Do you often find yourself hesitating before a big decision, or weighing the pros and cons?
In this episode of The Agent of Wealth Podcast, host Marc Bautis is joined by Jeanne Collins, Founder and Principal Designer of the award-winning interior design firm, JerMar Designs. Two Feet In: Lessons from an All-In Life is Collins’ first book, was written with the goal of inspiring more people to live life to the fullest. This mission to encourage people to live their best lives is integral to everything Collins does, from her work creating sanctuaries for her interior design clients, to mentoring women in business, she encourages us all to go for what we want with “two feet in.”
In this episode, you will learn:
- About Jeanne Collins approach to “jumping all in and not looking back”.
- Why it is never too late to find your passion in business and life.
- How investing more money in your business and delegating can bring you peace of mind.
- Why being vulnerable is important to be successful.
- And more!
Resources:
Two Feet In: Lessons from an All-In Life | JerMar Designs | House of JerMar Instagram | JerMar Designs Facebook | Bautis Financial: 8 Hillside Ave, Suite LL1 Montclair, New Jersey 07042 (862) 205-5000 | Schedule an Introductory Call
Disclosure: The transcript below has been edited for clarity and content. It is not a direct transcription of the full episode, which can be listened to above.
Welcome back to The Agent of Wealth Podcast, this is your host Marc Bautis. Today I’m joined by a special guest, Jeanne Collins.
Jeanne is an award-winning interior designer who left the corporate world behind to find her true self through design and internal reflection. Her firm, JerMar Designs, works with executives and entrepreneurs, focusing on projects that combine sophistication and balance with inner and outer wellness.
Winner of the 2022 Luxe Magazine Red Award, she was also recently nominated as an HGTV Designer of the Year.
She chronicles her journey and the approach that changed her life and work in her memoir, Two Feet In: Lessons from an All-In Life.
Jeanne, welcome to the show.
Thank you, Marc. I’m excited to talk to you.
Let’s start off by talking a bit about your book. Can you explain what living “two feet in” means to you?
“Two feet in” is really how I approach everything in life. When I’m at a crossroads, or there’s a decision to be made – whether it be personal or professional – I seem to have this ability to make the decision, jump all in, and never look back.
In time, I realized that a lot of people are not capable of doing this. A lot of times, self-doubt prevents us from accepting change – whether it be changing careers, or moving, or getting out of relationships. So, when I was writing the book, I recognized this unique ability I have. I approach situations differently. And, as a result, it’s allowed me to learn a lot and to really expand and grow my life to a point where I can really say I’m truly living my best life.
Were you always like that?
It’s funny you ask. Looking back, starting from when I was in my mid twenties, that is actually always how I approached it. I just didn’t know it. I didn’t see the common thread in my life until I actually started writing the book. And then once I started writing the book, then I saw that thread come out where before I didn’t, I just had people say, oh, the things that you do and the risks that you take are really inspiring and really motivating. But I didn’t see the commonality in my decision-making and in my behavior until I started writing the book.
What prompted you to write this book?
Right… I didn’t set out to write a book in my lifetime. I spent 22 years in advertising sales, working for a public company, running an advertising sales team, and back in January of 2020, which is a little more than four years ago, I got fired from my nice big VP job. I really had to figure out who I was going to be when I grew up and what I was going to do. I was about to turn 50 years old at the same time. So I decided that I wanted to leave corporate and I wanted to start my own business. And so I started an interior design firm in Connecticut and that action of doing that was so, I don’t want to say controversial, but in some ways yes, with my friends and family because that’s so drastic, who at 50 made a major career shift and also decides they want to go work for themselves.
That action made me think about my life. And about two and a half years in, I was on a Zoom call about writing a book because I thought down the road I’ll write a design book. Everyone wants a coffee table book with their pictures in it, so how cool would that be? And so I was on this call about the ability to write a book and after an hour and a half I had completely mind mapped out an entire book with chapters, sub chapters, lessons, the whole thing in the 15-minute brainstorming session that we had at the end. And I realized that while people tell me my story’s inspiring, I have a lot of stories like that and I’ve learned a lot. And if I could inspire even one person to want to take more risks and believe in themselves and change the way they live and that it’s never too late to do that, that would really feel like I had a purpose.
