162: Overcoming the Stress of Meal Prep & Food Storage The Preparedness Project

ALEXIS BYERS [0:00]

But the times that we weren't unified, we were so stuck in our decision making. And it seems like when we got unified after that, miracles would happen every single time.

[MUSIC]

CAMILLE WALKER [0:19]

So, you want to make an impact. You're thinking about starting a business sharing your voice. How do women do it that handle motherhood, family, and still chase after those dreams? We'll listen each week as we dive into the stories of women who know. This is Call Me CEO.

[MUSIC]

Welcome back everyone to an episode of Call Me CEO. If this is your first time here, I am Camille Walker, your host. And here we celebrate women, especially mothers that are building businesses and also raising families. How do they balance it? What is the passion that drove them to create this service or this product?

And today, we are extra lucky because we have three amazing ladies who are going to share with us how they built the Preparedness Project. And it's three co-founders, which is tripping me up a bit because it's exciting. There's a lot of beautiful faces to look at.

We have Alicia Wood, Jessica Ashcroft, and Alexis Byers. And they started on a street together with an initiative to come together and help women's lives be easier with meal prep and also food storage and how can we bring that all together. And listen, if you're anything like me, meal prep alone is a big deal. It feels like a big hurdle sometimes. And then thinking about meal prep and preparedness, that becomes a big mountain.

And so, I love that their approach is more about bite-sized ways that you can create sustainable food storage and meal prep that it does not create overwhelm. So, ladies, thank you so much for being on the show today.

ALEXIS [1:50]

Thank you so much. I'm so excited to be here.

CAMILLE [1:52]

Yeah. Oh my gosh, it's so fun. Because as we got on the call today, I'm looking at all of you and I've been inspired by many of you sometimes online and sometimes in person. And it's fun to get us all here on this online space. I feel like sometimes I see people online. And I'm like, it's my friend. And yet I haven't seen them for years. And you feel like you know what's going on with them, but they are not seeing you or it's a weird world that we live in. But it's something where we've all been so blessed by it too, especially with your account. I feel like you guys have such an innate way of bringing community together and women especially. And I would love to hear more about how that came to be.

ALICIA WOOD [2:33]

Yeah. So, we love telling our story of just how we came together because it was so serendipitous and led by God in many ways. So, like you mentioned, we started on the same street in Salt Lake County. And it was probably around 2020. I was pregnant with my first son. And obviously, the world was shutting down.

I just remember this moment where I was like, oh my goodness, I don't have food to feed my family. And I've been told and counseled to do this forever. And it would probably be a good idea. And I think a lot of us had that freakout moment when stores were shutting down or running out of supplies anyways.

So, it got me into this individual effort of preparing, but I was buying tons and tons of things, didn't really know, helter-skelter, spending way too much money embarrassingly. But then I was asked to present about all the things I was learning at an activity for our church. And Alexis and Jessica showed up. They were two that had lots of questions and were very interested. And we decided to start a little neighborhood group after we met, because we're like, we need to have continuity from this. Otherwise, we're not going to keep going.

CAMILLE [3:38]

Reminders, right? I feel like at that time, too, it felt apocalyptic where we're like, if we don't get this thing that's left on the shelf, we are going to die. I was buying some things I had never even ever bought before, like powdered milk, or some things still to this day that I have not consumed. But I'm like, it'd be good on a shelf. And other things that I'm like, oh, that had no shelf life.

One of my biggest jokes at that time was I was doing a grocery order. I'd never ordered Nutella before. And I thought, listen, if we are in a pandemic, everything shut down. I'm going to get Nutella because that's a splurge. I have never stopped ordering Nutella since that day. And what's even more funny is that at the time, grocery orders were getting mixed up. So I ordered one, but I got eight huge Nutella servings, big canisters of Nutella. And it became this big joke because I'm like I've never had it before. Now, I have eight. And I feel like that's what we were going through.

ALICIA [4:35]

It was a great start to your food storage.

