And I think it's important that when we go through struggles in life that you never know what doors are going to open after those struggles.
Welcome back to She Pivots, the podcast where we talk with women who have dared to pivot out of one career and into something new and explore how their personal lives impacted these decisions. I'm your host, Emily Tish Sussman. Last year, I wrote a piece in Marie Cleric titled Let's make Sensitive the new Strong. It was inspired by my son, who was five but has the soul of an eighty year old man. He is quiet and empathetic and deeply sensitive. And I didn't see any representation in
the media actually celebrating that. I only ever saw books and shows where the character overcame being sensitive. It's something I still feel like true. So when I heard about Laura's company, Snapology, I was immediately drawn to it. Her story stuck with me because she was inspired to create a company after her son had little interest in like the usual after school activities like football or soccer. Snapology is now a hugely successful program that focuses on steam education.
What started off as a side hustle now has one hundred and seventy franchise locations across the United States. And although I love Laura's vision to create more after school options for kids, I have to be honest that Laura's interview was actually a complete and happy accident. We get a lot of pitches, especially from communications or PR people,
into our inbox of founders. Basically, we get like a lot of pitches of founders, and when we're looking at how we put this season together, the most important piece for me is that we have diversity from every aspect, like from industry, from background. But the actual most important piece for me is that there is diversity in what I call like the intervening life event, like the personal
reason that changed someone's perspective. So for that reason, when we get a lot of pitches of a lot of founders, sometimes it ends up feeling like we get pitched the same story over and over. So as I was looking through our inbox of pitches, I was actually trying to filter out the founders. When I said yes to Laura Coe, our guest today, I actually confused her with a different Laura that we had been pitched. So we booked it,
we went through it. When I started looking at our prep, I thought, wait a second, I didn't realize that I had pitched another founder, and I wasn't sure we were going to end up airing this episode. I thought, you know, she seems nice, we'll do the interview. I wasn't sure
we're going to end up airing it. But once we actually had the conversation, her perspective was so interesting and different, and in particular, what I loved that she came back to is that we often talk about how we're afraid of jumping into something new, and so staying the same is what's safe. But Laura actually really challenges that when staying the same was the least safe option for her and she was forced to try something new. So I'm excited to get into Laura.
My name is Laura co and I am the brand president, CEO, and founder of Snapology.
Did you always see yourself as starting a business, being an entrepreneur.
Well, you know, it's interesting my parents owned a business. They started a business in my teenage years, so I think that's where I kind of started to maybe think that might be something I wanted to do. But I took a very traditional route, went to college, had a nice career, as an actuary. Always kind of in the back of my head, I think I wanted to do that, but I don't know, does anybody really know that's what
they're going to do. Maybe they do, but for me, I don't know if it was accidental or things just kind of fell into place.
Being good at math and numbers took her down a mathematics path, studied accounting in college, and went on to become an actuary.
In kind of, Once an actuary, always an actuary.
And if you're wondering what an actuary does right now, so is I.
Actuaries are basically mathematicians, statisticians. We have an expertise in data analysis, statistics, finance, and those types of things. So we're basically what we're doing is we're taking information that happened in the past, kind of taking a look at it, analyzing it, looking at what's going on in the present, and then projecting it to the future. So it's a lot of data, a lot of numbers, a lot of analysis.
For me, it was really kind of cool because it wasn't just sort of looking in the rear view mirror. It was actually taking that information and projecting it forward. So I'm a healthcare actuary. So we are the loved people who set premium rates at health insurance companies. So when your premium rates are high, it's likely an actuary
that set that amount. And my specific expertise is actually in prescription drugs, so looking at some of those high cost drugs that come out, looking at you know, rare diseases and things like that, and trying to figure out how much does the insurance company have to charge today to make sure that we can we can cover all of your expenses in the next year.
Did you feel satisfied as a healthcare actuary.
