The EO Visionary Voices Podcast

Brent (00:01.932)
Welcome to this episode of visionary voices, a podcast for entrepreneur network and EO Minnesota. Today I have Jen Fry. She is Jen talks and Coordle the founder of Coordle. Jen, go ahead. Do an introduction for yourself. Tell us your day to day role and one of your passions.

Jen Fry (00:21.712)
Yeah. Hey friends. It's so great to be on here, Brent Thank you very much. So this is Dr. Jen Fry. I'm the CEO of Jen Fry talks and Coordle. And so kind of my day to day is, I think it's kind of like one of those glitter bombs that goes off every, it's just everywhere all the time. So I am a professional speaker. sit there section of conflict and culture. So I do a lot of keynotes, workshops, all that jazz. And then I have a tech company called Coordle and we sit at the intersection of group travel and sports tourism.

So we help you manage and source all of your group travel information. And well, one of my passions. One of my passions is, you can't tell him that, but I just got a cat in December and his name is Pickle. And so I don't want him to know how important he is yet to me, but he is one of my passions because I travel so much, just being able to be at home and playing with him is a pretty awesome thing.

Brent (00:56.77)
That's us?

Brent (01:18.038)
Yeah, and we have a travel size dog that we travel with. Finn, F-I-N-N, yeah. So, all right, so Jen, before we get started, you have volunteered to be part of the Free Joke Project. I'm just gonna tell you a joke and all you have to do is give me a rating, eight through 13. So here we go, hold on, let me cue, I have to cue my joke first.

Jen Fry (01:22.65)
What's his name? Nice.

Jen Fry (01:32.687)
Yes.

Jen Fry (01:38.745)
Okay.

Jen Fry (01:45.027)
Okay.

Brent (01:47.628)
Alright, I went skydiving for the first time. This guy straps himself into me. We jump out of the plane and we're plumbeding when he says, so how long have you been an instructor?

Jen Fry (02:06.128)
Mmm.

I might have to give it an eight, Brent.

Brent (02:11.182)
It's probably my delivery. Kind of fumbled with it.

Jen Fry (02:14.096)
It's not!

I'll have to think on that one. That one I'll have to think on. That might be like a 1 p.m. joke, not a 9 a.m. joke, right, after people have gotten their coffee.

Brent (02:23.424)
Alright, yeah. Alright, fair enough, As a hobby, do pacing and, no, I do pacing and marathons and half marathons and I always say to people, is this your first marathon, your first half marathon? And they'll say, yes, it is, and I'll say, yes, it's also mine. Anyways, it's a good way to break the ice.

Jen Fry (02:32.314)
Skydiving?

Jen Fry (02:36.868)
Okay.

Brent (02:49.198)
All right, so just say no. I said no. Tell us a little bit about where you came up with this concept and let's dig into it a little bit.

Jen Fry (02:57.796)
Yeah, so I think kind of to backtrack. So I, when I first started thinking about writing a book, I was kind of like, okay, what would be the best thing that would resonate with people? What is a topic? I talk about conflict. And so it needs to be something within that realm and not just a book that people just read. want it to be something where they could kind of have these ideas of skill building, but also what I call micro advocacy of like, okay, I'm reading it.

Now I can start doing small things to advocate for myself on daily basis to really build up the muscle. Because I think a lot of people don't understand that when you talk about challenging folks, setting boundaries, self-advocacy, you have to have a skill. You can't just all of sudden do it. And so for me, I've always been a person that's been pretty bold and I consider myself a kind asshole. Like I'm not nice, but I try and be kind.

And so that was essentially going to be the very first title. But then after thinking through it and saying, okay, who do I want to buy it? Who do I want to have the ability to buy it? Kind of chatting with people. said, well, what resonates again with me that's still bold? And that's where the title I said no came from. And so I said no, how to have a backbone and brought boundaries without being a jerk is really this call to action of saying, here are ways that you are able to hold up boundaries. Here are ways that you can say no. Here's ways that you can.

remain mentally healthy because conflict is a mental health issue. Here's all the ways to do it. And it really starts with saying, said no.

Brent (04:34.027)
That's interesting. So do you have special courses for people in the Midwest that are passive aggressive when they say no? They really say yes, but it means a no?

Jen Fry (04:42.42)
Ha!

