I’m Adam Hayes. To my left is my co-host, Bob Payton. Across the table from us today is Leslie Bailey with Indy Maven. Welcome. Thank you. Welcome. Thanks for coming. Thanks for having me. Yeah. So tell us a little bit about your founding story with Indy Maven. We launched in October 2019 as a media platform for women in central Indiana. My background was journalism. So my co-founder, Amanda Kingsbury, and I felt that there was a gap when it came to telling women’s stories, just from our experience where we were at the time and just looking around what was out there. And you saw a lot of publications kind of nationally starting to start newsletters for women. And so I think we’re really kind of ahead of things trying to make that happen at our job at the time.

And it didn’t pan out. So we said, well, let’s go do it on our own. We launched and many years later in different iterations and it became, it evolved into something beyond just a news platform. But we still produce content every week and have a free weekly newsletter that goes out and we’re still rocking and rolling. And what’s five years in October. Yeah. So tell us about the inner workings of the business. So you said it’s more than that now. What is it? Well, right before we launched, we had women asking us how we could join. And I was we were sort of confused by that because I thought, well, you just have to sign up for a newsletter before; you just put your email address in, it’s pretty simple.

They want to be part of them; they want to be part of them they want to be part of a movement in the community, and so we very quickly threw together a membership program. Fortunately, this is when memberships were just really also becoming pretty popular, so there were some resources, not as many as there are now, of course. But okay, how do I do this? How do we figure this out? And so did it, you know, pretty messy and and now have since refined and used different tools, and um, now know what kind of the purpose was before; it was just responding to a request that we were hearing um without really knowing why. But just intuition which comes into a lot of, a lot of things that I do; just thought well people are asking for it, and a lot of people right considering we hadn’t even launched yet, for people to ask for a product um, told me that it doesn’t exist, and that they had already sort of decided in their head what it was going to be. Which I think is really interesting, right? So they they kind of took the identity of the brand and made it something for you, almost yeah, yeah, just. Based on hearing a concept we didn’t even have a website up, our social wasn’t up like it was purely just word of mouth and concept, and it was an overwhelming number of people reaching out because it just piqued their interest-oh that’s really cool, yeah.

What was uh maybe the first kind of I don’t know, meeting I’m not sure that’s the right word or not that you kind of like ‘holy moly’, this is going to be a thing. Well, we launched with an event that we did, the Alexander Hotel. There’s an apartment complex called City Way downtown. And they were opening their City Way complexes. So they had a brand new pool. Like literally, we’re finishing the pool the day that we were having this. So we had this launch party. They were partners of ours at the time. And so we invited 200 women of influence. I don’t want to say influencers because they’re across industries. It wasn’t what we think of it an influencer today, but women that we thought could really get on board with this mission of what we were trying to do, and so we had these 200 women around the pool; I had this awesome party.

And that people still talk to me about today. We do the party again. So I think that made a big splash early on. But then we had these 200 women who we asked to then be ambassadors for us. And a lot of them are still part of it today. So we started with that. And then the goal was to have monthly meetups in person. But, of course, five months later was COVID. But we also just had this digital product. While we had these in-person meetups every month, the product itself wasn’t dependent on being in person. So we had this captive audience for a digital product at a time where everyone was just. dying for yeah yeah, but they’re seeking connection and distraction and information, and we had this captive audience because we were already on the internet, so um in a lot of ways, I think it helped us probably grow faster than we would have otherwise.

So how is your audience finding you today in new ways? So We have yet to spend more than $500 ever, I think, on advertising and marketing. Everything has been word of mouth or trade. So I am at the point now where I’m like, okay, I feel like we’ve saturated this circle and the kind of word of mouth market. So this 2025 will be the year that we really start investing in doing, I mean, even just paid social. We’ve done an occasional boost. For the most part, we haven’t just relied on word of mouth. So, you know, and I have two businesses. So I have Indie Maven, the one we’ve been talking about. And then two years ago, I launched Maven Space, which is a coworking space. Okay.

