Business Growth: How Integrators Can Transform Your Vision into Reality with Ashley Connell

Brent Peterson (00:02.35)
Welcome to this episode of Uncharted Entrepreneurship. Today I have Ashley Connell. She is the CEO and founder of Prowess Project. Ashley, I don't know why I'm having a hard time with that. Go ahead, do an introduction for yourself. Tell us your day -to -day role. Make sure that I've said everybody's name right and your company name, and then maybe give us one of your passions in life.

Ashley Connell (00:28.369)
I love it. Well, first, Brent, thank you so much for having me and you got it right, Prowess Project, all about the skills. So hi everyone, I'm Ashley. As Brent said, CEO and founder of Prowess Project, my day today as the CEO is really looking at the resources that I have, time.

people and money and putting them in the places in the business where I get the most leverage so that we can make the most impact and reach our goals. And then my passion, that's such a good question. I was a yogi for years and then COVID hit and it just didn't have the same vibe doing yoga at home. So I hadn't done it, you know, for probably four years and I'm just now getting back into it and y 'all.

I feel bendy, I feel calm, I feel collected, centered. So good.

Brent Peterson (01:27.566)
Wow. So one of my, I don't know, can you have yoga heroes? So a yoga by Adrienne, she's in Austin and I was injured a couple of years ago. I run and I did yoga every day. I have a running streak. So I did a yoga streak. I should have been running, it doesn't matter, but I did a, I did the yoga by Adrienne every morning. And it really helped. I got, you know, I think as.

Ashley Connell (01:33.073)
Yeah! She is.

Brent Peterson (01:54.958)
Especially if you're a runner and as an older runner, you get very inflexible. Like my hips are super tight all the time and blah, blah, blah. So it's such, I should just always do it.

Ashley Connell (02:05.745)
It's truly life changing. Like it has been so amazing. And it's fascinating too from probably five years ago when I was really into it to now I'm like, that used to not hurt. I used to be able to stretch a little bit further than this. So getting back into it's been challenging but fun all the same.

Brent Peterson (02:21.998)
Yeah.

Brent Peterson (02:31.502)
All right, and this has never happened before. But before I tell you this, we're gonna do the free joke project, but my dog is right outside the door and he is wanting to come into the office. And I'm here by myself, so I gotta let him in. This has never happened, but hold on one second. Maybe I'll edit this out later, we'll leave this time. I'll put some music in.

Ashley Connell (02:37.777)
Okay.

Ashley Connell (02:41.937)
Get him in here! Yes! Get him in here!

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

No, don't! This is good!

Brent Peterson (02:57.22)
he's just gonna sit outside the door. All right, there we go. Now he can move in and out. I have a project called the, I'm doing this project on Instagram called the Jack Russell Project. And every day this year, I've been doing a different artist and I do their most famous painting with a Jack Russell in the painting. So my favorite has been Frida Kahlo and I have the two Fridas with a Jack Russell sitting between them or, yeah, anyways.

Ashley Connell (03:17.841)
That's cool.

Ashley Connell (03:25.393)
So good. So good.

Brent Peterson (03:26.734)
And what I've found is the self -portraits are the most fun, because it's usually the artist and their self, and then there's a Jack Russell over their shoulder. So I do have a lot of self -portraits of Frida Kahlo as well with the Jack Russell sitting. Okay, so we're way off topic. And if anybody's in EOS, they know that I have a lot of shiny objects. All right, so Ashley, I need to tell you a joke before we get started, and then we can get started. And this...

Ashley Connell (03:32.305)
Totally.

Ashley Connell (03:39.953)
Okay, so good.

Brent Peterson (03:54.126)
You know, this whole episode is supposed to be 15 minutes and we're going to just talk 15 minutes with the dogs coming into the room and let's just get going. So here we go. and all you have to do is just rate it one through five.

Ashley Connell (04:06.897)
the best? Or I'm hilariously laughing? Got it.

Brent Peterson (04:08.078)
Yeah, five being the best. Yeah. Yeah. All right. So here we go. Geni: I shall grant you three wishes. Me, I wish the world without lawyers. Geni: , done. You have no more wishes. Me, but you said I get three. Geni: , sue me.

