Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Lori Harder on Pivoting in Business and Reinventing Your Mindset for Success | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
Fri, 21 Feb 2025
At a pool party, little Lori Harder got up on the diving board only to hear her peers chanting “Whale!” And just like that, she went from a bubbly child to one who hid because of her body. Refusing to accept that her size was genetic, she threw herself into the world of fitness. Through relentless hard work, she became a 3-time fitness world champion, gracing the covers of fitness magazines. But she didn’t stop there. She built a successful fitness brand and has since excelled at other businesses. In this episode, Lori shares her journey of reinventing herself time and time again, including lessons on rebounding from failure and pivoting in business. In this episode, Hala and Lori will discuss: (00:00) Introduction (03:11) Mindset Shifts from Childhood Struggles (08:16) Finding Motivation Through Hard Times (12:02) First Steps into Entrepreneurship (19:17) Scaling her Fitness Business Online (26:51) Selling Success in Network Marketing (30:53) Launching a Successful Podcast (32:55) Opportunities Unlocked with Podcasting (33:21) Joining Lewis Howe's Mastermind (33:51) Starting a Podcast: Tips and Challenges (35:10) Teaching to Learn: The Ultimate Life Hack (37:02) Raising Money Through Podcasting (40:38) Pivoting for Business Growth in COVID (50:24) The Importance of Relationships in Business Lori Harder is a serial entrepreneur, top podcast host, and bestselling author known for her expertise in personal transformation, mindfulness, and entrepreneurship. She is also the founder of Glōci, a skin routine you can drink. A former 3-time fitness world champion, Lori turned her passion for fitness into a thriving career in network marketing and coaching. She hosts the Earn Your Happy podcast, a Forbes Top 11 business podcast. Through her events, podcast, books, and courses, she helps women connect with their like-minded tribes, take bold leaps in business, and live out their entrepreneurial dreams. Episode Sponsors: Shopify - Sign up for a one-dollar-per-month trial period at youngandprofiting.co/shopify Airbnb - Your home might be worth more than you think. Find out how much at airbnb.com/host Rocket Money - Cancel your unwanted subscriptions and reach your financial goals faster with Rocket Money. Go to rocketmoney.com/profiting Indeed - Get a $75 job credit at indeed.com/profiting RobinHood - Receive your 3% boost on annual IRA contributions, sign up at robinhood.com/gold Factor - Get 50% off your first box plus free shipping when you use code FACTORPODCAST at factormeals.com/profiting50off Active Deals - youngandprofiting.com/deals Key YAP Links Reviews - ratethispodcast.com/yap Youtube - youtube.com/c/YoungandProfiting LinkedIn - linkedin.com/in/htaha/ Instagram - instagram.com/yapwithhala/ Social + Podcast Services - yapmedia.com Transcripts - youngandprofiting.com/episodes-new Entrepreneurship, entrepreneurship podcast, Business, Business podcast, Self Improvement, Self-Improvement, Personal development, Starting a business, Strategy, Investing, Sales, Selling, Psychology, Productivity, Entrepreneurs, AI, Artificial Intelligence, Technology, Marketing, Negotiation, Money, Finance, Side hustle, Startup, mental health, Career, Leadership, Mindset, Health, Growth mindset, Career, Success, Entrepreneurship, Productivity, Careers, Startup, Entrepreneurs, Business Ideas, Growth Hacks, Career Development, Money Management, Opportunities, Professionals, Workplace, Career podcast, Entrepreneurship podcast
Chapter 1: How did childhood struggles shape Lori Harder's entrepreneurial mindset?
Lori is a serial entrepreneur, the host of the Forbes 11 business podcast, Earn Your Happy, which is in my podcast network, and the best-selling author of A Tribe Called Bliss. Lori has had to reinvent herself at several points in her life. She went from being a chubby kid with anxiety issues to then gracing the covers of fitness magazines and becoming a three-time fitness world champion.
