[00:17] Tara Bansal: Welcome to her life, her practice, her way.

[00:21] A podcast for and about female financial advisors. Tara I’m Tara Conti Bansal and I’ve been a financial planner and life coach for over 20 years.

[00:32] I want this show to share other women financial advisors journeys, struggles and triumphs.

[00:39] I want to highlight the unique and similar ways to enjoying our life and our practice on our own terms.

[00:47] I hope to build a community of like minded, deeply caring and exceptional female advisors who want to help our clients and ourselves live a life that we love.

[00:59] One that is filled with love,

[01:01] learning, connection, meaning and joy.

[01:05] I hope you listen in.

[01:07] Hello and welcome. This is Tara Conti Bantzel and I am here with Kristin Lux.

[01:14] I am beyond thrilled to have her.

[01:17] I got to know her through the Society of Advice and she was our 71 leader which I,

[01:27] I like to think of as just an accountability group. But she impressed me with her knowledge and her warmth and really her coaching ability.

[01:39] So she is my first kind of non financial advisor that I’m having on the show. But I, I really feel like it is worth your time to listen and get to know Kristin.

[01:55] She has her own company she co owns. It’s called for the Love of Systems and it is an operations coaching agency.

[02:05] She’s a certified director of operations and a Habit Story coach.

[02:10] So welcome Kristin. I’m so excited to have you.

[02:14] Kristen Lux: Thank you so much for that lovely introduction. It is such an honor to be called a good coach by you because you’re a good coach. So I take that as the highest compliment.

[02:22] Thank you.

[02:23] Tara Bansal: And tell I want to hear. Well, I always start with the first question but I, I have to hear what is a Habit Story coach?

[02:33] Kristen Lux: So Habit story is assess an assessment. So it’s a psychometric assessment. It was created actually by this amazing woman here in my community. I live in Columbia, Missouri,

[02:43] the middle of Missouri, in a college town. And we have these brilliant minds here because we have universities and we have lots of small businesses here too. And there’s a woman in town here who is a consult.

[02:55] She’s a behavioral scientist by training and she has this assessment called Habit Story and she. It was actually developed by someone else years ago. I think it’s been around for about 20 years.

[03:07] She acquired that assessment I think about maybe six or seven years ago and kind of did some improvements to it, modernized it, made it more of a user experience type assessment like you know, like Myers Briggs or any of those tools out there.

[03:20] Um, but the neat thing about Habit Story is it’s actually evaluating your habits so your habits, underneath your habits are your behaviors.

[03:29] And your behaviors are driven by the stories that you tell yourself, if you’ve ever heard that phrase. So habit story, stories you tell yourself.

[03:38] Um, and this assessment, it’s not one where it’s like fixed in time and space. You know, if you’re a infj, you’re probably an infj. Like for the most part,

[03:48] this is one that you actually want it to change.

[03:50] So when I first took it,

[03:52] it was, I mean, it was life changing for myself and my husband. That’s why we actually decided to get certified in IT and do that with our clients. But it was life changing for us to have this information.

[04:03] And it was just such a great self awareness tool for us and really helped us navigate some major challenges that we were having in our own business working together as husband and wife.

[04:13] Tara Bansal: Well, that was one of my questions I was going to ask is like, I’m not sure many people could do that, but keep going.

[04:21] Kristen Lux: Yeah,

[04:22] well, habit story has been actually a huge help in getting us over some of the humps that we dealt with as husband and wife working together.

[04:30] And so, yeah, the cool thing about it though is I retook it. So we took it for the first time two years ago and then I just retook it. He and I both did about six months ago.

[04:38] And my results changed drastically in ways that I wanted them to and on things that I was working on, as you know, I do a lot of personal development counseling is just like, oh, that’s my coach.

[04:49] Like, you know, like, that’s how I approach that type of stuff. And so making changes to me, while big and a lot to do, is just really important. It’s just part of like being alive, I feel like.

[05:02] So this assessment for me has been almost like a roadmap to follow because it’s data from my own self about my behavior.

[05:10] And there’s so many of our behaviors because our brains are wired to create these shortcuts to make everything quick and easy.

[05:18] We do so many things on autopilot, but a lot of the things that we do on autopilot are things that we actually don’t want to do. They. They used to keep us safe at one point in time, you know, when we lived or worked in some like, toxic environment that we had to like,

[05:31] survive in.

[05:32] And now as we are, at least for me, as I’m older and I’m creating my own environment,

[05:37] hopefully a beautiful environment for myself and my husband and our team, I don’t want these old behaviors in my life anymore. And so this assessment has just been a huge tool in helping me make the changes that I want to make.

[05:48] And that’s why we introduced it for our clients as well. Because if you want to get into some deep, deep personal development and self awareness, this tool is. Is it in my opinion.

[05:59] Tara Bansal: I’m going to check it out. I, it is on your website. But I,

[06:03] I, I may be trying it. I just,

[06:06] because I love, just like you, I love profession, self development and anything that will help me change for the better, I’m all for.

[06:16] Kristen Lux: So yeah, it’s, I, it’s just part of being alive, I feel like. Well, and especially if you’re a business owner or you’re working inside of a small business,

[06:24] I mean, change is a constant in a small business.

[06:26] Tara Bansal: Yeah.

[06:27] Kristen Lux: Coming up against human friction of not wanting to change because we’re wired to not change. So it’s kind of a fun process. But I have tools.

[06:36] Tara Bansal: I’m trying to think there’s a quote but, or I’ve heard it plenty of times. But if you want self development,

[06:43] have your own business because that’s going to bring up your issues and your things more than anything else. And I call it like that’s true.

[06:52] Kristen Lux: Yeah. I call it personal development on steroids is business ownership.

[06:56] Tara Bansal: Business owner. Yeah.

[06:57] Kristen Lux: Yep. Yeah. You have no one to look at but yourself. When things aren’t going the way you like it. It’s like, get that mirror out and take a look and blame yourself.

[07:06] Tara Bansal: Good and bad. Ye. Yeah.

[07:07] Kristen Lux: And be kind to yourself and then move on and go make the changes you need to make.

[07:11] Tara Bansal: So. Yeah, well, I’m definitely going to check that out. And when did you have to go to a training or a certification for it? And that’s nearby.

[07:22] Kristen Lux: Yeah, we actually did it on Zoom and it was cool. I mean, they’re in town here, but they work with people around the country and actually there’s a group out of the UK that does it.

[07:31] So it was over Zoom.

[07:33] Um, my husband and I did that together. I think it was about a,

[07:37] it was all, it was in one week. We did it in one week and it was like over multiple days in one week. And then, you know, we had to do kind of a,

[07:45] like a practice assessment with the group that put it on and, you know, I mean, we had to go through a training protocol.

[07:51] Tara Bansal: Yeah.

[07:52] Kristen Lux: Essentially to make sure we understood because we need to understand the science behind what we’re teaching too. This is not just about the results, but it’s about educating.

[08:00] So that they can understand how to make those changes.

[08:03] Tara Bansal: Very good, thank you. All right, so let’s go back to my normal initial question,

[08:09] but tell us your story how and I like to hear all the way back, like where you grew up, your family of origin to where you are now.

[08:19] Kristen Lux: Yeah. So I was originally born and raised in the St. Louis, Missouri area.

[08:23] I was on the Illinois side of the river. So Illinois and Missouri are like a metropolitan region.

[08:29] The town I grew up in was about 15 minutes from St. Louis, but was like a small town. Basically. Even though it was 15 minutes from like a big city, it was very much a small town.

[08:38] Lots of people who had lived there their whole lives. Their parents lived there. That was my parents story. They were born and raised there. So were their parents.

[08:46] My dad was an electrician and my mom was a stay at home mom.

[08:51] However,

[08:52] when I was eight, my dad decided that he was not happy in his marriage to my mom and he decided to, you know, obviously like split up.

[09:01] He stayed in our house for two years to help my mom get on her feet because she was a stay at home mom,

[09:07] which was a very kind thing for him to do, especially, you know, when you’re not wanting to be in that marriage anymore, to live under the same roof.

[09:14] Unfortunately for me as a child and as a child who loved her family,

[09:18] that was a very disruptive time for me because my brain thought that my dad was going to stick around because he stayed in our house for two years even though my mom would be like,

[09:27] you know, he’s not staying. Right.

[09:29] And I could acknowledge it, but I couldn’t process it at that age.

[09:34] So unfortunately that time for me while, while now it is an empowering time for me. It was something that kind of set me on a, I would say like kind of a depressing teenage years of my life.

[09:45] Um, I was kind of mad at my dad for the divorce, blamed him for all of it. I now know, of course as an adult now that I’ve been in my own marriage and relationships, that two people are involved in marriages.

[09:58] No matter whose decision it is to leave, two people are involved. But I didn’t know that at the time. And so my teenage years were honestly pretty rough.

[10:06] I was just depressed and you can see a before and after. If you look at me from fifth grade to sixth grade,

[10:12] the contrast in photos of me is actually really crazy.

[10:16] Yeah,

[10:17] I’ve had to do a lot of inner child work to get past that time of my life, honestly, because it was hard. It was.

[10:23] And my mom was just as Upset as I was. So she wasn’t always equipped to help me through, even though she tried her best, of course.

[10:31] So, yeah, my teenage years were kind of rough, and really what happened was I just disassociated, honestly, is what I did. Like, I learned to just kind of, like, check out for myself to get on with life.

[10:41] Well,

[10:42] I. For whatever reason, I was still able to be a functioning member of society, and I went and got a job. And, you know, I babysat all through high school.

[10:51] Um, that was how I, like, kept myself busy. I was in athletics when I was younger, but I never really. I’m not competitive at all. Like, I do not care about competition at all.

[11:01] Um, and so I don’t think athletics resonated with me because I was just like, well, I don’t really care if we win. So.

[11:08] So when I had the opportunity in eighth grade to start babysitting regularly for a family, that’s what I did all through high school.

[11:14] Um, and then right after high school, I fell into working in the restaurant industry. I had a friend who. She’s like, let’s go get a job at this restauran together.

[11:23] Well, she actually couldn’t even get hired because of her, like, school schedule. And I ended up working there.

[11:28] A career in the restaurant industry for the first, like,

[11:31] guess, probably. I think I left the restaurant industry when I was, like, 26.

[11:35] But then I came back later, too. So, I mean, I spent a Good Almost, like 10 years of my life working in the restaurant industry.

[11:41] I was that person who was, like, a great server. And everywhere, every restaurant I worked at either became, like, the lead server,

[11:48] an assistant manager, a manager. Like, I always got promoted into these roles.

[11:53] And the hilarious thing about it, though, is coming off of this time in my life where I was, like, very depressed and disassociated. I was really introverted and shy. And working in a restaurant is.

[12:04] I would say I would. I would attribute that to the people skills that I have today.

[12:09] And, you know, that fuels a lot of the work that I do in my business, Working with clients and coaching.

[12:13] But I was this very, like, shy, introverted person.

[12:17] Just. Even though restaurants are crazy and they’re just, like, kind of a chaotic environment, it was a really positive time in my life as far as helping me blossom into the person I am today.

[12:26] Tara Bansal: That’s good.

[12:27] Kristen Lux: Yeah. But eventually working in restaurants, you burn out because it’s chaos, stressful.

[12:33] Tara Bansal: It’s. Yeah. Like, I was a server, too. And for years, I would have nightmares.

[12:41] Kristen Lux: Like, I still do.

[12:42] Tara Bansal: Like, I still Do I mean, I call a.

[12:44] The. The name of the restaurant Nightmares. And like all of us that were servers there all say talk about our nightmares and it’s so vivid.

[12:53] Kristen Lux: But yeah, yeah, I, to this day, I mean it’s probably been a few months since I’ve had one, but I have dreams where like I get all these tables at once and like I can never get caught up.

[13:04] And it’s just those, one of those perpetual loop dreams that you like can’t get out of whatever you’re in.

[13:10] And that’s kind of what it’s like when you’re actually working in that industry too,

[13:13] because you don’t know when, you don’t know when the rush is coming. You don’t know how many people are coming for the rush. You just do everything you can to get ready, but it’s coming and you just don’t know when.

[13:22] So it’s crazy.

[13:23] Tara Bansal: And to me, like, I feel like it’s one of the skills and maybe one of the things I struggle with now is like I am in a rush, like always prioritizing like what is the most important thing I need to do next and then move on to the next and go on to the next and.

[13:43] And hearing this habit story, like I think that created something for me and now I want it to not be so always like pushed and rushed and juggling and how do I change that?

[14:01] Kristen Lux: Yeah, you have to really consciously work to undo that like rushed hustle mentality.

[14:07] It does, it drives you when you work in restaurants. But when you’re working in a small business and it’s not that environment, it’s like, whoa, whoa, whoa, calm down here.

[14:16] Like it doesn’t need to be that.

[14:18] Yes,

[14:20] this crazy. Oh yeah. I struggle with that for a long time. I still do. I mean, I can flip back into that mode on a dime if I need to.

[14:25] So I mean I could probably jump right back into a restaurant to this day if I needed to.

[14:29] Tara Bansal: I’m sure you could if you did work there for that many years. Yeah, you know, a lot. Yeah. So what, what was the pivot out of restaurant work?

[14:40] Kristen Lux: Yeah. So I was fortunate enough, which I now see it as fortunate to be overlooked for promotions twice by one company that I was working for.

[14:51] They, I was 26, I was a female, and they thought that 50 year old white guys were a better choice for management than me twice.

[15:01] Even after telling me the first time, hey,

[15:04] we made a big mistake. We see that you’re still running the restaurant, so we’re going to move you to this other restaurant and give you that one. But train you on the things that you need to learn, like budgeting and all of that.

[15:14] No training, nothing.

[15:16] Just bring in another 50 year old guy and replace me with him. So.

[15:20] So that drove me out because I thought that that was going to be my career. I was actually. I was in talks with them to move to another city at one point,

[15:27] run a restaurant in another city. They wanted me to get my legs underneath me in St. Louis and then they were going to move me to a new city because they were expanding.

[15:34] And that was like.

[15:36] It’s kind of like pulling. Having the rug pulled out from underneath you a little bit. At the time,

[15:40] especially being 26 and still being kind of disassociated and not really having gone through that was self.

[15:46] Tara Bansal: Awareness, your plan and your like projected future. That’s what you had. You know, the road you were going down.

[15:53] Kristen Lux: Yes. I thought that that was.

[15:55] Tara Bansal: I think your analogy of having the rug pulled out from you is a good.

[16:00] Kristen Lux: Quickly. It was very disruptive at the time.

[16:03] Tara Bansal: Yeah.

[16:03] Kristen Lux: Oops. I think we chopped out there a little bit. Sorry about that.

[16:06] Tara Bansal: That’s okay. So then what happened? You got passed over?

[16:11] Kristen Lux: Yeah. So I.

[16:13] I ended up in working in commercial real estate after this.

[16:17] So getting back to eighth grade, babysitting. The family that I babysat for in eighth grade, the mom was high up at a commercial real estate firm and they were looking for somebody to come into one of their property management offices as an administrative assistant.

[16:32] And I had those types of skills from being a manager in restaurants. I knew how to run a back end of a business at this point.

[16:40] And I had a connection into the company because I babysat for her kid.

[16:44] And I got hired into that role. And so that helped me start transitioning out of restaurants. I worked in that capacity for four years.

[16:52] That was a great opportunity for me because that was actually one of the few opportunities that I had in my career where I got to learn by seeing what was what should be done versus like by learning what not to do,

[17:04] which is every other experience I had pretty much.

[17:08] And so that kind of gave me some of the foundational skills that actually eventually turned into me building this business.

[17:15] I learned good bookkeeping, I learned good rhythms and routines.

[17:19] It was really just like a good overall experience working for this company because they did have their act together.

[17:25] And so I worked there for four years. But this whole time I’m in college. Okay. So I didn’t graduate from school until I was like, I think it was 33 when I graduated from college, so I jumped right into restaurants and started making money.

[17:38] And I was like, wow, I love working, I love making money. I’m gonna do that. And then I’m just gonna go to school part time.

[17:44] So even when I’m in property management, I’ve got school running in the background. Working part time.

[17:49] Tara Bansal: Was school in person or was it.

[17:52] Kristen Lux: Yeah, yes, okay,

[17:53] it was in person.

[17:55] At this point I had switched schools and majors. So I started my schooling at Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville, which was just like a close by my house school that I went to.

[18:05] Studied communications there. So my first half of school was there.

