All About Amber

Hi Amber! Let’s start with an introduction: who are you, and what do you do?

I am an in-person events specialist and business strategy & operations consultant, two tangentially related fields that nonetheless coexist nicely in my business. Combining an absolute passion for bringing people together and a knack for strategy and efficiency in business, I’ve worked with a variety of entrepreneurs to bring their visions to life!

I have a zeal for bringing individuals together for the unique energy and experience that is an in-person event! Ranging from intimate masterminds in exotic locations to large scale business summits, I have been managing and producing high-end events in the space for 5+ years!

I have a unique talent for intuitive efficiency and strategy and shine most when put in high stakes, fast paced environments – this is what led me to business management. I’ve worked with Executive Coaches, Podcasters, E-Commerce Brands and many others over the past 4 years to create solutions and systems for their businesses.

Tell us more about yourself – where you are in the world, and what has you excited about life right now?

I am currently in the midst of what I call an event sprint: a series of events that I am managing and attending which all seem to fall within a very tight time frame. So over the course of the past 6 months I have been continuing the Digital Nomad Lifestyle but taking my direction and location cues from clients. Started the year in Chile, then headed to Australia for an event, then to Las Vegas for another event, then to Switzerland for another event, a brief stay in Tbilisi to refill my energy cup and then off to Hawaii, then Bulgaria, then Bosnia for more events! 

As you might be able to guess, diving more in depth into the in-person events and soaking in the amazing community building and acceptance that I receive from these experiences is what has me pretty excited at the moment. I have been focused this past year on transitioning into handling Digital Nomad Events over E-commerce events which is the space I have been dominantly working in for the past 7 years or so. 

In terms of where I am in the world, still continuing on my nomad journey around this wonderful world. Currently trying to escape the crazy heat in Europe by heading to the baltics before heading out on the Nomad Cruise from Vancouver to Japan via Alaska which is very exciting.

Your journey has been a thrilling one, walk us through how your career has unfolded and moved successfully into the event space – how did you start and how is it going?

My career path has been a relatively intuitive and winding journey. In January of 2020, I decided to blow up my life living in Austin, Texas working in bars, restaurants, and hotel/resort event teams in order to launch into a Digital Nomad life. I let my apartment, put everything into a small storage unit, bought a one way ticket to Bali and was ready to go! I had this very confident belief that I could figure out how to make a location independent income over the course of one month on the road, despite having NO IDEA what I was doing, what other people were doing for this and having VERY LITTLE money to live on in the meantime. 

As you can probably guess, I was not very successful in creating a remote work role for myself, and the world was slowly closing down and falling into quarantine. After doing a stint of housekeeping at a hostel in Puerto Rico after my failed month in Bali, I realized that the world was legitimately closing down. I caught the last propeller plane leaving the island of Vieques and skidded back into Austin, TX to couch surf my family’s homes while we all held our breath to see what would happen. 

Enter Hannah Dixon, the Digital Nomad Kit, and this awesome thing called the free 5 day VA Challenge in March of 2020. I was at quite a low point, having, in my eyes, failed my nomad launch, failed remote work launch, and just generally thinking I really had no idea what to do with my life. Despite the impulse to just hide I took the “risk” of participating in the 5 day challenge.

After just the first few days of challenges and exercises, I was already realizing:

1. All the mistakes I had been making up to that moment
2. How many skills I already had that I had no idea I could apply to remote work, freelancing, virtual assistance, etc.
3. The power of activating my currently existing network of well connected business owners 

Needless to say, before the end of the 5 days with these awesome new insights, I had already landed my first 2 clients and was immediately bringing in $3k a month! I followed my gut to offer the types of services that I thought I could handle and as it turned out, I was pretty good at it. I also quickly realized that I seemed to have a unique understanding of optimizing operations and processes as well as being able to “brain-match” with my clients. I have an intuitive understanding of business strategy that I was able to apply to my own business and my clients businesses to great effect. This has developed into one arm of my business “New Daughn Management” which is all around Strategy & Operations Consulting and Online Business Management (which I run in partnership with my life and business partner Stephen Halper). 

Meanwhile, as I was working hard to build “New Daughn Management” into a full fledged business, I discovered that inside my professional network and amongst many of my clients there was a great need for someone who can produce, plan, and execute in-person and virtual events. I was already working on one annual in person and virtual event a year from my very first client and I realized that I 100% had the skills needed and I enjoyed all of the elements around events. So I made a bold move in basically just launching a high ticket offer with a fixed fee event management service offering. I began simply saying while I was working events that I also manage events on my own with “New Daughn Events”. I was shocked at how much of a demand there was immediately from inside my network for these services. Within one year of my coming out announcement I had 8 annual events per year, was drowning a bit in business and actually full on loving it! 

