In thisempowering episode, Betsy Pepine, Owner of Pepine Realty, shares how to dismantle invisible boxes and embrace entrepreneurship. If you struggle with dissatisfaction and unseen expectations, you won't want to miss it.

You will discover:

- How to identify confining boxes from family and society

- Why self-reflection reveals your true entrepreneurial path

- What mentors guide you from employee to founder

This episode is ideal for for Founders, Owners, and CEOs in stage 1 of The Founder's Evolution. Not sure which stage you're in? Find out for free in less than 10 minutes at https://www.scalearchitects.com/founders/quiz

Betsy Pepine is a best-selling author, speaker, and serial real estate entrepreneur. Her brokerage, Pepine Realty, has been named to the Inc. 5000 Fastest-Growing Private Companies in the USA multiple times and has earned spots on the Top 50 Florida Companies to Watch and Florida Trend Best Companies to Work For lists. Additionally, the Wall Street Journal has consistently recognized Betsy’s real estate team as one of the top-producing real estate companies in the United States. Betsy also owns a title company, a real estate school, and a property management brokerage. Betsy earned an economics degree from Duke University and an MBA from The Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania.

Want to learn more about Betsy Pepine's work at Pepine Realty? Check out her website at https://www.pepinerealty.com/

Mentioned in this episode:

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Founder's Quiz

Hello, hello and welcome. Welcome once again

to the start, scale and succeed podcast. It's the only podcast

that grows with you through all seven stages of your journey. As

a founder and I'm your host, Scott Ritzheimer, and there's

something that genuinely breaks my heart. As someone who's

helped nearly 20,000 people start their businesses and

nonprofits set their very first foot out on the entrepreneurial

journey. I can tell you, there's probably 200 or 300,000 who

haven't and for many of the wrong reasons, folks that are

living up to the expectations that someone else laid out for

them, living inside these invisible boxes from their

parents, their community, their employer and 1000 other places.

And that's just simply, there's lots of right reasons to not

start a business, but that's not one of them. So here to unpack

some of these boxes with us and help us to figure out what I

call the dissatisfied employee stage, that pre founder stage of

the journey that every successful founder faced at one

point in time, is the one and only Betsy Pepine. She is a best

selling author, speaker and serial real estate entrepreneur.

Her brokerage, Pepine Realty, has been named the ink to the

Inc 5000 Fastest Growing Private Companies in the US multiple

times, and has earned spots in the top 50 Florida companies to

watch and Florida trend Best Companies to Work For lists.

Additionally, the Wall Street Journal has consistently

recognized her real estate team as one of the top producing real

estate companies in the United States. Betsy also owns a title

company, a real estate school and a property management

brokerage as well. She earned her economics degree from Duke

and an MBA from Wharton School of Business and university at

University of Pennsylvania. Well, Betsy, welcome to the

show. So glad to have you here. Let's just start off. You've got

a book out now, and I want to unpack some some pretty cool

concepts they have in the book. But you talk about this thing

called breaking boxes, these invisible expectations that trap

us all. So tell us a little Why did you write the book and for

someone who's sitting there listening now, who maybe has a

lot of good things going for them or or maybe doesn't, but

either way, there's just this dissatisfaction that they can't

shake. What are the boxes that they're probably living in and

can't see yet?

Thanks, Scott. I wrote the book because I was

feeling confined for a long time and just dissatisfied for a long

time, and couldn't figure out the source of my unhappiness.

And through a variety of different modalities, I

uncovered that all all the points led to this feeling that

I was being I related to being like Jim Carrey in The Truman

Show. I don't know if you've seen that movie, but you know,

obliviously happy, quote, unquote happy, but then

growingly discontent, not realizing that his life was

being played out on a set orchestrated by others. And

that's what I felt like my life was, and that it was almost like

I was this puppet, and not realizing that I was choosing to

be controlled by these attitudes, opinions and beliefs

of others, or what I thought those attitudes, opinions and

beliefs were, and not really following my own true path. And

when I started to dismantle those boxes and break out of

them, I felt such freedom and aliveness, and when I shared my

stories with others, I sensed that they too were stuck and

didn't know how to disentangle themselves from these very real

yet non physical boxes that constrain us. So that is why I

wrote the book.

Yeah, I love that. I want to come back to

this idea of very real but because I think that plays out

in a whole lot of places, before we get there, though, I do want

to dial in on a place where I see it. This happen a lot, and

it's around education, particularly here in the US, how

we treat education? What? Let me just start with a question, what

boxes do you see, K through 12 and even college put us in,

either intentionally or unintentionally?

