Vicki Semanie appeared in the 30th episode of our second season of the Take the Leap podcast. In this episode, “It’s Never Too Late to Leap: Redefining Success After Retirement with Vicki Semanie” our guest shares a powerful reminder that success in entrepreneurship is a journey, not a sprint, and that leaning into purpose, patience, and presence creates the most meaningful impact.

Some of our favorite takeaways include:

• One of Vicki’s biggest lessons: Entrepreneurship takes time. Comparing it to an ivy plant: Year 1 it sleeps, Year 2 it creeps, Year 3 it leaps.
• Her philosophy: “You can only succeed if you fail first. It’s what you do with the failure that determines your future success.”
• Advice for new entrepreneurs: Have a financial nest egg. Be ready for unexpected pivots and delays in revenue. Focus on long-term relationships and impact, not instant results.

Guest Information:

• Guest, Vicki Semanie, Master Certified Professional Coach at Seven Stones Life Coaching
• Find Vicki on Facebook
• Find Vicki on LinkedIn
• Visit the Seven Stones Website

Vicki’s Bio:

Vicki founded Seven Stones after a long career as a finance and operations professional. As a Master Certified Professional Coach, Vicki assists others in achieving life and business goals that they never thought possible. 

She built an exceptional career and meaningful life because of her ability to pragmatically achieve her goals regardless of obstacles. As a business coach, Vicki assists her clients by providing clarity on the path forward. She works with the business owners to think through what the next steps of the business should be and by helping them develop leadership, communication, and sales skills. 

Vicki recently expanded Seven Stones by providing business consulting services through strategic business partnership arrangements. Her primary client is a business owner or CEO of a company with up to 50 or so employees. With this service, she provides strategy, operations, and financial consulting services over 12 months with intensive individual and group sessions and 1:1 coaching. 

Before founding Seven Stones, Vicki served as the vice president of finance for St. Mary’s Seminary & University. In that role, Vicki had responsibility for finance, information technology, facilities, dining, and housekeeping services. Before joining St. Mary’s in 2020, Vicki was the chief financial officer for Johns Hopkins Home Care Group and in similar roles at various Catholic healthcare organizations. Vicki is an alumnus of Loyola University of Maryland and Bentley University and serves on the board of directors of various not-for-profit organizations.

Ashlan: Welcome back, everyone to the Take Leap podcast. We’re really excited today for our guest, Vicki Semanie. Vicki founded Seven Stones after a long career as a finance and operations professional. As a master certified professional coach, Vicki assists others in achieving life and business goals that they never thought possible.

She built an exceptional career and meaningful life because of her ability to pragmatically achieve her goals regardless of obstacles. As a business coach, Vicki assists her clients by providing clarity on the path forward. She works with business owners to think through what the next steps of the business should be, and by helping them develop leadership, communication, and sales skills.

Vicki recently expanded Seven Stones by providing business consulting services through strategic business partnership arrangements. Her primary client is a business owner or CEO of a company with up to 50 or so employees. With this service, she provides strategy, operations, and financial consulting services over 12 months with intensive individual and group sessions and one-on-one coaching.

Before founding Seven Stones, Vicki served as the vice president of Finance for St. Mary’s Seminary and University. In that role, Vicki had responsibility for finance, information technology, facilities, dining and housekeeping services. Before joining St. Mary’s in 2020, Vicki was the Chief Financial Officer for John Hopkins Home Care Group, and in similar roles at various Catholic healthcare organizations.

Vicki is an alumnus of Loyola University of Maryland and Bentley University and serves on the board of directors of various not-for-profit organizations. Welcome, Vicki. We’re so excited to have you here. Thank you. Yeah. Yeah. Wow. And a very decorated career before starting your own business.

So yeah. We wanted to start this off like we always do, which is what’s your take the leap story. What drove you to start your own business?

