– Welcome everybody to today’s “Building My Legacy Podcast.” I have with me today, two very unusual people. Unusual because we don’t very often see husband and wife teams working together in business. We do some, but I think it takes a unique couple to be able to be in business together. And so Oscar and Kiya Frazier are CEOs of NDemand Business Consulting. And it’s a company that looks at growth strategies for businesses and really works with companies in how they’re growing. But then also they have another piece to their business called KO Thought Leaders where they work with couples who are in business together. So with that, I’m going to let you begin by telling your story, how you got into this and what motivated you.

– Absolutely, well, first and foremost, thank you so much

– Absolutely.

– for the opportunity to come on. We watch your, we listen to your podcast all the time and we were super impressed and it’s an honor be here. But I think Kiya would do it the best service to tell our backdrop is quite interesting.

– It’s quite the story. We both were in corporate space. Oscar was more so on the project management side of the house, working in federal space as well. And I was on the marketing side of the house working in federal space as well. We had it all mapped out. We were engaged, soon to be married. You know, we just had a life plan already set in motion just knew that we were gonna be very successful and you know, then continue to build our family. We always had an entrepreneurial spirit. So we were doing entrepreneurial things outside of working in corporate space, but we had it mapped out, how we were going to climb the ladder and then how we had an exit strategy and everything in place. So we went off for our wedding, had our honeymoon and a couple of days after coming back from my honeymoon, I was let go. And so–

– Okay.

– I mean, not an uncommon story, not always after your honeymoon, but it seems so many people that is a story that we are hearing, yes.

– Yes

– Absolutely.

– Go on, I’m sorry.

– It just kind of rattled us a little bit. I know during that time I was like, oh wow, we had this plan and now everything is just kind of up in arms. And so we sat down, we got really clear about the path that we wanted to take. And then we decided that I was gonna go ahead and start building the structure for our company. Our school will remain in corporate space. And then slowly after that, I’ll let him tell that side of the story.

– Yeah and so as she got let go, I mean, and imagine this was right in 2012 so this was not that long ago. Prior to that, we had already kind of started NDemand Consulting, and we were doing these little small projects here and there, but when she got let go I then realized that now we have a one income household, right? And we had just got back from this expensive wedding. So, as I’m working, I’m still inside the corporate space but a couple months later I got an email from my CEO. He brought me into the office. He thanked me for my time. And then he then let me go. And that’s when everything got real. Life changed for us, we had essentially lost just about everything that we had gained at that point. So it was really feast or famine at that point for us. So we sat there and I remember vividly the phone call, I’d be calling Kiya and saying to her, “Sweetheart, I just got let go. Are you ready to do this entrepreneurial-ship thing full time?” And she answered, “Yes.” And we have not looked back since, and that was in 2012. And now it’s been right at about almost what? Nine years of working within the NDemand Consulting. So I say all that to say, during that path we actually figured out a series of just helpful tidbits and tricks and things from real life experiences not the stuff that you can kind of go and Google and someone gives you the fluffy stuff. This is literally went from two incomes. You know, I think at that point we were doing just shy of a million dollars a year and to go from that to zero with still the same level of lifestyle that we were expecting was a very very shocking scenario for us. So would love to talk more about that as you see fit.

– Okay, so you talk also about having lost almost everything in 2017, what happened in 2017, that shifted what you were doing?

– Absolutely, so being that Kiya and I are serial entrepreneurs, we get into a little bit of everything. We’ve been successful with some, and not successful than others, right? But, so one of the things that we set out to do was we set up and we opened a 12,000 square foot restaurant in Charlotte, North Carolina. And it was our dream to open up a 5,000 square foot restaurant in Charlotte. But we kind of overshot ourselves by about, what was it? 7,000 square feet? And opened up this live jazz and blues restaurant that served new Orleans staff food. It was a great scenario. We opened it up right at the beginning of 2015. Things were going great but our marriage was not going great at that time. It started to become to a point that we were only seeing each other in passing. I mean, it literally was waking up running to our restaurant, seeing what’s missing, seeing what we gotta go to the restaurant depot and go get and it just got overwhelming. And there was a point we did our last performance and we won’t say the name of the artist but a very well-known, you know, jazz artist was performing and things didn’t quite go as we had planned for that night. And I remember getting home and I went in my little corner where I would shed most of my tears in the dark where Kiya wouldn’t see me at. And I remember the next morning walking into the bedroom. And I said, “Look, you know, Kiya, I’m ready to close the doors of our dream.” And she looked at me with a tear in her eyes well and said, “Let’s do it.” And at that point, when we closed the restaurant, we had already invested well over $400,000 into the restaurant. And that was really the only thing that we had accumulated during that 2012 period to 2015. It was our, pretty much our savings, our life savings. That’s all we had left and we poured it into the restaurant. So when we closed the doors in 2017, we left with maybe $2,000 left with a $2,500 mortgage, a car note, electric and gas bills that still had to be paid. And we just refused to go back into corporate space. We said that if we were going to be entrepreneurs and we were gonna do this, we had to do it for real. And that’s essentially what happened. And at the end of 2017, we moved Atlanta where we are now. And we moved here with exactly maybe $1,000 left.

