Steps to Empowerment: Holly Rivers' Entrepreneurial Waltz

Embark on an unforgettable odyssey with Holly Rivers, whose tale of transformation from dance teacher to entrepreneurial powerhouse unfolds in our latest episode. As your host, Veronica Edwards, I guide the conversation through the steps of Holly's life dance, where each pivot and twirl has led her to empower over 250 small businesses. Our chat isn't just about crunching numbers; it's an intimate waltz through Holly's personal and professional metamorphosis, revealing the therapeutic power of business ownership and the cathartic release of supporting others in their pursuit of clarity and success.

Holly's raw recount of closing her dance studio amid a global pandemic tugs at the heartstrings, echoing the silent struggles many entrepreneurs face behind the curtain of success. The resonance of her story lies in the profound strength she summoned to let go of her cherished farm after a divorce, a private moment of grief shared with the cascading tears of a secluded waterfall. Yet, from the ashes of closure and loss, Holly rose anew, embracing a career in coaching and consulting that's nothing short of inspiring. The wisdom she imparts is a testament to the courage needed to seek out new horizons and the value of educational capital when charting unfamiliar waters.

As Holly navigates the transition to her role in Asheville, her talent for organizing educational programs at Mountain BizWorks comes to the forefront. We delve into the variety of courses designed to arm entrepreneurs with the tools for triumph, from foundational business classes to advanced marketing strategies, painting a vivid picture of the resources at their fingertips. Her passion for private coaching, coupled with a love for numbers and spreadsheets, illuminates the path for others to follow—reminding us that sometimes, the most intricate dance steps are learned offstage, with a mentor who's danced through the spotlight and shadows alike.

Website: https://www.mountainbizworks.org/
Facebook: Holly Rivers
Instagram: _Holly_Rivers

This program is brought to you by:
Balanced Virtually

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Transcript

Veronica : 0:40

Welcome to the Veronica Edwards show where we have fun financial conversations that everyone listening can apply to their personal and professional life. I'm your host, veronica Edwards, so excited to be back here on bizradious for season three. Thank you, v Team, for supporting and giving me great feedback. I just released a newsletter. I've been trying to do more stories to get more presence in social media because I'm afraid of social media. But thank you guys for the positive feedback and, as always, you can listen to any of the prior shows at veronicaedwardsbuzzsproutcom, because we're still slowly crawling to our 4,000 downloads before season four. But we still have time and I know today's going to be an amazing show that will help us reach that goal.

Veronica : 1:30

So today's guest I have the privilege of working with wait for it Mountain BizWorks. I'm always talking about Mountain BizWorks. She is the learning programs coordinator, but really she's everything. She's my point person when I'm teaching financial tools, which I'm currently teaching when this airs, anytime I have questions, she fills in for so many people. She's also a business coach herself, with a passion for helping entrepreneurs move out of struggle and overwhelm and into ease, clarity and success. I was shocked when I saw this in her bio that she's helped over 250 small business owners start, grow and scale their business through one-on-one coaching and live group classes. Wow, so many questions for this guest, so without further ado, I would like to introduce Ms Holly Rivers. Welcome, holly.

Holly : 2:24

Hi Veronica, Thanks for having me.

Veronica : 2:26

Thank you so much for making the time to come on. Holly and I recently was able to have a couple of cocktails and dinner and we were like we got to get together soon, so I'm so thankful that we were able to get together. Still, I guess we're post-pandemic, but it still feels like we're half in, we're half out. Right when I feel like we're out of it, I'm like somebody sneezed and I'm going back in the house. So, holly, we always start the show asking the guests to tell us all about you where are you from and what led you to entrepreneurship.

Holly : 3:01

Thanks, veronica. So I've had a rather interesting journey, I would say, to entrepreneurship. It was not planned and actually funny story. When I was in my I have a master's degree in community counseling and when we were in our careers and development class and we were talking about entrepreneurship, I was like entrepreneurship, that's not me Not realizing the true definition of entrepreneurship, because I was still in that mindset of, like you know, that's somebody who wants a big business and wants like to be Amazon or-.

Veronica : 3:31

Right, a storefront, a brick and mortar.

Holly : 3:33

Yes, and you know I was living on our farm and raising our kids and teaching and doing all these other things. So I never dreamed that I would ultimately be an entrepreneur one day. But back up a little bit. I grew up in Cleveland, tennessee, and moved to Boone, north Carolina, where I stayed for 28 years of my adult life. Wow, yeah, I went and rooted and still have I will always be a heart rate. I still love Boone. But I met my husband when I was in college, or husband at the time. I'm now divorced and we were really ready to start our lives and live.