Well, I mean, I think it's changed, and I'm a

lot older than you. I'm 57 in terms of education growing up. I

mean, you definitely, I definitely felt the pressure to

check the boxes in terms of, you know, there was never a question

of, it wasn't even what college. It was what grad school were you

going to from the time I was little, you know, and that was

the expectation to succeed, you must have this degree. I do feel

like that's really changed in the last 10 to 20 years, where I

see a lot of I see the attitude shifting. I don't see that, you

know, I know when I interview people, regardless of what

position in my company, I don't even look to see if they have a

college degree. I am looking only at experience. So I do.

Feel like the messaging is changing for our youth in a much

better way than the pressure at least that I felt internally to

get these certain check boxes checked off so that I would be a

candidate for what I wanted to do. Yeah, I don't know you're

younger. So you may you and your children are younger if you have

children. So you may feel that differently, but I definitely

feel that that's it's moving in the right direction.

Yeah, absolutely we're we're back in

that mode now. My oldest is about to go into high school,

and so it's been a really interesting journey for me these

last couple of years, going back to my high school days and just

how catastrophically they failed me for anything about adulthood,

but and how do we not reproduce this for our kids? But one of

the things that happened to me at school, which I don't want to

say, has had a big impact on me, but I remember it to this day,

and so I'd be lying if I said it didn't, is actually had a it was

a math teacher told me that I was a waste of a beautiful mind

and and the question that comes out of this for me is, how do

the words of adults when we're kids shape the adults that we

become later in life? How did those words create boxes in and

of themselves?

Oh, I mean, they are the boxes. I mean, any you

know, when you think about that voice inside your head is, I'm

not a psychologist, but I've read a lot of books, and they

tell you that voice is a is a combination of all of the of the

major parental or authoritative figures in your life, including

teachers, and so that whatever messaging you the fact that you

remember that this many years later, means that that was one

of those voices, and that was the the that that teacher had

that position in your mind, and so it absolutely directs the

path that a child takes and forms beliefs about yourself

that you know you can choose to believe or not to Believe, but a

lot of children don't have the wherewithal to understand that

that's just one person's opinion, right?

Absolutely. So one of the things that

complicates this, I think, quite a bit, is that many of those

boxes have some kind of utility, right? They keep us safe in some

way, shape or form. They prevent us from going bankrupt from time

to time. But one of the very real areas that these boxes can

kind of take root is in our finances, right? And so kind of

tying in some of the legacy of education and how that starts to

shape us early in our career. One of the obvious ways, like, I

mean going through Duke and Wharton at UPenn, you probably

have an idea like, it's not cheap. There are loans that need

to be repaid. There's a very real financial so whether or not

someone has has business debt or student debt or just needs to

put money, just needs to make enough money to put food on the

table, how does the very real need for financial stability,

create boxes beyond that need.

I don't know. I actually think that's changing

too. I've seen some pretty resourceful I call them kids

because the kids come through my company, and they are, I've got

children a lot older than them, and they're they're very

resourceful, and they don't have to go into a lot of debt. They

understand there's so many resources now that are available

to them for free, which shocked me, because growing up, I don't

know if I was just not attuned to that, but I remember one

student came in from, you know, she was on fuller scholarship.

But I live in a town that's got a university the state of

Florida. University of Florida is here. She's on full

scholarship. And then, you know, she got me as a mentor for free.

She was getting coaching, other coaching for free. She was

getting her marketing for free. She was just, I was just shocked

at how she in her mind, she didn't have to, she knew she

didn't have to pay for anything if she had the right

connections. And I was like, wow, that's fantastic. So I

think, I think that there don't have to be the boxes that we

think there might be right if we assume that there has to be a

lot of debt. I don't know that that's necessarily true. I think

that might be a limiting belief.

Yeah. So how do we protect but it's a great

segue into, what do we do with this information? So how do we

start to identify what some of these limiting beliefs are, and

how do we start to break free of them?

Yeah? I mean, I think anytime you feel a source

of discontentment or dissatisfaction, typically what

I have learned, and I definitely have learned this later in life.

I wish I had learned it earlier, but the first sign is in your

body, your body will tell you if something's working or not

working before your mind will and I came from a very cerebral

family, we didn't talk about emotions and feelings. In fact,

if anything, they were discouraged and they were told.

We were told it was flighty and unreliable. And you know, what

does the science tell you? What do the facts tell you? And then

lead with that, but ignore what your body is telling you. And I,

I've learned to actually do the reverse your body will tell you

before your mind can. So that's your first sign. Is when your

body is in getting in touch with your feelings and and where will

they lead you? So that's going to be your first time. And then

dissecting what is it that's making you uncomfortable? Then

once you identify the box that you're that's no longer serving

you, then how do you extricate yourself from that box? And

that's that's working through what fear. It's always a fear.

