Welcome to Milestone Moments, the show where
we explore the journeys that lead to success.
I'm Sheila Slick, your host and founder of Five
Milestones. In every episode, we will bring you
insights from the minds of entrepreneurs, leaders
and experts who will share not just their expertise,
but the milestone moments that have reshaped
their journeys and led to significant achievements.
So if you're looking for motivation, you're in
the right place. Subscribe now and discover the
milestones that mark the path to success. Welcome
to another episode of Milestone Moments in Business
and Leadership. I'm Sheila Slick, your host.
And today, my special guest is Angela Mulroney,
also known as the arsonist. She is founder of
Unleashing Influence, Inc., where she helps accomplished
professionals build lean, profitable, personal
brands that actually convert. She built five
businesses from scratch after losing her career
in dentistry, and she now teaches others how
to pivot without burning out and selling out.
Welcome to the show, Angela. Thanks for having
me, Sheila. I appreciate it. How did you become
known as the arsonist? What's your backstory?
Well, the arson started with my career burning
down without having any control over it. So I'm
originally a dentist. That's where the doctor
comes from. And when I had my practice at the
point of being where I wanted it to be, I had
an amazing team. I had the skills that I wanted.
I was catering to cowards. So other dentists
were referring me to their phobic patients. I
ended up losing my career overnight. And my whole
world felt like it burned away. I had no idea
who I was supposed to be if I wasn't a dentist
because I'd wanted to be a dentist since I was
two and I was 32 at that point. So a three decade
dream was gone. And since then, I've been working
a lot in identity work with clients. That includes
with personal branding, with building their businesses,
with understanding what their niche of genius
and creating entrepreneurial endeavors or employment
endeavors with that. And what I always work on
with clients is let's figure out. you know, the
5 % of what you're doing that works and work
more on that instead of worrying about the 95
% that is kind of working or just wasting our
time. And so I always had my clients matches
to help them burn things down that aren't at
their highest level, at their maximum niche of
genius, so that they can really create simple
businesses, create simple brands, create simple
entrepreneurial endeavors so that they can actually
get to where they want to go faster without cluttering
it with the things that they can be doing, but
maybe shouldn't be doing. All right, but I think
I got a gap here, Angela. You're a dentist since
the age of two. I have no idea what happened,
but you said overnight, which no matter how much
we plan our lives sometimes, things happen that
are just beyond our control. So right there you
have me pausing and thinking. And then you founded
five businesses in total. Is this your fifth
one? Yes. So there's three in between? Tell me
a little bit about those three before we move
on to where you're at today, because I'm fascinated.
I love reinvention, even though before the episode
you talked about evolution. So give me that evolution
story. Sure. So after my injury happened, everyone
who was advising me was telling me, you know,
you build this amazing brand. Everyone knows
who you are. Just keep the clinic. And so I listened
to them because I had never lost my career before.
I was really young. I thought I was going to
be a dentist forever. So I kept it and it just
kept eating away at me because the people that
I brought into my practice, even though they
had good hearts, they didn't love the work the
way that I did, especially with the phobic patients.
And so I kept just kind of giving more and more
away of my brand and simplifying it down to what
most people did. So when 2015 hit in Calgary,
that was the oil crisis. I was like, the economy
was tanking faster than when I first built the
practice, which was during the global financial
crisis. And I was like, if I don't get out now,
I may not be able to get out. So I sold the practice,
took a year away from it and built my professional
dance company. Now I didn't run away and join
circus as a lot of people originally thought,
but I had been, I turned pro as a dancer the
day I became a dentist. So I had parallel careers
while I was in dentistry. Just a lot of people
didn't know about the dance career because very
different industries. So I returned to dance,
built my professional dance company and became
the second largest adult based Latin company
in the first six months of opening it in our
city. So that was the next endeavor. And then
a year into that of licking my wounds and trying
to figure out why this had happened to me, I
decided to take my dental education and put it
to use because I'd invested a lot, not only becoming
a dentist, but getting my business skills, getting
my other clinical skills as well. So I decided
to build a consultancy. and took to LinkedIn
to get that noticed and went from 200 to 12 ,000
dental industry followers in a year. And dentists
weren't supposed to be on LinkedIn. So when people
saw that, they're like, can you do that for me?
And so I started dabbling with people's social
media to see if I was a unicorn or if it was
replicable and it was replicable. So that's where
the fourth company came in, which was a full
-blown social media agency that I launched two
months to the day before the pandemic hit. It
was funny because at that time with the social
media agency, I had two and a half full -time
team members and they're looking around at their
colleagues going, everyone's getting laid off.
Like if you need to lay us off, there's government
funding, we'll be fine. And I was like, well,
the dental company is going to get shut down
because the industry shut down. So they're not
going to be hiring consultancy. The dance company,
we can't breathe on each other. So that's going
to be shut down. I'm like, we're going to take
this social media agency to the moon. By 10 months
into the pandemic, we had gone from two and a
half to 14 full -time team members. So we exploded
because a lot of my circle, they were also professional
speakers like I was. And so they didn't know
how to present to the camera in isolation from
home and have the energy that they had when they
had a room of a thousand people. And so they
needed training on camera. They needed to leverage
their social media because they couldn't have
coffee dates. Everything was shut down. So that
amplified my company very quickly. And then I
moved to Nicaragua in January of 2021 because
I didn't want to spend the pandemic in a snowbank
in Canada. And I got there and realized I was
working 100 hour work weeks living in paradise.