And so that is more heavily dependent on SEO, Google. But even there, we really didn’t invest. Now, I’m not saying that was necessarily a good thing. I’m proud of what we did. Right. But I will do things differently moving forward just because I have to, but also, you know, in hindsight, maybe I probably should have invested in those things, but you know, I’d never done this before. I, I’m, you know, it fell into entrepreneurship and I’ve been figuring it out as I go, you know, and then when you know better, you do better. So exactly. So how would you describe that journey then over the last several years? Well, in between all of that, I also had two kids. So the last seven years, my mother passed away.

I got pregnant with my first son. My husband’s mom passed away. We’ve also had a second son. We’ve moved different jobs. I mean, when you talk about that scale of life stressors packed into the last seven years. You’ve gotten comfortable being uncomfortable. Yeah. And I think that helped as an entrepreneur because if everything else had just been plugging along as usual, that would have felt so volatile, you know, like the ups and downs of entrepreneurship. But at some point I was like, this is my life now. Nice to come. You know, but it helped a lot. I mean, there are still blows, but I think it helped soften some of those. Or, you know,

also. Some perspective, yeah right, like for sure when there are people who are sick or dying or you’ve brought new life into the world, you know an open rate doesn’t seem to be as important, yes I mean our open rates always been always important but you know, yeah yeah it puts big stuff in perspective right and the small things that really don’t matter don’t matter. So, so I mean, who is your ideal client? Well, women for sure, to start. Sure. Is there a certain age group? Typically about 35 to 54. I would say the majority of which are probably parents, but not necessarily. Now, there are kind of two different clients that sort of overlap in the diagram from the coworking space to the media product.

But ultimately, we see a lot of leaders, whether that’s nonprofit or in the business community, a lot of founders, but we also have just a lot of remote workers. But I think the common thread there is people who see the power of community and the power of women within a community, so that isn’t necessarily just women; we do have some male members and some allies who come in and say, like, this is something that I want to get behind, um, as well as men in the co-working space too, but it’s a very different vibe than when you go into some of the more male-dominated spaces for sure, right? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Is that it? Are we good here? I think we both had a question at the same time.

You go for yours. I’m totally lost. We’ve never done that before. That’s a new one. Do you want to go ahead? Okay. Yeah. I’ll shift a little bit. Maybe you’ve got to this point, right? So what’s the next year or two look like for you? Well, I sublease the coworking space and that sublease ends at the end of this year. So I am currently in negotiations for a new location that I pretty much have my heart set on. So if that doesn’t go through, I don’t know. We’ll see. Or your fingers crossed on your other hand. Yeah. I don’t know. I also just have this like knowing that it will. So I’m not super stressed out. I hope I’m right about that. But again, intuition and I just lean heavily on that.

So we’re just going to say that’s going to go ahead and go through. So we’ll have a move on our plate. And we may even we’ll just keep, you know, plugging along. I think there’s some interesting trends as far as I think that people are going to the pendulum swinging back from overload of master classes and online courses. And I think getting back to smaller, more intimate in person, we hear a lot from our audience that the bigger events are too much, too overwhelming. Like they want the kind of 30, maybe 50 person events. But even sometimes, you know, if we’ve had 25, this is perfect. This is great. We don’t need any more than that. So, I mean.

We’ve got hundreds of people in the community, so that’s that’s harder to control, but really I think just more intentional; it’s the whole postcode with people being more thoughtful with their time, more intentional, and so not just having things to have them or doing things to do them, but making sure that we have a real purpose for why we’re gathering or why we’re doing what we’re doing. So those are kind of the two parallel things which again cross over um to each other, but also operate on their own. No, we see that as well; Adam and I both even have something cooking in that very area as we speak. Yeah, yeah, for sure. That you see that?

I mean, I would I would rather sit with 10 people than 100, sure any day, yeah, any day, because you get to know people and you get to know their stories and you get to know what’s going on versus okay, the economy. And you can get to a level of authenticity and, you know, transparency that can actually help you and help the other person. For sure. Tell us kind of the nuts and bolts of what it’s like to be involved and engaged in the community and what people are getting out of it. So we, like I said, we have the monthly membership or the monthly meetups rather as part of the membership. So there are people who.