Then she built a successful fitness brand and made it big with a network marketing business. By 32, she had made her first million. In this episode, Lori shares her journey of reinventing herself time and time again, including lessons on rebounding from failure and pivoting in business.
So get ready for an inspiring conversation about turning setbacks into stepping stones and discovering your true potential. Lori, welcome to Young and Profiting Podcast. I'm so excited to be here. I can't wait to chat with you. Likewise. I love chatting with my girlfriends.
And Lori, I thought I knew a lot about you, but it turns out I didn't know much about you once I started studying all your work and your life. And I found out that when you were a child, you were actually pretty overweight. And that was so surprising to me because I've always known you as somebody who's super fit You've been a fitness model in the past.
And I just had no idea that you had this transformation. So I'd love to understand what was it like for you as a kid? How did that actually shape who you are as an entrepreneur today?
Oh, my gosh. Coming from a family that it really stemmed from all of our joy came from connecting over food. It was just as far as I can remember back. All of our extracurricular time, when we were sad, when we were happy, when we were bored, we connected over food.
And I remember having a really loving childhood as far as family and parents go, but also there was a lot of pain that's connected to when you use food as a crutch. Because when I think about my mom, my sister, and all of my mom's sisters, who she had four sisters, there was a lot of anxiety. There was a lot of depression. There was a lot of health issues. There was a lot of self-loathing.
So it was kind of a mix of everything. And for me, having those moments as a young kid, I remember when I was eight or nine years old, it was the first time I realized, oh, this is going to be a little bit painful being in this body. I got invited to a pool party with a bunch of friends in my church. And I remember having such a massive crush on this one kid.
I was that kid who was so outgoing before this, even before this moment, which we'll chat about in a second. But It was always, oh my gosh, look at my dance moves. Look at this dance I made up. Record me. Somebody put a camera on me. This is who my personality was at the core. And so I remember going to this pool party and I got this new swimsuit because the love of my life was going to be there.
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Chapter 2: What was Lori Harder's first step into entrepreneurship?
So I wasn't allowed to do any extracurriculars and I wasn't allowed to do anything with anyone in school or quote unquote worldly people. So for me, I think the hiding also started because I was going to school in elementary school and middle school, but because there wasn't a whole lot of different kids in upper Michigan, like there wasn't a lot of diversity up there.
I remember one African-American student in my entire school career. And so it's like, you're also abnormal if you're not celebrating holidays and you can't do the art projects and art and you can't, and you can't go and spend the night at people's house and you can't go to their house after school. And so I got made fun of a lot in school and I started to get panic attacks.
So then I labeled myself because my mom was also experiencing these things. And I labeled myself as someone who has panic attacks. And I labeled myself as an anxious person. And I just started isolating more and more and more.
And it became a much bigger challenge for me as I was older to try to work through those things because you gain an awareness that once you're out in the real world, you're not going to function well if you can't connect with other people.
And so my entire life's work has been hot as a girl who came from a restrictive religion, who isn't allowed to associate with anyone else, who did not have any other network because I ended up leaving that religion at 18 into a world of no friends, really. I had a couple from my religion who also left, but that didn't go well for that more us either.
When you're held like a spring and you let go, it's like we had a disastrous life for a few years there. It was drinking and partying and it just was not a great experience. So how do you build a network? How do you overcome anxiety? How do you even start to dream when you've never seen the possibility in your social circle of what is possible for you because it's never been in your social circle?
And how do you create an entirely new identity outside of this woman that I used to be or girl that I used to be who was very much like, okay, we need to make sure we just preach about the Bible. And if you struggle, that must be righteous and really challenged money story, challenged with my weight and all of those different things.
So that's why I love what I do now because I feel like I'm a bit of like a excuse eliminator. Because when I hear things, I'm like, oh no, yeah, you can do this. Like I did it. Let me show you. So it's funny on podcasts. It's like, oh, we got to go back to the beginning again. But the beginning is so important. It's so important to see where we all came from to know like you can do it too.
