Read the success story of top network marketing leader, Shauna Ekstrom, whose greatest joys in life is coaching others to live the life of their dreams.
When I was 15, I decided that I needed to get a career and not wait for three more years to make money. I figured that I can be an adult and change my life and also I wanted to look like all the other kids at school not with the homemade clothes and hand-me-downs. There were always money issues in my family and so I decided just before school started in tenth grade, I was still 15, that I could change my life if I started my own career.
So I talked my mom into checking out if I could go to beauty school and so I never actually went to a day of high school and I ended up starting and realized that OK, I’m in an adult world now.
Actually, I didn’t get to start until the day after I turned 16 because the state board wouldn’t let you. So the day after I turned 16, I started beauty school and I was in this world of adults. So I got big hair flipped and I ended up loving it because I was working fulltime, having a career. I figured by the time the other kids were just going to go into their senior year, I would already have a job and I would be making money.
So I grew up really fast and the way it turned out, by the time I graduated beauty school, I had met my future husband. I really wanted to have a family. I didn’t have a clue as to how to be a mom or an adult actually. But I was pretending to be an adult. So there I was in this world and I thought, “Wow, how am I going to get through life?”
It’s just about – I guess I was pretending to be an adult but I was still a kid. The other kids were going to the school dances and I was in this new adult world that I absolutely loved and I don’t know why I’m crying because at that time, if I take me back, I was just having a wonderful adult time. I didn’t know that I had missed out. I guess it’s when I’m looking back, when I see teenagers that I realize that there were a few things that I didn’t get to do.
One of my friends who had a child that was the same age, we used to go to garage sales together and estate sales and that was our one break we would get maybe once a month. She had a business. I had a salon. When she asked me to look at a business opportunity, I was like, “No, I don’t do that.” But on the way back, she had helped me all day. So I said, “OK, I will listen.” I did.
I said, “OK. I will go to the meeting.” At this meeting, I heard someone say, “Make your strengths productive and your weaknesses irrelevant.” I said, “I can do this.” I wanted my kids to look like all the other kids at school. So I over-extended our finances, me. Not my husband. It was me. I saw a way out for our family. So I started studying, growing, reading the books, everything I could get when I was – after the kids would go to bed at night and everything was taken care of, I would read these books and one of the first ones that I read was Rich Dad Poor Dad. One sentence in there mentions network marketing and I mark that and I read that over and over.
I was very hungry to be successful because I had something to prove to me and also to my parents that they hadn’t made a bad decision by letting me quit school and eventually we ended up in a small town called Enumclaw, Washington and I called my daughter who’s a decorative artist and she was in school and she had her own business with painting and doing faux finish.
I said, “Heidi, what do you think? I can get this place at a very reasonable rate. What do you think? I can make my own salon.” She’s like, “Get it. Let’s paint the door red and call it the Red Door Salon.” I said, “OK.”
So she painted the door red and it was awesome. It was like a little boutique and overlooked the cute little downtown. It was on the second floor and it was just great. I was busy all the time and I thought this was – this is what I wanted to do. I didn’t want to have other people work for me because I had seen all the estrogen before and the salons I worked in, the competition, and I’m like, “I just want to be creative. This is what I do.”
I actually read the book The E-Myth. Somebody had introduced me to that book and I’m like, “Oh my goodness. You mean I’m a CEO and I’m a manager and I do the books? I’m the CPA? All these things, I don’t like any of those jobs. I just like doing hair and listening to clients. I love my clients. I’m interested in their lives. I love psychology but I don’t like the other jobs,” and that’s what I just have. I don’t like it. I realized I wanted more than this. I didn’t want to be in the four walls anymore and also at the same time, my marriage started going into – it was a struggle.
I can do this. I can have another business that doesn’t take this much time. I can build it. I can learn because I’ve already learned how to do hair. I’ve already learned how to be a mom. I can do this too. We were having financial stress to tell you the truth. But that probably had the biggest deal to do with it and I had a lot to do with that and one of the things I realized is you do have to have a story.
Network marketing is a storytelling business. In my real education, I didn’t even have a company then but I had hope because I had gone so far beyond the salon. I had dreams. I started dreaming big and I was not going to give up on my dreams and after a 31-year marriage ended and I was still helping out with finances for marriage, and also living in an apartment behind my shop, that was a 600-square-foot apartment where my son and I shared a bunk bed. I would crack up really inside myself. I would laugh and say, “This is kind of weird. I’m almost 50. I’m divorced. What is wrong with this picture? How am I going to change this?”
So there was no way to go back. I was realizing the heat right then and there and that I had to make something work because my salon wasn’t going to do it for me. I was dreaming again. I had to have more and I had read so many books by then and I was craving success and I could feel that. I could breathe it. I knew it. I knew it was coming.
So when I heard about a product that was that, a visual and an emotional product, like I got weight to lose. I’m going to do this. That’s when I really realized this is not about sales. It’s about sharing. It’s about really sharing something that you truly believe in. I already believed in network marketing. Bottom line is I went to work and we ended up growing this business to – I mean to where it’s crazy money. I mean the thing is, I never could have imagined. All I wanted at the beginning was to have enough to pay the bills. The reason I believe in network marketing is it gives you the freedom to do whatever it is you need to do or you want to do. I believe in you. I believe that you can be anything and do anything that you choose to do and I really want people to start believing in their dreams.
If there was a time when you stopped believing in yourself or stopped dreaming, I want you to know that it’s time to start dreaming again because no matter what your schedule is, how many hours a day you work, you can do this.
