Laila Arain & Sheryl Grant | How'd You Do It & Why Should I Care?

Laila Arain: 0:00

Hi, everyone. Welcome to the next episode of the Bay Street Capital Holdings podcast titled How'd You Do It & Why Should I Care? This series aims to highlight women doing amazing work in various industries. So today, we are so lucky to be joined by Sheryl Grant, who is founder of Sheryl International. Hi, Sheryl, lovely to have you here.

Sheryl Grant: 0:18

Thank you. Thank you. I am so excited to be here. So thank you.

Laila Arain: 0:23

Glad to have on the show. So let's start off with a quick introduction as to who you are you and also maybe an answerable question the podcast, which is how'd you do it and why should I care?

Sheryl Grant: 0:34

Well, first of all, my name is Sheryl Grant. And with Sheryl International, what do I do I empower women. My passion has always been to empower women. I started my journey, why should you care? Let me tell you why you should care that first of all, what I do, then I'll tell you why you should care. When I started my journey in I worked in corporate America for 30 plus years, don't do the math, it's okay. 30 plus years, and I worked for companies like Hewlett Packard, Dell, Yahoo, EMC, EMC, bought Dell and went back to Dell. And I just had this amazing career in companies that are doing amazing work. But I found that through my journey, I was not hitting what most would consider a glass ceiling, I was hitting a brick ceiling. And for most black women and women of color, it's a brick ceiling. And one of the things that you should know about glass. While it is hard to penetrate, it has penetrated Hubble. And if you've ever been driving down the freeway and had that magic little rock pop up from nowhere, and hit your windshield and hit it hard enough just in the right spot, and you go you get out your car, you don't think twice about it, you come back and you have this huge crack across your windshield. Well, that's the power of one small pebble in the demonstration of how it can break glass. For us in a corporate environment, it's very hard for us to break those ceilings. And if you think about brick, you can't throw a pebble, I don't care how hard you throw a pebble at brick, it's not going to break. And as a matter of fact, even if you're able to chip it away, let's say you're able to get with the right tools. And you have a sledge hammer, and you have a crane. And you can just basically knock one brick off. Before you can turn around two more bricks have been placed. And that was my journey, my career journey. And I got to a point where I was so frustrated, I was at a point where I started to have mental issues depression. Because I went to school, I went to undergraduate, I got my graduate degree, I was a top 1%. My job in those roles was to sell. And I had quotas as high as $5 million every 90 days. And as long as those sales numbers, I was golden, for about two weeks or less. And then I had to do it all over again and do it all over again. But yet, and still I couldn't find a way to navigate to the C suite. And in that journey, I decided to go on a journey to literally transform my body. I wanted to I figured if I couldn't they say the definition of insanity is to continue to do the same thing but expect different results. And I figured well, oh my god, well, since I can't fix this, maybe I'll fix me. I know it's a constant, right? So I went on this journey to transform my body. This is the key, I want you to listen well. I didn't just transform my body. Although I did that. As a matter of fact, not only I transformed my body, I became miss olympia. And Wow. That's impressive. I transformed my mind. And that's far more powerful. So what do I do? And why should you care? What do I do? I empower women, to break brick ceilings, to break any barrier that's in the way of their success. And it's all about, not about your physical strength. Although that's very important. It's about your mental strength. What do you think about you? So why should you listen to me? Because I got tools to help you so that you can break those brick walls? How did I answer the question?

Laila Arain: 4:32

That Thank you. And today we're way beyond my expectations. So I'm so excited to find out more. I guess what helped you I guess in your journey to empower women. You mentioned you had an undergraduate degree undergraduate degree but what were your best resources because you can't learn how to empower women in a book, you know?

