Business can be a lonely game, but it doesn't have to be.

Welcome to Boutique Chat, where we explore community over competition and how to scale your company with the balance and the happiness that we all seek.

We'll hear from product-based businesses of all types, retailers, e-commerce, and wholesale brands,

along with industry experts shaping the future of our industry.

I'm your host, Ashley Alderson from the boutique hub, and I can't wait to chat.

Hey, guys, welcome back to the podcast this week.

It's time for some big questions today. Is that a fair intro. It's time for some big questions today.

Is that a fair intro? It's time for some big questions, some big conversations.

I'm excited about this. Hillary, you and I happen to be local, which doesn't happen very often

for guests of the show. So it's so awesome to have you on today. Thank you. Yeah, I'm really excited to be here.

And it's a rainy Friday morning. So this is just an exciting thing to kind of kick off the long

weekend. Yes, it's perfect. So you guys that are listening today, I'm just going to set it up with

this. You're definitely going to want to grab a notebook and take some notes today because we're

going to empower you guys with some questions and some food for thought that I think is a conversation we all need to be having.

Every single person needs to be having, but frankly, we just don't have it enough.

Or sometimes we feel intimidated to have these types of conversations.

So I'm excited for the road that we're going to go down.

So Hillary, before we get started and get into all of that, can you just bring me up to speed? Tell me how you got into this line of business,

how this all become a spark for you. And tell me about your customers. Yeah, totally. So I'm

from, I live in Wisconsin from the Kooli region area. I actually worked in corporate finance

and accounting for about 10 years.

And I always tell people that because I think they assume because I worked in corporate

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