People Process Interviews: Angela Lauria

Rhamy Alejeal: Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the people processes podcast. I'm your host, Rhamy Alejeal and I am excited today to bring you Dr. Angela Lauria.Dr. Angela is the founder of the author incubator and creator of different processes for writing a book that matters. In 2018, The Author Incubator was ranked #275 on the Inc. 500 fastest growing companies and #87 on Entrepreneur Magazine’s Entrepreneur 360.Angela is an expert when it comes to building teams and scaling businesses and we are ecstatic to have her on the show. Welcome Angela.Dr. Lauria:       Thanks. I'm so excited to be here.Rhamy Alejeal: Great. Well you got to start telling me how you got into what you do now. It's a very cool niche and I know you've got a great story on how you got there.Dr. Lauria:       It is super cool. And I actually was recruited when I was in college to start working for an espionage author. He was a New York times bestselling author and wrote spy stories. I'm in Washington DC so I got my career tracking spies around Northern Virginia and helping journalists write books about them. And I know I was really lucky. And from there, I had an accidental freelance business. I spent 19 years as a ghost writer, proofreader, editor, blurb writer, publicist, anything in the book industry. I was doing it and my family would always ask me, when are you going to get a real job? And I sort of wondered that myself.So I was like, maybe I'll go to law school, maybe I'll get an MBA. And all of a sudden a couple of decades had passed and I still hadn't figured out what I was going to do when I grew up. And all the work that I did with books I was generating. I'm often for businesses upwards of 2000, leads a month from books that I'd done with them. And they were generating millions of dollars in revenue. But I sort of thought of it like pet sitting or babysitting dog walking. It didn't feel like a real job cause I got it in college and I just charged hourly. And I didn't even have a website. I didn't have a company name. I was just like a girl who helped people with books. And suddenly I was a mom with a two year old who helped people with books. And I was like, I gotta figure out who I want to be when I grow up. And I found this book called finding your own North star. What I searched for on Amazon was books, like what color is your parachute? And I want to take a quiz that said like, you should be a personal injury attorney. And then I would like go do that. And what this book said was, you should do what you lose track of time doing.And for me that was reading personal development books and reading and writing and editing the personal development business, books, nonfiction, like that was always my sweet spot. And I ended up hiring this woman as a life coach to help me figure out what I could make, how can I make money doing this? Cause all the books I had done were in a completely different genre and helped me. She actually trained me as a life coach. Her name is Martha Beck and I got trained as a life coach and she's like, you can work with life coaches on their books. And I didn't, I couldn't see the money. I couldn't see the revenue. I couldn't see myself as a business owner. I sort of saw myself as a freelancer and I read about probably seven years, not quite seven years, six years really working on myself.And then in 2013, I started the...