So that's funny because I was talking with someone and we were saying how in the East coast, so I'm based in Baltimore in the East coast, people are kind, but not nice. People on the West coast are nice, but not kind. And then you have the Midwest where no one says anything. They just are nice, but passive aggressive with what they really need. And so I think the Midwest and Canada, we definitely need to have specific courses for y'all.

So then that way, you could have a little bit of a jerk in you to be able to set some boundaries. So we do need to have a course for y'all.

Brent (05:22.805)
All right, so tell us how does this apply to business and how would this apply to leadership especially?

Jen Fry (05:29.36)
Oh, that's a good question. So I think it applies to business where we tend to see a lot of people who get overworked and they don't want to upset people. So they'll take every single thing that's offered to them. They will have their plate filled up till the brim and they really can't get out from under it. And so I think the first thing is being able to say, you know, are there other things I can take off my plate that I can fit this on? Talking to their boss about...

what they have going on in depth, and really trying to say no in ways that, you learn how to say no in ways that aren't gonna really upset people as much, but also help people understand the full totality of what you have going on. Because some people have realized they don't tell their bosses everything that's going on in depth, and so people just keep loading things on there. So I think it's just about the ability to talk about what's going on and say no. I think what applies to leadership,

is being able to self-advocate the ability to set boundaries, the ability to show up in ways that role model what this work looks like. Because what I tend to see is I see bosses that don't know how to say no. So because they don't know how to say no, they expect the people that they employ not to say no. That they're not used to self-advocating for themselves when it comes to a higher salary, days off, anything of that.

So then whenever their employees do that, they get really frustrated. And so I really think that leadership should always be role modeling these type of things and get comfortable with them. Because the more comfortable they are with them, then it allows the people that they supervise then to do the same type of thing.

Brent (07:13.715)
I think I read in one of your, in one of the pre-questions about the idea of not being hurt by some, when somebody says no to you or the idea of setting feelings aside in business. Talk a little bit about that.

Jen Fry (07:26.788)
Mm-hmm.

Jen Fry (07:32.453)
Yeah, you know, it's really hard, to not take things personal. Even though, you know, the whole, what is the whole frame about business decisions? It's just not personal. Yeah, that's fine when it's not your mortgage on the line. When it's not your kids schooling on the line. Like, I kind of hate that feeling, that statement. It's just not personal. It's a business thing. Well, it still feels personal. Regardless of, might not be saying, Brent, we are firing you because of you. It still feels personal.

And I think in some ways it can feel personal whenever your ideas are not taken. When you've maybe worked so hard on something and then someone ignores it, they're just very casual with it. It can feel hard and it can feel very personal. And so I think the thing about that is one thing I've learned in running a tech company is that in some aspects you have to set your feelings aside in order to get the feedback in the conversation. And that can be difficult because your feelings can be tied to stuff.

And so what does it look like to be able to sit to hear someone say, okay, that's not the direction we want to go and to be okay with that or to say, okay, that's not the direction we want to go. And to ask inquisitive questions instead of saying, fine, you're going with someone else's idea to really ask, well, what about this? Are you not wanting to go forward with it? Are there pieces of there? Is there something I can maybe change that makes this more enticing or sometimes also

People are really bad at selling their ideas and folks don't understand that. And so that's a major problem. So if I'm holding a water bottle right now, and so if I'm just telling Brent, you need to buy this water bottle just because I think it's a great water bottle, that's not going to be the best. Like, okay, that doesn't matter. And then if I get mad at saying, well, I told you it was the best one, why don't you want it? Versus saying, okay, what is important to Brent?

Does, it the size, the color, how much water it holds, whatever it is, and be able to sell my idea. And people don't realize whenever you work, you have to be better at selling your idea because if you're just out there selling something and you just assume, well, they should just take it just because I'm saying so, that's not gonna be the best way. You have to learn how to get really clear with your idea. And sometimes it takes no's so that you're willing to whittle down. But if you're not willing to whittle down your idea,

Jen Fry (09:57.668)
then you're just gonna be having, honestly, some ideas that are not fully formed.

Brent (10:02.849)
I know a lot of leaders or...

Yeah, leaders will say no to something and it's a hard no. They don't even stop to listen. And I like how where you're going with, with, kind of selling in advance. When is the right time to, well, first as a leader, how do you address when you're saying no, but you'd like to listen a little bit more about it or when, a leader, should you be saying, a maybe instead of a hard no.

Jen Fry (10:12.079)
Mm-hmm.

