How She Got Her Start with Jerri Hemsworth—Marty Stevens-Heebner

Announcer 0:00
And now from the Echelon Studios in Los Angeles, California, is the How She Got Her Start podcast.

Announcer 0:08
So let’s all get sarted with your host. Jerri Hemsworth.

Jerri Hemsworth 0:15
Good afternoon. Jerri Hemsworth here, and having a great discussion with a colleague, Marty Stevens-Heebner, and she we’ve known each other for quite some time, but we’ve never sat down and chatted.

Marty Stevens-Heebner 0:30
That’s right, this is great.

Jerri Hemsworth 0:32
Oh my gosh. So you have a firm that is Clear Home Solutions, and what is Clear Home Solutions all about?

Marty Stevens-Heebner 0:44
It’s about helping older adults and their families deal with their stuff. I always say, if it’s stuff, or seniors, call me and/or seniors call me, because if we don’t offer the service after 12 years of being nationally accredited and all that stuff. That we have such a deep resource list, and I’m always happy to share. Specifically we work with people’s personal property, the stuff in their homes, in their sheds, in their attics, garages, storage units that they don’t want to admit they have.

Jerri Hemsworth 1:12
Trunks of their car.

Marty Stevens-Heebner 1:13
Oh, oh, we’ve cleared out a few good cars, let me tell you, over time. And so it’s estate liquidation, it’s it’s obviously downsizing and organizing and things like that. One of our favorite things, and I’d say it’s our financial engine, is move management, especially specifically senior move management. We can do it for anybody.

Jerri Hemsworth 1:34
Sure.

Marty Stevens-Heebner 1:34
But our sweet spot is older adults. We love helping them move to assisted living. Basically, we are project managers for the move, and we can handle as much or as little of it as they want or need to. But basically, we can do the floor planning. We can do the sorting and downsizing that, you know, that’s the biggest thing.

Jerri Hemsworth 1:54
That’s huge.

Marty Stevens-Heebner 1:55
It’s huge. It’s very emotional, especially when you’re working with someone who, you know, could kind of reach out and they can touch the you know, they know the end of their life is there. They’re they’re closer to that than from the beginning. That’s very much, and leaving the home.

Jerri Hemsworth 2:09
Yes.

Marty Stevens-Heebner 2:10
They’ve lived in for often 30 years. One man we moved he was 89 he’d lived in that home his whole life.

Jerri Hemsworth 2:16
You’re kidding!

Marty Stevens-Heebner 2:17
We were so worried about him, thinking, Oh, he’s working moving out of this home

Jerri Hemsworth 2:21
Really?

Marty Stevens-Heebner 2:21
And assisted living, he was happy as can be at assisted living, because I’m sure all the women loved him. He was such a sweetheart.

Jerri Hemsworth 2:27
I love that.

Marty Stevens-Heebner 2:28
It’s great, but the sorting of the downsizing, getting things packed, overseeing Move Day, we can handle all the logistics. We’ve got great movers to recommend among many other professionals, and then unpacking the home and putting things away and organizing it in a way that is a reflection of the home they’ve left behind. So literally, if they, if we handle the whole thing, it’s turnkey.

Jerri Hemsworth 2:52
Wow.

Marty Stevens-Heebner 2:52
We handle it all, and then also we deal with clearing out the home through sale of items, donation, and there’s always some stuff to haul away.

Jerri Hemsworth 2:59
Oh.

Marty Stevens-Heebner 3:00
So that then it’s realtor ready,

Jerri Hemsworth 3:01
Sure. Yeah, sure. So then it’s ready to sell. And what a if, what a gift it is to the children or the heirs, and knowing that mom or dad are being taken care of and going to a place that is a little bit maybe safer even, I know of a few parents that have taken spills.

Marty Stevens-Heebner 3:24
Oh.

Jerri Hemsworth 3:25
You know when they’re at home or

Marty Stevens-Heebner 3:26
I’ve fallen at home!

Jerri Hemsworth 3:28
Well, yeah, you do.

Marty Stevens-Heebner 3:29
You know? Yeah.

Jerri Hemsworth 3:30
And it’s, it’s a little frightening, but then you see everything. And I’m speaking from my own experience, my parents never got rid of things, and they just kept acquiring so when they lost their parents, they had all their stuff, the generational materials. Seriously, in my garage, I have three filing cabinets that are filled with family photos.

Marty Stevens-Heebner 3:54
Oh, by the way, we do photo organizing and scanning, just FYI.

Jerri Hemsworth 3:54
Yeah! It is huge!

Marty Stevens-Heebner 3:54
It is huge. And it’s, you know, it’s really finding those legacy photos.

Jerri Hemsworth 3:56
Yes.

