She’s the doodle I made on a Starbucks paper napkin on the day I decided to be a freelancer.
She’s the muse for my 2 published freelancing books: RaketChick’s WHATDA! ANONG PETSA NA?! A Freelancer’s Sanity and Survival Guide; and RaketChick’s 7 STAGES OF… GOOD GRIEF! FREELANCER NA ‘KO! A Mustering the Nerve to Move On Travel Guide.
She’s a source of motivation for thriving independent creative professionals with her daily #raketips, webinars, and indiepreneurship tutorials.
A decade in, and she maintains to be the driving force that got me into public speaking. In this business, I share the ropes that can help one start and survive a lucrative career in the booming gig economy.
These RaketChick speaking engagements have made it to huge offline and online events, such as Anvil Publishing and National Book Store’s Her Voice: Women Empowerment in the Work Force; the Philippine Readers’ and Writers Festival: Women for Hire; adobo magazine’s Class A School of Creativity: Life of a Freelancer in the Philippines; The Underpaid Podcast’s Freelancing 101: How to Get Clients and get Paid More; the Indierectory’s Indie Power: How Independent Talents Can help Your Brand Thrive In The New Normal; and High Value and Financially Independent Women Network and Queen in Biz’s Bouncing Back as an Indiepreneur.
I also do workshops on creativity, advertising, and freelancing badassery. These RaketChick workshops have made it to company events that include Writer’s Block Philippines’ Creative Entrepreneurship, Writer’s Block Philippines’ Jumpstart Your Freelance Writing Career; and Microsourcing Asia’s Creating Effective Social Media Job Ads.
For universities, RaketChick’s Raketklass workshops have been rolled out to Mint College’s Work for Hire 101; and CIIT College of Arts and Technology’s Indiepreneurship Starter Kit.
If your team needs a boost in creative strategic thinking in today’s ultra competitive corporate landscape, if your school is open to exploring an alternative career for students outside of employment, or if you’re simply looking to put up a learning sessions for the growing population of creative nomads in the county, RaketChick and I –Karen Ferry-Fernandez—can be of great help.
You can find RaketChick (and me) on raketchick.com, Facebook, and Instagram.
Unwrapped – Flowers, Hampers and Gifts (Unwrapped) came from a humble beginning…
This humble company is composed of 3 ladies whose objective is to be self-sufficient while paving their way into a future of comfort and self fulfillment. They have always been fond of the idea of gift giving.
Before even creating an enterprise out of that idea, these ladies have always wanted to make sure everyone is happy and appreciated. It is kismet why this type of business drew them in the first place. They are not solely driven to generate profit out of this, this is a company who truly aims to put a smile on anyone’s face.
Before starting this company, these lady owners had their own 9-5 jobs, but despite it covering the bills and providing food for the table, they have a mutual sentiment that it’s not something that they would like to be doing for the rest of their lives. They realized that being bound on a desk in a cubicle is like putting blinders on their dreams and aspirations.
So when Aileen pitched in an idea to Pau to set up a flowers and gift shop, they immediately worked out a plan on how to set it up. After that, Pau encouraged her sister to join the business because she believed her sister is holding on to a job where she’d be drudging away hours that could have been allotted for something that is more fulfilling. Their outlook on this idea fueled their endeavor to create beauty with each gift curated and each flower arranged.
Of course, what is one more flower/gift shop in a market filled with it already.
For starters, on a surface level, you might think they are just your typical “buy something then go,” but they are more than that. For such a modest company, they are capable of reinventing the concept of “gift giving” based on the multiple clients that they cater, and of many diverse sizes, this company has amassed torrents of positive reviews from first time customers to regular customers.
They are not your run-of-the-mill shop to get generic gifts. The moment you wade in your inquiries to them, they got you covered all throughout from helping you with your inquiries, up to the day of the delivery. With sterling customer service, they aim to not only to build relationships with the customers but also maintain them. Maintain a familiarity that no other customer service of any shop can provide.
Traditionally, when people get sick, they respond by popping pills to alleviate their pain. When they can’t tolerate the situation, they see a doctor. However, Eli Abela, the first Certified Bulletproof Human Potential and Vitality Coach in the Philippines advocates for self-healing. She believes in man’s capacity to manipulate their brains and body outside the realms of traditional medicine. It is only then that they can get to the root of the problem and keep illness at bay.
Elis is a biohacker who teaches the art and science of self-healing. By changing the environment around them and within themselves, people have full control of their own biology. She transforms bodies, making them feel more energized, revitalized, and productive. Hacking is not just a cybercrime! Humans can hack their bodies, too.
She shares, “Biohacking is a unique process that calls for decisive lifestyle changes. I coach people with nonconventional holistic mind and body techniques. If you incorporate these new practices, your body can heal itself and function optimally.”
Finding the Fountain of Youth
As a biohacker, Eli helps people exceed limits to unleash their full potential with their newfound vitality and agelessness. Her primary goal is to help everyone maximize their physical and cognitive performance. With so many advocating for holistic wellness, the concept of healthy longevity is not far-fetched. Now, people are no longer aging, like they used to. With self-healing, people are expected to reach higher life expectancy without compromising their quality of life.
Eli shares that she found the secret to staying (almost) forever young with biohacking. Today, she is 48 years old but with a biological age of only 29. She feels so much better than she did in her 20s and 30s. She narrates, “I have 3 autoimmune diseases. I struggled with childhood asthma and suffered from allergic rhinitis in my 20s and 30s. Later on, I was diagnosed with hypothyroidism. But when I took charge of my own biology, I succeeded in reversing my age. Now, my hormones are balanced, and I am not plagued by hot flashes or mood swings even if I am hitting menopause.”
