Ep268: Ela Staniak Leaupepe – Use Multiple Lead Generation Platforms to Have a Safety Net

Andrew Stotz 00:03
Hello fellow risk takers and welcome to my worst investment ever, stories of loss to keep you winning. In our community, we know that the winning investing, you must take risk but to win big, you've got to reduce it. This is Andrew Stotz of a Stotz Academy where we help people facing four different challenges. investors who want to better manage their stock portfolio, aspiring professionals, professionals who want to learn how to value any company in the world, business leaders who want to make their companies financially world class, and even beginners who just want to learn how to implement a simple lifetime investment plan. Join us for free at my worst investment ever.com slash Academy and get instant access to my course. It's a short one. And it's called six ways to lose your money and six strategies to win. And this comes from the six common mistakes that I've learned from more than 250 episodes of my worst investment ever. So now on with the show. Again, this is your worst podcast host Andrew Stotz and I'm here with featured guests. Ella Stanek, Ella, are you ready to rock? Let's rock and roll baby. Exactly, we are going to do that. I want to introduce you to the audience because there's some some fascinating things about you that I've enjoyed learning. And so I hope the audience can appreciate that too. So Ella was born in Poland, and her challenging upbringing was a speed lesson in life. At 21 she moved to Australia and began working first in the fitness industry before embarking on a journey through online, online and corporate coaching. She studied fitness sports coasting, coaching, neuro linguistic programming, hypnotherapy, public speaking, intuitive coaching, and attended countless professional development events. Ella is the founder and CEO of feminine leaders, which creates a pathway for women to rise and find their place as a true leader in this world, a partner's with CEOs and executives and business owners to produce high caliber business results and to access their personal creative genius. I love that, Ella, take a minute. And for that, Phil, any further tidbits about your life.

Ela Staniak Leaupepe 02:18
Thank you so much. I am so excited to be here. And thank you so much for your kind introduction. It is so pleasant to hear things about ourselves which we have accomplished.

02:29
So thank you. Feels good. Yeah,

Ela Staniak Leaupepe 02:32
look at. That's right, it feels good. Look, today, I live in Sydney and amazing place in Australia. And I like to say that my journey has been so rich in experiences, whether in personal life, or my career, pretty much just summed it all up really, really well. Definitely, my upbringing had its challenges growing up in Poland, and I grew up with a father who had an alcohol addiction. But I was fortunate enough that I had a very positive strong female figure in my mother. So ultimately, my mother is an inspiration for everything, which I do today, in women empowerment, space, and look, moving first to Ireland and then to Australia was definitely an adventure, but also an eye opening experience, I became hungry to learn more, and that hunger actually never stopped. So those countless professional and personal development programs and courses and everything that I have invested in myself really has brought me to this moment here today, where I, I know exactly who I am, what I came here to this error. So this blood it's to do to accomplish and I bring a combination of my experiences my educational background, also to my well now in, in a state of global pandemic, to online coaching, and to my event space. So it definitely has been a journey.

Andrew Stotz 04:08
That's exciting. And you know, one of the things that I've learned over the years is that our biggest challenges become our biggest value that we end up adding, you know, if we are willing to deal to deal with it, to live with it, to grow through it. It can be, you know, something that we really, really can bring to the world. And I also think that is the overcoming of some of our biggest challenges that makes us a reliable, trustworthy person, like this person can get me to where I want to go. And I think that that's part of what we explore on this podcast is to go through those struggles and weaknesses and reevaluate them and reevaluate our mistakes. But in the end, I would much rather hire a person who is willing to go through their mistakes and struggles and say, here's what I did wrong. And here's what I learned than someone who claims to not have any. So welcome to the show. We have one other thing in common too, which is that I have a very strong mother influence from my mother who is, I would say, a woman who had a vision that her objective as a mother was to make her kids independent. So at the age of 18, they could go out and survive in this world. And she did that successfully. And so I know that the feeling of the feeling that I had at least, that I think there was times that I resisted her, of course, there was times that I didn't appreciate all that. But as I look back now, I realized that she pushed me to the edge, she pushed me into like a, like a mother in a bird's nest if you want, you know, eventually it's like, you gotta go, you gotta fly, and they kick you out. They kick that bird out, and the bird makes it and that's what my mom was tougher. I think my dad was much more much more chilled on that he wasn't he wasn't gonna probably do that. But she had that vision. So we have that in common. Amazing. Yeah. So well, now it's time to share your worst investment ever. And since no one ever, ever, ever goes into their worst investment thinking it will be tell us a bit about the circumstances leading up to it. And then tell us your story.

