Brainz Magazine Exclusive Interview
Amber Stitt is a Financial Consultant, Business Strategist, and Gallup-Certified Strengths Coach who helps individuals and businesses to take action to Catastrophe Proof their lives. She is co-owner at M.D. Disability Quotes and founder of the AmberStitt.com Blog and has been working in the financial industry for 10+ years.
Amber's passion is to help individuals identify how to implement custom planning processes that allow for those to do so within areas where they are naturally talented. She feels that it is everyone's duty to take care of those we love as well as ourselves, while we are able-bodied to; so working on your financial wellness is a must. Planning can feel like a daunting project; so many or most, don't take the time to work on their overall game plan. She loves to educate and motivate those that she meets, so they achieve success and resilience with whatever obstacles they may face in life!
You’re an expert in Disability and Term Life Insurance and a co-owner of M.D. Disability Quotes as well as the founder of the Amber Stitt Blog. Can you tell us more about your work and how you ended up where you are today?
Since the very beginning, I’ve always been a hard worker and an overachiever while also growing up in a family of entrepreneurs, so picturing ownership in an insurance firm seems to make perfect sense.
Still, it took me about 20 years to get there.
At a young age, I worked for my father’s financial firm while in college, and the traditional approach of in-person meetings involving financial presentations scared me quite a bit since Accounting wasn’t a class I scored well in. Due to this, I had sought out other corporate positions in my 20 and 30s that had a salary component and benefits as this field seemed too daunting for me. Let’s say it took me about 20 years to be a business owner in general, partly due to this experience in my undergraduate years! This was mainly caused by my lack of clear understanding of who I was, coupled with a bit of naivety. I will explain more shortly.
In my early 20s, I began a career as a loan processor since the mortgage industry was very lucrative in the US, especially in Arizona. When the US entered the housing market crash in 2008, many of my friends in the mortgage and real estate industry had lost their jobs and had difficulty adjusting to their new lives. Many of us were pushed to find alternate careers, and I was fortunate enough to be referred to a real estate law firm that focused on transactional work and business transactions. I then worked as a paralegal and continued courses in Legal Studies, which was perfect for me as I love to read and enjoy deciphering and understanding legal contracts. This was very much the opposite of math and financial reporting.
In my early 30s, my father had discussed how working with the family firm could be a good fit for me and let me know about an opportunity to make a transition. I strongly considered the chance as my corporate paralegal position had a lot of downtime due to the seasonality of the corporate filings, and I wanted more to do during the day. I studied for my insurance license and eventually transitioned to work with the family firm remotely, from AZ while the headquarters was in NE. It was an incredible experience to have a springboard back into the industry for training and learning about all types of services and products available for clients to assist them with their financial planning and risk management while working with my family. The first few years of this job gave me the opportunity I needed to start building an insurance book of my own making. While in this role, I was trying to transition into financial planning and investments as it seemed like a reasonable next step.
I studied hard to achieve more credentials during my time with the firm, constantly expanding my knowledge and career capabilities so that I could grow my client base. I wanted my current and future clients to trust me and my ability to handle their financial affairs, so obtaining more designations behind my title seemed like the obvious way to achieve that. I had always assumed that to be profitable or successful; you have to offer everything to your clients, so that’s what I wanted to do. I finally made it to a position where I could offer various services above just insurance planning. I was now able to provide investment management on top of financial and insurance planning.
Through my time stepping into this role, I learned that I loved insurance planning and coaching clients, but not the actual advising in the arena of financial plans. I love products and teaching, not so much running the numbers that could help them determine their lives 20-30 years down the road. So, even though I still advise people to get the planning done, I didn’t want to do that piece of the process for my clients. When my clients need that service, I can introduce them to a trusted business associate that can handle that part of their planning. I eventually decided to work within insurance planning and some small business consulting as that is where I have the most fun in my workday.
At 6-months pregnant with my daughter, I decided that I may need to start my firm to create a schedule that would work for my family so that I wasn’t letting down my current team by not being there full-time. I didn’t know what that would look like for me, so I knew being on my own would give me the flexibility to carve out the business hours that would work for us as a family unit. It was interesting that due to my daughter being a great sleeper, I was able to take actual maternity leave but would work during her sleep schedule during the day and was able to start growing my new business. I partnered up with a colleague in the industry that I had known for many years during my pregnancy, giving me an excellent transition time to build my new client base. We made a great team, and I eventually became co-owner at MD Disability Quotes. After my daughter was born, I also started the Amber Stitt Blog as a way to communicate the “wins” I achieve with parenting and also in business and like to share those stories with individuals and other business owners. On the Blog, we cover a range of topics from any lessons my daughter may teach me through Motherhood to Financial Wellness tips through my time working in Insurance Planning.
Have you encountered any significant challenges during your journey, and how have these affected you?
Previously I mentioned going into the industry and then having to niche down to the product eventually. This was a tough decision because, as I mentioned, I had studied rigorously to add the investment and financial planning leg to my book of business to only come to the conclusion that insurance is the only speciality I wanted to practice. So, after all the time and money spent on taking exams and building out that part of my business, I decided to not stick with any other designations.
While working as an employee and before the transition, I was lucky enough to undergo a group team exercise after taking a personality assessment through the Gallup Clifton-Strengths program.
Once the results came through, I was handed a robust packet outlining my talents based on the assessment. After reading the summaries aloud as a group and digesting them on my own, it was as if a light bulb had come to life in my mind. The ah-ha! moment I’d been waiting for had arrived. It was pretty clear from the list that I’m not a number-driven person but certainly great with people and building strategies. My assessment reported that I am a strategic thinker and a high communicator, and I am happiest when learning and teaching. This brought me back to why I loved completing insurance transactions while working as a loan processor and paralegal in the past, and now with my client’s insurance transactions. After this epiphany finally arrived, I worked hard to develop these strengths and finally accepted that I do my best work when I do what I love. This moment was a transition point that eventually motivated me to build my firm.
