should go for it, even if it doesn’t work out exactly the way you thought it was.
But yeah, the business, I think at the end, God shared with me that I’m an entrepreneur. That is my DNA. It is so intrinsically who I am that to go to not do what I do and what I love would’ve made me not as happy long-term. But I will forever be thankful for that season of sitting at that hospital and having the opportunity. It healed me. I tell people, I said, “I got healed in a hospital, but I wasn’t sick, not with cancer or anything else. I was sick in my soul. I was in this time of brokenness.” And it was in that hospital that God Himself, the great physician that He is, healed me back together. So, I do tell people, I said, “I got healed in a hospital, but I wasn’t sick in the traditional way.”

Warwick Fairfax:
So, what’s interesting to me is you have these businesses that you found and do, but you’re not just a business owner. You’re also a coach, a consultant, an advocate for women entrepreneurs in particular. That feels a little different in the sense that you feel a calling to help other business owners, particularly women. How did that come about? Because you could have just kept founding businesses and that’s who you are, but it feels different. It feels like there’s a particular calling here.

Amy Shippy:
It is, and it’s actually the desire of my heart. The desire of my heart is actually to scale my two businesses that I own into an exit strategy in the next few years and do Lady BizWiz for the rest of my life. I feel very passionately about business, obviously. And a lot of people who do consulting come out of the corporate world where they’ve worked in corporations and then they’re like, “Well, I’ve worked in corporations I know.” And I’m like, “Well, I’ve never worked in a big corporation. I build corporations, and so I can tell you exactly what it is.”
But what I find particular about working with women in business is… Actually, I was talking with a lady. I’ll give this as a great example. It’s not my example. It’s another lady’s example. And she said, so she goes, “Here’s the difference between men and women.” She goes, “Men can look at a job posting and they can fill in 50% of the qualifications. They’re like, ‘I’m good for that job,’ and they’ll apply for it. Women can look at the same posting, and if they don’t hit 100% of the qualifications, a woman is not going to apply for that job.”
As women, we want to be 100% qualified. And it’s just a mentality. It’s not a right or wrong mentality. It’s just the way that men and women look at obstacles and opportunities. And then women in particular take things a lot more personal than men do. So, when I have a thing that didn’t go my way, I’ll talk to my husband about it, he’s like, “You’re just taking it too personal.” Now, that usually starts an argument in our household because I’m like, “Well, just hear me out.” As husbands, it’s not the best thing to say to your wife. It’s not like my husband tells me to calm down. That also doesn’t work, but-

Warwick Fairfax:
Yeah, do not say that, no.