Marty Stevens-Heebner 3:56
And first of all, you have to take the time to do it. And that’s in the world we live in right now, that’s very difficult to do.

Jerri Hemsworth 4:15
Yes.

Marty Stevens-Heebner 4:15
It’s, it’s so challenging. And, you know, that’s why I wrote the book.

Jerri Hemsworth 4:20
Yes.

Marty Stevens-Heebner 4:20
That just came out How To Move Your Parents.

Jerri Hemsworth 4:22
I love it. How to Move Your Parents.

Marty Stevens-Heebner 4:24
And still be on speaking terms. That’s the big challenge.

Jerri Hemsworth 4:28
Yeah, it’s the speaking terms.

Marty Stevens-Heebner 4:30
Yeah, that’s the tricky thing.

Jerri Hemsworth 4:31
How to not kill each other while you’re trying to move your parents.

Marty Stevens-Heebner 4:34
Well, that’s the thing, and that’s where senior move management can be so helpful. Because certainly as an adult child, I know for me, because my mom died when I was only 58 dad made it to 90 though back in Buffalo, my hometown, of course, we’re in Los Angeles right now, and I just learned so much from dealing with all that. And senior move management comes in so handy, because you can do, you can certainly do some things. Because my dad used to say, I’m so sorry about this. I’m like dad, honestly, you’ve taken care of me basically my whole life in one way or another. It’s really lovely to be able to return the favor. But the thing is, as those of us who have gone through it personally know.

Jerri Hemsworth 5:19
Right.

Marty Stevens-Heebner 5:20
It’s it’s such a weight on you. You’re exhausted.

Jerri Hemsworth 5:26
Massive weight,

Marty Stevens-Heebner 5:26
You’re so worried. And you really feel, I mean, let’s face it, let’s really talk about the plight of adult children, of aging parents.

Jerri Hemsworth 5:32
Yes, yeah.

Marty Stevens-Heebner 5:33
You really feel, whether consciously or subconsciously, that you have their life in there, in your hands.

Jerri Hemsworth 5:39
Truly, truly.

Marty Stevens-Heebner 5:40
And older adults as it is, nobody wants to talk about later life.

Jerri Hemsworth 5:44
No.

Marty Stevens-Heebner 5:44
No one wants to plan for anything. And that’s so toxic. And so actually, what my mission in life is to be a small part, I’d love to be a big part, but a small part, at least, of transforming later life from a time that’s people fear, where they’re scared, they’re in pain, they feel lonely, they feel disregarded. I want to try, I want to transform that into a time that is safe and comfortable and cherished. The only way we’re going to get there is by talking about it and planning for it.

Jerri Hemsworth 6:13
Exactly. Yeah, bring it out of the shadows and shed beautiful light on it, because it’s a transition, and life is full of transitions. And kind of, like you and I were just talking about, you know, fear and how that plays into this, and how on so many levels, not only the parent that you might be moving, but also the children, the adult children. And like you said, I know when I had to move my mom out of assisted, well, wasn’t even assisted living. It was rehab center into a private assisted living house. Literally, I wanted her very close to here, she was, right down the block, and I guess what they called now a five pack or a six pack.

Marty Stevens-Heebner 6:59
We called those are board and cares. We call them six packs, because basically, they’re frequently former residential homes that have been converted.

Jerri Hemsworth 7:08
And, and, and that’s what I did with my mom and and, but making sure that you know she had what she needed and, and I did feel as though I had her life in my hands.

Marty Stevens-Heebner 7:19
You did!

Jerri Hemsworth 7:20
And and doing what was best for her, and divorcing my own self, okay, get rid of what’s best for me. This is what’s best for her.

Marty Stevens-Heebner 7:29
And that’s not good for anybody.

Jerri Hemsworth 7:31
Yeah.

Marty Stevens-Heebner 7:31
You know, put your put your own oxygen mask on first, because you’re no good to anybody if you can’t breathe.

Jerri Hemsworth 7:39
Yeah. You need to breathe.

Marty Stevens-Heebner 7:40
Right?

Jerri Hemsworth 7:40
You need to breathe.

Marty Stevens-Heebner 7:41
You need to breathe, and you want to be and it can be such an extraordinary time of life to go through that, both for the older parent and the adult child, because it was extraordinary. The things that happened with my dad as he got older. I was the DA in the family, the designated adult, which apparently you were.

Jerri Hemsworth 8:01
Yes, yes.

Marty Stevens-Heebner 8:01
And I’m sure a lot of people listening are as well.

Jerri Hemsworth 8:04
Sure.