[18:08] And then I transferred over to wash U in St. Louis, which was at this point right down the street from where I lived in St. Louis.

[18:16] And I studied sustainable communities and development there.

[18:20] So that I thought I was going to stay in commercial real estate forever at this point. So I’m like building my career now around staying in commercial real estate.

[18:29] So at some point though, I just had the realization in commercial real estate that there wasn’t going to be a ton of opportunity for me beyond going up the property management ladder a little bit.

[18:40] And as I would go up the ladder, I would pick up more responsibility that included answering the phone on the weekends and doing these things that I really wasn’t looking to do.

[18:50] Like, I love to work, I trust me, I can find like work to do all the time. I’m like that person. But I do want to be able to take time off and I don’t want my phone ringing on the weekends.

[19:01] And so I think I finally just had to come to terms with the fact that that career path wasn’t going to be for me.

[19:07] And what I did actually was just went right back to restaurants for a little while while I finished up my bachelor’s. And then as I finished my bachelor’s it coincided with me deciding that it was time to find a full time.

[19:19] So I had gotten connected to this project that I did in college and I started a career right after I graduated working in the solar industry.

[19:29] That job is the job that actually gave me my legs for the business that I have today. And it was my last full time job before starting my business.

[19:37] I got to build a company inside of a company there. So I was running a maintenance department and it needed to run really separately from the company because they were focused on building new developments and large developments at this point.

[19:51] And I had an account, I had accounts like 600 accounts that I was managing. A lot of them were residential installs. Some of them were commercial, but they were smaller scale commercial.

[20:00] And this company had now transitioned to being a very large scale, like national developer. So I had to set up a company and a company and run this maintenance department,

[20:09] set up my own accounting set up, you know, we had a CRM or client relationship management software,

[20:15] but it wasn’t really optimized. There weren’t good records.

[20:18] So I basically spent two years building out all this stuff, creating SOPs,

[20:23] leaving a trail behind myself, because what I walked into was really no trail.

[20:28] And it was hard to walk into a situation where there’s all these customers records about like what’s happened at their houses and all of this stuff. And so I kind of made it my mission to like leave that role better than I found it.

[20:40] Tara Bansal: Nobody asked you to do that or you just.

[20:42] Kristen Lux: Well, no, they didn’t because they weren’t interested in that line of business anymore.

[20:47] It was kind of like, we have these customers,

[20:50] we want to take good care of them,

[20:52] but our focus is really into the future.

[20:54] Like, that was like the rear view mirror and they were focused in looking out the windshield. They were going, yeah.

[21:00] And so it was just what I wanted to do, to be honest with you. I mean, they were happy to have me stepping up and doing what I was doing, certainly,

[21:08] but it wasn’t like part of my job description. My job description actually entailed that I was going to be helping with marketing. And I was. I hate to use this term, but it’s a little derogatory.

[21:18] But I was like a junk drawer kind of. Or that’s how they saw me.

[21:21] Oh, a little bit of marketing. Well, you’ll run the maintenance stuff. You’ll help plan the annual retreat.

[21:28] You’ll do all the things.

[21:29] Tara Bansal: Yeah, anything they didn’t want to do, they.

[21:34] Kristen Lux: And that was actually my realization also around how a lot of operations rules are treated that way as junk drawers.

[21:41] And again, I know that’s a derogatory term, but I’ve been a junk drawer, so I feel validated in saying it.

[21:47] Um, and that also really lit my fire. Feeling like a junk drawer, Feeling like, you know, I’m busy running this whole department in a department,

[21:54] and I’m supposed to also do marketing on top of it when I don’t even have marketing skills at all. By the way, I had no marketing training whatsoever.

[22:04] It was truly a jump drawer situation.

[22:06] And. But it lit a fire, right? So it lit this fire in me.

[22:10] I’ve seen so many times what not to do.

[22:13] I’ve seen what to do and I’M just burned out at this point because I didn’t have any boundaries either. You know, when you’re an employee, especially when you’re coming up in your career, maybe things are a little different now with young people now, which more power to them that they are starting to set boundaries.

[22:28] But I didn’t learn how to set boundaries around myself with work. And so,

[22:33] pretty much, if you asked me to do it, I would do it. I did draw the line on the marketing stuff.

[22:37] That was one thing that I said no to,

[22:40] but pretty much everything else I did, and it would lead to me burning out constantly, every single time.

[22:45] Tara Bansal: And so how many hours were you working? That job was.

[22:50] Kristen Lux: That job was just a full. It was full time. I mean, it wasn’t. I wasn’t working tons of extra hours in the job,

[22:55] but I was working my booty off when I was there working, like I was putting in, you know, eating or like working during lunch,

[23:05] that kind of stuff. Crying at work sometimes, like, you know, some of those kind of days. So it was challenging, but it was a. It was a. Struggles I have learned are there to teach us lessons.

[23:17] And even though they are terrible in the moment, I’m not going to sit here and be like, struggling is easy. It’s hard. It’s really hard.

[23:24] But I learned a lot from those struggles. And I was able to.

[23:29] To learn from all the experience that I got, too.

[23:31] I did have a really great mentor in that role as well. He’s the one who helped me build out the CRM and get it the way I needed it. And I’ve actually had conversations with him after the fact and had him help me with a couple client things that I’ve had come up over the years even,

[23:44] because that’s cool. So good with CRMs.

[23:47] So that was really as much as it was a challenging time. It was the launching point for me. I felt starting a business was my only choice because I wasn’t finding happiness.

[23:56] That was supposed to be my dream role when I took that job,

[23:59] and it wasn’t. Yeah.

[24:03] And so you have to kind of look in the mirror and go, okay,

[24:06] this didn’t work. What now? And my husband is entrepreneurial and got me to start a business, actually.

[24:12] Tara Bansal: Did you both start it together or you started first?

[24:17] Kristen Lux: Yeah, no,

[24:18] I was completely me in the beginning. So he was doing other entrepreneurial things. He’s been an entrepreneur since, like 2014.

[24:26] Um, he’s ebbed and flowed in and out of jobs over the years as he’s needed to, but he’s Like a through and through entrepreneur. You just need to go start your own company.

[24:34] Like, you need to just go do your own thing. I was terrified to do that, to be completely honest. I. That was not how I ever saw myself and my life going.

[24:43] I liked the stability in quotes of a job.

[24:46] Um, I now know that they’re not stable at all. Um, neither is owning a business.

[24:51] Tara Bansal: Yeah.

[24:53] Kristen Lux: But it’s like pick your, pick your hard. Right? Like, that was hard. This is hard. At least with this, I get to do what I want to do in ways that I know work.

[25:03] And if people don’t listen to me, then I don’t work with them because why would I work with someone who doesn’t want to listen to me when they’re coming to me for advice?

[25:11] Right. But when you’re an employee, you don’t have that ability, choice or those.

[25:14] Tara Bansal: Yeah, that control or those options. I agree. How did you meet your husband and how long have you guys been together?

[25:23] Kristen Lux: We met working at a restaurant. Yeah.

[25:26] Tara Bansal: Actually by surprise.

[25:27] Kristen Lux: Yeah,

[25:28] the restaurant where I was overlooked for the promotions actually is where I met him. So what a great gift that opportunity was too.

[25:37] He and I were one of like several marriages actually that came out of that restaurant, which is so funny because restaurants are like, very incestuous and like, people are all dating each other.

[25:46] And I’m sure everyone thought, oh, another fly by night relationship. And 15 years later, almost 16, here we are still together.

[25:54] Tara Bansal: So that’s great.

[25:55] Kristen Lux: Yeah. Yeah, it was really fun.

[25:58] Tara Bansal: So was he from the area also?

[26:01] Kristen Lux: He’s originally from the St. Louis area. He grew up, he moved around a little bit.

[26:05] His family moved for work in his early years, and then by the time he was 8, his family settled back in St. Louis. So he was from that area, went away to college,

[26:15] came back, didn’t want to come back. Actually a job that he had taken. They were going to transfer him up to a different city to open up a new location.

[26:22] And he ended up staying in St. Louis because he met me.

[26:26] So he thought,

[26:29] yep. Yeah, he. Well, and it, it ended up not being a fit for him anyway once he got into it. So he’s like, well, guess I’m staying in St. Louis.

[26:36] Guess I’m gonna hang out with her for a little while.

[26:38] Um, and then we eventually. We eventually got him back where he wanted to go, which was to Columbia, Missouri, where we live now.

[26:45] So it took us till 2018 to get him back, but we got here eventually.

[26:49] Tara Bansal: Very nice. What, and when did he join your company and how did that Come about.

[26:57] Kristen Lux: Yes. So he joined in 2023.

[26:59] That came about by us avoiding it as much as we possibly could. We were, like, working adjacent with each other at this point.

[27:07] We were sharing a client.

[27:09] We were both working in, like, a fractional capacity at this time, where we were with clients really long term.

[27:14] Um, he had brought me in. He’s more big picture, and I’m the details person.

[27:18] So we have this, like, amazingly complimentary skill set. Like, it’s almost crazy how complimentary our skills are.

[27:25] And so he was bringing the big picture for this client, but it was time to get into the implementation and the details work. And so he had brought me in,

[27:32] and we shared that client for about a year.

[27:34] But in working together with that client, we started developing these frameworks that we were developing for this client because he had one, like, holding company and multiple businesses spinning off of it.

[27:45] So it was a complex structure, and we had to create these, like, visual diagrams and just different ways to present the business and organize the business that we’d never really been challenged to do before.

[27:56] And we were doing it together.

[27:58] And so we just started to realize around the same time. I wanted to get away from doing the fractional work. The fractional work is very rewarding because you’re with people for a long time and you get to see the work all the way through.

[28:11] Tara Bansal: Yeah.

[28:11] Kristen Lux: But what is not rewarding about it is that you can only work with a couple people at a time. Like, two or three clients at a time is about the max that you can do.

[28:19] And I wanted to have a bigger impact than that. I didn’t want to, like,

[28:24] the work that we do, the operations work that we do is so needed in small businesses.

[28:29] My own experience working in small businesses is the fuel that drives me.

[28:33] And I see how much, you know, I mean, I was talking with a woman in who works in a small business at a conference a couple weeks ago and talking to her about our work.

[28:42] And I showed her a diagram that just explains, like, a concept that we have. And she started crying,

[28:47] like,

[28:48] because she’s so overworked and so, like, overwhelmed. Yeah. In her biz, in the business. And it’s not even her business. She’s an employee of this company.

[28:56] And so that’s, like, what fuels all of this is that.

[29:00] And so I wanted to have a bigger impact than what I could have just working with a few people. And so we just decided he was. He was consulting, I was consulting.

[29:08] I had a brand established. He really didn’t.

[29:11] And so we merged him into my Existing brand because the name and a logo and all the things. And so we merged him in.

[29:20] It took us a good year and a half to get stable. I would say we thought we were going to, like, pivot on a dime, and typically I would say we probably could.

[29:31] But when you’re doing new things in the market, you do have to get market validation on what you’re doing.

[29:36] And at each time we would seek market validation, we would get it, but we would realize the thing we were offering wasn’t something that we actually wanted to do.

[29:44] And so we kept having to move and twist and turn because it was. We were dialing in what we were going to offer, essentially.

[29:53] And along the way came more of our own proprietary frameworks. And the habit story assessment came along about a year into this journey.

[30:01] So it was very.

[30:03] For us, even though it was long and winding and we thought it was going to be quick, it was actually the perfect journey because it allowed all these other things to unfold while we were on the journey.

[30:12] And so last fall, I would say, so fall of 2024 is when I feel like we finally, like, kind of got our bearings about us. So that was about a year and a half into him joining the business.

[30:23] We had no website, actually, that whole first year and a half that he was in the company, we just had, like, a landing page up.

[30:28] Tara Bansal: Yeah.

[30:29] Kristen Lux: Um, thankfully we had enough of a reputation and former clients that we were able to sustain ourselves. But it was a challenging time with you don’t have clear services all the time, your website’s not up.

[30:40] Like, it’s kind of hard to stand in your confidence when you’re having conversations with people, when you don’t have that full clarity.

[30:47] My only confidence, I guess, was coming from the fact that I knew we could create transformations for clients no matter what we did or how we did it.

[30:54] And that kind of carried me through that time.

[30:57] But it was a. It was a challenging time, for sure. And that’s really when a lot of our, like, issues with each other started to come to the surface, too, because when you don’t have that clarity and you have all this uncertainty around what you’re doing,

[31:08] it’s just. It’s stressful. I mean, there’s no way around it than to say it’s stressful.

[31:13] So that led me to doing trauma therapy.

[31:17] He had done trauma therapy just before that. We ended up in couples counseling this year in 2025.

[31:24] So we finally have it dialed in where I think we’re in a really good place working together. But between the stress of all the pivoting and just all that uncertainty that gets created and then spending double time with your spouse in stress,

[31:38] it was like, I mean, it’s like two rocks rubbing up against each other constantly.

[31:44] Tara Bansal: Everything up to, you know.

[31:46] Kristen Lux: Yes.

[31:47] Tara Bansal: As you said,

[31:48] self development on steroids and then with your spouse.

[31:53] Yeah, that’s a whole nother level that I think is.

[31:58] So what,

[31:59] who are your ideal clients and what do you love to do?

[32:04] What do you want to be doing?

[32:06] Kristen Lux: Yeah. So ideal clients are service based businesses. They are small teams.

[32:11] So sometimes we are working with a solopreneur who’s about to grow a team or they’re just overloaded and they’re like, I need help.

[32:18] And they need that structure whether or not they’re going to have a team.

[32:21] But usually the business already has a team established and the owner brought in the team to help them. But the owner is now finding that they have a full time job managing the team that they brought in to help them.

[32:36] Often that is coming from business owners are visionary. So they have a vision, they have an idea, they’re going to bring that idea to life.

[32:44] Well, operations are what actually allow you to bring that vision to life. But visionaries don’t think in those terms. They’re very. Right brain. They’re very, you know,

[32:53] they’re on to the next thing usually before the last thing is even put together,

[32:59] let alone implemented. Right.

[33:01] So I was always that person that brought that. Well, wait, how are we going to do that? Like, like the visionary is the gas pedal and I’m the brake. Right.

[33:11] So I’m bringing that like break to the situation.

[33:14] And what that is, is just, it’s slowing down so that you can speed up.

[33:19] So you have to take a. I mean we’ve had to do this in our own business. We brought someone in earlier this year to start working with us. And I’m creating SOPs and I’m, you know, before I hand things off to her too, I’m not going to hand her a flaming pile of **** and say,

[33:33] here, help me with this, like I’m handing her SOPs now. Is she now responsible for updating and continuing to work on those sops? Yes, of course.

[33:42] But I need to give her an initial sketch of what I want her to do. And so that’s what we’re empowering business owners to do, is to have this structure, to have a container to hold this vision inside of that actually helps the vision come to life more fully and in a way that supports the client and the team,

[34:00] because, you know, a lot of times we think about the client and oh my gosh, everything for the client. Which of course they’re always the first priority. They’re the ones that pay the bills.

[34:08] But you can’t leave the team in the Dallas. Yeah.

[34:11] Tara Bansal: Long term the team has to thrive and not burn out or there’s going to be turnover. And that brings a whole nother, you know, set of issues.

[34:22] Kristen Lux: And a lot of times what’s interesting is I see that there’s a lot of these, a lot of the visionary business owners, they’re very dynamic, likable people. And so the team actually won’t even leave because they like the owner and they like the mission of what the owner’s trying to do in the business.

[34:37] But they just grow resentful. I mean, that’s what ends up happening is they grow resentful. And that’s not a good healthy environment to be working in either where someone is sticking around because they like the person they’re working for, but they resent the way the company is running.

[34:51] So it’s really those types of dynamics that we find ourselves in,

[34:55] they’re challenging to navigate. I won’t pretend that it’s easy to walk into those environments because we’re imparting change inside of companies.

[35:03] So the clients that we work with are growth minded. They’re, they’re looking to change.

[35:08] They’re not looking for us to wave a wand and fix all their problems. We are,

[35:14] it looks like we’re waving a wand probably,

[35:16] but we’re walking arm in arm with our clients. They’re doing the work with us, their team is doing the work with us. It is very much arm in arm.

[35:24] We’re going to show you the way, but you’re going to execute on the way that we show you.

[35:30] And we’re going to make sure that the way we show you aligns with what works for you and your team also. Right. We work very holistically.

[35:37] We have our frameworks and we have what we would like to do in a perfect environment. But there is no perfect environment in a small business.

