070: Jenny Blake of Life After College | Career Change

Imagine for a second that you build a business which becomes your brand. It’s how the world knows you. And it’s successful. Woo-hoo! Par-tay. It’s your birthday. And then, you move on. You grow. You become older. You no longer want to be known by that “brand.”

Jenny Blake experienced that. Like me, Jenny started her career in the world of politics. She actually was the first hire for a startup that specialized in political polling. After that, she went on to Google where she managed the Authors at Google program. But she is perhaps most well known as the founder of LifeAfterCollege.org, which is a website aimed at helping new college graduates to navigate life in their early 20s.

When she moved on, she found it a challenge to re-brand herself. To make a career change. Today, she is an author, a speaker, and a business coach and strategist. I had her on the Smart Business Revolution podcast to talk about what it’s like to make a career change – to move on from a business that has intimately become what you are known for in a way that doesn’t confuse people. If you’ve ever wanted or needed to make a career transition, and needed to “re-brand” yourself, you won’t want to miss this episode. Enjoy! Resources from this Episode:

• JennyBlake.me
• Life After College

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Transcript of Interview:

John Corcoran: Welcome to the Smart Business Revolution podcast episode no. 70.

Unknown Speaker: Welcome to the Small Business Revolution, revolution, revolution. You want a revolution. Say you want a revolution. The revolution, it's going on right now.

Welcome to the revolution, the Smart Business Revolution podcast, your source for how to grow your small business without working 24-7. Now, your host for the revolution, John Corcoran.

John Corcoran: All right, welcome everyone. My guest on this episode is Jenny Blake. Now, imagine for a second that you build a business which becomes your brand. It's how the world knows you and then you move on. You grow. You become older. You no longer want to be known for that thing that you're known for. Well, Jenny Blake experienced that. Today she is an author, a public speaker, a business strategist and she started her career in a very different realm. In fact she took a break from college and worked for a startup that did polling and politics and after that she went on to work at Google where she actually managed Google's authors at Google program but she became most well known as the founder of lifeaftercollege.org which is a blog and a website aimed at helping new college graduates to navigate life in their early 20's.

She wanted to move on from that so this interview we talk about what it's like to move on from that experience, to have a successful business and to move on in a way that doesn't confuse people who know you for one thing. So I think you'll like this interview. This is Jenny Blake.

All right. Welcome, everyone. I am talking with Jenny Blake. Jenny is an author. She's a speaker. She's a career and business strategist but Jenny, you know, you didn't start out that way. You've got all these different hats now but what's really interesting to me is that we've got these similar backgrounds. We both started actually in the world of politics. You were a poli sci major at UCLA. I went up the road a little bit, went to UCSB, similar type of school, a little less academic and you decide to take a year off of school and work on a startup that was involved in politics. So tell us what it was like starting your career in that way.

Jenny Blake: I just knew it was a once in a lifetime opportunity and my friends are saying things like why would you leave college to go work? You're crazy. You have 60 years. You have the rest of your life to go work, why cut your college experience short and go do that? I thought about it for a minute but then I just felt like here was this brand new company, a professor of mine, one of my favorite poli sci teachers, Lynn Vabrick, she was starting this company with a Stanford economist, Doug Rivers, and I felt like it happened to be in my hometown in Palo Alto. I just knew that there would be a lot of opportunity here and I figured I would try it for a quarter and if it didn't work out, I could go back to school.

But it ended up being incredibly exciting, nerve wracking, terrifying. I learned so much. I learned so much about how to just be in the workplace and then I slowly would start to take on more and more responsibility marketing websites, office management, every single thing was self-taught so that feeling of kind of carving my own path is what ultimately led me to start life after college, the website in 2005 and later turn it into a book.

John Corcoran: Okay, so you did. It's funny because the experience of taking time off of work is more of a Silicon Valley type of thing. You're from Silicon Valley. You're in LA. I'm from LA so I know that people in LA, yeah, so it's funny like the, in LA, people would be like why are you taking time off to go work for a company? But Silicon Valley, it's like a very common thing. Of course you'd go work for a startup if you have the opportunity, right?