Marty Stevens-Heebner 8:04
And you’re basically the sibling, the family member, sometimes the friend or the niece or nephew, who are really have become in charge of that care whether you’ve wanted to or not, and you need that time to be able to breathe, so that you have time to care for one another. You know between the generations and and find understanding. You know, it’s interesting. You’re talking about the generations of stuff. One of the things to be really aware of, especially for what they’re called demographically, is the oldest old those 85 years and over, if they didn’t live through the Depression in World War Two, they were born in the immediate aftermath, and so their parents had suffered through all that trauma.

Jerri Hemsworth 8:53
Yes.

Marty Stevens-Heebner 8:54
And so they couldn’t help but imprint that on their kids.

Jerri Hemsworth 8:58
Right.

Marty Stevens-Heebner 8:59
They were the greatest generation to live through all that. They’re also the deprivation generation.

Jerri Hemsworth 9:04
That’s very good point.

Marty Stevens-Heebner 9:05
Because everything had value. I mean, my dad used to tell me about his mom would cry some nights because she didn’t have anything for dinner. They couldn’t afford it.

Jerri Hemsworth 9:14
Wow.

Marty Stevens-Heebner 9:15
That’s how bad it was people, you know, it’s, it’s, it’s, so it’s almost 100 years ago, the depression. So it’s hard to, you know, remember that and imagine it. But so they’ve kept everything. And also, they were raised to appreciate the heirlooms, because, frankly, those heirlooms were the furnishings in their first house when they got married, had kids stuff like that.

Jerri Hemsworth 9:35
Or handed down from their grandparents to you know, they’ve been handed down.

Marty Stevens-Heebner 9:39
Yeah.

Jerri Hemsworth 9:39
And now, you know, even my own daughter is like, Mom, I don’t want that, but this was my great grandmother’s, and I’m thinking so her great grandmother, who she never knew, she doesn’t have that appreciation, because she never knew these people, you know, that were way back, whereas I did.

Marty Stevens-Heebner 9:58
Yeah, there’s also something to considered too in that, so millennials often and Gen Z by and large, they’re not into stuff.

Jerri Hemsworth 10:10
No.

Marty Stevens-Heebner 10:10
And also keep in mind, some of them are still living at home because they can’t afford to move out. Many of them are living communally again because of the economics and so they really don’t want or need a lot of furniture. They don’t want a dining room table.

Jerri Hemsworth 10:24
No.

Marty Stevens-Heebner 10:24
They want a table they can eat at and put their laptop on.

Jerri Hemsworth 10:27
Right, right.

Marty Stevens-Heebner 10:28
Which I admire, because we don’t need that stuff. And it can be, especially when it’s ancient, it’s your ancestors to part with it. And yet, just, you know, I, when I’m working, we’re working with clients, I’m no longer in the field. You don’t want me in the field because I haven’t done it in so long. My, I have these amazing colleagues, and, you know, talking to people and just really emphasizing, you know, you have that memory.

Jerri Hemsworth 10:54
Yes.

Marty Stevens-Heebner 10:54
It’s not, it’s not that table.

Jerri Hemsworth 10:56
Right.

Marty Stevens-Heebner 10:57
It’s not that chair, although now, it’s the feeling and the, and the memory, that’s what matters, and the love,

Jerri Hemsworth 11:03
Yes.

Marty Stevens-Heebner 11:03
passed through the generation.

Jerri Hemsworth 11:04
Yes.

Marty Stevens-Heebner 11:05
Now we live in the age of technology.

Jerri Hemsworth 11:07
Yeah.

Marty Stevens-Heebner 11:08
Take a photo.

Jerri Hemsworth 11:09
Yeah.

Marty Stevens-Heebner 11:10
Take a video of the story. There is this, actually, there’s this amazing company called artifacts, artifacts.com it’s A, R, T, I, F, C, T, S, so that there’s no second “A”

Jerri Hemsworth 11:22
Okay.

Marty Stevens-Heebner 11:23
Amazing founders, Ellen Goodwin, Heather Nickerson, they’ve become very good friends. They actually met in Afghanistan when they were in the CIA.

Jerri Hemsworth 11:32
Your kidding!

Marty Stevens-Heebner 11:32
And to meet them, you would they’re both very petite, they’re very wonderful and fun and,

Jerri Hemsworth 11:38
Oh my God!

Marty Stevens-Heebner 11:38
You would never think that’s how they met,

Jerri Hemsworth 11:39
I love it!

Marty Stevens-Heebner 11:39
or that they even did that, but it’s wonderful because you can go there, and you can invite your family members, upload all the photos, multiple photos, videos, either write the story, dictate it, whatever, and it’s there.

Jerri Hemsworth 11:53
Oh my.

Marty Stevens-Heebner 11:54
As a legacy, and it’s just so “Artifcts” without the second “a” .com. So that’s a great way to preserve those memories, and frequently,

Jerri Hemsworth 12:02
That is so cool.

Marty Stevens-Heebner 12:03
that’s the big thing I think we have issues with, is this story letting go of those stories.

Jerri Hemsworth 12:07
The stories! Right, and our past, who, what makes us who we are, or the experiences that my parents, my grandparents lived through and and passing that on, because you always want to, well, I shouldn’t say you it’s me. I want to shake my daughter and say, do you understand what your grandfather did? You know, we wouldn’t have arson squads if it wasn’t for your for my grandfather.

Marty Stevens-Heebner 12:29
Wow. What? How did that happen?

Jerri Hemsworth 12:31
Oh, Grandpa, he studied, he was a fire chief of San Diego, way back in World War Two.

Marty Stevens-Heebner 12:38
Oh, wow.

Jerri Hemsworth 12:40
And he was called to fires that he knew were there was a crime that had been committed, but there was no real communication between the police and the fire. And so he started chatting and talking with the police departments. And then he came up to USC at the time and took some fire science classes and and then went back down and he worked with the San Diego Fire Department and the police department started working together as an arson squad, and put several people away, and, you know, death chamber and all that kind of stuff because of murders that were being committed. Very sad and tragic, but it was, it was his forethought of thinking, we have to do something to prove that this was not an accidental fire. And, yeah, pretty interesting. And then, after he retired from that that fire department went to become a teacher, a professor of Fire Science at Miramar College.

Marty Stevens-Heebner 13:45
Wow.

Jerri Hemsworth 13:46
And started that whole series there. So pretty cool stuff.

Marty Stevens-Heebner 13:49
What a legacy, if you have some like, either, you know, take your own photos or use artifacts and document what you have in those stories, because what a legacy in your family.

Jerri Hemsworth 13:58
Yeah, very, very cool. But I want to you touched on something, and I want to ask you so you grew up in Buffalo.

Marty Stevens-Heebner 14:05
I did!

Jerri Hemsworth 14:06
Okay. Did you have any idea where you would end up in your career back then? What did you want to be when you grew up back then?

Marty Stevens-Heebner 14:13
I when I was little, because I remember the moon walks.

Jerri Hemsworth 14:16
Oh yeah.

Marty Stevens-Heebner 14:17
I wanted to be an astronaut.

Jerri Hemsworth 14:19
Oh gosh, that is brave.

Marty Stevens-Heebner 14:21
You know. But, well, that didn’t happen, of course. And I got more interested in things like stories. I My background is I got my degree in his my Bachelor’s at Cornell in history, and my masters, and my MFA at UCLA in film and television. And people will say, and you do this, yeah, it’s like, yeah…

Jerri Hemsworth 14:40
But it fits together.

Marty Stevens-Heebner 14:41
You and I know because you know, you know marketing.

Jerri Hemsworth 14:43
Yep.

Marty Stevens-Heebner 14:44
And it’s just about telling the stories, also appreciating stories. And that’s one of the things I always look for, excuse me, when I’m hiring my colleagues and my people to work in the field, is, well, first I look for empathy. That’s number one. But also I kind of say we’re friendly nerds who can’t sit still, and so there’s a little level of really respectful curiosity, wanting to hear people’s stories and really embracing them and understanding them and and sometimes knowing how to tell them either to other family members. And thankfully, with those two degrees, it’s taught me to appreciate the legacy, history, and also how to tell the story. And that’s why I wrote the book, you know? And it just comes in so handy. I’m very grateful for my education and everything. And you know you were talking beforehand, you know what made you who you are today? And when I was writing the dedication to my book, I was trying to think, and I just I wrote this book is dedicated to the generous planet we live on. The night sky with its inspiring stars and luminous moon. That’s me loving astronomy and and then in quotes, I say, quoting from Maureen Stapleton’s 1981 Academy Awards acceptance speech, “everybody I ever met in my entire life, for you have taught me everything I know.” I couldn’t narrow it down!

Jerri Hemsworth 16:06
Right.

Marty Stevens-Heebner 16:06
You know, it’s really all of that.

Jerri Hemsworth 16:09
And all coming together.

Marty Stevens-Heebner 16:10
And all those stories are

Jerri Hemsworth 16:11
In magical ways.

Marty Stevens-Heebner 16:13
Exactly.

Jerri Hemsworth 16:13
Right?

Marty Stevens-Heebner 16:13
It’s the stories.

Jerri Hemsworth 16:15
Yes.

Marty Stevens-Heebner 16:15
Yeah.

Jerri Hemsworth 16:16
Absolutely. Look at the pieces of of things we’ve done. And I think that’s what being on the mature side allows us to do, is to go, Okay, I now see how this works, because we can’t see it when we’re in our 20s and 30s. We just can’t. But once you get, I think past 40, and definitely for myself, past 50. You really see, Oh, I get this now, yeah, I get why I’m doing what I’m doing.