[35:44] And so we’re always adapting how we work to meet the clients where they are because that’s the only way you’re actually going to impart change. And we’re not coming in to bring change for change’s sake.

[35:54] We’re bringing in to bring change to improve the business.

[35:58] And so we need everybody level looked at. Yeah.

[36:01] Tara Bansal: Grow.

[36:01] Kristen Lux: Yeah. And we need everybody to be bought into that. And so we work in a way that we really want the team and the owner to be bought into what we’re doing.

[36:08] And that really looks like meeting them where they’re at to make sure that we’re. We’re really all on the same page and doing what’s going to be best for them long term, because they’re ultimately the ones that are going to continue working inside the company, not us.

[36:20] Tara Bansal: Yeah. So how. I’m sure what percentage of your clients are financial advisors?

[36:28] Kristen Lux: I would say probably around 50% at this point have been financial advisors. So we got really blessed by this wonderful client that we have from this. From Columbia, where we live.

[36:39] We worked with her a couple years ago, and she’s in a mastermind. She’s a financial advisor. She’s in a mastermind. And one day, like three months after we worked with her,

[36:49] I got like four inquiries in the same day of people booking discovery calls. And I’m like, where did all these financial advisors come from?

[36:58] She emails me and she’s like, hey, I mentioned your name at my mastermind. I hope you don’t mind.

[37:04] And I’m like, I don’t mind at all. Thank you very much. Um, and what was just beautiful about it is that they’re all amazing people.

[37:13] Everyone she has referred into us has been that have come out of this group are just amazing people. And so that helped us see that we really like working with financial advisors.

[37:23] Financial advisors, they tend to have that growth mindset, at least the ones we’ve worked with.

[37:28] Meeting people like you just reaffirms that even further for me that there’s a growth mindset, there’s a willingness and an understanding that you sometimes have to invest to get yourself to the next level.

[37:39] There’s an understanding that you need an outside perspective. Oftentimes that your perspective as the advisor is where your knowledge lies.

[37:47] But then when it comes to how all that gets brought to life, that’s not necessarily your expertise. And so we just find that advisors get it. Like they. They understand what we do, they like how we work.

[37:58] Um, there’s just a real. I think it’s a values alignment, to be completely honest with you, more than anything.

[38:04] Tara Bansal: Yeah. Hearing you talk, I think so many advisors,

[38:07] we do what we do because we want to make a positive impact. And it’s funny that hearing you like shifting away from the fractional work was because you wanted to make more of an impact and you’re passionate about it, like just the name of your company.

[38:23] And I think a lot of financial advisors are also.

[38:27] But to your point,

[38:28] they only know what they know and do not either enjoy or thrive in the operations part.

[38:41] Big struggle.

[38:42] Kristen Lux: Yeah. And we’ve found too that one of the, one of the best ways we can help is if they already have a team installed, if they have a, you know, a client services director or someone kind of sitting in that client facing role, we can actually oftentimes spend a lot of our engagement working with that person rather than the owner themselves.

[38:59] Usually the owner will have to be involved in the first part of it because that’s when we’re really digging into the vision and trying to realign things to the vision and to where they’re trying to head.

[39:08] But once we have all that down, we can really. Any implementation work, the owner doesn’t need to be involved in that at all. So if they already have that team, it’s really almost the perfect formula because they don’t have to, they’re already on the hamster wheel basically.

[39:22] So we don’t want to add extra work to their plate. It is inevitable that someone on the team is going to have extra work,

[39:28] but it’s better if they’ve got some kind of right hand person that we can train oftentimes too, those right hand people,

[39:34] you know, I’m 42 years old and I’ve had a ton of experience in front of me.

[39:38] If your right hand person is 25, 26,

[39:42] they’re probably super smart if you’ve put them in that role. I mean, most client services ops people are amazing humans and their brain works the way it needs to work for that role,

[39:52] but they really haven’t seen the full range of experience of what is out there and software tools that you have to use for all of this and how to document things.

[40:02] And so that’s really where we come in, is almost like mentoring that person to bring them up to that next level so that they can shine in that role.

[40:10] With the owner not having to do that because the owner can’t mentor them in operations because that’s not what they do.

[40:16] Tara Bansal: Well, one, because it’s not what they do and two, I feel like they don’t want to take the time to do it either. And so I feel like that’s hearing that is powerful and important.

[40:28] How long are most of your engagements?

[40:30] Kristen Lux: So three months is usually the max of most of our engagements. We can get a lot accomplished in three months if everybody’s dedicated to the work and sets aside the time that’s needed.

[40:40] Um, we have an engagement that’s as short as one day where you know if you can imagine the three month is like maybe going through steps one through ten.

[40:48] One day is going to get you through step one or two. Right. Like we’re only going to get the first little slice. But if you’re,

[40:54] we talked with someone yesterday where his business just really isn’t defined enough right now for us to go all in.

[40:59] And so working with us to get him to just that next step is like perfect for him.

[41:04] But if you already have a functioning business, you have defined services and the wheels are just starting to fall off the bus,

[41:11] you’re going to need that three month engagement to really get to the next stage.

[41:15] With the exception of, you know, sometimes a one day might look like, hey, I need to hire someone and I need help putting together a job description and what my application questions are going to be.

[41:25] That’s absolutely something that sometimes an existing business might need. But typically we find that when they come in that we’re going to need to do a good three months worth of work together.

[41:34] The three month engagement is really focused on process work though. So kind of the three areas we work in are people,

[41:41] process and then planning.

[41:44] Planning is really from more the annual planning perspective and getting the strategic kind of perspective out to get everyone on the same page and then the people work. While we would love for it to come first, it’s almost like icing on the cake after we’ve done the process work.

[42:00] Because you really can’t take the time to do that deep inquiry self development work when the wheels are falling off the bus.

[42:09] So we have to get the wheels back on the bus and maybe build a new bus or put some new paneling in and new chairs and some seat belts and you know, all the things and then we can look at doing things like habit story and stuff like that.

[42:22] So if someone were to tack habit story on, they’d be with us for three and a half ish months to add that on. And then if someone also did annual planning, it would take four months in total.

[42:33] So if you did everything with us, it would take four months.

[42:35] Tara Bansal: Okay, that’s helpful.

[42:37] Kristen Lux: Yeah.

[42:38] Tara Bansal: What, what are some of your core personal values and how did they show up in your life both work wise and at home?

[42:49] Kristen Lux: Yeah, that’s a good question.

[42:52] I would say recognizing the inevitability of change is one of my major core values. And just knowing that that’s part of life so that I’m not like paddling upstream, resisting that,

[43:07] that’s something that I fought for a long time. So now that it’s like ingrained in me. I think it’s pretty critical in my flow to. To mind.

[43:17] And it also keeps me going with, you know, reading personal development books and all the things that I know I need to do to stay up to date. Even when I think I’m up to date, I’m like, oh, yeah, I should go back and read that book that I read two years ago because I need to refresh my knowledge.

[43:30] Right. So that drives me a lot.

[43:34] I also,

[43:35] I have the belief that we will only be as strong as our weakest link.

[43:40] And I mean that on a small business level. I mean that on a societal level. I mean that on a world level.

[43:46] Yeah, on all levels.

[43:48] And so, you know, the work that we do with small businesses, we’re trying to raise the level of everyone up to the same level.

[43:56] But I believe that on a societal level as well. And you know, the way we’ve built our company where we have one team member, but we take good care of her, we pay her well, we.

[44:05] She has benefits. Like we’re a small business,

[44:09] but we.

[44:11] And it takes a lot to administer benefits for a team of three.

[44:15] But I wouldn’t have it any other way because why would I bring someone into this world and then leave them high and dry inside of our company? And so I think that’s a big, A big part of my personal values is just taking care of each other and taking care of each other as humans.

[44:32] Like recognizing that we’re all just humans doing our best. And even if we don’t like how somebody’s showing up, they’re doing their best on that day.

[44:40] Tara Bansal: Mm,

[44:42] so true. Yeah.

[44:44] And I agree with you on that. Like, I feel like if you treat the people you work with well,

[44:51] that makes such an important difference long term.

[44:55] And that’s the way I feel like I wanna be treated. So I want people, you know.

[45:01] Kristen Lux: Yeah, it should be standard practice and I feel it is becoming more and more standard practice. But you know, small businesses, it’s hard to run a small business and a lot of them do struggle to figure out how they’re going to do benefits and how they’re going to do all the things.

[45:16] And I think one of the things for me was that I designed the business around being able to do those things.

[45:23] So we’re a digital first business. We don’t have an office space, we don’t have a lot of the typical overhead that a business would have that has those things because we don’t need those things to run our company.

[45:34] Some companies do need those things. You know, if you run a brick and mortar business with a storefront, you have no choice. Right. But we try to keep ourselves as lean as possible as a company so that we’re not carrying a bunch of extra load that then bogs us down.

[45:50] That keeps us from being able to do the things that we need to do, like paying people well and things like that.

[45:57] Tara Bansal: Why, why did you join the Society of Advice? Just to network.

[46:04] Kristen Lux: Networking, for sure, was part of it.

[46:06] I would say that I was also, I was just looking for a place to land at the time. I had just come out of a group, a group coaching program, and I just like the consistency of having some kind of call every month that I don’t know, made my brain work and think or like,

[46:22] yeah, see things differently, like gain new perspective, I guess I would say.

[46:26] And I had come across Carl a couple years ago, actually someone recommended that I listen to the Kisses and Carl podcast well before we had ever worked with a single financial advisor.

[46:36] And he was recommending that we hear their perspectives just from a business owner perspective. He said, you should just hear what they have to say for your own business.

[46:45] And I came across them and Carl really resonated with me and Carl’s approach.

[46:51] And I don’t even remember how I came across the Society of Advice, to be honest with you, but I was like, oh, that’s Carl from the Kitsas and Carl podcast.

[47:00] And at this point we had, yeah, we had worked with, you know, a number of advisors at this point,

[47:06] and I was just looking to enrich my brain basically and find a community.

[47:10] And it,

[47:11] it’s advisors, but it’s a mindset community, I would say, at its core.

[47:16] And so I think the advice that he’s giving is applicable to any type of business.

[47:20] Tara Bansal: Any service.

[47:21] Kristen Lux: Yeah, business.

[47:22] Tara Bansal: I feel like I agree with that. True.

[47:24] Kristen Lux: Yeah. And so I, it just, it resonated with me. And again, the values alignment with, with advisors is a big part of that though.

[47:32] Being in the 7:1 groups and meeting all these amazing people in these breakout groups that I’m in. It just only affirmed that that was the right path for us, was for me to kind of like spend more time networking with advisors.

[47:45] So that’s where I put a lot of my time and energy now when it comes to business development is meeting and working with advisors because they’re one of the groups that we like to work with the most.

[47:55] Tara Bansal: So what, what do you think or what comments do you have around female advisors in the industry? Any advice or observations you have noticed?

[48:10] Kristen Lux: I think that the female led advisor firms that we have worked with have been some of the best run companies that I have seen.

[48:19] So where when we come in, we’re fine tuning some things.

[48:24] We’re, you know, we’re still helping them get to the next level,

[48:27] but they already have a lot of really great things in place inside their companies and they tend to take really great care of their team.

[48:35] Not to say that the men we’ve worked with haven’t also,

[48:38] but I don’t know, there’s just a different level of warmth, I think that comes sometimes from women who are running businesses.

[48:45] And I don’t know, I just, I, I think that the future is female financial planners.

[48:54] Listening to one of your other podcasts, actually,

[48:57] she was talking about the data behind women being better planners and that our brains are just wired more for this. Right. Like it’s, it’s more. I think the men like the relationship side of it and they like the, you know, kind of the excitement of like no two days are the same.

[49:14] But I don’t know, the women I feel like are very made for the industry and I understand the challenges of being in male dominated industries. It’s very hard.

[49:26] I encountered that myself working in the restaurant industry and in that situation where I was overlooked for the promotions. And you feel like you’re kind of fighting an uphill battle a little bit sometimes trying to break into that, but the only way to break into it is to break into it.

[49:40] Like all you can do is just do it and then more women will do it because they saw you do it and then somebody sees you do it. And that, you know, it’s just like a, it’s a domino effect basically.

[49:51] And so there are women who have paved the way and now the path is clear. And I think that the future is female in financial advising. I really do.

[50:02] Especially with the, you know, the average age of an advisor is what, like 60 now? I think, like, there’s a major issue with needing to get some young people into the advising world.

[50:13] And if we’re looking at who’s most naturally suited for it, it is women.

[50:18] So why not bring more women into the field?

[50:22] Tara Bansal: Do you have any ideas on how to bring more women into the field?

[50:26] Kristen Lux: Oh, goodness.

[50:29] I think mentorship is a huge thing for anybody trying to find their way.

[50:35] I know just even in operations, the work that I do and helping to elevate the profession that I’m in, that’s something that I take great pride in, is meeting with other people who, you know, they might have the title Admin assistant or something.

[50:48] That’s not really operations in their title, but I see that they’re an operator.

[50:53] And so having someone mentor that person to help them see the skills that they have and the gifts that they have, I think is a really big part of bringing people into things that feel uncertain to them,

[51:07] because people need to see a path. They need to see, like, oh,

[51:10] this has been successfully done before.

[51:12] Like,

[51:13] I don’t have to figure it all out on my own.

[51:16] So I think mentorship with any profession is one of the number one ways that you can usher someone into it is just by showing them the way and. But being honest with them, too, about what they’re up against,

[51:27] you know, and being transparent about what they’re going to walk into so that they’re not.

[51:33] You don’t bait and switch them. Oh, this is a great, you know, whatever.

[51:36] Tara Bansal: Dishonesty. Yeah, yeah,

[51:38] no, I agree. And I love you bring that up because I feel for most of the women I’ve had on the show,

[51:45] many of them have talked about the importance of mentorship in them moving forward and even getting where they are. Yeah, I agree with that. Thank you.

[51:56] Kristen Lux: Yeah.

[51:58] Tara Bansal: What boundaries or systems or mindsets help you avoid burnout?

[52:06] Kristen Lux: That’s a good question.

[52:08] Boundaries wise. I.

[52:10] Right now we’re in a phase where we do sometimes have to work on the weekend.

[52:14] So I accept that as my fate right now.

[52:18] Don’t love it. Don’t want this to be my life.

[52:20] But I try. What I try to do is Saturday.

[52:25] There’s an X on the calendar. Like, there’s no work. Nothing’s getting done on Saturday. You know, I’ll do stuff around the house or whatever, but no work on Saturday.

[52:33] So if I do have to work, it is going to be on Sunday.

[52:36] In general, my boundary would be no work on the weekends.

[52:39] Tara Bansal: But again, you’re working towards that.

[52:41] Kristen Lux: Yes, working toward that right now.

[52:43] Sometimes we have to work harder to work less hard.

[52:48] That’s the phase I’m in right now.

[52:50] And then systems, you know, I rely a lot on digital tech to help me stay,

[52:55] to help me maintain my boundaries. So using my do not disturb on my phone to not allow interruptions during my day, nothing we are doing is an, er, emergency situation.

[53:07] And while we do want to be responsive to our clients, we have our clients pretty well trained that you email us when you have things that you need from us.

[53:16] If you’re calling or texting me, it’s urgent.

[53:19] Like, it’s an urgent situation. And so keeping my phone on do not Disturb to just keep those notifications out of my purview. I am actually adhd,

[53:30] so you would not always think of a systems person as being adhd.

[53:34] But I think I came into this world because I had to figure out how to navigate the world and I didn’t even know I had adhd.

[53:41] Um, I found that out.

[53:42] Tara Bansal: How old were you when you found that out?

[53:44] Kristen Lux: Like a year and a half ago.

[53:45] Tara Bansal: So I was like, so many more and more people are finding out. And yeah, that’s another whole. We could talk about that for a while, but.

[53:54] Kristen Lux: Oh, yeah, it’s. It’s crazy. Um, so you know, just having like using the tech. So the do not disturb turning. You know, we use Google Voice for our phone. So people don’t have my cell phone number.

[54:08] They have a business phone number.

[54:10] If I go out of town and I want to completely turn Google Voice off, I can.

[54:14] And we can have Hannah, who is our marketing and ops coordinator, watch the phone because it’s a voiceover IP phone system. So I don’t have to somehow get her my cell phone and be like, hey, watch my cell phone.

[54:25] And then now I don’t have my phone with me or something. Like, we can easily. So kind of building the business digital first, I think was a really big part of this for me to set it up where other people can come in and provide support inside of our company so that everything isn’t reliant upon me.