Basically, never miss one are those different topics and how do you come so we try and alternate like personal and professional and then we also alternate um if we host them at Maven Space or if we host them out in the community. So next week our meetup will be at Alice’s Garden which is a garden center on the Northwest side um they’re doing like a little mini house plants mini workshop basically here’s how to not kill your plants a little VIP shopping experience but they’ve got a beautiful, beautiful little event space. The next one in September, we’re actually going to do a pickleball clinic at Broadmoor. Oh, of course. Yeah. But we’ve done a few months ago, we had Marketing Maven. So that was obviously on the more professional side of things.

Really trying to alternate the personal and professional. Because I think, you know, especially as women, we kind of do the it’s doing it all, right? We contain multitudes, right? We all do. But that’s a way that. Sometimes you see the same people at every single one of those events and then it’ll alternate based on interest. It’s also a great way for us to grow our audience if someone sees that event they’re open to the public to buy tickets but if you are a member, it’s included. We also have a platform um that is called ‘It’s On’ Circle, the membership platform, and so I think as people are also sort of getting off social. We have a number of people in there who are just like, this is great because I’m not even on any social anymore.

I’ve deleted my Instagram and my Facebook. So, having this very safe private space where it’s just our members, you know, just off the top of my head this morning, somebody looking for a financial advisor, you know, we’ve seen there’s a lot of recommendations, but a lot of volunteer opportunities, job opportunities. So, you have this This insulated sort of community engagement ecosystem. We also have perks with local businesses in there and a lot of different ways to get engaged. But I think those are the things that I hear the most that people getting out of. And then the same thing for the co-working space. You know, you can go get an office anywhere, obviously. We have tons of co-working spaces that are great. I think what’s different and.

I have a coworking coach and actually a broker who specializes in coworking that I’m working with right now. And the conversation we’re having a lot of is our model’s very different in that this is not, we’re putting up offices and then you’re going to come fill them. Because that to me is not my version of co-working as somebody who’s kind of maybe newer to the industry. My version is I have a community. That needs a place to work and it might be a private office and it might be a flex desk and it might be this, but I’m more in the hospitality side of things and events are a huge part of what we do so we have a liquor license food and beverage.

So, what I’ve realized is that I kept trying to kind of fit what we’re doing into this traditional co-working model-it’s not. And now I’m okay with that. Right at first, I was like, ‘I’m doing this wrong.’ But I also was just working with what I had and what people wanted. So now I feel I think a little bit more emboldened to lean into that um moving forward, especially in the next space and next iteration-hopefully if my pro forma is right good proof of concept. Oh yeah! What area of town are you targeting? With that, it’s Nora okay, yeah, so the majority of our audience from where you are now, um, I would say maybe 20 in traffic, but the majority of our audience is north side of Indianapolis, and kind of the surrounding areas.

We certainly have people from all over, but the I would say one of the top three objections that we would get was, ‘Can you, you know, could you build something on our side?’ You know, eventually, you hear that enough times and think, ‘There might be something maybe we should listen to that piece right so.’ How did you get to your journey uh before you started Indie Maven and Maven Space? What did that look like? Where did you grow up? Kind of just give us the highlights of how you got here. I’m from the Detroit area. Okay, two today. You’re the second. Our first one’s from Detroit as well. And we asked them, and I’m going to ask you the same question. Is Detroit-style pizza a real thing or is it marketing hype?

You know what? It is. And I just learned about it on the back of a pizza box. My phone said they used like something from an engine to bake the pizza in and that’s how it ended up being like an engine pan or something, and that’s how it ended up being deep dish. And it was on the back of just like a frozen pizza box. This is how I learned this and it is very much a thing and I love it right, oh interesting well it’s cool to embrace it right it comes from you know that area of the country specifically. A rectangle-style pizza cut into rectangles, right, right yeah, that’s the little somewhere between a thin crust and like Chicago style, it’s kind of in between.

Now it’s it’s interesting, definitely thicker yeah um it’s not New York it’s not Chicago style, it’s its own thing that’s square yeah, it was like Motor City Pizza or something so where do you get that around here? Yeah, You know, what is it called? Is it Sam’s? I’m going to blank on the guy’s name, but there is one. Okay. There is one. And I feel like it’s Sam’s. Once we find it, we’ll put it in the description. What area of the city is it? Ron Miner’s brother. And I want to say it’s like maybe the near east side of downtown. Okay. I will look it up, but I will tell you. All right. But you can, he’s doing Detroit style pizza. So yeah, you can have the. There’s all different types, right?