Vicki: As you described, I had a long career as a finance and operations executive and decided that I didn’t want to do that anymore and I wanted to retire, but I knew that I needed to do something like I can’t, I don’t golf, I don’t, I needed an activity and I needed to feel.

A sense of purpose and social connection. Yeah. All those things that you experience when you work you need to replace those in some ways when you retire. So when I was at Johns Hopkins, I had led the mentoring program for the finance division, and I also co-founded an affinity group called the Female Finance Professionals Network.

So through that. Both of those experiences. And then just in general, being an executive, I had done a lot of mentoring and coaching and I loved it, and I decided that’s what I will do when I retire. So it’s so strange because I did not think of myself as an entrepreneur. I thought of myself as. A life and business coach.

It’s weird but regardless when you found a company, you are an entrepreneur. So that’s where I ended up.

Ashlan: I love that. I love that you pivoted or you said some really important things right there. One that, you know, even when we retire, we still need social connectedness. Like you can’t just hide inside and not be connected to people. And then the fact that you said you also needed purpose because they do feel like a lot of folks think of some entrepreneurs as they’re Grady, they just want money. They don’t wanna help anybody but it really is that purpose-driven mission drivenness that I think guides a lot of us as entrepreneurs, is wanting to have an even bigger impact than we ever had being internal in a company.

Vicki: Yes, I agree. And it’s your decision on how you take your purpose and.

And put it out there right through your business versus, as you said, if you’re an employee, working as an employee, you may feel you have a purpose, but you’re not always able to use that at work the same way that you would like.

Victoria: Absolutely. Absolutely. I love that. What’s one piece of advice now that you’ve been doing this for a little bit, what’s one piece of advice you would give yourself knowing what you know now when you first went out on your own?

Vicki: I think I would tell myself to be more patient. I. I really thought that my pretty deep network Okay. Of people would be referring people to me for life coaching. Okay. And, that it isn’t that, I haven’t had some of that, but it hasn’t grown as fast as I would have liked it to. But I’ll come back to the reasons why I think that is, but I was working with a business attorney and she said to me, owning a business, starting a business, the is like growing Ivy.

The first you plant the Ivy the first year. It sleeps the second year it creeps. And the third year it leaps. So I’m in my third year. My original business plan was out the window. Like I didn’t meet those revenue goals. My advice to someone starting a business is you have to have a nest egg.

You’ve gotta have. Some financial resources, either starting your business when you are still working or saving up the money because you’re not necessarily gonna gen generate the revenue that you think you will from the beginning. So having patience with the process, I think is critical.

Victoria: I love that you said a couple things there that are so important because I think first of all, patience, just in general, being an entrepreneur, like we’ve said this before on the podcast, it’s not, success isn’t like a straight linear path.

It’s there’s lots of ups and downs, and every year is different than the year before in different ways. You face different challenges and things just evolve, and so you could be having a really good month and then the next. Month without knowing it, you might not have as great. And so being able to be patient and know that some opportunities just aren’t going to work out.

And also sometimes that means it’s making room for other opportunities and or maybe that seed that you planted over here. You won’t actually see grow for another couple of years down the line. It’s just, I, it’s part of the process of being an entrepreneur no matter what industry you’re in. And that’s the biggest thing that I’m learning too, is like we really, we can make business plans.

We can make strategies for the year and timelines for the year, but at the end of the day, we can’t tell the future. So we don’t actually know what’s going to happen. And I think. That resilience piece of being an entrepreneur and being, being able to weather those storms and learn from them and look for those opportunities and have patience with them is so helpful in the long run.

Vicki: And I think it, that patience has to go through everything. So to give an example, when I first would have a discovery call with the potential client, I was. I don’t wanna say rushing, but I was rushing towards making my sales pitch of why I could help them. Okay. Now I just sit back, I actually use it as a mini coaching session, so the person’s getting 45 minutes of free coaching.

I don’t even talk about unless they ask. I don’t even talk about. How, what my services cost, how I bill, how I meet, none of that because I think that’s a better way if you can prove yourself in a mini coaching session and then follow up with an email rather than be rushing in. That seems to work better for me.