Going Back to Where It Started
Eli’s journey with biohacking started with a certificate course at the Bullet Proof Institute headed by Dave Asprey in 2016. His process is not a get-healthy-quick scheme. Instead, it involves practical methods that challenged the participants to understand their own biology. By learning how to play a role in her own health journey without traditional medical intervention, Eli learned approaches that allowed her to harness her self-healing powers.
Read more here to crush these limiting beliefs and to live fully.
At our first Business Learning Intensive Session in January this year, we invited Ms. Lorenz Aimiee Mutia, Certified Human Resource Professional (CHRP), and Employer Branding Professional, to shed light on the considerations in hiring the right way and building your employer brand.
She shared the following perspectives.
Q1: How do you hire the right way?
Make sure your hiring goals are clear. Knowing what you need and when and where you can find the right rockstar is paramount. Investing in people takes a significant amount of time, effort, and money to train, onboard, and retain them.
However, you need to check first if there is someone in your team with the skills you need. One common mistake of many companies is to keep on hiring for skills that should have been developed internally.
There must also be a specific timeline. There is this notion that business owners felt the need to find the best candidate for the position (i.e., your best rock star), but they don’t get to realize that it takes a while. It takes six months for some companies to fill in certain positions. As a business owner or manager, you need to determine where and when do you find your rock star.
Another key factor in hiring the successful rock star is to do research so that money, time, and effort are not wasted on candidates who will join you but later on either leave you or not perform well in the job.
Q2: How do you select the right person?
Ideally, there are layers in the hiring process depending on the size of your team or company. It would be better if you have a consultant hiring for you. There are also assessments done like personality or logic assessments, among others. There are also certain exams for a specific skill set.
If you decide to move the interview forward, ideally there must be an additional layer before you make the final call. It can be the head of the operations, supervisor, or someone who oversees the entire team when you are out. It is best to collaborate with your team in understanding what you are looking for in a candidate. Otherwise, you might spend a lot of time doing interviews but not going anywhere. The recruiter’s job is to collaborate and calibrate with the hiring managers and upper management.
That’s a big word starting 2020. Yes, it was a year like no other.
Many entrepreneurs experienced the huge effect of the current pandemic on how they handle and manage their businesses.
The sales and retail industry were disrupted by the sudden change of consumer behavior.
Everybody is online nowadays. Well, NOT by choice, but by circumstance.
That’s why a lot of businesses need to pivot online.
But I observed a lot of entrepreneurs are confused about where to start. They are overwhelmed by the different marketing strategies that are available nowadays.
What they often missed are the timeless marketing principles that can be done even in the digital world.
One example of an Ageless Marketing principle is…
… H2H (Human-to-Human) Marketing
In an era where bots, Artificial Intelligence and other forms of machine learning prevail, H2H marketing is more beneficial now more than ever.
Humanizing marketing efforts builds trust.
It taps into people’s emotions—and based on studies, this is one of the most important elements in the decision-making process of the buyer’s journey.
So go ahead and personalize your marketing messages. Incorporate user-generated content as much as you can.
Use stories as well to become more memorable and different.
Research shows that if people love your brand’s story, 55% are more likely to buy from you in the future, while 15% will buy the product immediately.
Storytelling is a potent and necessary “human” element for marketers in any industry.
When people resonate with your brand story, mission and vision, there’s a high possibility that they will follow you.
It is evident that female business owners nowadays are on the rise. In fact, women run about a quarter up to a third of private businesses worldwide and still counting. And yet, most of their businesses have few assets, struggle to scale, and are having a hard time to have more profit. These may get worse when they tend to shatter their confidence and underplay as a business owner and may be hesitant to call themselves ‘leaders’.
The consequences of being a leader Women business owners struggle with building networks, business loans, and dealing with family members or friends who don’t support them fully. Some women purposefully limit their ambitions or goals to have more time for their relationships. And sometimes, they hinder their own vision and goal when they think it’s way out of their societal identity. Because women are expected to be nurturing, selfless and collaborative – these traits are not mainly focused on leadership. Society still sees the business world in masculine traits (such as ambitious, aggressive, risk-taker, etc.) despite women’s gains in business nowadays.
Developing into something they are unaware of… ‘Imposter Syndrome’, this happens when people question their own abilities and when they become successful, attribute it to luck or fraud and not on hard work. This will feed the doubts within oneself, making it hard to internalize the milestone or success that is achieved.
And you may not know it, but all of us actually experienced this in one way or another. Some of you may have overcome this, learned how to go about with it, and turned it into a competitive edge (congratulations for the win! 😉). But some of you might feel stuck because of your own thoughts of self-doubt and self-denial – believing that your success is just a stroke of luck. When you believe you’re not worthy of your position or title, and you feel stressed because you’re doing your role and yet you think you’re not qualified, it will be hard for you as a high achieving woman to manifest your success as proof of your abilities and your leadership (even when it’s actually you who did it).
Looking into a different perspective… Changing how you view your roles and strengths may take time, but your view for success and what it takes to attain it is where you can work on right now. The
truth is, there is no ‘gender advantage’ that exists in regard to leadership because both male and female leaders tend to agree on the relative importance of the top-tier leadership traits. Regardless of gender, both possess traits that are essential for leadership such as decisiveness, honesty, intelligence, and being compassionate. It’s just a matter of knowing your true self and your true abilities.
As women business owners, you should define entrepreneurship and business success in light of your greatest advantage. It is important to know your strength and develop self-awareness. This will allow you to build your confidence so you can lead and carve your way to success… and eventually conquer the business world!
You can eventually start by learning from the successful female entrepreneurs nowadays.
Be inspired by the Empowered Woman behind Kimstore, Kim Lato on the first edition of HiFi’s Empire Building e-magazine.