But the one that I’m used to and what I grew up eating. Well, we also have Little Caesars, right? Yes. That’s what we were talking about. And I think Jets Pizza is from that area too, right? Jets is also. Yes, it is. Which is what I get here usually. I think it was an oil pan. An oil pan. That makes sense. That makes sense. Detroit, Ottawa, right? Interesting. Interesting taste and flavor. Right? But that’s a perfect segue because that’s what also brought me here was racing. My dad worked in IndyCar racing. He started a series called Indy Lights back in the 80s. He was working here during the week and then going back to our hometown on the weekends where my mom still was and I came down here.

I did a little brief stint in California when I was 18 and didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life so I moved to Indianapolis and just was going to finish school really quick and then You know, people always like to say Indianapolis is very sticky. Yes. And I totally get what they mean by that because it’s like every time I, every year I thought, Oh, I’ll go somewhere else. I’ll go somewhere else. And you know, 20 years later, it’s kind of too easy to live here. Yeah. It sounds awful, but it’s why people come back. Yeah. Yeah. They go somewhere else and like, this is hard. Yeah. And like everything just sort of.

Fell into place from there, I literally met a guy on the street in Broad Ripple and when I was 21, he said, ‘Oh, do you want to write a blog about going out all the time?’ I was like, ‘Sure, I don’t know what a blog is, but that sounds fun and then that snowballed into my journalism career and eventually led me to a job at Indianapolis Star, later Indianapolis Monthly, and then I was doing freelance writing and editing, and then that’s what happened. Gotcha. And that’s what happened. Yeah. Cool. So go ahead, we got to quit doing that. So I’m going to quit looking. Just spit it out. It’s gone now. You’ve thrown me off. Did I? We’ll have to edit that out. It’s awful. It’s our new thing.

I don’t know. It better not be our new thing. We’ve got two more of these coming up. Well, maybe the question, you know, back to the future just a little bit. So, I mean, You’ve got some immediate plans. You’re going to have a transition here a little bit on location. But what do you see happening in the space you’re in? You’ve created a different space than everybody else because I’ve been in every co-working space in Indianapolis, right? So I know kind of all of them and kind of the different genres. But, I mean, one, do you see that continuing to grow just because the corporate? inbound, I’ll call it, office space demand has just, you know, totally gone away, especially downtown. But I mean, what do you see kind of in that space?

What do you see maybe changing or not or growing in the next five years? Well, the industry as a whole is expected to be valued at $24 billion by 2030. So it is growing rapidly. and i think that we’ll see more i think we’ll see like smaller and rural right so definitely getting away from from that um the big like box office situation um where it’s just like here’s a desk and here’s three you know what is that three i guess with the door three highlighters yeah yeah yeah and i i believe Not because I’m doing this, but I believe and listening. My coach and broker have a podcast called Fox Uncensored. And their most recent episode was a guy who lives in Nashville and all of his spaces are in Florida.

And his model is very similar to mine. And I kind of want to dive deeper. I can’t remember the name of his space, of course, because apparently my brain is fried. It’s Friday. I can’t remember the name of anything. But he it’s very it’s very like industrial vibes, very different. But overall, hospitality first, a lot of food and beverage events right because people want to be able to do it all in one place and that was always kind of our thing from the beginning, especially women like if you are running a business or even just you know working for a company as an employee typically if you are a mom and a woman like I, I don’t have time to run to

you know a coffee meeting and then to a gym and then to the kids’ school and then to the office and then back to something else oh and they forgot their homework like you obviously can’t help running to school and back and even if you don’t have kids like that’s not a good use of our time that’s not even if you’re not a parent even if you’re not a woman like that’s not a good use of anyone’s time running all over the place so my thought was bring it all in house so we have a fitness center on site, we have a cafe on site, you can get your juice in the morning, you can get your workout in; we have a podcast studio, you Can report record your podcast.