I did enjoy being an actuary, to be honest with you. I still dabble in it here and there, and so I will never kind of get rid of that curiosity piece and that intellectual stimulation that kind of comes along
with being an actuary. I want that challenge. I want that, you know, sort of predicting the future, kind of looking ahead, and in everything I do, I'm always looking behind me, trying to figure out what happened, what went well didn't, trying to figure out what we can do in the future to make it better.
Using her keen math skills, Laura decided to take a leap in her mid twenties and follow the path of her entrepreneurial family. She carefully calculated and decided to make her move an in home senior care franchise.
When I did the research and saw that we had this huge population in Pittsburgh, I thought, well, I need to do something with seniors. So I didn't have a lot of capital at my fingertips, and I didn't have a whole lot of credit yet either, right, you know, just a typical twenty five twenty six year old at the time, And so I chose a business that had a low entry to get in and that I thought would do well, that I thought would would make money. It was completely against all of the advice that I
give everybody now and even give my own children. To be honest with you, I don't necessarily have a passion for that business, which is another reason why it wasn't a great fit, because I didn't have that drive, that desire to get up in the middle of the I didn't I wasn't doing the business for the right reason. Do what you love right, Do something you're passionate about. If you do something you're passionate about, then you'll want
to work at it, you'll do well. You know, all the things sort of come along with it when you do something that you love well.
Building her first business, she worked full time as an actuary, a field that has been historically male dominated, especially at that time.
When I first started as an actuary, back in the early nineties, the women actuaries, women mathematicians. We were kind of a rare breed. I grew up with a brother who was less than a year older than me. We were, you know, best friends, and you know, I always kind of hung out with the boys. I was honestly a little bit of a tomboy and myself, I was into sports and so being around guys, being around men boys, you know, never like I never even looked at it
that way. I never really thought about it. And I was in a well respected profession. And I understand the plight of some women sort of being held back because they're a woman. I was very fortunate that early on in my career I never really experienced that. So I was the only woman a lot of times. But I don't feel like, at least in the profession I was in, that that really ever held me from being able to do the things that I want to do.
What was that transition like to parenthood for you, Because one of the challenges of being in really male dominated fields is there's a less of an understanding about the physical toll that it can take, the amount of leave that you might actually need, and the fact that you can actually do both your job and parent. So what was that like for you?
Yeah, I mean that is a real phenomenon, right, There is a real and I honestly experienced that to some extent still today. In the beginning, I kind of hid some of that stuff from the people I worked with. Right, A lot of the men didn't have the same struggles. They weren't trying to, you know, make sure they were home at a certain time to get their kid off the bus, or they weren't. They weren't kind of experiencing
the same struggles that I had. And so I made a lot of excuses when I was younger, and I had a lot of doctor's appointments for myself that really weren't for myself and those types of things. And it's not really that I was embarrassed about it. It was
just that I didn't really feel like explaining it. I didn't become a parent until I was in my early thirties, So I had a good ten years of the working world before I had my first child, which I think was a benefit because I was able to kind of prove myself before I needed to have that flexible schedule. But yeah, I mean it's tough for working moms. It
really is. You know. I was talking with somebody about it the other day and kind of thinking about, like, I think it's really hard for people who either don't have children or aren't the primary caregiver to the children to understand it. I mean, I'm basically working at least two full time jobs every day, right, I've got my job at Snapology, but then you go home and you've got another whole full time job. Right, it's making time
in your data. And I think I've done a load of laundry every day for twenty years now, right, I mean, it's how do you fit that in? It's like mixed in with pouring a cup of coffee. I'm switching a load of laundry and doing different things, and so it is a struggle, but I think that it's a great struggle. I wouldn't trade motherhood for anything in this world, and so you find a way to balance it, you find a way to make it work, because the reality is,
I'm not working a shorter day. I'm just working a very different day, right I mean, I'd get up, get my kids to school, then i'd work a regular day. Sometimes I'd even be doing emails before i even woke my kids up for school. Right then I'm waking my kids up, getting them ready, then I'm getting back to work. Then I'm getting them taking a little break to get them off the bus and get them a snack, and then I'm going back to work again, right where everybody
else is probably done at that point. I'm still working like these different shifts and juggling when I'm working and when I'm doing stuff for the kids, and then I put them to bed, and then I'm going to be going back and checking my email again and doing stuff. So it's a different lifestyle. I think that I didn't really explain to people before at hand, but i think people get it a little bit more now. But I'm
not afraid to say it because I've proven myself. They know I'm working hard, but I'm not working the same schedule that a lot of the men that are working side by side with me are and that's okay.