Amy Shippy:
Do not say that. But women do take things personally because we do take a miss as a personal failure. Women, especially in this day and age, do feel like we’ve got to be it all. We’ve got to be in the marketplace, we’ve got to be in the household, we’ve got to be in the parental role. And so that’s a lot of pressure on women.
And so when I speak to women entrepreneurs especially, which is what has really driven the passion behind it, is I’m like, “Yeah, you really don’t need to have 100% of the skills. We can develop some of those skills.” And I said, “Really, maybe 100% of those skills are not even needed in the business idea that you have. Maybe only 60% of them.” But unless you get off the bench and into the game, all you can do is talk about it. And if you really are serious about a business and I think it’s a valid idea… If I think it’s a valid. If I don’t, I will tell them. I will say, “I don’t think you’ve really thought about this that well.” Or, “My marketing strategy was going to post it on Facebook.” I’m like, “Not really a great marketing strategy. You’re not going to get a lot of… Unless you got a huge following, it’s not really that effective of a strategy.”
But what I can also tell women is, “That doesn’t mean anything. We can talk about strategies that will work. What are you good at? What are you not good at? Are you a people person? Are you not a people person?” All these things can run successful businesses, but how can we leverage your business with your personality style to get you off the bench and get you into the game of being an entrepreneur basically at step A? We can talk about five-year goal, but if we can’t get through one-month goal, six-month goals, and one-year goals, we never get to five-year goals. So, what can we set here that does not require… Don’t typically recommend, most people I work with, to take out large amounts of loans. That’s just an albatross. Those banks want that money back, whether your idea takes off or not. So, how can we scale this small to get you into the marketplace? How can we look at your margin? And things like that.
I started working with SCORE, which is a nonprofit mentoring nationwide program, I think it’s a fabulous program, several years ago. And as much as I love what it does, it was all free mentoring. And what I found is when things were free for people, there wasn’t always an intrinsic sweat equity value to it because it was free, so it cost them nothing whether to take the advice or not take the advice. But I did talk to… And 68% of their clients were female business owners. And actually, I think 73% of them were minority business owners. And there’s a big need for minority and women business owners to make it in the industry, and so I love working with both.
But I do feel very passionate, I do feel like it’s a total mission for me to break down business into easily digestible chapters, so to speak. I was telling Gary about that this morning. I read. I read a ton. And my children especially love when I can get a hold of a 1,400-page book that’s going to keep me occupied for at least two weeks. And my kid’s like, “How do you read a 1,400-page book?” And I’m like, “One page at a time.” It doesn’t matter how long the book is, if it’s a good story, it can go on for a while.
And that’s what I try to tell women about business. Business at its very basic is what is your input? What is your startup going to cost? What is your widget? How many of those widgets do you need to sell to make back your startup costs? How do you reinvest that? And then how do you continue to build those blocks and then develop and grow your company as it goes? And I try to take a lot of the fear out of it for women because women are, for the most part, rather fear-based. And not so much fear-based of… Well, we don’t like failure. That’s the truth. And our society doesn’t really applaud failure. We’ve been so ashamed in mom failure and things like that, so those are just all core languages about women.
But I truly think that women truly have some of the best, especially product ideas. Some of the best products came from women because they found a hole in their home life that they needed a product that didn’t exist one, and so they created one to make household stuff easier or raising children, or the lady who started Spanx. It was a hole in the market. And so I think women have great ideas. I just think that their confidence tends to hold them back.
And so what I do with Lady BizWiz is I’m not a rainbow and unicorn coach. I really want you to be successful, and so I really do the deep dive into how do you know your numbers? And so the master class I put together, we build out when you finish, you have a fully built-out business plan, because I think a lot of people don’t understand the importance of a well-thought-out business plan, again, from all the facets, helping women create a solid foundation for their business. Because I think the foundation of most businesses are about the same. The walls is where I think the differences come in based on what they’re selling, technology, things like that. Everybody has to have a marketing plan. Everybody has to have startup costs. Everybody has to understand how to price their product. Everybody has to understand how they’re going to source their product or their ingredients or whatever. Those are all intrinsic across the board, so I work with taking the mystery out of some of that so it really doesn’t seem something that’s nearly as scary as women want to make it out to be.

Warwick Fairfax:
What’s interesting, Amy, about what you said is you deal with the practical side with women entrepreneurs. Have a plan, one goal at a time, let’s look at marketing, let’s look at financing. But then you deal with the inner challenges. You got it, there’s the practical, which is incredibly important, but then there’s the inner fear. If I don’t have it 100% sorted out, then maybe I shouldn’t try. And I imagine too, it’s easy to be very negative. “Oh, gee, why can’t I be more objective as my husband or some guy and not take thing so personally?” You could go down that list, but I’m sure you probably go down the other list, which is women have some qualities that many men don’t have.

Amy Shippy:
Absolutely.

Warwick Fairfax:
There’s a lot of men that aren’t very empathetic, that aren’t very discerning. It’s like he seemed like a nice guy to me. It’s like, “Nice guy? Come on, didn’t you see the signals? Come on, the guy’s seen as a creeper. What’s your problem?” Or men can get very competitive. Competition is okay, but it can get in the way of common sense. Does it matter who wins in the meeting? Let’s just get something done and cooperate.
So, there are qualities that women have that men could learn a lot from women. So, it’s easy to look at the glass half-full, but I’m guessing with women, you do the practical marketing, but you also tell them, “Yes, I realize there may be some things that you, Woman A, might feel like you wish you were a bit different than maybe some men you know.” But maybe there’s some qualities are not… They’re underrating the qualities that many men don’t have, if that makes sense.

Amy Shippy:
I think they do underrate themselves. And we aren’t a one-sided thing. We have two sides. As much as I love the logical side of things, I’m equally an artist, and so I feed both of those parts of me constantly, because when those both are running at about 50/50, I am the happiest. So, we are not a flat object. And when you look at both, the business needs the foundation, it does, but if you neglect who you are where you’re not firing on your greatest strengths, whatever they are, you’re not going to be a happy person. And I think that you can take whatever your strengths are and you can put those into your business. You don’t have to take what my strengths are. You need to take what your strengths are.
To your point, God didn’t make a mistake when He made you. He made you exactly the way you were. How can we leverage all of these good things that you already are, if you want to be an entrepreneur, into being the best entrepreneur you can be? And so we are multifaceted, and that’s the beauty of what we are. And you do need to take counsel. Scripture’s clear about that. And get other sides. It’s not the Amy train necessarily. But no, I think we’re absolutely perfectly and beautifully and wonderfully made, and we have to care for both sides of that. And I think that’s who makes the best business people.