We have a lending library. You don’t even have to go to the library. Like what can, how can we create in this little ecosystem so that you aren’t driving all over the place every single day. You can talk to the person next to you and maybe meet your next accountant or attorney or graphic designer, which that you do get in a lot of spaces, but you don’t get that when you, I don’t think you do though. This is the question I was going to ask you. I found in sitting in various spaces over the years. Some are way more connected or willing to have that conversation with whoever’s sitting there. And some others are just heads down. Don’t bug me. And I appreciate some of that, right?

Because there’s a time and a place. But you’re in a co-working space so that means co-working, right? It’s like being alone together, yeah, right? It’s really strange, and so each each of the ones has different personalities, I’ll call them “so” and I’d be fascinated to know kind of what that’s like you know in your space and I think that comes down to the vibe and the tone that you set as the operator as your community manager sets because you know That doesn’t mean nobody’s getting work done. And there are definitely days where it’s like, ‘Hey, nice to see you.’ I got to keep my head down.

But you also know that people are going to be friendly and people are going to be kind and they’re there to support you because that’s what we set out to do in the mission. And as long as I think you maintain and stick to what your brand is about. And then not tolerating when people go against that, and say you know, not everybody’s going to be a fit, and and we’re not going to be a fit for everybody else too, and that’s okay, right? Yeah, so what do you see as your core challenge going forward in the next four or five years? I mean, I think my personal challenges are going to be just this is a different model than what I’m used to because if I move for the space I’m looking at, we’re looking at, you know, maybe 20 private offices and I don’t have private offices currently, so that model changes but for me that’s also too good because we’re going to maintain an event space but we’re not going to have to necessarily you know, you don’t have the turn of membership or events changing when you have the private offices right? So my hope and plan is that alleviates some of that every month having something that’s a little bit more consistent. I think that I was hesitant to get into the industry which is interesting because this guy in the Other podcasts said the same thing, like I didn’t consider myself a co-working owner operator in some ways because I was doing it so differently so I didn’t really get involved I didn’t go to all the conferences I’ve gone to one conference I went last year and now I’m sort of seeing like oh but I can also I sat in that conference thinking I’m different, I’m doing this wrong, this is bad but now I’m like well what I need to do is show up at this conference and say hey there’s more one more than one way to do this and here’s where we’re having success um you know my my my coaching and the broker were like, What is this line item, ‘like sponsorships and partnerships’? Like, it’s what it says. What are you talking about? They’re like, we just, we don’t see that on performance because we don’t have that. Why wouldn’t you? Thank you, PNC. They sponsor our event space. They’re wonderful partners. They’re so supportive of women in business. We’ve been able to do so many things with them.

Why wouldn’t you invite people into what you’re doing to do that? Not only is it a cool and helpful thing to do, but that’s now a line for us of revenue. So I think it’s cool that we’re thinking outside the box. And now instead of being sort of like insecure about that, I want to share that with other people because I think that our challenge is always going to be, it’s not the next coworking space. They say it’s like your kitchen table. You’re probably like. You’re going to decide, do I want to stay home or I don’t want to go to a space? It’s not, do I really want to go to this space or that space? You know pretty clearly what’s going to be the right vibe for you.

It’s just a matter of, do you want to get out of your house? And my argument, not just because of what I do, but it’s like we weren’t, there’s a reason the saying, ‘it takes a village’, like we weren’t meant to do any of this alone. And so, sitting at your kitchen table, let alone forget about the laundry and the dog barking and all that stuff. You’re alone. Right. That is not a good place to be. And we’ve all learned that. If we haven’t learned anything else for the last couple of years, it’s that that’s not good for us. And sitting. Yes, exactly. So get on the treadmill and use the fitness studio. Yeah. That’s awesome. So what inspires you as a human being to do all this stuff?

When I get to see the like. Sounds so cheesy, but the magic happened in the space. So when I introduced two people, I love telling the story where I introduced these two women at this space, they ended up realizing that they were neighbors and lived together in Greenwood, literally could walk to each other’s houses. So they did, they had wine one night, they ended up working together and one hired the other one. And, you know, they would have never known each other and they lived locked up, right. And had to come downtown to this space to figure that out, to figure that out. So that happens. All the time I love being a resource; I love making connections with people and sharing information, so it inspires me to be able to to be the hub because I know how hard it was for me to figure everything out on my own and I just wasn’t very it wasn’t that I was too proud to ask for help; it just never occurred to me.

