My Story, My Life
Episode #1: Welcome to the She Builds Show, I’m your host, Stefanie Olson. I’m excited to share my very first podcast and so grateful you decided to check this out! My goal today is to give you a little insight about me, my history and how I got here, as well as give you an idea of what I hope you will gain from listening. Here’s to She Builds baby. First things first, I’m a general contractor. Crazy, right? A woman contractor. Yep. How in the heck did I get here? Well, it probably started when I was a kid, and I chose playing in the dirt over dresses every time, or most of the time I was in the dirt in the dress that my mother forced me to wear.
I created the She Builds podcast, because I want to help you. I want to encourage you. I want you to dig deep in your soul and speak out loud the things you have been dreaming about, because if I can be a woman contractor in a male-dominated industry, then you can speak your dreams. What are you building?
SHOWNOTES:
• My truest love is horses, so I’m a throw and through cowgirl, I wear Cowgirl boots every day, and my idea of style is to pick up yesterday’s clothes and give it a big whiff to see if it’s still clean, this is partially out of survival and the fact that I have really grown and matured and take into the idea that how we look and how I dress no longer consumes me, I am me, and I like how I was created. (1:11)
• I’ve been married for 10 amazing years to a husband has truly taught me the real definition of kindness, sacrifice, selflessness and unconditional love, it’s definitely not a perfect life, but when I choose gratitude for daily. So growing up, my father ran his own accounting practice, he’s a CPA, I’m extremely detail-oriented, and he ended up encouraging me to help him a lot growing up. I went to school actually to be a teacher, honestly, because I wasn’t sure what else to choose. I wish they wouldn’t make you choose a career path until you were at least 30, because I had no idea what I wanted to do at 18. So I taught for a year, I figured out it wasn’t for me, and then I decided to work with my pops at the accounting firm, but I didn’t have the credentials to do that, so dad made me write up a business plan presented to him on how I would accomplish getting my license, and then he would consider making me a partner, I got married, became pregnant with our first sweet little girl. (2:54)
• I had time during the summer months to be creative with what I wanted to do, real estate really had drawn in my interest. We bought our first flip in about 2011, and that snowballed into about 100 flips over the next five years, as well as getting my real estate license. That all sounds really easy to say, but it was a crap ton of work from there, I bought a piece of ground that needed to be sub-divided and I built four houses on it, that blossomed into a relationship with a local developer and contractor that had asked me to be a part of our team. We, together, built about 80 new construction homes over the last five or six years. Now a while back, those guys who I had the pleasure of learning from and being taught so much information, they told me they wanted to slow down, I kind of freaked and knew I didn’t wanted to go find another contractor, what is a woman to do? Get er done. (4:25)
• I got my general contractor license, and while that should pretty much sum up where we are current day. So, getting my licence really sprouted a new dream for me, a dream where women do hard things and support each other, where women get encouraged and step into industries that history may have told them in the past that they don’t belong. Then She Builds was born. To me, She Builds is a place where women step into undefined roles, where women feel empowered to reach beyond their day-to-day life and achieve what they only dreamt about. Women’s potential and dreams will not be stagnant here, their voices will be heard and ideas counted. (5:24)
WAYS TO CONNECT WITH STEFANIE…
• Website: https://shebuildshomes.com
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/shebuildsbetter
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/shebuilds.homes
• YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/shebuildsshow