Marty Stevens-Heebner 16:16
Yeah. And, you know, you go, everything has its sunlit and shadow side, and you look bad at bad experience. It’s like, oh, that was awful. But at the same time, you know, there’s some sunlight there, there’s a couple of rays of sunlight that came from that. It’s, yeah, it’s important to appreciate that. And just know, I mean, you’ll there was actually, actually, it was a playwright, a playwright, a screenwriter, actually. Jay Preston Allen, she said, “you learn a lot more from the failures than the success.”

Jerri Hemsworth 17:13
Oh yeah.

Marty Stevens-Heebner 17:14
You do!

Jerri Hemsworth 17:15
Oh yeah, definitely. You were talking earlier when that you have been on the humanitarian side of of and you’d visited every single continent on the planet.

Marty Stevens-Heebner 17:33
I’ve been very fortunate that way.

Jerri Hemsworth 17:35
Tell us how that happened.

Marty Stevens-Heebner 17:37
Yeah. First of all, you were mentioning your 50s. I should say I’m 63 so I’ve had time to have a lot. I’ve had time for a whole lot of lives. And when I’m talking to people in their 20s and 30s, I say, you have so much time you do.

Jerri Hemsworth 17:49
Yes.

Marty Stevens-Heebner 17:49
I mean, I didn’t start Clear Home Solutions till I was 51.

Jerri Hemsworth 17:52
Yeah.

Marty Stevens-Heebner 17:52
You know. And so anything. And I’m launching a new venture now, AgeWise Alliance, which is where, right now, it’s only in Southern California, but we’ll grow it so it’s national. AgeWise Alliance is an online platform where older adults and their families can go to find all the answers, the professionals that they need for their non-medical later life challenges.

Jerri Hemsworth 18:12
Perfect.

Marty Stevens-Heebner 18:12
Because people don’t know!

Jerri Hemsworth 18:13
Right.

Marty Stevens-Heebner 18:13
That, you know that came to me because I was, again, marketing you can appreciate that. How do I get people to know about senior move management? Because nobody’s heard of it, and they may suspect that there might be services like that, but they don’t know how to find us.

Jerri Hemsworth 18:26
Right.

Marty Stevens-Heebner 18:26
And then I would start thinking, well, geriatric care managers who now call themselves Aging Life Care Specialists.

Jerri Hemsworth 18:32
Okay.

Marty Stevens-Heebner 18:32
The different kinds of attorneys, the patient advocates, all these different kinds of professions. There’s actually 80 plus listed on AgeWise Alliance.

Jerri Hemsworth 18:41
Holy.

Marty Stevens-Heebner 18:42
And they are defined because people don’t know how much help there is. I mean, this goes back to having the time, making the time, so that you can really cherish one another as you go through this big shift in life for all generations of the family.

Jerri Hemsworth 18:55
Sure.

Marty Stevens-Heebner 18:56
It’s really lovely. Yeah. So the way the seven continents came about. And yes, that does include Antarctica. I know, my God,

Jerri Hemsworth 19:04
Wow!

Marty Stevens-Heebner 19:04
Because everybody always says, I get,

Jerri Hemsworth 19:06
Even Antarctica?

Marty Stevens-Heebner 19:07
Yeah. It’s like, yes, the seven continents, yeah yeah, know.

Jerri Hemsworth 19:10
There are seven. Been on all seven.

Marty Stevens-Heebner 19:12
Yeah, exactly, exactly. It’s usually somebody who’s kind of competitive. But anyway, I just it was, I was lucky. I was lucky. And it actually a lot of it came in the aftermath of my mother passing away.

Jerri Hemsworth 19:23
Oh.

Marty Stevens-Heebner 19:24
Because my father was just bereft. He never remarried. She was the love of his life. And my sisters, I knew, Okay, Dad would get really distracted, in a good way, if there was a trip coming up, like he would read up everything he’d get he’d get a little obsessed. And so there were, there was the opportunity. Actually, it was through Cornell’s, their adult university, they had this trip to Antarctica.

Jerri Hemsworth 19:50
Really?

Marty Stevens-Heebner 19:50
How remarkable? And I can’t remember how all the machinations came together, but we, my dad and I ended up on this trip to Antarctica that was remarkable. It was remarkable. Of all the places I’ve been, it’s the place of greatest majesty, because everything is either just large or large in number peng a penguin recovery when you’re coming up on it, 1000s of penguins. And can I just tell you how badly they stink?

Jerri Hemsworth 20:16
Oh, I was gonna say the smell must have been wonderful.

Marty Stevens-Heebner 20:19
Oh, yeah, it was a lot. It was a lot. And I’ll leave it at that.

