Career Relaunch®
Joseph Liu
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Keeping the Right Company with Tamiko Kelly
The company you work for and the people you work with can have a huge impact on your perspectives, outlook, and self-belief. In episode 64 of Career Relaunch, Retail merchandiser turned baby sleep expert Tamiko Kelly explains why surrounding yourself with the right people can have such a profound impact on your career. She’ll explain the steps she took to move from the corporate world to set up her own independent business. We’ll talk about the importance of starting even if you don’t have a plan fully mapped out, getting yourself out of bad environments, and letting go of things that no longer serve you. Key Career Insights Doing 1-on-1 work that feels unscalable can actually allow you to develop deep insights that enables you to create more scalable offerings. You don’t have to have a fully ironed out marketing strategy to get your business off the ground. You just have to start somewhere. At some point, you have to let go of the things that are no longer serving you and trust that things are going to work out. Getting yourself out of a toxic environment is the first step toward getting back the confidence you need to relaunch your career in a more positive direction. Tweetables to Share You're doing yourself more harm staying in a situation that's no longer serving you. Tamiko Kelly Tweet This Resources Mentioned I mentioned the Myers-Briggs Type Inventory on today’s show. You can read more about Myers-Briggs and take the survey yourself to find out which of the 16 personality types you fall into. Listener Challenge During this episode’s Mental Fuel segment, challenges you to think carefully about the company you keep. Think about what specific impact the people you spend the most time with are having own your personal and professional well-being. Write it down. If they’re having a positive impact, great. But if they’re dragging you down all the time, ask yourself how long you’ll willing to tolerate being around those people, and if you feel the time has come to get yourself out of the situation, what small step you could take this week to lay the groundwork for moving somewhere else. About Tamiko Kelly, baby sleep expert Tamiko Kelly is the founder of Sleep Well, Wake Happy and the creator of The Feel Like Yourself Again Baby Sleep Solution. As a certified sleep consultant and holistic health practitioner, Tamiko helps tired moms feel like themselves again by teaching them how to get their babies sleeping through the night. Her sleep advice has been featured on Yahoo Finance, Care.com, Spawned Parenting Podcast and she has appeared as a guest expert on Austin’s ABC Affiliate TV Show, Studio 512. You can learn more about her workshops here. Prior to doing this work, Tamiko spent her career working in the corporate world doing retail merchandising at some well-known brands including Banana Republic and Nordstroms. You can follow Tamiko on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook. Did You Enjoy This Episode? Please Let Us Know! Tweet: If you enjoyed this episode and have a few seconds to spare, Tweet to let me and Tamiko know! Tweet a thank you! Review: I’d also love for you to leave a positive review and rating for the podcast on Apple Podcasts, which helps my show reach more people who want to relaunch their careers. Subscribe: Be sure to subscribe to Career Relaunch podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Stitcher, or Android so you can automatically get each new episode on your device. Full instructions. Stay in touch: Follow Career Relaunch on Twitter and Facebook. You can also follow host Joseph on LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook. Comments, Suggestions, or Questions? If you have any lingering thoughts, questions, or topics you would like covered on future episodes, record a voicemail for me right here. I LOVE hearing from listeners! Leave Joseph a Voicemail You can also leave a comment below. Thanks! P.S. Have you heard of Freshbooks? Freshbooks offers user-friendly, simple yet professional invoice templates ideal for small business owners. If you’re a self-employed professional or small business owner looking for simple invoicing and accounting tool, try it free for one month by going to CareerRelaunch.net/Freshbooks. Episode Interview Transcript Teaser (first ~15s): The longer we stay in toxic environments, it really makes us start to believe that we aren’t capable, that we can’t do things, that we are not successful. You’re doing yourself more harm staying in a situation that is no longer serving you. Joseph: Good afternoon, Tamiko. Welcome to Career Relaunch. We’re going to talk through a few different topics today, including what made you want to leave your retail career behind and how you decided to start your own business focused on, as you put it, helping tired parents. Can you start by telling me more about what you’re focused on right