Since then, I have been trying to control the firehose flow of potential clients in order to be a bit more discerning about which clients I work with, as well as shifting into different event spaces which are more aligned with my own personal interests. I am also now exploring speaking more often at events myself as this is a joy point for me.

You’re joined at “New Daughn Solutions” by your partner, Stephen Halper, who is also an incredible VEA alum. What’s the journey like to complete the program and work hand-in-hand with your life partner?

Indeed Stephen Halper, my life and business partner, is exactly that: my partner in all things life. He equally participates and handles both “New Daughn Events” and “New Daughn Management”. It has felt quite natural for us to develop both our Digital Nomad Lifestyle and our business together. We are very different people and bring incredibly different skill sets to the table, fortunately, they complement each other rather than compete or conflict with each other. We actually completed the VEA on more separate journeys where he had relatively different goals and aspirations than the direction that I was following. After our initial few months of virtual assistance work, I was in need of help rather desperately and Stephen so perfectly stepped into all the elements that I needed help with that “New Daughn” almost instantly made more sense as both of us. As with most of my business journey, we made this decision rather intuitively and I can’t imagine doing it any other way at this point. 

There’s actually a professional networking group that he and I have joined together as couplepreneurs and I wrote a fun description of our business that I think is very representative:

“New Daughn provides comprehensive solutions and services for solopreneurs. Amber works as a designer and creator of strategic processes and solutions for your business. Stephen operates as a process mechanic taking those systems and implementing and executing them with excellence while fine tuning for real world applications.

Amber has a superpower for building connections amongst networks (ie networking) which has drawn her to predominantly focus on the events side of New Daughn. She works planning, creating, and ideating events with different event producers in various spaces while also continuing to offer strategic consultation for the management side of New Daughn. 

Stephen has a superpower for the implementation of processes which has drawn him to take over the Management side of New Daughn. He also continues to use his superpowers for good at our in-person events to implement and execute the programs.”

As a remote-working, nomadic couple, have there been specific benefits that the lifestyle has afforded the two of you? Do you feel this work has significantly changed your life?

Working remotely had all the same liberating and amazing benefits for us that I think it has for almost anyone. Especially in the beginning, while COVID and the lockdowns were still in place, Stephen and I were both out of work because all restaurants had been closed so we needed to find a way to make money in a location independent way. Once that door was opened and we came to realize that we could match and exceed our previous incomes while “working from home” it was a very short step to “work from anywhere”. This pretty much instantly became our way to stay sane and be happy throughout the entire pandemic while we were stuck in the US. 

This simple realization that we could support ourselves and see the world all while working at our own pace on interesting projects became so completely tied to our lifestyle and way of being in the world that I honestly don’t understand how other people live “traditional” lives anymore. I think that completely leaning into the freedom and self-determinism that came along with remote work and the nomadic lifestyle has been literally a dream come true for me and has allowed me to become so much more myself than ever before. Not sure if this is the answer to the question you asked but it’s definitely my truth 🙂

What are three values that you hold onto both in business and your personal life?

1. Honesty. This is the absolute biggest value for me. I am an incredibly genuine and honest person and have real difficulty accepting or working with dishonesty or disingenuous people. I am very straightforward when it comes to my abilities, potential capacities, and thoughts on everything in both my personal and professional life and I truly expect that same honesty in anyone who is a part of my world.
2.  A genuine desire to be helpful. My father (who is a serial entrepreneur and has been a big mentor to me in launching my business) and I were on a hike through the woods of Arkansas about a year into launching my VA business and he was saying how proud he was of me for taking what was a genuine desire to help people (anyone really – I have a bit of a problem with this lol) and turning it into a viable career. It really stuck with me that this seems like a really important trait/value to service based entrepreneurs: a real and true desire to be helpful if you can.
3. A “can-do” attitude or unwillingness to accept obstacles as insurmountable. I have never really accepted that there is anything out there that I (and others) CAN’T do if we just really chose to. The power of the mind and the human will can move mountains, change the world, and make miracles happen.

A Journey to Success

At “New Daughn Management” and “New Daughn Events”, how did you decide on your current service offerings, and which ‘offline’ work experiences did you find most valuable when transferring to the online space?

You’ve reached many milestones in your journey, but were there any moments that you were especially proud of? And what goals or future developments do you have planned for the future of your business?

In 2022 I decided to step away from my biggest client to focus on events. I also realized the work was not bringing me joy nor was the client’s mission aligned with my mission. It led to a tough few months financially, but Q3 of that year I landed multiple events and more aligned clients. This was the start of a very big shift for me in my business. I spent the past 2 years or so shifting towards the event space and then honing and refining my clientele in the event space to find my community and my truly aligned people. It’s been a winding journey, however I can definitely say that I am proud of the progress that I have made into this space having planned, managed, spoken at or volunteered for more than 10 events in 2024 including one of the largest ecommerce events in Australia and one of the largest digital nomad events in Bulgaria!