What fear is holding you back? Fear of failure, fear of social

stigma, fear of loss, fear of financial security there. I

mean, there's so many different fears, but it some fear is

holding you back. And so it's, it's actually, like you said

earlier, boxes serve us. That box, even though, you know it's

no longer serving you. It's, it is serving you in some way, but

it's probably a detrimental way, but it's a comfort that almost

like a security blanket that you're not willing to

disentangle from. But I encourage everyone write it out

on paper. What fear is that anything on paper looks so much

less fearful on paper than it does in your mind, where things

can just go crazy, but write your fears down. And then I

always do an exercise, okay, Betsy, what's worst case

scenario? And worst case scenario is never that bad.

Worst case scenario, the outcome doesn't turn out the way I had

hoped, and I have to pivot. Yeah, that's it. I've done that

before, and I'll have to do it again, and I'll have learned

something so great, a lesson that I get to take with me for

the rest of my life. That's worst case scenario, so that

that doesn't sound that bad once you start working through that

process, and then it makes it so much easier to start taking

those small steps to get yourself out of a box that's no

longer serving.

Yeah, that's so good. So Betsy, you working

in the the realty space? It's very entrepreneurial industry,

right? There's a pretty big burden on the individual like,

hey, go out and make it happen. And so you see a lot of folks

who come and go, you see a lot of create a lot of success, and

others who it's not the right thing. What has that taught you

about what it takes to be a successful entrepreneur?

Yeah, unfortunately, in my industry,

the bar is really low to get the license, and so it's just a one

week class and the test. And so I think sadly, a lot of people

assume that then it must be that easy to make a living in the

space, and it's not the vast majority of real estate is sold

by a very small percentage of the realtors out there. And I

think with any endeavor that an entrepreneur makes, you have to

treat it like a business, especially with

entrepreneurship, there's there is nobody telling you what to do

and holding you accountable. So where I people, where I see

people fail, is they don't understand that you really do

have to be the manager of yourself. And so some people

just their personalities are not cut out for that, and they need

accountability from from somebody other than themselves,

and they don't have the discipline and the mindset to

make it as an entrepreneur. I mean, you have to, you have to

be disciplined in in the plan you have. You also have to be

very, very okay with trying and failing. I always say

entrepreneurs fail at more things than most people, but

that's what makes them successful. The most successful

people, I believe, are entrepreneurs, and they fail the

most, but that takes a certain personality to be able to be

strong and understand that failure is just a part of the

game.

Yeah, yeah. So true. I love that. Yeah, you've

dialed in on two really big points that are just worth

reemphasizing, but you've got to be willing and able to manage

yourself, and you've got to be willing and able to fail and get

back up again. So so good. Wish more people knew that ahead of

time. So, Betsy, there's this question that I have that I ask

all my guests. I'm very interested to see what you have

to say. And the question is this, what would you say is the

biggest secret that you wish wasn't a secret at all. What's

that one thing that you wish every founder, or even pre

founder, listening today, knew?

Well, there's so many things, but one on the top

of my head would be that you don't have to go at it alone.

You know, I I got a coach about six years into real estate. I

wish I had gotten a coach on day one, I didn't think I needed a

coach. I and I still have a coach. I will always have a

coach. But in addition, if you can't afford coaching, although

there is free coaching if you, if you can't do that, there's

always people willing to help you. And I always like people to

identify two types of mentors, the mentor that is just a couple

steps ahead of you, and then. Mentor that is years ahead of

you, and it's important for me to always have both sets,

because one is very obtainable. I can see what my next year or

two, that what I'm striving for, and then the one that's 10 years

out, and you will be surprised at how many people will help you

if you let them know you want to be helped. You know that's the

natural human condition is to help people. And I think there's

so many people that are scared to ask, but the minute you say,

You know what, I don't know it all. I'd love help. People are

willing to help you that are above you and further along than

you are.

That's powerful. That's powerful.

Betsy, there's some folks listening who'd love some help

unpacking some of these boxes. And where can they tell us

again, the title of your book, where they can find a book, and

where they can reach out for you as well.

Sure. Scott, my book is breaking boxes,

dismantling the metaphorical boxes that bind us. It's

available on Amazon and all the major book retailers online. I

am all over social media with my name. So my website is

betsypepine.com there's a free there's a free workbook in

there, as well as a course that is a corollary to the book. I'm

also on all the social media platforms with my name at Betsy

Pepine.

Fantastic, fantastic. Well, Betsy, thanks

so much for being on the show. Really was a privilege and

honor. Having you here with us today, for those of you watching

and listening, you know your time and attention mean the

world to us. I hope you got as much out of this conversation as

I know I did, and I cannot wait to see you next time. Take care.