The Risks, Rewards and Realities of Entrepreneurship with Maria Locker

Maria Locker:
No matter who’s around you, if they are trying and taking the risk to put themselves out there, ask them how it’s going, ask them if there’s anything you can do to help. Don’t even ask them some days, just go ahead and do something that you know is going to make an impact in their life. It just helps a woman realize that help is absolutely necessary. You cannot do life without help along the way.

Mathieu Yuill:
Hey, and welcome to the Leading With Nice Interview Series podcast. My name is Mathieu Yuill, and we want to help you inspire others, build loyalty, and get results. Now, today I am super excited, as I usually am, but I’m particularly excited because this guest came via reference from my sister, and I’ve talked about both my sisters on social media and in videos and whatnot. They’re both entrepreneurs themselves. One is an author, one works in a variety of different arenas, and one of my sisters recommended today’s guest, Maria Locker because Maria has been influential in my sister’s life for many years.

Mathieu Yuill:
Maria is an advocate and champion for the advancement of women and female entrepreneurs across North America. She is the founder and CEO of the Mompreneurs organization and now the founder and CEO of RevolutionHER. Maria and her team have welcomed, get this, over 30,000 members and subscribers and presented over 800 events, which leads me to believe that Maria actually has mastered cloning as well, because that’s a lot for one person, so there must be multiple Marias out there. She’s also given back over a staggering $200,000 in funding and business mentorship to women entrepreneurs through their annual awards programming, so as the son of a great entrepreneurial mother and the brother of two entrepreneurial sisters, man, I could not be happier to have Maria on my podcast. Welcome here today.

Maria Locker:
Thanks so much, Mathieu. I’m very humbled. Your sister has been amazing, so I’m really glad that she introduced us to each other.

Mathieu Yuill:
Yes, so shout-out, Cindy. Cindy, over the summer, we were on the phone and I was talking about my business and how she was doing. I bemoaned the fact that I’ve been doing this podcast for about 18 months at a time and I’d booked and recorded five episodes, but I think I had three published and she said, “Well, what’s your biggest pain point?” and I said, “I can find the guests and I am really great at creating the questions, but it’s all this stuff in-between, like inviting them and getting them on that has me stumped, and booking them.” She said, “Well, listen, I’ll book. I’ll take care of all your bookings.” Since that day, so in my first 18 months did five interviews, three published. Since that day, I’ve done, I think in less than six months, 15 interviews, and we’ve published 10 of them, all thanks to her.

Maria Locker:
Yeah.

Mathieu Yuill:
I don’t know if you want a virtual assistant, anybody, but if you do, send me an email, I’ll connect you to Cindy. Anyway, Maria, you have a crazy background of your journey, and we’re going to talk about it a bit, how you’ve ended up where you are today. If someone met you 15 years ago, you actually would have been in your second year as a primary school teacher. That’s not a bad gig, right? You have Christmas, March break, summers off, you get a great pension. But less than five years later, you’re launching Mompreneur, the precursor to RevolutionHER. I just am curious, what was happening in those early years? I ask this because I want listeners to hear what you say. They might recognize something that sounds familiar to them that might be an indication that there’s something stirring and entrepreneurial, so first, what was happening and maybe what were some of the indicators that, okay, it’s time to pivot?

Maria Locker:
Yeah. Well, first off, I have to say, I grew up in an entrepreneurial family, so business and small business working with family was something I always knew. I was two years old when my parents opened up our company, our family business that is still running. I’m actually the only one out of my three other siblings and my parents and my aunts and cousins that does not work there, so it’s in my blood, entrepreneurship.

Maria Locker:
But something happened when I was in university and I was a little girl in grade two, I always said I wanted to be a teacher, and a switch was flipped in university. I was like, “You know what? I think I’m going to do it. I’m going to apply for teacher’s college,” so I was very passionate about teaching. I look back on those days with so much fondness and love for just being surrounded by kids that wanted to learn. Fast forward a couple of years, though, I had my kids. I was one of those crazy people that decided to have my kids 18 months apart.

Mathieu Yuill:
I love it. 18 months is, in the new math, that’s like two weeks.

