Stephanie Heath (she/her) is a Job Search & Career Coach that helps soft-spoken men and women land soul-aligned, six-figure, corporate positions.
Her global online business has transformed the lives of thousands of uninspired professionals by teaching them how to tap into their corporate worth, interview powerfully and negotiate high six-figure salaries.
Her work has been featured in Forbes, CNN, FOX, Well+Good, HelloGiggle, themuse.com, and SheNegotiates.com, as well as in-person and online workshops; turning awkward interviewees into confident multiple offer earners around the globe.
For more details, visit their website here.
Here we sit down with Stephanie, to know a bit more about her journey as a career coach.
Q. What inspired you to become an entrepreneur?
Stephanie: Necessity and the inability to go on another interview; and give so much to another employer.
It’s important that we take responsibility for where we are in life.
At the time I was a huge people pleaser, I had no boundaries and I didn’t know who I was. I wasn’t equipped to show up as a well-adjusted, leave work at home, professional and if I am being completely honest; my time in Japan took away from my recruitment chops. After I was let go from an incredible company, with a really supportive team; I fully jumped into entrepreneurship and never looked back.
Q. How did you get started?
Stephanie: I started out in a boiler room-esque, sales-heavy recruitment agency environment after graduating with a Psych (BA Psychology) degree. I eventually transitioned out of agency recruitment into a few different corporate environments like Amazon and Sony.
After a few years, I found myself a bit disillusioned, considerably unhappy and severely burnt out. I realized that although I loved creating awesome candidate experiences, and helping companies market and find their special unicorns, I had some underdeveloped skills (leadership, healthy boundary setting and attention to detail) that prevented me from truly excelling in my career.
After a soul-crushing layoff from a company that (at the time) felt like I had given my blood sweat and tears to, I fell into a dark place mentally. My therapist recommended I do something unexpected and so I decided to go teach English in Japan for two years. It ended up being the biggest healing experience I didn’t even know I needed.
Unfortunately, after a significant death in my immediate family, I returned to the US and immediately jumped into another high-stress Head of Recruitment role. And although Japan definitely patched up my nervous system…it didn’t give me the tools to step up as a business partner and company lead. My angel of a manager at the time did me the favor of letting me go right before the founders let go of 75% of the rest of the staff… and so I found myself in a new city, alone, with a huge $$$ one-bedroom apartment and no income.
Following that, I decided that I could not survive another corporate experience (at that time) and so I bet on myself and continued the entrepreneurial work I had started in Japan. My first company was called Soulwork and Selfies providing self-development and self-esteem building support. I eventually combined self-esteem development with career coaching and developed a coaching package that helped people get their dream jobs, with top of the range offer packages. That is how SoulWork and Six Figures came to be.
Q. What was your biggest startup challenge? What steps did you take to overcome it? What did you learn?
Stephanie: Oh man; where do I start. Developing self respect for sure. Handling the emotional strain of being responsible for providing a product/service that works; while also showing up as myself. I’m very childlike in speech and inflection; I enjoy the color pink; and for most of my entrepreneurial journey; I’ve hidden from that and looked at that side of me as something to be hidden. I have no interest in talking about resume writing. I deeply want to provide transformative experiences with my clients – getting to the root of why they are procrastinating on writing their resume instead.
Dealing with and managing different personality personas and as my sister says, being objective. That’s been huge for me. I believe if I weren’t as sensitive or needing to find purpose through my work, SoulWork would be a lot more ‘successful’ by now but I’m not there yet.
Building team has been an area of growth for me. Being well aware of my flaws and knowing how deeply they impact every area of the business is the stuff of nightmares lol.
Taking this journey, most of at least, alone in the beginning. Talking to myself, asking questions, and making terrifying decisions by myself. That’s not the case now, and I’m actually a lot more capable of making these decisions but those are some of the areas that I’ve found really challenging.
How we’ve grown as an organization is by leaning into surrender and the idea that all decisions are right decsions; and if they aren’t then they are here for our growth. We lean into our mission and values – purpose, ownership, transformation, being a steward our energy, highest self activation and conscious communication. That helps ground as as we’ve seen growth as well.
Q. What is the Most Memorable Thing You’ve Done Since you Started your Business?
Stephanie: Casually mentioning to my Publicist, Amanda Rumore and PR agency (Publicity for Good, https://publicityforgood.com) at the time that it would be cool to get on TV/News and finding myself on every major station a month later. That was a whirlwind experience. I felt as if I were thrown into the fire. The experience definitely changed the trajectory of my career.
Otherwise, just watching clients do epic things. Watching an early thirties Black female client go from 98k base to 220k was wild. Watching clients get six figure salaries packages after working multiple part time jobs and battling really unfortunate family circumstances has been incredible to witness.
