TREPX Podcast | For enTREPreneurs by enTREPreneurs, TREPX Podcast provides actionable advice, tips, and steps for freelancers - How Entrepreneurs Tell Their Story with Leanna Johnson - Episode 69

How Entrepreneurs Tell Their Story with Leanna Johnson - Episode 69

04/18/16 • 23 min

TREPX Podcast | For enTREPreneurs by enTREPreneurs, TREPX Podcast provides actionable advice, tips, and steps for freelancers

Micky Deming: (00:35) Hello and welcome to the TREPX Podcast! This is Micky Deming and I’m really excited about today’s interview! I had a chance to talk with a fellow journalist. I talked to Leanna Johnson who is a journalist and who is using her journalism to build a business around it and to promote entrepreneurs to help them tell their stories. As entrepreneurs, as business owners we talked about this in the Chris Smith interview if you’ve heard that, telling your story is one of the most important things you have to figure out how to do. How to pull out those stories of who you are, of why you do what you do, and sometimes we can’t pull it out of ourselves.

We need to be interviewed, we need to talk to someone else, and a journalist can really help with that. So Leanna is doing that for others and she is really documenting everything that she’s doing, everything that others are doing, on her website. It’s some really cool stuff. So if you are at all curious about how to do some better storytelling, some better writing, you definitely want to check out her site and everything she’s up to. You can find it at LostLass.com and again that is Leanna Johnson.

Had a great time talking to her. Talking about the fun journalism stuff that we’ve both seen with interviewing and telling stories. Very much enjoyed chatting with her. Again, you can see her at LostLass.com and see this interview at TREPEXGroup.com. Please enjoy this interview with Leanna Johnson.

Micky Deming: (02:04) Hello Leanna Johnson, welcome to the TREPX Podcast! How are you doing today?

Leanna Johnson: (02:08) Hey Micky! Glad to be here! Thanks for the opportunity.

Micky Deming: (02:11) I am really pumped because we have so much in common. I just sense how exciting that is! The main thing is that we are both journalist. I guess I would be a former journalist, but it’s still in my soul and you are very much a journalist. This is going to be fun!

Leanna Johnson: (02:30) I think so too!

Micky Deming: (02:31) I don’t think I’ve interviewed a journalist before, but here’s where I think I was disappointed because our way into journalism, yours was so much more noble than mine! I was reading your website and it says, “I became by the human experience. I combined my love of world cultures, curiosity of the human condition, and global awareness to create a multi-dimensional, multi-media career”. That’s so awesome!

Leanna Johnson: (02:58) That was also really good copywriters, just so you know!

Micky Deming: (03:04) When people ask me like why did you get into journalism? I say, well I was a pretty good writer and I like sports, so I thought I could write about sports and that’s my answer. Yours is so much cooler!

Leanna Johnson: (03:16) Blinding skills! Yeah well, I guess writing has always been sort of a part of how I communicate and I traveled a lot when I was a kid and up until now. I have a pretty multi-cultural background, so it just kind of seemed to fit. I don’t know, it was sort of a natural progression. I grew up wanting to be an FBI agent, so I didn’t start off with the journalism thing. I sort of rejected the idea of criminal justice early on in college when I figured out how much desk work that would be and how probably boring that would become and I thought you know what, I can just kind of make my own rules and do my own thing as a journalist and still have that kind of detective, dangerous, fun experience. So there might be a little bit of an adrenalin junkie in there too.

Micky Deming: (04:17) That’s cool! So you’re going to create the next cereal, that’s what you’re saying. You’re working on that right now? No, this is cool! There are so many things I want to ask. This audience being entrepreneurs, I always have said this, that the skillset you needed for journalism is so important in marketing and entrepreneurship and communication and so I think there is a lot we can learn from you and your experience, but before we get into that I just want to let you share kind of an overview of your business and how you’ve turned your journalism skills into an actual business.

Leanna Johnson: (04:55) Well Micky, I honestly didn’t take the traditional route. When I think of journalism, I think of someone who works on the school paper, who practices photography from when they’re like 13, and interviews everyone, and just sort of builds up this really solid, awesome background with internships, and jobs, and so forth in college. I did not do any of that. I did dabble a little bit in newspaper and magazine journalism early on in community college, but I took kind of a roundabout way to get to it I guess. Instead of majoring in journalism, I actually majored in communication at UIC in Chicago. You could concentrate in journalism, but I really got this, I think of it as, English degree for 21st century people where you can actually make money as opposed to where yo...

