Fit for Life, Fit for Business, Fit for Growth and Freedom

Transcript

Linda J Hansen: Thank you for joining us today. My guest today is Abby Resch. She is the owner of Orange Shoe Fitness Studio, a personal training studio located in Wisconsin. I chose to have her on because she is a great example of a young entrepreneur who loves life, is excited about her role as an entrepreneur, a business owner and a job provider. She loves to help people and she loves this country. I thought our listeners would really be blessed to hear from Abby. So welcome, Abby. Thank you for joining us.

Abby Resch: Thank you so much, Linda. It’s a pleasure to be on your podcast. You are such a motivation and an inspiration around Wisconsin as a whole. I love to see the work that you are doing, how encouraging you are to women in business, conservatives around Wisconsin. It’s a challenging time for us and you are a huge light in this world.

Linda: Oh, well, thank you. Thank you. Abby encourages me. She helps me to stay more fit. (Laughs) She’s great. I just think her story is amazing. I don’t know who might be listening to this podcast, but if you’ve ever thought about taking the journey to become an entrepreneur, your life may be encouraged by listening to Abby. So Abby tell us a little bit about your background and how you ended up owning Orange Shoe Personal Fitness.

Abby: Yeah. So I graduated college not too long ago. I’m only twenty-four years old. Most people you talk to would say that’s not enough life experience to own a business, so on and so forth. I heard a multitude of those statements before going into this. It was daunting, none the less. So I was just a trainer in Madison for a couple of years before doing this. My husband and I, we got married and we decided that we wanted some more for our life. We have so much faith in the Lord and we prayed and prayed and we were unclear; it was unclear where He wanted us to go. We were just really praying and hoping. Covid hit and helped us slow down. We got to move back for a couple of months with his parents. His parents are wonderful entrepreneurs and they talked to us a ton. They said, “Look, you guys believe in the Lord. You believe in His plan. You can do whatever you want to do. He’s going to help you through all of these trials and tribulations. We did it. We know you guys can do it.”

We took this big leap into business ownership at maybe a stage in life where if it weren’t for God’s love and His grace that He’s given us through this really hard time, we probably wouldn’t be here and had the faith in ourselves to do this. So we went into ownership about a year ago. It’s going tremendously. We’re learning so much. Just having the faith in God has helped us to be guided throughout every single day.

Kind of going back a little bit, if it weren’t for this newer found Christian faith in my life, as about five to six years ago, in general I don’t think I would even have been married and have had this incredible life partner who is just a beautiful light in my life and so wise. We complement each other and it’s all because God led us to each other. If it weren’t for him helping me and me helping him through all of this stuff, I don’t think we would be at this stage of ownership at this age. It’s been incredible to just see and just pray every single day. You wake up and you pray and say, “Lord, show me a challenge today and help me through it.” I am very encouraged just knowing people like Linda and having you in my life to be this mentor and this guider. I really think that if you open up your life and your eyes to see where God is leading you, it doesn’t matter if you are 24 or 84, something will be there for you. It’s just nice to have the open eyes to see whatever He wants me to see and then accepting it and using it and doing it.

Linda: Right. That’s just so encouraging. To anybody listening, her faith in God obviously is a driving force for her. But also I just want to commend you, Abby, because one of my favorite quotes is, “Those who say it can’t be done should not interrupt the one doing it.” I’m sure you had people tell you, “You can’t do this; you’re too young. You don’t know enough,” or whatever, but you jumped right in with faith and confidence. I’m sure your confidence was shaky at time (laughing) like all of us. But you jumped in.

To encourage you, too, I was with someone a couple of weeks ago who’s a serial entrepreneur, a very successful businessman. He said that he sold his first company at twenty-three for something like 31 million or something. So age is not the determining factor here. But when you have wisdom and a great business sense, and good mentors and guidance, you can go really far. It’s been fun to see what you’ve done with Orange Shoe. I knew the previous owners and have high respect for them, actually missed seeing them, but am so excited for your journey here and what you bring to the table, not only as a business owner but as a young woman setting an example for other young women who can become entrepreneurs. It’s just been great to see you grow.

You have changed some in your views regarding politics and government intervention in business and things as you’ve become a business owner. I just want to highlight the fact that you did something really brave. You started a new business during Covid. Most people were closing their businesses during Covid. So that’s a real act of faith and courage, but you have learned a lot. What is your biggest challenge right now regarding government involvement or intrusion, shall I say, in how you run your business?

Abby: Yeah. As we opened up about a year ago, the lockdown was just ending. The doors were reopening to this fitness studio. There were a ton of guidelines and it felt like every single day there was something new as everybody knows. Every single day there was something new to be challenged with—new hurdles. How do we talk to our clients about this? How do we talk to our employees about this? There was just a ton to learn every single day. That was a challenge none the less with Covid.

But another one that a think a lot of people are probably struggling with is retaining and gaining new employees. I was telling Linda earlier that the business is growing, thank goodness, like God bless, but we are having a very hard time keeping up with it because employees are hard to find. They are hard to retain. As a small business owner who’s starting out with this, we, my husband and I, can barely take much home for ourselves at this time and we’re trying our best to invest in our employees. So we’ve found that the investment towards employees is getting larger and larger and larger because of the standards that employees are coming in with.

