Meet the fierce Zelda Greenberg, a woman with more than 25 years of experience as a small business owner, the recipient of the United States SBA District and Regional Family-Owned Business of the Year award… and a master of reinvention, both in her career and in her businesses.

In addition to her current work as a realtor, Zelda is also a sought-after keynote speaker who shares a blueprint for business success in her talks.

Zelda’s astounding story is a testament to the resilience of the human spirit and the power of effective delegation. Her metaphor of ‘planting seeds’ to foster future development is an inspirational lesson for entrepreneurs everywhere battling difficult circumstances.

 

In this podcast you’ll learn:

• How to rebuild and scale your business (or career) in uncharted territory following even the most devastating event
• Why you should listen to your intuition, work tirelessly, and seize every opportunity to build a resilient business framework
• How Zelda’s story serves as an inspiration to all entrepreneurs and business owners facing hardships, reinforcing the belief that with resilience and effective strategizing, any situation, however dire, can be transformed into an opportunity for growth.

You’ll walk away inspired and guided to build your own empire despite the odds faced.

 

Ready to jump in? Read the full transcript below!

 

Kelly Youngs:

Hello everybody and welcome back. I am so pleased to be back with another powerful episode of the She Is Fierce podcast. This week we are featuring Zelda Greenberg, a woman who has a wealth of experience as a small business owner for more than 25 years. She is the recipient of the United States SBA district and regional family-owned Business of the Year award, and she’s a master of reinvention, both within her own career and within her business. Now, in addition to her current work as a realtor, she is also a sought-after keynote speaker who shares a blueprint for business success in her talks. I am thrilled that Zelda is going to be joining us and sharing her wisdom on our stage on April 25th at our Success Summit, and I’m so happy to have you here with me today. Welcome, Zelda.

Zelda Greenberg:

I’m thrilled to be here. Thank you for inviting me, Kelly.

Kelly Youngs:

Well, I invited you here to share your story, but also to talk about how relationships fuel success, which is something that a ton about. You have helped thousands of people break through self-doubt and find success through business. Your speaking and your own personal relationships have really led to that knowledge, that wisdom and your ability to translate that for others. So before we jump in to all of that advice, can you share a little bit of your personal backstory so that our listeners can get to know you and why they need to hear your advice about relationships and all of the things that come with that later in our conversation?

Zelda Greenberg:

Absolutely, and it starts with, I’m from an entrepreneurial family. That’s all I’ve ever known. I worked very briefly in corporate America as a school teacher for two years and I said, this is not for me. So I’ve been on an entrepreneurial journey ever since. So my first business was in a special events company called An Ultimate Event. I started it from scratch. You hear all these stories on the kitchen table and I learned that business from my mom and I won’t go into that, that goes too far back, but that’s where I started my personal journey. And I did that for 10 years and then I sold it to a company that is still around today and I sold that company and then I thought, well, what’s next? I didn’t know what to do next. And my family had a company that was started by my grandfather and now my father and my brothers were in there and it was a wholesale produce distribution company.

We sold wholesale produce to the grocery stores, to the military bases, to restaurants and what have you. So that was what my father said, well, why don’t you join us? You’ve made a lot of connections because when I had the special events company, I joined networking organizations, the Chamber of Commerce. I was out there networking, getting known, and so I said, well, I don’t have anything else to do and I still have children to feed and myself. So I joined the produce company and at the time I figured I’ll stay for two years and then I’m out of here. Two years turned into 10. Funny how that happens. I had no desire to stay there 10 years, but it just happened. So when I was there a couple of years, the year was probably 2004, which it was August, and that’s hurricane season for Florida. I’m a Floridian and there was a hurricane that was supposed to hit somewhere in Florida within a day or two. But being from Florida, I really didn’t pay much attention.

Kelly Youngs:

Sometimes we don’t even pay attention. That’s right.

Zelda Greenberg:

Another hurricane warning. Okay, whatever. So I’m busy doing my thing and the next thing I know on this particular August day, I get a call from my brother screaming, we’re out of business. Well, it wasn’t quite that calm

And at this point I’m the president of the company, so we were majority woman owned. And I said, oh my gosh. So we had a building that was a solid brick building and I rushed back to the office to see what kind of damage there was. Oh my gosh. It looked like the war zone that you see on the six o’clock news. It was devastation. Wow. We were out of business. There was nothing. And all I could think of was we can’t be out of business. I have people to feed and we have employees that have families. My mindset was we can’t close our doors. We had no trucks for deliveries, we had no phones, we had no computers, we had nothing. And I didn’t know how we were going to do it, but my family was like, Nope, we’re done. And I was like, well, we’re not done because I’m not signing anything that says we’re done. And because I’m the president, you need my signature.

Kelly Youngs:

I love. Okay, so let me pause you there. I love that spirit and I want to say, first of all, thank you for sharing a little bit of your story, but also I love that you kind of just briefly shared something that was a huge starting point for you, which was your own event business. So you worked in your family business, but prior to that you actually grew and sold your own business. And I will say, and I always tell people that work in events this, that my favorite people to work with are people who’ve worked in media or people who’ve worked in events because they are hard workers. They are the hardest workers that I have worked with because there’s always a deadline, there’s always something happening. There’s always a crisis that has to be dealt with and you have to keep your cool. So it sounds to me like that translated for you. I mean, I can only imagine the building that you work in. Everything is destroyed and as a normal reaction would be, it’s a crisis. We’re out of business. But you had the ability to translate that and say, well, it is a crisis, but we’re not going anywhere. So I love that

Zelda Greenberg:

They all looked at me like I was probably nuts and you

Kelly Youngs:

Probably were. Yeah.

Zelda Greenberg:

Well, here’s how nuts I really was. One day I went to work and one of my employees came to me quietly and said, Zelda, I need to talk to you. And I’m like, oh dear, what? Now your pants are on backwards. I’m like, yeah, they actually were. I said, well, thanks for telling me in the afternoon. You couldn’t have told me that this morning. Yeah.

Kelly Youngs:

Well, okay, so take us from that moment where your brother called and said, everything is destroyed. We’re out of business. There’s no way we can come back from this. And just to give context for our listeners who are not from Florida, most of the time when a hurricane is coming, it doesn’t actually affect you. Nothing happens, but if it really hits it. And so your business was devastated by this. This was

Zelda Greenberg:

Actually not the hurricane that hit. It was a tornado.

Kelly Youngs:

Oh my goodness. And

Zelda Greenberg:

I was so naive. I thought, tornadoes don’t hit Florida. They hit mobile homes in Kansas. Yeah. So this tornado touched down, it hit our building and our trucks were knocked over. The windows were busted out. The ceiling of our building was, there was no ceiling. Wires were dangling. The trees that surrounded our warehouse had snapped like toothpicks. There was the inside the warehouse where our produce was and the coolers are, the produce was mixed with parts of our heating and air conditioning system. Parts of lumber and chunks of asphalt that were missing from the parking lot were now in our warehouse.

Kelly Youngs:

That sounds rough.

Zelda Greenberg:

It was rough. And my father, who was in his mid to late eighties at the time and still worked, just was sitting there just devastated of what was left of the front docks where the loading docks and just he could not fathom what was going on. And that’s when a true leader has to step up. And that’s when I really became recognized as the leader of our company. Before it was just the female that was there and just the figurehead in front of the public, but now they really saw what I was capable of and it was, no, we’re going to roll up our sleeves and we’re going to get to work. And so when your staff and the outside world sees that you have the right attitude because that is what leads you to resilience is your attitude. You have to have the mindset of I can do this, I will do this.

You don’t even have to know how you’re going to do it. I certainly didn’t know how. They just started seeing me do things and they all started showing up the next day. Our staff, they didn’t just stay home and say, oh, we don’t have a job. They came and they looked for the leadership to say, what do we do now? I go, we need to find a space to accept produce, because right now we can’t accept produce coming in from California or anywhere because we have nowhere to store it. So our staff started helping us finding places to store some produce, and it wasn’t much produce that we could store at this time. We were used to having six coolers and now we had nothing. So customer of ours had one cooler. They said, we can share it with you. Okay. We started there. Then about a week later, one of our competitors called and said, wait a minute, we’ll help you.

Our gloves are off. We are not going to compete with you when you are down and you’re trying to get back on your feet, what can we do to help? We can offer you a larger cooler space and do what you can come in and use our facilities, which was a blessing. We got to go in there not to spy, but we got to see the things that they were doing that were good, the things that they were doing that were not so great. And we got to observe and we got to use cooler space. And then about two weeks after that, the biggest guys around, which was Cisco, Cisco called us and said, we didn’t realize you got hit by that tornado. We have a facility here. We’re going to clear out a whole cooler for you and you can use that for whatever you need and you can use our parking lot as an office.

So we brought in a mobile trailer. I’d never had one of those before, and we put it in their parking lot and we were able to use their facility. They sold us what we were short produce, what all of us did. If you were short a product we could buy from each other. And then we didn’t have a phone still. So that’s another whole story. When this first happened, I’m like, how are people going to call us for their orders? So now back in 2004, everybody and their mother did not own a cell phone. Okay. So can you imagine? I remember

It was landlines. If you don’t know what a landline is, call me later and I’ll tell you. But so I went out and bought a dozen cell phones and distributed them among our staff so that people, and we gave them to our restaurants. So we called all 200 restaurants at the time to say, here’s the phone number I want you to use to call in your orders. Now we’re in this new parking lot and we still have these cell phones. And someone I didn’t even know from an organization that I networked in found out what was going on, had connections at and t called them. And within that week we had phone lines connected from the street to our trailer office, and then you have to deal with all this insurance. So I reached out to a friend of mine who was in the insurance industry. I went to her office crying, I don’t know what to do. What are we going to do? And she explained to me the process and what to do when she calmed me down. And I will tell you, she was not our insurance agent.

Kelly Youngs:

She was just a good friend,

Zelda Greenberg:

A good friend. And so people just started showing up and helping. These were restaurants that we serviced and all, they were used to having produce delivered before noon. And they were patient with us. They said, we don’t care what time you get here, just get here. And some of them didn’t get produce until 11:00 PM that night. So they adjusted their orders to accommodate us while we were trying to get back up on our feet and

Kelly Youngs:

Yeah. Okay. So Zelda, I want to just take a moment and try to put myself in your shoes or put our audience in your shoes to say you were running a large scale business, so you were delivering, you just shared you were delivering to two, it was

Zelda Greenberg:

Millions of dollars worth of business.

Kelly Youngs:

So this is not a small business. I mean, it was a small business in the context of American business, but it’s a business that has lots of employees. You’re delivering to tons of clients and everything shuts down. And you kind of shared a little bit of this, but you had a competitor reach out and help then another competitor reach out and help you shared that you had business contacts that were able to connect you to the right people, people who are helping you with insurance, who you are not paying for help. So I think it is easy in a situation like that as somebody who is not a part of your business to look at that and say, wow, everybody fixed this for you. Right? That’s amazing. All these people came in and they solved your problem. That’s incredible. Congratulations. But the reality is that comes from years of connection, positive relationships, you probably helping and doing the same for those people when they needed it.

And especially the example I love of your clients being willing, especially in the restaurant business, you need food to be able to serve in the restaurant business. So the goodwill that they had with you and your entire business to be able to say, we’re going to adapt our menu. We’re going to choose to do something different within our business each day in order to accommodate and to work with you because they really enjoyed working with your business is massive. So will you take us back way before we got to this crisis and talk a little bit about how you were able to build those relationships, both you Zelda as the president of the company, but also I’m sure people within your organization who were building positive relationships along the way.