This is so possible for you.
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Chapter 3: How did Lori Harder scale her fitness business online?
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And now you guys are just this amazing power couple that's always doing these awesome events. And it's just really inspiring, honestly, to hear the story about how you guys grew together and did this all together and how he supported you and helped you. Yeah. So at what point did you take this and scale it online? What was that like?
With the in-person personal training, you kind of have a realization that you are trading time for money because I wanted to make more because of this number that we were in debt. And so my head and my husband's head starts doing the math on how long is this going to take us? And you realize you'll be like 80 years old to pay this off.
So we're like, okay, can't just trade in-person stuff because we'll never pay this off and we'll never be in the positive, essentially, the way that we want to live life at all. So at that time, I was starting to do fitness competitions. And the woman that I had found through a fitness magazine and I had gone to her camp had an online training membership.
But the membership was for fitness competitions if you wanted to compete. So it would be the workouts, it'd be the competition diet, all of those things, group calls, group recognition. And I was like, wait, this is freaking amazing. Why wouldn't I do this for just the people who can't train with me?
Because I had slowly started building a Facebook presence and I built it simply by every single day I would show up and write something that I was going through or something that I was reading and something that I was doing to move through it. And it became like an online journal for me. And somehow I didn't even realize what I was doing. I was obviously growing a personal brand.
And so I would have people all the time because I'd talk about my workouts that day. I'd post them online and I'd have people would be like, God, I wish I could train with you. I wish we could do this together. And so I knew that there would be some people. I didn't know how many there would be, but I'm like, oh, I think I can count like five who would join this thing.
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Chapter 4: Why did Lori Harder pivot from fitness to entrepreneurship?
Thank you. Thank you.
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
,,,,,,,,. P P P P P P P set實,實, ,, ,, ,, ,, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , a Little P P P P P P P P P P P P P P So I strategically in the middle knew that because I had read her book, I was like, I'm going to tell her about my company and what I'm doing, what I'm launching. And so in the middle of it, there was an opportunity to be like, oh, this is amazing.
I can understand the struggle because right now I'm trying to raise money and blah, blah, blah. And I'd mentioned it and I mentioned a little bit about the company. And then afterward, I had said to her, this is huge, huge key. I had said to her, what else can I do for you? How can I get this book out more? What's the biggest thing that would help you that I could do for my audience?
And so she tells me and I'm like, great, I'm going to do it. What happens is people want to reciprocate. Now, did she have to reciprocate? Absolutely not. But people want to. And so she was like, hey, is there anything I can do for you? And I was like, I would love for you to just look at this deck if you want to give me any critiques, if you know anyone who I could talk to about investing.
And the next day she was like, I'm going to invest and I'm sending this to 15 other women and I'm letting them know about it. And then one of the people she sent it to also invested, who was a celebrity. She sent a list of celebrities and copied me on it. And I was like, oh my God, I'm so glad I asked because I almost didn't. I was so intimidated and I almost didn't ask. So that's crazy.
That's amazing. So you ended up getting sponsors for this light pink brand. Can you tell us a bit about this brand? And we'll talk about how you transitioned and everything.
This was 2019, 2020, just turned 2020. But 2019 was the initial idea. That's when I was getting the deck together and the idea and doing all the things, formulation, all that stuff. It was a non-alcoholic rosé and a light rosé wine spritz. So at the time, this is when Gary Vee had just launched his wine and then canned wine, Empathy Wines. And then also White Claw had just come out.
Spritz were taking over. And I was like, wait, this industry is huge. I'm a wellness and fitness person, but I love wine, but I want something lighter. And I also want something for non-alcoholic days and they don't have anything that's good right now. It was like, oh, here's your sparkling water. There wasn't really anything good. Now it's like freaking loaded with non-alcohol options.
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