CAMILLE [4:37]

Yeah. We don't have that anymore. So, that became a new habit. But it's funny because I feel like that was a time that we were all just like what do I need and what's my family really even going to eat? And, yeah, so it was tricky.

ALICIA [4:50]

Totally. And we just feel like the more women that we've talked to, that's everyone's story. A lot of people really were in this frantic, almost manic state of like, what am I supposed to do? And picking all the wrong things, spending way too much money.

And through that process, we all have made lots of mistakes, very big mistakes, similar to you. Probably worse than that, way worse. And then through that process, we started meeting together every couple of weeks to learn different skills and just to do it together.

And it was interesting how there was a shift of initially, there was some overwhelm with everyone like, oh, she knows so much. And I don't know anything. But after a minute, we realized we could all calm down because we had each other. And we're all good at different things. And that started to change all of our lives. The three of us, stuff that was overwhelming, I was like, oh, Jessica is good at this. So, I don't need to be great at this. And Alexis is good at this. And I think they felt similarly that we all were making up the gaps that we thought we had to do all by ourselves.

ALEXIS [5:49]

Yeah. I remember when I first moved away, and we hadn't started this business yet. But we had been talking about something like this. And I just remember telling Alicia on the phone like, "I can't move away from our neighborhood. We have this amazing thing set up. And when the apocalypse happens, I want to be here."

ALICIA [6:10]

Yeah. We started to realize that everyone had different strengths. There was someone who knew how to do something. Other people had a generator. So, it started out as this emergency preparedness thing. But then over time, we started to realize that people were so overwhelmed with emergency preparedness, they couldn't even start. And so then, we backtracked and said, okay, where are people getting stuck that's getting them not even to start preparing unless it's frantic?

CAMILLE [6:38]

Yeah. Okay. So, what I'm hearing you say is that as a community, as a neighborhood between the three of you, you're like, okay, let's figure this out together. And it was also through that process, that you said, let's become partners in this business. How did that decision get made?

ALICIA [6:57]

So, I'm a software engineer by trade. So, what really started it is, I was like, "Guys, we need to somehow figure out how to scale this in a bigger way," because what we have is magic, this little group, and we need to bring it to the world." And the way that I know how to do something like that is through technology.

So, I was like, "We need to build an app." That was just my answer. So, I remember talking to them. And bringing the Lord back into it, I had this impression just like I was already really close to Alexis and Jessica. I knew, just had a lot of skills and was always someone that I wanted to be friends with and connected deeper to.

And so, I just had this impression invite the two of them. And it didn't really make sense at the time, how it was going to work or what it looked like. But we started meeting every few weeks in Jessica's basement and started talking about some of our ideas. And we're like, "What could this even be?"

CAMILLE [7:44]

That's amazing. As far as creating a partnership, I have done that before. When I first started blogging, I had seven women that I started my business with. But at the time, it was like a hobby that we hoped could maybe turn into something. And through that process, we learned very quickly. I did that there were three of those women that were like, this is a job and I'm not getting paid. And the four of us were like, we're in for the long haul and we were able to figure it out. But it happened pretty quickly. So, the fact that you were able to identify that early on is amazing because I feel like that can be tricky. How were you able to identify those strings early on?

ALICIA [8:30]

Our individual strengths you're saying?

CAMILLE [8:32]

Mm-hmm. Just to build the business.

ALICIA [8:33]

Go for it, Alexis.

ALEXIS [8:35]

Yeah. That's a good question. Because at first, I think it really was hard. We had a lot of that. I personally just always thought we would do some kind of a blog and do free service. I never expected money. But like Alicia has been in the trade forever and Jessica too. And so, they're like, "No, we need to make money," and stuff like that.

So that was a time I think where we were stepping on our toes a lot, stepping on each other's toes trying to figure it out. And then, I think what really made the difference is when we lined up clear and decided, okay, Alexis is going to be the chief people officer because I have really good people, customer service, PR skills, things like that. Jessica is going to do the design. And she's actually designed a lot of the framework behind our challenges. And then, Alicia is doing all the tech stuff.