Jenny Blake: Yeah and at that time it was really pretty Peter Teal, it was pretty dropout, school's kind of ?

John Corcoran: It's a big popular thing now.

Jenny Blake: Yeah, it wasn't, that wasn't as big of a movement at the time but it was 2000, when did I get the job? Maybe 2003, 2004 so it was after the dotcom crash that things were starting to pick back up and for me, I was almost gonna minor in computer science if I'd stayed in UCLA because I was ahead, I was double majoring in poli sci com. So I was just so organized. I loved figuring it all out. I was gonna be ready to graduate within two and a half years so I also felt like okay, I got to add something here because otherwise I'm gonna be bored and so instead of adding a computer science minor or trying to go work on a presidential campaign, I thought great, a startup sounds awesome and I got to do a really great combination of things like marketing and websites and even office management.

I used to love stationery stores as a kid so even now it's fun for me to be the one replacing our Post-its or picking the signage for the front door of University Ave., things like that were just, there's so much diversity in the role that I really loved it.

John Corcoran: Variety is the spice of life as they say.

Jenny Blake: Yeah.

John Corcoran: Yeah, so all right. so you did that and then you go back to school and you come back and graduate, right?

Jenny Blake: Yep, I had one quarter left after taking a few classes at Stanford so I went back to graduate with my class, came back to the startup for about six months and pretty soon after that moved over to Google in a role in, its product training.

John Corcoran: Okay, so how'd you get a job at Google? Getting a job today, Google is like the cream of the crop so how'd you get that?

Jenny Blake: Even then it was really, really tough. I interviewed for four months. I had to do four rounds of in-person interviews including a mock Google Earth presentation to a room full of 12 people who are on the training team and I had to pretend they're a group of realtors. So it was intense. It was very intense and I didn't know that I was applying to a team where they had never hired somebody from external to the company before but ultimately part of what did it was actually my technical and HTML skills that were self-taught. I didn't think they could care two licks about it but it turned out they needed a training team website and then the other thing was I'd been managing our Google Ad Words accounts at the startup company.

We're doing political polls and I was managing our accounts so I actually had some experience coming in and I would say it's those two things and then Google in general, you have to be extraordinary and if you interview at Google and everybody likes you and they send your hiring packet all the way up to the top committee which at the time was still Larry, Sergei, and Eric, and they didn't think that you were exceptional, they would reject you no matter how much everyone liked the interview.

So part of that was selling leadership, just being Google-y, being friendly, being collaborative, showing that you can be adaptable and I think all those things are qualities that many companies today are looking for.

John Corcoran: But their hiring centers I think have evolved over the years. Is that correct? Do you know what they are today, how they've changed?

Jenny Blake: They're very similar. It's very, very similar. What evolved was when I applied, they would reject you almost immediately if you didn't come from a top school or have a top GPA and so I did have a good GPA and UCLA was not the top tier for them but hey, they let me in anyway.

John Corcoran: It's a public school, right, state school.

Jenny Blake: At that time, they would pretty much reject you outright if you didn't have a very strong GPA and over the years it's become more lenient because they understand that especially in engineering, a lot of those people are self-taught and you can't learn the most cutting edge engineering techniques or coding necessarily in the university setting.

John Corcoran: Yeah. Did you know anyone to get in there? Did you just apply to their regular public process?

Jenny Blake: It was through the account representative who I'd worked with for a year and a half to two years at the startup and the funny thing was that my boss was kind of gruff at times and would get very stern with her. So it's almost like good cop, bad cop and I was the good cop and so she and I had a really good relationship and I'm so glad that I really took care in our relationship and I didn't blame things on her or send her angry emails or angry phone calls. I was thankful that we had developed such a strong relationship that she was willing to refer me to the company.

John Corcoran: What did you learn at Google? You started out in one capacity, eventually moved into the authors at Google Track. Tell us about that.