Yeah, I find that pre wake up that time is actually my most productive in many ways, like the clutter of the day hasn't gotten to me. That's when I find I can actually be more productive most of the time.
Yeah, I'm not sure that we're the poster children for wellness, but I think we're definitely not in and alone. I do envy. I've got a couple of coworkers that I really respect that they get up and they walk right, they clear their head and they walk and they start their day. And I think to myself, man that I would love to be able to do that, but I just it's just not going to happen. So yeah, I mean what works works and I've been successful with it.
I probably need a little more of those wellness have its, But I don't know old dog new tricks. I'm not sure it's in the cards for me.
May Yeah, maybe we're not going to work it in just yet. But I love this point that you made about how you had proven yourself in your career and then you were able to take whether it was flexibility
or some chances. I really felt like I didn't start having kids until even later until my mid thirties, and I felt like I had earned it, and I felt like I still was able to get the respect of my colleagues even if I was showing up to the office at different hours or in a different way, because they knew what I was capable of and I had banked all that time before me.
Yeah, I think that's absolutely true, right. That's what gives you the confidence to be able to have a flexible schedule is you're not worried. But even when you leave to do something, you feel almost guilty, right because you're leaving everybody behind and they're working so hard, and you're leaving to do something, and you're wondering, Okay, do they understand? You know, are they going to think less of me
because I'm leaving to do this kind of thing. I feel bad for young mothers, right because they maybe haven't banked that time, but they're yet still so productive. I'm hopeful that society is changing a little bit, that we maybe understand that a little bit more. So.
You working as an actuary, had two kids sounds like pretty close together.
I did. Yeah, my boys are seventeen months apart, but it wasn't really until after I had the children I was married, had children that I had sold that other business, realized that it just wasn't a good fit for my lifestyle. I just didn't have the support that I needed to
be able to do that type of business. And then in my early thirties, actually bought a different franchise that my husband at the then time that he ran, and really watching him kind of start this business and kind of help him from the side made me realize, I really want a business of my own. I really want to do this on my own, do it full time. So at this point I had sold the first franchise, the Senior Citizen franchise I'd sold that. My husband was
running the cleaning business and doing his thing. I helped him on the back end with pricing and financials and some of the more technical things and a little behind the scenes. At the time, my husband and I were going through a divorce, so I was kind of itching to do my own thing.
With the divorce and being a new mom of two kids under five, she needed to adjust.
I needed more flexibility in my life. I wanted to be there for my kids right I wanted to be able to take them to activities my youngest was starting kindergarten, and I wanted to be able to go to the book fair, and I wanted to be able to do some of those daytime things that moms do. Also kind of needed to have a job that didn't require me
to travel. You want to find a motivated woman, Tell her she might lose custody of her kids if she doesn't change what she's doing in terms of travel, in terms of her job, and so as I was sort of all of that stuff happening at once, I needed more flexibility. I needed not to be traveling. I needed to kind of change my job, my role. I needed to support these kids, now going through a divorce. Now I was going to be a single mom. I needed to be able to financially support these kids. How was
I going to do all that? That's really how Snapology was born.
Kids, it's not just about building towers these days, thought Legos. You can build some truly amazing things. So now your kids can to learn how with the help of Snapology. That's a traveling program that uses legos to teach science and technology and engineering and arts and math.
Us.
But beyond the flexibility that she found in the work, Laura finally found something that she was passionate about and that was personal to her.
