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Today we welcome my friend Suzan Bond, a self-employed entrepreneur with a history of work in the tech boom, moving across the country without knowing a single person, five layoffs, and multiple successful businesses.
Resources Mentioned
Full Transcript
Eric Rosenberg: Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, children of all ages, welcome back to the Personal Profitability Podcast. Today we have a very special guest and someone I think you will be excited to hear from because I did not meet her at FinCon, she’s nothing to do with finance blogging whatsoever but she did start her own business and go from working for someone else, working for the man, to working for herself. So now she is the man, or the woman, whatever you’d like to call her. Her name is Suzan Bond, Suzan with a Z. And she’s here on the line with us. So say a quick hello, Suzan.
Suzan Bond: Hello
Eric: Before we really dive in, as usual, I like to make sure personal finance stays personal. So Suzan and I each have a drink. I here, am holding a Fat Tire in an old cart on a standby, you can’t go wrong with that. Suzan on the other end told me she doesn’t have a beer in hand but she does have a drink ready. Can you tell us what you’re drinking and why.
Suzan: Yeah. I’m drinking a multi-green Kombucha. I can’t really drink a lot of alcohol these days but I love the Kombucha because it’s good for your stomach stuff, you know, the probiotics. It gives me like a nice little tingly happy feeling. That’s what I’m drinking.
Eric: Everyone loves the tingly happy feeling. What better preview could you give than ‘it gives me the tingly happy feeling?’
Suzan: Who doesn’t? Right. And also not a lot of sugar or other stuff in it. So, yeah, I like that.
Eric: I’m in Portland. So here in Portland, there’s tons of Kombucha everywhere. It’s like a thing here. I’ve only tried it a couple of times. I wasn’t a huge fan maybe I need to get a little more into it, try a couple of different flavors.
Suzan: Well it depends, right? Sometimes it’s super medicinal, which is not my favorite palate. But the kind I like is very, more bubbly almost mineral-y, it’s a little vinegar-y. But I actually had some great Kombucha when I was in Portland a little while back at a little coffee shop that I can’t remember the name of. So it might not be your flavor profile but you could try it a couple of different times to see if you like it.
Eric: Yeah. I mean, who am I to turn down an alcoholic beverage? That just seems un-Portland of me.
Suzan: It does have a little trace amounts of alcohol in it. It’s true.
Eric: Because I know it’s for grownups. So if you are listening and you are not driving a car, or at work where you’re not allowed, hit the pause button, go grab a beer or a Kombucha, or a glass of wine or a scotch of your choosing.
Okay we’re back. Now you got your drink. I’m glad you are able to have a drink with us.
Startup Communities
Eric: So Susan, I met through the, there’s a Denver Startup community, lots of good events, things like Ignite and Startup Weekend, all these great fun stuff. I kept running into Suzan, this awesome person at these events. We became very good acquaintances, I would say, through Twitter and the social media.
Suzan: Oh yeah.
Eric: I’ve always kind of kept track, I saw you’ve had a couple of moves. Can we start by telling how you got involved in the startup community in Denver and why you left Denver and where you landed?
Susan: Yeah, sure. I love startups. I love the energy of startups. I’m not a, kind of on the startup side, I’m not more of a busy person, very much a bootstrapper kind of person. But I love startups for the innovation, the way that they’re trying to push around boundaries and it was just the group of people that I fell in with when I was living in Colorado. And I love youthful energy like the, ‘We can do this! We don’t know what we’re doing but we can do it.
Eric: We can do everything!
Suzan: Yeah
Eric: All the things!
Suzan: All the things. I love that. I’m an eternal optimist. My dad always says, your assets and excess become your liabilities and he would always point out my optimism but I still like that quality of mine. And so I was in Colorado for 5 years but then I started dating someone who I met on Twitter, actually. I met him in Portland.
Eric: It’s like a whole worldly experience with Twitter.
Suzan: It is. It’s really interesting. We’ve been Tweeting with each other for a year, we knew each other from the Tech community particularly in Ruby on the Rails language kind of community.
Eric: Do you have any mutual friends or was this a total chance Twitter meeting?