Ashley Connell (04:31.249)
Okay, you gotta chuckle, you gotta chuckle. I'm not gonna lie, you gotta chuckle. I'm gonna give that.

Brent Peterson (04:32.27)
Yeah, I know. Well, I mean, the delivery was pretty poor. It's hard to say that kind of joke. It's more of a reading joke.

Ashley Connell (04:42.161)
It is hard to especially totally totally totally. I'm going to give that a 2 .75.

Brent Peterson (04:53.55)
Yeah, I agree. I would have given it less, but... Okay, I'll do one more. Why do golfers love donuts? Because there's always a hole in one. See, that's easier to say. Yeah.

Ashley Connell (04:55.525)
you

Ashley Connell (05:05.457)
but I'm shh. Yep, way easier to say, but I'm actually going to give that one lower. I'm going to give that one a two. I kind of liked the lawyer one. It was unexpected.

Brent Peterson (05:12.494)
all right.

Yeah, I'm reading a book called Humor Seriously. I can't remember the author's name right now, but it's pretty funny. They talk a lot about it. You have to have something unexpected in you. It's humor for business.

Ashley Connell (05:30.225)
Yeah, no, someone was just telling me about this and she highly recommended that I read it. Is it two women out of, yeah, yeah, yeah. I believe it's like professors in human or persuasion or yeah.

Brent Peterson (05:37.326)
Yes, yes.

Brent Peterson (05:43.694)
Correct, yeah, one is Stanford is when one is somewhere else. So, all right, so, well, we just burned five minutes. Anyways, so let's get started. Let's talk, I wanna talk a little bit about EO. I know you're in EOA. Tell us why you joined.

Ashley Connell (05:48.625)
Amazing.

Ashley Connell (05:57.809)
Sure.

Ashley Connell (06:03.793)
So I joined EOA because I needed business basics. We mentioned that I live in Austin, Texas, which is a big tech hub. And I started my business prowess project through several accelerators and incubators, which I'm extremely grateful for my time there. But what I learned in those were how do you build out technology and how do you raise money? And that's finding good.

But then we realized we don't want to raise money. And then I had to figure out what are the business basics. And that is why EOA has been just wonderful for our business.

Brent Peterson (06:47.598)
Yeah, I just interviewed another entrepreneur and there's a gap between needing to raise money and not having to raise money. And it seems like, especially maybe it's in the private equity space or angel investors or whatever, it's a...

Ashley Connell (06:56.401)
Totally.

Brent Peterson (07:11.726)
It's not always necessary to raise money, and especially if you're in a service business or you're selling your own services and you need to somehow scale, it's more about how can I hire more employees?

Ashley Connell (07:23.921)
Totally. Well, and we do have a technology component. So we had to bootstrap the technology build, which actually was the best decision in the end because we have more control over what we do, where the business is going, what we invest in.

Yada yada.

Brent Peterson (07:45.006)
Yeah, so tell us some of the challenges. So I mean, I guess, yeah, tell us some of the challenges you've had around just scaling what you're doing already.

Ashley Connell (07:58.113)
This is a great story and it's perfect for EOA. Okay, so real quick what we do. We help professional women who want a more flexible career learn how to be what we call online business managers, which is essentially an integrator light when you look at like EOS. They are the operators of the business. They're that mix between a COO and a virtual assistant.

We train them to do that as they're going through the training, we're gathering data on them. We use that data to mash them up with their visionaries. So the CEOs who need to hire them to run their business. with scaling, we're scaling both sides because the point is to have enough matches that both sides are happy and fulfilled. And so that has been what was so challenging. It's this, this constant seesaw. Now, one thing that.

I am so grateful that I learned during my time in EOA was we had had had to niche down. So when I went into EOA, we were basically the LinkedIn for women. That's what we were going to be. And after really thinking through how we were going to get to the next level and stop being everything for everyone, my coach said,

Ashley, you need to focus on one role. And that's where we zeroed in on those online business managers or like integrator lights. And it has been nothing but up into the right sense.

Brent Peterson (09:41.71)
Yeah, I think that focusing on the niche is the best thing that any business owner can do. And it's the hardest thing that any business owner can do. And I can speak from experience that going through wanting to be able to do everything and not saying no to a client is so inviting. Or that's your nature as a salesperson to say, of course we can do that. Or.