now in your career and your life just to get us started? Tamiko: Right now, I am making a big shift in my business where I’m going to be out of the day-to-day activities, focusing on the new offer for my company, which is super exciting. Personally, I am about to start the moving process, which we all know can be a little crazy, but as soon as I get my hands around it, because I’m off early with the prep work, so it’ll be easier for me. I’m excited about my new place. Joseph: I know that you said that you are moving on a little bit in the nature of your work. At the same time, I would be curious to just hear a little bit more about what you had been doing before making this transition. For those people who aren’t familiar with what a sleep consultant does, what exactly have you been doing for parents out there? Tamiko: I help tired moms feel like themselves again by teaching them how to get their babies sleep into the night. My clients call me the baby whisperer. Basically since 2008, I spent over 50,000 hours. It’s probably closer now to, if I had to guess, over 80,000 or 90,000 now. I was spending that amount of time teaching babies how to sleep and helping their parents be super excited and get a good night’s sleep as well. I have not met a baby who I couldn’t teach to sleep through the night. I also work with toddlers and older kids as well. If you have a kid who can’t sleep, I’m definitely the girl who can help you. It all started back in 2008, so it’s been a long, wild, crazy ride. Joseph: I know that you have not always been a sleep consultant, and I do want to come back and hear a little bit more about exactly what you have been doing as a sleep consultant, but can we go back in time and go all the way back to your days working in retail? Then we can move forward from there. Perhaps we could start with your time at The Gap. Could you just explain what you’re doing when you kicked off your retail career at The Gap? Tamiko: I used to live in the Bay Area, San Francisco, for our folks who are not in the US. I graduated from FIDM, which is the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandise in San Francisco, and my first job out of that—and this is after I already had my Bachelor’s Degree, so this is my second degree—was working at Gap. It started off as a strictly contract position, and all I was supposed to do was to help the Piperlime, which is no longer in existence. We help Piperlime basically organize their inventory. Back in those days, Piperlime had actual hard goods sample sent from the vendors that we used to service, and we had a sample room. My job was to go into that sample room and actually create inventory organization because what will happen is that our photo team would take pictures of all of the pictures for the actual website so that people could see what the shoes look like and videos of people actually wearing the shoes. Then those shoes had to be chucked somewhere. That was my first stop at Gap. Joseph: How did you like that and how did you see your career at that point in time progressing? Tamiko: I loved working at Piperlime because it was literally a startup. It was brand new. The team was excited. It was a super driven time because Gap had never gone into the shoe business before, so it was super exciting for the whole team to kind of be in the inaugural division of the company basically proving ourselves that we could be profitable, etc., that we could actually do the work and actually make money selling shoes. I had no idea where I wanted my career to go. I had been in retail for so long that I was super excited to be in actual corporate. Anybody who’s in retail, had been to retail, you understand the grind that comes with working on the store level. I was excited not to be at the store level anymore, so I did not care what job it was as long as don’t get the store, and so Piperlime was a super exciting time for me for sure. Joseph: Then you made a transition—is that right?—to work in high-end clothing retail. What happened during that chapter of your career, and what made you want to make that shift? Tamiko: Actually, after Piperlime, I was recruited by another division of Gap, Banana Republic, to come and work on their team and specifically work on the men’s business and visual merchandise. I’ve had so much experience in visual merchandising. I was an actual stylist, so I worked with magazines and photographers and did runway shows on and stuff, dressing models and all that, and so they were super excited to have that experience on that team. Basically, at Banana Republic, I work in the photo studio. My job there was to help the stylist again keep all of the merchandise organized. That was my first role, but then as I was on the team, I’d again got promoted to actually working on the visual men’s merchandise side of the business where I was working with the VP of that division. We were actually setting up the visuals that the ent
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