[54:42] And that’s the very same thing we do for clients. So it works out full circle.

[54:47] And then just on my personal life too, having again using digital tech, though, like, my husband and I have a really great system for how we grocery lists and keeping track of what we’re going to run out of so that neither one of us is on the hook for keeping track of all of it.

[55:00] We have like a shared grocery list system that we use and little things like, it’s like little micro actions, I think that move the needle the most a lot of times with this stuff.

[55:09] So it’s all these little tiny things that pile up to create a world where we can have some boundaries and not be burning out all the time.

[55:19] Tara Bansal: Yeah.

[55:19] So you apply the systems to your personal life too, is what I’m hearing. And the difference that makes and what strikes me is one of your values. And I heard like embracing change.

[55:35] So it’s having systems, but which is one side, which to me sounds very structured, but the other side is you have to still embrace change for those.

[55:45] Kristen Lux: Systems because the systems are what allow you to Embrace the change without losing your mind.

[55:52] I mean,

[55:53] it’s not like I’m not like one of those people that like my house is like, everything has its place and like,

[55:58] like I’m not that rigid. But at the end of the day, having some structure, having some systems running, what you’re doing, it gives you that creative ability to be more flexible with what’s coming your way because you know you have these things to fall back on.

[56:15] You know you’re not gonna forget to change the furnace filter because you’ve got the reminder set. Right.

[56:19] Tara Bansal: Like, do you think these systems helped you, help you manage your adhd?

[56:26] Kristen Lux: Yes, very much so.

[56:27] Tara Bansal: That’s like.

[56:28] Kristen Lux: Yeah.

[56:28] Tara Bansal: Part of. Yeah.

[56:29] Kristen Lux: That you earned.

[56:31] It’s also discipline though too. Like, like as an ADHDer, you, you’re like chasing the next dopamine hit.

[56:39] So it’s like whatever the thing is that’s like in front of you that you want to go do, sometimes you have to stop yourself from doing it,

[56:46] especially if, you know you have a reminder set to do it at a later time.

[56:50] Like if you built the structure and you built the system, you have to rely on it to almost run you rather than just letting your whims run you. It’s not to say that I won’t let whims take me some days, because I will.

[57:03] Because sometimes my best copywriting or email newsletter or whatever comes from a whim.

[57:09] And so you do have to sometimes lean into that.

[57:12] But really trying to let those systems support me and knowing that I have them there and I can lean on them so that I don’t have to chase after every single whim is a really big part of it, for sure.

[57:25] Tara Bansal: Yeah, I think. Well, that resonates with me. So what would you tell your younger self? What advice would you have for your younger self?

[57:36] Kristen Lux: Oh boy,

[57:38] it’s not about you.

[57:41] So,

[57:42] like the restaurant promotion thing, that actually wasn’t about me at all.

[57:48] It was about a direction they were headed in with their business. They were going corporate.

[57:52] They had brought in this corporate guy who had his ideas of what things needed to look like. And it could have been any 26 year old female in that role that would have been booted out.

[58:02] Also.

[58:03] It was just me, right. But it wasn’t about me. And it didn’t reflect my value. It didn’t reflect who I was and what I was contributing.

[58:11] I went on to create budgets at my very next job because someone showed me how to do it right.

[58:15] So it had nothing to do with me.

[58:19] Didn’t realize that at the time.

[58:21] So really good lesson learned. But I think everything in life to recognize that it’s really not about you. Someone being mean to you,

[58:29] um, you know, somebody flipping you off on the highway. Like, none of that is about you.

[58:35] Yes, maybe you did cut them off and that was rude, but all you did was flick them over the edge when they were already on the edge.

[58:42] So, yeah, that’s my advice to my younger self.

[58:46] Tara Bansal: What, what does success look like for you?

[58:50] Kristen Lux: What,

[58:51] it’s freedom. So it’s having the freedom to live my life the way I want to live my life.

[58:57] Um, again, right now, I don’t have all of that lined out. I do work on Sundays a lot.

[59:04] But I’m also in a space right now where next fall, my husband and I are talking about going down to Houston for six months because we have nieces that live there.

[59:11] We have no children.

[59:13] That’s by plan,

[59:14] by design.

[59:15] And we’re just at a phase where we’re like almost feeling like a little nomadic. And before we don’t own a house right now. That’s also by design.

[59:24] We are pet free. That was not by design, but here we are.

[59:28] And so we kind of see this opportunity of like, oh, we’re like, kind of like ready to be nomadic for a minute.

[59:35] And so going and spending some time with our nieces next fall is like now on the table. Where.

[59:42] Yeah, it’s just. I don’t know, it’s an interesting place to be in life to. To have what I would call this level of freedom.

[59:49] It’s all because I’ve worked hard to get here.

[59:52] Um, I built this business from the ground up. I built it remote first. Like, this has been part of the plan all along. We’re just finally to the point now where we can actually start thinking about some of these things,

[01:00:04] which is really nice.

[01:00:05] Tara Bansal: So in your ideal world, how much time is spent working and how much time is playing or hiking or doing other things?

[01:00:16] Kristen Lux: I would like to be to a four day work week at some point.

[01:00:19] Um, that’s my goal.

[01:00:22] So that’s. I think that’s the. To me, the happy medium is be in front of the computer doing the thing most days of the week.

[01:00:31] But have one day where you can get your chores done and run your errands and do all your things.

[01:00:37] Have a day that you can socialize if you want to, and then have a day that you can rest.

[01:00:42] Because right now the rest and the errands and all of that kind of gets mixed up into one day. And then you socialize in the evening and it’s like it’s just too much for one day, I feel like.

[01:00:53] So I’d like to have three separate days for each of those things and then I, I mean, I’ll even work 10 hour days if I need to on the other four days.

[01:01:01] Tara Bansal: That freedom and carve out nice. Well, we’ve already gone way over, but what, what favorite book, podcast or resource are you loving right now?

[01:01:17] Kristen Lux: I am in a not consuming very much content phase of life right now.

[01:01:22] I do have a new podcast though, that was my former business coach and good friend. It’s called Unsolicited Business Advice and her name’s Amanda Quick and she’s just one of those like, no nonsense, like tell it like it is firecracker.

[01:01:38] Tara Bansal: I feel like I’ve heard her name before. Is that possible?

[01:01:41] Kristen Lux: I don’t know. Maybe it is possible, I would say. I mean she’s around on the Internet and stuff.

[01:01:46] She’s in Columbia where I live, but she’s definitely around. So I would definitely. If you like to just hear. It’s. It’s her and another person. They’re both business owners.

[01:01:56] They’re just giving hard truths about business. But they talk about a lot of. They do a lot of personal development too. So they talk a lot about the, the personal underneath it all, you know, root cause kind of stuff.

[01:02:08] Tara Bansal: I love.

[01:02:08] Kristen Lux: Yeah, I love it too. I just think it’s. I love business. Like I.

[01:02:12] Business is my baby in a lot of ways and so I love soaking up that information.

[01:02:18] But right now I’m at a like no new frameworks phase of life where it’s like, I have enough frameworks. I don’t need any new frameworks. Like you can hit me with some information that’s helpful and some thoughts and perspectives, but I don’t want any more frameworks right now while I work to assimilate the ones I already have into my life.

[01:02:35] Tara Bansal: Yeah, that’s great. Your go to self care ritual.

[01:02:41] Kristen Lux: Walking in nature.

[01:02:44] Yeah, it’s the movement combined with the nature and then if you can have a partner, a friend, somebody join you on one of those walks, it’s like the perfect combination in my opinion.

[01:02:55] Tara Bansal: How often do you get to do that?

[01:02:57] Kristen Lux: A lot.

[01:02:58] So part of the reason we moved to Columbia, Missouri was to get ourselves closer to trails. Columbia has a really cool Rails to Trails trail that runs through town.

[01:03:08] We can be at that trail in five minutes.

[01:03:11] We have really great parks and other things too. There’s another one that’s about five minutes away that’s kind of hiking, like, in, like, a neighborhood.

[01:03:18] Um, so we’re really close to those things. And that’s by design. I mean, we moved here. That was one of the big reasons we moved here, was to put ourselves five minutes from nature walks.

[01:03:27] And we’ve been here seven years, and we still probably three, four, sometimes five times a week, find ourselves on that trail. So.

[01:03:34] Yeah.

[01:03:34] Tara Bansal: Yeah, it’s not. That was taking a value and something that was important to you and making it. Making it real.

[01:03:41] Kristen Lux: Yeah. Designing our life around it, really. And then we live in a great community, too. I mean, that’s the. That’s the bonus of it all is, like, we have this amazing place that we live that also has amazing trails.

[01:03:51] So it’s. It’s worked out pretty well.

[01:03:53] Tara Bansal: Very good. What’s one thing bringing you joy right now?

[01:03:59] Kristen Lux: I would say it’s my marriage.

[01:04:02] Tara Bansal: We’ve done all this work.

[01:04:04] Kristen Lux: Yes. We’ve done so much work. We are on the other side of, like,

[01:04:08] all the things.

[01:04:10] And we’re really happy in our relationship, and I think we’re really happy in our life. We’re. We’re happy with what we built for ourselves. We. We’re still doing a lot of work with, you know, working six days a week and all the things, but we’re happy with where we’re at.

[01:04:24] We’re happy with the direction we’re headed and, like, where we’re at right now was a dream at one point in the past, and we’re there like we’re living the actual dream right now.

[01:04:33] Even though some days it doesn’t always feel like I’m living the dream.

[01:04:37] I remind myself I think that’s normal.

[01:04:38] Tara Bansal: And everybody needs to hear that. So.

[01:04:40] Kristen Lux: Yeah. I just remind myself, though, that, like, one. One day in the past, this is where I wanted to be. Like, this is. This is good. Yeah.

[01:04:48] Tara Bansal: And I feel like. I don’t know, at least for me, hearing, like, your marriage, that. That’s awesome. That just.

[01:04:55] Kristen Lux: Thanks. It wouldn’t have been that a year ago, so.

[01:04:57] Tara Bansal: Well, and that makes it even more sweet, you know, that, you know, you made that the effort and put in. You know that it didn’t come easily. Right.

[01:05:08] Kristen Lux: I don’t think anything good does come easily. I really don’t.

[01:05:12] I’m not a proponent of, like, work hard all the time,

[01:05:15] but if you don’t put in hard work for things. That’s one of the things that I don’t like about AI is it actually steals the struggle from you a lot of times.

[01:05:23] And I think it’s okay.

[01:05:25] Tara Bansal: I agree with that.

[01:05:26] Kristen Lux: Yeah, I think it’s okay to have things help you with the struggle.

[01:05:29] I use AI. We’ve got a note taker on this meeting right now. That’s an AI note taker. Like, I’m all about it. But recognizing where those things can help us and where they can hurt us is a really important part of using technology.

[01:05:42] And anything that’s looking to steal your struggle the right way so that you don’t inadvertently make it too easy on yourself where now you don’t even appreciate what you have because it came so easily.

[01:05:53] Tara Bansal: And I think that’s a great point because I feel like almost all my growth has happened in the struggle. And that’s how you learn.

[01:06:01] Kristen Lux: Oh, yeah. And it sucks in the moment. Like, let me be clear. Struggle is not fun.

[01:06:06] I. I’m the first one to start crying immediately when something is going the way I like.

[01:06:13] Tara Bansal: I’m a total crier, so. Oh, yeah. Where can people learn more about you and your work?

[01:06:20] Kristen Lux: So I like to hang out on Instagram and we’re on Facebook and we’re on LinkedIn.

[01:06:28] My LinkedIn is Kristen Lux. K R I S T E N L U X and then all of our handles online are for the love of systems. So F O r the love of systems.

[01:06:39] And I’m going to be doing a lot more speaking next year. That’s one of my big goals for next year, is more speaking. So you may see me at conferences if you had any that you recommend that you think I would be great for.

[01:06:50] I would love to hear it because I really want to spend time at financial advisor conferences. That’s one of my big goals for 2026.

[01:06:57] Tara Bansal: Exciting. I can’t wait. Yeah,

[01:06:59] I. I always say this, but I do feel like I could talk to you for another hour.

[01:07:05] Agree. I do have more questions, but we already went over and I really appreciate your time and your being here and.

[01:07:13] Kristen Lux: So glad to be here.

[01:07:14] Tara Bansal: An inspiration just hearing your story and thank you.

[01:07:18] Kristen Lux: I’m so glad to be here and thank you so much for taking the time to ask me all these beautiful questions.

[01:07:25] Tara Bansal: Wow. Thank you.

[01:07:26] What stayed with me after this conversation is how clearly Kristin shows that entrepreneurship really is one of the most powerful paths for personal development.

[01:07:39] Building a business forces you to sit with yourself,

[01:07:43] notice your patterns, limiting beliefs, and decide who you’re going to become.

[01:07:49] And when you do that, alongside your spouse,

[01:07:52] it’s a whole other level of growth.

[01:07:54] The change, the uncertainty, the counseling, the hard conversations.

[01:07:59] And then to hear her say that her marriage is what brings her the most joy right now.

[01:08:05] I just,

[01:08:06] I thought that was awesome. It says so much about how willing she’s been to do the inner work, not just the business work.

[01:08:15] The other thing that really stood out to me is Kristin’s commitment to being a good human and treating people everywhere well.

[01:08:24] One of Carl Richards favorite sayings is to be a better advisor, be a better human.

[01:08:30] And that is what Kristin is doing.

[01:08:32] She’s building a company where her small team is paid well and offered benefits.

[01:08:38] Where operations exist to support humans, not squeeze them.

[01:08:43] That resonates deeply with how I want to run my own business.

[01:08:47] I think of the people I work with as a second family.

[01:08:50] I want to work with people I love, help them grow and treat them with great respect.

[01:08:56] Kristin reminded me that when we put humans first,

[01:09:00] our clients,

[01:09:01] our teams, our partners,

[01:09:04] everything becomes better and more sustainable in the long run.

[01:09:08] The systems,

[01:09:09] the structure, the growth,

[01:09:11] all of it flows from the decision to care for each other.

[01:09:15] I hope you feel as inspired by Kristin and the way she’s building her life and business as I do.

[01:09:22] Thank you for listening to her life, her practice, her way.

[01:09:27] A podcast for and about female financial advisors.

[01:09:31] I truly hope you have enjoyed this podcast and got some value from it.

[01:09:35] If so, I would love to ask a favor of you.

[01:09:38] Please go to Apple Podcasts or Spotify and rate and review my podcast.

[01:09:44] This will help me get the word out to other amazing like minded female financial advisors.

[01:09:50] You can also send it to a friend or two who you think would gain something from listening to it.

[01:09:55] Until next time, I’m wishing you the very best.

For the Love of Systems – https://www.fortheloveofsystems.com/ -Kristen’s operations coaching agency

Habit Story assessment – https://www.fortheloveofsystems.com/people-services – Example Habit Story Report

Carl Richards’ The Society of Advice – https://www.thesocietyofadvice.com/

Unsolicited Business Advice with Amanda Quick – Website: https://www.amandaleequick.com/unsolicited-business-advice – Podcast: https://rss.buzzsprout.com/2538572.rss

Columbia, Missouri Rails-to-Trails system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MKT_Trail (Kristen’s beloved hiking spot)

For the first fifteen years of her career, Kristen Lux withstood the continuous operations challenges of scaling small businesses before finally burning out. In January of 2020, she launched For the Love of Systems to bring much-needed operations frameworks and coaching to small business owners and their teams.

Leveraging the power of digital systems + processes combined with proprietary frameworks, For the Love of Systems empowers their clients with new approaches to their operations that reduce burnout and bring ease to their day-to-day.

Through one-on-one coaching, team development workshops, and keynotes, For the Love of Systems is on a mission to educate and empower business owners and their teams with human-first, technology-enabled operations strategies + frameworks, empowering them to adapt to uncertainty and changes in how they work and create value collectively.

Kristen is a Habit Story certified coach and Certified Director of Operations, and she has more than twenty years of operations experience working for and with small businesses. When she isn’t nerding out over processes and habits, you can find her outdoors walking, hiking, biking, and paddling, volunteering, going on road trips, doing yoga, and watching corgi videos.

Social Media Handles

Kristen Lux

• LinkedIn:  linkedin.com/in/kristenlux

For the Love of Systems

• Instagram: instagram.com/fortheloveofsystems
• Facebook: facebook.com/fortheloveofsystems
• LinkedIn: linkedin.com/company/fortheloveofsystems

 

[00:17] Tara Bansal: Welcome to her life, her practice, her way.

