Jane Stobbie Keer’s whole career has one shape to it. "One thing that brings me more joy than anything else in life is elevating people. To walk into a room, teach them, give them knowledge, and have them walk out an inch taller than when they walked in."

She came by it honestly. Her mother was a special education teacher who worked with dyslexic children. Jane got her start at Apple in the UK, took a Mac SE home when almost nobody worked from home, demoed fourteen Newton MessagePads that could not reliably read handwriting, then spent twenty years running Train with Jane, teaching PageMaker, Quark, Photoshop, and the earliest web design software to anyone who walked in.

We get into the two women who each handed her a client list when she started over from nothing, the free classes she still teaches through the library system, the genuinely excellent story behind a surname like Keer Keer, her mother Carolyn and the Wall of Hope, and complex regional pain syndrome type 2, which she has lived with for seventeen years and which is the reason she recorded this episode standing up.

Elizabeth Yang goes by The Deal Fixer. Companies call Better With Company when deals feel like they should be moving and are not, and her work sits in an unusual place: half sales process and strategy, half whatever is going on inside the person trying to sell.

She did not plan any of it. She had a comfortable consulting career until a stranger messaged her on LinkedIn, described a business that was stuck, and asked how much she charged. "I was like, I don't know. I guess I got to figure that out. I guess I got to start a business."

We get into moving from Fresno to Minnesota at twelve and becoming a linguistic chameleon, why hearing the Hmong language feels like home, the mortgage broker whose hands shook every time he picked up an application, the $50,000 price of being nice, and why you cannot turn Walmart shoppers into Nordstrom shoppers no matter how much you care about them.

My guest for Episode 5 is Mitch Bliven, founder of Genius Network Solutions, though this conversation is far more about the man than the company.

Mitch grew up wanting to be a short order cook or a stand up comedian. He went to college for business, felt completely out of place, and switched to social work, then left that to become a police officer, and left that too. By 24 he had two careers behind him and, by his own telling, felt pretty lost. Construction taught him a trade. Spreadsheets taught him he loved solving problems. And a pattern of burning out roughly every 18 months finally led him to a 10-minute assessment that, as he puts it, gave him ten years of understanding of his burnout in one sitting.

That assessment was the Working Genius, and it became the foundation of his work. Mitch now describes himself, only half joking, as a "corporate social worker," helping people and teams understand where they find joy and where they find pain, and build work around it. We get into a lot: why "where do you find joy in work" is a question almost no one gets asked, the difference between wanting and needing something, why connection beats every other source of happiness, and what it actually feels like to start a business.

In this episode:

• The line cook, the comedian, the cop, and the social worker: how a winding path led to his real work
• The 10-minute assessment that explained a decade of burnout
• Why "where do you find joy in work" is a question we almost never ask
• Wanting versus needing, and giving yourself permission to want what you want
• Why connection, not the Porsche, is what we are actually chasing
• Being kind to your younger self, and trusting that the dots connect looking backward

Learn more about Mitch's work at leadwithgns.com.

East Side Enterprise is hosted by Sam McKinney and produced locally by McKinney Creative Ventures. Know a business owner whose story should be told? Reach out and tell me who I should talk to next.