Ashlan: That makes a lot of sense too, because I do think that one of the tricks to sales calls and sales conversations is it has to be their idea to hire you. It can’t, you can’t really force the idea on them. It has to come. And I think especially for something like coaching, where I feel like if somebody is not bought into the idea that they will welcome in help and support, you’re.

No matter what pitch you gave them, it would never work. So there has to be that internal agreement for themselves that they are, ready to accept that. And then, yeah, the more, because I do something really similar on our marketing calls as it’s a lot of Hey, you said you were struggling with this, and this.

Let’s dive deeper into that. Let’s, navigate through it. And then usually at the very, as we’re getting. To the end because they know it’s only 45 minutes. They’ll be like, so how much does this cost to hire you? And then that’s where the true conversation starts to happen.

So it’s great. Great to hear that reflected in a very different industry as well.

Victoria: Yeah. I’ve heard that too, of and I think it’s just in general sales and marketing in general. When you listen to your customer, you listen to your clients and figure out what it is that they want and need, like that is usually a better way than just saying, here’s my pitch.

That’s great.

Ashlan: Awesome. So I have one more question before we jump into the hot seat questions. What’s your why, and I guess because you did have kind of a career in something totally different, why business and life coaching? Why this path?

Vicki: As I described before, because I felt comfortable doing it and I like doing it, so my why for being a coach is I have experience and knowledge and the capability to help people in a very direct way and even more direct than I did in my career. So in my career, like I was helping a patient, but I was a couple people removed from that, right? I was enabling other people to do their jobs and.

Therefore helping a patient. Now I directly impact how a person feels about themselves, how they feel about the decisions that they’re making, providing advice. When asked or necessary on the next steps and I can see the fruits of my labor pretty much right away. That’s a very rewarding thing.

My husband and I used to talk about the fact that we are both finance people. You can work on something for a very long time. A project, and it might take a year for you to see the fruits of your labor versus if you are a carpenter or you’re a plumber, or you’re a painter, you see the fruits of your labor as you’re doing it, you fix the faucet, you paint the wall, you see it right away. That’s how coaching is for me. I get to see how I’ve helped people. In the moment as opposed to a year later.

Victoria: I love that. That’s so cool. I love that a lot.

That’s great. Are you ready for our hot seat questions are not

Vicki: sure.

Victoria: They’re just fun. They’re just fun questions.

Vicki: Sounds good. I’m ready.

Victoria: All right, so the first question, we always ask the same question every time to kick it off. What is the best and or worst advice you’ve received throughout your career?

Vicki: The best and worst advice. Oh gosh. I would say in my current world, it’s the advice that attorney gave me that caused me to be more patient. So the best advice? Okay. Yeah. Slowing down. And the other reason that was really good advice if I could, is because my business was growing more slowly and I had to be more patient.

I had to do other things. So I write a weekly blog. I never thought I would be writing. In my current career. And I also speak, so I do presentations or interviews. I do that sort of work too that I didn’t think I would be doing. So the advice of being patient led me to do things that I’ve really enjoyed that, I didn’t think this path was going to take me on. So there’s that worst advice. That’s a tougher one. Think about that for a second. Do people struggle with the worst advice question? No.

Victoria: It depends on the person. I would say. There’s some people who have been a have had some really fun answers right off the top of their heads.

Some people only had a bad advice or some people only had a good advice one. It just depends on. Their experience. I wonder if can’t find one. That’s true.

Vicki: I wonder if, I can’t recall a worst advice because I just dismissed them. I was gonna say, you just ignore them.

Ashlan: You get better at ignoring them and yeah.

That’s

Victoria: not for me.

Vicki: I you

Victoria: know yourself, you know your worth. That’s awesome. Yeah.