Gary Schneeberger:
This is the perfect time, folks, to both ask a question I’m about to ask, but also to point out that sounds you heard was the captain turning on the fasten seatbelt sign. We’ve begun the descent to end our conversation. We’re not there yet. Before we get there though, Amy, I would be remiss if I did not give you the opportunity to let listeners and viewers know how they can find out more about you, your businesses, and your coaching that you do with Lady BizWiz. How can they find you on the World Wide Web?

Amy Shippy:
So, you can find me on Instagram, @lady.bizwiz is my Instagram handle. You can find me at Lottiebelle’s, which, if you like candy pecans or iced teas, it’s my pecan and tea company, and it’s @lottiebellesga on Instagram. Lottiebelles.com, ladybizwiz.com, and then Blue Poppy is bluepoppydesigns.com and @bluepoppydesigns on Instagram. All my social media are basically what my company’s names are. And so we do from the design, the pecan stuff, we do corporate gifting and we can take care of any kind of gifts and things like that. That’s what that is. And if you want to work with me, if you’re finding obstacles in your business and you want to have help with that or you want to take the masterclass, all of that can be found on ladybizwiz.com. You can take the masterclass. You can work one-on-one with me. I am very small business-friendly in my pricing because I want to be accessible to everybody, so I’m not a really expensive coach to work with. I just really believe in getting people off the bench and into the game of business.

Gary Schneeberger:
Aren’t you glad, folks, that there’s a rewind button that you can go back?

Amy Shippy:
Sorry.

Gary Schneeberger:
Because there’s a lot. No, there’s a lot of really good stuff that Amy just spoke about, so please rewind and get all of those URLs so that you can find out more about the fascinating stuff that she’s doing and that we’ve talked about here.
Speaking of fascinating stuff, Warwick, I know you have a question or two, and I’ll turn it back over to you.

Warwick Fairfax:
So, Amy, there might be a business person, a woman in business, entrepreneur, and maybe today might feel like their worst day. They’ve been where you were, they’ve lost the business, they’re angry at themselves, God, whoever’s up there, maybe everybody they know, everybody they’re in business with, family, kids, maybe a big long list and they’re frustrated and maybe they’re saying, “You know what the lesson is? I should never have gotten out of bed. The smart play is don’t try, because then you won’t fail.” So, for the entrepreneur, the women entrepreneurs who had some failure, what would a word of heard be to that person who might feel like this is all too hard, I’m just staying in bed, because that way, I won’t fail?

Amy Shippy:
I know how you feel. I know that that morning that you don’t want to get up, you just don’t want to face the day feels so insurmountable to you. And I’ve been there. I haven’t wanted to get out of bed. I just didn’t think I was worth enough and I just didn’t think I had anything to offer. But I will tell you this, that is a lie. That is not who you are. That is not what you bring to this world.
And so if you are feeling that way, please talk to somebody. You are not alone. And this loneliness and this brokenness that you feel, it is not permanent. Maybe it’s how you’re feeling right now, but it is not a permanent feeling. So, get up, stand up, put one foot in front of the other, and just take a deep breath. You have succeeded in your life. If you’ve gotten here, you’ve succeeded more than you failed. So, hold on to that. On those days that I do not feel like enough, that is what I reach into. Somebody loves you. Somebody feels that you are precious to them. And if you cannot name that person, the Lord Himself says that you are worth getting out of the bed for today.
I am sorry that you are feeling like that is just something that you don’t have the energy for, but I’m here to tell you that you are not alone. You are not the only person that have felt that way. I have felt that way, and I have been able to overcome because people and things that were bigger than me said that I could. And you can too. And I am so sorry you’re feeling that way, but please do not feel defeated in that. Life has a lot in store for you.

Gary Schneeberger:
Folks, I’ve been in the communications business long enough to know when the last word’s been spoken on a subject, and it was just spoken evocatively with an exclamation point by our guest, Amy Shippy.
Warwick, we just wrapped a conversation with truly, I say this all the time, I’m like a broken record, but it’s true, a fascinating guest, Amy Shippy, who had both a pretty tough crucible but then had a tremendous bounce back, and she’s living now a tremendous life of significance. Lots of things that we could talk about there. What are one or two things that you think that folks should focus on in this episode?