– Started different scratch.

– Started from scratch again

– All over again.

– and we were able to rebuild again. And this time we’ve got it. And luckily we’ve got some continuity as far as what we’re actually doing. So yeah, that’s what happened in 2017.

– So tell us a little bit about what your business is today and the businesses that you target. What is it that you, what kind of outcomes is it that you strive to create?

– Absolutely, I’ll take this one and I promise I’ll be quiet so Kiya can If you can’t tell, I’m quite the talkative guy here sometimes but– So in essence, NDemand Consulting is in the business of efficiency. We kind of, we provide two lanes if you will. One side is on the global crisis management side where we have and we are currently doing nine projects across the continent of Africa. Where we focus in on countering violent extremism and minimizing propaganda and disinformation.

– Okay, but just a minute, who hires you for that?

– Yeah, the United States Agency of Global Media. So this is a federal, this is in the federal space and we work with the Voice of America and Voice of Africa. So some folks that’s listening probably heard of VOA, come Voice of America. And that this is just one of those organizations that helps to ensure that whenever let’s say maybe information is coming up that may be less than favorable, we kind of minimize chaotic events from happening or any levels of extremism. So our job is to train journalists and to train various media reps in media outlets on how to properly communicate that information to minimize that level of chaos that can happen across countries. So and then on the other side is our geeky technology side which is where I love to be. So we work within the robotic process automation sector but then the health care and the logistics spaces. So that’s really where we spend most of our time. Those two lanes I’ll have, we’ve been again doing since 2004, but we, it really just kind of took off for us over the last few years.

– So that’s fascinating because you didn’t come out of a health care perspective and yet you’re working in that. Tell me, how did you get started?

– You wanna take that one or you wanna–

– Well, so it really started from just some of the projects that we had and really finding a love for it. We were helping with data management, fraud, waste and abuse along those lines, and we developed a passion for it. And it just kept going, kept finding ways to be more efficient in that space and help people with their records management and on and on and so forth.

– Yeah, and in the spaces where we actually started out and back in 2000 was where my career really started. I was already in program management and a lot of data analytics and line six Sigma type stuff, if you will. And then when I went over to the federal space, I spent a lot of time within the DHS or Department of Homeland security umbrella and all of the sub agencies within that you can think of and supported, you know the army and DOD and et cetera. So our background really already was within the technology and solutioning space. And so this was really a natural progression for us just based on our past performance and our experience.

– Got it. Wow, you’ve had an incredible journey. Amazing, amazing. Absolutely.

– So having done that, what advice would you give to people who are looking at doing something different like people who are maybe getting out of corporate life and looking at their next chapter, the legacy that they’re gonna leave. Or people who are entrepreneurs and trying to figure out this path. What’s your biggest learning that you think is important for people to hear?

– You wanna talk a bit about

– Well,

– yeah.

– the before step?

– Well, I’ll start off, transparency, getting very transparent with what you actually want out of life and where you see yourself in the next few years. And sitting down with your significant other or just sitting down with yourself and being very, very clear about what you wanna do. Be honest, write down what your fears are. What’s holding you back from doing that. And that leads our second step which we tell a lot of couplepreneurs as well as entrepreneurs, is doing an introspective analysis. And I’ll let Oscar explain the introspective analysis, he loves this part of it.

– Isn’t it obvious,

– He loves it.

