There are no shortages of lessons learned coming out of the pandemic. In addition to the economic, health, and working from home we all faced new challenges around every corner during the last year. As many of us found ways to navigate our new lives, many of us also took a look in the mirror and asked ourselves what are we doing, do we love it, are we over stressed, and so many other questions.
Lisa Hendrickson joins us and shares with us how she reinvented herself during the pandemic, and what she is doing now.
Video Transcription
Harry Brelsford 0:17
Hey Nation, Harry here and flying the SMB Nation flag of yesteryear. And I'm with longtime friend and community member Lisa Hendrickson How you doing?
Lisa Hendrickson 0:27
Good? Happy, sunny day in Florida today.
Harry Brelsford 0:32
Yeah, Yeah, no kidding. You said what was it for you recently moved to Fort Myers from Minneapolis. Is that correct?
Lisa Hendrickson 0:39
No, I moved here about a year and a half ago. Oh, my bad. I, you know, here I watched one of our old videos. And it was right. When I was doing the grad school thing. Yeah, I'm gonna I decided not to do grad school. And within two months later, I didn't even want to be in Minnesota. So there wasn't for me now, like, I hope. No,
Harry Brelsford 1:04
no, I hear you. If the pandemic recession that just the pandemic did anything, a lot of us have changed. But we're not here to talk about me, we're here to talk about you change you have coming up. So what's your new field of endeavor? What's going on?
Lisa Hendrickson 1:20
Well, you know what, so the grad school thing didn't work out, I decided not to force myself into learning things that probably didn't need and moved Florida. I moved here right before the pandemic, so it was kind of wild. Like, I literally didn't have any my stuff. And then after the pandemic, I went through kind of like what other people went through was considered the great pause. Like, my business didn't slow down during lockdown. In fact, it went up, but it wasn't because of lockdown. It was, I get a lot of 365 requests now. So that was during that time, and you would think, but a lot of these clients already worked from home. So wasn't that but but then during June and July, things did slow down, and I had a lot of downtime. And I was just like, kind of getting frustrated with the work I was doing. And I said, I need to do a change. Like, what else am I gonna do for 20 years? You know, I can't be an outlook expert for 20 years, there has to be something else. Yeah. So um, so I wrote down like a list of all the things I love doing about my business. I love the marketing, I love the videos, I love this. I love that. And then I knocked it into two different areas. One is training, which, you know, I've, I've loved it and hated it for years. And then also doing email investigative work. Not so because I have the skills with Outlook I have my two. I have a law enforcement degree and a corrections degree to track, I kind of have the background to be able to do that. And plus, I have the knowledge with outlook. And I've already helped some clients with some some law matters. Yeah. So I did two things. I started a new business called Agent 99. And I got to experience the fun of starting a new company with all the experience of starting one before. Yeah. A lot harder than you think.
Harry Brelsford 3:23
Yeah,
Lisa Hendrickson 3:25
I got the business part done. And then I had come the marketing and the networking. And that's where I started to fail.
Harry Brelsford 3:31
Okay, well, it's a journey. excited about the new direction. I mean, I understand always takes longer than you think I can attest to that.
Lisa Hendrickson 3:41
It does. And you know, the thing is, I think that when you're building up the business, you do the operations, you do the setup, the website, how you're going to do things, I did all of that part. And that was the building of it. And I loved it. But then I had to come up with all these ideas on how to market it. And boy, let me just tell you that it's a lot. And finally, I was just kind of like out of ideas, and I know how to do marketing, you know, that I said, I think I'm just gonna put it aside for now. Because something else popped into my life that came a little more prevalent, which is the training. Yeah, so just had to just put Agent 99 to the side. It's all done, built websites up. It's great. Now, I'm focusing back on doing training for corporate you know, corporate training, and nonprofit and small business, all custom training, no cookie cutter stuff. And the reason why is because an opportunity came in, and it was a big deal. So I had to take advantage of it.
Harry Brelsford 4:40
Oh, sure. Sure. And you know, you're a true entrepreneur. And you know, I get it. I do like the idea of Agent 99. Long, long ago we had an employee named Beatrice Mulzer, SMB Nation, so early 2000s and it's is one does she she moved along after that must have been five or six years. And she got into representing a legal software platform and going into law firms for the life of me, I can't remember if it was document management or this or that. But, you know, they have very specific software in their industry, right. And so she did that for a few years. And then she moved along again, and ultimately ended up being owning a yoga studio in Titusville, Florida, and then sold that and now is a business coach. So the point is, must be something in the water in Florida.
Lisa Hendrickson 5:41
Well, business coaching is something I probably could do too. But you know, I'm very, I don't want to venture out of what I do now. And the business coaching is really hard to sell. Yeah, it is. People don't want to pay for it. Like they also don't want to pay for training. Yeah.
Harry Brelsford 5:58
Well, I'll end on this, and get that certificate out while I'm talking. But the nice thing about training is, back when I was an MCT, I'm not currently an MCT. But I was and I liked it. I was doing the roadshow, the Microsoft hands on labs. So you know, you fly out Sunday night, and you're home by Thursday night, and that kind of three day weekends. But what I liked it was my job was over at 5pm. With training, I really liked that, that I'm done. You know, there's no pager going off. So I like the discrete nature of training,
Lisa Hendrickson 6:39
you know, like emergency calls, and my outlook won't open. It's nine o'clock at night. And, you know, you missed the entire struggles I had with Outlook last summer when Microsoft had zillions of update problems. Yeah, and it was painstakingly hard to fix these calls. And, you know, I was like, really at my wit's end with Outlook last summer. It was not only the great pause was killing me, it's just that Microsoft kept doing things to home users, business users mixing it all up. That I was, I was so exhausted at the end of the day that I would, you know, be in tears, like, just tired and exhausted. But you know, during, um, during the, it was during Christmas last year when I was thinking about Agent 99 and put myself in a better place. I raised my fees. guy said enough of this. Yeah. What Yeah,
Harry Brelsford 7:37
yeah, no, that's a key takeaway. Nothing like raising your fees to recast who yarn. What kind of people work with you? Wait, we're almost out of time to flash that certificate up. I want to talk about that. So certified,
Lisa Hendrickson 7:54
certified. It's my first certification ever. And I found out there's probably more I could get with this. But that was a good start. It's outlook and outlook 2019 365. So
Harry Brelsford 8:06
well, there we go. Well, I'll tell you what we're gonna circle back to you in the fall. We're not going to wait a couple years. But we'll circle back in a few months. And and because I'd like to talk with you about seeing if you still have a joint promotion in you for I believe was Black Friday at Thanksgiving used to work with us and some other people. Think about it over the summer. But we really enjoyed that. It was brilliant, the way you brought different stakeholders together. And they all pinged their list to the mutual benefit of each of us.
Lisa Hendrickson 8:38
Right. And we've been doing it about nine years now. So we're doing it again. Every year, everybody changes what they do. So it's great. You betcha.
Harry Brelsford 8:49
All right, Lisa. Thank you.