And then, what's really beautiful about it all is we share the load on social media. And so, it's just so hard to get overwhelmed with social media these days because we've all set up like these are our days that we do it. This is a day we do the reel. These are our days for stories. And I think just having that orderly fashion and house of order, being organized, has just made things so much easier. And everybody seems pretty happy and sticking to their roles.

CAMILLE [10:03]

That's awesome. So, for people who are listening to this for the first time and don't know what the Preparedness Project is, because we talked about what it was, but tell our audience what that means. What it is that you do and the services that you have, so that they know how it works. And maybe that developed over time. So, you could tell how that developed. But tell us what you do. How does this help people specifically with food preparedness and their meal planning?

JESSICA ASHCROFT [10:34]

So, our vision has shifted even over this last year since we first launched our app. So, we started out wanting to provide this anything, emergency preparedness for people, just all the resources that we had gathered over the last few years preparing, we knew we wanted to give them an app. And so, that's always been a part of our offer.

And the app currently can track your food storage, your water, and your toiletries. And then, we have lots of other content in there. But as we were getting feedback from people and just listening to our audience, we noticed that they needed just really focused guidance on the food storage and the meal planning aspect of it.

And a lot of people don't even put those two together in the same sentence, like meal planning is its own thing. And food storage is another thing. And not a lot of people our age put them together because they think food storage is outdated.

And so, after learning that, we created a 14-day food source challenge. And essentially, it just breaks down into very small, we call them baby steps. So over 14 days, you learn the same system that will give you success in meal planning and using your food storage on a daily and weekly basis.

So, we just hope to empower women to see that that whole part of running a home and being a wife and mother can be way more simple than you think it is, than you think it can be. And it can actually help just have peace that you know that you're preparing and following the Prophet and also know that you're saving money. And you're helping your home just run as smooth as it can.

CAMILLE [12:50]

Yeah. And did you want to add to that? Yeah.

ALICIA [12:55]

I was just going to add to that, too. One other thing that Jessica was mentioning, we started to really realize that, yeah, it became an extra thing to do food storage. And who has time or energy to do an extra thing? But the more that we applied it in our lives, we start to realize like, oh, man, being prepared makes our lives run smoother. So, we can do more, more of what we're meant to do, our purposes, be with our families, more present, those things.

Whereas, so many of the other information out there that we've seen about preparedness is fear-based. It's overwhelm. It's all that feeling. And especially with 2020, just even the perception shifted even more to these extremes. And so we're trying to hit in between and normalize it, make it not extreme, make it just like a normal thing for moms.

CAMILLE [13:37]

Yeah, I love that it's the approach of using products that you're already using to fill your food storage because I'll admit, hand raised over here, when I was able to buy a product that was freeze dried, really high-quality food that had a shelf life and I could check mark that box, I was like, yes.

I just had my 19-year anniversary. So, I'm feeling really old. Thank you. It was on Monday or Tuesday. But to be able to afford that food storage took a hot minute. So, I love that your approach isn't this all or nothing. It's a step by step. Let's work with what you have, budgeting it and using it. So, it's not just this dusty canister somewhere in the basement, which is nice, even if you have the freeze-dried stuff, but it's also nice to think, hey, we just ran out of ketchup. Go downstairs and grab some. That concept just feels so much more freeing to what food storage can be.

ALEXIS [14:48]

And I think too, it's like you can do a mix of both because for me, I also have a lot of freeze-dried stuff because I like produce and meat and stuff like that. But I think a lot of people have that idea of that's what food storage is.

CAMILLE [15:07]

Yeah, for sure. So, let's talk about unity, I know that a big piece of your brand and what you're building as a business is unity with the Lord and also unity with each other. What are some ways that you've helped to implement that into your business and with each other.

ALEXIS [15:24]

So, I think we've all always had a common goal that we want to serve God in our business, and that we're not just doing this to make money. We're literally doing it to help prepare people for the second coming of Jesus Christ. That's just really where we're at.