Ela Staniak Leaupepe 06:20
Sure, thank you. I am really excited to talk about this. Because there are so many lessons in it. But we will get to lessons a little bit later on. As I just mentioned earlier, it was probably in my mid 20s, when I realized that I wanted to completely redesign my life. I wanted to create an amazing health for myself loving relationship, I knew I wanted to have a family and I wanted to have a business, which could serve women all over the world. And I wanted to have a unstoppable, unlimited plus freedom in my choices. So in saying that, I decided that the smartest thing to do would be to hire a coach. And that never stopped. I invested so much time, effort, and of course, finance into various business coaching programs. Now, because it all pretty much happened in the last five years, most of my business coaches would have practiced all sorts of advertising and marketing strategies on Facebook. And so at first I was so technology, technologically challenged coming from fitness background, all I did was being with people very kinesthetically in a very connected way. In, in face to face, I could feel the energy I could feel and really connected to a person. So wanting to be able to work with people with people, especially women all over the world, I knew that I needed to figure out technology. And so I dived in, into automation into marketing heavily on Facebook, right. Making long story short, after years of challenges, I finally figured it out, I actually became a lover of technology, I found my comfort to the point that now I today actually teach it to other people. So it definitely has been a great journey. Now. I probably invested $100,000 in various personal development programs, business coaching programs, and that's amazing. I also probably invested under $10,000 in Facebook marketing. And finally, this year, I found my sweet spot in business. I created that. That's the social media presence on Facebook. And I was initially the go to person for weight loss for hypnotherapy for finding that empowerment with it. So if you could use hashtag women empowerment. For a lot of women, I was the go to person which was great. I thought to myself, I finally achieved that I finally am someone who women can lean, lean as a rock that women can lean on and

09:24
to my surprise

Andrew Stotz 09:28
getting excited.

Ela Staniak Leaupepe 09:32
The sweet spot didn't last very, very long. flows of business are amazing. And in June this year, I woke up one morning, and my son was only at that point four months old. And I found an email that there was a suspicious logging activity on my account in Facebook and I have to go and verify My identity, making long story short, that verification was authorization and verification was rejected, my accounts got completely deleted, deleted and disabled.

Andrew Stotz 10:14
Oh my god, so the listener I had is collapsing onto my desk.

Ela Staniak Leaupepe 10:20
I, there's more to it. I so just to build a picture of the gravity of business, which I had, I had just under 5000 connections on my personal profile, nearly 11,000 connections on my business page, my business page is connected to my Instagram which which got nearly 6000 connections, I was running two different Facebook groups, one of them had 1600 women in there. Also from all over the world, from India, from Africa, from us from Australia. And at first I went into shock, complete denial and disbelief. And like, I thought to myself, the first few hours, I thought this cannot be surely I can get this back. I haven't done anything wrong. Of course, there must be a way to contact this huge platform, which is got such monopoly of the market in terms of the influence. So I've tried and tried and tried and eventually the comments started coming up that this has been verified, reviewed. And, it's been rejected, and so there is no point to to try it anymore. It definitely was a shock. At first I cried. And I thought the first thought which crossed my mind was the years of work, sleepless nights, 18 hour days, those moments of tears moments of giving up and continuously pursuing and persisting and building the business on Facebook and Instagram, mostly. I thought is it all gone? So I definitely was in shock. And there was just definitely a moment of disbelief. Hmm. Now the second thought that I had was okay, Allah, nothing is ever the end of the world, you have been in this place before, you have been in the place where you thought that everything was in brackets taken away from you. And you know what to do now? Look for the options, what can you do here? I for myself needed to find freedom of choice here. And so I said to myself, I asked myself, What am I going to do here? What am I going to do? And I thought of the conversation which I had literally 12 hours earlier to that event with my VA and my dear friend tool. So he's a business partner to one of the branches of my business where we do business coaching for business owners, mostly in service based industry. And I remember the conversation, I remember the words I said, I said to them, I am ready to go big. I am ready to fully step in and be the leader of my life. And I am ready to go to that next level. Enough of playing small,

Andrew Stotz 13:38
I am going big. And then the lights go out. Okay. Yeah, now it's time to prove it.