Is there something special that keeps you motivated?
I aim to help families to remain resilient as life can throw many curveballs, as we all saw happen a lot during the pandemic. So with the planning I offer, it can begin by providing resources to help the household, which they organized, by way of insurance planning among personal development strategies. My motivation helps others to take action, similarly as I have done for my family. While having skin in the game now as a spouse, mother and business owner and doing the steps myself, I have learned strategies through my efforts due to my experiences, and I am so happy to share those with others. I spend a lot of time studying products so that I can bring awareness to individuals based upon their specific needs and risk management goals.
But, my primary motivation now would be my daughter and the legacy I want to leave behind. I want to make her proud of her Momma. If anything were to happen to me, I know there is tangible evidence of how hard I worked for her, my husband, and my clients. Transferring risk away from the family can bring you happiness and peace, that you are not leaving them in a bind in the event somewhere happens.
I have my daughter involved in little ways through my writing on my Blog, with photography for social media and my success stories that I share with others while in Motherhood. I know that she and I can look back at that together as she grows and as my business grows and see the milestones we have achieved along the way. I know my husband is also a true partner in this journey and my stepdaughter, so we try to create as many systems for our family to remain resilient as we try to procure longevity.
What is your work inspired by?
My family inspires me but so does my love of information and arranging data. This allows me to build processes that can help take away the daunting aspect of figuring out what to do. If I can look back to the feelings I had in my 20-30s on why I stayed away from the financial industry, I can think of many people that may avoid taking action and steps because they don’t feel confident. They feel informed and overwhelmed, so they do nothing. When I have time with friends and family, I listen to them talk about their lives, and often they tell me that they are not on track, not organized and can’t get their partner to see the importance or vice versa, their partner feels that way about them, and it makes them feel bad. My consulting is to solve this very problem. With personal development in learning about one’s personality and strengths, they can build their goals to suit their personality. Once a person knows this about themselves, their partner can then see that too and then as a team, a family can build out processes that help both partners find that balance, even though they may think differently. This really can help the partnership between couples. Even in business partnerships as well. I have seen this happen, and it is so great to witness this!
Helping others relieve the stress from their lives is a big driver but also to modernize the way insurance and financial planning feels to people. Through my approach, I hope to provide the financial expert with the products they are looking for while teaching the novice about the options that are available to them. I offer a custom, boutique approach in this world of automation on purpose. No one wants to feel sold something but listened to. Some individuals I meet who have a financial background may go quicker through the product selection process, so I customize my research for them differently than those that are not confident in finance. I understand this frame of mind more so, as I mentioned before. I was not a financial consultant that excelled in accounting and economic mapping but loved to provide education on products and processes.
Tell us about your most significant career achievement so far.
It was developing the “5 Pathways to Peak Performance.” It was initially built at the beginning of the pandemic when people were starting to be sent home either to work from home or because the business had to close. I already had a virtual business, and clients already knew how to work with me online and through email and secure email inboxes. But what about all the other industries? What about my colleagues and friends with “in-person” businesses? I started to interview other business owners on how they were going to take service to an online business model, while the world tried to sort out their next steps within their communities to manage the pandemic. I put together an Action Plan for clients that helps them to:
Focus on their Talents
Focus on Money
Focus on Risk Management
Focus on Marketing and Technology
Focus on their Communities and Network
The Action Plans are built around their personality to set appropriate goals.
What makes you feel ‘out of your comfort zone?’ How do you handle these types of situations?
Somehow, even though I am a communicator and love to talk and work with people, the in-person interviews and public speaking aspect can be stressful for me. It is so bizarre I have this mental roadblock that doesn’t exist if on zoom or speaking with people by phone. Not many people know this about me. I guess the cat is out of the bag now! Being on stage and filming content takes me into a comical sense of pause. I am not sure why that mental roadblock exists, but I have stopped being upset with myself about it. I just build systems around it so I can do what I feel I need to do while putting in the time to practice.
So, although you will never get rid of the anxiety of getting on stage, I do have methods now that I practice preparing. If you get yourself to the point of total preparation, the anxiety factor helps to drive you into the moment and stay present and gives you that buzz of energy when you are in the moment. I think that is part of the journey and excitement of that act of being able to help those in the audience or those the watch videos or listen to me through a podcast.
Something I did do early on after having an awful experience with hiring a camera team to help me with someone-one-one video content was to build a home studio setup and study how to film myself in the office on my own terms. I would otherwise just freeze behind the lens if someone was back there watching me, waiting for me to speak. I know just film on my own timetable based upon my marketing calendar.
So, what’s the next big goal or project for Amber, and how can someone get in contact with you?
I’ve wanted to write a book for as long as I can remember as I am fascinated by books and love to buy hardback books for my personal library. I think most people dream about becoming an author, putting that story down to paper, and finally getting it out of their heads and hearts. This year, I’ve had that opportunity.
I have been working with a fabulous team to put together a book called “Uncommon Results”, where other co-authors and I share our journey of entrepreneurship. We have been working on the final version of the book, and this is due to launch end of March 2022 on Amazon. The pre-order version is already available on iBooks and Amazon.
Another amazing thing that has happened is the launch of The Amber Stitt Show. We officially launched on 3/1/2022, and I am excited to share amazing insights through my show with my listeners.
Thank you for taking the time to interview me. I had a lot of fun!