Linda: You mentioned earlier to me that it’s hard to get people to even want to be employed because as of right now—we are recording this in June of 2021—and as of right now so many people are happy to stay home and not work and get paid by the government and not work. Employers all over…I just saw a poll done in the Milwaukee area that 67%, I think it was, 67% of employers were saying that it is very hard to find new employees. People don’t want to work. People are getting incentives, cash incentives, to even show up for an interview. It’s just a difficult time for employers who truly do want to invest in their employees like you do, but they can’t get the employees to decide they want to work.

Abby: Yeah. Yes, exactly. That’s a very real struggle in the restaurant industry, in the fitness industry and in many different industries, but we are definitely personally dealing with that. So from that level what I suppose we would request and be very appreciative of the government would be to almost step aside and allow us to create the business that we want and not have such crazy standards for what these employees have gotten in the past and what they are expecting today from us. We want to pay our employees well and we want them to feel valued, none the less. We care so much about our employees. They help us to keep the doors open. Without them we wouldn’t be able to do that, but it would be wonderful if the government would be able to lessen their grip on the unemployment crisis and allow workers to feel empowered to go back to work.

Linda: That’s a really good point. We talked a little bit about the high taxes that you have to pay. We talked a little bit about some of the liability laws and things. I’m sure as a fitness studio you have a lot of liability insurance …

Abby: (Chuckles) Yes.

Linda: …that you must cover. Do you ever feel like the government at state and federal levels, local levels, too, that they could help you in that area?

Abby: Yeah. Definitely. There are an absurd amount of payments that we pay to our liability insurance and it’s slightly overwhelming at times. We are caring people that aren’t reckless. I wish that there would be some recognition for that and a tad bit more freedom. It feels like our freedoms are slowly being put to the side for the benefit of people elsewhere in the government.

Linda: Right. Right. You had mentioned to me earlier that your shift to conservative views was partly due to your Christian faith, the development of your Christian faith and your relationship with the Lord, but also as a business owner, you’ve come to understand how conservative policies and economic policies and other policies really do elevate the individual and they care about the person. Would you just be able to share just a little bit about your transition in your thought processes?

Abby: Yeah. Yeah. Definitely. So this transition happened five to six years ago. So if you can do the math, I was a teenager still. (Chuckles) That’s just crazy, crazy to think about, but it happened in mid-college time. I was struggling with my ethics, I suppose you could say. It just wasn’t making any sense. The people around me—what they were doing—wasn’t making any sense. So I had this lovely friend of mine who helped guide me towards some mentorship in the Christian faith. So I was really encouraged hearing the Good News. Prior to this and at this point as well, my political views were leaning very left because that is where my ethics aligned. They aligned with free love, free just- do-what-you-please and hope people like you for it. (Laughing) That was very troubling. It made no sense at the time. I just kind of went with it because that’s what my peers were going for.

Then coming to the Christian faith, I started to reevaluate what I was thinking and realizing what the Bible was telling me and what I was praying for and all of these things. I just wasn’t aligning with the left view anymore. I seeked out some wisdom from counselors—parents, different mentors like that—and just really realized, “You know what? This doesn’t make any sense.” I started reading books. I started really diving into the Bible, reading the Word, listening to podcasts, anything I could do just to make sense of what this meant, what conservatism meant. Over a very short period of time, I quickly realized that that was where my views aligned. I would say that even prior to becoming a Christian, once I learned what a conservative view was, I was like, “Wow, I can’t believe my eyes weren’t opened to that sooner.” I think helping the youth become aligned with that is something that we really need to do as a society or else we don’t know what’s going to happen.

Linda: We’ll lose our country.

Abby: We’ll lose our country. Yeah. Absolutely.

Linda: Well, you bring up a really good point of helping the youth. I know that with Prosperity 101 I try to always encourage employers to educate employees about how all of these issues not only affect their jobs, but their livelihood, their families, everything. Little things that we can do, just sharing your story, is helpful. I’m sure that the listeners have been really encouraged.

I know before we started recording, I shared a quote that I had just seen recently. It was that very few people, I don’t think I’ve ever heard of a conservative turning liberal after doing research. But we know of many, many liberals who turn conservative after doing research. You are a great example of that, not only turning more conservative in your political views, but also just coming to faith in the Lord and understanding some truths of Scripture and being willing. That is really commendable that you had a humble spirit. You had a teachable spirit. You really wanted to learn. You weren’t just taking everybody else’s word for it. You were struggling to learn and then you stepped out in faith which is a great example for young people and old people everywhere.

Thank you so much for sharing time with us and for encouraging everyone with your enthusiasm and your freshness I shall say. But you are the future of our country. You and other young entrepreneurs like you are the future of our country. We thank you and we support you.

Abby: Thank you, Linda.

Linda: If people want to reach out to you, what’s the website?

Abby: Yeah. You can just go to orangeshoe.com and you can find me there.

Linda: Super. Thank you. Again we just want to thank Abby Resch from Orange Shoe Fitness. Thank you, Abby.

Abby: Thank you