[00:21] A podcast for and about female financial advisors. Tara I’m Tara Conti Bansal and I’ve been a financial planner and life coach for over 20 years.

[00:32] I want this show to share other women financial advisors journeys, struggles and triumphs.

[00:39] I want to highlight the unique and similar ways to enjoying our life and our practice on our own terms.

[00:47] I hope to build a community of like minded, deeply caring and exceptional female advisors who want to help our clients and ourselves live a life that we love.

[00:59] One that is filled with love,

[01:01] learning, connection, meaning and joy.

[01:05] I hope you listen in.

[01:07] Hello and welcome. This is Tara Conti Bantzel and I am here with Kristin Lux.

[01:14] I am beyond thrilled to have her.

[01:17] I got to know her through the Society of Advice and she was our 71 leader which I,

[01:27] I like to think of as just an accountability group. But she impressed me with her knowledge and her warmth and really her coaching ability.

[01:39] So she is my first kind of non financial advisor that I’m having on the show. But I, I really feel like it is worth your time to listen and get to know Kristin.

[01:55] She has her own company she co owns. It’s called for the Love of Systems and it is an operations coaching agency.

[02:05] She’s a certified director of operations and a Habit Story coach.

[02:10] So welcome Kristin. I’m so excited to have you.

[02:14] Kristen Lux: Thank you so much for that lovely introduction. It is such an honor to be called a good coach by you because you’re a good coach. So I take that as the highest compliment.

[02:22] Thank you.

[02:23] Tara Bansal: And tell I want to hear. Well, I always start with the first question but I, I have to hear what is a Habit Story coach?

[02:33] Kristen Lux: So Habit story is assess an assessment. So it’s a psychometric assessment. It was created actually by this amazing woman here in my community. I live in Columbia, Missouri,

[02:43] the middle of Missouri, in a college town. And we have these brilliant minds here because we have universities and we have lots of small businesses here too. And there’s a woman in town here who is a consult.

[02:55] She’s a behavioral scientist by training and she has this assessment called Habit Story and she. It was actually developed by someone else years ago. I think it’s been around for about 20 years.

[03:07] She acquired that assessment I think about maybe six or seven years ago and kind of did some improvements to it, modernized it, made it more of a user experience type assessment like you know, like Myers Briggs or any of those tools out there.

[03:20] Um, but the neat thing about Habit Story is it’s actually evaluating your habits so your habits, underneath your habits are your behaviors.

[03:29] And your behaviors are driven by the stories that you tell yourself, if you’ve ever heard that phrase. So habit story, stories you tell yourself.

[03:38] Um, and this assessment, it’s not one where it’s like fixed in time and space. You know, if you’re a infj, you’re probably an infj. Like for the most part,

[03:48] this is one that you actually want it to change.

[03:50] So when I first took it,

[03:52] it was, I mean, it was life changing for myself and my husband. That’s why we actually decided to get certified in IT and do that with our clients. But it was life changing for us to have this information.

[04:03] And it was just such a great self awareness tool for us and really helped us navigate some major challenges that we were having in our own business working together as husband and wife.

[04:13] Tara Bansal: Well, that was one of my questions I was going to ask is like, I’m not sure many people could do that, but keep going.

[04:21] Kristen Lux: Yeah,

[04:22] well, habit story has been actually a huge help in getting us over some of the humps that we dealt with as husband and wife working together.

[04:30] And so, yeah, the cool thing about it though is I retook it. So we took it for the first time two years ago and then I just retook it. He and I both did about six months ago.

[04:38] And my results changed drastically in ways that I wanted them to and on things that I was working on, as you know, I do a lot of personal development counseling is just like, oh, that’s my coach.

[04:49] Like, you know, like, that’s how I approach that type of stuff. And so making changes to me, while big and a lot to do, is just really important. It’s just part of like being alive, I feel like.

[05:02] So this assessment for me has been almost like a roadmap to follow because it’s data from my own self about my behavior.

[05:10] And there’s so many of our behaviors because our brains are wired to create these shortcuts to make everything quick and easy.

[05:18] We do so many things on autopilot, but a lot of the things that we do on autopilot are things that we actually don’t want to do. They. They used to keep us safe at one point in time, you know, when we lived or worked in some like, toxic environment that we had to like,

[05:31] survive in.

[05:32] And now as we are, at least for me, as I’m older and I’m creating my own environment,

[05:37] hopefully a beautiful environment for myself and my husband and our team, I don’t want these old behaviors in my life anymore. And so this assessment has just been a huge tool in helping me make the changes that I want to make.

[05:48] And that’s why we introduced it for our clients as well. Because if you want to get into some deep, deep personal development and self awareness, this tool is. Is it in my opinion.

[05:59] Tara Bansal: I’m going to check it out. I, it is on your website. But I,

[06:03] I, I may be trying it. I just,

[06:06] because I love, just like you, I love profession, self development and anything that will help me change for the better, I’m all for.

[06:16] Kristen Lux: So yeah, it’s, I, it’s just part of being alive, I feel like. Well, and especially if you’re a business owner or you’re working inside of a small business,

[06:24] I mean, change is a constant in a small business.

[06:26] Tara Bansal: Yeah.

[06:27] Kristen Lux: Coming up against human friction of not wanting to change because we’re wired to not change. So it’s kind of a fun process. But I have tools.

[06:36] Tara Bansal: I’m trying to think there’s a quote but, or I’ve heard it plenty of times. But if you want self development,

[06:43] have your own business because that’s going to bring up your issues and your things more than anything else. And I call it like that’s true.

[06:52] Kristen Lux: Yeah. I call it personal development on steroids is business ownership.

[06:56] Tara Bansal: Business owner. Yeah.

[06:57] Kristen Lux: Yep. Yeah. You have no one to look at but yourself. When things aren’t going the way you like it. It’s like, get that mirror out and take a look and blame yourself.

[07:06] Tara Bansal: Good and bad. Ye. Yeah.

[07:07] Kristen Lux: And be kind to yourself and then move on and go make the changes you need to make.

[07:11] Tara Bansal: So. Yeah, well, I’m definitely going to check that out. And when did you have to go to a training or a certification for it? And that’s nearby.

[07:22] Kristen Lux: Yeah, we actually did it on Zoom and it was cool. I mean, they’re in town here, but they work with people around the country and actually there’s a group out of the UK that does it.

[07:31] So it was over Zoom.

[07:33] Um, my husband and I did that together. I think it was about a,

[07:37] it was all, it was in one week. We did it in one week and it was like over multiple days in one week. And then, you know, we had to do kind of a,

[07:45] like a practice assessment with the group that put it on and, you know, I mean, we had to go through a training protocol.

[07:51] Tara Bansal: Yeah.

[07:52] Kristen Lux: Essentially to make sure we understood because we need to understand the science behind what we’re teaching too. This is not just about the results, but it’s about educating.

[08:00] So that they can understand how to make those changes.

[08:03] Tara Bansal: Very good, thank you. All right, so let’s go back to my normal initial question,

[08:09] but tell us your story how and I like to hear all the way back, like where you grew up, your family of origin to where you are now.

[08:19] Kristen Lux: Yeah. So I was originally born and raised in the St. Louis, Missouri area.

[08:23] I was on the Illinois side of the river. So Illinois and Missouri are like a metropolitan region.

[08:29] The town I grew up in was about 15 minutes from St. Louis, but was like a small town. Basically. Even though it was 15 minutes from like a big city, it was very much a small town.

[08:38] Lots of people who had lived there their whole lives. Their parents lived there. That was my parents story. They were born and raised there. So were their parents.

[08:46] My dad was an electrician and my mom was a stay at home mom.

[08:51] However,

[08:52] when I was eight, my dad decided that he was not happy in his marriage to my mom and he decided to, you know, obviously like split up.

[09:01] He stayed in our house for two years to help my mom get on her feet because she was a stay at home mom,

[09:07] which was a very kind thing for him to do, especially, you know, when you’re not wanting to be in that marriage anymore, to live under the same roof.

[09:14] Unfortunately for me as a child and as a child who loved her family,

[09:18] that was a very disruptive time for me because my brain thought that my dad was going to stick around because he stayed in our house for two years even though my mom would be like,

[09:27] you know, he’s not staying. Right.

[09:29] And I could acknowledge it, but I couldn’t process it at that age.

[09:34] So unfortunately that time for me while, while now it is an empowering time for me. It was something that kind of set me on a, I would say like kind of a depressing teenage years of my life.

[09:45] Um, I was kind of mad at my dad for the divorce, blamed him for all of it. I now know, of course as an adult now that I’ve been in my own marriage and relationships, that two people are involved in marriages.

[09:58] No matter whose decision it is to leave, two people are involved. But I didn’t know that at the time. And so my teenage years were honestly pretty rough.

[10:06] I was just depressed and you can see a before and after. If you look at me from fifth grade to sixth grade,

[10:12] the contrast in photos of me is actually really crazy.

[10:16] Yeah,

[10:17] I’ve had to do a lot of inner child work to get past that time of my life, honestly, because it was hard. It was.

[10:23] And my mom was just as Upset as I was. So she wasn’t always equipped to help me through, even though she tried her best, of course.

[10:31] So, yeah, my teenage years were kind of rough, and really what happened was I just disassociated, honestly, is what I did. Like, I learned to just kind of, like, check out for myself to get on with life.

[10:41] Well,

[10:42] I. For whatever reason, I was still able to be a functioning member of society, and I went and got a job. And, you know, I babysat all through high school.

[10:51] Um, that was how I, like, kept myself busy. I was in athletics when I was younger, but I never really. I’m not competitive at all. Like, I do not care about competition at all.

[11:01] Um, and so I don’t think athletics resonated with me because I was just like, well, I don’t really care if we win. So.

[11:08] So when I had the opportunity in eighth grade to start babysitting regularly for a family, that’s what I did all through high school.

[11:14] Um, and then right after high school, I fell into working in the restaurant industry. I had a friend who. She’s like, let’s go get a job at this restauran together.

[11:23] Well, she actually couldn’t even get hired because of her, like, school schedule. And I ended up working there.

[11:28] A career in the restaurant industry for the first, like,

[11:31] guess, probably. I think I left the restaurant industry when I was, like, 26.

[11:35] But then I came back later, too. So, I mean, I spent a Good Almost, like 10 years of my life working in the restaurant industry.

[11:41] I was that person who was, like, a great server. And everywhere, every restaurant I worked at either became, like, the lead server,

[11:48] an assistant manager, a manager. Like, I always got promoted into these roles.

[11:53] And the hilarious thing about it, though, is coming off of this time in my life where I was, like, very depressed and disassociated. I was really introverted and shy. And working in a restaurant is.

[12:04] I would say I would. I would attribute that to the people skills that I have today.

[12:09] And, you know, that fuels a lot of the work that I do in my business, Working with clients and coaching.

[12:13] But I was this very, like, shy, introverted person.

[12:17] Just. Even though restaurants are crazy and they’re just, like, kind of a chaotic environment, it was a really positive time in my life as far as helping me blossom into the person I am today.

[12:26] Tara Bansal: That’s good.

[12:27] Kristen Lux: Yeah. But eventually working in restaurants, you burn out because it’s chaos, stressful.

[12:33] Tara Bansal: It’s. Yeah. Like, I was a server, too. And for years, I would have nightmares.

[12:41] Kristen Lux: Like, I still do.

[12:42] Tara Bansal: Like, I still Do I mean, I call a.

[12:44] The. The name of the restaurant Nightmares. And like all of us that were servers there all say talk about our nightmares and it’s so vivid.

[12:53] Kristen Lux: But yeah, yeah, I, to this day, I mean it’s probably been a few months since I’ve had one, but I have dreams where like I get all these tables at once and like I can never get caught up.

[13:04] And it’s just those, one of those perpetual loop dreams that you like can’t get out of whatever you’re in.

[13:10] And that’s kind of what it’s like when you’re actually working in that industry too,

[13:13] because you don’t know when, you don’t know when the rush is coming. You don’t know how many people are coming for the rush. You just do everything you can to get ready, but it’s coming and you just don’t know when.

[13:22] So it’s crazy.

[13:23] Tara Bansal: And to me, like, I feel like it’s one of the skills and maybe one of the things I struggle with now is like I am in a rush, like always prioritizing like what is the most important thing I need to do next and then move on to the next and go on to the next and.

[13:43] And hearing this habit story, like I think that created something for me and now I want it to not be so always like pushed and rushed and juggling and how do I change that?

[14:01] Kristen Lux: Yeah, you have to really consciously work to undo that like rushed hustle mentality.

[14:07] It does, it drives you when you work in restaurants. But when you’re working in a small business and it’s not that environment, it’s like, whoa, whoa, whoa, calm down here.

[14:16] Like it doesn’t need to be that.

[14:18] Yes,

[14:20] this crazy. Oh yeah. I struggle with that for a long time. I still do. I mean, I can flip back into that mode on a dime if I need to.

[14:25] So I mean I could probably jump right back into a restaurant to this day if I needed to.

[14:29] Tara Bansal: I’m sure you could if you did work there for that many years. Yeah, you know, a lot. Yeah. So what, what was the pivot out of restaurant work?

[14:40] Kristen Lux: Yeah. So I was fortunate enough, which I now see it as fortunate to be overlooked for promotions twice by one company that I was working for.

[14:51] They, I was 26, I was a female, and they thought that 50 year old white guys were a better choice for management than me twice.

[15:01] Even after telling me the first time, hey,

[15:04] we made a big mistake. We see that you’re still running the restaurant, so we’re going to move you to this other restaurant and give you that one. But train you on the things that you need to learn, like budgeting and all of that.

[15:14] No training, nothing.

[15:16] Just bring in another 50 year old guy and replace me with him. So.

[15:20] So that drove me out because I thought that that was going to be my career. I was actually. I was in talks with them to move to another city at one point,

[15:27] run a restaurant in another city. They wanted me to get my legs underneath me in St. Louis and then they were going to move me to a new city because they were expanding.

[15:34] And that was like.

[15:36] It’s kind of like pulling. Having the rug pulled out from underneath you a little bit. At the time,

[15:40] especially being 26 and still being kind of disassociated and not really having gone through that was self.

[15:46] Tara Bansal: Awareness, your plan and your like projected future. That’s what you had. You know, the road you were going down.

[15:53] Kristen Lux: Yes. I thought that that was.

[15:55] Tara Bansal: I think your analogy of having the rug pulled out from you is a good.

[16:00] Kristen Lux: Quickly. It was very disruptive at the time.

[16:03] Tara Bansal: Yeah.

[16:03] Kristen Lux: Oops. I think we chopped out there a little bit. Sorry about that.

[16:06] Tara Bansal: That’s okay. So then what happened? You got passed over?

[16:11] Kristen Lux: Yeah. So I.

[16:13] I ended up in working in commercial real estate after this.

[16:17] So getting back to eighth grade, babysitting. The family that I babysat for in eighth grade, the mom was high up at a commercial real estate firm and they were looking for somebody to come into one of their property management offices as an administrative assistant.

[16:32] And I had those types of skills from being a manager in restaurants. I knew how to run a back end of a business at this point.

[16:40] And I had a connection into the company because I babysat for her kid.

[16:44] And I got hired into that role. And so that helped me start transitioning out of restaurants. I worked in that capacity for four years.

[16:52] That was a great opportunity for me because that was actually one of the few opportunities that I had in my career where I got to learn by seeing what was what should be done versus like by learning what not to do,

[17:04] which is every other experience I had pretty much.

[17:08] And so that kind of gave me some of the foundational skills that actually eventually turned into me building this business.

[17:15] I learned good bookkeeping, I learned good rhythms and routines.

[17:19] It was really just like a good overall experience working for this company because they did have their act together.

[17:25] And so I worked there for four years. But this whole time I’m in college. Okay. So I didn’t graduate from school until I was like, I think it was 33 when I graduated from college, so I jumped right into restaurants and started making money.

[17:38] And I was like, wow, I love working, I love making money. I’m gonna do that. And then I’m just gonna go to school part time.

[17:44] So even when I’m in property management, I’ve got school running in the background. Working part time.

[17:49] Tara Bansal: Was school in person or was it.

[17:52] Kristen Lux: Yeah, yes, okay,

[17:53] it was in person.

[17:55] At this point I had switched schools and majors. So I started my schooling at Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville, which was just like a close by my house school that I went to.