My older son, Sebastian is just a really really neat kid, but just not interested in traditional activities for boys. He just wasn't interested in sports, and I was having trouble finding something that was kind of in his wheelhouse. Both of my boys very academically inclined, and I needed something
to get them socialized. So I realized that the thing that was going to bring me that flexibility was owning my own business, and the thing that was going to give my kids what they needed was owning a business that was for my kids, right. So took the idea of the Lego bricks and doing different things with legos, did a ton of research on what was going on around the country and found Lego Robotics. That was really what what made me start it, and I went to
my sister, she lived four doors down. I walked down the street and said, hey, you know, I really want to do this. I need to do this for my kids. What do you think about this Lego idea. We could do birthday parties, we could have robotics, we could have summer camps and stuff, you know. Would you want to do it with me? And she was all in. She didn't have kids at the time. She does now, but she didn't have kids at the time, and she was like, that's great.
Did it feel very risky or it felt natural?
It was risky for sure, and it felt risky. I'm very blessed to have. I mean, first off, my career as an actuary is fairly lucrative, right, so I'd saved a little bit of money. I had a little bit of comfort and a little bit of a buffer there. I went to my sister, to be honest with you, because I needed that support. And not only that emotional support. Right, I'm moving into, you know, single motherhood. I'm investing a
lot of my own money. To have her support on the back end, both emotionally and financially, gave me that little bit of extra comfort, right. But it was a risk. It was a pretty big risk. I put it all on the line, and you take all of your four oh one k or you take all of your investments, and you go all in with it. I think sometimes the greater risk in what you're doing is by not doing it. What happens if you don't do it? Didn't have to choose being an entrepreneur. Didn't have to choose
setting out my own business. I had to stop traveling. I was going to lose custody of my kids, or there was at least a fear that I was going to lose custody of my kids if I didn't change what I was doing. So I had to change something, and the fear of that if I didn't change anything was not a scenario that I even would ever want to consider, and so the fear of not doing it, honestly, was a huge driver in what I did, and still to this day, I make a lot of decisions out
of what happens if I don't do this. I think it's something that's overlooked a lot sometimes is everybody's like, oh, you took this big, you did this, you did all these things, which yeah, was a huge risk, but the risk of not doing it in some cases is actually greater than the risk of actually doing it.
Another piece that you jumped into was moving into a business and financial relationship with your sister, which I think is also a risk. How did that play out for you?
Yeah, you know, it's funny. We still laugh about it to this day when we first started the business. The huge story for Snapology was that two sisters and I'm going to obviously exaggerate this could actually like each other enough to go into business together. I mean it's not the way it was pitched, but two women going into business together. I think the story that were women obviously
is important, right because we're women in stem field. My sister's a pharmacist, so she has very much a science background, And for us, it wasn't hard. We're a very close family. My brother and my sister are my best friends. My brother was actually involved in the business as well for a long period of time, and I loved every day being able to work with my brother and my sister. But the reason that works, and I think this happens too with unrelated partners, is you have to stay in
your lane. So my sister, Lisa and I we knew our lanes, right. We're very very different people, which is why I think we're able to get along so well. I'm the finance, I'm operations, you know, kind of boots on the ground getting stuff done. She's more of sort of the strategy and marketing and sales, and she's our safety officer. So what's important to me, was never important
to her in it, and so she would yield. And when we would get to an area where I knew Lisa was more educated, or more experienced, or more passionate about, I would yield to her decision. But yeah, Lisa and I have never had any problems working together. But I've heard a lot of horror stories about families working together, and I'm just thankful that that's never happened to us.
So how did you start? What was the first Stepology?