And I think for us, we have had little stints where we weren't unified before we cleared up our roles. And when we just recently hired a business coach, whatever it may be, but the times that we weren't unified, we were so stuck in our decision making. And it seemed like when we got unified after that, miracles that happen every single time. I'm not even kidding. It's crazy.

For example, we just decided to hire a business coach, and it took a long time for us all to get on the same page about it. And one of us was really dead set on doing it. And then the other two were just like, "I don't know. That's a lot of money. We can't afford that yet." And then, one by one, we all just finally got on the same page. And then, we were like, okay, we all want to hire this coach, how do we afford it?

And I'm not kidding. The very next day, we had a proposal for a brand partnership come through for us. you know what I mean? And that didn't like cover the whole thing or anything. But that happened. And then we figured out this creative way to make the business coach work financially for our business, and all this, just boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. Three days later, we hired a business coach. You know what I mean? And so, it was just nuts. Amazing.

CAMILLE [17:20]

Yeah, that's incredible. I know that there are times when it can be a leap of faith, hiring a business coach. I've hired business coach, I coach people with business growth. And it's getting an outside perspective, especially with different team members can be so impactful because they're outside perspective and objectiveness to what's happening on the inside is so valuable because they can see pieces you can't or maybe look at strengths and place you or help you define it better in ways that maybe you didn't see yourselves.

So, I'm a big advocate of business coaching at any level of business that you're in because you want to be where someone else is and it's like taking a shortcut in the line. That's how I've always looked at it. It's like you can use your time and resources to get there. But it's a shortcut if you can use the money to help you jump the line. So, that's awesome.

ALEXIS [18:21]

I love that. And I think too, I like how you said it was a leap of faith. And it really was. And it was like once we really decided to put our faith in that thing, it was just miraculous the way that everything worked out.

ALICIA [18:35]

Yes. Can I tell another story? This deals with unity, and especially with the Lord and seeing our value. So, I hear a lot of Jesuit women, especially just at least in our circle talk about how your business helps you change more than anything in your life. And I have started to see that so much.

Anyway, so we were trying to figure out this 14-day challenge that we have this offering. And one piece that we were very not unified in was pricing. That was really, really hard for us for a bit. We were just all over the place. All of us thought money mindset stuff that we're working through and trying to figure out especially because this is so driven by our desire to serve people, we're like, we shouldn't charge anything.

And it was interesting because we have been shopping around for a business coach, and we'd had another call with one of them. And it was interesting, because in that call, she lit something up inside of us that helped us see our worth in a deeper way that we were providing this thing that could actually help change people's lives. And we forgot how much it's changed ours and we're continually using the process to improve our own lives, and so that we can be less overwhelmed, but it was literally crazy.

So, I feel like the stories are insane because literally can't make this crap up, but literally within days. So, we've been so ununified. We're thinking about the pricing. And I'm trying to think of the order of this. But basically, the next day, our following exploded. Literally the next day and it just kept going and going and going. How much was it? 12,000 or something? I don't know, overnight.

ALEXIS [20:17]

We gained like 13,000 followers in a week.

CAMILLE [20:22]

Wow. And was that a reel that went crazy or what was it?

ALEXIS [20:26]

Two of them. And they were old reels. That was the thing. They were older ones that suddenly just randomly blew up out of nowhere.

ALICIA [20:36]

Yeah. And so, it was just weird because I don't believe in coincidences. But it's really interesting to see the resistance and the opposition. Before that, we were all struggling to be on the same page. And even after that, as we've been figuring out pricing and things like that, as we've prayed, it's been miraculous to see how we've been brought together. And just the momentum, for some reason, it's so clear to see when we're all together when we can feel like something's off. And then we shift it. And it's like a sale will come in literally that minute. No joke, we've had that happen multiple times. It's crazy to see. So, it's just fun.

CAMILLE [21:12]

That's way cool. I think that it's faith always precedes that miracle. It's like unless you're putting yourself out there, you don't test it. It's like you're missing all the shots you never take. So, I think that that's a huge testament to that of putting yourself out there and being willing to take that leap. So, that's really cool.