Jenny Blake: Yeah, I started doing really technical product training for our customer service reps. Authors at Google later was more of a, it was never my full time role but I did help that team through a transition and I ultimately was on a career development team working on global manager coach training programs. I would say that things that I learned be scrappy with the huge Google mantra, launch and iterate, like just get shit out there. It's like I was set [inaudible][00:09:16] ship at Google we were always saying launch and iterate, get something out, fix it later. I learned about really fighting for my own career goals.

So when I first asked to do coach training on nights and weekends and submit for education reimbursement through Google's internal system, I got turned down four or five times but I was refusing to accept no as an answer. I felt like if people were going and taking random courses, why can't I take training and as part of that ? I was willing to pay for it on my own if I had to but I really learned how to advocate for the, my skills that I felt were important and that would help me contribute better to the team and to the organization as a whole.

Then I would also say I learned scale, how to communicate when I was at the company, it grew from 6,000 to 36,000 employees so learning how to launch a program from the first year I was at the company to the fifth was very different.

John Corcoran: When you were working in the authors at Google capacity, you of course later became an author yourself. So were you consciously using that role in order to develop relationships that would help you later?

Jenny Blake: No. That wasn't really a motivator. It was more I loved books since I was a little kid and authors are my celebrities. Authors are my idols. I just, meeting an author is like Christmas. It still is to this day I will go fangirl mode. Even if I'm on the same speaking line number as an author who I love and so for me, Authors at Google was this great bridge. I was very thankful to be meeting and connecting with some of my favorite authors just like you've pointed out but it was never the driving goal there. It was a nice side benefit that I got to build those relationships. I just loved being able to have a say in who we brought in, be able to help expose Googlers to this author, be able to help the author kind of get their foot in the door there and expose people to really interesting business books.

John Corcoran: I imagine some of those relationships continue to this day, some of the authors that you brought in, correct?

Jenny Blake: Yeah, I remember bringing in Pam Slim, Michael Bungee Stanier and Joshua Kaufman. Those are all I think either the first or second times that we met in person and I'm still in touch with all of them to this day.

John Corcoran: Now, let's talk a little bit about life after college because the audience there, obviously you understand the [inaudible][00:10:07] better than I do. It's people in their early 20's after college helping them to find some purpose. Now on the other hand, I have to say your career has been pretty amazing. You worked for a hot startup. You worked for Google now. You got a book deal now so how do you relate either in the form of coaching clients or speaking on the stage to that audience of 20 somethings who are struggling on their career when you actually have been quite successful? do you struggle to relate to them or do they struggle to relate to you?

Jenny Blake: I don't know how they feel but I try to be really honest with what I share and I'm trying to share my process and how I felt along the way and I feel in some ways I can relate because when I was at the entry level, none of my friends were. I was alone. I felt very alone and confused so I can relate to that feeling of being on an island after school and feeling ,even though I wasn't confused about what my job would be, how to navigate all of it and how to navigate life was confusing to me.

Then working at a big corporation, I learned what that's like. I learned what it's like to work in a cubicle, now self-employment, what it's like to go to the roller coaster of entrepreneurship. So I feel like I've had a variety of experiences and more so, I'm actually classified as a highly sensitive person so I learn more about it all the time but I'm very introverted, much more introverted than people might think. Things affect me very strongly. I don't always feel all that resilient. I feel like I get rocked pretty hard when I'm going through change and transition and so for that reason, even if I can't relate to a specific struggle, I know what it feels like to have a hard time just getting the basics done any given day because I'm wrestling with so much mental gymnastics.

Those are the things that I talk about and how to optimize for what's important to each individual, I'm less concerned with resume tips how to interview effectively. I've done some of that on my websites but I figure people can get that. There's plenty of that elsewhere so I also try to focus on the domains where I can add value and add both side of the coin in a really honest authentic way and then I'll also say that sure, I have come out of the other side on a lot of these aspects. I'm not 31.