Jerri Hemsworth 20:22
That’s a lot of poop!

Marty Stevens-Heebner 20:23
Yeah. And then also going back and forth to visit my mom as she was languishing. I accrued all these frequent flyer miles. So this is in the mid 80s until late 90s, and back then, I mean, it was a lot less, you know, they didn’t know what they were doing the airlines.

Jerri Hemsworth 20:43
Yeah, yeah.

Marty Stevens-Heebner 20:43
So, I ended up with so many miles I could take friends with me.

Jerri Hemsworth 20:47
Holy smokes.

Marty Stevens-Heebner 20:47
That’s how I wound up wound up in Australia. That’s how I wound up in Europe. And so very grateful. And then going to Asia, the first time was with my dad actually on a on a business trip.

Jerri Hemsworth 20:59
Nice.

Marty Stevens-Heebner 21:00
And so I just, it was sheer luck, really, and a lot of his thanks to my mom. My mom always wanted to travel. Dad was a very successful businessman back in Buffalo, but he was, he was, you know, he loved my mother. He also loved business, and he liked fixing things. And so there we would go to the Finger Lakes. By the way, if you haven’t been at the Finger Lakes region in New York. You need to go there. So beautiful. And so we spent our summers growing up there, but frequently my dad was back in Buffalo, and my mom, I could tell she wanted to travel the world. And so I kind of feel like her final gift to me was the ability to do that.

Jerri Hemsworth 21:36
Yeah, yeah.

Marty Stevens-Heebner 21:38
And I got to see it, you know, I brought her eyes with me, if you will.

Jerri Hemsworth 21:42
Interesting that you said your father loved business and fixing things.

Marty Stevens-Heebner 21:47
Yeah, I was,

Jerri Hemsworth 21:48
Apple doesn’t fall far from the tree now, does it?

Marty Stevens-Heebner 21:50
Well, it did in the, you know, back in my 20s and 30s and even my early 40s, I was like, I’m not going into business. I’m not going and then,

Jerri Hemsworth 21:57
Surprise!

Marty Stevens-Heebner 21:57
Boom, yeah, yeah, I kind of fell into it.

Jerri Hemsworth 21:59
Entrepreneur.

Marty Stevens-Heebner 22:00
Yeah, and it was, I was a solopreneur to begin with. And then, you know, there was my Eco handbag line, and then there were other things before that, but, like I say, solopreneur. And then, as my dad was languishing and going back and forth, obviously, at the bag business took a big hit. I mean, I wouldn’t trade my time with my dad for anything. But after he passed, or as he was almost, I thought, Okay, what am I going to do? Do I resurrect this thing? And honestly, being in fashion is awful. It’s cut throat the design parts fun.

Jerri Hemsworth 22:31
Yes.

Marty Stevens-Heebner 22:32
Yuck. Otherwise,

Jerri Hemsworth 22:33
The after, it’s the business side that sucks.

Marty Stevens-Heebner 22:35
It’s awful, yeah. And I thought, okay, either I resurrect this or is there something else I could do? And I always felt like I was best in, you know, in a service area, like doing service work, there, there we go, that’s the word I want, yeah, service work. And also from a and I loved what I had learned about senior-dom, later life, working with people in later life, with my dad and some other relatives. And as a business person, I recognized how huge the Senior Market was, and that would only grow. 10,000 baby boomers turn 65 every year, every day, not year, every day. And so I thought, Well, where does my skill set fit in? And I found this amazing profession of senior move management, started Clear Home Solutions and never looked back. And I’m very lucky, because I’m just ending my presidency of our national organization. It’s a mouthful, the National Association of Senior and Specialty Move Managers. That’s why we just say NASAM N, A, S, A, M, .org.

Jerri Hemsworth 23:32
Okay.

Marty Stevens-Heebner 23:34
But it’s been very it’s been very good to me. We have 1200 members. I always tell people, look, if, if you’re not in the LA, LA Ventura County area, you know, shoot me an email with a zip code. We have 1200 members, US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, England. I’m happy to help.

Jerri Hemsworth 23:50
What a gift, what an absolute gift, and I can imagine the gratitude you do feel for having the experience with your aging parents family members, because it’s giving you what you’re doing today.

Marty Stevens-Heebner 24:07
It really has. It really has. And I was just form, I was just formulated, formulating it the last several weeks of my father, until he passed. And he was like, oh, that sounds interesting. Like, okay, even Dad likes it, all right, good.

Jerri Hemsworth 24:20
Dad like it. See?

Marty Stevens-Heebner 24:22
Of course, he could appreciate it, at that point.

Jerri Hemsworth 24:23
A lover of business, yeah, on so many fronts, but the pride he must have had in you.

