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For over a decade, Nashvillian Julie Solomon has been empowering lives, her own being no exception.
Through her entrepreneurial courses (including Pitch it Perfect, The Influencer Academy, and SHINE) she teaches clients how to take their personal brand and turn it into a profitable business. And the influencer practices what she preaches, as she shares the knowledge she acquired from the firsthand experiences that helped transform her own life.
As a business coach, speaker, and host of the top rated The Influencer Podcast, Solomon’s passion for helping others achieve their dreams permeates many platforms. And now, with the release of her book Get What You Want: How to Go From Unseen to Unstoppable (available June 7), Solomon is sharing her expertise to empower audiences on an even larger scale.
Building a Business: I’m originally from a small town in Tennessee called McMinnville and moved to Nashville when I was seven; graduated from the University of Tennessee in journalism and marketing; moved to New York in 2007; and started working for this incredible PR firm. Music PR was my focus at the time, and at a really young age I was able to connect to these stars—people who were at the top of their game—and I learned a lot. After a couple of years, I moved back to Nashville and started working for Thomas Nelson doing book publicity. I took my expertise on the music PR side and started to integrate it into book PR. I worked with a lot of incredible best- selling authors and thought leaders on their book campaigns and that slowly laid the foundation for my work. I met my now husband, actor Johnathon Schaech, who lived in Los Angeles, and in 2012 I moved there. I had no job, no friends, and I found myself needing to build a network, connect, and get out there. I started to figure out ways to do that; at the time it was called blogging, but we now know it to be influencer marketing. This whole idea of creating content and marketing online was becoming more and more of a thing, so I started a blog to connect with other women and quickly discovered these women did not need my lifestyle tips; they needed my support on the marketing and PR side. I saw the opportunity to take this background that I had been building for the last seven years in PR and marketing and start to really help these women. I started to consult content creators, bloggers, and influencers; manage some of them; negotiate contracts; and really support them in building a personal brand and monetizing it. I quickly discovered my own capacity to support was getting tight because there are only so many hours in the day and said, ‘I wonder if I can take this method that I have proven not only to help me build my own personal brand but to help other women build their own personal brands and put it in a program that would allow me to help a lot of people at the same time?’ In 2016, I did just that and created my very first course, Pitch It Perfect, and we’ve had over 7,000 entrepreneurs, content creators, bloggers, YouTubers, influencers, anyone who wants to build and monetize a personal brand online take this course. It completely changed my entire life and business.
Speaking from the Heart: I am a communicator at heart. The way I show up in the world and teach is through using my voice, speaking, writing, podcasting, so it felt only natural to have that continuation of communication come through in book form. This book [Get What You Want: How to Go From Unseen to Unstoppable] is a very personal one. I am someone who tends to be more of a vault, especially when it comes to social media. I think when people think of the typical lifestyle influencer, they think of someone sharing every detail of their life on social media. I use social media to socially grow my business, not to tell everyone my innermost dark secrets or let people know where I live; I’m a much more private person than that. But I know it’s also important to let people in and for people to be able to see themselves in you. I knew that if I was ever given the chance to write a book, I wanted to open the vault, peel back the layers a little bit, and share more than strategy and my business tactics. You’re going to read a lot of really personal stories in the book. I share that in the midst of moving to Los Angeles I was hiding over $30,000 of credit card debt from my husband, and I had to figure out how to get myself out of that hole, which kind of was the trajectory of me having the focus, dedication, and resilience to build the business I now have. I talk about scarcity mindset, money mindset, my fears around money, why I felt for a very long time to not be worthy of money. I know a lot of women relate to that feeling of not being worthy of what it is you want in life and not believing that it’s possible. Yes, there are a lot of goal setting and strategies in the book, but I wanted to put in a lot of tough, honest, and not-so-pretty elements of what makes me a human being, what makes me the leader that I am today, and really bring in that piece of self-love and self-worthiness we all need to believe that what we want is possible.
Pro Tip: In the first couple of chapters, I talk about what’s called your origin story, and we all have these origin stories that come from our origin, our childhood, where we began, and they shape the way we think and feel in the world. Everyone’s origin story is different, but there is this common thread that I have seen in the women I have supported through the years and it’s my favorite quote in the book: “You can’t hide yourself and expect to be seen.” I think that’s the biggest common denominator I’ve seen that makes someone not get what they want. For so many women out there—whether they are content creators, work at a corporation, are a stay-at-home mom—there’s a common thread that women want to be seen and heard, yet they keep hiding themselves. You can’t hide yourself and expect to build that network that you’re longing for. You can’t hide yourself and expect to get that job, or find the partner of your dreams, or land that big opportunity, whatever that may be. That would be the biggest takeaway that I hope readers leave with: start showing up in the world and shedding those origin stories, those limited beliefs that don’t serve you, and start looking at your life and those possibilities in a newfound way.
Aspirations: My biggest hope for this book and how it impacts readers is that it gets in the hands of the people that need it most. It’s about changing the life of one person; helping someone think a little bit differently about something or expanding their beliefs in a way they never knew was possible. My hope for my life and where we’re going next is to continue to have a healthy family. I’m so grateful that I have beautiful, healthy kids that are thriving and that I get to see them thrive every day. It would be great to continue to grow our family and our home here in Nashville, which we love. It is so great to be in my hometown and seeing how much this beautiful community enriches my family’s lives. It’s my hope that I’m going to be able to give back in more ways than one in some of the issues that matter to me for the people that need it most.