And so that’s how I started out writing the book. I did not set out saying, I’m going to be a writer and I want to be an author and I want to be a speaker, and I want to do all the things that I do now. So it’s been a really fun journey of trying something new.
Jeanne’s First “Two Feet In” Moment
Starting the interior design business, was it something that you had planned for previously and then leaving your job kind of just triggered it? Or was this a spur of the moment, alright, here’s what we’re doing.
From a financial planning perspective, it was a whole lot more of here’s what we’re doing. However, I was really fortunate that I had had a good career and I was able to take the time and the resources to invest in myself. And that’s how I looked at it as I was going to invest in myself and I was going to borrow from myself to start my business and go back to school at the same time. And that there was only one way to do this, and that was becoming an entrepreneur and starting my own business. And I gave myself permission both with my career risk but also financially to say, you know what? I’m going to give myself a certain amount of time and I’m going to invest in myself and yeah, I’m going to have to spend money. That is very true, and I did, and I still do actually.
But at the same time, I also looked at it from the perspective of I’d already been working in corporate America for 22 years in advertising sales and I’m probably going to work for at least another 20. So imagine what I could build both with a business and financially, over that time, that I could afford to take that risk and do that. I was fortunate enough to have a great financial planner that showed me how financially I can do it and make it work. I’ve been able to, I am fortunate that I could do it, but it was definitely like, okay, I don’t want to go back to corporate America. What are my passions? What do I, what do I want my days to look like? How do I want to feel about my job and what I do and finding my purpose? And so out of that came my passions were interior design, and so I never thought I’d be an entrepreneur. I never thought I’d own my own company. I never thought I had the skill set, quite honestly to be able to do such a thing. But then when I decided that, you know what? I want to be my own boss. I want to control the show. I want to do what seems really challenging and daunting and I don’t know how to do, but I want to overcome that. And so I literally four months after getting fired, made my company an LLC and started my business and had already gone back to school.
Related: 5 Mistakes to Avoid When Hiring a Financial Advisor
The Value in Not Looking Back
I guess that is part of your approach with two feet in or all in, do you ever look back at some of the decisions? An example would be this one or is it just full steam ahead and we’re not looking back at any of this?
Yeah, that’s the key. It’s never looking back because even if where I end up isn’t exactly where I thought I would end up, it doesn’t matter because there were things and factors at the time that made that decision the right decision for me. And so for example, I’ll go back to when I was younger and I started getting a master’s degree in food service at NYU and I spent two years in that program and then two years into the program I decided I didn’t really want to be doing this. I really wanted to be doing food marketing, not cooking and running a restaurant or running a catering business. I had already invested two years, but I had to make a major pivot because I then decided I wanted to get an MBA. And so I never looked at that decision of the two years that I committed both of my time and of my money to that program as a waste. I looked at it like it really helped me redefine what I wanted and what my passions were, and realizing two years in that it wasn’t what I wanted wasn’t a bad thing because it then put me on a very different path because I went out to go find a company that was going to help subsidize that MBA instead of me paying for it. And that put me on a 22 year career in an industry I never imagined I would be in.
Yeah, I mean it’s a really really good approach to take is that your food services degree is an example of you look at it as not that I made a mistake or I did something that it’s not going to turn out, I’m not going to use it. It was a waste of time, but instead I learned something that I don’t want to do and now I know what I do want to do. And going forward, it kind of helps define where your path is going.
I think that’s such an important lesson for people of any age, especially I do a lot of speaking to young people as my daughter’s 17 years old, and I think it’s really important for people at younger ages and also if they’re trying to make career shifts later in life and people are so afraid of doing that, it’s like, you know what? What’s the worst thing that’s going to happen? You’ll learn something, you’ll learn something about yourself, and if that path or that decision isn’t the right one, that’s okay. It doesn’t make it a bad decision if you make it as an informed, educated decision with the right reasons behind it. It’s not a bad decision, it’s just part of your journey and…
How Being Vulnerable Can Help You Succeed
In Two Feet In, you discuss your mission statement, success requires perseverance and vulnerability. For those who haven’t read the book already, how’d you come up with this realization and what does it mean to you?
