Thank You To The Smart and Strong Women In My Life

The older I get the more I realize how much my life was influenced by other people that I learned from or have benefitted from. Many of those people are women. Not that there haven’t been men in my life that have influenced me, my Dad, both Grandpas, my brother, and many bosses and mentors over the years have helped me and influenced who I am today. But today I would like to thank many of the women in my life.

My grandmothers, Lucille Staplin (don’t you dare call her Lucy!) and Lavon Hughes were both very smart women and were the matriarchs of their families. Both of my grandfathers may have acted as though they were in charge, but they knew who was really calling the shots! Grandma Staplin was very intelligent about business, and being the serial entrepreneur that I am, she always encouraged me to pursue business. I would run my business plans by her and if she really liked it, she would say “I would invest in that”, but if I just got a mild chuckle from her, I knew I had some work to do on the business plan. She also understood that you can go too far with many things in life, she was the first person to tell me the saying “Don’t get so busy making a living that you forget to make a life.” She would tell me that often, and now that I look back, I see that she was very wise and saw where I was heading. She lived until 93 and was a very important person in my life. I miss her often.

Grandma Hughes was also very smart and resilient. They never had a lot of money, but she managed to raise a family that never was short of anything they needed. She didn’t finish high school but went back to school later in life and graduated with honors. I remember when I was 7 or 8, she saw me doing math the old-fashioned way, carrying the one, etc., and then showing me shortcuts so I could do it in my head. She said, “you can do a lot of things in your head if you just concentrate on it and think of shortcuts to get to the same conclusion.” She was very efficient and also very particular; I inherited those traits from her.  She died in her early 70’s from cancer, just after my daughter was born. I wish my kids would have been able to know her, she was also an important person in my life whom I miss often.

My mom, Phyllis Staplin, is smart and strong in many ways. She worked at banks for many years and moved up into management for a reason. She has an incredible work ethic and is still always busy, even at 81. Like both of my Grandmothers, she managed the family’s expenses. We also never had a ton of money, but always had what we needed and were taught to work hard for what we really wanted. Mom also knew about business and what it takes to succeed. She saw the business sense in me and always encouraged, or forced, me to take the proper classes to help me succeed. In high school, we had different “tracks” that you could take and she made sure I was enrolled in the advanced program to prepare kids for college business courses. I remember when I was a freshman, she saw my writing and said, “you’re taking a typing class”. Well, that was about the most uncool thing a freshman could take, a damn typing class! But she insisted and it was probably the most beneficial thing I learned in life. My writing is still so bad that I can’t read it a lot of the time! But thanks to her, I am pretty efficient at typing, and I love to write. I’m lucky to still have her, and she now lives in a house I built behind my house, on the property she was raised on. Full circle for her.

My wife Susan is smart about a lot of things that I am not, and that’s probably why we are a great team and have been married for 32 years. Susan has this incredible emotional intelligence that I just was never born with and have to work on constantly. She is very even-keeled, especially in tough life situations. There have been many times in our lives that she was the one that brought me down from my Irish temperament and stubbornness to a calmer, common sense state of mind. She is also no dummy when it comes to business, having been in the business world for her entire career, she knows what it takes to succeed and there are times that she has given me an idea or a little nugget that I run with. She is also very budget conscious, when I want to do an investment, I have to prepare a whole summary for her like I was presenting to the board of directors! Besides being a great wife and partner, she is a great mother and very smart when it comes to the kids. I’m lucky to have her.

My daughter Sierra has taught me a lot, especially in the past few years. She is a graduate of UNLV with a BS in Psychology and an MS in advanced education. The brain has always interested me, it’s an amazing organ that makes us who we are. Learning from Sierra about thought processes, and how negativity and positivity affect so many things in your life, has been instrumental in the decision to change my life in 2016. Sierra is also the one who inspired me to start my coaching business. She is also very smart about business and marketing. She has her own coaching business and is very successful in coaching businesswomen on social media and other aspects of marketing. She helps me often and encourages me to try new aspects instead of my old-fashioned way of doing things.  She is a great daughter, a smart businesswoman, and most importantly, a good person with a huge heart. I’m blessed with both of my kids.

Recently, a former assistant of mine, Lisa Larcabal, suddenly passed away from a rare disease. I hired Lisa as part of my life transition in 2016 to help me take some of the load off of me. She was a very intelligent person who excelled in grammar and writing. She was a speechwriter for some local politicians and then left to start a commercial real estate career. She was instrumental in my transition into a “normal” life instead of constantly running, but above all else, she was very supportive of me and my family. There was never a day that she didn’t ask about Susan or my kids and how they were doing. She always offered help with anything we were doing, whether it had to do with business or not. She was a smart, strong, caring woman and I was lucky to have her in my life. She will be greatly missed.

Thank you to all of these great women in my life and those that will come into my life in the future.

Thank you for your time. 
Brad