[18:05] Studied communications there. So my first half of school was there.

[18:08] And then I transferred over to wash U in St. Louis, which was at this point right down the street from where I lived in St. Louis.

[18:16] And I studied sustainable communities and development there.

[18:20] So that I thought I was going to stay in commercial real estate forever at this point. So I’m like building my career now around staying in commercial real estate.

[18:29] So at some point though, I just had the realization in commercial real estate that there wasn’t going to be a ton of opportunity for me beyond going up the property management ladder a little bit.

[18:40] And as I would go up the ladder, I would pick up more responsibility that included answering the phone on the weekends and doing these things that I really wasn’t looking to do.

[18:50] Like, I love to work, I trust me, I can find like work to do all the time. I’m like that person. But I do want to be able to take time off and I don’t want my phone ringing on the weekends.

[19:01] And so I think I finally just had to come to terms with the fact that that career path wasn’t going to be for me.

[19:07] And what I did actually was just went right back to restaurants for a little while while I finished up my bachelor’s. And then as I finished my bachelor’s it coincided with me deciding that it was time to find a full time.

[19:19] So I had gotten connected to this project that I did in college and I started a career right after I graduated working in the solar industry.

[19:29] That job is the job that actually gave me my legs for the business that I have today. And it was my last full time job before starting my business.

[19:37] I got to build a company inside of a company there. So I was running a maintenance department and it needed to run really separately from the company because they were focused on building new developments and large developments at this point.

[19:51] And I had an account, I had accounts like 600 accounts that I was managing. A lot of them were residential installs. Some of them were commercial, but they were smaller scale commercial.

[20:00] And this company had now transitioned to being a very large scale, like national developer. So I had to set up a company and a company and run this maintenance department,

[20:09] set up my own accounting set up, you know, we had a CRM or client relationship management software,

[20:15] but it wasn’t really optimized. There weren’t good records.

[20:18] So I basically spent two years building out all this stuff, creating SOPs,

[20:23] leaving a trail behind myself, because what I walked into was really no trail.

[20:28] And it was hard to walk into a situation where there’s all these customers records about like what’s happened at their houses and all of this stuff. And so I kind of made it my mission to like leave that role better than I found it.

[20:40] Tara Bansal: Nobody asked you to do that or you just.

[20:42] Kristen Lux: Well, no, they didn’t because they weren’t interested in that line of business anymore.

[20:47] It was kind of like, we have these customers,

[20:50] we want to take good care of them,

[20:52] but our focus is really into the future.

[20:54] Like, that was like the rear view mirror and they were focused in looking out the windshield. They were going, yeah.

[21:00] And so it was just what I wanted to do, to be honest with you. I mean, they were happy to have me stepping up and doing what I was doing, certainly,

[21:08] but it wasn’t like part of my job description. My job description actually entailed that I was going to be helping with marketing. And I was. I hate to use this term, but it’s a little derogatory.

[21:18] But I was like a junk drawer kind of. Or that’s how they saw me.

[21:21] Oh, a little bit of marketing. Well, you’ll run the maintenance stuff. You’ll help plan the annual retreat.

[21:28] You’ll do all the things.

[21:29] Tara Bansal: Yeah, anything they didn’t want to do, they.

[21:34] Kristen Lux: And that was actually my realization also around how a lot of operations rules are treated that way as junk drawers.

[21:41] And again, I know that’s a derogatory term, but I’ve been a junk drawer, so I feel validated in saying it.

[21:47] Um, and that also really lit my fire. Feeling like a junk drawer, Feeling like, you know, I’m busy running this whole department in a department,

[21:54] and I’m supposed to also do marketing on top of it when I don’t even have marketing skills at all. By the way, I had no marketing training whatsoever.

[22:04] It was truly a jump drawer situation.

[22:06] And. But it lit a fire, right? So it lit this fire in me.

[22:10] I’ve seen so many times what not to do.

[22:13] I’ve seen what to do and I’M just burned out at this point because I didn’t have any boundaries either. You know, when you’re an employee, especially when you’re coming up in your career, maybe things are a little different now with young people now, which more power to them that they are starting to set boundaries.

[22:28] But I didn’t learn how to set boundaries around myself with work. And so,

[22:33] pretty much, if you asked me to do it, I would do it. I did draw the line on the marketing stuff.

[22:37] That was one thing that I said no to,

[22:40] but pretty much everything else I did, and it would lead to me burning out constantly, every single time.

[22:45] Tara Bansal: And so how many hours were you working? That job was.

[22:50] Kristen Lux: That job was just a full. It was full time. I mean, it wasn’t. I wasn’t working tons of extra hours in the job,

[22:55] but I was working my booty off when I was there working, like I was putting in, you know, eating or like working during lunch,

[23:05] that kind of stuff. Crying at work sometimes, like, you know, some of those kind of days. So it was challenging, but it was a. It was a. Struggles I have learned are there to teach us lessons.

[23:17] And even though they are terrible in the moment, I’m not going to sit here and be like, struggling is easy. It’s hard. It’s really hard.

[23:24] But I learned a lot from those struggles. And I was able to.

[23:29] To learn from all the experience that I got, too.

[23:31] I did have a really great mentor in that role as well. He’s the one who helped me build out the CRM and get it the way I needed it. And I’ve actually had conversations with him after the fact and had him help me with a couple client things that I’ve had come up over the years even,

[23:44] because that’s cool. So good with CRMs.

[23:47] So that was really as much as it was a challenging time. It was the launching point for me. I felt starting a business was my only choice because I wasn’t finding happiness.

[23:56] That was supposed to be my dream role when I took that job,

[23:59] and it wasn’t. Yeah.

[24:03] And so you have to kind of look in the mirror and go, okay,

[24:06] this didn’t work. What now? And my husband is entrepreneurial and got me to start a business, actually.

[24:12] Tara Bansal: Did you both start it together or you started first?

[24:17] Kristen Lux: Yeah, no,

[24:18] I was completely me in the beginning. So he was doing other entrepreneurial things. He’s been an entrepreneur since, like 2014.

[24:26] Um, he’s ebbed and flowed in and out of jobs over the years as he’s needed to, but he’s Like a through and through entrepreneur. You just need to go start your own company.

[24:34] Like, you need to just go do your own thing. I was terrified to do that, to be completely honest. I. That was not how I ever saw myself and my life going.

[24:43] I liked the stability in quotes of a job.

[24:46] Um, I now know that they’re not stable at all. Um, neither is owning a business.

[24:51] Tara Bansal: Yeah.

[24:53] Kristen Lux: But it’s like pick your, pick your hard. Right? Like, that was hard. This is hard. At least with this, I get to do what I want to do in ways that I know work.

[25:03] And if people don’t listen to me, then I don’t work with them because why would I work with someone who doesn’t want to listen to me when they’re coming to me for advice?

[25:11] Right. But when you’re an employee, you don’t have that ability, choice or those.

[25:14] Tara Bansal: Yeah, that control or those options. I agree. How did you meet your husband and how long have you guys been together?

[25:23] Kristen Lux: We met working at a restaurant. Yeah.

[25:26] Tara Bansal: Actually by surprise.

[25:27] Kristen Lux: Yeah,

[25:28] the restaurant where I was overlooked for the promotions actually is where I met him. So what a great gift that opportunity was too.

[25:37] He and I were one of like several marriages actually that came out of that restaurant, which is so funny because restaurants are like, very incestuous and like, people are all dating each other.

[25:46] And I’m sure everyone thought, oh, another fly by night relationship. And 15 years later, almost 16, here we are still together.

[25:54] Tara Bansal: So that’s great.

[25:55] Kristen Lux: Yeah. Yeah, it was really fun.

[25:58] Tara Bansal: So was he from the area also?

[26:01] Kristen Lux: He’s originally from the St. Louis area. He grew up, he moved around a little bit.

[26:05] His family moved for work in his early years, and then by the time he was 8, his family settled back in St. Louis. So he was from that area, went away to college,

[26:15] came back, didn’t want to come back. Actually a job that he had taken. They were going to transfer him up to a different city to open up a new location.

[26:22] And he ended up staying in St. Louis because he met me.

[26:26] So he thought,

[26:29] yep. Yeah, he. Well, and it, it ended up not being a fit for him anyway once he got into it. So he’s like, well, guess I’m staying in St. Louis.

[26:36] Guess I’m gonna hang out with her for a little while.

[26:38] Um, and then we eventually. We eventually got him back where he wanted to go, which was to Columbia, Missouri, where we live now.

[26:45] So it took us till 2018 to get him back, but we got here eventually.

[26:49] Tara Bansal: Very nice. What, and when did he join your company and how did that Come about.

[26:57] Kristen Lux: Yes. So he joined in 2023.

[26:59] That came about by us avoiding it as much as we possibly could. We were, like, working adjacent with each other at this point.

[27:07] We were sharing a client.

[27:09] We were both working in, like, a fractional capacity at this time, where we were with clients really long term.

[27:14] Um, he had brought me in. He’s more big picture, and I’m the details person.

[27:18] So we have this, like, amazingly complimentary skill set. Like, it’s almost crazy how complimentary our skills are.

[27:25] And so he was bringing the big picture for this client, but it was time to get into the implementation and the details work. And so he had brought me in,

[27:32] and we shared that client for about a year.

[27:34] But in working together with that client, we started developing these frameworks that we were developing for this client because he had one, like, holding company and multiple businesses spinning off of it.

[27:45] So it was a complex structure, and we had to create these, like, visual diagrams and just different ways to present the business and organize the business that we’d never really been challenged to do before.

[27:56] And we were doing it together.

[27:58] And so we just started to realize around the same time. I wanted to get away from doing the fractional work. The fractional work is very rewarding because you’re with people for a long time and you get to see the work all the way through.

[28:11] Tara Bansal: Yeah.

[28:11] Kristen Lux: But what is not rewarding about it is that you can only work with a couple people at a time. Like, two or three clients at a time is about the max that you can do.

[28:19] And I wanted to have a bigger impact than that. I didn’t want to, like,

[28:24] the work that we do, the operations work that we do is so needed in small businesses.

[28:29] My own experience working in small businesses is the fuel that drives me.

[28:33] And I see how much, you know, I mean, I was talking with a woman in who works in a small business at a conference a couple weeks ago and talking to her about our work.

[28:42] And I showed her a diagram that just explains, like, a concept that we have. And she started crying,

[28:47] like,

[28:48] because she’s so overworked and so, like, overwhelmed. Yeah. In her biz, in the business. And it’s not even her business. She’s an employee of this company.

[28:56] And so that’s, like, what fuels all of this is that.

[29:00] And so I wanted to have a bigger impact than what I could have just working with a few people. And so we just decided he was. He was consulting, I was consulting.

[29:08] I had a brand established. He really didn’t.

[29:11] And so we merged him into my Existing brand because the name and a logo and all the things. And so we merged him in.

[29:20] It took us a good year and a half to get stable. I would say we thought we were going to, like, pivot on a dime, and typically I would say we probably could.

[29:31] But when you’re doing new things in the market, you do have to get market validation on what you’re doing.

[29:36] And at each time we would seek market validation, we would get it, but we would realize the thing we were offering wasn’t something that we actually wanted to do.

[29:44] And so we kept having to move and twist and turn because it was. We were dialing in what we were going to offer, essentially.

[29:53] And along the way came more of our own proprietary frameworks. And the habit story assessment came along about a year into this journey.

[30:01] So it was very.

[30:03] For us, even though it was long and winding and we thought it was going to be quick, it was actually the perfect journey because it allowed all these other things to unfold while we were on the journey.

[30:12] And so last fall, I would say, so fall of 2024 is when I feel like we finally, like, kind of got our bearings about us. So that was about a year and a half into him joining the business.

[30:23] We had no website, actually, that whole first year and a half that he was in the company, we just had, like, a landing page up.

[30:28] Tara Bansal: Yeah.

[30:29] Kristen Lux: Um, thankfully we had enough of a reputation and former clients that we were able to sustain ourselves. But it was a challenging time with you don’t have clear services all the time, your website’s not up.

[30:40] Like, it’s kind of hard to stand in your confidence when you’re having conversations with people, when you don’t have that full clarity.

[30:47] My only confidence, I guess, was coming from the fact that I knew we could create transformations for clients no matter what we did or how we did it.

[30:54] And that kind of carried me through that time.

[30:57] But it was a. It was a challenging time, for sure. And that’s really when a lot of our, like, issues with each other started to come to the surface, too, because when you don’t have that clarity and you have all this uncertainty around what you’re doing,

[31:08] it’s just. It’s stressful. I mean, there’s no way around it than to say it’s stressful.

[31:13] So that led me to doing trauma therapy.

[31:17] He had done trauma therapy just before that. We ended up in couples counseling this year in 2025.

[31:24] So we finally have it dialed in where I think we’re in a really good place working together. But between the stress of all the pivoting and just all that uncertainty that gets created and then spending double time with your spouse in stress,

[31:38] it was like, I mean, it’s like two rocks rubbing up against each other constantly.

[31:44] Tara Bansal: Everything up to, you know.

[31:46] Kristen Lux: Yes.

[31:47] Tara Bansal: As you said,

[31:48] self development on steroids and then with your spouse.

[31:53] Yeah, that’s a whole nother level that I think is.

[31:58] So what,

[31:59] who are your ideal clients and what do you love to do?

[32:04] What do you want to be doing?

[32:06] Kristen Lux: Yeah. So ideal clients are service based businesses. They are small teams.

[32:11] So sometimes we are working with a solopreneur who’s about to grow a team or they’re just overloaded and they’re like, I need help.

[32:18] And they need that structure whether or not they’re going to have a team.

[32:21] But usually the business already has a team established and the owner brought in the team to help them. But the owner is now finding that they have a full time job managing the team that they brought in to help them.

[32:36] Often that is coming from business owners are visionary. So they have a vision, they have an idea, they’re going to bring that idea to life.

[32:44] Well, operations are what actually allow you to bring that vision to life. But visionaries don’t think in those terms. They’re very. Right brain. They’re very, you know,

[32:53] they’re on to the next thing usually before the last thing is even put together,

[32:59] let alone implemented. Right.

[33:01] So I was always that person that brought that. Well, wait, how are we going to do that? Like, like the visionary is the gas pedal and I’m the brake. Right.

[33:11] So I’m bringing that like break to the situation.

[33:14] And what that is, is just, it’s slowing down so that you can speed up.

[33:19] So you have to take a. I mean we’ve had to do this in our own business. We brought someone in earlier this year to start working with us. And I’m creating SOPs and I’m, you know, before I hand things off to her too, I’m not going to hand her a flaming pile of **** and say,

[33:33] here, help me with this, like I’m handing her SOPs now. Is she now responsible for updating and continuing to work on those sops? Yes, of course.

[33:42] But I need to give her an initial sketch of what I want her to do. And so that’s what we’re empowering business owners to do, is to have this structure, to have a container to hold this vision inside of that actually helps the vision come to life more fully and in a way that supports the client and the team,

[34:00] because, you know, a lot of times we think about the client and oh my gosh, everything for the client. Which of course they’re always the first priority. They’re the ones that pay the bills.

[34:08] But you can’t leave the team in the Dallas. Yeah.

[34:11] Tara Bansal: Long term the team has to thrive and not burn out or there’s going to be turnover. And that brings a whole nother, you know, set of issues.

[34:22] Kristen Lux: And a lot of times what’s interesting is I see that there’s a lot of these, a lot of the visionary business owners, they’re very dynamic, likable people. And so the team actually won’t even leave because they like the owner and they like the mission of what the owner’s trying to do in the business.

[34:37] But they just grow resentful. I mean, that’s what ends up happening is they grow resentful. And that’s not a good healthy environment to be working in either where someone is sticking around because they like the person they’re working for, but they resent the way the company is running.

[34:51] So it’s really those types of dynamics that we find ourselves in,

[34:55] they’re challenging to navigate. I won’t pretend that it’s easy to walk into those environments because we’re imparting change inside of companies.

[35:03] So the clients that we work with are growth minded. They’re, they’re looking to change.

[35:08] They’re not looking for us to wave a wand and fix all their problems. We are,

[35:14] it looks like we’re waving a wand probably,

[35:16] but we’re walking arm in arm with our clients. They’re doing the work with us, their team is doing the work with us. It is very much arm in arm.

[35:24] We’re going to show you the way, but you’re going to execute on the way that we show you.

[35:30] And we’re going to make sure that the way we show you aligns with what works for you and your team also. Right. We work very holistically.