That was insane. So I decided to start lighting
matches and burning off my company. So I sold
them and took the best of everything into Unleashing
Influence. As it was at that point, and that
has continued to evolve, and it's become actually
an innovation house as well as a personal branding
and identity company. So where are you living
at now? I'm back in Calgary, and it's wintertime,
and I don't like it, but I'm here. So I moved
back here from Nicaragua after 23 years. Oh my
goodness. We have that in common. Mm -hmm. Yes,
it is a beautiful country. Beautiful. It is.
So I love your story. I connect and that's where
my heart's at is in that evolution. I love, too,
how you've pivoted and not just pivoted, but
you've pivoted successfully because sometimes
we have certain ideas that we try. And in that
short time, it may not be successful. You end
up, you know, say, all right, I got to move on
to my next idea or my next hat, so to speak.
Do you still have the dance company? I actually
was just handed back the name a couple of months
ago, and since I'm back in Calgary where I developed
the company, we're already developing a full
-on stage show that we'll probably be presenting
end of summer or fall next year. So now let's
talk a little bit about AI, because I know this
is something that you're either passionate about
or you speak a lot about, is how to keep your
identity and make it irreplaceable in this age
of AI. Yes, so my journey with AI started...
About this time last year, actually, I took an
AI mastery course and a programming course because
I was looking at AI and I was going, I don't
understand this well enough. And I know what's
coming and it's freaking me out because I know
it's going to eat my lunch because I was doing
a lot of copywriting at that time. And with my
clients, I would do a 12 -hour process where
I'd interview them and I put together their strategy
guide, which was about 60 pages long. So you
can imagine why it took so long. And so when
I was in the program, I was like, you know what?
A lot of what I'm doing, isn't magic like people
always said i had a magical brain i'm like it's
just pattern recognition so i decided to start
building a model and training it how i pattern
recognize to build these strategy guides and
what came out of it is my personal branding playbook
which people go in It interviews them. They just
talk to the machine and answer the questions.
They end up in this stream of consciousness that
allows them to have a lot of insights just from
being asked all those questions. And then now
they actually get a 90 plus page strategy guide
that is customized to them. It's customized to
their genius. It's customized to who they want
to be working with those best, those highest
level skills so that they can either take that
and go get their next job or they can take it
and build an entrepreneurial journey from it.
What happens is when they get their niche of
genius specifically, they stop looking for those
external accolades. And with senior professionals,
especially, those external accolades are disappearing
as ageism is happening more and more. And AI
is being blamed for that, but oftentimes it's
ageism. And so then they start getting really
centered in who they are. And that gives them,
it brings their confidence back and allows them
to go, hey, this is the impact I want to make
in the world. Now I have choices as to how I'm
actually going to execute on that. Yeah, it gives
them purpose too. Yes. And for so many people
who have relied on those external validations
of those accomplishments, especially like really
intellectual people, they're facing massive identity
crisis like I did when I was 32 and lost my dental
career. And they don't even know where to start
because they were expecting to work until at
least 60, 65. And like I have clients who are
almost 80 who are still killing it out there.
They're not working for other people. They are.
creating their own consultancies and own intellectual
property and products like I did. And so they
still feel like they have so much to contribute.
And the more you study what happens to the brain
and what happens to these senior professionals,
they get more discerning as they get older. They
have a better filter. They recognize things that
a younger person wouldn't recognize because when
we're younger, we're trying to grab everything.
They sit back and go, oh, this is what's important.
Forget about all this. And so they have a lot
to contribute. The problem is if they don't package
themselves well, whether that's for their entrepreneurial
endeavor or to get another position in a corporation,
then what happens is they're lost. And so a big
part of what I'm doing with the playbook is I'm
trying to avoid the identity crisis that's already
started, but it's going to get worse as AI actually
does start to take over positions. AI is being
introduced to companies and it's being used a
bit as an excuse to let people go. It will get
smart enough to be able to take over those roles.
And then we're going to have a whole wave of
highly intellectual people, great thinkers who
are sitting there letting their brain rot because
they don't know how to actually create the impact
that they want. So it helps them to really understand
like, yes, I can still contribute and you can
contribute for years to come in the way that
you want. You don't have to be in the same box
that we were trained into, like climb the corporate
ladder. If you got kicked off the ladder, you
still have options. So is this online? How could
someone find what you built? So if you go to
app .unleashinginfluence .com slash v2, you can
go on there. It's $497 to set up your account.
You do it once and then you get your document.