Zelda Greenberg:

Yes. It doesn’t start when you have your disaster. It doesn’t start there. It starts many years before now. This was a generational business. And so the industry had changed a lot. And I will say, I have to say it started with my father. So my father would network, although they didn’t call it networking, he called it, I’m just going out to meet people. And he would go to, it was a grocery store in our area called Win-Dixie. And he would go every day. This was as a little child growing up. He didn’t come straight home from work. He would go to different Win-Dixie stores, and he would go to the produce departments and he would talk to whoever was the stock boys that were loading the produce. He talked to the managers and he would just get to know them. And over the years, some of them would move on to other positions, some of them would lead the company and others moved up.

And so many years later when I was in high school, they needed a new tomato salesman, a new vendor, and they called my father because they all knew my dad. And that’s how he got in there because he had built the relationship over time. And also we helped each other. Like you said, if we were short a product and our produce trucks weren’t coming in from California or wherever they were coming in from for a couple of days, I knew I could call my competitor and they would help us. Now, I’m going to tell you that not everybody helped us during that crisis. We had a couple of sharks that wanted to eat us alive and take advantage of us, but you have to be on your toes to know who’s the shark and who’s not. Okay. So you have to be careful in the ocean of sharks. Yeah.

Kelly Youngs:

Well, and Zel, I hope you don’t mind me, I just want to pause on that because I love the positive story of people jumping in to help you. But I think it is also important to recognize in those moments of pressure when you’re accepting help, but you’re also under pressure. I’m sure as a business owner you’re under immense pressure even with everybody jumping in to help you. And then I think that’s one of the hardest things in business is you realize that there’s always somebody out there who wants to compete. Even if you don’t want to compete, right? You want to help them, but they not want to help you.

Zelda Greenberg:

We hired a consultant to help us, and he was evil. As long as he’s evil, he actually wanted to destroy us and he wanted to get back into the produce business. So he had been out of it a long time and he was just, I’m just going to say he was evil. There’s a higher judge than me. So there was another one who was a competitor that thought they were really hot shots and they were going to buy us out, or they were going to help us by charging this ridiculous fee to pack our stuff and box it and deliver it for us and charge us. It was, you want to say pressure? Well, I wore my clothes on backwards another day. I wore mismatch shoes. I mean, it was a lot of pressure. So don’t fool yourself. It was not that easy. But again, it goes back to your first questions and it was about resilience and having the right attitude.

If you are positive, you get a choice every day. I tell people, when you get out of bed, you can say, it’s going to be a miserable day and I’ve got all this junk I have to deal with today. Or you can say, Hey, it’s a great day and I have faith that it’s going to be a great day. I had the desire to rebuild the company, and we never lost one customer, not one. In fact, our business soared from, it was probably at 1.2 million when we started, and by the time we sold our company, it was closer to 6 million. So we were a small company, but we weren’t that small.

Kelly Youngs:

That’s incredible. So I mean, those are two incredible facts. So never losing a customer in the middle of a massive crisis is really impressive. And then growing at six times the size of the business. And that really happened from when you came in as a leader. Is that fair to say?

Zelda Greenberg:

That’s very fair to say.

Kelly Youngs:

So that I think is both an impressive feat and also something that a lot of times, and I think especially with a family owned business, and if you are, you’ve scaled to over a million dollars, that is an impressive feat in a family owned business. So there are a lot of people that would come in and say, wonderful, I’m going to maintain, I’m going to continue this great revenue generating business and we’re going to do a good job. And instead you came in and said, okay, I think we can grow and scale this and ultimately sell this business and make a great profit. So in your mind, what was the motivation coming in? Was it just that’s your nature or was there something in you that said, this has potential?

Zelda Greenberg:

When I joined the company, it was because I didn’t have anything better to do. It was like, okay, I’m an entrepreneur. What am I going to do next? So I went in it with that attitude as, okay, I’m going to say two years while I’m figuring out what I want to do, but it just sort of grew on me and I was good at it. And in the industry at the time, there were very few women, in fact, there were no women. I was, and I started hiring women salespeople. They were women. They could get into the kitchens where the men were the chefs, but they were also very skilled at sales, so they knew their stuff. And so we did that. It wasn’t, oh, I’m going to grow this business so we can sell it. I was just doing my thing and it just grew slowly. You don’t want to scale super fast. You go, it was a slow process. I didn’t go in there. I’m going to grow it to more than $1 million. And we didn’t go in there to take customers away from our competitors who were helping us, but it just sort of happened. So we just started acquiring new customers. And when we were rebuilding the company and my family really wanted to just close the doors and walk away, my motivation was, what am I going to do? I can’t know what else to do. And

Kelly Youngs:

You were a mom at the time, right?