Marty Stevens-Heebner 24:28
Yeah, not that he’d admit it to me.

Jerri Hemsworth 24:30
Right, yeah.

Marty Stevens-Heebner 24:30
He bragged to other people, and that’s how I would find he’s like, okay, dad couldn’t, couldn’t say it to my face, but

Jerri Hemsworth 24:36
Yeah.

Marty Stevens-Heebner 24:36
And I loved him a lot, and he did us a huge favor, my siblings and I, because he went through the house and cleared out so much. We had actually two attic spaces, and he cleared them all out.

Jerri Hemsworth 24:49
Oh, you’re lucky.

Marty Stevens-Heebner 24:49
He went through so many things.

Jerri Hemsworth 24:51
Yes.

Marty Stevens-Heebner 24:52
He had all of his estate planning down to a T.

Jerri Hemsworth 24:55
Whoa.

Marty Stevens-Heebner 24:55
And he had showed me a couple of summers before he passed. He showed me where the will was, where the trust was, where the safe deposit box key was. This is key, bad pound, not intended, I swear. And so he really tried to make it as easy as possible for us, and yet it was still so hard, and there was so much to do and so much to learn quickly amid the grief.

Jerri Hemsworth 24:56
Yes.

Marty Stevens-Heebner 24:56
And so the families we work with, often there’s no estate plan.

Jerri Hemsworth 25:14
Unfortunately.

Marty Stevens-Heebner 25:16
Mom and dad didn’t touch the stuff. I will point out, though, that my father well and my mother, when it went far enough back, they had their tax returns from 1957 that is one of the one thing they hoarded. We are hoarding specialists, by the way, and it’s, you know, what I got is going back and, like, Dad, I’m going back to the 80s, and then I start going back 70s. I’m like Mom, because she always handled that stuff. She handled the family finances.

Jerri Hemsworth 25:51
Yeah.

Marty Stevens-Heebner 25:52
Like 1957 I was born in ’61

Jerri Hemsworth 25:55
Yeah.

Marty Stevens-Heebner 25:55
So I’m traipsing off to the, you know, shredding comp, I think with Staples I took it to. 200 pounds shredding.

Jerri Hemsworth 26:00
Oh my God!

Marty Stevens-Heebner 26:01
Like it was insane, but that went but that was it!

Jerri Hemsworth 26:04
Yes.

Marty Stevens-Heebner 26:04
And he didn’t even want to have an estate sale. He’s like, just donate it. And there was a friend of mine who was, she was in the middle of a divorce and she was moving out, and so a lot of my parents furniture still lives with her.

Jerri Hemsworth 26:16
Oh, wow.

Marty Stevens-Heebner 26:17
Which is so amazing. Back in Buffalo, it’s so amazing.

Jerri Hemsworth 26:19
You walk in, you go, I know that piece.

Marty Stevens-Heebner 26:21
Yeah.

Jerri Hemsworth 26:22
I know that piece.

Marty Stevens-Heebner 26:22
I know. Thank you, Dawn, and I knew if that’s exactly what my parents would have wanted, my dad,

Jerri Hemsworth 26:28
Sure.

Marty Stevens-Heebner 26:29
But yeah, I’m I’m just really lucky to have had the experience of living several lives and doing the humanitarian work in Chiapas, Mexico following the Zapatista Rebellion in the mid 90s that transformed every part of my life.

Jerri Hemsworth 26:42
What was the biggest difference after you went through that?

Marty Stevens-Heebner 26:49
This is in the mid 90s. Because the rebellion was ’94 they were the good guys, by the way. They were the, you know, it’s very rare that rebel groups and governments are both good, but they were the good guys. I won’t bore you with the whole story, but, you know, we did, the Internet was, was just starting,

Jerri Hemsworth 27:08
Yes.

Marty Stevens-Heebner 27:08
I mean, just starting, some email here and there, and I would often be out of touch with anybody I knew in the US for weeks at a time, sometimes, and learning to live like that was really amazing. Basically, learning, you know what it’s really learning how to adapt. And also, when you’re in anybody’s in any kind of conflict zone, and doing humanitarian work, you end up in dicey situations.

Jerri Hemsworth 27:37
Big time.

Marty Stevens-Heebner 27:37
There were a couple of times I could have wound up dead. There were definitely times when I, and not just me,

Jerri Hemsworth 27:43
Sure.

Marty Stevens-Heebner 27:43
But anybody I was with all of us there, could have wound up badly injured or attacked. And I respected, oh, my God, I respected my Mexican friends there because they were living that every single day I could get arrested, I, you know, I would be there periodically, you know, like a few to several times a year, until I got threatened with being deported, but because they were kicking out all the humanitarian work, workers.

Jerri Hemsworth 28:08
Gotcha.

