From Harvard University Executive To WyzeTribe CEO With Melanie McSally

Why would somebody who has a job as an executive at Harvard University decide to drop everything and start a business from scratch? That somebody certainly followed her passion and took it to the next level. Welcome to the life of Melanie McSally, the Founder and CEO of WyzeTribe, LLC. In this conversation with Mark Yuzuik, she relates how she made breakthroughs at Harvard IT Academy and how that experience inspired her to start her own IT business. Melanie now helps business owners scale their vision and streamline their business by taking their genius online.

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From Harvard University Executive To WyzeTribe CEO With Melanie McSally

I’m going to make sure you get your mind set until you can become successful, fulfilled and grow in every way possible. Subscribe to my show so you get regular notifications and you can learn from all these different episodes, as well as my guests. All guests that I have on here are nothing more than they’re about growing you in many different ways. Go to my website, GetYourMindSetWithMark.com. Download my free book, Creating The Life You Want. Listen to it, read a chapter a day and you will be inspired to grow.

I have a guest, and believe it or not, the opportunity that she had and stepped it up from there. She worked for Harvard University for ten years and decided, “There’s more to life than that.” Can you imagine having a job at Harvard University, getting out of it and growing to the next level? Let alone getting the job at Harvard would be a goal for so many of you, but yet she stepped it up. I want you to read her story in why she did it, but how many other people she was influenced and came in contact with because she is a phenomenal woman.

She’s a powerful woman, a speaker and a tour that is going nationwide. She’s making a difference with many different lives, as well as herself. I would want to drive by Harvard and see what it looks like. Let alone be invited to work there for ten years and then telling him, “It’s time for me to move on because I’ve got many other things that I want to accomplish in life.” Melanie, thank you for being on my show. You’re an inspiration, gorgeous and you’re here to make a difference. Tell them about your story. Harvard, quitting it and going from there.

Thank you for having me on your show. You are equally amazing. It’s inspiring to be around other like-minded and inspiring people. I spent a decade at Harvard. I started there as a software engineer. I wanted to grow, learn and affect more people at Harvard. As you can imagine, with an institution that has twelve private colleges, as well as an undergrad school and a big graduate school in Arts and Sciences, they have a lot of complexity, democracy and they’re very risk-averse. It took a long time to get things done. I wanted to be able to impact more people from my seat. They say that you can be a leader from anywhere and I truly believed that. I wanted to become a manager at Harvard and they told me I had to give up my list.

How important is a list? You have this database of important people and these were the movers and shakers at Harvard University. Harvard only employs people that are best in class. Those were the types of people that were on my list. They told me I would have to give up my list in order to become a manager. I thought, “That doesn’t work for me. Let’s reinvent the wheel here and think about a new way of doing things that could make things more streamlined and optimized.” That’s my gift. I can bridge the gap between technical and non-technical. I can show people how they can optimize and streamline their life and their business to give them back those precious commodities of time and money.

WyzeTribe: Your life and business can be optimized and streamlined so that you can take back time and money for yourself.

What’s a list mean? Tell them some of the influential people that were on that list that you’re humbly not telling them about, because I know some of the people that you’ve mentioned. Tell about that so they know what you’re talking about having to give up your list.

These are Nobel Peace Prize winners, presidents, former presidents and leaders of our country, as well as our top institutions. Mark Zuckerberg, Michelle Obama, Barack Obama and Natalie Portman went to Harvard. These are the types of people that were on that list. Bill Gates went there as well and a huge donor to Harvard. Harvard gets most of its money through fundraising and running these big campaigns to bring in, not just money, but physical things that the students, the faculty and staff can use to better their lives and the future of the world.

You had to give up that list if you want it to take this other position and you said what?

I said, “That doesn’t work for me. There’s a better way to do things.” I proposed that we transform all of IT in a way that would work for me. At the end of the day, we want things to be our way because we always know better. Harvard is a little risk-averse. They thought, “How about you transform this team and we’ll see how it goes?” I did and they gave me a true challenge. They gave me a team that was considered the worst team in IT and I transformed it to be the most productive, highest performing team of all of it. They thought, “Let’s see if you can recreate this. Why don’t you scale it to a program which is multiple teams?” I did and had the same success. They then did it to the department, another department and they rolled that out to all of IT. The CTO approached me and said, “You have this reputation of being somebody who gets things done, who can see where we should be, rather than where we are. We’re trying to move the university into the Cloud. We would like you to be the director of Cloud.”

What is CTO?

It stands for Chief Technical Officer. He reported directly to the president of the university.

Take your expertise, your smarts, even your passions in life and move it online so that you can start to create passive income for yourself. Share on X

You created this success. First, they tried to put you in a situation that would fail so they could prove that their way was the right way. You prove them wrong and that wasn’t good enough. They wanted you to do it again with a team, you proved them wrong again. From there, where did you go, “Where do I go with my life from here?”