Now, I want to talk a little bit about how we plan our food storage, getting into the meat of people who are thinking that this is something that they might want to implement, but feeling overwhelmed. It's their first time or maybe they've tried it and had failed attempts, what would be the best way for someone who's getting into this and wanting to start food prepping and having food storage in a way that sustainable?

JESSICA [21:58]

Okay. So, the very first thing we recommend someone who's overwhelmed doing is just making a list of their favorite meals, simple meals that their family loves that they know that they can make. And then with that, you want to put those into rotation and start getting enough of those ingredients that you don't always have to think about it every week. When you sit down to make your grocery list, you can plan out those meals and know that you already have some of those ingredients ready to go.

And then, once you get in that habit, you can start building bigger and bigger quantities of food until eventually you have six months or a year's worth of food for these meals that you know that you're going to make, that your family will like to eat, and that you can save money by making them because you already have the ingredients.

CAMILLE [23:01]

So, would you say for someone, let's say that I was starting this month, how many meals per week? Because we eat out a couple times a week typically for sure once. The kids get pizza on Friday, when we go out. But how much? If I'm starting to build up a sustainable approach to this, how much extra am I buying per week, per month? What's the cadence of that?

ALICIA [23:32]

So, in our challenge, we recommend just starting small. We're all about baby steps because it needs to be maintainable. Because like what you were saying is so many of us were having this big mindset shift away from checking your food storage every year or every six months to using it every single day or every single week when you're pulling up and stuff into your pantry.

And so, we don't necessarily recommend a certain amount. In our challenge, we say, pick one meal, do that seven times. Pick another meal, do that sometimes. So, you end up having two weeks, but it's just two meals repeated over and over again.

CAMILLE [24:05]

Meaning you prep for that one meal, but then you store the other six of that same meal?

ALICIA [24:10]

Exactly, yeah. So, if I was going to eat pasta this week and I was doing the challenge at the same time, I would be buying all those ingredients, but then also, yeah, six times whatever the full recipe was. So, that's what we usually recommend.

And it also depends on people's budget, but based on our experience, we've had frantic runs to Costco where we stock up on tons of things and it’s also not great because then you have a ton of food that's all expiring at the same time. But if you're constantly adding stuff, we call it a living food storage, where you're adding the new stuff to the back and to be used last because it's the newest thing that you bought and then taking the most recent thing and eating that and working with that.

CAMILLE [25:01]

So, would you say when you're having someone start this 14-day challenge, is your goal eventually to help them get to a year's worth of storage? Or what is the benchmarks of like, oh, cool, you've made it to three months, six months? Is a year the ultimate or what's the timeline?

ALICIA [25:20]

So, yeah, ultimately, a year. We think a year is a good amount to store. However, in our app, it actually allows you to track how close you are to a specific month goal. So, we're very different to a lot of food storage things, but we're very much use the meals that you eat, not what I eat. And then also, set your goal that works for you to start and that feels right because if you're trying to do a six-month goal and that feels overwhelming, that is literally an anti our system.

We're like this needs to be led by piece and by just little steps so that you can maintain it. So, we don't necessarily actually have an actual month goal right now that we say. We just say if you want to start with one month, great, that's better than zero.

CAMILLE [26:03]

Yeah. What would you say the biggest hang-ups are that people have when they're first starting or some of the most commonly asked questions?

ALEXIS [26:12]

I think mindset with food storage is probably the hardest thing for people. Especially if you grew up in our church, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, food storage is huge. And everybody has their mom or grandma food storage horror stories.

Seriously, my husband was very averse to food storage when we started doing this. And then now, he's a little bit more on board. But, yeah, I think mindset is huge. And I think also I'm thinking back to before we came up with this system, what I thought food storage was. And I think it was like what Jessica was saying where it feels like I need to plan my meals and I need to figure out food storage. And this is way too overwhelming. I can hardly plan my meals. You know what I mean?