Maria Locker:
Yeah, it’s crazy, and you know what? It was a blip. It was like a haze for a little while there, but I turned to my husband, who’s also a school teacher, he still is currently a teacher, I turned to my husband and said, “Look, babe, I don’t think I really want to go back and teach 30 other kids and leave my two with someone else. This just is really not sitting well,” and he had the same feelings, and so we had that conversation as a couple: “Are we willing to sacrifice losing a whole salary? Are we willing to sacrifice certain things for one of us to be home with our kids?” and we were, and so that’s really what I did. I enjoyed the first couple of years just being a mom at home and I loved being with my kids and watching them grow and I was very fortunate to be able to have that experience.

Maria Locker:
Then by the time my daughter turned, she was just about to turn two, so my son is my firstborn, and then my daughter, she was just about to turn two, and I was noticing more and more that every time I was going out to the parks and I would take the kids for walks, I was always meeting other women. I think I’m a very talkative person, I’m a very social person, and I would meet these women at the park and I’d always ask them, “What do you do?” and nine times out of 10, they were entrepreneurs and they were super quiet about it. They wouldn’t really talk about it. It was like I was trying to pull information from them. I started talking to more and more women and I just found, you know what? We need to talk about this more. We need to be together and support one another more. I grew up in family business. It was normal for me to be a kid, seeing my parents work. I think a lot of the women I was first meeting just really found, “Nope, I’m here as a mom right now. I’m at the park. I’m not supposed to talk about work. I’m not supposed to talk about my business,” and it just really was weird for me.

Maria Locker:
Honestly, that’s where it all stemmed from. I had been home for a couple of years. It was doing freelance work and it just developed from there. I just saw the need for women to be able to connect with one another in a way that made sense for them. As a small business owner at that time, I was doing a direct marketing business on the side, and like I said, some freelance social media marketing. I just found I couldn’t connect with the chambers locally. I couldn’t go for a 7:30 AM meeting when I had my two kids with me. There were no online meetings. That was unheard of at that time, so there was just no way for me to connect, and I was realizing there was no way for other women to connect, and that’s really how Mompreneurs was born. If I’m being honest, it was truly a selfish need to just want to talk to other women. That was it.

Mathieu Yuill:
One of the things this past 12 months that been top of my mind is with the greater awareness of Black Lives Matters, we’re recording this just after International Women’s Day, and there’s this quote by Stephen Covey that I hold dear and I’ve started applying in different ways. One of his seven habits is: “To know something but not to do it is truly not to know it.” Where it’s been resonating with me as I look at educating myself and just becoming more aware of what it means to be a white man in 2021 is when you told that story right now, I’ve never been a mom, right, and I never will be. Well, most likely, I will never be a mom, and so these are things that just without you sharing it, it would never even cross my mind. I wouldn’t be aware. I wouldn’t know how to support my wife or my sisters or nieces, so partly, one, thank you for bringing that awareness to that on this podcast, and two, it’s just for people that are listening that have not been in that scenario because they just simply aren’t in that scenario, that’s something I would encourage you to ruminate on after you stop listening to this podcast.

Mathieu Yuill:
This actually flows right into this next question we had talked about. You write and speak a lot about finding clarity, which is what you just described, your process for finding clarity and living a life of purpose, which of course, aligns well with leading with nice. For you, this was really highlighted in 2016, 2017 when you basically took illness the same way you took having children, you battled both Hodgkin’s lymphoma and thyroid cancer within a year of each other.

Maria Locker:
Yeah.

Mathieu Yuill:
What was it, do you think? I don’t mean to make light of it, but again, you don’t do anything far apart, it appears. What was it, do you think, that instead of this calling you to just coast and mail it in, because nobody would challenge you for just chilling the rest of your days, but instead, you’re like, “You know what? I’m going to mix it up and ramp up my whole life.” What was it? Tell me.

Maria Locker:
It was sitting on a couch for days in and days out staring at the same four walls. It was like, “Okay, let’s just get through this moment and move on to the better and bigger things.” It was such an odd time, and I have to say, even though I was diagnosed, I was actually diagnosed two months apart, so I was diagnosed first with thyroid cancer, and then actually about a month-and-a-half later, Hodgkin’s lymphoma, but I had been trying to figure out health issues for over 10 years. I can’t even really describe the frustration that comes from knowing something’s up, but having to go through the process for so long, trying to figure out what that is, so I was just happy to finally have gotten some kind of answer and I was ready to, “Just tell me what I got to do. I’ll do it so I can move on,” and that’s really how I tried to approach it.

Maria Locker:
Now, having said that, I wasn’t prepared with a will. I wasn’t prepared in my business. I had no idea, if something happened, who was this going to go to? I had thousands of members that looked to me, and then all of a sudden, if something were to happen to me, I wasn’t prepared for that, so it was a big lesson there. But for me, even going through chemotherapy, the radiation, and just bouncing back, getting my immune system back on track, a lot of it, I was working on our annual conference for 500 women. I was booking speakers. I was interviewing, I think at one point, I interviewed Manjit Minhas for our magazine. It kept me going, knowing that I had this important work to do and that I was hopefully touching the lives of other women. It was really important to me, and so it’s just how I do, I guess. It’s just how I function.

Maria Locker:
Now, during that time, because I was inside for so long because my immune system was shot, I can still remember the feeling of going outside and hearing the birds chirp at the beginning of spring around this time and it was just beautiful. It just makes you realize the importance of things that you maybe just take for granted on a daily basis. We’re only here for so long. It’s up to all of us to make an impact for however long we’re here every single day. We have to show up every single day, whether we’re feeling great or not. I really, truly believe that.

Mathieu Yuill:
Thank you for that masterclass on resiliency. A few takeaways: One, first of all, if you’re a small business owner and you do not have a will, go do it right now.

Maria Locker:
Yeah.

Mathieu Yuill:
Stop this now. Call your local lawyer. Get a will, because like Maria said, if something happens to you, if you have clients you need to care for, you have employees, potentially, you have partners in addition to your family, so go take care of that right now. Then also, yes, there are people to help you with the work, but you will still need to be responsible for driving that. You’re the fuel in the car, right?

Maria Locker:
Yeah. I will say that I had an incredible team behind me. We had just signed this massive project with the government of Canada and the Coca-Cola Foundation, I had just opened a nonprofit, we had this whole thing, the biggest project in my life, and I had to turn to my team and say, “Guys, I’m here, but I’m really not here. See what you can do without me,” and I’m so thankful because even for some of those team members that are no longer with the company, with me, they’re lifelong friends. They had my back and I will always have theirs.

Mathieu Yuill:
Yeah, that is amazing. I want to take that same theme because I want to speak a bit more about transition. Mompreneur was happening, it was successful, and I think it’s fair to say, and you can correct me if I’m wrong, that RevolutionHER was born out of that, and so as you saw the call or you felt the need to pivot, what I’d love you to share right now is maybe almost a checklist for people like that: What were the signs that you needed to pivot or grow or change your company? If you saw them again, would you recognize it as definitely indications that it’s time to make another pivot?

Maria Locker:
I think so. I think I would. For me, the number one sign that I saw was really complacency. I was comfortable doing the same thing to the point where it wasn’t exciting me anymore. I loved the community that we obviously had brought together, I loved putting on events, but there was a spark missing. At some point, there was a spark missing in terms of something’s not speaking to me. I’m normally much more excited about these things and it’s kind of like, “Eh.”

Maria Locker:
It was really one of those complacent issues that I just, it made me realize that I am not comfortable staying comfortable. I am constantly looking to change things, do things differently, improve, get feedback, and develop. That’s where my spark comes from. That’s where my passion comes from, because that means I’m growing and I’m constantly evolving. That’s really where RevolutionHER came from. When I started Mompreneurs, I was a young mom and it really spoke to me, the word “mompreneur” spoke to me, and it spoke to others. As my kids started to grow and as the world around us started to shift, new conversations were happening. Was the word “mompreneur” even really necessary? Why are we putting the labels on women? Over the years, it just kept sticking with me: Something’s different and has to change.