Suzan: We did but we didn’t discover until later. So we tweeted for a year about time travel and all sorts of psychology and weird experiments and all sorts of geeky stuff. And I was going between Seattle and Portland, and I tweeted that I need a hotel in one hour. He said, ‘You’re in Portland? Let’s meet up.’
Now, I’ve been asked out on Twitter before but I’ve never gone. And for some reason, I said yes. And we discovered later that we had many people in common. I actually used to date his former boss.
Eric: Wow
Susan: Yeah. But anyway, we dated long distance. He was actually in Portland briefly and then he moved to New York, back to New York where he’s from. So we were long distance for a year and a half and then it was time to close the gap on that. I moved to New York City about year and a half ago.
Eric: So where in New York are you living?
Suzan: We’re in Williamsburg. In Brooklyn.
Eric: So you’re in like hipster central out there.
Suzan: Kind of
Eric: Either you’re a hipster or you’re a Hasidic Jew. Otherwise, you’re not allowed in Williamsburg. That’s the way it is, right?
Suzan: That’s what I’ve heard. Although I don’t identify with either of those so I feel a little bit out of it. I pretty much work or do my hobby which is travel.
Eric: Nothing wrong with that. We’ll ask more about that later, too. So you landed out New York. I know with this, you’ve had your own startup journeys starting your own businesses. You’ve worked for other companies. You now work for yourself.
Online Career and Side Income Projects
On the site I talk a lot about freelancing and side income projects and building up an income to let you breakout, you know, trying lots of different things. And Suzan’s definitely done several different things. She’s not just one day been like, ‘Okay I’m working for myself.’ And that was the day. Could you share a little bit about your journey in your career and internetizing and awesomizing; I just made up some words; could you do share all those words I just made up and how they apply to you and your story?
Suzan: Totally. I love internetizing. I like to make up words, too, so, I like that.
Eric: I say I’m an internet awesomizer. If you go to my personal website if I may, like a speaker/writer and website awesomizer. That’s my self-proclaimed title.
Suzan: Totally. I feel like you can add ‘izer’ at the end of something to make it really cool.
Eric: Because ‘ninja’ is worn out. Like everyone is like, who needs another SEO Ninja or Marketing Ninja?
Suzan: Or ‘rock star’, too
Eric: Yeah, rock star.
Suzan: Rock star. ‘izer’, I think that’s perfect.
Eric: My wife actually, I know I’m totally cutting off as you’re answering the question, my wife she’s actually joined in some of my online stuff and I thought, you know I’m the CEO of my business, I can create whatever titles I want and I was also, I was thinking like I am tired of ninjas and I’m tired of rock stars, so I made her the ‘Twitter Pirate’.
Suzan: Oh, I love it!
Eric: …for my brand. She’s no longer the Twitter Pirate, she’s now the Chief Mob Officer for another brand.
Suzan: Oh, okay. I was just saying, there’s not a lot of pirates, there’s not a ton of pirates on the internet these days.
Eric: There should be. I mean, not like stealing-people’s-content-illegally pirates but like wearing eye patches and having birds and saying, ‘Aarrgghh’.
Suzan: Yeah, totally. That’s totally cool.
Eric: So your story, back to that.
Suzan: Okay, waste in pirate, back to my story. I’m gonna try to, I’m a ways into my career so I’ll try to shorten the story for you a little bit, give you highlights. Of course, feel free to ask more, in more details if there’s something you want to hear about.
The early part of my career I worked in a number of different functions doing a number of different things – marketing and project management. I ran the project management department for internet active agency back in the late ‘99s, mid ’90s to late ‘90s. So I was doing that, we built things like American Airlines’ first website, we’re building up travel website for Walmart. It was back in the days when building a shopping cart was a million dollar problem and took a long time and a lot engineers to build. And I don’t know if a lot of people remember those days, but I do.
Eric: We’ve just come a long way to WordPress and WooCommerce, like to have someone set up with a shopping cart. It won’t do much but I can have one setup in under ten minutes probably.
Suzan: Totally, yes, exactly. I want to set that context because I’d always have this notion of wanting to work for myself because I definitely have a problem with authority, there’s just no question. So I always wanted to work for myself, always wanting to create for myself. But back then it was really hard. It was definitely a much harder thing. People didn’t really purchase on the internet or they was beginning to. I was strange because I bought my airline travel on the internet and I was super into Amazon before it was what it is now.