Vicki: Yeah. So I would say if the advice was really bad, I probably didn’t follow it. Now, that’s not to say that I haven’t done things that I wish I did differently,

Ashlan: that’s fair. Absolutely. It was interesting that you talked about the slowing down and the patients and and in your earlier answers you talked about, I thought that the network would just refer people.

I think it’s really hard when your network knows you for one thing, so especially if. You had this career in one particular avenue and you’re completely pivoting in entrepreneurship. It takes a while to train people. This is what I do now and it’s not a bad thing. I. The majority of the folks in your network are probably gonna still support you.

They’ll be like, Vicki was a badass at this other thing. There’s no way Uhhuh. You know what I mean? Exactly. She’s gotta be good this thing too. But it does take people time. And then I do find that, that it is it is difficult. When it comes to coaching and business advice is that for people to want this, they have to be vulnerable, right?

They have to say that there is something that I personally cannot do, and that is why I’m seeking help. And we as humans don’t like to show a lot of vulnerability in, in our. In our worlds and in our lives. So I do think that is a major challenge for folks who do go into the coaching industry because, it’s very similar to how a lot of people don’t do therapy.

It’s because they think they’re fine. They think they’re fine without it. They don’t wanna ask for that help and support as well. Yeah, that’s true.

Victoria: Yeah. That’s very true. That’s very true. Awesome.

Ashlan: I actually, let’s tease up my next question really well. So you have a great quote on your website.

You’re going to make mistakes, but don’t try and hide them, own up to them and figure out how to fix them. Do you find that a lot of the folks that you work with stay stuck in that like spiral of I messed up and they don’t pause, reflect, and be like, okay, I messed up. How what’s the next step now, to move forward and to make those fixes?

Vicki: I think there are two things. Going back, when I had people reporting to me people, and even, I’m a, I was a pretty. Accepting boss as it was related to, I knew people were gonna make mistakes. They shouldn’t make the same one multiple times. But, come and tell me and we’ll figure it out.

But oftentimes people feel, if I admit that I made a mistake, what are people gonna think about me? Are they going to? Am I going to get written up? Am you know, at the lowest level am are people going to not want to give me new work? That sort of thing. So there’s this fear. 

And currently I would say in my coaching world, it’s more a matter of, it’s not that people don’t recognize they made a mistake. And that they fix it however they need to do that. If that means telling your client, I made a mistake and this is how I’m going to rectify that, but allowing that mistake to define you is it gonna run in the back of your head?

Is it going to break down or wear down your confidence? So I think now I see that more. And I always say that you can only succeed if you fail first, so you’re going to fail. It’s what you do when you fail and you figure out how to fix it, that makes you more successful going forward.

Victoria: I love that. I feel like I need to write that down and put that up in my office here. I love that.

Vicki: And I think as an entrepreneur you really have to be willing to fail ’cause you’re gonna do stuff that you think is gonna work and then it does it.

Ashlan: It doesn’t. Yeah. Yeah. Oh my gosh. There’s so much stuff.

There’s, yeah. I feel like every entrepreneur, you throw the spaghetti at the wall and you see what, you see when it’s ready or you’re like oh, gotta keep going. Yeah. That’s, yeah. Yeah. I do a lot of cooking analogies be like we put too much spicy sauce in the soup,

Victoria: it’s true though, even I feel like even if you’re an employee working for a company, like there still is like a little bit of that as well, but there’s something about being an entrepreneur if you wanna be successful, if you wanna make things happen, you just have to be willing to fail. So just spiraling off of that and the coaching business in the coaching world what’s. Has your approach at all changed since when you first started to now when you’re coaching with your clients? What’s something that you’re doing now that’s like a little bit different than how you would coach them when you first started?

Anything you wanna share like that?

Vicki: I think my approach is more or less the same because the way I was trained is that the client drives what we’re gonna do. I, one thing that I’m very good at, that I have always done in my coaching is asking the hard question, the question that the person really doesn’t want to answer.