Brent (10:36.239)
or at least leave it open for discussion, even if at the end you're gonna say no. You know, I think that, I think part of it is knowing what your team wants and at least listening to them. And if you just shut them down upfront, they, then you're probably not gonna get more ideas in the future.

Jen Fry (10:42.981)
Yeah.

Jen Fry (10:52.132)
Yeah.

Jen Fry (10:56.24)
100 % agree. And I think it's a few things. You know, I think if you're the person pitching the idea, asking yourself, A, is this the right time to pitch it? What's going on in that person's life to pitch this idea? I think B, the next thing, have you thought about manpower and money? Because if you're coming to me and saying, Jen, we need to buy a thousand water bottles and you haven't looked at the budget, or you don't even know if we have the money to buy it.

Well, there, you know, I think it's about also doing a due diligence. Have you looked at the manpower it's gonna take to go and load up all the water bottles? And do you know if we even have that manpower? Or are we gonna have to pay someone extra hours or whatever it is? And I think sometimes people don't think about those type of things. It's just like, I have this idea and that's it. And I, when I was younger,

that would be me. I would put an idea forth. I did not think about it in the whole totality of it. And then I got frustrated if it wasn't used. But like, it shouldn't have been used. It was a bad idea. Like it wasn't a good idea. So I think in that aspect of like how much of the totality of it are you thinking about? On the side of the leadership, I think it's about using your words. So it might be...

you know, thank you Brent for giving us your idea, right? You know, have you looked at these things and asking questions or saying, right now isn't the time, but if you want to come back in a week when I have some things off my plate, we can have a conversation. There, I took this improv class in this program I was in and you know, they talk about, you do this thing, it's like yes and where you don't stop the conversation. And so what does it look like when people bring ideas?

that you kind of have this yes, this yes and mindset or a no, but tell me more. And so getting more conversation going so that you're not just no, and that's it. Because like you said, when people consistently hear nos for no reason.

Jen Fry (13:06.466)
Ideas are going to stop flourishing. And I think you as a leader have to start thinking, why is it that when anyone sends me any type of idea, am I immediately saying no? What about it is making me do that? And really question yourself. Because many times leaders don't really question themselves. They don't say, the reason why I keep saying no to ideas is I don't want people to really realize that we just don't have the money. Or I don't want people to realize that

we're not actually equipped to do this thing. And so really thinking through as a leader, why you keep saying no, but also thinking about how do I still keep ideas flowing, ask questions, but understand that I might be the person stopping innovation because of how many no's I'm consistently giving.

Brent (13:59.918)
As you've gone through your companies and what you're doing, have you learned entrepreneurial skills by just doing what you're doing and then hopefully validating against what other people have witnessed?

Jen Fry (14:19.994)
God no, you learn by failing so much. Like that's the hardest part of what people don't understand about entrepreneurship is that your best lessons are gonna come from the worst things happening. Like that's just how it is. know, you don't win, you don't, whenever a team is winning, you're not gonna learn a lesson. Think about it, think about a sports team. Any team that has eight, nine, 10 and O is not gonna learn lessons.

In some ways they don't have a need to. And so that's the hardest thing about this is that your best lessons come from taking losses and that's how you learn. Can you learn from other people? Yes, you can learn from other people, you can learn from conversation, you can learn from all of that stuff and your best lessons come from the things that you're just like, damn, I thought that would work and then it fails miserably. And the miserable failures are...

or what I like to think of is like preparing you for the future. Sometimes when a hard lesson happens, my thought process is this lesson happened because if I didn't learn it, in the future something worse would happen. So this is protecting me somehow. I don't know about it, but this is protecting me and that's kind of how I started to look at it.

Brent (15:37.453)
How do you look towards the future and failure and also taking into account what you failed at and then helping your team learn what you failed at so they'll succeed?

Jen Fry (15:53.232)
So can you repeat that again? One question at a time. My little brain can't handle multi-questions.

Brent (15:57.998)
So you just got done, we were just talking about failure and learning from failure and that's the best, one of the best ways entrepreneurs can grow is by recognizing a failure, acknowledging it and then moving forward. Some entrepreneurs will never admit that they failed at anything and then their team realizes that if I fail, maybe I'm out of a job or something like that, but you, in a sense,

Jen Fry (16:04.493)
Yeah.

Jen Fry (16:10.5)
Yep.

Jen Fry (16:27.63)
Mm-hmm.

Brent (16:29.807)
want to encourage people not to fail all the time but to fail part of the time to learn from what you're doing right. Obviously you want to be successful as successful as possible but as a leader then how do you help your team by communicating failure and helping them to understand how you've learned from that.