Some people reading life after college may be 21 so once I've made it through something, I then make every effort I can to create a template or a resource or a book or something that someone coming after me can use and life after college in particular, that's also why I've brought on a team of writers. Two of them are Yale students. It's really a range of voices. One contributor's a professor. There's another two who are entrepreneurs and then at jennyblake.me, that's now where I discuss business and creativity and some of the things because I realized just like you said, I'm kind of moving past the just out of college phase.

John Corcoran: Was that difficult to come to that realization that your career was gonna move on beyond what your brand represented?

Jenny Blake: What was hard for me was so Life After College the book was coming out in spring of 2011. I took an unpaid leave of absence from Google to do a self-funded book tour and when I didn't go back to Google, suddenly I became defined as the girl who quit Google and that's okay. I talked about that for many months. It brought me lots of coaching clients, people who also wanted to leave big fancy jobs but then I got really confused like okay, my book is out, I'm not 27 turning 28, I'm kind of moving on from wanting to talk about life after college but I can't just be the girl who quit Google or the girl who wrote Life After College like what's next?

I was having a very hard time understanding what was the next five years of my career gonna look like and I'm only coming out of that now. that was two and a half years of really intense searching and questions to feel like I had some real clarity and substance again.

John Corcoran: What conclusions have you come to so far even though I imagine it's a work in progress?

Jenny Blake: Yeah, it always is, right? It started fuzzy. At first when I launched the Jenny Blake website under my own name, that was big for me because I was coming out, I was kind of hiding behind my life after college a little bit, the weren't for me pictures, I talked mostly about career, not really anything else, sometimes other things in my life. Jennyblake.me now puts me front and center so I was like well, who am I? What do I stand for? What's my personality as a brand? Who knows? But I decided mind, body, and business, the intersection of those three things.

Later in the year, I added systems at the intersection of mind, body, and business then I started talking about mid-life crisis and quarter life crisis are out. They're only gonna accelerate the pace of change and innovation is really picking up. So I got hooked on this idea of pivoting as people, not just startups and now I'm excited to say I just got a book deal with Portfolio, Penguin that the pivot method is gonna be my next book and it's my next really major meaty area of study of how we can be more agile and resilient in a rapidly evolving economy.

John Corcoran: Wow, so what I'm curious about is you find a way to talk about a lot of different topics and to wrap it all in one brand whereas a lot of people struggle with that, particularly when you read, people try to be many things to dent many different people through their blog or in person and it is confusing to the rest of the world. So, how do you wrap all those different issues that you talk about, all those different areas that you focus on without seeming too dispersed if that makes sense?

Jenny Blake: Yeah, it's a great, great question and from the beginning, people said you've got to have a niche and I wondered for Life After college, I didn't. I refused. I wrote about life, work, money, happiness, goals, books, and food. Those were the main categories. It was literally everything under the sun. Even Life After College is all of life under the sun because life after could be anything and then moving over to Jenny Blake, mind, body, business, okay, great, that's everything. Once again it's so broad.

So like you said, I'm kind of buck to the like find the super specific niche. What I have always assumed is if I just be myself, I'll get, I'll just attract people who are interested in the same or at least let's say 80 percent of the similar topics that I am, not every post will be relevant to every person but I guess I'm fortunate I've been having an online presence now for almost 10 years so a lot of the people who are reading have just been around and they're really kind of just reading about their journey of different things and I'd say that the one area that I have chosen to be specific in a way is providing templates and that has been a thread, a through line through everything where no matter the topic, if I can simplify a complex topic in some way and provide a shortcut, a tool, a template then everybody's happy no matter the topic.

John Corcoran: Yeah, everyone wants a shortcut.

Jenny Blake: Yeah, so that's something I think people can kind of rely on me on or have come to know me before in different aspects.

John Corcoran: Now, you are very good at connecting with people and I recall watching an interview with you in corporate bar inside of Fizzle where you, I think he was talking a little while ago but I think he's talking about your do these five-minute or did these five-minute Skype calls with people. Is that right? Does that ring a bell or 10-minute?