And I don’t mean that, that it’s just why are you doing it that way? Or what makes you think that? Or, and they, it’s a hard question when they have to stop and think about it. Like they’re really digging deep. So the only thing that’s changed in my business is as I’ve leaned more into the business coaching and the business consulting, especially on the consulting side, I am actually giving advice versus in coaching.

You’re not so much giving advice. You are helping the client get to where it is that they want to be. You’re like a guide. If that makes sense.

Ashlan: Yeah, I think that’s a big distinction. And I think there’s a lot of there’s a lot of gray area of if you hire a business coach, you hire, if you’re working with a mentor, if you’re working with a consultant, if you’re working, with somebody who’s gonna do things for you versus somebody who’s going to explain to you how you do it or help you break down those barriers, right?

That are. Those roadblocks that honestly, a lot of it is to do with mindset. Especially if you get stuck in the kind of that spiraly of I suck and I can’t do you know, anything. And I think. You may have written it, or I think you wrote something recently about or maybe it was just somewhere on your blog about celebrating the wins and just making sure to like, recognize those things because they, I feel like anytime anybody has something that they consider a failure or something that they did not do well, all of that other stuff goes out the window and you’re like, wow, what, like I, you zero in on this one thing that went wrong instead of celebrating and picking yourself back up and being like, okay, we just, we have to run the playbook again and work through it again.

Vicki: There’s a book called The Gap in the Game by Dan Sullivan, and that’s where I learned about celebrating my win.

So every day. I write down three things that yesterday were gains from me or wins, and sometimes they’re small. Sometimes they’re like, oh, I actually went out and ran yesterday and I haven’t done it in two weeks. Or sometimes they’re really big. Like tomorrow’s would be, I was on this awesome podcast.

That will be my win or my game. So I think keeping that, I love that continuing to think about the things that you did the day before that were gains to your business or yourself to yourself personally is critical. Awesome.

Victoria: I love that. I’m also going to write that down. Celebrate the wins.

I need, I keep telling Ashlyn I needed just like a board right here where I just write down

Ashlan: these things. Yeah. Just to, maybe that’s what we’ll do. We’ll do like a poster of all the good. Yeah. Here’s your little like entrepreneur checklist for the day. Yeah. We

Victoria: need it like right in front of me so that yeah. Every, I just see it every day. It

Ashlan: happens. Yeah. Totally. Cool. Pivoting slightly. I think I remember when we first met, you and I chatted about how entrepreneurs often just work work, and they don’t think about retirement or their, their life in the long term. I am wondering how you are helping your clients to get there to their ideal, what it is it, other than just working that you want on the other side of that.

Vicki: Yeah, I actually have a a program where I talk about planning your life after retirement, and I teach at a local college in their lifelong learning program. And that’s what the seminar is. So basically, as we were talking about earlier, what do you want your purpose to be in your retirement? How are you going to.

Replace that social interaction that you had while you were working. So we’ve all been to McDonald’s or Panera Bread where you see like the table. They’re often men having coffee on Friday morning at nine o’clock. That’s what they’ve done. They’ve retired. They might golf too, they might do other things.

What are you now going to tell people? What you do. I used to say, oh yeah, I’m the CFO of St. Mary’s Seminary University. So if your identity is tied up in what you do, you have to think about what that means for you when you retire. I also tell people, retirement doesn’t mean completely leaving the workforce.

It might be like me starting a business. It might be. Working fewer hours. It might be volunteering more. It might be, it might be having a different type of job than what you had when you were working professionally. I also think it’s important for people to think about what kind of lifestyle do they want, because that drives on where you’re going to live.

So if you want

Ashlan: to

Vicki: be active boating all like a lot of outdoor things where you may need to actually relocate in order to live that lifestyle and to not assume that I’m a golfer, so I’ll just move to a golf community. That may be like the last thing you should do. So you people really need to think through those things and it takes time.

So yeah,

Ashlan: absolutely. That’s such a good point. I feel like I was just, oh, I was with the chiropractor this morning and the person next to me was talking about her, how her parents just moved out here. They didn’t move out here. They bought a home out here. They’re based in Michigan and they are becoming snowbirds because Michigan winners.

