SDH 451: Leaving a $300,000 Corporate Salary to Pursue Her Own Business with Ashley Kirkwood

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Hello my beautiful friends! This week I’m so excited to welcome Ashley Kirkwood to the show. Ashley is a successful attorney who owns an innovative subscription based law firm, Mobile General Counsel, and her firm has negotiated and landed several multi six-figure licensing deals and corporate contracts.

After being consistently asked how her company landed such deals, she launched the Speak Your Way To Cash brand, with the book launching at the end of this year! Speak Your Way To Cash is one of the most unique and successful speaker training programs on the planet. Inside, Ashley teaches speakers how to start at the top of their speaking market with a five or six-figure corporate speaking offer.

Ashley is extremely passionate about her business and truly loves her life’s work and what it has afforded her. She loves impacting listeners both internally with her employees and team members as well as externally.

The Short Story…

Ashley has always thrived on certainty. She liked knowing that if she did A, B, and C, she would get D. She likes progression and felt that corporate was the way to go. However, she wanted to figure out how to make more money in the corporate world. Once she learned the art of salary negotiation it became easy for her to make more money as a corporate professional.

Around the age of 25-26, Ashley’s salary was already at $200K and with her savvy skills she negotiated a $100K raise, bringing her salary to $300K per year. She began working for someone who had been recruiting her for years, but after starting to work together, it just didn’t align; ‘It was like straight out of Horrible Bosses’. It was just not the best dynamic.

Knowing that it wasn’t a good fit, Ashley began to hype herself up, knowing what her worth was and trying to get her brain to realize that no matter what they were already paying her, she was worth more. They were just paying her to keep her there.

While working in the corporate world Ashley began putting herself up for awards and national publications and also had her own YouTube show. On her production level quality YouTube show, Passion, Purpose & Paychecks, she interviewed entrepreneurs who had left their jobs to do something they were passionate about - but they also dove into their financial journey and how much they were making.

Ashley put a lot into her YouTube channel working with producers from the Steve Harvey Show and NBC Universal as well as having a professional videographer, cue cards, call times, and a full hair and makeup team.

“One of my goals was to be Oprah. I want to have my own talk show.”

Despite already working in corporate, Ashley knew there was something else she wanted to do, but just couldn’t determine how to monetize it or what it actually looked like. Realizing that she was becoming stagnant, she decided to make a change, put her money where her mouth is and go all in.

However, people still saw her as a lawyer and didn’t know they could actually do business with her because she wasn’t selling anything, just connecting to and meeting people.

The Tipping Point

Feeling tired of being unheard and disrespected at work Ashley began to really look outside her corporate bubble to see where she could go, how she could build and grow a business, and do what she was passionate about. She had seen so many of her mentors, peers and people whom she admired take the disrespect because they were trapped by the money. When she had become consistently unheard and brushed off when bringing up concerns Ashley decided she did not want that life, or the life of those at the top either.

Ashley had written a book in college called The Law School Hustle, all about her journey becoming an attorney. At some point in her time in college she nearly gave up but pushed her way through and wound up graduating at the top of her class from Northwestern Law School. She took her speaking experience as a trial lawyer, her experience from writing her book, and started speaking while building her own law firm.

It took roughly six months for her law firm to start generating any revenue, but in the last six months of her first year in business her gamble had paid off and she had generated over $100,000 in revenue. The following year her business grew 400%, and again the year after that. She continued on with her momentum building her law firm and landing speaking contracts. Ashley took what she knew she was good at and her transferable skills to create something she truly was passionate about.

Ashley and her team are hosting their 6th Speak Your Way To Cash (virtual) event this year and offers a high-level six-month coaching program called The Academy, where she builds out five and six figure offers with her clients. They continue to evolve the business by listening to exactly what their clients want and need and never resting on their laurels.

One thing Ashley does admit to wishing she would have done sooner was offer people a way to work with her after speaking engagements. At the time she would offer paid speaking engagements where she would give people the tools they needed but in many cases they still felt stuck on where to start after that. Looking back, Ashley wishes she would have offered some kind of coaching to those people because they were walking away with all of this high-level information and super excited about their journey, but felt stuck and needed that push and validation to get started.

The PAID Method (Ashley’s Proprietary Coaching Method)

P = Press
It's great to have a brand, all corporate clients will Google you and they're not going to just look at what you send them. They're going to go to Google and Google something. So it's great if you have a press strategy and a way to showcase what other people are saying about how great you are.

A = Assemble
Then you want to assemble your offer. It should be a package - the ultimate package. Don't just sell someone on one speech. They may need two or three speeches to get their end result, or they may need a couple of consulting sessions to get their end result. Assemble that offer together and have it ready to go for your clients. They know that you can't just do one thing, you can do a lot of different things and continue to serve them for a long time.

I = Invite
Have a strategy for inviting people to work with you. Know your sales plan, how you plan to sell your service, and what you want to make money on.

D = Deliver
Deliver amazing service and a really good product that is memorable and impactful. Have a way to deliver that information that you've thought out and formulate in a way you’re confident in.

Ashley now lives a modest lifestyle, but the one thing she and her family love to splurge on is travel (especially to Thailand!). Having a business that has afforded her the ability to mold her lifestyle so it fits how she and her family want to live has been something that makes her never look back. It motivates her to keep moving forward and helps her business continue to thrive.

Want to hear more about Ashley’s upcoming book launch or connect with her one-on-one? Check out her website or email her directly (she still loves to handle her own emails!).

Until next time, friends, keep doing it your way!

Insights:

“She began working for someone who had been recruiting her for years, but after starting to work together, it just didn’t align; ‘It was like straight out of Horrible Bosses’.”
“Cultivate that confidence.”
“One thing Ashley does admit to wishing she would have done sooner was offer people a way to work with her after speaking engagements.”
“Your price is always talking. I didn't like what my prices were saying to my clients, when my prices were lower. I wanted them to know they're getting the best of the best. We are world class. We have trained all over the world. I have spoken in other countries, like they needed to know that and not from just what I said, but from the price they were paying me to do business with them.”