Jenny Blake: I never did five minute but I was that girl ? no, I was just that girl, this was back in 2007, 08 where if I had someone I resonated with on Twitter, I would always say let's have a call. So my friends used to make fun of me for always being let's have a call and I would just do what with people I wanted to connect with and it was not always trying to find a mentor or like you know, reach for the stars or go for like the busiest most prominent people. It was peers. It was just trying to connect to people who are at my exact same level and that was really fun and we were ? because we were both excited to talk to each other, it wasn't a one-way thing and then as we've all quote grown up together on the internet, it's been really fun to be able to support each other over the years.

John Corcoran: So let's break that down for everyone who's listening to this. Give us the template. So what did that look like? Did you just send an email to someone? Do you follow it on Twitter? You're like I admire you, can we do a call? How do you incentivize that person to take time out of their day to connect with you?

Jenny Blake: Well, first if I have to incentivize someone, done, I'm not interested in that. So like I don't, it has to be mutual. Even when I reach out to an author who I think is say, a level above me or something, if I at all get the idea that they're doing me a favor, I'm done. I'm not really interested. I don't need that. We're all busy you know, don't do me any favors and so for me, if it's not a mutual thing, it's okay. I'm ready to, like I'm patient at this.

John Corcoran: That's an interesting point. So does that mean that it somewhat is at a higher level, you know, like a really successful author that you don't try to reach out to them or does that mean that if you do reach out to them, you want to see that there's some enthusiasm in return?

Jenny Blake: So it's a little of both. I'll reach out if I really have a reason but more so I kind of just wait to cross their path in person. I recently met my idol, David Pogue. He was the New York Times technology columnist.

John Corcoran: He's great. He's a great writer. Yeah, I love him. He went to Yahoo a couple of years ago, right? Yeah.

Jenny Blake: Yeah, we were on the same speaking line up at a conference recently and so at the end of the day I went up to him and said you're my hero, you're the reason for Thursdays, you know, I just totally gigged out so I didn't mean to email him to like have coffee or have a meeting. I just wanted to say thank you in person and to your question, here's an example. Recently I emailed someone who I think I would say maybe at my level, maybe he's busy, I don't know. I don't pay too much attention to that but his assistant responded. He never wrote back and said yeah, sure let's get coffee. His assistant said sure, you guys can get coffee and as we started to schedule it, it was now two months out, three months out and I just thought you know, it's okay. Don't worry about it.

I never heard from him saying like great, yeah, looking forward to it. So and so will help you schedule. So I just kind of dropped it. I just felt like I don't need to force this. We live in the same city. If I run into you, I'll run into you.

John Corcoran: It's interesting because one of the things that I personally struggle with is the amount of emails we all got and it could be tempting. I don't think I'm quite at the level where I would hire an assistant to handle things that I wouldn't touch at all but it would be tempting sometimes, you know, because you get to that point where it's just so many emails so how do you manage it? I mean I'm sure you receive a lot of emails. How do you manage to handle it all?

Jenny Blake: It's hard. It's hard. I was lying in bed last night thinking email gives me heartburn, actual heartburn because I want to write back to people. I really respect that whoever it is has taken time out of their day to write me a thoughtful note and barring spam, I want to write back but I also understand that there may come a point where I simply can't do that and get my work done, especially write a book which I'm kind of, you know, staring down soon so I don't have a great answer. I have developed many more systems. I do have help with my email but in the case of a peer trying to connect with me, two things, one, I would either say no, sorry, I'm gonna write a book. I would say not now, can we revisit in April or I would say like sure, my schedule's a little crazy but my assistant CC can help schedule.

It's important to me that if it's a person I'm gonna develop a relationship with, even if all I said was three words and that would then initiate the next step of the process, that to me is a little better but I'm with you. I don't wanna fault anyone. I think everyone's trying to understand how to wrangle the email beast.

John Corcoran: Yeah. Yeah, it is. It's quite difficult. Okay, so and you know, we're coming up on the half hour here and I wanna be respectful of your time but I wanna ask a little bit about what's next for you and also the public speaking focus because you've made this transition into being more of a public speaker. Why did you decide to go in that direction? what does it do for you?