Eric: Buying books? That was all that you could buy there probably.
Suzan: Yeah, totally. Oh, yeah.
Eric: What was your first Amazon purchase? Do you remember?
Suzan: I don’t actually. I wish I knew. I wish I could look it up. I don’t know. Maybe I could look it up but it was so long ago.
Eric: Actually I looked mine up not too long ago and found it. I bought a book called ‘Company’ by Max Barry. I still love that book and still highly recommend it. And The Alchemist, which I’ve lost my first copy. I left it on a plane. So I got my replacement for The Alchemist which is my favorite ever and I highly recommend it to everybody.
Suzan: Such a good book
Eric: Life changing book
Suzan: Such a good book. Just for vanity sake later, I’m gonna have to look up and see what my first purchase was at Amazon.
Transition to Coaching
Suzan: In the midst of all these, in the early 2000s, I heard about this thing called coaching. Not little league, right, but like, most people think of it as life coaching but there was executive coaching and career coaching. And because I managed the project management department, I had 12 people under me, I started to get really into organizational development and coaching people and using those kinds of skills. And so I thought, ‘Oh, maybe I could have a business doing this.’ So I started in the end of ’99, early 2000 I started taking all of these courses in coaching.
The plan was, there’s a whole bunch of people in my class, they took like, there’s 5 weekends. You go to a weekend course and they’re like 5 months apart. And then after that you basically graduate for the program and you go can go on to a certification, which you don’t have to do. But after the first weekend, half of my class went back to their jobs on Monday and quit their jobs.
Eric: Whoa
Suzan: Yeah, I know. It was frightening.
Eric: That’s very sudden
Suzan: Yeah, it’s very sudden. They went to one weekend program, they decided that they want to become a coach and they quit their jobs. That scared me. I thought, ‘Well I think that’s a little too much. I need some runway here. I need to figure out what I’m doing. I need to understand my skill sets. So I spent the next year to a year and a half getting some training. I signed up for a six months certification process. I was beginning to start the transition to having my own business when suddenly I was laid off, and a few months later the entire company went under.
Eric: Wow
Suzan: Yeah. This was during the dot com bomb of 2001. This was shortly before 9/11.
Eric: So you rode it up and you rode it back down?
Suzan: Yeah, exactly. It was really one of those stories. So it was sort of like, ‘Oh, okay. I guess I’m gonna do this now. Because also, think about that bend, too, the bubble, the internet. A lot of those jobs went away, right? Jobs, working in the internet really went away at that time. There was still some there but it was a huge, that particular industry took a huge hit.
Starting a Business during a Financial Downturn
Suzan: That was when I started my first business was in the midst of, this is like ‘how not to do it.’ Okay everybody, don’t do it this way.
So I got laid off and also the company did not give me the amount of money for severance that I was promised. Because I knew it might not happen but they did not give that to me. So I started in a little of a downturn, with not a lot of money in pocket, people not even knowing what career executive coaching was and no one knowing who I was in that context.
Eric: It’ll be like if you got out of college one day and were like, ‘alright, I’m gonna do this.’ Like starting from scratch.
Suzan: Pretty much; in the worst time.
Eric: Starting from scratch in the middle of the worst economic condition we’ve seen in, probably since the late ‘80s.
Suzan: A long time
Eric: Twenty years
Suzan: Yeah. It was not smart; not the way to go about it.
Eric: But how did it go?
Suzan: For the first few months I was like, okay I can totally do this. Right? I’m an optimist. I can totally make enough money to live on. I did okay. But again, thinking about everything that was going on, it was definitely a struggle. It was eating into savings. I would say… I’m trying to think about how much money I made a month, like in those context. I don’t remember the dollar amount but I would say it was like 50% of what I needed to really live on. Do you know what I mean? Like the basics.
Eric: From your, the job you got laid off, I’m imagining high flying dot com bubble you were doing pretty well; from doing pretty well to can’t pay the rent.
Suzan: Pretty much. That was hard. It was not as planned. Right? I’m like what not to do at that phase but I was just doing…
Eric: Did you have enough savings that you were comfortable getting through starting the business or were you staring at the account balance worrying?