Micky Deming: (02:04) Hello Leanna Johnson, welcome to the TREPX Podcast! How are you doing today?

Leanna Johnson: (02:08) Hey Micky! Glad to be here! Thanks for the opportunity.

Leanna Johnson: (02:30) I think so too!

Leanna Johnson: (02:58) That was also really good copywriters, just so you know!

Previous Episode

How to Approach Entrepreneurship with Emad Rahim – Episode 68

Micky Deming: (00:35) Hello entrepreneurs! This is Micky Deming and this is the TREPX Podcast. The podcast where we talk about entrepreneurship and how to grow a business, how to build something that is bigger than yourself, and there is a variety of ways to do that. In this podcast we cover so many different topics and in this episode is one that is I think we covered some of the most important pieces. They have to do with really how you approach entrepreneurship and how you approach building team and building something bigger than yourself.

It was so cool to get to meet and talk to the guest of this episode who is Emad Rahim and Emad has quite a background that you will hear in this episode. A crazy story of where he’s come from and he has been through a lot and turned it into an incredible story. He has impacted so many people. He is doing amazing things. In this we talk really about education, entrepreneurship, and really the future of entrepreneurship and what the younger generation of entrepreneurs need to know.

One amazing take away that I wrote down after talking to Emad was that the most important thing that he wants entrepreneurs to understand, and I want everybody to hear this, is that it’s not about you. So if you make it about you, you will always be limited in what you can accomplish. There is always a limit to that, but if you make it about something that’s bigger than you and make it about a team and make it about others who you are serving, you have the opportunity to do something that is really significant. So that is one of many great takeaways in this episode that I think you will enjoy.

I really want you to check out Emad’s website. You can find him at EmadRahim.com and you can see his Ted Talk and all of the stuff he does on twitter and all over the place, the books he has written. A very, very interesting guy and I had a blast talking to him, so check him out, EmadRahim.com. You can check out this episode which will also have a link to his site and all the stuff he has done at TREPXGroup.com. Thanks to Emad for joining and thank you for being here and hearing this episode and so I will now turn it over to the interview. Please enjoy this conversation with Emad Rahim.

Micky Deming: (02:48) Hello Emad; welcome to the TREPX Podcast! How are you doing today?

Emad Rahim: (02:52) I’m doing wonderful! How are you doing today?

Micky Deming: (02:53) I’m doing fantastic! I am thrilled to have this conversation! I have read about you and your story is an incredibly inspiring one and some of the listeners who may not know it, or not heard it, I really want them to know it. Can you, just to start out, share a little bit of back story and how you got here today?

Emad Rahim: (03:15) Oh, wow! Where should I begin? I was born in a concentration camp in the killing fields of Cambodia, umm and like many refugees, we escaped the area that was in turmoil, was in the middle of war, and we ended up in a refugee camp in Thailand and eventually we go sponsored to come to America. Like most refugees and immigrants that come to America, they weren’t placed in a great neighborhood. They were not often placed in the suburbs, right? So they ended up placing us in one of the roughest neighborhoods in Brooklyn in the 80’s. I grew up in Sunset Park, Brooklyn in the 80’s during the height of the crack epidemic, when poverty was at an all-time high, when gangs were at an all-time high. This was before the “hipster” Brooklyn that we know today with Beyoncé and Jay Z and all of that fun stuff happening.

I grew up in that type of environment for many, many years and as a kid I was shot in the leg, just being at the wrong place at the wrong time during a street block party. My mother made the hard decision to relocate us to Syracuse, New York, which is upstate New York about 4 hours away from New York City, to give us a better life, but even in upstate we still had our struggles. We lived in section 8 housing. We lived in the west side of Syracuse, which is right now considered the highest concentration in poverty of all of the United States so it is still a very struggling community, but a loving community. I would say people are wonderful here and we decided to stay here, but I found my way through education.

As a young person, as an adolescent, I struggled with education. I am dyslexic so I struggled with learning disabilities throughout my public education years, but I realized dyslexia was not an issue for me. It was actually and opportunity when I entered college and I found ways to really grow and learn and to improve on what was considered disability. I took advantage of that and really entered programs and engaged in programs that allowed me to take advantage of what was considered disability and I excelled in education in college. I went on to earn a doctorate in management, studied at Harvard, and also in that process discovered my love for...