Holly : 4:17

We bought land, started our well, built our house of our own. So we built a log cabin, we plowed up land to grow a garden, put in fences and started our homestead, our farm, and raised our children there. While I was doing that he was starting a nonprofit outdoor education center, so I was helping him do that and I was getting my master's in counseling while I taught dance classes at the university. So from there we raised our children and the things that I was doing I didn't realize was entrepreneurship because it just was things I did. So I love helping people. It's like a real big part of my soul and I also, when I get really passionate about things, like I just want to teach it, like I just want to bring it to other people and see if it can't do something similar for their lives.

Holly : 5:11

So when I was on the farm and raising the kids like you know why not? And you know getting a degree and working part-time I was like why not do more things? So I would host workshops on my farm, I would, my daughters and I did summer projects where we did a farmer's market and would take our extra produce and little crafts and things that they made to the farmer's market and was doing things like that. Still really didn't realize that I was a bit of an entrepreneur until my daughters got older and one of my colleagues was selling her dance studio and by that point I was teaching body-mind classes. I was teaching dance classes, but the dance classes had been pulled from me because I didn't have a master's in dance. I'd only danced my whole life.

Veronica : 5:55

Yeah, that's BS.

Holly : 5:56

And so the you know creditors were like she's not qualified to teach dance anymore and so it was just an opportunity. It was kind of fell in my lap and I thought, why not? Like the dance studio was a bigger project in the school year, when my former husband was not as heavy with his outdoor education center His was more summer, I was lighter in the summer I thought, well, I think this will really work with our life. What was interesting?

Holly : 6:22

As I fell in love with business and I love the kids, I love the community that I stepped into and helped grow and continue to cultivate but I really got passionate about business and I actually tell people that becoming a business owner was the best therapy I ever got in my life.

Holly : 6:41

Like I had to step into myself in a way that I had never done before in order to be successful, cause I'm someone that, like when I take someone on, like I want to do a good job, and so in order to be a good business owner, I actually had to learn how to stand up for what was good for the business, which was also many times what was good for me, and so it taught me a lot about who I am. It empowered me to step into my life with a little bit more confidence. And, yeah, it led to a lot of different changes and I was growing my studio under unusual circumstances because I focused on the business of it. I let my teachers do what they do fabulously, I made sure my team was as good and as supportive as they could be and I focused on the other stuff and I went from five part-time employees to 14 part-time or 14 part-time.

Veronica : 7:34

Wow, excuse me, ma'am.

Holly : 7:37

I went from 90, you know what I call the tuition-based students that signed up for our tuition classes 90 of those to 120. And then I grew an adult education program. By the time the pandemic hit I'd hit, I think, 40 adult dancers. And then I brought a young woman in to run a pay what you can program. That grew within the first year to 60 students where they could. In our, we did the preschool up until 13, around fifth grade, and then they could start filtering and integrating into other classes under scholarships. So and then I became a business coach and consultant through Mountain BizWorks.

Veronica : 8:21

I was first how you got time to do all this. Like you totally skirted over. Oh, we got like a little farm. A farm is a lot of work and two girls. I feel like you guys could have had an HDTV show. Like I want to. I want to be your life, I want to be your daughter. Like this sound amazing. Yeah.

Holly : 8:42

It was a lot and I didn't realize it at the time because I was just living my life, but my former husband was gone a lot and with his work, and so it was mostly well, a good third of the year. It was just myself and my daughters on the farm and and I was working part-time and um all the married people listening in the light. I like that so there's one more like little trick to that is it was off the grid, so what?

Veronica : 9:12

yeah, um, it was cool like you were doing all this stuff before everybody else got woke, like you've been doing this.

Holly : 9:18

Yeah, we've been doing this for a while. I actually there's a part of me that I talk to people very differently about that experience when I was in it, cause you know, when you're in it, you're just grinding, yes, and there are things. There's things that I don't regret any of it. All of it was wonderful and I learned so much. But there's two things I don't ever want to live without again, and one is running hot water. Never, ever want to live without running hot water.

Veronica : 9:47

That's jail, sis. That's jail without hot water. Yeah.

Holly : 9:51

Exactly, and the other would really probably be some sort of power source.

Veronica : 9:56

Like I really, when our lights for a while, where we started with little kerosene lanterns, went to propane lanterns and finally got electric lights, and I was like I went from, like you know, the early 1900s, like we just went through several decades and like years I was going to say it's giving little house on the prairie, but I love it because now I'm sure there's so many little things that are like first world problems that we'll complain about and you're like relax.

Holly : 10:23

Oh yeah, oh, it puts a lot of things in perspective. I still kind of live a minimalist lifestyle because I'm not really attracted to stuff. I like things. I mean don't get me wrong but yeah, I don't like to carry a lot with me is how I talk. I think about it as like I like to move seamlessly and easily through life.

Veronica : 10:44

Wow, there's so many things I want to ask you about. How long did you have the farm for? And also, how long did you have the dance studio for?