Ela Staniak Leaupepe 13:47
Exactly. Thank you very much. And that's what I said to myself. I said, I asked for this. Well, I mean, the middle of the ocean, I said swim glorified girlfriends just swim. And so I contacted my VA. I said, Listen, I just checked out different phrases on, um, you know, on Google, I've, I've there have this phrase, bouncing in my mind, and it hasn't been there for a long time, feminine leadership. She says to me, why are you so excited? Why are you panicking? And I said, No, no, I panicked, but I'm over that now. What I want you to do now is I've already purchased a domain. I need you to transfer my own website onto that new domain. We're going to feminine leadership. And she said, Are you okay? And I said, Yes. Let's go. Let's do this. She says, Okay, I am really worried. And I said, Let's not worried. Let's not be worried. Let's let's just do this. We're going to listen to my intuition. I wanted this or we're going to make it work. And so this is how actually feminine leaders was born. So I completely rebranded I changed my business name and I took a few shorter programs which I was running in the past. And I glued them together into a six months self leadership Muslim mind program for women who are in executive positions, women who are very career focused, and women who now feel like they have lost a part of themselves. And they want that body, mind and soul alignment. So most of my clients come to me with a problem in the relationship that they have developed with themselves. A lot of my clients come to me with relationship problems. And a lot of my clients come to me feeling like they have stepped into a huge degree of a masculine energy, and now wants to connect to their feminine energy and take their businesses to the next level their personal relationships to the next level, and they just want to feel good in their own skin, and doing all that. So there it is, it definitely was a bad investment.

Andrew Stotz 16:05
So let me ask you, what lessons did you learn

Ela Staniak Leaupepe 16:09
so many, I'm pretty sure within the next three days, I actually did a massive post about this on LinkedIn, and, and Instagram. I don't know how but I can still access my Instagram, even though that I was using my Facebook logins to access Instagram. The biggest lesson that I really wanted to share with the whole world is this. When you are creating a business, have multiple lead generation systems and have multiple platforms, which you use to serve your network your clientele. Now, I was lucky enough that I did have a few different platforms, I had an email list, I have my different platform called meetup where which I used to run my networking nights for women through I had, as I said, Instagram, so I still had a little bit of a soft spot to fall onto. But the reality is that 90% of my business was coming from Facebook. So definitely lesson number one, multiple lead generation systems. Lesson number two, if you want to run a business on organization, or being in a managerial position, practice, flexibility and adaptation. And just live by it because challenges, whether it's in business or personal life never ends and never stop. So as soon as you you feel like you have reached the comfort and things are flowing, flowing easily and you are moving forward, amazing. Enjoy the state of flow. But be ready. Because when you want more growth in different areas of your life challenges will come because we can only learn by overcoming challenges. And you said that at the beginning of the show.

Andrew Stotz 18:11
Yep. Yep. And it reminds me, you said flexibility and adaptation. And I thought about your fitness background. And thinking actually, you know, physically that's a huge part of physical fitness is flexibility, but also adaptation of your muscles and all that. And it also made me think about how I'd love to in Bangkok, the airport here it faces north south. And sometimes when I go to the airport, I take off going north, somehow I take off going south, and it seemed very confusing. How could they manage, you know, flights coming in and out and coming in and out in different ways like that. But then I realized I learned that when the winds shift and the wintertime comes, the winds come from China, from the north. And so they have to take off into the wind. So they take off to the north. And when the wind shift and the monsoon season comes in the winds come from India and up from the Indian Ocean, then they have to switch and go taking off from the south. And then that's when you learn that, yes, you rise with resistance. You know, it is that challenge that you need. A plane rises because of the headwinds that it faces. Let me summarize a few things I take away from what you've said. You know, you mentioned something in the beginning, that's actually kind of interesting, and you didn't go through it. But I think it's a fascinating idea, which is just the idea of like, connecting over zoom. You know, you were saying how you first started it was a very physical idea I face to face, you know, and we all have been at that point, and now we're kind of forced to connect through zoom and really, it's very hard to judge, other people and all that stuff. So that's a fascinating story. challenge that it reminded me of and how do we deal with that as a society or, as I've seen in Thailand, as we've gone, you know, the lockdown is pretty much over in and people are back to normal. And you realize it, I had two different Executive MBA courses, groups. One, the first group that I did, I taught the same course to these two groups. The first was all online because it was right in the heat of the crisis. And the second one was live. So I asked the live students, you know, we had a, we had a day, we had to make up a day. And I'm like, Look, we got a really tight schedule. But the good news is, I have all that material online. So I can just give you that course online for that day. And you can do it from home and the university will allow it and they said, No way. We want to be together. And I was like, okay, so yeah, people don't really want to communicate by zoom. But that's, you know, that's an interesting challenge. The second thing that you reminded me of is the interview, I think it was sean penn that I saw on Jay Leno, or Johnny Carson, or whatever, the one of these night, late night things. And he was talking about, oh, I heard that your house recently burned down. He said, Yeah, I, I was like arriving home and my house was burnt to the ground. And there's like any said, every single thing I owned, was in there. Every photograph of my youth, every photograph of my family, every heirloom, everything was in it. And he said, My God, how do you feel? He said, great. It's like, I had no burden. And you know, that's, I thought about that, as I was listening to your story is that when you were shut down, it's got, there's no choice. So you've got to find the new way. And you embrace that. And then the last thing is something that I was kind of just thinking about, and you made me think more about it. Since we've been talking. I was recently watching a Facebook post that someone did, and they'd had a video of a girl doing boxing. And you know, everyone's like, yeah, go girl, you know, and it was like, Girl Power and all that. And I, you know, very impressive. I would never box with this woman, for sure. But I asked myself the question, which I don't have the answer to. But I said, Does this female empowerment being mean being more like men? Does that? Is that what that means? Or is it being more? Like women? I didn't I kind of like thought that for a moment. I'm just curious. Those are my takeaways from what you shared. Is there anything you'd add? Or any any points that you would make of that?