Sheryl Grant: 4:49

So, I'm going to tell you something that my journey to fitness taught me so many valuable lessons and just bear with me because I'm going to connect the dots it's one of the things I do At my company very well as connect dots. So on my journey to miss olympia, I had to really re transform every area of my life. Because when you're in a fitness competition, I can no longer eat the same foods. As a matter of fact, I had to get on a regimented schedule where I had to eat at a certain time, every two hours, I was not allowed to eat anything that was white like pasta, rice, sugar, salt, my diet had to completely change. I couldn't even go out to restaurants. Because most restaurants have a truck. And no offense, if any of you work for this company. I'm just speaking. But the company is Cisco Sy, SEO that backs up to those company. A lot of that is prepackaged, which means it has preservatives, which means it has things in it, in order to gain a longer shelf life. I couldn't eat those foods, not even going out to a restaurant that be very specific about what I ate, I had to transform the people I hung out with. Because the people that were in my circle, were amazing people. But they weren't on my trajectory. They weren't on my journey. They weren't on a fitness journey. So they didn't want to eat right, they wanted to go out drinking, I couldn't drink, I had to commit to working out at least two hours a day, sometimes double days. And at least five to six days a week. So my entire world changed. But what I learned in that was that the people that I needed to align with appeared. So whenever you're on a journey in your life, the right people show up when you're mentally fit, you'll start attracting the right people. And the beautiful thing for me is that everybody on my journey, I created the Dream Team. And there were five of us and all of them were amazing women, some of them, doctors, some of them lawyers, some of them, just amazing women. But the beautiful thing, we were all on the journey together, I say no matter what you do, it takes a village. And for you to do it alone is you could do that. But there's an old African proverb and it goes like this, if you want to go fast. Go alone. If you want to go far go together. You are we are far greater together than we are ever singularly alone. So it's about building community. And that's what I learned. And I'll tell you, I learned I when I went back in my master's program, I created what I call the C four matrix. So first of all, let me just step back a second, when after I finished my fitness journey, I created a program called fit. Fit is a play on words, fit stands for faith, intuition and tenacity. I'm not a religious person, but I am a very spiritual person. So faith for me is your ability to believe in something you can't see. You believe in something that you can't see. I teach people how to do that intuition. How do you learn how to start trusting yourself. Most often, we all going out outside of ourselves to look for happiness outside of ourselves to look for fulfillment outside of ourselves to look for worthiness outside of ourselves for everything to validate that we are worthy. And I want to say to you stop. And I want to say you are worthy. Repeat after me You are worthy. Wherever you are, I can't see you are worthy. And so I teach people how to believe in themselves again, through my bit bit faith, intuition and tenacity, your ability to do it. But going back to your other question, when I was in grad school, I couple that once you go through my personal development, the second phase of that is how to build your network because your network is your net worth. And I created something called the C four matrix. And what is that? I know you asked, right? is powerful, simple, but it's powerful. It starts off with what we're doing is communication. When you communicate, then you connect. And when you connect, then you can collaborate. And when you collaborate, you can build community. And when you build community, you can do anything. And it goes back to my fitness journey. I built a community of people that were like minded, like myself, and together, we went

Laila Arain: 9:17

far. Wow, that's so inspirational. And if you put us to gather like we're in tribe before you embark on the journey, but were there any lessons that you wish you would have known before starting in this industry?

Sheryl Grant: 9:30

Lessons that I wish I had learned? The number one I'm sorry,

Laila Arain: 9:36

the lessons that you wish you would have

Sheryl Grant: 9:40

had to encounter.

Laila Arain: 9:43

Oh, like that you wish you knew before starting in this industry?