– I get excited right here, at this part of it. So, within all the chaos that we just talked to you about a little while ago, in 2014, we wrote a book and it was called, “Confessions: The Truth About Perfect Timing.” And this was because we had thought we had perfect timing then we learned that there’s no such thing as that. And introspective analysis is really what saved our, I would like to say our lives. And what this is, if you think about a straight line across a sheet of paper. If you draw a point in the very middle of that sheet of paper on that line, look at that as being your current state, where you currently are right now in your scenario, whether it’s good or bad. Then what I’d like for you to do is go back five years making one tick to the left, then go back 10 years making the second tick to the left and then make the third tick at that 15 year mark, 15 years back. But I want you to do is, is to write down all of the things you said you were gonna do and accomplish that you didn’t. And what were those excuses and what did they look like? And then what I want you to do is look ahead, right? In marking to the right of that medium point looking at the first tick, which is five years future state, 10 years future state, and 15 future state. The key here is thinking about what do you want to accomplish? But then when I put, there’s a terminology if you will, or sequence of words we use during this exercise. And what it is, we would say at the five-year Mark ahead, let’s say I wanna become an astronaut, right? And what I would say is in five years, I wanna be an astronaut. I know that five years ago, the following things prevented me from accomplishing my goals but I’ve solved those things now. I am whole, perfect, strong, powerful, harmonious, and happy. And then you move to the next thing. And what this is gonna do is it helps to just clear your mind and all of the excuses that we tend to make. Because if you think about a success leaves clues and so do failures. So if you think about the five, 10, 15 year ago marks and then you do that ahead of the curve, and you start thinking about, you know, yes I wanna do these things now but before this is what held me back, but now I’ve overcome those things and I’m ready to move forward. That’s that second phase that we walk all of our entrepreneurs through. And it’s mind blowing when you write it all out and you see all the excuses that you’ve had over the last 15 years of your life, and all the things that you said you were going to do. And then you figure out how do I get rid of those things? How do I just move those things to the left of me so I can begin to move forward? That’s what that introspective analysis is all about but it also takes a lot of time. This is something that we do not rush through with any entrepreneur because will lead you into the third step that’s gonna, that Kiya could pick up on now.

– And that’s defining lanes, especially when you’re a couple entrepreneurs, defining complimentary skills that you have. So Oscar is very successful and very good with operations and very good with program management and me on the other side, I’m very good with seeing the visual strategically looking at things and then putting together the visuals that will get us there, right? So the graphics, the marketing, all of that side of the house. And we know that those two things compliment each other. So we’ve defined our lanes and we stay in our lanes. It took a couple of years to learn that but we found that and it works very well

– Every once in a while, I find myself crossing into her lane and I learned very quickly that that was a mistake. So yes, that is the third step. And then the fourth and final step that we walked them through, is setting more micro goals. Small goals, obtainable goals, looking at this as a 90 day runway, right? We’re not looking at, so yes we’ve set up this whole 15 year goal that we’ve just wrote you through in step two. But now we say step forward, just to get to the five-year Mark, let’s think about how many 90 day marks do we need to do goals to get you there? And so now we can bite off just enough to be successful for those 90 days and we celebrate celebrate. We figure out a way to enjoy that. What that does for, that just married couples but for couples or just entrepreneurs it lets you start to recognize your successes. I mean, in our industry, and I’m sure you can relate to this because we’ve done a lot of research on you and we know that you have quite the resume as well. And from our, I guess experiences, is we tend to just keep moving. We don’t ever stop and smell the roses or see that it’s sunny out today. And those 90 day kind of like tall gates, if you will, is what that set up for. Is the stop and really smell the roses. And this has been successful for us because had we not done this, I’m not sure that we would still be married. I don’t know if we would still be in business but there’s a lot of things that this was real for us. And it’s in our book, you know and we would love to be able to continue to share that with those listening.

– You know, what you’re talking about is so practical, right? And I think where somebody’s systems break down, is they get complicated. And as soon as they get complicated, we go I’ll think about that later. And that means you never come back to it generally. So I wanna go back to your timeline that you were just speaking about Oscar, and you’re delineating the problems and the things that stopped you five years, 10 years, 15 years, there’s a lot of mindset things. There are feelings and emotions. Messages we’ve had from childhood, school, teachers, whatever that we all come with those. So do you have a process for people to work with those? Or what do you do with that baggage that people bring into what they’re trying to build?

– We had a lot of that stuff in step one which is all around the transparency piece. Transparency is down and in a more, and if you can visualize this with me for just a second, take a ride with me here. If it’s four of us in a room, it’s Kiya and I, were sitting across, we’re in a circle, and we’re doing this, we’re having the couple. If this is a couple revenuer scenario, we have the couple that’s sitting across from each other. And we ask just for transparency, what that does for most people is it chokes them up because now I’m looking at the person that I’ve committed to. And I’ve gotta be honest. I’ve gotta be honest about the things that happened to me when I was a child that made me scared. Now, some of those things that I want to do as an entrepreneur. And that session sometimes last hours upon hours and we’re here for it because we know when we had to do it it was because we literally had lost everything and we had no choice, you know? So before you get to that point, let’s go ahead and learn that transparency component. A lot of this is not as trying to be counselors, it’s really us being listeners and guides. But the people, the real heroes here are really the two people that setting out to be on this entrepreneurial path, you know? And so our job is really to sit there and set the stage and allow those two people or that individual if it’s one entrepreneur to just be transparent with himself or herself or their partner. That’s where that really takes place, which is why steps one and two can take as long as it needs to take.

– As good as day, for some that might be months.

– Yeah.

– Absolutely. I totally relate.

– That’s months. So for you, I mean, that’s a journey. How many clients can you work with at a time?

– We don’t like taking on any more than four clients at a time, if it’s on this journey, it was on this four-step journey. Four at a time, what that allows us to do is to space things out. Because energy for us and this is probably a whole nother topic of another time but the energy for us, you know we are a huge components of the law of attraction, right? And also what we bring into the aura of other people. And during these sessions, we do not wanna bring in any baggage or any energy from previous sessions. So we tend to try to space these out quarterly, right? So, if I’m looking at one first quarter, we are committed to that person or that group for that quarter. By the time we get to the second quarter, they’re now on that 90 day spin. They’re on that 90 day cycle, is starting to happen for them where now they’re looking at goals and getting there. So we would like to take on no more than four per year at a time to ensure that we’re giving them the best service possible.

– Absolutely.

– Got it, wow. That’s quite an undertaking, but also quite a promise to clients, I think, because what you don’t want if you’re a client just to get lost in your own chatter in your own busyness, right?. ‘Cause then you don’t get the attention to really solve issues. I think that’s been the problem with many coaches is they flutter from one thing to another and real work doesn’t get done. So I really compliment you on that.

– Yeah, thank you.

– Absolutely.

– One other thing, I think one of the hardest things perhaps for couples that are in business together, how do you keep the business out of the bedroom?

– I knew that question was coming.

– All yours.

– So we set a cutoff time each day for ourselves and we’ve come to the understanding that work is work, home is home. So when we leave the office, we leave work at the office. I’m gonna say that the truth about work-life balance when you’re an entrepreneur, is it really does not exist, but because you have taken those steps to be very transparent with each other, then you create a comfort space. So there are times that we’re sitting at home and we might be watching a show on TV or we might be talking about something that’s more home-related and then work kind of starts to seep in. And we’ll have those conversations but then we know that, hey, we’re at home, so we wont elaborate. We’ll put it on our checklist for tomorrow. These are discussions we need to have tomorrow when we get to the office. And that’s how we kind of keep that balanced. We just, we set that cutoff time and we stick to it.

– Yeah, I wish we were that good at it in the very beginning. I found myself trying to be a manager to my wife. And that was a huge mistake, a huge, huge ,huge, mistake. And this was before we learned about defining lanes and all that jazz. Because I had been in a programmatic medic space for a very long time and I was used to managing a lot of people. So she would come with these ideas and I would be very rigid, almost to the point of being a bit brash because I was trying to handle being a single income in the house, try to figure out our next move. And then I was trying to do so many different things at the same time that I found myself trying to be Kiya’s boss, as opposed to her husband. And that did cause a lot of rifts in the beginning because bed rule became like this awkward space, right? Because the whole day I spent, reaming on her about various things that she was doing as far as work or products or deliverables and then I expect to have quality time at night and it’s like, that doesn’t coincide. It doesn’t make sense, you know? And so yeah, that was quite the experience and I’m sure other couplepreneurs can relate to that as well.

– I think the transparency part of it in the very beginning also helps with ego, right? Because there’s a level of ego, especially when you’re a couple in business, because each one of you have your own expertise. So that has to be discussed in that very transparent first step in the very beginning and understanding boundaries and defining lanes also helps with that as well, yeah.

– Unbelievable what you have learned and what you share. So our time is almost up and it has gone so quickly. What have we omitted that people should know about or think about from today’s discussion?

– I think just a way to get a contact with us. You know, we love text messaging. So what you could do is you could actually just text the word business, just the word business to the following number, which is 678 672 1444, again, 678 672 1444. Just text the word business to that and what we do, that comes to us and you will get an immediate reply that’s going to provide you with links to more information, a link to our book, our direct email addresses, et cetera. You know, we’re an open book and we’d love to get in contact and communicate with your audience.

– Okay, no problem. And we put the show notes in the, with the podcasts. So information about you is available to the audience and we really invite people to do that because why not? You’ve got an expert why not learn from the expert?

– Absolutely.

– So Oscar and Kiya, thank you so much for being with us and “Building My Legacy Podcast” today. And for those of you who are listening to “Building My Legacy Podcast,” thank you. And be sure to visit our website at build2morrow.com and our social media sites as well. Thank you.

– Thank you

– Thank you, take care.