Ela Staniak Leaupepe 22:36
Yeah, sure. Look, I do believe and Funny enough, I use hashtag feminism on LinkedIn all the time. I believe we're women empowerment was born was simply a long time ago, where? Well, to a degree, we still deal with this. And we still need a lot of education on equal to in between men and women, not only in the workplaces, but generally in life. Now, you know, decades ago, women simply we wanted equal rights, we wanted a right to vote to wear pants to do the same activities to work. And, and so this is it's such a old space, when you think of it well old, let's say decades, right? Maybe hundred years. Right? Yep. So now where I am today, so in the modern world, I have experienced this myself, and 90% of my clients have experienced that to somewhere in late night 90s I believe we, when we really entered we women entered the workplaces, and really began achieving great successes in the workplaces. I know that we faced and we still do a lot of resistance, especially in male dominant industries. We've felt and now we feel still like in order to be acknowledged, and in order to be treated equally. We nearly would ourselves in that race with men. We became more masculine in the workplace in order to have the same rights in order to be treated equally. Now I'm totally generalizing here, I'm just talking about the repetitive pattern which I have discovered. Now, the problem with this is, is that when we become more masculine and shut down our feminine energy, which both energies are amazing and they're not determined by by gender, we actually shut down our talents and we shut down our natural our natural attributes, which is nurturing gathering connection to others itself, state of flow multitasking, and we replaced that with a lot of masculine features which are seeing task oriented, very determined, very single task focused. See, it's important to know where to drove from different energy masculine and feminine for men and women. The problem for us women, a lot of the time is is that when we stay in a masculine energy for a long period of time, throughout the day, throughout the week, throughout the years throughout, throughout our lifetime, that becomes our new normal a definition of normal. And we take that to our personal relationships, we take those behavioral operational systems and apply them to every single area of our life. So we actually take our natural sense of empowerment away from it. Look, to tell you the truth. I've seen as I've met amazing women who are so comfortable in their feminine women who are amazingly, there's business owners lead leading teams achieve amazing success. All right, I met women who are very comfortable in their masculine and loved it was no problems for them. I met men who are very much in their masculine. Some of them hated it. Some of them found themselves very comfortable in it and achieved whatever they wanted in their life. And I met men who are who are very connected to their feminine traits and love it. So it's really about what works for you. Are you applying your behavioral patterns in a way that those you can create what you want in your career and your personal life? Or are you not? So this is when I come in, and I teach dogs to, yes, women in corporate, but I also teach that to two men in corporate.

Andrew Stotz 26:50
So I guess the message that I take away from that is, try to be more of yourself to be more of what, you know, you said something also previously, which is that you found your place on this earth. And that's part of it is that it's that it's finding your place. And that could be feminine, that could be masculine, but for the ultimate empowerment, the ultimate satisfaction in life is to say, I am where I'm supposed to be. And I and I'm happy to be here. And that's hard for all of us, male or female. So I think that's a, that's a great challenge to the audience, really, is to think about the challenge of Am I happy where I am right now? And you know, and what would I change? And what do I really want in my day to day interactions and in the things that I do, you know, in my life? So I think that's something that I learned from you. So I appreciate that.

Ela Staniak Leaupepe 27:53
Yeah, amazing. I'm so glad.