Suzan: Yeah. It was the second one. That was me. What happened was, I would say, I got laid off probably, I don’t know, May, June, July, I can’t remember, somewhere there; late summer. By September, October, it was also a hard time because there weren’t a lot of also temporary jobs. It was very crushing. People remember that time. It was extremely hard. I was living in Chicago. What happened was I decided that I needed to get some kind of, I needed to work with a temp agency. And that’s what’s big, back in the days. I needed to work with somebody to find some sort of office job. That was the plan. I would get a day job and then at night I would work on my business, and I would have all my client calls at night.
Eric: Okay
Suzan: So that’s what I did. I started working for, first I started working for JP Morgan and I worked on one of their trading floors. I basically did very menial work like expenses and things. It was not hard. I didn’t get paid a lot. I think I got paid like $14 an hour, which is, coming from what I was coming from, is nothing.
Eric: It’s quite a bit better than minimum wage but not what you are accustomed to.
Suzan: Right. And you know, I was in my early 30s so you know, you have a lifestyle at that point. And then it got a lot better a few months later. I started getting more clients. And then I took a job doing marketing which had been some of the early part of my career. So I took a job doing marketing at Deloitte & Touche, so I would work there 30 to 40 hours a week and then I would work probably another 20 or 30 on my business as well.
Eric: Okay. That sounds familiar. I’m sure there’s a couple of listeners out there that do that.
Suzan: Well you do whatever it takes to make the business work. I would work on Friday nights and everyone’s like, ‘how’s your weekend?’ I’m like, ‘I worked, you know, but I enjoyed it.’ I was happy with that.
Eric: Yeah, as long as… there’s a Confucius, as a joke. There’s actually a real saying from Confucius. He said, ‘If you find a job that you love, you’ll never work a day in your life.’ We know you’ve found your passion projects and what you really want to get into when you can get home from work and start to work and it doesn’t feel like working.
Suzan: Yeah. I didn’t even noticed that it was Friday night and that I didn’t even have cute clothes anymore to go out. You know? I was like, ‘Oh, I don’t have like cute going out clothes anymore.’
Eric: And good clients clothes, right? For business.
Suzan: Yeah. I have a couple of suits and I have a bunch of tank tops and jeans.
Eric: Do you ever wear that, you could wear a suit to the nightclub? Do you wear it out, like hit the bars with the girlfriends and you were like in the nice suit?
Suzan: I didn’t. Although I should have it. Now where were you when back then, I needed to know that, right?
Eric: Well now, if you have wardrobe questions for a night on the club better give me a call.
Suzan: Yeah, totally. Now I have that resource.
Overcoming Career and Personal Setbacks
Suzan: So that was the first business that I started. That was the first that I worked for myself. I did that for like four, five years and it was good and I did well. And I was recognized as one of Chicago’s most successful coaches. I was definitely gaining some ground but in the intermediate time I ended up getting married, very briefly. And I realized that that marriage wasn’t right and so when I got out of my marriage, I realized I just needed to get a job that I needed to, you know…. I was worried that landmark, you know, the time of four to five years is make or break time. And because of my personal situation I decided to go back to work. So I went back to work for other folks.
Eric: You just stopped coaching then completely?
Suzan: Well, I stopped coaching as a side job because I was doing it in my day job. So I got a job working for the Gallup organization who actually has huge human capital consulting. That’s where they make, at the time, 70 to 80 percent of their income. And apparently, it’s harder to get into than Harvard, who knew.
Eric: I just know about their polls.
Suzan: Yeah. That’s what everybody knows. That’s the sexy part of the business. But the other part is this human capital consulting and then I worked for a couple of other firms doing that. So I stopped doing the side business because I was really, to be very frank, when life happens, right, when you make a mistake, like ooppss shouldn’t have married that person, lovely person just not the right person for me. I just put everything into, you know, survive. You know, get a good salary. I had to basically buy a lot of new things, just like knives and sheets, cause we got married I got rid of all mine and I didn’t have anything.
Eric: Right. Divorce can be a huge…particularly if you’ve been in a longer marriage than a shorter one. It can be a huge financially devastating thing for both parties. It’s a very high reason for bankruptcies and a lot of financial troubles people deal with today. Just having to buy new knives, buying a new apartment full of stuff or house full of stuff is a ton of money. It could have been worse, right?