Jenny Blake: I just love speaking. Back when I applied to that Google job in 2005, I applied specifically to the training and development team because I knew that I got so nervous in front of a room and I also knew that someday I would wanna be an author and a speaker and I knew that taking that job where being in front of a room was my full time job would like really work all the fears out and so I had done training and speaking for five and a half years internally and now for three years since and it's just a bliss zone for me.

I love everything about it. I love traveling. I love checking into the hotel, practicing, getting ready, going on stage, talking to people afterward and it was really fun to do the NPO Speak Like a Pro Conference and talk to some of my speaking idols and understand that really everybody still gets nervous and no one said that was a bad thing and so anyone listening, take that as encouragement that even people who write books on speaking, they're still nervous but that means that it's a cool opportunity and so that conference is still available.

If people wanna check it out, you can go to jennyblake.me/speaklikeapro and to your other question of what's next, I'll be digging into the pivot method and I'm excited to just really flesh out these ideas and through all the coaching and speaking and writing, I've, it's becoming much clearer how to write this book and what it will look like but I'm sure that will change tremendously between now and January 2016 when it's slated to come out.

John Corcoran: So you got time to outline it for us but can you give us a little bit of an insight like what are some of the tools? If there's anyone who's listening right now, I'm sure there are who maybe is unhappy where they are or where they're working or with their company or with their business or their career, what are some of the tools that they can use to pit it and move into a new direction?

Jenny Blake: This is great. Okay, I'll give you the 60-second book synopsis.

John Corcoran: Good, I love letting off this practice. You have to come back in probably a year or so when it's coming out and we'll see how it changes.

Jenny Blake: So oh, my gosh, totally. Right now, there's one part called Surf the Void meaning get ready to strap on your seatbelt because there are some days and nights that are very dark when you're going through a big change and a big pivot. One of my quotes, all change involves loss even if it's exciting, even if it's you're getting married, you grieve something, your single life, something so there's always this surfing the void and how do you navigate that.

The second part is foundation. This is before we even get to the pivot method, do not pass go if you are not sleeping, not exercising, numbing out with TV, alcohol, food, any of the crutches that we all fall prey to from time to time, social media, it's really tempting during a void, of transition to wanna numb out or to drop our health habits and without getting proper sleep and exercise, your brain is just not at optimal functioning. So some of what I'm gonna talk about is how does optimize your human machine to be its most agile and resilient and then the pivot method is the three-step process, plant, scan, pilot and I kind of adopted this from a basketball player.

You ground down on what's working first. That's your plant foot. It's what are your assets, your strengths, your interests, your previous experiences, your network. Part of your plant foot is also your vision. What do you want? Even if you do not know the specifics, maybe all you know is I wanna feel engaged and excited to get out of bed every day, great, those are your known variables.
Next step, scan, what's out there? Who's out there? So who's doing what you wanna do? What job opportunities might there be? What skills might you wanna learn? What books do you wanna read? Scanning is just kind of like looking for ideas. Then the third step, pilot. This is like pivot before you leap is one of my mantras. You don't need to bet the whole house or do some kind of crazy 180. Piloting is doing small experiments to test your hypothesis about what you might wanna do next so that could be for me it was like doing coach training on nights and weekends.

Someone else might be attending yoga teacher training and the questions for a pilot are do you enjoy it? Are you good at it? Is there a market need for it? If you're gonna wanna make that the next step of your career, mark it neither one. So the idea of piloting is take the pressure off one big jumbo decision and instead run a series of experiments and adjust and you can go back through this whole process, plant, scan, pilot, plant scan, pilot over and over as you refine your next direction.

The key about a pivot is that you are building from what you've already done in the past and shifting very methodically in a new direction. So if I'd quit Google to become a full time yoga teacher, that would've been a 180 and not really a pivot. So the idea is look for the clues in your life now and how can we piece them together in a new way?