Andrew Stotz 27:55
Yeah, I appreciate that. All right. So based on what you learned from this story, and what you continue to learn, what one action would you recommend our listeners take to avoid suffering the same fate? And I mean, this is like a great, this is a very real question. Because myself, I'm thinking about because I, I'm thinking about my connection with my different Facebook groups, and we've got great connections. If that was just shut off, they'd be like, Where? What happened? You know, like, so I'm really, really wanted you to think about what would be the one piece of advice that you would give to myself and others to avoid suffering this page? Sure.

Ela Staniak Leaupepe 28:36
Look, it will, I would, I would say expand your thinking, expand your consciousness. What I mean by this is, if your vision possibly is quite, and this happens to all of us, all of us have a tunnel vision until we decided to actually be able to see more and have a peripheral vision. What I would really encourage you to do is, as I mentioned earlier, use multiple platforms to provide your network your clients, your let's say, your network, with multiple availabilities to access to whatever you offer. Yep, so now for example, I use a platform like kajabi, I'm still on Instagram, I've got my email list of I'm on LinkedIn, I'll probably launch a new group on LinkedIn now. So if one thing is taken away from you, or if one thing stops working, or, you know, who knows, maybe maybe sooner than later, we might have a massive technological crush. You never know what's coming next. We cannot predict it. So if you can for yourself as a business owner, but also for those people who you are serving, if you can create those safety nets, many of them I think you are just serving yourself and others to a greater degree, and that ultimately puts you in the center. In a winning position in the game of business,

Andrew Stotz 30:03
you know, it's exciting because it's something that I teach, because I do some coaching with and helping companies and CEOs and management teams to make the companies more valuable. And value is different from profit. You know, you could have a company, let's say, Amazon that lost money for 10 years, but they were creating value. And that value later became realized. And in the world of finance, if we, if we take one of those complicated finance formulas, and I break it down, as I do for my students, and my clients, and I basically say there's four things that drive the value of a business, there's just four things is only four things. So and I usually stand up in front of them, and I turn around and I show them my but not my whole, but you know, just my butt, meaning my jeans or whatever. And they first of all, they're shocked, like, what kind of teacher would get up and go, what's that? And they go, you know, what ass and I say, Okay, what that is, is my rear. And I use the acronym rear, because the four drivers of value, and I tell people that the never going to forget what the four drivers of value in the world of finance are, number one, revenue, increase it. Number two, expense, decrease it, number three assets, decrease it or get more out of the existing assets that you have. And number four, is risk, reduce it. And what you're teaching today, is the idea of how do we reduce risks by expanding our distribution channels, and making sure that we have multiple points of contact with our various audiences. And so that fits the theme of this podcast pretty darn well, because this is the number one risk management podcasts and you just taught us a very important life lesson. Yes. So all right, last question, what's your number one goal for the next 12 months.

Ela Staniak Leaupepe 32:00
I cannot wait. And I am so excited. I'm envisioning this every single day. When our beautiful world and our society finally overcomes covet, I cannot wait to launch my biggest women empowerment events, that there will be the biggest one I've done so far. I'm hoping that this is a goal for the next 12 months. Now if I have to stretch it to the next 24. That's fine. I'll adopt. So my biggest goal is definitely just an amazing transformational experience for women where they can come in and I'll be using all my ammunition, of intuitive coaching, hypnotherapy, even experiences which I've had in fitness industry, to give women a basic understanding of their psychology, provide them with the experience of feeling of letting go of the past and making peace with the past, experiencing the now and creating the future and providing them with ultimate connection to others. I see thousands of women in the room. That's what I see. Beautiful. Planning now, right?

Andrew Stotz 33:08
I, you know, when you said, you know, to break free from the past, that's I just teared up a little bit. Because I think that, you know, we all have that. And when I finally let go and break free from the past, it's a beautiful world out there. It's a beautiful world out there. So beautiful. I love your gold.

Ela Staniak Leaupepe 33:28
Beautiful words. Yeah. Thank you so much.

Andrew Stotz 33:30
All right, well, listeners, there you have it another story of loss to keep you winning. Remember to go to my worst investment ever.com slash Academy to get access to the short course called six ways to lose your money, and six strategies to win. As we conclude, Ella, I want to thank you again for coming on the show. And on behalf of a Stotz Academy, I hereby award you alumni status for turning your worst investment ever into your best teaching moment. Do you have any parting words for the audience? You made it?

Ela Staniak Leaupepe 34:05
Thank you so much. My final words is remember this, you are the one and only CEO of your life. So take your life by the horns and write it.

Andrew Stotz 34:16
Beautiful, beautiful and that's a wrap on another great story to help us create grow and most importantly protect our well fellow risk takers. This is Andrew Stotz, your worst podcast host saying I'll see you on the upside.