So the first Stepology was in Pittsburgh, and so the very first event was a summer camp. It was kind of like a friends and family thing. So my good friend growing up, my best friend in high school, was actually a school teacher. So I called her up and said, Hey, Nindy, will you write a some curriculum, Like, here's what we're trying to do. We're going to use lego bricks. We want to teach a little bit of engineering. We want to use the lego bricks for this and that. Can
you write us up something? And so we started with two programs that she wrote, started with just a group of friends, and it expanded really quick. It clearly wasn't the only mother who was looking for this kind of thing. I mean, we had probably that first summer, we probably had forty sixty kids come through a couple of different camps, just really piloting it and testing it.
They wrapped their pilot program in August and just a month later opened up publicly in September, just in time for an after school program.
So we moved quick. We knew we were onto something. Our first legit program where we went out to the public was in a recreation center that was phenomenal as well. I mean, we opened up enrollment, we were waitlisted within hours, So our first legit program was actually in a local rec center here in Pittsburgh. We move fast, I mean, and we still do. With stepology. I think that's the secret to a lot of business's success is that being able to build the plane as it's in the air, right,
or build the plane as it's flying. It's you don't have to button it up. You just have that idea and go for it and then fine tune it as you go along. But if you're waiting for it to be perfect, if I waited for that curriculum to be perfect, if I waited for the marketing to be perfect, or to have that a location that was maybe a little safer.
If I had waited for all of those things, right, I might get passed up by somebody, or it might cost too much money, or you just sometimes I think, just have to kind of bite the bullet and just go for it.
With the experience of building two other franchise systems, one in her twenties and one with her husband, it would be natural to assume that Laura created Snapology as a franchise from the start.
We actually didn't decide on franchising initially. So I had mentioned that my parents opened up a business when I was a teenager. That business was actually under a licensing concept. So licensing is what I knew, and so when Lisa and I first kind of started it, we thought, well, we'll just license the curriculum, we'll license the name, and
we'll approach it that way. And so for two years, so basically we opened the business we started, and then we'd always kind of had dreams of multiple locations or dreams of expanding it, and never quite where we ended up. I mean, that was beyond our wildest dreams, where we've kind of ended up with this, and you just kind of take it and just keep running with it. But we started to have people we actually took the idea
we were in the rec center. We actually got a physical space, so we got what we call a discovery center. Is very small, it's about nineteen hundred square feet. People started coming to us from out of town, and we started to have people saying, Hey, this is cool. Can we take it back to Texas or wherever they were at? And so we were like, okay, yeah, So we started cataloging everything we were doing to try this licensing model,
and we grew for two years. Under the licensing model, we grew to maybe about a dozen locations, so, you know, twenty fifteen, so we're five years in business. Then we moved to a franchise. I got smart, I got educated. Actually met a franchise attorney who really kind of explained to me. He's like, I don't understand why you're not. Franchising is a great concept. You know, you have access to all these different tools and resources and people and network.
And I was like, yeah, I don't want to do that. Seems complicated. But he stuck with us, and he convinced Lisa and I took him about three months of convincing us to move to a franchise system. It's the best decision we ever made, and it just opened up so many doors.
They're wondering exactly what a franchise is. It's when they are individual owners of each location who pay a fee to the parent company to use the business model, trademarks, and proprietary knowledge. Think McDonald's or Subway.
They call the franchising model like a three legged stool. My understanding of the difference is, are you dictating what somebody's doing on a day to day basis? Right? Are they following like a very specific system. Are you dictating how they do things? When they do things? And it was kind of a gray area for a stapology. Like in the beginning, we're like, eh, here's the curriculum, here's our name, just go out and have fun. And it was very loosey goosey. It was very much a licensing
type thing. But then as we started to go through time and we started to realize, you know what, not everybody knows how to do this on their own. Like we were having some people who were struggling and we're like, no, this is the way you should approach schools. This is how you do things. We want you to teach the curriculum in a certain way. We've designed it to have these like elements in it. You can't just give up one.
So you started a growing and successful business based on in person meetings right when COVID hit, What was that impact?