You actually get a call with me as well to go
through it because there are some options in
it. So I help you to customize it. And then you
also get access to my other product, which is
the content machine. So for people who are trying
to build a brand, what often happens is they're
like, I know I need to put myself out there,
but I don't know what to say. And maybe I don't
want to. And so the content machine writes at
a really high level. So it takes what it learned
from you in the playbook. It understands your
tone of voice. It understands your archetypes.
It understands your intellectual property, who
you're going after, the impact that you want
to create, and actually writes on your behalf.
So you put in one idea and you'll get a week's
worth of stuff to post. So you'll get a high
level article. You'll get... You'll get carousels.
You get all these things. So it makes it really
easy to put yourself out there. And you don't
even have to create videos to be able to put
yourself out there. You can actually just leverage
the content machine to do that. I like it. I
can't wait to visit that page. And I'll make
sure to leave it in the comments so that anyone
else that wants to visit it can just click. And
I love how you offer that personal conversation
after they get those results because... There's
a human behind the AI. Yes, absolutely. What
would be the first move that somebody should
make in the event they feel like they're being
replaced or overlooked? Honestly, going and doing
the playbook will, again, even just them asking,
being asked those questions and them talking
to it, they start to have revelations about who
they are. So they start. getting this grounding
in themselves even just from the questions and
then once they have it in writing with the strategy
guide that gets spit out then they see it in
writing and that niche of genius section that
we have really helps anchor people and when they're
even if they've done it and they've gone out
and they're using it and suddenly they hit Maybe
they get trolled online or they don't get the
client that they wanted. When they come back
to the niche of genius and read it again, it
gets them re -centered again because it really
is the essence of the truth of the potential
that they have and the impact that they want
to create in the world. So it is that anchor
point and resets, we could say their North Star,
that they've been chasing so that if they got
off path because something external happened,
it brings them back to that path and back to
themselves. So this tool would also serve perhaps
for someone that is looking to pivot or somebody
that faces an unexpected change in their life
and is forced to pivot because it's out of their
control. Yes, absolutely. So it's a multi -purpose
tool. I love it. Do you have anything else that
you want to share? Anything else that you're
doing? Your next milestone? The next milestone
is really starting to... get in more with corporations
and help them to start reframing what is happening
with ageism. Because when you look at the studies,
and I talk to a lot of researchers, I talk to
a lot of people experiencing it, I talk to people
who are working with people experiencing it,
and the research shows multi -generational teams
way outperform homogenous teams. So us letting
go of our senior professionals and, again, letting
them rot and letting that intellect die with
them is not... useful to any company and it's
sometimes a matter of reframing how they come
in and it's they're not necessarily going to
be a cog in your wheel anymore right they're
going to be someone who maybe is a little bit
of a disruptor in the cog because they're going
to bring in this wealth of experience and they
understand how to use technology they get labeled
as not being tech savvy honestly some of my most
tech savvy clients are in their 70s so that's
a myth So when you can actually bring those people
in and bring that relevance that they have into
your company, your company is going to flourish
exponentially compared to if you just have a
homogenous one generation team. So how is that
passion born? I want to make that connection.
Sorry, I want to connect the dots. For sure.
Well, the passion with the identity crisis comes
from my own identity crisis, right? Like losing
my dental career, having no idea how I fit in.
That happened to me at 32. This is happening
to people in their later years when they're not
expecting it. And I wasn't expecting to lose
my dental career either. It was awful. So that's
where the identity crisis passion comes from.
And also, I've been working with senior professionals,
like one of my clients is former CIO of NASA.
So came to me after a 40 -year tech career and
wanted to pivot. And what I witnessed with senior
professionals or anyone who has been in corporate
and has had those external accolades, when now
it's suddenly just them. and they're representing
themselves, it's a totally different ballgame
than if they're representing a company. So they
go through this massive identity adjustment to
figure out, okay, no, I need to be good with
me and not have to worry about these external
accolades. And we eventually have to train them
out of introducing themselves as I'm former whatever.
And I used to do that myself. It took me a long
time when people asked me what I do to not start
with, well, I used to be a dentist because that
was the identity that I'd had for so long. That
gave me instant credibility. People know what
a dentist is, right? People know what a VP is.
People know those titles. But when you're now
representing yourself as an entrepreneur in something
like identity architecture, it's a curiosity
for people, but they don't instantly go, oh,
right? The recognition isn't the same as having
the title that you would have earned from university
or in the corporate world. Yeah, I've witnessed,
I've been working with people on that for a long
time. And all the companies that I built, even
though they seem very disparate, they were all
part of my identity. And so I had to figure out
what my genius was in the market and make myself
unignorable with each of those. That's how I
was able to build successful company after successful
company is because I built it around my genius
and I made myself unavoidable. Do you want to
share how we can get in touch with you online?
Yes, LinkedIn is usually the best place. So if
you look up Dr. Angela Mulroney with two O's,
you'll be able to find me on there and my company
is Unleashing Influence, Inc. And I'll make sure
to leave it all in the comments. Well, thank
you so much for joining me today, Angela. My
pleasure. Thanks for the time, Sheila. And thank
you all for tuning in to another episode of Milestone
Moments in Business and Leadership. Until next
time.