Maria Locker:
It really hit me when we had our last Mompreneurs conference. 2019, we had our conference and there was a really special event that took place. Ellen DeGeneres was coming to Toronto and it was the weekend of our conference and I got a little cheeky and posted a picture of our group of women and I superimposed Ellen’s face on one of our members’ bodies and said, “Ellen, look, you fit right in.” Posted it on Twitter and I had a mini viral moment to the point where her producer reached out and said, “Hey, Ellen can’t join your event, but she would love for your mompreneurs to join her at her event,” and I was like, “Oh, my gosh, this is craziness,” and so the spark was reignited. I was like, “Oh, this is going to be awesome.”

Maria Locker:
We managed to collectively bring together 600 women in pink Mompreneur T-shirts to the Ellen DeGeneres show in Toronto. And what was amazing was there were, I would say, over 50% of the women that joined us were women. I hadn’t talked to in five or six years, women that were no longer even entrepreneurs, but had stayed part of our community because they still felt like they wanted to be part of it and it was like a light bulb moment. These women, whether they’re entrepreneurs or not, they’re still, we all just want community, and that was really the catalyst for me to say, “Okay, I love the work we’ve done with Mompreneurs. We need to evolve and shift so that we’re now able to support women, whether they’re entrepreneurs or not, whether they’re moms or not, whether they’re transgender or not, whether they’re anything or not,” and it really came from just wanting to open our arms wider and welcoming as many women as we could, and the word “evolution” was really where I was focused on. It just felt like it was time to evolve and RevolutionHER is what came out of it.

Mathieu Yuill:
Very cool. Okay. Real quick, then: Top three things in bullet point form, don’t think about it, just tell me, top three things. If you’re feeling this, investigate it, because it might be a pivot time for you.

Maria Locker:
If you’re comfortable, it’s for change. If you’re not driving forward, in terms of change, you need to talk to someone and find new inspiration. Mm, I’m going to go with two. Those are the two big things.

Mathieu Yuill:
I love it. I’m a middle-aged white man and just based on our sex and gender, we’ve had very different journeys in building our business. Because of my privilege, I haven’t had the same challenges as you and for our listeners that are thinking to themselves right now about a woman in their life who they’d like to support on their entrepreneurial journey, what do they need to be aware of that they may have never even thought about because they aren’t a woman or an entrepreneur?

Maria Locker:
I will say, if there’s anything I’ve learned about women is that they truly believe they can do it all and that they’re supposed to do it all, so if you have a woman in your life who is trying to run a side hustle or run a business, they’re not necessarily going to tell you all the stresses that come in their life, and they’re going to make it look like it’s okay to still keep the house clean and get the kids to school and pack lunches and whatever it is that is happening in their daily lives, taking care of elder parents. There’s this misconception that women really do have to do it all, and as much as we say there’s that joke that men don’t stop for directions, women really won’t stop to ask for help, and if they do, oftentimes, it’s met with not the most positive.

Maria Locker:
We’ve connected with a lot of women whose partners don’t support their entrepreneurial efforts, who don’t take them seriously, who believe it’s just a hobby and it’s a waste of time, and that’s soul-crushing for a lot of women. No matter who’s around you, if they are trying and taking the risk to put themselves out there, ask them how it’s going, ask them if there’s anything you can do to help. Don’t even ask them some days, just go ahead and do something that you know is going to make an impact in their life. It just helps a woman realize that help is absolutely necessary. You cannot do life without help along the way.

Mathieu Yuill:
That is really powerful. Everything you said, I love, I am down with. As I’ve been journeying along, and, again, being a brother and son to entrepreneurial mother and sisters, I’ve often wondered, how can I without, because I’m entrepreneurial, how do I not try to just take over what they’re doing and be like, “Oh, I could help,” it really means like, “Oh, I’ll do it for you,” or I’ll do it because whatever. That’s what I’ve always been personally trying to figure out: How do I support and ally with them well? I don’t have the definite answer today, but I do think one thing that Leading With Nice can do that can help is I’d love to give away five of your annual memberships to listeners or viewers of Leading With Nice, so we’ll talk about how we can do that offline, but definitely check out Leading With Nice social media or our website. There’ll be information on how you can have a chance to get one of these five memberships.

Maria Locker:
Wow, that’s amazing.

Mathieu Yuill:
I’m super excited because I had looked at it before, so if you actually just tell people what’s included in an annual membership. The curated welcome boxes actually sounds… I want one. Yeah, tell me about what’s involved in the annual membership at RevolutionHER.