Yeah? That was interesting, right, because what we're doing with stapology is stem or steam education, and the whole idea of it is children are in person, interacting side by side, and they're learning those social skills. Right. I mean we've been teaching those academic elements for years, right, the engineering,
the science, those are just academic elements. What makes it true stem and steam learning And what's really I think sometimes sets apart stapology is that social emotional learning part of it. That those social skills, those soft skills, those teamwork, collaboration, problem solving and so to have kids working side by side is the crux of our model. And so when schools started closing, when the world kind of started to shut down, we were like, oh, no freaking you stay at home.
That is the order to night from four state governors. As the coronavirus pandemic spreads new you talk about the coronavirus crisis is changing so fast that these maps can't keep up. The Great Shutdown of twenty twenty is underway. Positive cases and resulting classroom closures in quarantines have spiked in public schools, has.
Younger kids and younger kids. Has caused one summer camp company to close all its camps for the next two weeks starting Monday. Kay, when you Lucy Cale shows us how one summer camp had its last day for a while.
That was everything that we were was was the in person learning. But again, I've got a great team that works with me at Snapology, and we all kind of pulled together. Our curriculum director at the time took sixty hours of our curriculum and said, okay, we can do these online. And what we can do online. What's happening to children now? And if you remember in the beginning, it was tough on kids. Right. They literally one day were in school playing with all of their friends, and
the next day they were locked at home with their parents. Right. I mean, good for them if they had siblings to play with, but if they were an only child, they were locked at home with adults and there was no way for them to see or talk to their friends, and it was hard. It was hard on the kids,
it was hard on the adults. And so my curriculum director really pretty quickly, and also our operations director has a behavioral health background, we pretty quickly learned that what the kids were going to be lacking was that social element.
So if we could get them online interacting with each other, even just seeing each other was a big deal in the beginning, but if we could get them online interacting with each other, then we could at least be doing the core elements of what snapology is meant to do. And that's the kids are having fun, they're getting a
social component to it, and they're getting some academics in it. Right, So we still use lego bricks, We did some really cool online digital escape games to help them kind of use their brains, and so we had all of the elements. We just focused much more heavily on that social component and it was it was amazing for kids. I mean, just even the first time they were able to get online.
Probably I think we had the sixty programs done before the first school even closed, and our online program started like March fourteenth, so just probably a week after they were kind of or a week or two after they were at home, and so they were able to just their eyes lighting up when they got to see their buddies online. Was just amazing.
What do your sons think about this, that they were the inspiration for it, that your business has built as big as it has.
My oldest now, Sebastian, that I started the business really for. He's a sophomore in college, and he's kind of getting to the point where he's old enough to understand that he was a little challenging as a child, and that you know, he understands snapology and why we did what we did, and he understands the benefits and the things that it brought to him. So I don't think they understood so much when they were younger. I think they just kind of got drug everywhere with me, and they
enjoyed playing with legos and doing different things. But now that they're a little bit older, I think they get the business aspects of it, and they understand it and the motivation. And now he's in school for entrepreneurship. He wants to own his own business, right, so he sees the benefits of it and really has learned a lot
from it. It's been neat to watch my kids kind of go through it and see what they pick up, not only just in kind of my career and kind of what's going on, but even just from being in the snapology program. So it's been a really fun experience to watch them learn and grow through it.
You know, that is something that I think about a fair amount. My son, my oldest, he's six now. Last year I wrote an article in Marie Claire called Let's make Sensitive the New Strong because my son is incredibly sensitive and I didn't feel like I had good parenting tools to help him see his sensitivity as a positive and not as something he had to overcome, Like I felt like all the picture books about kids and sensitivity
were about how to overcome the sensitivity. But really I want him to be proud of the fact that he is sensitive and the flip side empathetic. I wrote the article because I felt like there must be other people struggling with this too, and it ended up becoming an incredibly well performing article, So either it did resonate or they or people were reading it, you know, for interest factor. But I think about that, you know, how much do
I put out there about him? He gets so embarrassed about extra attention, Like when I drop him off at school in the morning, he makes me turn the music down so that the teachers can't hear what music we're listening to because he gets so embarrassed. He's going to probably hate this interview one day once he can hear it. You know, how much do I put out there? So how do you balance that?