Suzan: Yeah. I mean, I would say I relatively got out okay but it definitely hurt me financially and it had pretty long reverberations not only not only in my financial but in my career. It’s funny, I think looking back, I would say I felt nervous and scared. Like maybe I couldn’t make it on my own. He wasn’t supportive of me having my business and maybe that played into it but it took me a few years of working for other people and getting laid off again. I’ve been laid off probably four, five times in my career during the middle of….
Eric: Is there like a contest for the most number of layoffs people have been through?
Suzan: I know, right? I think I might do really well on it but it would be horrible.
Eric: Yeah. That’s not something you want to win; that’s rough.
Suzan: It absolutely is. I think I’ve been laid off five times. So what happened was like, 2008 I was working for a company, an organizational development and career development doing a lot of helping folks with even personal branding and within the organization, branding themselves; as an expert because it was a very expert kind of folks that I was working with in their field. And I got laid off and then I was looking for another job, that was in 2008, I got laid off. Six months later I got another job. I knew the day I walked into the job that it was the wrong fit. But it was another downturn, right? Remember in 2008? That was ugly.
Eric: Yeah
Suzan: So I stayed at that job
Eric: I worked at a bank around then
Suzan: Oh gosh
Eric: Actually I left that job voluntarily. I was not happy working where I was but it was a great learning experience. There’s a silver lining on every job even the ones that don’t work out. You always learn something at least. But, yeah, I got that.
Suzan: Then I just took that job and I was like, this is not a fit. But it’s a downturn so I’m just gonna dig in and I’m gonna save my money. And I started making other plans, I started to think about ramping up my business again. And then I got laid off from that job again. From that job, I got laid off twice in less than a year.
Eric: Whoa. So you got laid off brought back and then laid off again? Or are they separate companies?
Suzan: Separate companies
Eric: That’s just really, really bad luck.
Suzan: Yeah. Really bad luck. At that point I thought, you know what, this is 2009, I moved out to Colorado and I really thought I need to work for myself. Somebody else can lay me off but I’m in charge of that, if I want to lay myself off.
Eric: It’s called retirement, right? Laying yourself off?
Suzan: Yeah, totally. Exactly. That time I was smarter. I had saved some money and I had some plans. Again like I said I’m not sure I did everything right or mean really much of anything in start of if but I don’t want to swear, I have a tagline but it involves swearing so, let me see how I can say it. ‘I’m resilient as heck…
Eric: You can say that word, this is the internet, it’s not broadcast radio, lay it out there.
Suzan: Okay. Here’s my tagline: Resilient as fuck, like a cockroach. I feel like I survived all of that because I’m pretty resilient.
Eric: That’s awesome that you made it through all these.
Suzan: Yeah. Sorry, I feel like I’m talking so much.
Eric: It’s a podcast. That’s the point. Otherwise everyone out there listening right now would be like, listening and nothing. That wouldn’t be any fun. You’re fun.
Suzan: I mean, if you could sell that air, wow, that would be great.
Eric: That’s my new billion dollar business; selling that air.
Suzan: It’ not the air, its quiet, its ultimate quiet.
Eric: It’s like the yule log but for the rest of the year.
Suzan: Totally
Eric: Like don’t let us sleep, I’ll listen to nothing.
Suzan: Yeah exactly. Out of the New York City I know what a premium silence is.
On Being Self-Employed
So that takes me up to 2009 and then I started working for myself again. And since then I have basically worked for myself very happily.
Eric: That’s great. And that’s how you got into the path that you’re on now, right?
Suzan: Yeah. And it had several different, I’ve had some variations with it, trying to figure out exactly what I wanted to do in the beginning. I did a lot of straight marketing stuff because I enjoyed it and it was easy.
Eric: Were you thinking of yourself then as a freelancer or you’re thinking of yourself as a business owner? What was your mental picture of yourself at that time when you were getting going with the new business?
Suzan: Great question. Cause I’m very opinionated about this. I never called myself a freelancer. And I’m sorry if that goes against what you’ve said.
Eric: That’s okay.