Holly : 10:53

Yeah, so the farm we well, I was there. It's still there. I was there for 20 years, yeah, and actually it was the hardest part of my divorce was the relationship I was ready to be over with, but the farm I was not. And for the divorce papers I bought new shoes, I bought myself flowers. I was like it's time for my new life. Like I was very excited and then, like when I had to sign over the deed to my ex-husband, like I sat in my car and cried, I went into the lawyer's office to write that signature and I cried more and then I actually went. I have a kind of a special waterfall that I go to. That's like hidden and only like locals in the Boonee area really know about it.

Holly : 11:42

So, nobody's ever there. And I went there and I cried on a rock for a couple hours and then stood up and was done and went back to my life. Man, wow. And then the studio unfortunately had a very similar story. Wow, and then the studio unfortunately had a very similar story. So, like you know, I had it for almost 10 years, I think Maybe it was a little more than eight. It's muddy because you know that time warp of the pandemic.

Veronica : 12:08

Oh yeah, we lost a year or two. I'd be like what's going on?

Holly : 12:11

um, so I bought the studio. Three years into owning the studio was when my divorce happened and then and I was kind of growing a little bit I was mostly just in learning phase of that time um, that's around about the time I started, uh, taking coursework and get a, got a coach through mountain biz works and, um, and then left my marriage and then the next two years just was growing and what's really and this I'm gonna give out educational growing and what's really and this I'm going to get about educational capital. That's what I call it Soapbox for a second. When you like, as a business owner, when you think I, I need to learn and grow my business, you cannot invest enough in educational capital. I not only was I growing my studio during that time, that was really when I started taking off was when I started taking coursework. I didn't only do it through Mountain Biz Works, I did it through.

Holly : 13:03

There's an organization in Boone, high Country Social. I took coursework. High Country Startup took coursework. Through them have mentors in Boone, mentors here in Asheville. And I grew my studio get this so Boone here in Asheville. And I grew my studio get this so Boone. When I bought Boone had four dance studios Boone has, like you know, about 30,000 people in it right Four dance studios.

Holly : 13:23

By the time the pandemic hit, there were seven dance studios. Three more opened up. Wow, and I still grew. So like, I was still growing my business while the market was getting a sad market, was getting oversaturated, and I attribute that to educational capital. Now then the pandemic hit. I got the rug pulled out from under me. Boone was a very COVID conscious town. My clients did not want to go online. They did not want to, you know, have their kids back in class. So I went the first when they and they had a shutdown for nine months. They didn't even let us try to do it safely, which, interestingly, the research after the first, like three or four months, where the dance studios had like a 0.001% transmission rate, because listen, tell dancers what to wear and where to stand and we'll do it.

Veronica : 14:17

I know that's right, and if we're allowed to still get our hair done and our nails done, I'm thinking we can dance.

Holly : 14:24

Yeah, and so we were kind of kept shut down. You know people say there's government help but it's all debt. So I kept going into debt. And then I got emotionally and financially exhausted. I wasn't lucky enough to sell. There had been a family I'd been actually talking about as their dancer grew up. She was a senior in high school, us partnering. Because I wanted to actually start moving, expanding into the coaching and consulting, start moving and expanding into the coaching and consulting. Because by that point mountain bizworks had kind of recruited me to um, come in and be one of their facilitators and one of their coaches and I was loving it because it gets back into, like I really love this, let me teach everybody about it, yes, yes. And so I, I was lucky and I, so I turned and said, hey, new plan, I'm out, I can't do it anymore. I mean, I got to where I hated, driving to my dance studio, like I would get that pit in my stomach.

Veronica : 15:25

Oh yeah, it's time.

Holly : 15:27

And I was crying all the time and I was like I am going to be. The studio cannot move forward and continue to grow if this is how I feel, and so I knew it was time for me to get out and turn it over to somebody else, because I also don't think I was going to recover from like even if we'd gotten to the other side and gotten students up the level of distrust I developed with people during that time, of people I had helped over the years and when I would ask for help they did not help me back. Things like that that I just I didn't have my heart in it anymore and you know I was getting more and more clients and loving what I was doing. So I knew it was time for me to move on.

Veronica : 16:09

And I'm glad that you mentioned that, because you've you're kind of a serial entrepreneur and you went through seasons in your entrepreneurship. It's not always going to be high, it's not always going to be low, but the constant thread is that you love helping people and you can help people through dance. You can help people on a collegiate level, you can help people through, you know, coaching and consulting, and we're so happy to have you now at Mountain BizWorks, to have you now at Mountain BizWorks. So I would love for you to share what do you do as the learning programs coordinator? You know what type of programs are taking place. This show is going to air mid-April. So we're always looking to support all the Mountain BizWorks programs. But I have to just share.