Sheryl Grant: 9:47

Oh my god. That's a great question, by the way, and the My biggest thing is, my greatest desire is the ability to empower Women, that's what I do now. Our women, and I love it. My goal is to reach 50 million women this year, and I'm going to do it, and I need your help. As a matter of fact, you can do that by following me you go to my website, and log on and follow me, my goal is to reach 50 million women, black women, women of color, all women, because I think together, we are so much we can do so much more. I the lessons is that a couple of them that really stick out to me changes something everybody says that they want. But it's very difficult. We say we want to change. So I said I wanted to go on a fitness journey. It's one thing to say it, it's another thing to do it. And I wish I would have had somebody who could have early on in my career been a mentor to me, been a person that I could rely on that could give me really good advice. As I charted my career, it's I never had that. Or I wish I would have had people that looked like me, hmm, that we're enrolls, that we're doing what I wanted to do, that could speak to what I was doing. I didn't have that. I wish that I would have had a community when I say community now I'm speaking of corporate institutions, that understood that my journey wasn't the same as everybody else's journey, even though we were women. And we're going through the same thing. My journey as a black woman was not that as my counterpart of a white woman in what she went through. And it's a really hard journey. And if you don't have anybody to talk to, that is what set me in a world of depression. Yeah, I built my company. I built it specifically to overcome everything I just shared with you. So I believe in not giving out. I don't believe in giving a handout. I believe that we're all capable, nobody comes here. Nobody's half your whole through the things that you need to worry about. You're already whole, you're amazing. You're an amazing person. I was okay. Nothing was wrong with me. The world was trying to tell you something was wrong with me. Nothing was wrong with me. You're already a whole person. So I believe in not giving handouts. There's an old saying, and you can see I believe I like sayings. But if you give a man a fish, you'll feed them for a day. If you teach a man to fish, you'll feed him for a lifetime. Everything that I do in my company is structured around that. I believe in extending an arm. Why do I say an arm? Because an arm means I'm committed you have you have 100% of me, arm for me, in my company. And across everything that I do. I have a nonprofit, I have an S corp. And I have a two LLC and a technology company. But my messaging is the same across every platform, nothing changes how I deliver it changes, but nothing changes. An arm, I get give women access to funding. I give women resources and training. I give women mentorship, all the things that I didn't have, I give it to them through my company.

Laila Arain: 13:30

Wow, you can really, really tell the passion that you have further work for you, dude, from your experiences and the way you talk about it. And I'm sure it was obviously hard to you know, found your own company. But thinking about the span of your career, what was paid out? And what did you learn from it?

Sheryl Grant: 13:47

From Mike, what did I learn from it, that you can do anything when you put your mind to it? And that there truly is something called possibilities. And so often, especially during this pandemic we've all been challenged with how do we recreate ourselves. And I want to tell you that when we look at the most powerful things in life, and it looks like Doomsday, I want to say that's where our greatest opportunity resides. I had to go low before I could go high. I had to learn and go within and not outside to look for my value. And I want to say to everybody there that the lessons I learned is I could do it, and I can't do it. How am I going to reach 50 million women? Like that's an audacious goal.

Unknown: 14:39

Like you can do it. That's my point. Exactly. I

Sheryl Grant: 14:45

can and you can too. If you have a dream, if it's to write a book, you can do it. If it's to go back to school, you can do it. If it's to elevate your career, even in today's time. And I think the pandemic offered us an opportunity. And for those of us who are really willing to do the work, I want to say to you, I want you to look at my mouth, and my words, you can have it, it's yours for the asking. But you have to believe that you can. And you have to stop going to resources that tell you that you can't change your circle and change your life.

Laila Arain: 15:30

So important, and we've just been dropping a lot to people who advise, one piece of advice would get somebody who wants to start their own company.

Sheryl Grant: 15:42

Okay, this is the number one thing I'm gonna say to you. entrepreneurialship is not for the faint at heart. I don't want to discourage you from it. But I want you to know, that is work. I've worked in corporate for over 30 years. And I think one of the greatest assets of that was I got to learn a lot. And I got to understand under somebody else's guys how to run an operator company. But it still wasn't enough. When you start a business, go into it for the long haul, you need to have a vision. Because where there's no vision, the people perish, it got to know where you're going. And you got to align yourself with like minds, and you got to do your homework. Don't go into anything blind, do your homework, do your research. Once you've done your research, you want to start to build collaboration and partnerships with like minds. Do some interviewing people who are in your field, what were the pain points? What were their successes? How did they overcome those pain points? Once you've done that, then you want to make sure you setting up your company structure. You want to make sure that you have the right presence. Are you on social media? A lot of people band it is the future, embrace it. We are in the digital age. And depending on who I'm talking to, there's various age groups. If you're millennials, you get it. If you're Jin, woo you get it. If your baby boomers, which is my generation, we have to sometimes react well, yes, but this is the future, embrace it. Make sure that you're on the right platforms that are going to target your audience. Where's your audience? Do you know your demographic? Do you know who you're targeting? Is your message speaking the right language to those individuals? And then I want to say to you get a business coach. You don't know everything. And there's so many things that you're not going to know. And you want to know how to set up your company? What's the best structure to set up your company? Is it an S corp? Is it an LLC? Is it a C Corp? Is it a B Corp is what is that structure that you need. And maybe in the beginning, you don't need an LLC, because your taxes, you need to be aware of what taxes are. And when you have to pay them as an LLC, you have to pay $100 a year in taxes, whether you make money or whether you don't when you can operate as a sole proprietor until you start bringing enough revenue. So little things like that you want to be able to avoid for the thing I want to tell you. If it scares you do it anyway. If it scares you do it anyway, as a matter of fact, do it just because it scares you. And get the support and help that you need. There's so much more. And that's what I do too is I help entrepreneurs, there's so much more. But those are the basic tips. I think those are the starting points to get you to where you want to go.

