27: How to lead first by example and get paid your worth With Olenka Cullinan

Empowering women to stand up, show up, and take action<br /><br />The guest I am bringing you this week is someone incredibly special, a woman who can scale any business and shows up real, raw, and vulnerable. Olenka Cullinan is an entrepreneur, corporate speaker, author, life coach, and badass founder of Rising Tycoons, as well as iStartFirst. Throughout this episode she shares her journey to success and how her family and upbringing shaped her, her mentality, and her drive to become everything she put her mind to. <br /><br />Listen to this episode to hear the story of how one woman uprooted her life in Russia, paved her own way to success in America (with no support or money), and how you can be empowered to do the same with your own business.<br /><br />A leader goes first <br /><br />Olenka Cullinan was raised to believe that any good leader has to go first. Her mother was a die-hard entrepreneur who worked 80 hours a week and her dad was a very conservative government official. At a young age she learned how to develop a strategy for success based on minimal resources, and after her parents’ divorce, was uprooted from Russia and forced to move to Iowa with her family. <br /><br />Teaching the skills to succeed<br /><br />Olenka shares how she moved to school, met a girl on the plane, and with borrowed money built a home and worked three jobs to get through college. She talks about her journey to becoming a teacher, the job she took in Phoenix teaching at a county school, and the impact the children made on her—forever changing her life. During her time teaching there, she realized the skills that students needed to learn to succeed were outside the regular curriculum—and decided to teach them. <br /><br />Scaling her first business<br /><br />She discusses the beginning of her first company, Rising Tycoons, and the children she worked with that grew from a few to 10,000 within three years. As she continued to evolve and speak at conferences around the country, she began to realize the few women who were pre