[35:37] We have our frameworks and we have what we would like to do in a perfect environment. But there is no perfect environment in a small business.

[35:44] And so we’re always adapting how we work to meet the clients where they are because that’s the only way you’re actually going to impart change. And we’re not coming in to bring change for change’s sake.

[35:54] We’re bringing in to bring change to improve the business.

[35:58] And so we need everybody level looked at. Yeah.

[36:01] Tara Bansal: Grow.

[36:01] Kristen Lux: Yeah. And we need everybody to be bought into that. And so we work in a way that we really want the team and the owner to be bought into what we’re doing.

[36:08] And that really looks like meeting them where they’re at to make sure that we’re. We’re really all on the same page and doing what’s going to be best for them long term, because they’re ultimately the ones that are going to continue working inside the company, not us.

[36:20] Tara Bansal: Yeah. So how. I’m sure what percentage of your clients are financial advisors?

[36:28] Kristen Lux: I would say probably around 50% at this point have been financial advisors. So we got really blessed by this wonderful client that we have from this. From Columbia, where we live.

[36:39] We worked with her a couple years ago, and she’s in a mastermind. She’s a financial advisor. She’s in a mastermind. And one day, like three months after we worked with her,

[36:49] I got like four inquiries in the same day of people booking discovery calls. And I’m like, where did all these financial advisors come from?

[36:58] She emails me and she’s like, hey, I mentioned your name at my mastermind. I hope you don’t mind.

[37:04] And I’m like, I don’t mind at all. Thank you very much. Um, and what was just beautiful about it is that they’re all amazing people.

[37:13] Everyone she has referred into us has been that have come out of this group are just amazing people. And so that helped us see that we really like working with financial advisors.

[37:23] Financial advisors, they tend to have that growth mindset, at least the ones we’ve worked with.

[37:28] Meeting people like you just reaffirms that even further for me that there’s a growth mindset, there’s a willingness and an understanding that you sometimes have to invest to get yourself to the next level.

[37:39] There’s an understanding that you need an outside perspective. Oftentimes that your perspective as the advisor is where your knowledge lies.

[37:47] But then when it comes to how all that gets brought to life, that’s not necessarily your expertise. And so we just find that advisors get it. Like they. They understand what we do, they like how we work.

[37:58] Um, there’s just a real. I think it’s a values alignment, to be completely honest with you, more than anything.

[38:04] Tara Bansal: Yeah. Hearing you talk, I think so many advisors,

[38:07] we do what we do because we want to make a positive impact. And it’s funny that hearing you like shifting away from the fractional work was because you wanted to make more of an impact and you’re passionate about it, like just the name of your company.

[38:23] And I think a lot of financial advisors are also.

[38:27] But to your point,

[38:28] they only know what they know and do not either enjoy or thrive in the operations part.

[38:41] Big struggle.

[38:42] Kristen Lux: Yeah. And we’ve found too that one of the, one of the best ways we can help is if they already have a team installed, if they have a, you know, a client services director or someone kind of sitting in that client facing role, we can actually oftentimes spend a lot of our engagement working with that person rather than the owner themselves.

[38:59] Usually the owner will have to be involved in the first part of it because that’s when we’re really digging into the vision and trying to realign things to the vision and to where they’re trying to head.

[39:08] But once we have all that down, we can really. Any implementation work, the owner doesn’t need to be involved in that at all. So if they already have that team, it’s really almost the perfect formula because they don’t have to, they’re already on the hamster wheel basically.

[39:22] So we don’t want to add extra work to their plate. It is inevitable that someone on the team is going to have extra work,

[39:28] but it’s better if they’ve got some kind of right hand person that we can train oftentimes too, those right hand people,

[39:34] you know, I’m 42 years old and I’ve had a ton of experience in front of me.

[39:38] If your right hand person is 25, 26,

[39:42] they’re probably super smart if you’ve put them in that role. I mean, most client services ops people are amazing humans and their brain works the way it needs to work for that role,

[39:52] but they really haven’t seen the full range of experience of what is out there and software tools that you have to use for all of this and how to document things.

[40:02] And so that’s really where we come in, is almost like mentoring that person to bring them up to that next level so that they can shine in that role.

[40:10] With the owner not having to do that because the owner can’t mentor them in operations because that’s not what they do.

[40:16] Tara Bansal: Well, one, because it’s not what they do and two, I feel like they don’t want to take the time to do it either. And so I feel like that’s hearing that is powerful and important.

[40:28] How long are most of your engagements?

[40:30] Kristen Lux: So three months is usually the max of most of our engagements. We can get a lot accomplished in three months if everybody’s dedicated to the work and sets aside the time that’s needed.

[40:40] Um, we have an engagement that’s as short as one day where you know if you can imagine the three month is like maybe going through steps one through ten.

[40:48] One day is going to get you through step one or two. Right. Like we’re only going to get the first little slice. But if you’re,

[40:54] we talked with someone yesterday where his business just really isn’t defined enough right now for us to go all in.

[40:59] And so working with us to get him to just that next step is like perfect for him.

[41:04] But if you already have a functioning business, you have defined services and the wheels are just starting to fall off the bus,

[41:11] you’re going to need that three month engagement to really get to the next stage.

[41:15] With the exception of, you know, sometimes a one day might look like, hey, I need to hire someone and I need help putting together a job description and what my application questions are going to be.

[41:25] That’s absolutely something that sometimes an existing business might need. But typically we find that when they come in that we’re going to need to do a good three months worth of work together.

[41:34] The three month engagement is really focused on process work though. So kind of the three areas we work in are people,

[41:41] process and then planning.

[41:44] Planning is really from more the annual planning perspective and getting the strategic kind of perspective out to get everyone on the same page and then the people work. While we would love for it to come first, it’s almost like icing on the cake after we’ve done the process work.

[42:00] Because you really can’t take the time to do that deep inquiry self development work when the wheels are falling off the bus.

[42:09] So we have to get the wheels back on the bus and maybe build a new bus or put some new paneling in and new chairs and some seat belts and you know, all the things and then we can look at doing things like habit story and stuff like that.

[42:22] So if someone were to tack habit story on, they’d be with us for three and a half ish months to add that on. And then if someone also did annual planning, it would take four months in total.

[42:33] So if you did everything with us, it would take four months.

[42:35] Tara Bansal: Okay, that’s helpful.

[42:37] Kristen Lux: Yeah.

[42:38] Tara Bansal: What, what are some of your core personal values and how did they show up in your life both work wise and at home?

[42:49] Kristen Lux: Yeah, that’s a good question.

[42:52] I would say recognizing the inevitability of change is one of my major core values. And just knowing that that’s part of life so that I’m not like paddling upstream, resisting that,

[43:07] that’s something that I fought for a long time. So now that it’s like ingrained in me. I think it’s pretty critical in my flow to. To mind.

[43:17] And it also keeps me going with, you know, reading personal development books and all the things that I know I need to do to stay up to date. Even when I think I’m up to date, I’m like, oh, yeah, I should go back and read that book that I read two years ago because I need to refresh my knowledge.

[43:30] Right. So that drives me a lot.

[43:34] I also,

[43:35] I have the belief that we will only be as strong as our weakest link.

[43:40] And I mean that on a small business level. I mean that on a societal level. I mean that on a world level.

[43:46] Yeah, on all levels.

[43:48] And so, you know, the work that we do with small businesses, we’re trying to raise the level of everyone up to the same level.

[43:56] But I believe that on a societal level as well. And you know, the way we’ve built our company where we have one team member, but we take good care of her, we pay her well, we.

[44:05] She has benefits. Like we’re a small business,

[44:09] but we.

[44:11] And it takes a lot to administer benefits for a team of three.

[44:15] But I wouldn’t have it any other way because why would I bring someone into this world and then leave them high and dry inside of our company? And so I think that’s a big, A big part of my personal values is just taking care of each other and taking care of each other as humans.

[44:32] Like recognizing that we’re all just humans doing our best. And even if we don’t like how somebody’s showing up, they’re doing their best on that day.

[44:40] Tara Bansal: Mm,

[44:42] so true. Yeah.

[44:44] And I agree with you on that. Like, I feel like if you treat the people you work with well,

[44:51] that makes such an important difference long term.

[44:55] And that’s the way I feel like I wanna be treated. So I want people, you know.

[45:01] Kristen Lux: Yeah, it should be standard practice and I feel it is becoming more and more standard practice. But you know, small businesses, it’s hard to run a small business and a lot of them do struggle to figure out how they’re going to do benefits and how they’re going to do all the things.

[45:16] And I think one of the things for me was that I designed the business around being able to do those things.

[45:23] So we’re a digital first business. We don’t have an office space, we don’t have a lot of the typical overhead that a business would have that has those things because we don’t need those things to run our company.

[45:34] Some companies do need those things. You know, if you run a brick and mortar business with a storefront, you have no choice. Right. But we try to keep ourselves as lean as possible as a company so that we’re not carrying a bunch of extra load that then bogs us down.

[45:50] That keeps us from being able to do the things that we need to do, like paying people well and things like that.

[45:57] Tara Bansal: Why, why did you join the Society of Advice? Just to network.

[46:04] Kristen Lux: Networking, for sure, was part of it.

[46:06] I would say that I was also, I was just looking for a place to land at the time. I had just come out of a group, a group coaching program, and I just like the consistency of having some kind of call every month that I don’t know, made my brain work and think or like,

[46:22] yeah, see things differently, like gain new perspective, I guess I would say.

[46:26] And I had come across Carl a couple years ago, actually someone recommended that I listen to the Kisses and Carl podcast well before we had ever worked with a single financial advisor.

[46:36] And he was recommending that we hear their perspectives just from a business owner perspective. He said, you should just hear what they have to say for your own business.

[46:45] And I came across them and Carl really resonated with me and Carl’s approach.

[46:51] And I don’t even remember how I came across the Society of Advice, to be honest with you, but I was like, oh, that’s Carl from the Kitsas and Carl podcast.

[47:00] And at this point we had, yeah, we had worked with, you know, a number of advisors at this point,

[47:06] and I was just looking to enrich my brain basically and find a community.

[47:10] And it,

[47:11] it’s advisors, but it’s a mindset community, I would say, at its core.

[47:16] And so I think the advice that he’s giving is applicable to any type of business.

[47:20] Tara Bansal: Any service.

[47:21] Kristen Lux: Yeah, business.

[47:22] Tara Bansal: I feel like I agree with that. True.

[47:24] Kristen Lux: Yeah. And so I, it just, it resonated with me. And again, the values alignment with, with advisors is a big part of that though.

[47:32] Being in the 7:1 groups and meeting all these amazing people in these breakout groups that I’m in. It just only affirmed that that was the right path for us, was for me to kind of like spend more time networking with advisors.

[47:45] So that’s where I put a lot of my time and energy now when it comes to business development is meeting and working with advisors because they’re one of the groups that we like to work with the most.

[47:55] Tara Bansal: So what, what do you think or what comments do you have around female advisors in the industry? Any advice or observations you have noticed?

[48:10] Kristen Lux: I think that the female led advisor firms that we have worked with have been some of the best run companies that I have seen.

[48:19] So where when we come in, we’re fine tuning some things.

[48:24] We’re, you know, we’re still helping them get to the next level,

[48:27] but they already have a lot of really great things in place inside their companies and they tend to take really great care of their team.

[48:35] Not to say that the men we’ve worked with haven’t also,

[48:38] but I don’t know, there’s just a different level of warmth, I think that comes sometimes from women who are running businesses.

[48:45] And I don’t know, I just, I, I think that the future is female financial planners.

[48:54] Listening to one of your other podcasts, actually,

[48:57] she was talking about the data behind women being better planners and that our brains are just wired more for this. Right. Like it’s, it’s more. I think the men like the relationship side of it and they like the, you know, kind of the excitement of like no two days are the same.

[49:14] But I don’t know, the women I feel like are very made for the industry and I understand the challenges of being in male dominated industries. It’s very hard.

[49:26] I encountered that myself working in the restaurant industry and in that situation where I was overlooked for the promotions. And you feel like you’re kind of fighting an uphill battle a little bit sometimes trying to break into that, but the only way to break into it is to break into it.

[49:40] Like all you can do is just do it and then more women will do it because they saw you do it and then somebody sees you do it. And that, you know, it’s just like a, it’s a domino effect basically.

[49:51] And so there are women who have paved the way and now the path is clear. And I think that the future is female in financial advising. I really do.

[50:02] Especially with the, you know, the average age of an advisor is what, like 60 now? I think, like, there’s a major issue with needing to get some young people into the advising world.

[50:13] And if we’re looking at who’s most naturally suited for it, it is women.

[50:18] So why not bring more women into the field?

[50:22] Tara Bansal: Do you have any ideas on how to bring more women into the field?

[50:26] Kristen Lux: Oh, goodness.

[50:29] I think mentorship is a huge thing for anybody trying to find their way.

[50:35] I know just even in operations, the work that I do and helping to elevate the profession that I’m in, that’s something that I take great pride in, is meeting with other people who, you know, they might have the title Admin assistant or something.

[50:48] That’s not really operations in their title, but I see that they’re an operator.

[50:53] And so having someone mentor that person to help them see the skills that they have and the gifts that they have, I think is a really big part of bringing people into things that feel uncertain to them,

[51:07] because people need to see a path. They need to see, like, oh,

[51:10] this has been successfully done before.

[51:12] Like,

[51:13] I don’t have to figure it all out on my own.

[51:16] So I think mentorship with any profession is one of the number one ways that you can usher someone into it is just by showing them the way and. But being honest with them, too, about what they’re up against,

[51:27] you know, and being transparent about what they’re going to walk into so that they’re not.

[51:33] You don’t bait and switch them. Oh, this is a great, you know, whatever.

[51:36] Tara Bansal: Dishonesty. Yeah, yeah,

[51:38] no, I agree. And I love you bring that up because I feel for most of the women I’ve had on the show,

[51:45] many of them have talked about the importance of mentorship in them moving forward and even getting where they are. Yeah, I agree with that. Thank you.

[51:56] Kristen Lux: Yeah.

[51:58] Tara Bansal: What boundaries or systems or mindsets help you avoid burnout?

[52:06] Kristen Lux: That’s a good question.

[52:08] Boundaries wise. I.

[52:10] Right now we’re in a phase where we do sometimes have to work on the weekend.

[52:14] So I accept that as my fate right now.

[52:18] Don’t love it. Don’t want this to be my life.

[52:20] But I try. What I try to do is Saturday.

[52:25] There’s an X on the calendar. Like, there’s no work. Nothing’s getting done on Saturday. You know, I’ll do stuff around the house or whatever, but no work on Saturday.

[52:33] So if I do have to work, it is going to be on Sunday.

[52:36] In general, my boundary would be no work on the weekends.

[52:39] Tara Bansal: But again, you’re working towards that.

[52:41] Kristen Lux: Yes, working toward that right now.

[52:43] Sometimes we have to work harder to work less hard.

[52:48] That’s the phase I’m in right now.

[52:50] And then systems, you know, I rely a lot on digital tech to help me stay,

[52:55] to help me maintain my boundaries. So using my do not disturb on my phone to not allow interruptions during my day, nothing we are doing is an, er, emergency situation.

[53:07] And while we do want to be responsive to our clients, we have our clients pretty well trained that you email us when you have things that you need from us.

[53:16] If you’re calling or texting me, it’s urgent.

[53:19] Like, it’s an urgent situation. And so keeping my phone on do not Disturb to just keep those notifications out of my purview. I am actually adhd,

[53:30] so you would not always think of a systems person as being adhd.

[53:34] But I think I came into this world because I had to figure out how to navigate the world and I didn’t even know I had adhd.

[53:41] Um, I found that out.

[53:42] Tara Bansal: How old were you when you found that out?

[53:44] Kristen Lux: Like a year and a half ago.

[53:45] Tara Bansal: So I was like, so many more and more people are finding out. And yeah, that’s another whole. We could talk about that for a while, but.

[53:54] Kristen Lux: Oh, yeah, it’s. It’s crazy. Um, so you know, just having like using the tech. So the do not disturb turning. You know, we use Google Voice for our phone. So people don’t have my cell phone number.

[54:08] They have a business phone number.

[54:10] If I go out of town and I want to completely turn Google Voice off, I can.

[54:14] And we can have Hannah, who is our marketing and ops coordinator, watch the phone because it’s a voiceover IP phone system. So I don’t have to somehow get her my cell phone and be like, hey, watch my cell phone.