Yeah, I think the number one thing in there is vulnerability, to be honest, because when I went to go write my book I had to really think about it. It’s a memoir; it’s about my life. And so there’s definitely some dirty laundry aired in that for people who haven’t read it, it’s a little, parts of it or juicy, it reads a little bit like a novel. It’s not your traditional self-help or business book. While it does have a lot of threads of self-help and business advice in it as well and lessons learned. I think when I started to write it, I realized that if I wasn’t willing to be vulnerable, it was going to be very hard for the reader to really connect and really learn from my stories. And I think vulnerability is required when you want to take risks. For example, when I started my business, I was 50 years old and there was so much I did not know A) about being an entrepreneur and B) about running a business in the interior design business that is not my background.
So I had to be willing to reach out to people and say, Hey, I’m 50, I’m new. I don’t know how to do this. And when you’re going and talking to professionals and trade professionals and you’re saying, I don’t even understand how to buy products from you, I don’t understand markup, I don’t understand margins, I don’t understand receiving warehouses, which is where the furniture gets shipped when we buy it a trade. I didn’t understand any of it and I had to be okay being vulnerable and reaching out to people and asking those questions. And as a result, some of the first people that I reached out to were so incredibly pivotal in how I run my business now because they were open and willing to share with me the knowledge that I didn’t have. And I’m incredibly loyal to them as vendor partners and I buy lots of products from them now, and they are dear friends, and they were pivotal in helping me learn how to set up my business, but I had to be willing to be vulnerable and be like, guess what? I have no idea what you’re talking about and I don’t know how to do this, and that doesn’t make me a bad designer or even a bad business person. It’s just being honest.
So I think in order to gain success in life, you really have to be willing to say that and be willing to, some people might shut you down, but others will embrace the vulnerability and embrace the honesty. And I think in general, people actually want to help other people and people want to connect with other people. And the more vulnerable you can be, the greater your connections will be, and that will make your life much more fulfilling.
Work-Life Balance
Yeah, I definitely agree with that. Talking about being an entrepreneur, how do you maintain a work life balance? Because I know it can be difficult.
It can be, I’m really good at outsourcing more so than a lot of entrepreneurs, and it goes back to being willing to invest in yourself and invest in your sanity quite honestly. And so I’m pretty cognizant of the amount of time I spend against my business and the amount of work that I take on at any given time and how do I balance that because I spent so long not having any control over my time and feeling like I didn’t have any balance and there was no life at all, it was all just about work and they owned me. So I am really cognizant about making decisions to make myself feel like I have that life work balance. And that can be anything from, I work out every day, and that doesn’t always happen at eight o’clock in the morning, sometimes it happens at noon, but I’m my own boss and I can do that and I make sure I make time to go have lunch with friends or with business colleagues. And that might mean that I work at night or I might work on the weekends, but that’s okay because that was my choice with my time. But ensuring I’m doing the things in my schedule that allow for that, I make sure I take five weeks off of vacation.
The Importance of Delegating
You have to set up your business for that level of success, which means if there isn’t someone else to do the work for you while you’re gone, it’s about financially understanding that you’re going to be taking that time off and allowing your schedule to be shaped so that you can take that time off because you have to be able to unplug and you have to be able to recharge when we work all the time and our brains are constantly thinking about our businesses as entrepreneurs constantly, we’re always working in the business and on the business if we’re trying to grow it, but you have to force yourself to take that time and to take those breaks. And so a lot of it for me is scheduling time blocking and delegating things out to other people. That might not be my strength. It might take me too long to do. It’s worth paying someone else to do it. They’ll get it done much faster. And then I can spend my time working on what I’m really good at.
I read a book recently titled Who Not How by Dan Sullivan. He kind of talks about who can help you rather than always thinking of “how can I do this?” or “how can I do that?” or ” who can help me get this done?” And you’re almost kind of what you mentioned is you’re basically designing your own life is what you’re doing to whatever is important to you or whatever brings you happiness or things that you enjoy.