Ashley Connell (10:01.585)
Yes. Yes.

Brent Peterson (10:09.102)
Yes, we'll do that or take it on and I think that one of the things that that it is very difficult for an entrepreneur to understand if you're trying to do everything is that one little thing that that gives you so little That one little thing that that doesn't allow you to To do it that you can't do really well is going to potentially derail all your business and it could just be 10 % of the business and

Ashley Connell (10:37.969)
It's absolutely true and it was my EOA coach Tim Hamilton, he's wonderful. He really got me thinking about the niche strategy when he says use that as a magnet not a filter. And what he meant by that was if we're going to focus on

Brent Peterson (10:38.862)
but that 10 % will knock out 90 % of your business.

Ashley Connell (11:04.593)
online business managers and someone came to us and they're looking for a VA. It's my decision as a business owner. Do I want to match them with a VA? The pros are money now. The cons are that's not where you're focused. You're not going to get the case studies that you want. You're not going to get the referrals that you want and it's going to be a lower price point. And so as soon as he's saying that it gave the niching strategy became less scary and more of control still on me. If we need to make payroll,

the VA is coming in, you know? Luckily we don't have that problem right now because we focused, but.

Brent Peterson (11:41.102)
Yeah, tell us a little bit more about your solution and how it differs or is similar to fractional.

Ashley Connell (11:49.937)
So they are fractional. So, the problem that we saw out there were twofold. From the impact side, there were 43 % of women leave the workforce to raise kids after three years. When they want to return, they lose 37 % of their compensation power forever. So my question was, why can't they go back part -time? And 97 % of them would. And so,

We were like, okay, we can make these fractional professionals who have such impact available for CEOs who need them. Well, I am more of the visionary type of, I don't know, stereotype. So I'm out talking to other visionaries and they're like, Ashley, I can't get my job done. I have all of these ideas. I have bright shiny object syndrome. I have all these things I wanna go do and I need someone to help me make it all happen, to project manage it, to...

figure out the systems to figure out the technology. And that's when it was just this light bulb of we are going to train these women who want part -time work to be these OBMs and match them with the visionary. But the key here was the compatibility. The visionary integrator roles, you have to be so compatible because you're trusting this person with your baby, AKA your business.

So we spent three years investing in the technology where we're looking at compatibility and not just skills, but also communication style, teamwork style, emotional intelligence. So it's really, really well -rounded match.

Brent Peterson (13:34.67)
Yeah, that's interesting. I've heard mixed things on fractional integrators. Tell us about how, or tell us how you've been successful in that role of an integrator. Or maybe we should start with what's an integrator for the people that don't know that name, that moniker. So just kind of give us the 30 second elevator pitch on why somebody should have an integrator.

Ashley Connell (13:54.449)
Okay.

Ashley Connell (14:01.361)
Absolutely. So everyone has a zone of genius. Your zone of genius is where your passion meets your innate ability. So oftentimes there's two types of people who are running a business. There's the visionary, the big idea person, the relationship person, the, most of the time, like sales and market marketing person. And then there's the integrator, the operations person, the person who takes that.

Brent Peterson (14:02.382)
and then tell us how they've been successful in that role.

Ashley Connell (14:30.961)
big idea and turns it into a reality. And so we have been successful in matching our fractional integrators. Again, we can't call them integrators because it's trademarked. So it's online business managers with the visionaries because sometimes, especially if you are between 250 in revenue to 3 million, you don't need a full -time integrator.

You need someone who's going to come in, help you plan, help you strategize how to make it happen, and then add in the technology and automation so that you can walk away knowing what's happening, it's happening.

Brent Peterson (15:12.462)
Yeah, that's good. And I think, do you feel that having that role helps to maximize the investment you're making with the facilitator, EOS facilitator? And for those that aren't familiar, typically the facilitator is about $8 ,000 a meeting. And then they go away and come back in the next quarter and it's up to you to make sure everything's happening, right? I mean, they're always there to help you.

Ashley Connell (15:31.729)
Right. Bingo.

Brent Peterson (15:39.374)
But this is the thing you need to do and that integrator role is the most important part of making sure that EOS is running.