Suzan: I’ve never actually thought of myself as a freelancer even when I probably was doing that after the first lay off way back mid ’90s. I never did. I’ve always considered myself a business owner.
Eric: Okay. So when you started on day one did you took steps to have a professionally presented business? Did you just drew up a website, business cards, the whole bit? What was your process getting started with that new business in being a business owner again?
Suzan: When I got started again, I did do a website and I had a website at that point. I think I got some cheap Moo cards when I went to [inaudible 00:27:06] interactive. But really, to be very frank with you, I didn’t set up a lot of business structure. I set up an LLC, I went really low rent. As a bootstrapper I’m the kind of person who does not spend a lot of money on expenses in her business. Maybe to my indulgement, but I’ve always been like, starting on literally on shoestring. I worked really low rent and what I did was I focused, the way I got business, was like focus on what I thought was my best asset, and what I thought my best asset was honestly, was my personality. I somehow see, now maybe this sounds arrogant but…
Eric: I say something, you didn’t end up as an escort you ended up marketing.
Suzan: Oh gosh, my family would….yeah, no. But I think I assessed myself and I said, okay well your best asset is your personality. And so I went to events and I met cool people and that’s how I got business. I just sort of, chatted with people. And I got my first client relatively soon. I’m trying to think… like just maybe a couple of months. It was a good client, that client paid me enough so that I had plenty of money in my bank account and I could try to pay some things off, pay for health insurance which was really expensive at the time. I did really well doing it that way going very low key.
Eric: Great. Flash forward today, what does your business look like now?
Suzan: Yeah, great question. Today, I do a couple of things in my business. I’ve really hanged over the years cause I have this really interesting constellation of skills – little bit of project management, little bit marketing and personal branding and a lot of business experience. And so now what I do is, maybe what you call an agent or a band manager for technologists who are authors and trainers who are very high profile people. So I manage their contracts, their business, I give them strategic advice, I manage their marketing, I’ll hire them folks if they need to, I do creative direction on logos and books and things like that.
Eric: Your client list, proprietorial, you’ll have to share any names, some we might know?
Suzan: I can share one. I don’t know, she’s very well known in a particular world, her name is Sandi Metz and she’s very well known in object oriented programming or objectorian to design world particularly in the Ruby programming community. She does pretty well, in that world she’s like the fifth Beatle.
Eric: There’s some Ruby fans out there listening are having a fan boy moment right now hearing this.
Suzan: She’s great and she’s the biggest client and other folks. I would say, that’s the biggest client these days that I can talk about. And I’ve worked with other folks, a lot of folks in the Ruby world. That’s like a core community for me.
A Practical Guide to Professional Freedom
And the other thing that I’m doing is working on a book called Bet on Yourself. It’s a practical guide to professional freedom. And that’s a book for people who are actually considering working for themselves. It’s like, earlier in the process, what to do before you go, you know, ‘don’t do it my way.’
Eric: Here’s all the things I learned the hard way and I learned the lessons you don’t have to.
Suzan: Oh my gosh, yes. Please do not do it the way that I did it. It’s basically advice on mindset, how do you manage the transition, like most of you should not quit your day job. Touches a little bit of business and then it touches a lot of how to market yourself without feeling evil and then how do you build an audience. This is gonna be filled with a lot of stories from folks who I spent a lot of my time talking with folks about their stories of working for themselves. That’s part of what I think you and I connected again on, Eric, was we both have this interest in that.
Eric: I saw you and having not talk to you in probably a few years, I saw you tweeting about that exact topic. That’s how you ended up here today.
Suzan: Yes. That’s what it looks like today. Mostly I worked with technologists or other internet makers, designers, writers, any sort of folks like that.
Eric: That’s great. Well when you have a copy ready I would love to share it with the readers and I’ll throw up a link to your book and help you get the word out cause it sounds like a great resource for people who are listening to this and who have yet to find us, to try to find their journey.
Suzan: Yeah, absolutely. It’s like a perfect companion because you talk a lot about the financial side which I’m doned as much maybe because I feel like I should not be. But I love what you’re doing cause it’s so important.