And so, automatically, I think a lot of people when they think about food storage, they think overwhelmed, they think scary world events. People don't want to think about that. You know what I mean? And I think for me, I use my food storage all the time because I forget to go to the grocery store all the time.

If I get sick and can't make it to the store or I just don't feel like going or whatever, I just always miss the grocery store I feel like on a random week. But I use my food storage to make meals that I love and that I know my family is going to eat. So, it's not just like for, oh my gosh, the end of the world or another COVID or suddenly there's going to be some crazy apocalypse and you can't get food for a year.

It's literally for an everyday mom happening. You know what I mean? If you need a quick meal, because you have soccer practice and you have to pick up the kids from school, and then you have another kid that needs to be picked up from dance or whatever, you will have that. You know what? In your pantry. And it's like you don't have to think about it.

ALICIA [28:10]

I was going to say another mindset thing that people we were helping, we were just talking to a friend. We were asking like, "Oh, what are some meals that you guys normally?" She's like, "We eat frozen pizza a lot." And honestly, when we were just talking about it, we're like, "Literally, stack up your freezer with 10 frozen pizzas. That is our technique is build up what you have." And she's like, "I never had thought about before."

Because so many times, we think, oh, it's rice and beans. Oh, it's wheat. Oh, it's this. Jessica, Alexis, and I eat so differently, all of us. And we cook differently. And so, our food storage actually looks very different, all of ours. And I think sometimes people just come in wanting to say, "Tell me what to store. Tell me this." And we want to help and that's what we're trying to figure out. How do we help you do what works for you instead of just using this default food storage? It's really the mindset away from the way it was done before to a new way that's easier.

CAMILLE [28:59]

Yeah. I think of when you imagine, even 50 years ago, the way we prepped and ate food was so different than how we eat today. I think one of my first gifts that my in-laws gave us for Christmas was a hand wheat grinder. She was like, nice, but I thought this is nice to tuck away somewhere. If we were so desperate, we were grinding our own wheat, which is great. But I think the reality of us using that is probably pretty slim.

So, I like that that's your approach is creating and sustaining food systems that work for you and your individual families. Do you ever do food tours or food storage tours within each of your houses to show how they are different?

ALICIA [29:51]

No. I like that.

CAMILLE [29:52]

Will you?

ALICIA [29:55]

That sounds fun.

CAMILLE [29:56]

Yeah, you're welcome. I just think I have ideas and too many, that's the problem. But I think that's really cool because I think that too often, we think that our food shortage or our solution to anything, this could go for so many things in our lives that we have an idea of what it's "supposed" to look like, where as individuals and as families, we're different.

And that's practically perfect in every way. That's the way it's supposed to be. So, I love that it's very individualized. And I would love for you to share with our audience where they can find you and figure out ways to fix their own food service or food preparedness and food prep. Can you tell our audience where they can find you online?

ALEXIS [30:40]

Yep, you can find us on Instagram. The handle is @thepreparednessproject. Should we give our website?

CAMILLE [30:51]

And on Instagram, what can people expect to find there? What do you have going on? Obviously, you have some viral videos. So, what's the magic there that has done really well for you there and what we can see?

ALEXIS [31:03]

Okay. So, we've got plenty of how-tos inspiration on building food storage, a lot of transformation videos and stuff like that. Yeah, just fun. In stories, we just show our lives a little bit and also try to add value and add more tips in stories as well. So, definitely, stories can be really great.

ALICIA [31:33]

I was going to say another thing that we actually do on Instagram, we have a lot of and I've talked about a ton, but it's so important is water storage. And we realized that it's actually a secret. That is actually the number one thing we think people should be doing. But no one even starts there if they don't have food.

So, that's where we flipped our system. But we have tons of resources of how to store water, how to clean water barrels, how to rotate it because that's also an overwhelming piece. But we haven't even gotten into that. Eventually, we'll teach it more in a program, I'm sure, but we're like we got to help people with where they're at. But those that already have food storage, we have other resources for water and other things down the road because it's a constant progress. Once you're at one point, then you move to the next and the next.