Laila Arain: 18:41

That's awesome. And I'm sure you're really busy at the moment with one of your companies. But what have you read or looking to read? It's really

Sheryl Grant: 18:49

there's a couple of books that I've been reading and I, I read I'm a reader that is inspired by things that I'm working towards. So I've been doing a lot of dei work. I've been reading a book, I wish I had it in front of me called caste, which basically is saying that race is made up. There's no such thing as race. It was developed as a way of making an inferior and superior culture, but we're all equally made. And I can't think of the author's name right now. Another book I just got online was power economics. Another book that's always true. And I go back to old books too, and I do read a lot and a majority of my library, which I probably I have well over 200 books, I'm sure more but are people like Eckhart Tolle the power of now. I'd like to read a lot of self help books because it keeps me relevant to where I am and I do read business books too. You know, thinking Grow Rich, by Napoleon Hill. Those are just basic signature books. I listen to a lot of podcasts to keep myself relevant and a lot of audiobooks. Most of my books are done audio, because I do work a lot. And it's much easier for me in the morning after I work out that I, you know, I turn on, Alexa can listen to it on my Alexa while I'm cooking breakfast or what have you. So I try to maximize my time as best as I can.

Laila Arain: 20:26

That's awesome. And thinking back across the span of your life, who is three people who have been the most influential team?

Sheryl Grant: 20:37

first cousins, my mother, oh my god, can I Okay? My mother and my grandmother. My mother, because she was an entrepreneur. She's a very strong woman, and she believes in herself. And I watch her leave corporate and truly take care of her family as a single mother, and never was on any type of government support. Not that I deem that for those who need it, but I was very proud of her and how she maneuvered that. So my mother, my grandmother was also an entrepreneur, my grandmother was my rock. I created a foundation after my grandmother Esther came in the kingdom Foundation, which is about helping young entrepreneurs. So I have that whole program. Somebody whom I love and adore and who does an Oprah Winfrey. How can you not, she's amazing. She's just, she's an Amana terian. She's a philanthropist. She's just a human being that I just aspire to get to see if I could get half of what she has done in touching other people's lives. And I consider myself accomplished. And last, but not least, is Maya Angelou. She touches my heart. Oh my god, Harriet Tubman. Okay, I'll stop there. I'll stop.

Laila Arain: 22:04

I'll stop because I can go on to limit to just three. And then finally, to wrap up our conversation, what is one piece of advice that you wish you gave yourself at any point in your life?

Sheryl Grant: 22:19

You know, I'm going to tell you, I think the theme has been very, very apparent for me. When you believe in yourself, when you believe in yourself, I want you to let that resonate with you. When you believe in yourself, anything is possible. We often doubt ourselves. And I just really want to encourage your listeners and the people out there to understand that there's always going to be obstacles in life. And we all are going to have to overcome them. But that's where your strength is made. And if you can shift your mind from looking at it as a problem, to an opportunity, and know that that next one is going to come just as soon as you get rid of that one. I think you will set yourself up ahead of the game. And you will always not to say that, you know, you won't ever be sad because that's a part of life too. But I think it'll set you up for success far greater than when we get caught up in it and then allow it to become us and suck us dry. So believe in you. And you can do anything when you believe.

Laila Arain: 23:35

What a powerful message to end on. Thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me today. It's so clear that you're passionate about what you do and about your company and I just can't wait to see where you go next.

Sheryl Grant: 23:47

Thank you and thank you for your patience.