And if the business gets really busy, then I hire people to help and to take on the workload and I make that investment. In the short term, does that mean that I make less money? It does, but it also allows the business to grow because in order to grow, there are only so many hours in the day, and so you’re only one person. And so I think very early on, I had a business coach who made me very aware of the fact that there are only so many hours in the day. I am only one person. And so in order to really scale a business, it can’t be just about charging for my time because that is a finite cap on my business when I’m in a service business. And so recognizing how you can expand and make money in other ways and not have it just be that I am physically doing all of the work. And in order to do that, you have to be willing to outsource and you have to have people on your team that are going to do some of the work that you were not.
How to Shift Your Mindset to Avoid Burnout
Yeah. And as a financial planner, what I’ve seen especially over the past couple of years, and ever since really COVID started was people asking me, people were just burnt out and this is whether they were an entrepreneur or whether they were working for a company. And the question, one of the top questions that people came to me and said is Tell me the earliest I can retire and I can stop doing this. And then we worked a lot into almost your path where it was working for a corporate company and how do we figure out how to design something where they have more, whether it’s time freedom or whatever freedom they were looking for.
But there’s definitely been a shift in what’s important to people and how willing they are to kind of put that as one of their top priorities.
Oh, for sure. And I think COVID made it even more so for people because I think so many people, especially executives, are driven by work. We’re passionate about work, we like to work. It’s not that we don’t want to work, it’s just that we want to have that balance and we want to make sure we’re working on something we’re passionate about. So for me, and for many people, it’s not about stopping the work, it’s about slowing down the work. It’s about having the life work balance and ensuring what you’re doing in your work is really fulfilling and giving back to you. And for a lot of people, as we start to get older and we’ve been in our careers for a long time, starting something new is actually really exciting and getting to learn new things and meet new people. I am so blessed by the new people I have met in the last four years with this career change.
Related: How to Breakthrough Burnout and Go From Stress to Success
It’s changed my life, the number of people that I’ve met and the things I’ve learned from people. And I was like, I truly believe I will be living longer. I’ll be working longer as well, but I’m completely okay with that because I love what I do. I don’t look at it as work most of the time. Sometimes it is, but most of the time it’s really not work. It’s what I really enjoy. And as long as you can have that balance and still feel like you have all the life things that go along with it, that’s ideal.
How the Energy In Your Home Affects Your Life
Yeah, I think it’s important too that people’s mindset also has shifted where I think a lot of people are looking for how to build memories, experiences rather than the tangible things of whatever it is. So I think that is kind of a shift. I’ve also seen in people’s mindset in your book, you state “a good life isn’t so different from a good home after all”. Can you expand a little bit on this?
Part of what makes my approach to interior design different from some designers is it’s not just about making your home pretty. And so like you talked about experiences, COVID helped because people realize that they can have so many experiences within their own home and the value that their home can provide to their family and their friends in those experiences. But I take it a level further and say to them, how can your home be giving back to you and really starting from within you, and what’s the energy that you’re creating in your home and how is that helping you feel more fulfilled, more calm, more balanced? And it’s everything from what colors are on the walls and really thinking about how those colors impact how you feel.
I had one male client say to me once, he had a double story family room and it was a beautiful room, but all the wood was yellow and the furniture was brown. So, I was brought in to redo the room and we added some more windows. We painted the walls white, all the windows became black so that you can more clearly see the nature outside. Then all of the furniture became white and light gray, and they had three kids and two dogs. When it was done and we painted all the wood a light gray, it was all refinished. When it was completely done, the husband said to me, I never realized how stressed that yellow wood and that brown furniture made me until now I have this new very zen room and I walk in and I can feel my shoulders drop after a long day of work and I can feel that this room comforts me and makes me calm. But I never realized how stressed this room made me because A, I didn’t like it and all the yellow and brown just was not good energy.