Ashley Connell (15:47.761)
That's exactly right. Like it, it, I mean, how many times, gosh, do we go to any sort of strategy session or presentation or whatever it is, you get all of these to -dos that you want to go implement in your business and you're like, wait, who's doing those to -dos? wait, that's me. You are one person. You have 24 hours. How are you going to get all that done? Especially if it is not your zone of genius.

It's going to take you longer and that opportunity cost of you focusing on that is massive. So stay where you really thrive and hire on someone else who really thrives in that area. And it's magic.

Brent Peterson (16:30.446)
Yeah, I recently interviewed somebody as well that had a co -visionary. Tell us about how a integrator would work with two visionaries and how they keep, how, I would imagine that's even more difficult to try to capture both visions and then put it into play. Or is it just what the visionaries have to get along on, figure out what they're doing and then give it to the integrator.

Ashley Connell (16:50.529)
So if I were to help match co -visionaries with an integrator, the integrator needs to have such amazing communication skills. They need to be able to flex skills, styles, like nobody's business, and they have to be really good at creating compromises.

If they can facilitate that and get both of them, both of the co -visionaries on the same page of where you are going, then the integrator's job is just as straightforward. But you can't, you got to know where you're going before you can get there, right? And that is going to be the hardest part for that integrator is nailing down and keeping consistent where they are going.

Brent Peterson (17:43.566)
Yeah, that's such a good feedback and good point. The other one I suppose would be when there's a sale in a business and the visionaries change and they have to now start taking on this new vision of what the company should be.

Ashley Connell (17:55.313)
Ashley Connell (18:01.457)
Absolutely. And it happens all the time. And oftentimes, because we, we believe so strongly in the match in the work style, emotional intelligence match of the two, that the integrator may opt out from that sale. And they may be like, Hey, look, this isn't for me. Or there needs to be a conversation for the new visionary in advance being like, this is how we're going to work together.

So, probably it's all about communication when it comes down to the two main people in the business, the two main leaders, especially because you want your visionary integrators to be compatible, not the same.

Brent Peterson (18:47.502)
Do you see a lot of businesses just let go of EOS after a sale because the new visionary doesn't believe in the process? Or they think they have a better way to do it?

Ashley Connell (18:59.601)
You know?

seen a ton of that to make a blanket statement, but just by definition, everyone's going to have their own how strict they are with the rules of EOS. And so I kind of see it turn up the dial a little bit or down the dial when it comes to how strict you are. But no, I don't see a ton of, unless it's private equity and private equity has their own way of going about things and they want it done that way, then that's different.

Brent Peterson (19:32.462)
You've talked a few, you've been talking about the match and some of that. What are the key aspects in matching up that integrator with Visionary?

Ashley Connell (19:42.129)
So it's really, I say this all the time, it's really, really, really about the interpersonal skills, not the hard skills or professional skills. And if you're looking at a spectrum and you have a visionary who is extremely risk, super risky, you cannot have an integrator who is the opposite, like,

deviation risk adverse. You have to have an integrator who will allow that visionary to be risky within restraints. Or else if you have a super, super, super risky visionary and one that is super, super risk adverse when it comes to the integrator, you're not going to get anything done. So it's a very calculated way, which is why we poured.

resources and behavior science and all of this into the matching because it's so important.

Brent Peterson (20:46.286)
Did some of your technology go into that matching process? You hinted a little bit of having to have some technology to get started.

Ashley Connell (20:52.785)
That is the technology that we built out is really this algorithm of figuring out how do you match the ideal visionary with their ideal integrator.

Brent Peterson (21:02.67)
When you first started, you talked about an online business manager. Are you only doing to online or does it also apply to somebody that's going to come into the office?

Ashley Connell (21:14.385)
Right now it's only online. However, if you happen to be in Austin, Texas, we have a lot of people in Austin, Texas, and maybe your OBM would be, you know, happy to come in one day a week. For the most part, these people work remotely.

Brent Peterson (21:31.278)
And do you work with EOS implementer? And I will say that be pre -COVID, EOS implementers only did in -house and you really only went to a local implementer. And now because of COVID, now implementers are doing it over Zoom. And the whole idea of having to have the meeting in person has sort of shifted. I'm assuming you've seen that same shift in your business.

Ashley Connell (21:44.145)
Right.