You're right? I mean, kids that are sensitive are exactly the kids that we're talking about with your son and my son, and they need to understand that that isn't a weakness necessarily. And as we're going out and we're talking about it, I think Sebastian in someday you're son too. I mean, Sebastian understands that I did this business for him to help him to celebrate his strengths. Right, he wasn't good at football, you know, or he wasn't the
star baseball player. You know. He had fun dabbling in those things, but just wasn't his thing, right, What his thing was was he's a good friend. He's a really good friend. He's really smart, really engineering in klined, academically gifted,
he's got a great sense of humor. Those are the things that I want to celebrate with him, and I want him to know that the reason that I'm talking about this stuff, the reason that I started snapology, was so that more kids like him that don't fit in where people think they should fit in, that we can celebrate their differences.
But he does have that anxiety, and figuring out how to parent him when he is actually so different from me has been I think one of the most formative challenges of this point in my life.
One of the things that we really talk about with kids, and one of the reasons why we set up our stapology programs the way we do is because we want kids to fail. We want them to learn, learn to fail, fail gracefully, fail forward right, learn from your mistakes. We want it to be okay, because it's not really failing, it's just trying, right. I mean, when he reads a word wrong on a page, he's not failing. He tried it and it didn't go so well, So okay, try
it a different way. Maybe maybe that'll be the way that everybody else reads that word right. So everybody makes mistakes, everybody fails, or whatever word you want to use for it. But that's just a part of life.
Something that we ask all of our guests that I'm really curious to hear what your answer is to this, That what is something that at the time you thought was a negative and now in retrospect do you see that it really was a positive and your.
Trajectory gosh, I mean, probably the biggest challenges we had was it kind of goes back to the legal group and how I met the lawyer. I was using a full service firm here in Pittsburgh, and I was using them for all kinds of legal work for the business, for person and all, and I had a situation where I had to stop using them, and it was devastating because we had all of our contracts with them, we
had everything with them. It was going to cost us a ton of money to move over to a new firm, and it was pretty abrupt and quite frankly, there were some things going on in my personal life that were really kind of challenging at the time, and it was tough. But changing legal firms was the best thing that ever
happened to me. It introduced me to franchising. It took Snapology to new heights, and where we ended up with it, we would have never been where we are today if that misfortune with the other legal group hadn't happened, And I would say that, you know, most people who have experienced success, that success is kind of paved with those situations, right, A struggle that moved you in a different direction. COVID actually,
in some ways was actually good for us. It gave us a chance to really demonstrate how important socially Snapology programs are to the public. COVID really heightened that social component of it. And I think it's important that when we go through struggles in life that you never know what doors are going to open after those struggles. And that's what entrepreneurship is about, as my grandma always said, the taking lemons and making lemonade.
Thank you so much, Laura, it's great to have you on.
Yeah, absolutely, thank you.
Last year, Snapology sold to Unleashed Brands, another pivot for Laura as she continued to work on Snapology. The company continues to grow and was the number one ranked Children's and Richmond franchise in entrepreneurs Franchise five hundred for the past two consecutive years. Laura remains passionate about educating and socializing our future generations. Although her two boys are a bit older now, she is still proud of what Snapology
has accomplished and how it's impacted their lives. For more about Laura and Snapology, you can visit them at snapology dot com. Thank you for listening to this episode of she Pivots, where I talk with women about how their experiences and significant personal events led to their pivot and eventually their success. To learn more about our guests, follow us on Instagram at she pivots the podcast. Leave a rating and comment if you enjoyed this episode to help
others learn about it. A special thank you to our partner Marie Clair and the team that made this episode possible. Talk to you next week. She Pivots is hosted by me Emily Tish Sussman, produced by Emily eda Veloshik, with sound editing and mixing from Nina Pollock, and research and planning from Christine Dickinson and Hannah Cousins.
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