[54:25] And then now I don’t have my phone with me or something. Like, we can easily. So kind of building the business digital first, I think was a really big part of this for me to set it up where other people can come in and provide support inside of our company so that everything isn’t reliant upon me.

[54:42] And that’s the very same thing we do for clients. So it works out full circle.

[54:47] And then just on my personal life too, having again using digital tech, though, like, my husband and I have a really great system for how we grocery lists and keeping track of what we’re going to run out of so that neither one of us is on the hook for keeping track of all of it.

[55:00] We have like a shared grocery list system that we use and little things like, it’s like little micro actions, I think that move the needle the most a lot of times with this stuff.

[55:09] So it’s all these little tiny things that pile up to create a world where we can have some boundaries and not be burning out all the time.

[55:19] Tara Bansal: Yeah.

[55:19] So you apply the systems to your personal life too, is what I’m hearing. And the difference that makes and what strikes me is one of your values. And I heard like embracing change.

[55:35] So it’s having systems, but which is one side, which to me sounds very structured, but the other side is you have to still embrace change for those.

[55:45] Kristen Lux: Systems because the systems are what allow you to Embrace the change without losing your mind.

[55:52] I mean,

[55:53] it’s not like I’m not like one of those people that like my house is like, everything has its place and like,

[55:58] like I’m not that rigid. But at the end of the day, having some structure, having some systems running, what you’re doing, it gives you that creative ability to be more flexible with what’s coming your way because you know you have these things to fall back on.

[56:15] You know you’re not gonna forget to change the furnace filter because you’ve got the reminder set. Right.

[56:19] Tara Bansal: Like, do you think these systems helped you, help you manage your adhd?

[56:26] Kristen Lux: Yes, very much so.

[56:27] Tara Bansal: That’s like.

[56:28] Kristen Lux: Yeah.

[56:28] Tara Bansal: Part of. Yeah.

[56:29] Kristen Lux: That you earned.

[56:31] It’s also discipline though too. Like, like as an ADHDer, you, you’re like chasing the next dopamine hit.

[56:39] So it’s like whatever the thing is that’s like in front of you that you want to go do, sometimes you have to stop yourself from doing it,

[56:46] especially if, you know you have a reminder set to do it at a later time.

[56:50] Like if you built the structure and you built the system, you have to rely on it to almost run you rather than just letting your whims run you. It’s not to say that I won’t let whims take me some days, because I will.

[57:03] Because sometimes my best copywriting or email newsletter or whatever comes from a whim.

[57:09] And so you do have to sometimes lean into that.

[57:12] But really trying to let those systems support me and knowing that I have them there and I can lean on them so that I don’t have to chase after every single whim is a really big part of it, for sure.

[57:25] Tara Bansal: Yeah, I think. Well, that resonates with me. So what would you tell your younger self? What advice would you have for your younger self?

[57:36] Kristen Lux: Oh boy,

[57:38] it’s not about you.

[57:41] So,

[57:42] like the restaurant promotion thing, that actually wasn’t about me at all.

[57:48] It was about a direction they were headed in with their business. They were going corporate.

[57:52] They had brought in this corporate guy who had his ideas of what things needed to look like. And it could have been any 26 year old female in that role that would have been booted out.

[58:02] Also.

[58:03] It was just me, right. But it wasn’t about me. And it didn’t reflect my value. It didn’t reflect who I was and what I was contributing.

[58:11] I went on to create budgets at my very next job because someone showed me how to do it right.

[58:15] So it had nothing to do with me.

[58:19] Didn’t realize that at the time.

[58:21] So really good lesson learned. But I think everything in life to recognize that it’s really not about you. Someone being mean to you,

[58:29] um, you know, somebody flipping you off on the highway. Like, none of that is about you.

[58:35] Yes, maybe you did cut them off and that was rude, but all you did was flick them over the edge when they were already on the edge.

[58:42] So, yeah, that’s my advice to my younger self.

[58:46] Tara Bansal: What, what does success look like for you?

[58:50] Kristen Lux: What,

[58:51] it’s freedom. So it’s having the freedom to live my life the way I want to live my life.

[58:57] Um, again, right now, I don’t have all of that lined out. I do work on Sundays a lot.

[59:04] But I’m also in a space right now where next fall, my husband and I are talking about going down to Houston for six months because we have nieces that live there.

[59:11] We have no children.

[59:13] That’s by plan,

[59:14] by design.

[59:15] And we’re just at a phase where we’re like almost feeling like a little nomadic. And before we don’t own a house right now. That’s also by design.

[59:24] We are pet free. That was not by design, but here we are.

[59:28] And so we kind of see this opportunity of like, oh, we’re like, kind of like ready to be nomadic for a minute.

[59:35] And so going and spending some time with our nieces next fall is like now on the table. Where.

[59:42] Yeah, it’s just. I don’t know, it’s an interesting place to be in life to. To have what I would call this level of freedom.

[59:49] It’s all because I’ve worked hard to get here.

[59:52] Um, I built this business from the ground up. I built it remote first. Like, this has been part of the plan all along. We’re just finally to the point now where we can actually start thinking about some of these things,

[01:00:04] which is really nice.

[01:00:05] Tara Bansal: So in your ideal world, how much time is spent working and how much time is playing or hiking or doing other things?

[01:00:16] Kristen Lux: I would like to be to a four day work week at some point.

[01:00:19] Um, that’s my goal.

[01:00:22] So that’s. I think that’s the. To me, the happy medium is be in front of the computer doing the thing most days of the week.

[01:00:31] But have one day where you can get your chores done and run your errands and do all your things.

[01:00:37] Have a day that you can socialize if you want to, and then have a day that you can rest.

[01:00:42] Because right now the rest and the errands and all of that kind of gets mixed up into one day. And then you socialize in the evening and it’s like it’s just too much for one day, I feel like.

[01:00:53] So I’d like to have three separate days for each of those things and then I, I mean, I’ll even work 10 hour days if I need to on the other four days.

[01:01:01] Tara Bansal: That freedom and carve out nice. Well, we’ve already gone way over, but what, what favorite book, podcast or resource are you loving right now?

[01:01:17] Kristen Lux: I am in a not consuming very much content phase of life right now.

[01:01:22] I do have a new podcast though, that was my former business coach and good friend. It’s called Unsolicited Business Advice and her name’s Amanda Quick and she’s just one of those like, no nonsense, like tell it like it is firecracker.

[01:01:38] Tara Bansal: I feel like I’ve heard her name before. Is that possible?

[01:01:41] Kristen Lux: I don’t know. Maybe it is possible, I would say. I mean she’s around on the Internet and stuff.

[01:01:46] She’s in Columbia where I live, but she’s definitely around. So I would definitely. If you like to just hear. It’s. It’s her and another person. They’re both business owners.

[01:01:56] They’re just giving hard truths about business. But they talk about a lot of. They do a lot of personal development too. So they talk a lot about the, the personal underneath it all, you know, root cause kind of stuff.

[01:02:08] Tara Bansal: I love.

[01:02:08] Kristen Lux: Yeah, I love it too. I just think it’s. I love business. Like I.

[01:02:12] Business is my baby in a lot of ways and so I love soaking up that information.

[01:02:18] But right now I’m at a like no new frameworks phase of life where it’s like, I have enough frameworks. I don’t need any new frameworks. Like you can hit me with some information that’s helpful and some thoughts and perspectives, but I don’t want any more frameworks right now while I work to assimilate the ones I already have into my life.

[01:02:35] Tara Bansal: Yeah, that’s great. Your go to self care ritual.

[01:02:41] Kristen Lux: Walking in nature.

[01:02:44] Yeah, it’s the movement combined with the nature and then if you can have a partner, a friend, somebody join you on one of those walks, it’s like the perfect combination in my opinion.

[01:02:55] Tara Bansal: How often do you get to do that?

[01:02:57] Kristen Lux: A lot.

[01:02:58] So part of the reason we moved to Columbia, Missouri was to get ourselves closer to trails. Columbia has a really cool Rails to Trails trail that runs through town.

[01:03:08] We can be at that trail in five minutes.

[01:03:11] We have really great parks and other things too. There’s another one that’s about five minutes away that’s kind of hiking, like, in, like, a neighborhood.

[01:03:18] Um, so we’re really close to those things. And that’s by design. I mean, we moved here. That was one of the big reasons we moved here, was to put ourselves five minutes from nature walks.

[01:03:27] And we’ve been here seven years, and we still probably three, four, sometimes five times a week, find ourselves on that trail. So.

[01:03:34] Yeah.

[01:03:34] Tara Bansal: Yeah, it’s not. That was taking a value and something that was important to you and making it. Making it real.

[01:03:41] Kristen Lux: Yeah. Designing our life around it, really. And then we live in a great community, too. I mean, that’s the. That’s the bonus of it all is, like, we have this amazing place that we live that also has amazing trails.

[01:03:51] So it’s. It’s worked out pretty well.

[01:03:53] Tara Bansal: Very good. What’s one thing bringing you joy right now?

[01:03:59] Kristen Lux: I would say it’s my marriage.

[01:04:02] Tara Bansal: We’ve done all this work.

[01:04:04] Kristen Lux: Yes. We’ve done so much work. We are on the other side of, like,

[01:04:08] all the things.

[01:04:10] And we’re really happy in our relationship, and I think we’re really happy in our life. We’re. We’re happy with what we built for ourselves. We. We’re still doing a lot of work with, you know, working six days a week and all the things, but we’re happy with where we’re at.

[01:04:24] We’re happy with the direction we’re headed and, like, where we’re at right now was a dream at one point in the past, and we’re there like we’re living the actual dream right now.

[01:04:33] Even though some days it doesn’t always feel like I’m living the dream.

[01:04:37] I remind myself I think that’s normal.

[01:04:38] Tara Bansal: And everybody needs to hear that. So.

[01:04:40] Kristen Lux: Yeah. I just remind myself, though, that, like, one. One day in the past, this is where I wanted to be. Like, this is. This is good. Yeah.

[01:04:48] Tara Bansal: And I feel like. I don’t know, at least for me, hearing, like, your marriage, that. That’s awesome. That just.

[01:04:55] Kristen Lux: Thanks. It wouldn’t have been that a year ago, so.

[01:04:57] Tara Bansal: Well, and that makes it even more sweet, you know, that, you know, you made that the effort and put in. You know that it didn’t come easily. Right.

[01:05:08] Kristen Lux: I don’t think anything good does come easily. I really don’t.

[01:05:12] I’m not a proponent of, like, work hard all the time,

[01:05:15] but if you don’t put in hard work for things. That’s one of the things that I don’t like about AI is it actually steals the struggle from you a lot of times.

[01:05:23] And I think it’s okay.

[01:05:25] Tara Bansal: I agree with that.

[01:05:26] Kristen Lux: Yeah, I think it’s okay to have things help you with the struggle.

[01:05:29] I use AI. We’ve got a note taker on this meeting right now. That’s an AI note taker. Like, I’m all about it. But recognizing where those things can help us and where they can hurt us is a really important part of using technology.

[01:05:42] And anything that’s looking to steal your struggle the right way so that you don’t inadvertently make it too easy on yourself where now you don’t even appreciate what you have because it came so easily.

[01:05:53] Tara Bansal: And I think that’s a great point because I feel like almost all my growth has happened in the struggle. And that’s how you learn.

[01:06:01] Kristen Lux: Oh, yeah. And it sucks in the moment. Like, let me be clear. Struggle is not fun.

[01:06:06] I. I’m the first one to start crying immediately when something is going the way I like.

[01:06:13] Tara Bansal: I’m a total crier, so. Oh, yeah. Where can people learn more about you and your work?

[01:06:20] Kristen Lux: So I like to hang out on Instagram and we’re on Facebook and we’re on LinkedIn.

[01:06:28] My LinkedIn is Kristen Lux. K R I S T E N L U X and then all of our handles online are for the love of systems. So F O r the love of systems.

[01:06:39] And I’m going to be doing a lot more speaking next year. That’s one of my big goals for next year, is more speaking. So you may see me at conferences if you had any that you recommend that you think I would be great for.

[01:06:50] I would love to hear it because I really want to spend time at financial advisor conferences. That’s one of my big goals for 2026.

[01:06:57] Tara Bansal: Exciting. I can’t wait. Yeah,

[01:06:59] I. I always say this, but I do feel like I could talk to you for another hour.

[01:07:05] Agree. I do have more questions, but we already went over and I really appreciate your time and your being here and.

[01:07:13] Kristen Lux: So glad to be here.

[01:07:14] Tara Bansal: An inspiration just hearing your story and thank you.

[01:07:18] Kristen Lux: I’m so glad to be here and thank you so much for taking the time to ask me all these beautiful questions.

[01:07:25] Tara Bansal: Wow. Thank you.

[01:07:26] What stayed with me after this conversation is how clearly Kristin shows that entrepreneurship really is one of the most powerful paths for personal development.

[01:07:39] Building a business forces you to sit with yourself,

[01:07:43] notice your patterns, limiting beliefs, and decide who you’re going to become.

[01:07:49] And when you do that, alongside your spouse,

[01:07:52] it’s a whole other level of growth.

[01:07:54] The change, the uncertainty, the counseling, the hard conversations.

[01:07:59] And then to hear her say that her marriage is what brings her the most joy right now.

[01:08:05] I just,

[01:08:06] I thought that was awesome. It says so much about how willing she’s been to do the inner work, not just the business work.

[01:08:15] The other thing that really stood out to me is Kristin’s commitment to being a good human and treating people everywhere well.

[01:08:24] One of Carl Richards favorite sayings is to be a better advisor, be a better human.

[01:08:30] And that is what Kristin is doing.

[01:08:32] She’s building a company where her small team is paid well and offered benefits.

[01:08:38] Where operations exist to support humans, not squeeze them.

[01:08:43] That resonates deeply with how I want to run my own business.

[01:08:47] I think of the people I work with as a second family.

[01:08:50] I want to work with people I love, help them grow and treat them with great respect.

[01:08:56] Kristin reminded me that when we put humans first,

[01:09:00] our clients,

[01:09:01] our teams, our partners,

[01:09:04] everything becomes better and more sustainable in the long run.

[01:09:08] The systems,

[01:09:09] the structure, the growth,

[01:09:11] all of it flows from the decision to care for each other.

[01:09:15] I hope you feel as inspired by Kristin and the way she’s building her life and business as I do.

[01:09:22] Thank you for listening to her life, her practice, her way.

[01:09:27] A podcast for and about female financial advisors.

[01:09:31] I truly hope you have enjoyed this podcast and got some value from it.

[01:09:35] If so, I would love to ask a favor of you.

[01:09:38] Please go to Apple Podcasts or Spotify and rate and review my podcast.

[01:09:44] This will help me get the word out to other amazing like minded female financial advisors.

[01:09:50] You can also send it to a friend or two who you think would gain something from listening to it.

[01:09:55] Until next time, I’m wishing you the very best.

For the Love of Systems – https://www.fortheloveofsystems.com/ -Kristen’s operations coaching agency

Habit Story assessment – https://www.fortheloveofsystems.com/people-services – Example Habit Story Report

Carl Richards’ The Society of Advice – https://www.thesocietyofadvice.com/

Unsolicited Business Advice with Amanda Quick – Website: https://www.amandaleequick.com/unsolicited-business-advice – Podcast: https://rss.buzzsprout.com/2538572.rss

Columbia, Missouri Rails-to-Trails system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MKT_Trail (Kristen’s beloved hiking spot)

For the first fifteen years of her career, Kristen Lux withstood the continuous operations challenges of scaling small businesses before finally burning out. In January of 2020, she launched For the Love of Systems to bring much-needed operations frameworks and coaching to small business owners and their teams.

Leveraging the power of digital systems + processes combined with proprietary frameworks, For the Love of Systems empowers their clients with new approaches to their operations that reduce burnout and bring ease to their day-to-day.

Through one-on-one coaching, team development workshops, and keynotes, For the Love of Systems is on a mission to educate and empower business owners and their teams with human-first, technology-enabled operations strategies + frameworks, empowering them to adapt to uncertainty and changes in how they work and create value collectively.

Kristen is a Habit Story certified coach and Certified Director of Operations, and she has more than twenty years of operations experience working for and with small businesses. When she isn’t nerding out over processes and habits, you can find her outdoors walking, hiking, biking, and paddling, volunteering, going on road trips, doing yoga, and watching corgi videos.

Social Media Handles

Kristen Lux

• LinkedIn:  linkedin.com/in/kristenlux

For the Love of Systems

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