Ashley Connell (21:49.553)
gosh, yes. I mean, March 1st, 2020, lots of people were coming to us and they're like, I would never hire remote. March 20th, 2020, they were coming to us and being like, I got to figure out this remote thing, please help me. So it was night and day. And I want to share that.

Yes, we have online business managers who focus on EOS, but we're not exclusive to it. So there are tons. I was told, I'm curious your thoughts on this, that EOS was really built for businesses that are doing two, three million and above. So we have online business managers that specialize in that 250 to two to three million scale. And

Those were not, they're not as strict on EOS. The ones who are bigger, oftentimes they tend to be.

Brent Peterson (22:54.99)
Yeah, I think you bring up a really good point about dollar, a dollar amount. Just like in EOA, I think it's more challenging to get to employee count rather than dollar amount. So if you talk about having 10 employees or even having 20 employees and you're 100 % service -based business and your hourly rate is $30 an hour or whatever, $40 an hour.

Ashley Connell (23:08.945)
Mm -hmm. Sure. Sure.

Brent Peterson (23:22.83)
that you could potentially have a larger staff and EOS is gonna be a great tool for you. Where if you're a business that sells $50 ,000 widgets and you and your assistant are doing all the business, EOS has nothing, there's no need for it, even if you had 20 people in the company.

Ashley Connell (23:26.001)
Yeah.

Ashley Connell (23:34.449)
Mm -hmm.

Ashley Connell (23:45.937)
Britt, I'm so glad you've said that because in all of the conversations that I've had, no one has pointed out that maybe it is the number of people, not the revenue amount. I'm so glad that you brought that up. I'm having a big light bulb moment here on your podcast.

Brent Peterson (24:02.414)
Yeah, I'll send you a bill later. Or another free joke. You'll probably want the bill.

Ashley Connell (24:05.473)
That's so good. No, that's a great point. That's a really good point. Thank you for sharing that.

Brent Peterson (24:15.374)
Yeah, I think that, you know, the other thing in EO, and this is not a bash on EO time, but the other part of EO is, is it more important your revenue or your profit? Like we just, I just went through a Jack Daly. Jack Daly was in the Twin Cities. He's a sales guy. He does such a great job at doing these presentations. And he used to saying, you know, what's more important, your revenue or your profit? Cause you can have a lot of revenue and you could lose money. And I used to have a retail business and I always told my employees.

Ashley Connell (24:25.041)
I can go back.

Ashley Connell (24:31.601)
Mm -hmm.

Brent Peterson (24:45.422)
We're going to sell everything at a loss, but I'm going to make it up in volume.

Ashley Connell (24:49.585)
Could not agree with you more on Well, no, I I was I'm still so on the yes profit is so much more than Than revenue and it is interesting that the measurement is revenue What's that saying revenues vanity profit is sanity cash is king yeah, it's so true

Brent Peterson (24:52.75)
So that was a little joke.

Brent Peterson (25:15.118)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, there you go. Yeah, good. I gotta remember that one too. That is a good saying.

Ashley Connell (25:18.737)
It's so true. Yeah. -huh. Absolutely. you're so right. And going back to how I started my business, where it was all about growth and revenue and numbers. And because I had to go to these tech investors who wanted to see growth as the metric, not profit. They weren't worried about that. And then when I decided away, raising money isn't for us. I had to completely shift that mindset.

and start really measuring the profit because that's how I was going to eat, my family was going to eat, and everyone on the team, that's how they were going to eat. So again, why I love EO so much is because it's really helped me realign my key metrics with what I need, AKA profit cash.

Brent Peterson (26:06.862)
I want to talk a little bit about EOA, the EO Accelerator program. What is the key component that you have gotten the most value out of EOA?

Ashley Connell (26:20.785)
It is so like EO there's a monthly accountability group meeting. And the difference is there is a coach who is a multi, you know, a million tens of million dollar coach or what have you, who is helping you on that journey.

My coaches have been so helpful because they see through the excuses, they see through the nonsense, they see through the challenges and know if you do X, Y, and Z, you're gonna get on the other end. And that has been so incredibly valuable, especially the ones who have challenged me and said, Ashley, I want you to go speak to.