Marty Stevens-Heebner 28:09
Anyway, but my courage got tested, and it was great to find that I had some.

Jerri Hemsworth 28:16
Yeah, yeah!

Marty Stevens-Heebner 28:17
Number one. And I always have that in my hip pocket.

Jerri Hemsworth 28:19
Right.

Marty Stevens-Heebner 28:19
I always have that. I know I have that.

Jerri Hemsworth 28:21
Yes.

Marty Stevens-Heebner 28:22
But also that’s what taught me, you brought up fear earlier on. I actually, I do this presentation called Fears On Your Side. We need to learn to make friends with our fear. Because imagine that you had someone whose sole purpose, sole purpose was to keep you alive, keep you healthy, keep you successful, give you a good life, care about you. We would adore that person.

Jerri Hemsworth 28:47
Absolutely.

Marty Stevens-Heebner 28:49
We would treasure them. And that’s fear. That’s what fear is. That’s that part of us. That is that person we should be cherishing and listening to.

Jerri Hemsworth 28:50
It has a name.

Marty Stevens-Heebner 28:50
It has a name. It’s a it’s the four letter F-word fear, and we’re afraid of it. We get angry at it, we ignore it, we shove it away. And really it’s there to benefit us. And I had this epiphany several years ago, and I’m so grateful. I can’t tell you when it came to me or anything like that, but I thought, Oh, wow, I need to listen to this. And mind you, it’s much easier to tell somebody else to do this rather than, you know, get myself to do it. But even that resistance we feel, I say I feel scared every morning I wake up.

Jerri Hemsworth 29:30
Sure, sure.

Marty Stevens-Heebner 29:30
That’s because there’s, I know, I have stuff to do.

Jerri Hemsworth 29:32
Yeah.

Marty Stevens-Heebner 29:32
But there, you know, even resistance in life, whether it’s, it’s in business or in our personal lives, that’s fear, and it’s trying to tell us something.

Jerri Hemsworth 29:41
Right.

Marty Stevens-Heebner 29:42
And so you know you really have to sit it down with you. Sit down, get quiet and go, Okay, what are you trying to tell me here? Because sometimes you’ll go, oh my goodness, I forgot to do that.

Jerri Hemsworth 29:52
Yes, yes.

Marty Stevens-Heebner 29:53
Or really, I need to, to let fear give me, it’s giving you that energy. It’s giving you energy exactly on purpose. And so I got to use that to make that tough call.

Jerri Hemsworth 30:07
Yes.

Marty Stevens-Heebner 30:08
Make that phone call, write that email with whomever it is.

Jerri Hemsworth 30:11
Yep.

Marty Stevens-Heebner 30:12
And then also, sometimes, when you’re sitting there going through it, you realize it’s just a bunch of old baggage kicking around in the caboose that you really don’t need anymore.

Jerri Hemsworth 30:19
Yeah, it’s the old messaging that just keeps coming up, and it’s that that voice or that person that you think is there.

Marty Stevens-Heebner 30:26
Yeah. So welcome fear. I mean, in those moments when a Mack truck is coming at you, and you know, it, it saves you.

Jerri Hemsworth 30:34
Sure.

Marty Stevens-Heebner 30:34
Well also it can save you in other circumstances as well. So we need to start making friends with fear.

Jerri Hemsworth 30:40
It is such a great perspective.

Marty Stevens-Heebner 30:42
Thanks. Thank you.

Jerri Hemsworth 30:43
Such a great perspective.

Marty Stevens-Heebner 30:44
I feel like the world would be a much more peaceful place if people would just do that but,

Jerri Hemsworth 30:50
And you’re available for speaking engagements.

Marty Stevens-Heebner 30:51
Oh, anytime. Yes, anytime. That and many other topics, yes, absolutely. I like to talk, as you can tell.

Jerri Hemsworth 30:57
Oh, it’s great fun. Thank you so much for sitting down with me today, I so appreciate it and so enlightening. And as I mentioned before, what you do is is a gift. I because I experienced it about eight, nine years ago, and I wouldn’t have gotten through it without this help. So thank you.

Marty Stevens-Heebner 31:18
Oh, well, thank you for having me on and I’m grate, I thank my industry, which has been very kind to me.

Jerri Hemsworth 31:25
Very nice.

Marty Stevens-Heebner 31:25
Very grateful for it.

Jerri Hemsworth 31:26
It’s a great industry. Take care.

Marty Stevens-Heebner 31:29
You too. Thank you so much, Jerri.

Jerri Hemsworth 31:31
Thank you.

Speaker 1 31:40
You’ve been listening to the How She Got Her Start Podcast brought to you by Echelon Business Development.

speaker 1 31:46
More than just networking, way more!

Transcribed by https://otter.ai