My future plans are very much still in the works! I plan to continue my event specialist work with ideally 6 annual events/producers in the ecommerce, nomad, language, and women’s empowerment spaces being my goal. I am also rolling out a new service offering in 2025 for High-Yield Mastermind Facilitation initially for in-person events and eventually as a virtual offering with some fun specific platform development included. I am working with Erik Harkness (a fellow VEA alumni!) on developing the tech and specifics behind this which is very exciting! 

I am also launching a new project that is very near and dear to my heart in January of 2025 called the Women On Stage Collective. With women making up 50% of the population, you would think that they also make up 50% of the experts and speakers across all categories. However, I have found in the past 5 years or so that I have been booking speakers for events that this is sadly not the case! Also, after speaking with many women at various different events, a continuous theme seems to have emerged. Women find it difficult to cultivate their uniquely feminine stage presence and establish their expertise in a dominantly male driven arena. Thus was the Women On Stage Collective born! It’s a speaker training program designed for women in business, by women in business to empower us to speak with confidence and purpose!

Every success story has its bumps in the road. Since you started this journey, what was your biggest “failure” or something you wish you had done differently in hindsight? How did you overcome it?

Oh this is definitely making decisions from a scarcity mindset! It took me a few spins around the failure dance floor before I realized what the trend was. Almost every time I take on a client based on money instead of passion for their project, I have regretted it! I am not sure if it’s just that the money blinds me to the red flags or if I just draw the wrong people to me when I am feeling financial pressures. To try and protect myself from my own bad habits I have learned to be much more selective with my clients, write better contracts to protect myself, and ALWAYS run big money contracts past Stephen to see if they pass the “sniff test”.

With the work that you do, you must speak with, network, and manage a lot of people. Is that a process that comes naturally to you? Does it ever become overwhelming, and if so, how do you come down from that overwhelm?

Speaking with, networking, and managing lots of people has always been something I have done naturally to some degree. I find people fascinating and can spend lots of time just listening to each person’s story and how they will go on and on about endeavors they are passionate about. It’s kind of funny as I am pretty sure that sentence describes about 70% of what people pay me for these days! 

Despite appearances, I am actually a fairly introverted person and so yes 100% I can become overwhelmed by all the people, conversations, and connections. I find that I have social batteries that last for about 7 days. I can go non-stop for one week and be an impressive force for connecting and networking (also planning and managing). However the cost of this is at the end of that week I pretty much have to become a hermit and be completely away from people for at least a week (sometimes more) to recharge those batteries. This involves lots of reading, watching mindless tv, playing silly matching games on my phone, and walking in nature daily. I think it’s super important to listen to where your energies are at and to take that time to recharge or hide during events if that’s what you need. That way when you do show up, it’s as your best self instead of a fired, cranky, drained version of you.

Behind the Scenes & Beyond

What does an average week at “New Daughn Solutions” look like for you? How do you balance the business and all the coordination and logistics involved in event planning?

Depending on where I am at with how many events at any given moment my weeks and day to day work can look very different. For about the past 6 months or so, Stephen and I have been trying a bit of a different arrangement where he handles the OBM clients mostly and I focus on the events clients. 

So my work weeks include anywhere from 3-10 hours of calls, meetings, and communications around events. This can be speaker interviews, production team meetings, ideation calls with event producers and that sort of thing. There is likely another 5 hours or so a week that goes towards “documentarianism” for events, this is things like writing email templates, creating agendas, making event maps, timelines and the like. Then I usually have anywhere from 2-5 hours a week that goes towards my role in the OBM side of things which is client management, strategy and biz dev meetings with clients, and graphics and SOP type of work. 

Stephen’s work week usually looks like the more day to day running of our clients businesses things like contracts, bookkeeping, email communications, scheduling, etc. He dedicates about 10-20 hours a week across anywhere from 3-5 clients and this also includes co-working or client babysitting sessions that come along with the nitty gritty tasks.

Though you work remotely, your business model does involve hands-on work as you produce in-person events, what has that experience been like for you?

Having boots on the ground is a huge advantage when planning in-person events for some aspects, though, a lot of the logistics—like booking activities, securing venues, and arranging transportation—can be handled from anywhere, but I definitely need to be there for the event itself. Luckily, these events usually happen in pretty amazing places, like a mountain village in Bulgaria or an island resort in Fiji, so it’s a fun part of the job.

This year, I’m especially excited about a high-end event in Iceland, which is new for me. Having set travel destinations throughout the year also makes it easier to plan our nomadic lifestyle. While flights and accommodations are typically covered, we try to stay in regions that make travel more accessible and affordable. For example, before heading to Iceland, we’ll plan to be in Europe or Eastern Asia to keep flights easier and more budget-friendly.