50 people who are in your target audience in 30 days and then come back and tell us what you found out. Go. I had to do that. I had to do that. And so I completely cleared my calendar and that's all I focused on. And the gold that I got in doing all of those info interviews, we completely changed the business and we went from burning.

a ton of money each month to wildly profitable each month. It's insane. Absolutely insane.

Brent Peterson (27:46.286)
Yeah, that's good. And one thing I loved about it is that you'd get, especially in the quarterly days, you got so many action items out of it. I know that we had a team of about 10 people when I went through EOA and people would hate when I'd go to a quarterly day because I'd come back with all these ideas. And the point I'm making is that we didn't have an integrator to put in action of all the things that were in my head.

And then after a while, everybody's like, Brent's going to go. He's going to come back with all kinds of ideas. And then let's just listen to him for a while and we'll ignore it. And it's going to go away where. Yeah. I think the point, the picture, the, what you're saying is that you need that integrator to kind of connect the dots to get everything out of the visionary's head and then into the business where it needs to run or figure out what way, if it's going to work. And the, and one last thing I'd like to just say on the implementer side.

Ashley Connell (28:17.169)
total.

Brent Peterson (28:37.102)
is the EOS implementer will often help you decide that this is not what your business needs to do.

Ashley Connell (28:44.081)
Well, that's what, yeah, that's what I was just about to say. So our integrator at prowess project, her name is Leah and she's absolutely amazing. Where her genius is, is I come back from these, you know, learning days, I have all of these ideas and she's looking at our rocks for the year and saying, okay, actually we're going to prioritize these three things that you came back with because these are going to move the needle. And so she's helping me choose which of the.

18 ,000 ideas by trying the objects that I came back with are going to move the needle.

Brent Peterson (29:19.374)
Yeah, I think one thing too that, so I do, I want to go come back to the, to your fractional integrator idea. The idea that a business owner can just hand it off without any work is there has to be a lot of prep work. And I'm going to go back to Jack Daly saying that we should, if we should, everybody needs an assistant and you need to offload the things you don't do well and just focus on that left column, all the things you do do well.

Ashley Connell (29:47.665)
Yeah. Yeah.

Brent Peterson (29:49.55)
But if you're not prepared to hand those things over and you can't articulate it, you're wasting everybody's time and it's gonna be a failure. So I guess my question for you is how do you line up your integrators for success in order to get that information out of the visionary's head?

Ashley Connell (30:09.905)
I love that you asked this question because this is a big learning that I had from EOA too, is we desperately needed a customer success person on the CEO visionary side to help them get the most out of their fractional integrator and provide them resources, advice on how best to onboard off -board.

And so we spent a ton of time, energy, software money, all of these things on figuring out how do we download all of this from the CEO's head and then put it into something actionable and hand it over to the OBM and setting expectations on what communication needs to look like. So, hey, CEO that I'm just starting to work with, we need to have, I'm going to make this up, no, two, three hour sessions.

so that I can ask you all of these questions so that I'm ready to go. And we oftentimes have our integrator start with an audit of the business to understand everything that's going on so then that she can make the right decision on what needs to happen next again to move the needle.

Brent Peterson (31:27.022)
If you had, and I know we're not supposed to give advice, if you could share your experience on how to get that business owner to reach out to an integrator and to, you know, the other, the concept is letting go to the vine, right? And a lot of times they think a business owner doesn't think they need to let go of the vine because they've been doing all this stuff all these years, so great, all on their own. And I think part of that is not seeing,

Ashley Connell (31:53.009)
Mm -hmm.

Brent Peterson (31:55.662)
that having all that extra time, the 168, what are you going to do with your 168? That's how many hours there are in a week. You can't get anything, you can't get more than that. You got to sleep. And I think they said, what is it, 56 hours of sleep or something like that. So like you're whittling time down no matter what. And I think that if you took an analytical approach to it,

Ashley Connell (32:01.873)
Wait, 168? I don't know what that is.

Ashley Connell (32:10.225)
Yeah.

Brent Peterson (32:23.918)
It makes it easier to hire that integrator than if you were to just take an emotional approach to the money part.

Ashley Connell (32:31.441)
the money part. You're absolutely right. I think that you can easily look at, okay, what is my time worth? And then, you know, what is an integrator worth? And okay, that makes that makes more sense for me to outsource this. But going back to the 186, and we see this a lot that 168, no, no, no, no, no, I did that wrong. Is the opportunity costs that the visionary CEOs are, are giving up is joy.

