Why It Is Your Duty to Charge Your Worth, Call in Your Abundance, and Become Unapologetically Rich with Aria Leighty

Why It Is Your Duty to Charge Your Worth, Call in Your Abundance, and Become Unapologetically Rich with Aria Leighty

Welcome, to episode number 40 of The Determine Mom Show. Today we have Aria Lady with us; she is the founder of mob nation. She is the mother of a beautiful 13-year-old girl. And she has a ton of other stuff to tell us. So I’m just going to go ahead and give it over to her. So welcome, Aria. I’m a ton of stuff all the time. That’s all moms that are balancing all this. A long laundry list, but thank you for having me. I’m excited to be here.

I have been kind of following you for quite a while. Probably been almost a year, and I am aware of your organization. Just the way that the mob nation organizes mom business owners together and supports and helps them is very impressive. 

Tell us about how you started as a work-from-home mom and maybe how the mob nation came to be. The first quote-unquote real business, I just went for it and opened a brick-and-mortar location. So that was a kid’s art studio in Portland, Oregon. And It was like 2011, and I was a single mom then, and my daughter had just started kindergarten. And I was like, I’m just going to do this, and went into it kind of blind and crazy. 

And was running that for a couple of months and realized that you don’t know what you don’t know until you’re in the thick of it, and I was just completely lost and drowning and going through all these different things of Why would I even consider starting this or that I knew what I was doing at all. And I was trying to find just one other mom that also owned a business just to kind of like bounce ideas off of and I mean, basically relate to like, I wanted to be like, 

Hey, are you ever late to pick up, or have you ever had to like to close your location because of a sick child and all of that type of stuff? So that’s what I set out to do. And I made a Facebook group at first to have, you know, the one or two other moms at the time, just looking for in my area, Portland, Oregon, and it just kind of blew up from there. 

We are having that support and commiseration, if you will. Some of the things we go through as mom business owners are critical. Having a mom, business owner best friend, like our regular friends, and I will use the word regular friends because it’s different from being a mom and a business owner. So sorry, regular moms out there, most likely you aren’t. 

But it’s different if you’re a regular Mom because there is so much more to balance and juggle. And I know there was a lot to juggle before I even was doing a business, working and having kids, and all those things. But then, when you add in that business level and think about the marketing, planning, and all of those things, it becomes like a completely different animal. And at the time, I was young, so none of my friends had businesses or kids.

So that’s like sick of hearing them say that they were tired because I’m like, you don’t even know we don’t relate on this level. I mean, you hear about how tired you are one more time. Even not just they don’t have kids, even when they do have kids, they just have to worry about the kids. And that’s the only thing they have to worry about. I’m like, Well, yeah, but there’s other stuff. But yeah, worrying about that. Yeah. You know,

So you take on, like having another child almost, you know, you start to feel all this pressure of letting down a community and your customers and clients. And that was just a pressure that I had never anticipated taking on, and I would only suggest people take it on if they’re fully prepared. Like, I’ve consulted so many people that I’ve always wanted to have a boutique. So I’m going to open one, and I’m like, ah, let’s talk about what the first couple of years will look like for you.

And are you prepared for that? It’s just a mental game. The biggest thing, spiritually, is you are prepared to give up here, the next couple years of your life, and your child’s life too. So because it will be a blur, I’m seeing my daughter; I had her. And I’ve been working at home since the day I had her, and I cannot believe she’s going on two and a half. Like, how did that happen? Alright, so you found a couple of moms in a Facebook group. So how did that evolve from a few moms in a Facebook group to like a full-blown national franchise?

I asked myself that all the time. How long did that evolve to this? I found those moms, and it turned into about like 10, and for a couple of months, we would like to meet at my art studio or somebody use, you know, dining table, and we just are like, oh, who do you use for payroll or you know, kids are jerk sometimes or whatever, you know, across the, across the gamut of all the things I could talk about. And then I realized, okay, we need to start having some significant events because I had been to many networking events, and I couldn’t feel like when I went to the networking events, is very cliquey.

It didn’t seem like people were there to grow their network, instead just gossiping with their friends or showing off how many people they knew. And it felt very fake. There’s a lot of mask-wearing and trying to pretend like, especially then, the mom renewer thing wasn’t a huge focus. And so it was almost like the moms there were trying to hide that they were moms, and as a single mom, I owned an art studio. I’m going and like yoga pants that are covered in glitter and, you know, messy bun and stuff like that. Like I want to make some friends and meet some people. 

We started hosting meetups and then the group grew, and many people would come into my art studio and talk business with me. And so, after meeting that time, hundreds of my companies, I realized that so much more was needed other than just getting together in person or having a space to vent, just having resources readily available.

We don’t have time to sit and be on Google for hours trying to figure out, you know, why Facebook changed their algorithm again and how to do that. So, just like a community of women tutting their hands, they’re like, yeah, we’re going to support each other. We’re going to give referrals to each other. We can; we will always buy the services and products from each other first before big box retailers. So we launched the alliance in 2016. 

And that’s the paid membership version of the mob. And that’s just for the moms that are ready to take their business to the next level, invest in the mom community, invest in themselves, and be around other women that are also doing the same kind when you’re ready to level your circle and be around people that are super committed to this community and Coming into their businesses. 

That’s awesome. That’s such a needed thing. And it might not be true; this is an opinion; I’m going to say this is an opinion, not a fact. But a mom, business owners need that extra level of support from other people that understand because there is no like; it’s different.

If you are a man and a business owner, it’s different if you were single, like without children, and a business owner, there’s just another aspect and element. We already touched on that. Having that extra layer of support from those who understand is extremely important. And I’m so happy you identified and solved that problem for thousands of moms. It’s fantastic.

And if you think about it, like if we have, you know, graphic designers and lawyers and stuff like that, and the mob and 90% of their business come from the group, and so they’ve been able to shift, you know, we’re Working only with mobs primarily, which means that now there’s just kind of this level of understanding that when I come to meet with you, I might have like a snotty nosed kid on my hip or you know, whatever.

And so it’s created this environment for a lot of our members where you don’t have to choose or worry about being, being the mom first and working with clients that understand that and you know if you have to cancel last minute because you have to go pick up your kids, they’re at school and hurt themselves or something that you don’t feel that level of guilt that you used to have when you would call those clients that you know, we’re not going to understand and probably go with somebody else.

I completely understand that 100% of my daughter is often in my meetings. Those are my clients like love the fact that she’s there and they like, like, she’s like crawling on me while we’re working, you know, like through Zoom sessions and stuff, and they love it, but because their moms, you know, yeah, but if it was like a guy or you know, like somebody Like, I do have one client, that’s a man, and he has four daughters. So he completely understands, and he loves my daughter too. But that understanding needs to be there. 

Even knowing that you’re about to meet with another mom doesn’t mean they are necessarily going to relate to your struggles. You know, there’s a lot of, like, Mom guilt, and mom shaming, and mom bashing and stuff like that. So like, you still feel less than 100% comfortable with other moms.

And once you enter the mom community, it’s like masks off, like, Come as you are, we’re here for whatever season of life you’re in. And just because you’re in yoga pants doesn’t mean you’re not a powerful creator, a great lawyer, or running an amazing coffee shop. There’s even more opportunity to remove that next layer of fear and guilt when working with a fellow mob.