Q. What is one book you recommend, and why?
Stephanie: The Big Leap by Gay Hendricks was given to me by one of my first Business Coaches, Brianna Rose; and it was life changing. It’s so hard to get upset at other people or situations anymore lol. It’s actually pretty frustrating but it’s great.
It teaches that once you’re in the middle of an up leveling; your subconscious may try to interrupt and cause external outside problems to bring you back to the level/homeostasis its comfortable at so let’s say just received a big promotion or you just received a bunch of incredible press; you may find yourself waking up sad or starting arguments with your spouse. It’s actually just your subconscious trying to bring you back down. After you read the book you really can’t blame the world as much anymore; you kind of just look at upsets and weird occurrences a bit differently.
I highly recommend it but after as I mentioned you’ll have no choice but to throw a lot of your BS out of the window.
Q. What are your top 3 favourite online apps, tools, or resources and what do you love about them?
Stephanie: Calendly for scheduling all of our client sessions, meetings, and a la carte paid services of course.
Kajabi.com because it’s an all-in-one website host, payment processor, storefront, course library and community. They also have 24/7 chat support which I’ve relied on heavily lol.
I believe my new favorite will be Dubsado, but we are just getting started with them!
Q. In terms of legacy, what is the mark you’d like to leave on the world?
Stephanie: If I am honest, I started my first company SoulWork and Selfies because I was tired of having parameters around what I could be or do based on my skin color. I hated the fact that society brainwashed me before I was even out of elementary school to look down on myself because I was Black and of a dark complexion. The world likes to pretend that there is no color but we all know there is.
We all have assumptions about ourselves based on our race, gender, and socioeconomic level and to be quite honest I was tired of being second best in the Black community and on the absolute bottom in the greater – general American world.
I resented how much work I had to put in to even like myself, much less love myself and how it came so easy for other races and women with lighter complexions because they were affirmed since they were young. I created SWS because I wanted to help other women that were fighting hard to believe that they were worthy.
Now, I’m not as concerned with how I am perceived in the world.
I don’t care to be approved of by anyone. I am building a profitable company that helps and transforms lives. And we’re actually doing it….So, to be frank, I approve of myself already.
Instead, I just want to keep increasing the take-home pay, and work fulfillment of our clients and arm them with the tools they maybe didn’t have access to if they are an immigrant for example or they come from poverty with a crap education, or they are 1st generation and hold a lot of trauma and wounding around asking for what they want in the workplace.
Right now my goal is likely what a lot of other people’s goals are – to use the skills that we innately have to help.
Here at SoulWork, we know without a shadow of a doubt how to get you higher salary packages, with companies that will value and respect you; so for now that is what we are focused on.
Q. In one sentence, what’s the best advice you’d give to someone just starting out on their entrepreneurial journey?
Stephanie: It’s really easy to take the advice of entrepreneurs that have been in the game for 7 + years and believe them when they say – oh you just need to pray about this, or work on manifesting this, but trust me. The reason why they can easily turn their audience into buyers is that they took seven years to build it.
Make sure that when you are interviewing potential business coaches or viewing stories of entrepreneurs that are 22 years old and millionaires after launching a product in less than a year what their background is. A lot of them spend 7 plus/6plus years in heavy personal development and marketing and sales programs.
It can be so disappointing when you only read what these coaches advertise – I launched my business and one year later I made 500k when they don’t include that they had ANOTHER business that failed for 7 years and through that experience, they may be re-launched and started a business that worked for them. It is actually disappointing to see that so many people don’t keep it real with how long it took them.
Even when you look at, for example, the founder of Calendly.com who made an incredible product that is its standard in its industry; he had three other companies that 100% failed before that one didn’t…
So, definitely prioritize your spiritual practices or manifestation practices but please please do not look at this as a get-rich-quick thing. There is SO MUCH to learn and master as an entrepreneur – you need to learn sales, marketing, creating systems and processes, how to be your own accountant and book keeper. If you are a service provider – you need to learn client delivery, client retention and management. You need to learn to manage your own emotions. You need to learn how to be the expert or service provider when most of your life you were the customer…its a lot. And for me I love it but hope for and wish for and dream for it to go quick and aligned for you but also prepare for it to take time. You want to treat your product or your service like its your special baby. You want to take things slower and build its roots and your methodology. Honor your company. It’s not here to serve you. It is not you and it shouldn’t run you either; but give it the time and the respect and the GRACE it deserves. Focus on creating something people need and can only receive from you. Let go of the pressure to rush it.
To keep up to date with Stephanie and her journey, connect with her on LinkedIn and Instagram.