Brent Peterson (32:47.662)
168. Did I say 186? OK.

Ashley Connell (33:01.233)
Like imagine if you were just working on what you love to work on. Imagine if your day was done at actually 5 PM and you could make little league. Like imagine if you could take a two week vacation to Italy and leave your laptop. Like that, that is what it is. But no, instead you are, you know, putting stuff on social media and instead you are project managing your whole team. Instead you're working in the business. No, because there are people who love doing that. They love to tinker.

They love technology, they love automation. Let them. Let them.

Brent Peterson (33:33.806)
Yeah, and there's some people that are so much so bad, much better at that. My previous business was the software business. And I knew if I had to start looking at individual tickets in JIRA, that the project was already off off base. And, you know, at that point, if the owner is in looking at tickets, then we're in a serious problem.

Ashley Connell (33:50.257)
Yep.

Ashley Connell (33:58.449)
Yes. And I, we just started doing L10s and having like a dashboard that we look at for the health of the business. and that is one thing that we really look at is the, dear, we're under threshold and oftentimes I have to step in and that's how we know that, no, this is not good. We need to spend the extra time, love, energy, people, whatever in that area to get back on track.

Brent Peterson (34:27.118)
Yeah, so we still have some time left. Tell us a little bit about your business and how people can get in touch with you and who's the right fit for people that you're looking for.

Ashley Connell (34:41.841)
The right fit for people on the visionary CEO side is someone who has big aspirations, wants to make a lot of impact, wants to make a lot of income and appreciates and values people who think differently, who can bring different ideas and values systems, processes and repeatability for scale. If a

That is you. You're a perfect candidate. And you're cool with remote work, of course. On the integrator OBM side, these are what we call like the Jill of all trades. And there's so many women, especially out there who in their professional life, they were always that person who went and plugged the hole in the business.

hey, I know that you can go figure this out. Like go, go figure out bookkeeping. wait, no, no, no, Susie. Like you're, you're so good at bookkeeping, but now we have an issue with, you know, our onboarding process and they're always that person. And they weren't sure because they had such a quote unquote patchwork quilt like backgrounds. They didn't know how to go turn this into a career. And that's what we're really helping them do as becoming the integrator or online business manager.

Brent Peterson (36:06.478)
That's perfect. Ashley, as we close out the podcast, I give everybody a chance to do a shameless plug about everything, anything they'd like to plug. What would you like to plug today?

Ashley Connell (36:20.017)
I would love to plug just our business in here's why. Sure, of course we want to grow, right? Of course we want to, you know, money, dollars, revenue, all that stuff, sure. But at the end of the day, we have a goal to help 5 ,000 women create flexible careers.

that they feel like they are making an impact in a business. And that's why I want to put up Prowess Projects. There are so many women out there who are dying to be the integrator. They're dying to make the impact in the business. That's what I hear all the time. Beyond the income, it's actually, if I can really help a business scale, I'm more fulfilled than anything else in the world. And that excitement and that...

I don't know, watching their eyes light up at that opportunity is what gets me out of bed every day. So if my shameless plug is all of these amazing women who, man, can just, I don't know, run circles around making your business happen.

Brent Peterson (37:34.254)
Is Ashley the integrator or a visionary?

Ashley Connell (37:37.489)
visionary, you do not want me doing any sort of technology systems. Nope, nope, nope.

Brent Peterson (37:46.894)
Do you think that visionaries can temporarily become integrators?

Ashley Connell (37:52.817)
Absolutely. I don't think there is a purist in any way, shape or form. I think, you know, you're going to have some integrator capabilities. And quite frankly, if you're the CEO, the buck stops with you, right? So if you need to swoop down and be the integrator for a season, guess what? That's your job. Because you're the leader. You know, you eat last. That's the rule. And so, yes, I think they can do it. Absolutely.

Brent Peterson (38:22.51)
Perfect. Ashley Connell is the CEO and founder of Prowess Project.

Ashley Connell (38:29.361)
You got it. Thank you so much for having me. It's been really fun.

Brent Peterson (38:30.542)
Thank you.