Maria Locker:
That’s awesome, Mathieu. Thank you for the support. We’ve put together a membership for women who, basically, it includes all of our events throughout the year. Just to give you an idea, we just hosted Meena Harris, founder of Phenomenal, she’s VP Kamala Harris’s niece. We just hosted her. We’ve hosted a New York Times bestselling author, Jen Sincero, The Birds Papaya, massive influencer on social media. Membership gives all of our events for free throughout the year and it also comes with our RevolutionHER curated box, which we’ve handpicked some amazing products from women-founded businesses. I think we’ve packed in over $200 worth of products in this box that when you become a member, it’s delivered to your door, and it’s just a way for us to not only highlight women that we admire, but also just say, “Girl, we got you, we’re sending you a box, and there’s a little something just for you. There’s nothing for your kids. There’s nothing for your husband. It’s literally just for you and enjoy it and welcome to the club.”

Mathieu Yuill:
Well, I think one of the cool things, too, I mean, this sounds really neat to me is you go through books together and then you actually have chats, like you do online events, correct?

Maria Locker:
Yeah, we do. It’s such a fun opportunity to just come together. Our next book chat is at the end of the month. We’re featuring The Home Edit, these two amazing women. I’m not sure if you’ve seen them on Netflix, they have a series on Netflix, so we just pick books that we think we would love and that other women would love and we talk about what’s really resonated with us, and then we host other events, too. We have specific events for entrepreneurs as well. We do a mentorship session where women can ask questions and go into a small group conversation with other businesswomen who can offer advice and give feedback.

Mathieu Yuill:
We are recording this in basically month 11, on the verge of month 12 of COVID, so Maria, I have seen it on Netflix. I’m even watching Steven Seagal movies now, it’s that bad. Before we do some thank yous for this, where can people go to find out more information about what you do, and maybe even not just only the website or the resource, but also, what should they be looking at when they get there?

Maria Locker:
Okay, so you can find all the information on us at revolutionher.com. We’re across all social platforms. Membership is one of those things, if you are interested, of course, we would love for you to become a member, but you can participate in so many ways without spending a penny. Subscribership is free, and then we actually invite you to join our private Facebook group where you can just have conversations with other like-minded women. There’s just so much we try to offer, especially now in this age of COVID, to support as many women as we can. The only ask we ever have is if you love it, please tell another woman in your life so that we can continue to support in a beautiful circle. But yeah, revolutionher.com is probably the best place to start, or you can find us on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook at @RevolutionHerTM.

Mathieu Yuill:
Cool. You and I having this conversation did not happen in a vacuum, so I like to thank everybody who was involved. First, we talked about her already, my sister, Cindy. She connected us, she booked us, she made sure the link for the website we record this on was available. Thank you, Cindy. Naomi works at Leading With Nice and she helps me get prepared and keeps me organized and makes sure the questions I want to ask are all in the right place. Carrie Cotton’s our account manager. While we were doing this, I saw messages in our Slack channel. She’s doing work so that I can take some time out to chat with you. Austin Pomeroy is our audio editor and producer. He puts this all together, makes us sound great, and Jamie Hunter is our content manager. The reason you’re hearing this right now is probably because you saw it online or social or heard about it. He crafts the blog posts. He makes all the social content and then schedules it and makes sure Maria’s photo’s included. Sam is our graphic designer. He put together all the graphics you saw around this. Sam did that. Team, thank you so much. Maria, though, you were here, you showed up, and man, did you bring some authenticity and vulnerability?

Maria Locker:
I hope.

Mathieu Yuill:
You brought it, man.

Maria Locker:
Thank you so much, Mathieu. Honestly, I think the more we’re all open and sharing with each other, the much nicer the rest of the world will be. Just like you said, leading with nice, it’s so, so important, so it’s been an honor to be here with you.

Mathieu Yuill:
Maria, thank you. People always tell me, clients always tell me I should be saying this more: The stuff we talked about today, if you implement it, it will increase your bottom line. This is not just feel-good stuff, it is good business practice, so Maria, thank you very much.

Maria Locker:
Thank you.

Mathieu Yuill:
We will talk to you next time. Thanks for listening.