And it was fascinating to me because this was the husband and he’s in finance and he works in New York City, and I’m like, these aren’t the normal people who talk about calm and energy of a room, but he’s right because the room now, it’s like a warm white fuzzy blanket now. It’s so comforting and it’s so zen. I do call it the Zen family room. So I think what I bring to the table for people is helping them realize how their homes, if done well, have energy and they can give back to them. And when you start to internalize that and how you live in your home, it’s how can that improve your lifestyle and how can that improve your mindset and how can that make you feel more calm? And so there’s a lot that I do with my clients where we focus on how do your homes make you feel and how do you want your home to make you feel? Because life is stressful. And so life is chaotic and crazy and we’re all busy. So if you can figure out how to make your home much more of a sanctuary, then your home is giving back to you.
Takeaways From Two Feet In
What is the main message you want readers to take away from Two Feet In: Lessons from an All-In Life?
There are two main messages:
Make Yourself a Priority
If you can learn to make yourself a priority in life, it is amazing how your life can change and being a priority in your own life and being a designer of your own life does not make you selfish. It’s your life and you have control over your own life. So that’s the first message.
Seek Inner Peace
I talk about a lot of everyone’s sort of seeking happiness as this journey and I don’t look at it as seeking happiness because happiness can go up and down. It’s about seeking inner peace. And so my book focuses a lot on mindset and wellness and then also how your home can help you with that inner peace. And if you can achieve inner peace, then it helps the rollercoaster of happiness up and down and the good days and bad days become much easier, much more easily dealt with. If you can have inner peace, and I have incredible inner peace in my own life, and if there’s one gift I could give to people, it would be to have a little dose of that because that is life altering.
Related: Investing In Yourself: The Importance of Personal Development
Yeah, I mean, I definitely see both messages. So many people feel like their lives are out of control, so having a sense of control is definitely important. And then, yeah, inner peace, when you compare it to happiness, how it will smooth out. And not to equate things to financial topics, but some people like their investments, they see up and down, up and down. Most people would rather have a straight line and not have to have those down days or down periods of time.
Well, and also look at the long game. I mean, if you’re constantly looking at your portfolio, you’re going to have anxiety every single day over something that you can’t control, right?
Correct. Something you don’t have any control over at all. So it’s more like looking at the long game and looking at your long-term financial plans and making goals against that. And then see how you’re pacing towards those long-term goals as opposed to on a regular, daily, weekly, or even monthly basis, you can make yourself crazy. And so picking the things that you do have control over and also being willing to ride the wave a little bit with finances and with life. Ride the wave a little bit. I’ve had people ask me, when should I decide to pull from my business if it’s not going well? And I’m like, well, have you tried hiring a business coach? Have you tried hiring somebody to investigate what you’re doing? Maybe you just need to tweak something a little bit. Maybe you just need to cut your expenses a little bit and all of a sudden your business can become profitable. Or do you even understand your financial statements of your business and what you’re doing? Right. Read some books. Profit First, great book if you’re an entrepreneur. So it’s like, don’t throw in the towel yet. Have you kind of given it a chance? And to your point, same thing with the market, with your finances, don’t throw in the towel just because you have a bad month or a bad quarter. The longer game, in my opinion, is definitely better.
Yeah, I like the way you framed it. Ride the wave.
Ride the wave, right. You know what? There’s so much we can’t control. We can’t control the economy, we can’t control who’s the president. There’s so much we can’t control about what’s going on in the world. So you have to reel into the things that you do have control over and also not obsess about them.
Jeanne, that’s all the questions I have for you today. I want to thank you for joining me on The Agent of Wealth Podcast. It was great hearing about your book and learning more about what you do. I think your tips and advice will be very useful for our listeners. Speaking of the listeners, where can they pick up a copy of Two Feet In?
Well, first of all, thank you for having me on, Marc. It’s been a pleasure to speak with you. Your listeners can pick up Two Feet In: Lessons From an All-In Life on Amazon. It’s available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and as an audiobook. You can also find me via my website, jermardesigns.com. There, you’ll find links to my social platforms and to my book.
Great, we’ll link to those resources in the show notes. Thanks again, Jeanne. And thank you to everyone who tuned into today’s episode. Don’t forget to follow The Agent of Wealth on the platform you listen from and leave us a review of the show. We are currently accepting new clients, if you’d like to schedule a 1-on-1 consultation with our advisors, please do so below.