Suck. Yes. And they’re like, I don’t, I can’t do, nobody wants to be trapped in the house and now that you’re not going to work every day. Exactly. You don’t really have that interaction. So they’re here so that they can interact with their, their daughter, their grandkids, and then they’ll go back, and do the stuff on the lake in the summer.

And so I do think, that is important to think about. And so Nice, that we do live in a country where, you know. There’s not the travel between is not as difficult as it would be in other places.

Victoria: Yep, absolutely. And as somebody who has a parent hitting that stage very soon yeah, these are all really good reminders.

’cause I know she’s been very focused on, she also owns her own business and so she’s been very focused on figuring out how to sell that and everything like that. And she’s been, really swamped, really busy not putting, a lot of thought into, she’s put a lot of thought into her finances, but she hasn’t put a lot of thought into what she’s going to do after.

Yes. And so I think these are some good reminders that I can start. Ping her.

Ashlan: Yes. And it’s a lot of time to fill, I feel like once you retire, like retire, like I, my, both my in-laws are retired and they just came here at the end of February, and yeah, I feel like they don’t have enough to fill their.

There days with sometimes, like we, we had little projects for them to help out with here because we were like you’re not active enough to like, do go stuff while you’re here. So yeah, it’s definitely something to think about for

Victoria: folks. Absolutely. That’s super important.

So I have one more question for you and then we’ll wrap up everything. And this is gonna be a total pivot. We are, for this season, we’re doing something fun and we are asking all of our guests this question because we’re making a playlist. Okay? So what is a song or an album?

That has been really inspirational to you lately. That’s just been on repeat that you’ve been diving into,

Vicki: huh? I actually, if you don’t mind, can I answer it in a different way,

Victoria: you mind? Yes, absolutely. Okay.

Vicki: So yeah, I, when I was a lot younger, I often felt as a woman. I was forging a path, right?

And there was a song by the Eurythmics, I’m, you probably know who the Eurythmics were, I hope. And it was I can’t remember the name of the song, but it was like the lyrics went something like, the woman behind the man, like there’s always but Twine, every good man, there’s a good woman.

Now the women are coming out. Like we’re no longer the woman behind the man. And I felt like that so much early in my career that, my bosses were men and I’m like behind them supporting their efforts and everything. And now I’m going to do it, like I’m gonna do this myself. And it was almost like a battle cry for lack of a better term now nowadays.

There isn’t a particular song I do listen to Christian music and often that there are a couple of those that are inspiring to me because it makes me realize that no matter what, I’m not doing this by myself. And again, the purpose, like my purpose is connected to something bigger than just me.

That’s how I feel about it. I also I’m a firm believer that music is an inspiration. In fact, I have a, there’s an old blog out there about how do you get inspired? And for me, music is one of those things.

Victoria: I love that. That’s a really great answer. I love that so much. Thank you for sharing that.

You,

Ashlan: the internet will help me find that song.

Yeah. Vicki, we have come to the end of our questions. Okay. We wanted to just say thank you for being on with us today, and then if there’s anything that we didn’t cover that you wanna make sure that you share with our audience before we wrap up,

Vicki: I, there’s nothing I want to cover necessarily other than to just say that, being an entrepreneur is an amazing thing, and being able to take what you want and what you believe and put it out there, it really doesn’t get much better than that. And as hard as it might be sometimes you just have to keep pushing forward and reach out to people that can give you advice, that can help you, that you know you’re never really doing it all by yourself.

Absolutely.

Ashlan: I love that. Yeah. Thank you so much again for being on with us. Thank you. I appreciate it. And for our audience, if yeah for our audience, if you have any questions or guest suggestions, you can always visit our website and submit the online form or send us a DM on Instagram. And until next time, we will see you back here at, take the.

Thanks everyone. Bye. Thank you.