Welcome to Authentic Leadership for Everyday People, , the podcast where we investigate the connection between effective leadership and authenticity. If you are looking for inspiration and tips on how to become a better leader by being your true self, you are in the right place. Today we talk to Jackie Hermes, Founder and CEO of Accelity, a B2B Marketing Agency that specializes in helping SaaS Software companies grow their business, and host of The Art of Entrepreneurship podcast.Jackie shares her journey to growing her agency to a 7 figures business without any external funding and support, and gives us her perspective on the most important things new founders need to focus on.KEY TAKEAWAYS[02:34] - Jackie, it's great to have you here. Why don't we start, give our listeners a little bit of your story; your background and get them to know you.[03:51] - What led to the drive of being an entrepreneur? Have you always been interested?[05:37] - Tell me a little bit about how that process worked for you when you realize that maybe it was okay, if you weren’t going to turn out what your parents or friends expected and how you went about that.[07:01] - What are some of the key lessons that you’ve learned along the way? [08:46] - How was the process to learn what type of leader you wanted it to be? And when did you start articulating like, “okay, this is my leadership style”.[10:50] - As you are building your company and your own team, what are some of the key lessons that you bring in, as you bring people to work under you to make sure that you're setting the right culture that you want for your company?[12:38] - What is true and authentic to you? How do you define authenticity? And then, how do you define it for yourself?[13:41] - You mentioned that there were situations that maybe have taught you a little bit of a lesson or like, where you are not confident? Is there an example that you would be comfortable to share?[16:28] - What is your vision for the business? What's your goal in terms of scale? And how do you define success?[18:11] - Do you have a perspective on what you'd like to do?[19:12] - How do you define success for yourself?[20:10] - How important is that a part overall of the culture that you're setting within the company?[22:22] - do you do anything in terms of helping them manage clients expectations and helping manage client expectations to support your team?[24:00] - How do you think about which clients you want to take on and maybe clients that you may decide to pass on? Hmm,[25:40] - There's an episode in your podcast that I really liked, which is when you talk about how to react, about feedback and comments from external people and negative feedback. So I don't want you to give away the whole thing, but can you talk a little bit about that?[27:42] - if somebody was either building an internal team or a new internal venture inside a company or starting their own company right now, what would be the like, two or three most important things that you think they should be thinking about?[28:39] - Anything else people should be thinking about?[29:05] - Let's move a little bit to the personal side. What is a passion that is not directly work related, that is important to you? And how was it informed, your work?[30:32] - We all live in an era with big business cliched, jargon expression, which is one that drives you crazy, once makes you want to rip your head out.[31:11] - Food for the soul, or food for the body. So is there a particular, either recipe or drink? Or if you want to go to the soul site, a book, a movie, some music, a piece of art, that really speaks to you?Contact dino at: dino@al4ep.comWebsites: