Welcome to my podcast, The Wellness Project with Des, where I interview people with passions, hobbies, or side hustles trying to live their best lives by following their dreams and pursuing their goals. Get ready to be inspired!
On today’s podcast episode, I interviewed Emily Smart, founder, and owner of Blue Shift Web Services, a Full-Service Digital Marketing Agency.
Emily is in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math). She’s had an interest in computers her entire life! As early as the age of 4, she would play minesweeper on the computer.
Women are a minority in STEM. There is a statistic that girls start getting pushed out of the STEM fields around age 11. Emily recognizes that that was the case in her own life. Emily tells me about her many teachers and colleagues being discouraging of her being in the STEM field. She had to work against being female, short, and young. She says that, if you are not male, tall, and older you don’t get respect or trust in the tech field. She explains that she experienced this throughout her education and career.
Even once owning her own business, Emily still has clients that assume her husband is the tech guy and clients have at times refused to work with her or make sexist jokes about her being “the boss” or “bossy”.
Emily attributes her success and continuation in the STEM field to her 6th grade- female math teacher. Her teacher saw that she was great at math and gave her advanced work. By the end of 6th grade, she was already working on 9th-grade math!
Dropping out of traditional public high school and college, Emily worked for NASA and eventually opened her own business. Today she is living her dream by working full time at home with her husband and caring for her two young children.
Listen to Emily’s incredible and inspiring story of resilience and determination here —>
One of my favorite companies when it comes to toys made for kids is GoldieBlox. I would always buy my little sisters GoldieBlox kits when they were little. It was so fun to spend time with them building these awesome toys that encourage girls to learn STEM from a young age.
Check out these videos below of my sisters and me playing with GoldieBlox.
And here we are dropping Ruby off the porch in the Parachute we built her!
Key Takeaways:
- The first foot you put forward, you want to look the best: first impressions matter!
- Going door to door landed them 3 clients in their first week
- We live in an amazing time! You can teach yourself almost anything right from the palm of your hand.
- Every business should have an online presence- website, social media
- The center of all of your digital marketing is your website
Recommended:
Where to Find Emily/Blue Shift Web Services:
Check out Emily’s business and make sure you hit subscribe to my podcast and follow me on Instagram and join the FB community of encouraging and supportive creatives!