CAMILLE [32:15]

Yeah, that's amazing. So, last parting bit of wisdom I want to hear from each of you. What do you think has led to your success so early on? Because you're a relatively newer company. What is some advice that you would give to someone who's thinking about starting a business? And that can be and/or involving other people? Alicia, we'll start with you.

ALICIA [32:39]

Okay. How have we been successful? The Lord. Truly that's what it comes down to. I'll be real. There's been so many times where each of us have been like, is this worth it? Should we keep doing this? And I think at different points, each of us has reminded each other of the higher goal. And we are very intentional. We study business strategy. We study marketing. We study these different things, but we really are like, does that feel right? Does that feel like what our step is? And so, we try to apply these principles in a spiritual way because that's our whole message is to involve the Lord in taking baby steps. And so, I would say it's truly one of the biggest things.

And also, second to that is allowing a business to refine you. I feel like the more that I've just surrendered to I need to shift and I need to improve in this area. And Jessica and Alexis are teaching me these things that they're good at or that we're butting heads on or whatever. It's like we see miracles after that because we feel like this is our own preparation. At least personally, I feel like this is my own preparation and a spiritual way to prepare to meet the Lord. And that's a cool thing that he's using. And so, yeah, that's what I would say.

ALEXIS [33:55]

Yeah, I also was going to say Jesus. I feel like I walked into this with zero skills. I just really did. I was speaking from a business perspective, I have lots of skills, okay. But zero business skills and I liked how Alicia said allowing the business to refine you because I personally have grown exponentially in this last year.

A big theme in it was give it to God and watch what he can do with you. You know what I mean? And that has been so powerful for me just overcoming certain lifelong weaknesses that I've made big leaps on just this last year. That's so powerful keeping the Lord in charge.

The other one that I would say is unity. And I think that goes alongside with staying with Jesus and just being unified with one another and unified with God. I know we've talked about that. But that's truly been, I think our secret sauce. I think anything that you want to do, I have learned that anybody can do business. I have been trying to get all of my mom friends around me to do business. Because, yes, the Lord will work with you and you will get to do really cool things. So

CAMILLE [35:27]

That's cool. Very powerful.

JESSICA [35:29]

Yeah, for me, I had already been a business owner before we started this business together. And so, like they both said, I've learned a lot about how to involve God in your business. Because before, it was just me. I was making the decisions. And to see how Alicia and Alexis both bring God into the equation every day, how they really trust in Him, and have faith and just really make their decisions based on what they feel God is telling them to do has been so amazing for me to see. And just the success we've seen in this business has been so different than what I've seen before when I was just by myself. So, yeah, I know, it's like the default answer. But yeah, really involving God in all that we've done this year has really given us a lot of success.

CAMILLE [36:37]

That's amazing. This has been so helpful. I feel like anyone listening to this is thinking about food storage in a new way, which is the goal. And I'm really appreciative for that. What I've heard as a theme more and more is discovering your why, really tapping into your purpose and being unified in that.

If you are interested in discovering your why and building a business, I do have a free five-day discovering your why on my website that you can grab as well as coming to the website and getting a Mom Balance Playbook. It's a 56-page playbook where you can find the balance that's just right for you and your family, which also includes easy meal prep ideas and dinner ideas that are slam dunks in our home. So, check that out at www.camillewalker.co.

And thank you ladies so much for being on this episode. If you know of anyone who is looking for help in this, please send them this episode as well as head over to Instagram and follow them @thepreparednessproject. So, thank you ladies, this has been amazing.

ALEXIS [37:37]

Thank you so much.

JESSICA [37:38]

Thank you so much.

ALEXIS [37:39]

This has been a blast.

ALICIA [37:40]

So fun.

CAMILLE [37:41]

Hey, CEOs, thank you so much for spending your time with me. If you found this episode inspiring or helpful, please let me know in a comment in a 5-star review. You could have the chance of being a featured review on an upcoming episode. Continue the conversation on Instagram @callmeceopodcast. And remember, you are the boss!

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