Like, I just grew up figuring things out on your own, sure. So, I’ve had to learn and get better about asking. But it’s so much more efficient; it’s just so much easier, right? So if you can lean over and say, ‘I am having problems with this Word document versus you know, and somebody helps me in five seconds versus me spending the next 25 minutes trying to Google it, and then I’m going to pay back that favor later. Like, that’s where magic happens, and that’s where we actually… we talk about accelerators, um, and they’re so like, yes, business accelerators, right? Serious and structured, and all these things. And I went through something. I’ve gone through similar things. These are the types of things that I think are going to be outdated.

Because when I realize, oh, I could also learn most of that by showing up a few pieces of programming, talking to a few people here in this space, et cetera, et cetera. And I don’t have to spend that amount of time or money or whatever it may be. That’s where in my mind, that’s what real acceleration is. So I think we’ll see more of that. And that’s what I’m excited about. Right. So, are you, do you feeling like your vision for the new space is exactly the vision that you want to achieve? Or do you think there’s concessions in there? I think it’s exactly what I want to achieve. I think I will be sad to leave our existing space just because it’s so big.

I mean, we’re in 15,000 square feet and it’s beautiful, but at the end of the day, people don’t want to come downtown. And I, I was fighting that battle for so long and was such a cheerleader for downtown. Is it the parking or is it the travel time or what is it? Or is it both? Yeah. It’s all around. Yeah. It’s, you know, um, there’s, there, people just didn’t necessarily want to go back. It’s there, you know, They don’t feel safe, or it’s too far, or they don’t want to pay for parking. And I was just fighting these battles. And then I’m like, why am I fighting this? You’re like, but this space is so beautiful. I know, but I’m like, but it’s so pretty here.

And that’s what everybody says once they get in there. They’re like, oh, I just wish it could be closer, or I wish it didn’t have to pay, et cetera, et cetera. So this new space I’m looking at, that’s free parking. It’s probably more convenient for a lot of our audience. It’s a smaller event space. I’m okay with that because I don’t know that I ever really was interested in doing the sizes of events that we do, um, those are awesome but we also have really great event spaces that people can go to for those larger scale events. I think our sweet spot is like, where do you go for that 50 person event? That’s where what we get a lot of calls on right because you can go to the big event spaces, yeah, and if you don’t want to sit in a hotel conference room there aren’t a lot of options, that’s correct.

Um, so I feel like it has everything I want, I, I would like to think that we will probably look at the whole kind of hub and spoke model. And are there other satellite locations? Because at the end of the day, it’s still kind of bothers me that now it’s going to be in one area. And what if you live somewhere else? Like I want everyone to be able to benefit from this. You want it to be accessible? Yeah. And keeping pricing, you know, accessible to like keeping that in mind that. That it is a luxury because working from home is free, but at the same time you pay for it, don’t you? So it’s not really. It does have a cost. Everything has a cost. Exactly. Yeah.

But you know, I was just surprised when we launched to see how many people weren’t familiar with coworking in general. I didn’t know I would also have to do so much education about, about what coworking is. Sure. So really, that surprised, that surprises me too. I think Indianapolis is. Is matured a lot in the last decade, right now, but when it started, it was pretty rough, yeah, I mean it was really rough, yeah. Not surprising we tend to be a little behind on our trends, um, but that’s okay. I like you know I like introducing people to new things, that’s I think that’s the journalist didn’t mean the storytelling storyteller in me too is like this, that’s why I started this because through my work with Indy Maven, I saw these were things that other cities had And I just remember thinking, if someone starts a female-forward co-working space and it’s not me in the city, I’m going to be so mad.