Jen Fry (16:37.274)
Mm-hmm.

Jen Fry (16:54.928)
So I don't know if it's about communicating or it's about my reaction when they fail. Because I could tell you, Brent, the whole time, it's okay to fail, it's okay to fail, and then you fail and then I yell at you. So for me, it has been not telling you it's okay to fail, but it's communicating, it's how I communicate when you do fail. So for instance, one of the things that we talk about is that we have to do stuff fast. When you do stuff fast,

there's gonna be mistakes made. And how I respond to that mistake is gonna be determined if they make any mistakes in the future. And so really understanding what is my spectrum of mistakes and how do I feel about it. So meaning, what is my number 10 that if you make this mistake, you're probably gonna be out of job. Like what's my number 10? What's my number one? Where if it happens,

I'm not even gonna really have a conversation about it because it's not that big. What's my five or six, right? I have to have the conversation. What's a seven or eight mistake, right? What are those mistakes that if it's a seven or eight, there's gonna be some repercussions to it. And so understanding on that scale about it so that I know myself if these things happen, these are my responses. And...

then my team also knows that. And so I think that's the big thing is that how I've tried to manage my response, because your response is everything. I can tell you all the time that I love cheese. And then when you give me a cheese pizza and I throw it off the counter, that tells you a different story. And so I, you know, we see leaders all the time say, you know, we're okay with mistakes, you're okay with mistakes, and then there's a mistake and they blow up everyone.

And so that's been kind of, think, the biggest thing is A, how I respond to it, but B, when mistakes happen, I apologize for them and I admit fault. Or I try and figure out where I, like there was a mistake we had with our app development for ads. And my, one of my first questions was, where did I misunderstand? Not where did you make the mistake, but where did I misunderstand? And so, or being open of I,

Jen Fry (19:16.57)
don't remember saying that, thank you for bringing that to my attention, I apologize. And so being very willing to apologize and admit mistake is important because like you said, if our boss doesn't admit a mistake, and there's a massive mistake that everyone, because we've seen that happen, right Brent? Our boss makes a massive mistake, everyone knows it's the boss's mistake, and the boss doesn't say a word. Well now you're setting it up that you're not able to be held accountable, then you're gonna make other people have an unwillingness to be held accountable because they're like, well,

If our boss isn't going to admit mistake, and if I admit it, what can possibly happen to me? So you have to be very honest in order to create that culture. Again, it's not what you say, it's what you do in those times that really show people it's okay to fail.

Brent (19:59.905)
And that's great. Jen, we have a few minutes left. As I close up the podcast, I give everybody a chance to do a shameless plug about anything they'd like. What would you like to plug today?

Jen Fry (20:09.872)
Yeah, the thing I would love to plug is my book. So I just released a book called I Said No, How to Have a Backbone in Boundaries Without Being a Jerk. It's on Amazon and Barnes and Noble in both EPUB, Kindle, and paperback. its paperback is $14.99 and the electronic versions are $9.99, so I tried to keep it reasonable. And I would say if you're someone that worries about people pleasing, not saying no.

not setting boundaries, those type of things. I think this is the book for you. I tell a lot of stories throughout it, but at the end of each chapter, there's reflective questions. And so the goal of it is just to help you in small bits be better. This is not a change your life in a day book, but it is if you do consistently the work whenever you get into those hard moments, I think it's gonna, you're gonna look back in a few months and be like, look at me advocating for myself, because those are the things that takes, the small micro-advocacies.

that build upon each other, give you confidence, help you figure out your words, figure out what you're gonna say to help you in the future.

Brent (21:11.658)
That's great. And how do people find you, get in touch with you?

Jen Fry (21:15.95)
Yep, you can find me on all social media at Jen Fry Talks or for my tech platform at Coordle, C-O-O-R-D-L-E. We tried to make it really easy so that it's not like Jen Fry Talks dash dash dash on one or Jen Fry Talks, you know, others. And so that's kind of the goal is that everything is all the same. So Jen Fry Talks or Coordle.

Brent (21:38.796)
Perfect, and I will make sure those get into the show notes. Jen, it's been such a pleasure. Thank you so much for being here today.

Jen Fry (21:41.39)
Yay!

Thank you. And I so appreciate you, Brent, in doing what you're doing and helping entrepreneurs because things like this are what's critical to our success.

Brent (21:52.759)
Thank you.