Warwick Fairfax:
We talk a lot about crucibles and people’s worst day, but this is an interesting example of a business failure. Amy Shippy was somebody that was spectacularly successful. She grew up in an entrepreneurial environment, parents are entrepreneurs, grandparents. It seemed like every relative she had was entrepreneurial in a sense, which is amazing. She got a lot of encouragement.
She started this furniture business, I think in the late ’90s, a business that was, back before it was that common, packaged furniture, which you put together once you got it. And then the internet came along in the late ’90s and it was very successful. But then around 2012, the recession came and the business went under. And in a sense, at least for a while, it almost broke her. She was almost at a point where literally she couldn’t get out of bed. She was angry at, well, probably everybody. Her husband was in the business, everybody from herself, husband, God. She’s a person of faith. Just angry, frustrated.
And it sure seemed like she had her identity and success just wrapped up in what she did, so she had to unlearn all this. And she’s always going to be an entrepreneur, but I think she’s learned some powerful lessons of not to tie up who you are in what you do. I think one of the things we all have to learn is who we are is more than our worst day. It’s more than how much money we have or how big a house we have or how successful our business is. It’s about our characters, who we are as human beings, from my perspective, created by God.
That’s something that Amy had to learn. And it was fascinating, one of the biggest ways she learned that is she was at a retreat that her in-laws had signed her up for before the company went under, before this furniture business went under. She’s at this retreat six weeks, I think, before the company would go under. And she met some guy that was a chaplain in hospitals and he said, “Well, why don’t you join me?”
Well, eventually, not that long after her business went under, she did. And she realized when you’re talking to folks there at the hospital, some are about to suffer permanent loss. Their loved ones are about to die. There’s no coming back from that, at least not in this world. And so she realized she suffered loss, but it wasn’t permanent loss. And she was grappling with what she should do in life, and should she be a chaplain? And I think in not so many words, it felt like the Lord’s saying, “No, I made you to be an entrepreneur and you need to keep going at it.” Her husband encouraged her. So many things that you do succeed. Does everything work? No, things happen, but let’s get back out there.
And really, that time in that hospital, just seeing people with permanent loss, she was able to get back at it. And she has started a lot of successful businesses. Her macaron business started not that long after her furniture business failed, and then she has other businesses, Blue Poppy Designs, Lottiebelle’s. And they may not be as successful in terms of dollars as the previous business, but they make for a very comfortable living. And now, she’s able to do what she’s so passionate about in Lady BizWiz, which is, she said this is really her calling. She enjoys the businesses that she’s in. She said she’ll like to get out of them at some point, sell them.
With Lady BizWiz, she comes alongside women entrepreneurs and gives them the practical skills of how to create a business plan, a marketing plan, how to work on one step at a time, rather than focusing on what’s it all going to look like in five years. “Okay, let’s just try to get to step one, make it profitable. Let’s not worry about five-year packaging that you don’t have the money for. Let’s focus on what you can do now.” And she gives them a lot of very practical advice, but from her perspective, women can have a lot of self-doubt and fear. And she gives a very good example of saying with men, if they have 50% of the qualifications for a business, they’ll apply. With women, if they don’t have 100% of the qualifications, they won’t apply. That’s her perspective on women in business. So, she’s trying to help them understand you don’t have to have 100% of everything all together, just if you’ve got enough for step one, start.
So, she gives them both practical business advice as well as spiritual and just really sole advice to help them be the best they can be. And so this is really her calling and help overcome fear. She’s learned so much. And she may not be as successful as she was before in terms of dollars, but in terms of life success, separating your identity from what you do, loving the businesses she has, really enjoying and thriving at helping other women business owners be successful, she is, I would say, more successful in the full meaning of that word. Success in terms of life, spiritual success, business success in the terms of enjoying what she’s doing. Maybe less dollars, but she is loving life and really, in particular, loving helping other women business owners be successful and learning to just take it one step at a time. So, she’s really thriving in all senses of that word.

Gary Schneeberger:
Yeah. We say it all the time. This is a big spotlight example of it didn’t happen to her, it happened for her, her business failing, because there’s ebullience in the way that she talks about it. She’s energetic, she’s happy, she’s clearly living her calling, and that’s obvious. And that’s something that awaits everybody if we bounce forward from our crucibles.

Warwick Fairfax:
Well said.

Gary Schneeberger:
And that, folks, is a perfect place to end this week’s episode. Until next time when we are together, please remember, we know crucibles are hard. We’ve been through them, but we also know they’re not the end of your story. In fact, they can be the beginning of a brand new story that leads you to the best destination you can possibly get to, and that is a life of significance.
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