Eric: Personal finance is, whether we like it or not, the core of what lets us do a lot of what we want to do in the world. I always say, stop working so hard for your money and put your money to work for you. And part of doing that, I think is building up a business and building a multiple income streams. If you do get the layoff, bad news one day, you don’t have to have a heart attack and say, ‘Oh my God, I don’t have any money, what am I gonna do?’ You can instead say, “Well, I have some savings, I have a plan, I have a little bit of money coming in.’ There’s always a path or there’s always a way.
Suzan: One hundred percent. I actually talk about that in the book, not more about on the money side but like, the people who think, ‘Oh that’ll never happen to me.’
Eric: I thought I would never have anything like that happen. One day, a little over a year ago I was called into a meeting and they started by saying today’s my last day. I’ve been in that room and I know several other people who have been. It’s no fun obviously. It’s much nicer to leave on your own terms than leave on someone else’s.
Suzan: One hundred percent.
Eric: When you’re not busy working a full time job and another full time job today, what do you guys like to do out in New York if someone were coming out to visit and they wanted to do a ‘not touristy’ trip, they wanted to the Suzan Bond version of New York? What would you have them do?
Suzan: It’s funny, my nieces and my sister just came out. And they wanted to do a lot of touristy things but tried to take them to other things as well. I actually showed them Brooklyn, there’s a lot about Brooklyn and Williamsburg, there’s just a lot of beautiful stuff about Brooklyn, that is… you know, you have a nice view of the city and all of that. So I would definitely show them that…
Eric: What’s that giant park right in the middle of Brooklyn? There’s probably several, I’m thinking there’s one that’s like, it felt like half of Brooklyn.
Suzan: Prospect Park is pretty big.
Eric: That’s it, Prospect Park. I went there once on a trip a few years ago. It was awesome. They were doing Brazilian dancing. I didn’t even know that was the thing, it was so much culture. It’s such a vibrant place now.
Suzan: Yeah, there is. Brooklyn actually has a lot. I love Manhattan and in Manhattan I’d actually show people part, one of my favorite parts in the city is the Lower East Side and away from SoHo, there’ just these tiny little cobblestones streets and there’s just interesting things and there’s always like, I love street art, and there’s just always random street art. You can walk around and see all different sorts of people all in one area. Those are some of the things that I love to do is show people that side or there’s some off Broadway shows that I’ve been to that have been fantastic. So that’s the kind of stuff that I’d show people in New York.
Eric: If someone’s on a budget you can take them down to Canal Street to get some stolen purses, fake purses.
Suzan: Exactly. You know what’s great, even on a budget, walk across the Williamsburg Bridge which is super fun. I’ve done that before. It’s a walk, but even walking across the bridge is super fun.
Eric: Totally. I did the Brooklyn Bridge walk, one trip, and that was, I felt like I’m in New York I gotta work over the Brooklyn Bridge at least once. It was really neat.
Suzan: I haven’t done that one yet. I really wanna do that one.
Eric: There’s a little awesome pizza joint on the Brooklyn side that’s kind of below the bridge if you’re over there. You’ll probably find it on Yelp if you’re hanging out on that side of the bridge that I went to. That, I recommend.
Suzan: Very cool.
Eric: Anyway, so we’re about out of time. Before we go I have to ask, I want you to tell if people were inspired by your story if they want to learn more about you, they want to more about the person in the myth, the legend that is Suzan Bond where should they go on the internet to connect with you?
Suzan: Sure. My website is suzanbond.com and it’s s-u-z-a-n-b-o-n-d dot com and on Twitter also @suzanbond, and Instagram, same thing, I am not very original but I have a really brandable name.
Eric: That’s really good consistent branding. I wish that I could get my own name on all those platforms. But there’s way too many Eric Rosenbergs out there.
Suzan: Yeah. I got lucky. The Z helps me and I grabbed all that stuff really early. I actually just grabbed all my nieces’ URLs and everything for them recently because I think personal branding is really important. But yeah, you can find me at suzanbond with a z pretty much everywhere. I’m the first two or three pages if you Google that.
Eric: Well thank you so much this has been a great, time has flown, you have a great story, a lot of inspiration there. Thank you so much for taking the time and being a part of it. I’m holding up my Fat Tire to give you a cheers. Cheers! Thank you for sharing your story. Thanks everyone for coming and listening. And until next time, stay profitable.