I left because Harvard is a big institution and I realized that I had a gift that I could capitalize on for myself by helping small businesses. I first went to Berklee College of Music and Boston Conservatory. They’re very similar to Harvard in the notion of, they have the best in class in their own specific genre. What is to Nobel Peace Prize winners is to music, arts and opera. Here we have equally gifted, amazing people that might not be the most technical people on the planet. They had created this great institution that was a startup and they had scaled far beyond their wildest dreams and they didn’t have the infrastructure to support it. They had grown fast that they had too many students and not enough support to give to these students. They asked me to come in and help them build that infrastructure. When I help them do that, set them up for success in a year, I knew I needed to do that for small businesses. I went out on my own. I sold my million-dollar home. I got rid of everything I owned to give it all away to charity. I went on the road. I started my own business helping small businesses do exactly what I’d done for Harvard and Berklee.

She’s a young, passionate woman and didn’t let some institutions hold her back. She proved the institutions many times over and then she says, “How do I take this message and help people out there get to the next level?” You have a whole program that you created to help small businesses. Tell us about that.

I created this program that allowed people to move their genius online. This was my first iteration of it. Take your expertise, your smarts, even your passions in life and move it online so that you can start to create passive income for yourself. This is having money come in, where you don’t physically have to do any work for it to appear in your bank account. You do the work once and then it will continue to make you money over time, every day as you sleep or vacation. It doesn’t matter.

What I did was I caused a problem for myself because people were moving their geniuses online, but they had no way to market these courses. They had no way to follow up with the customers who bought them to bring them into even greater packages that they were creating. I then expanded my program so that it was the entire customer acquisition process from attracting your perfect lead all the way through never-ending follow-up. This is all centered around your digital course or your membership site that you’re trying to create.

This is something that you created for small businesses out there. What would be three tips you can give to the readers out there to get started? I wanted to be able to get how do they get ahold of the woman that gave up Harvard, told Harvard, “No,” and continue to help a small business out there become massive businesses?

WyzeTribe: Start to jot down or collect the content you already have so that you can work with somebody to move it online.

First, I’ll tell them how to get started or how to elevate from wherever they are. The first thing is people don’t realize how much content they have in their possession. Do you have a diary or a blog or a book, or something that you’re passionate about? Something that your friends are like, “Show me how to do my makeup. Show me how to ride a bike. Show me how to network effectively.” Something that your friends go to you because they know that you have the skills to show them how to do that. Start to jot down or collect the content you already have so that you can work with somebody to move it online. This is something that you can start to monetize that you already have in your possession somewhere. It’s either in your brain or on paper or recorded.

The next thing is to find that special somebody who can work with you to put it online and give you that package that is going to attract the person that needs this information and will support you because, at the end of the day, it’s a partnership between you and all of your clients. You’re serving them, but then they’re serving you by speaking about you to all of their friends. This mutually beneficial relationship. The third thing is to always keep moving. You are definitely going to hit roadblocks, curveballs and challenges in life, but take a step forward. It doesn’t even matter if the step is in the wrong direction, the universe will correct you. It’s much harder to push something that’s still than it is to continue the momentum forward. Move because things will work themselves out over time and you’ll get to where you want to be.

I will say, “Now, that I got these steps, I’d rather call you because you take small and large businesses and bring them to the next level wherever you are in your business,” but you’re also helping them grow personally, too. It’s a combination of both business and personal growth as well. What if I say, “Let me go to the one woman that’s got it all down, helped me get out there and do the right steps so I can get to the fast track instead of taking it the slow way.” How do we do that? Is there a better way of doing it because you’re being very humble in saying, “You can do it on your own?” Doing it on your own is a lot different than having your peers, people that have already done it many times over helping guide you to do it for you. Is there a way they can get in touch with you so you can help speed that process up because they don’t know what they don’t know? How do they get ahold of you?

My website is WyzeTribe.com. They can also go to WyzeTribe.com/EmeraldsClub and if they put in the promo code, CRUISERS19, they will get access to my Emeralds Club for a year absolutely free. This has all my tech guides and everything that they could need to find technical equipment, which CRM to use and which digital course tool to use. If they want to contact me directly, they can contact my cell phone. It’s +1 (508) 951-5470 or they can go to my name MelanieMcSally.com.

Can you imagine having a powerful woman that decided, “Harvard is a great high-paying job, but why settle when I’ve got more to offer out there?” This is what you want to surround yourself with. If you want to be on a fast track to success, get yourself a team member. Check out her website. Email her, call her and get in touch with her. From Harvard, to being a very highly successful, financial woman and independence like you’ve never seen before. Thank you for being my guest here. I appreciate you very much, Melanie. Thanks for reading my blog. Subscribe so you will be notified. Go to my website and email me. Go to GetYourMindSetWithMark.com and download my book. Life is about moving forward so rock on. I’ll talk to you in the next episode.