Zelda Greenberg:

I was a single mom at the time. I was like, I have to feed my children and myself and I don’t want to lose my house. So we just put one step in front of the other and you don’t swallow the whole elephant that’s in the middle of the room. And again, my father taught me, you grow it one restaurant at a time. Let’s get one new one, take care of them, then get another one, take care of them. And that’s how we grew it one restaurant at a time. That’s how it grew. And it wasn’t until the tornado hit that I thought, okay, we have nothing to sell. We can’t sell our business. We got nothing. One brother was in charge of finding us a new facility and doing the coolers. I was the sales person and the public figure. Another one ran the internal office with our bookkeeper and our drivers and such. So we all had a job to do. So it was not Zelda doing the whole thing. It was, I’m really good at delegating. I like delegating. And so as we’re doing this, I’m thinking, we’re going to build it back up and we’ll sell it then, because my children had no desire to enter this business, and we were getting older and the fun had worn off. So we rebuilt it with the idea of planting the seeds, let’s build it and we’ll sell it. And that’s what we did.

Kelly Youngs:

So first of all, thank you for sharing that story because it’s probably a moment in your life in the big scheme of your life, but it’s such a powerful illustration of what is possible, not just for you, but for any of us who have these really overwhelming challenges that pop up and that are almost always expected. And they take completely different forms depending on what kind of business you have or what professional career you have. But everybody has those moments where they’re like, oh, I just can’t do this anymore. And you have to make a decision, and you have to choose how you’re going to proactively move forward. So just for a moment, I want to pause and ask you on a personal level before we talk a little bit more about those relationships and cultivating relationships. A question that I ask everyone, and that is you define purpose. So you’ve had many different kinds of careers. You have perfectly illustrated the ability to stay motivated in the midst of success and also in the middle of crisis. But what do you define as purpose throughout the ebb and flow and all of the different pieces of your career that keep you going and keep you motivated?

Zelda Greenberg:

I think it’s just something that’s inside of me, to be honest with you. I just think I have that entrepreneurial spirit. I don’t think I could work for anybody else because I like to do my own thing and I have my own opinions, and not that anybody else doesn’t either, but I’m just not the clock puncher. That’s why I left teaching school after two years ago. This is not for me. I’m confined to this room. And so when I sold that company, the produce business, I had to figure out what is my purpose? What am I going to do? And it opened the doors for opportunity. You have to look for opportunity. And when I’m speaking, I talk about different people who look for opportunities and how they find them. I didn’t know what to do next. It was like, well, what is my purpose? What am I supposed to do? And it was a family member that said, you’ve made all these connections. You network, you go to business organizations, you do the chamber, you know this person and that person. So many people, maybe you should consider real estate. And I was like, I got to take a test.

Oh, I’ve been out of college for too long. But I did. And I got into real estate at the worst time. It was like nothing but short sales and the recession had started. It was just a horrible time. But I made the best of it and had a fantastic start in real estate while most realtors were leaving the industry because of all the people who were underwater. I jumped right in because I guess I like a crisis. No, I

Kelly Youngs:

Was going to say, you’re just good in a crisis, but we’re not asking for one, let’s say that.

Zelda Greenberg:

No, no. I’m not going to put that out there. And it’s probably been my best and most favorite career up to now. Oh, that’s

Kelly Youngs:

Wonderful.

Zelda Greenberg:

Yeah.

Kelly Youngs:

Well, within that, so you shared it, it’s something that comes from within. But what do you think is that defining characteristic for you? And I think one thing I’ve learned is it’s different for each of us, but a defining characteristic that has helped you be successful across these different periods in your career.