Veronica : 16:52

You know, when I first met Holly and I think it was when you sat in on one of my financial tools classes I was like, hmm, she's different. You know, I could just, in a good way, I could just tell that yes, you had a lot of good experience and things to say, but you're firm but supportive. You know, like you remind me a lot of my mom, where my mom is very maternal, but she always say I'm not giving you a pity party, and so that's one thing about Holly. Holly will send emails out like OK, if you, if your hours ain't in, you're not getting paid, peace. We were like damn, ok, you know like, but I liked it because you are about your business and but you have your confident and your no nonsense and you can back it up with your experience. So I would just love you kind of already shared how you got with Mountain BizWorks, but if you could kind of tell us a little bit more about your role.

Holly : 17:39

Yeah, so I ended up getting this position. So you know, I talked about living in Boone and then when I sold the studio I helped them transition that year and then I like, pieced out of Boone and went to Bend, oregon, and lived with friends there and just kind of regrouped and then realized I cannot leave the Western North Carolina mountains, right, and so I came back and when I came back I was doing some more backend support while they had two people on leave and this position actually then turned around and opened up. So I just moved to Asheville settling in. I thought you know why not? Why not set aside my sort of my entrepreneurial hat for a skinny second and take on this position and just settle into being in Asheville and having something that's more consistent and that I'm really passionate about.

Holly : 18:27

Because the learning programs coordinator one of the things I do, which is what I'm good at. I did it actually for the university as one of my roles and then I did it with the dance studios. I bring people together into learning situation right. So like I make sure that people know where to be, how to be, how to like best be in that space, how to pay your bills, how to get paid.

Holly : 18:51

I love I do love organizing people. I love making sure that people have access to the education that they need. One of the things I do is work with the scholarship aspect of both of our classes and our coaching, so we do have the ability to give scholarships to students, and so I can work with them to make sure that we get the paperwork that they need to get in so that they can get that educational capital that they need to be successful in their business. And, of course, as somebody who's been a facilitator and a learning client, I have both sides, so I'm very passionate about both the client experience and the contract employee experience our facilitators and our coaches because I've been in both shoes, and so that's one of the things I really love about being in this position right now.

Veronica : 19:42

Oh yeah, you definitely have superpowers and it shows and I've never heard anybody say anything bad about you, holly and just how much you're helping level. Not that Mountain Bitsworks needs to level up, but you definitely have helped step up. You know the level of experience and with your background, so we only have a minute or two left. Holly, I would love for you to share what programs. What are some popular programs at Mountain Biz Works? What are some things that people if they want to get involved in the programming and they don't have to be in Western North Carolina, but how can they find out more about the programs that we have going on?

Holly : 20:21

Yes, so they. We have the foundations class. It's kind of your get started in business. We have your financial series. We have marketing and branding. We've started our scale up, which is on the other end, and just to conserve time, I'm not going to go into all of our classes. Conserve time, I'm not going to go into all of our classes. What I'm going to encourage and we'll put a link in the transcript of the class schedule because it's changing consistently, like I'm getting more and more people added to the schedule and more classes out of the schedule. So our courses are building out and also then coaching, like coaching is ongoing and we have, I think, around 50 coaches right now that are available.

Veronica : 20:59

I'm one of the coaches I have to shamelessly plug Veronica Coach of the year 2022. Just saying, okay, sorry.

Holly : 21:08

We should absolutely plug that. And you know, your ability to make numbers and balance sheets like exciting is incredible. I was like wow this is like I'm so engaged and we're talking and I actually I do love spreadsheets, I love making a spreadsheet and I love the numbers, but and that's what I do a lot with my private coaching that I still do is we work in the numbers.

Veronica : 21:33

Yes, well, holly, we're already to the end of the show and I was telling you earlier, if all goes well, we want Holly back. I want you back, holly. You're a great talker. So much more I want to talk about. I always tease people like you.

Veronica : 21:45

A dancer, like ballet, like what kind of dance you do? So I just love to talk about the dance studio and just being on the farm. Like that's like a fantasy in my mind, like I want to have a farm, but I know it's a lot of work, and so I just appreciate you being so transparent and telling your story, because I know your journey is going to help others listening, and I usually always ask for tips and jewels. You already gave one.

Veronica : 22:07

I love that educational capital. You know, for business owners listening, you have to invest in education. Even though you might not be the doers of everything in your business, you still need to know enough to be dangerous and know when you need to get the help that you need. So thank you so much, holly, for taking time out of your busy day and your busy life, of all the amazing things that you're doing, and we're so happy to have you here in Asheville. Yeah, awesome, thanks for having me Absolutely, and I want to thank the listeners for tuning into bizradious for the Veronica Edwards show, which airs on Wednesdays across all platforms on Biz Radio, and if you miss the live airing, you can listen to all prior shows at veronicaedwardsbuzzsproutcom.