John Corcoran: That's great because I can see in your career how you did pilot to go from Google to being self-employed although no one really knows what it's like to be self-employed until you're self-employed. That's part of the fun of it but you were speaking regularly. That was part of your job. You did the coaching, the one on one coaching. You were writing regularly so all those elements became what you did when you're self-employed so it's not like you just completely as you said, quite Google entirely without having tested out these areas.

But I wanna ask you about another one. You moved to New York. That's a pretty big jump so how'd you try that one out?

Jenny Blake: I just, okay, I'm glad you asked. I had been traveling here once a quarter for work. My manager was in New York. First of all I applied to Columbia out of high school. I wanted desperately to go to school in the east coast, didn't get in to anywhere that I wanted and so I'd always have this bug about moving in New York then my pilot was my friend Julie and I moved to New York for one month in April of 2011 and we said if we like that month, we're gonna do it full time. She and I both ended up quitting Google around the same time and in September of that year, I moved full time.

John Corcoran: That's brave though. You picked April. You didn't pick February.

Jenny Blake: February would've been braver with the snow.

John Corcoran: Yeah. April and September, those are great months in New York.

Jenny Blake: Yeah, ours is a rainy one but New York is so magical and I didn't know though, I thought maybe just have like vacation syndrome that when you only go to New York for a week, it seems so wonderful, what if I move here and I hate it but I have to say from the minute I moved, I walked out my front door the next day and I felt like I lived here my whole life. Even though I need to escape from time to time, for the most part, I really love it.

John Corcoran: Very cool, all right, last question which I ask everyone which you've touched on a little bit throughout this interview but tell us about a little bit more about some of the relationships along the way that have made such a big difference to your career, to your business growth. They could be mentors. They could be friends. They could be business associates. They could members of your mastermind group. Tell us a little bit more about some of the relationships that have made a big difference for you.

Jenny Blake: It's really been a little bit of everything or a lot of everything that you've just mentioned. I love mastermind groups or calls, even very informal ones where we just plan the talk every other week and check in. Mentors have just been wonderful. Whether I call one-off mentors when it's just a one-time phone call and someone's extremely helpful over coffee or more ongoing mentors, one of my long time mentors, Susan Beole like plucked me out of obscurity when it was just my parents reading my blog and she said I wanna support you and let's have monthly calls.

That was I don't know, maybe 2007 and we still are in touch and she's so wonderful and, but you know, you don't have to have that one mentor and then Pierce which we talked about earlier, I'm so grateful. I don't know where I would be without Pierce where we could just shoot the [inaudible][00:33:31] like what are you doing, what's working in your business, what isn't? Give me specifics, you know, and friends like Alysa Ducet and Ryan Stevens and Grace Boyle, there's this whole network of bloggers where we've just been in it together for a very long time and Susan Roane.

You know, there are people, she may be intro for you and I to do this podcast so it's always ?

John Corcoran: She's become a great friend. She lives right near me, yeah.

Jenny Blake: Yeah, she's so fantastic and so I just, it's so fun also to have serendipity and randomness play a role in this. You never know who you're gonna meet or who's gonna introduce you to someone else.

John Corcoran: Great, great. Well, Jenny, thank you so much. I appreciate you taking the time. It's been a pleasure talking to you and I hope we'll get to meet in person at some point.

Jenny Blake: Likewise, thanks, John, for the great questions and to everybody, thank you so much for listening.

John Corcoran: Final one, so people could, you've mentioned it already but JennyBlake.me, is that the best place they can check you out?

Jenny Blake: That's the no. 1 spot or lifeaftercollege.org and then you can find me on Twitter at jenny_blake.

John Corcoran: Very cool. Okay, thanks, Jenny.

Jenny Blake: Great. Thanks, John. Bye, everyone.

Unknown Speaker: Thank you for listening to the Smart Business Revolution podcast with John Corcoran. Find out more at SmartBusinessRevolution.com and while you're there, sign up for our email list and join the revolution, revolution, revolution, and be listening for the next episode of the Smart Business Revolution podcast.

Transcribed by GMR Transcription