Zelda Greenberg:

Absolutely. The connections I make, absolutely. For instance, one of the things when I speak, because I do speak around the country, is I talk about having, first of all, it’s trusting your instincts. If something inside of you is saying, no, don’t do it, don’t do it. Because how many people have gone against that? I mean, I have and

Kelly Youngs:

I’m raising my hand.

Zelda Greenberg:

Yeah. It’s like, no, listen to that voice. You’re going to screw up if you don’t. And I also believe in having an inner circle. So I have a group of friends, I call them my informal sounding board or board of directors. And I’ll throw out an idea, and I’ve done this. I do it all the time and I’m not sure of something and they’ll give me feedback. But you want that inner circle not to be your yes man or a woman. You want them to give you honest feedback, ask you the tough questions and make you think. And so I believe that’s really what helps me is are all those things. It’s like when this tornado finished and I’m recovering from it, I wrote a book called The Art of Bouncing Back. I started looking at other people and also started interviewing people that I knew that I knew had overcome obstacles and situations.

And I noticed that there were seven actions that people followed to overcome their challenges. And they were your attitude. It was accepting change and adapting to it. T was trusting your instinct. I was your inner circle. O was looking for opportunities in his networking. And S was your self investing. You have to self invest. And I believe in self investing, and that means not just taking care of yourself physically and mentally, but going to industry associations and conventions like your summit. Go to these things, meet people, get to know them. And by getting to know them, it doesn’t mean, hello, how are you? It was nice to meet you. And then you never see or hear from them again. Do a follow up. And I do a whole talk on how to do this follow up so you get to know people. Those are the seven action steps that I talk about a lot.

Kelly Youngs:

So first of all, I love that you have this great personal story, but also that your keynotes and your book are really informed, not just by your own story, but also what has worked for other people when they have been forced to bounce back. Which again, we all go through those periods of time. And I do want to ask you, and you touched on it for just a moment there, but I want to ask you, in your mind, what is it that keeps those powerful connections going? There’s one piece that is so the advice that we give to everyone. So get out and meet people and network and just find your people. But once you find those people, how do you cultivate those relationships? How do you build that circle of people that you trust? I think that’s something that everybody within our community for sure would love to have if they don’t have it already. And it’s something that doesn’t necessarily come naturally to everybody to be able to, I know I have a tendency to just pick up the phone and ask anybody, but I know that’s something that many women in our community might struggle with or just not quite know the right word. So do you have any advice for them on not just finding that person, but really creating a deeper connection?

Zelda Greenberg:

And that’s my favorite part of it, is creating those deeper connections. In fact, somebody was asking me the other day, what’s your favorite part about selling houses? It’s not even the transaction, although I love the transaction and the little pieces. I said, it’s at the end of the day when the transaction’s over, I’ve made a new friend. And that’s because when you cultivate your friends, it doesn’t mean you meet them. And then that’s the end of it. You have to stay in front of them. You have to constantly stay in front of them. And by that, I have a dog. I go to the dog park, I meet people at the dog park. They know that. And I usually am wearing a T-shirt that says, real estate is my hustle. Or something that identifies me as a realtor or a speaker even. And they know to come to me for their real estate questions.

And so over time, I’m known as the realtor in the group. You can also, I know when people’s birthdays are and anybody can find a birthday, go on Facebook. You can tell when people’s birthdays are. It identifies them. I send them birthday cards and I don’t just send them a store bought one, although there’s nothing wrong with that, but write a handwritten note in there. If you’re, your child is in a soccer game, you’re sitting there talking to the person next to you at the soccer field or whatever it is, go for pizza and beer. The kids are networking. They’re eating pizza and play, and you’re having a beer and you’re getting to know the person that you share the soccer field with your children. So you have to be authentic. You can’t be fake. People know if you’re fake and you get to know them and you write them a note, Hey, it was great getting together with you for a pizza the other day with our kids. Love to continue our conversation, blah, blah, blah. Things like just a short little note. So you can do that. Something I’m doing to stay in front of people is coming up because it’s pie day, pi day. I’m providing people with free pizza pies. If they come and get them, I’m ordering them, come and pick it up. Here it is. It’s on me. Cute.

