We recently connected with Ashleigh Henry and have shared our conversation below.
Ashleigh , so excited to have you with us today. So much we can chat about, but one of the questions we are most interested in is how you have managed to keep your creativity alive.
When you’re an entrepreneur your creativity is one of your most key assets, especially in 2024 when innovation is the name of the game. It’s quite easy to have a lackadaisical attitude, especially if your services, products, or business momentum has continued to be fair and similar to usual feast times.
To keep my creativity alive I follow many of the frameworks gifted to us by Julia Cameron in “The Artist’s Way”; it’s a book that most of us creatives swear by, even if you thrift through the chapters and only find a key component or two that you carry with you… you’ll carry them with you for decades to come.
I enjoy what Cameron calls “Artist Dates” every week for an hour or two to reboot my sense of wonder, connection to the world, and perspective on life. From galleries to antique shops to concerts to coffee shops without a journal, book, or cell phone, and instead just eyes wide open to the buzzing of the lives and moments around me, I come back thriving from every artist date. It’s a simple way to reset our nervous systems, our eyes on the world, and ultimately, our viewpoint because our creativity isn’t much else beyond our unique POVs meeting a medium to facilitate the vision through.
I’m also privy to connecting with Cameron’s suggestion to write Morning Pages; three pages every morning of the stuff and junk that’s sitting in our heads that cloud the artistic viewpoint that we depend on. At The Cheetah Company, our clients are seeking us to be advisors and guides for their creativity, their unique business goals, and my creativity has to be there in order to meet them in their vision and innovation.
Appreciate the insights and wisdom. Before we dig deeper and ask you about the skills that matter and more, maybe you can tell our readers about yourself?
As the Founder and CEO of The Cheetah Company I’m honored to serve female founders worldwide alongside our nationwide team of women! We’ve supported female founders launching pre-revenue startups and established brands of 10-20+ years and everything in-between to help them increase their profit, peace, and play as they move society forward with their unique craft and brands.
We serve our clients through private consulting, coaching and education through our digital products, mastermind, and in-person events and retreats to ensure that our education and energy are accessible to many founders! We also love to expand the way our community can feel supported by us through our collaborative blog space, The Cheetah Cafè, and our podcast, Your Conversation Pit, where life and business-changing conversations happen.
Every day my feet hit the ground of our Blue Ridge Mountain home in Asheville, North Carolina with excitement because I love serving our community with business information that can move their businesses forward into their own personalized next-level. Helping our community move forward in leaps and bounds IS what entices me to ask “who can I serve today, where should I go to be supportive, how can I help, and who can I notice?”
We’re currently, as of March 2024, enrolling for our mastermind, The Harmonious Business Mini-Mind, and our fall business retreat, Retreat and Revive, hosted in Asheville, North Carolina. Connect with us at www.thecheetahcompany.com for more information about either experience!
There is so much advice out there about all the different skills and qualities folks need to develop in order to succeed in today’s highly competitive environment and often it can feel overwhelming. So, if we had to break it down to just the three that matter most, which three skills or qualities would you focus on?
Love this question!
The three skills I revived and refined again and again on my journey to success have been: communication, sales psychology, and leadership.
Without being the leader in the room it’s easy to watch your team, no matter how large or small, tussle and wrangle in the business night… trying to figure out the best way to approach problems. With communication and leadership training it’s by no means “easy” to lead a team, but it’s manageable, you can increase your capability, fail forwards, and always move into humility when you fail. Every failure is just a lesson, anyways, and showing your team that it’s safe to trial and error will get you further than the old ways of leadership ever would.
Sales psychology increased my capability to serve and sell within our communities without the distasteful and tongue-in-cheek ways that most folks are used to being sold to. Being able to course-correct in sales conversations, read sales data, and evolve the way we sell again and again has allowed for us to move from being a pre-revenue startup in 2020 to multiple six figures very quickly.
If you’re early in the journey of building your brand portfolio, work with a mentor that supports your subconscious beliefs — I adore Lacy Phillips’ work and her membership To Be Magnetic for this. Starting with yourself is the best way you’ll ever be able to lead a team forward. Once you’ve moved through Phillips’ work, work with a mentor that supports you to increase your knowledge in sales psychology, with interactive ways to simulate sales situations that you’ll navigate in the wild because without sales… a business is a hobby.
We’d love to support you with this and have a podcast episode on our podcast, Your Conversation Pit, about this! The episode is called “Everlasting Relationships Build Everlasting Opportunities
We’ve all got limited resources, time, energy, focus etc – so if you had to choose between going all in on your strengths or working on areas where you aren’t as strong, what would you choose?
I adore this question because it’s such simple advice that’s tossed around that people in general should stay within their “zone of genius” and not be a “jack-of-all-trades and a master of none”. I personally think those sayings can really pigeon-hole folks into believing that they cannot exceed, excel, propel, or even TIP TOE into other areas to see if they could potentially be a bit more well rounded in their efforts and ambitions.
I do think that it’s best to begin with our strengths, to sharpen those to a needle point and smooth edge all the same to ensure that we have high-valued skills in our arsenal, but I found in my career that more often than not I would begin as a person with one job title and then be invited to engage in another skill that was noticed in me. From there, I did become a person that has many zones that I can jump into to be a well rounded player and a lot of that previous work allowed for me to build The Cheetah Company around a unique set of skills.
When we set out to hire folks for our team, support our clients with their hiring efforts, or partner with peers and parallel service providers that can serve our clients… I’m seeking well rounded applicants more often than masters at one or two skills because not only is it well rounded in essence, I also just recognize it takes emotional intelligence and a calm nervous system to manage several skills and that makes a more attractive applicant than anything else.
Contact Info:
- Website:www.thecheetahcompany.com
- Instagram: @thecheetahcompany @ashleighchenry
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thecheetahcompany
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ashleighchenry/
- Other: Join us on our podcast, Your Conversation Pit, on all major podcast platforms.
Image Credits
Corry Frazier Photography