Well, that informed you that you needed to do it. Yeah. So how are you still scratching the itch of journalism these days? impulsivity last night so there’s this trend right now that’s nancy meyer’s core so the filmmaker nancy myers she don’t know uh something’s got to give it’s complicated parent trap father the bride so she’s a filmmaker producer director okay she has this like she’s known for having these beautiful homes and aesthetics her characters live in these beautiful homes especially with beautiful kitchens and um for some reason there’s this new trend it’s resurged because of tick tock this hashtag nancy meyer core and nancy meyer aesthetic and last night i was just like that’s

so fascinating their own brand around her brand it’s fascinating right i think that’s what the kids call meta i don’t know how that works but last night i was like oh i i love nancy meyer phones i just got this idea of like i want to have a post about all the local places you can shop to get the nancy Myers core aesthetic, whatever. And so I just like whipped that post up last night. And I know to my core, that’s going to do really well. It’s going to perform really well because this topic is trend and that felt so good. And I was doing a little outreach, you know, checking with the stores and getting images. It’s not probably the best use of my time ultimately as an owner and a CEO, but it felt; it got me, it did.

And I felt I was in. Better mood this morning and I woke up excited to finish it, and I think that the more I do that, so I need to keep that in mind that if it’s just like one little piece of it that’s like hard investigative journalism which is not what I ever was to begin with anyway, mind you, but I love defying of something that’s relevant a topic and something that I think will excite people and again kind of that inform inspire delight thing that’s still really important to me so cool. What I do is go off the rails. And then I’m like, hey, team, you weren’t expecting this. And now I’m going to mess up our whole night’s schedule. There’s the name of the blog right there, off the rails.

But where are we on the new space, Leslie? I know. And I’m like, shh, I’m finishing this post about Nancy Meyers’ core. It’s very important. I can’t imagine why I get nothing done. That’s awesome. So what do you like to do for fun? Write blog posts. I read. I’ve just gotten back into reading. I walk every day. That’s become very important to my sanity. I’m that person that has to have a 30-minute walk in. I’m cranky. That’s important to me. Trying to spend some time at the pool. Trying to get back into actual exercise. Walking is physical activity. I just hit 40 this year. But I’ve got two little kids. Gravity changes things for me somehow. Yeah, it’s weird. Gravity and dinner. I also love food. I love cooking.

I’m a big foodie. I love going out to eat. What’s your favorite foods? Oh, wow. If you had to pick three things to eat. Okay, so seafood. I’ve implemented seafood sundaes in our house. Oh, nice. Especially in the summer, grilling. So I love seafood. I love Italian food. What would be my third? I love just like snacks. So I love, I’m very excited. I’m going to Boca next week for a happy hour to celebrate our former director, but they have a, like an Aperol Spritz flight and dollar oysters. Like that’s the type of thing that I could do just like snacks and appetizers. I really like. Snacky appetizer food like super bowl is awesome, I love the Super Bowl because charcuterie-right, yes, yeah!

My six-year-old makes charcuterie boards really, yeah, that tells you anything, yeah, it’s a thing in your house, yeah, definitely. They’re the weirdest weirdest plates of food. Speaking of seafood, where do you get fresh seafood to cook on? So of course because I, my brain doesn’t work, but there’s a place in Broadview Pool that opened by Renee’s, yeah, um, I’m just gonna make this up or Dallas, Oh, yes. It’s like seafood market, I think is what it’s going by now. Oh, there you go, yeah. I started going there. We had lobster. Well, I went in to actually just buy fish to cook and then we ended up getting lobster rolls two weekends ago. They were delicious. They have smoking goose, like a whitefish spread that was delicious. So yeah, that’s been my spot lately.

Awesome. How will people find you? Like if they tune into this, you know, and they’re in your target audience, how should they find you and reach out? So IndieMaven. com or MavenSpace. co are the websites. And on social, I am Lesalina. That’s my @. Lesalina. L-E-S-A-L-I-N-A. Part of the Nancy Meyer core. It was just, like I said, I didn’t know what blogging was when this guy asked me. And that was like my Twitter handle. And then it just became my handle on everything. And here we are, 40-year-old woman. Known as Lesalina. The new Disney princess. Yeah. Lesalina. Yeah. Well, thanks for coming on today. It’s been great having you on the show today. Thank you for having me. Really enjoyed it. Thank you. Me too. You bet.