Kelly Youngs:

That’s awesome.

Zelda Greenberg:

A lot of realtors will do high day at Thanksgiving time, and that’s a real pumpkin pie. Now, you don’t have to be buying people things all the time, but it’s what do you enjoy doing? Do you like to play tennis? Do you like to go bowling? Are you in a book club? Whatever it is that you enjoy doing, I promise you somebody else likes doing it too. And you have to keep showing up. If you show up, you’re going to meet people. You’re not going to make a connection with everybody in the group, but if you can pick a couple of them and you develop that relationship that way and that connection. And over time, just like when my dad would go to the produce businesses, they might pick up the phone and say, Hey, I need to talk to you about insurance. I need to talk to you about financial planning, or I need my carpet cleaned. And I know, do you know a carpet cleaner? That’s how you build the connections by having authentic, real conversations.

Kelly Youngs:

Yeah. Well, so thank you for sharing that practical advice. I think that’s what so many of us are looking for. Right? In anything, when you’re learning anything, you want some practical advice, but also, I just want to say that I really appreciate you highlighting the need for authenticity and also the fact that you’re not going to connect with everybody, but those people that you really do connect with can become that meaningful circle that, for your example, will come through for you in those hard times and that you have to come through for as well, right? When they’re struggling and they need a little bit of help,

Zelda Greenberg:

You never know who’s going to come through for you. I mean, total Strangers came through for us, total strangers. So you just don’t know, and you have to show up for them as well. There’s times that I know that people have tough times and they’re short of maybe to go to a special meeting, a dinner meeting or whatever. I’ll pay it forward.

Kelly Youngs:

I love

Zelda Greenberg:

That. I don’t have deep pockets, but I can pay it forward a little bit, or I can watch your dog while you have to go to a doctor’s office. I can help you out. They help me out with mine. So you just do little genuine things that really are authentic. And when you mentioned calling people, that really resonated because most people don’t want to pick up the phone. They think you’re bothering them, but you’d be surprised at how many people enjoy getting your phone call. It’s not to sell them something, it’s just to check in on them. So you call them and you check in with them just to say hello.

Kelly Youngs:

I love that. Well, Zelda, I’m so grateful, truly for your story. I think it’s so inspirational, but also for your wisdom that goes beyond your personal story. And really, I think gives us some tools for creating connection, identifying people that you have an authentic relationship with, and the need to both help others when they’re struggling, but also be willing to reach out and ask for help and recognize that your community can support you when you’re struggling, right? Absolutely. Yeah. I want to ask you, as we kind of close our conversation, is there, or are there any words of wisdom that you really want the women in our community to hear before we wrap up this conversation that you just wish other women knew this thing because it would make their lives easier or better?

Zelda Greenberg:

I would just say reach out to people. Have faith that things will work out, because there’s so many things, and I learned this late in life that are out of your control. So let it go. Just let it go. Because those are things that you cannot control. You can only control what’s in your mind. So you can control that and just have faith that things will work out the way they’re supposed to work out.

Kelly Youngs:

Beautiful. Well, Zelda, how can our audience get in touch with you, connect with you about keynote speaking? Obviously, if they have a ticket to our Success summit, they’ll get a chance to meet you in person. But let us know how everybody can get in touch with you by your book and just learn more about you.

Zelda Greenberg:

So my books are all available on my speaking website, which is Zelda speaking. There’s another Zelda out there. So mine is zelda speaking.com. And if you go to the book page, you can buy the books there, and all my contact information is there as well. I, that’s the best. Teach me

Kelly Youngs:

Well sda. I’m so truly so grateful for your story. I’m so excited to attend your session at our Success Summit, and I look forward to having you in our Shes Fierce community for many years to come. I’m very grateful for your time today. Thank you.

Zelda Greenberg:

Thank you for having me, Kelly. Look forward to it.

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