Welcome and Meet Helen

Brian 0:20

All right. Well, welcome back to the Vero Beach Podcast. I'm Brian.

Shawna 0:23

And I'm Shauna.

Brian 0:24

And today we're sitting here with Helen from the HLP Quality Media.

SPEAKER_01 0:29

Is that correct? Correct. Awesome. Also known as HLP Writing Services.

Brian 0:33

Oh, nice. Okay, nice. Well, I you know, I obviously the writing person is going to correct me, which you're gonna probably correct me a lot through grammar and stuff. I'm used to it. She does she's got me covered. But uh, we're so excited to have you on the podcast, Helen.

SPEAKER_01 0:47

Thanks for having me. I really appreciate it.

Brian 0:50

Yeah, definitely. Well, we would love to get to know like before we start talking about the business, we want to get to know a little bit about you, Helen.

Shawna 0:56

So what were you like growing up?

SPEAKER_01 0:59

Um, very shy. Really? Extremely shy, yes. My sister was like my only friend, and when she got a little older, she would avoid me like the plague because she just didn't want little sister hanging around. We're about as different as salt and pepper. Oh, that's great. Left and right. On the other hand, she used to start the arguments, and I used to finish them.

Brian 1:26

Oh, you're a finisher.

SPEAKER_01 1:28

And I would tell mom the truth, and my sister would say, No way, no way. That's not true. That's not true. Oh my goodness. So yeah, she would start them, egg me on, and then I would respond in kind.

Shawna 1:42

Sure. It's so funny to imagine. It does make sense though, because of course you're still tiny and you're still feisty and you're still like straight to the point. So I love it. That's true.

SPEAKER_01 1:54

I am straight to the point. I'm very poignant. Um if people don't like it, it's just too bad.

Brian 2:01

Well, you know, if you think about it, I know we're gonna get into what she does professionally too, and you're you're a finisher. So that's interesting. That's a good point. You've kind of carried all this, you know, this all came from your your uh your raising and stuff. So are you you're so is Vero home for you then?

Coming Home After Years Away

SPEAKER_01 2:18

Well, it hasn't been all my life. Born here, yes.

Brian 2:22

Okay.

SPEAKER_01 2:23

Moved when we when I was seven, and my dad's got a new job, and he and um we had to travel, we had to move to a couple different states. We came back when I was 13. He was an investigator for the government.

Shawna 2:40

Oh wow.

SPEAKER_01 2:41

But uh, we landed in South Florida because it was closer, it was the closest domicile to Vero Beach, and we wanted to be near both our they wanted to be closer to the grandmothers and families because they were getting way up in years. So I spent way too many years down in that area. Sure. I let's just say if I never go back, it'll be too soon. I truly dislike it immensely. I don't like to use the word hate. Sure. But in this case, it might be appropriate. I really, really can't stand it down there. So after mom and dad passed, I stayed down there because of mom and dad. I had other job opportunities and things that I didn't take because my sister had moved out of state when she was well, she was young and she stayed out of state. And I just felt like it was my obligation to stay. So after they both passed, I did what I could to get the house updated and kitchen, the bathrooms, that stuff. I sold my house and used that money and dumped it into their house.

Shawna 3:54

Oh wow.

SPEAKER_01 3:55

I called my sister one day. I said, um, guess what? She said, What's that? I said, I'm getting the hell out of here. I am moving and I am going back home. She's like, Good for you. As we were on the house deed together, really, her her contribution to the house was half property taxes and half the insurance. And she didn't like that.

Brian 4:21

Yeah, I could

Growing Up With An Investigator Dad

Brian 4:22

get that. Well, okay, so as your dad being an investigator, and how are you very quiet and kind of, you know.

SPEAKER_01 4:30

We had we were held on a tight string.

Brian 4:32

I was gonna say, how did you get anything past him?

SPEAKER_01 4:34

Because you hardly. I never did. I quit school one time and I got caught. He was in Miami working. I'll just say there were times when he was working some pretty heavy-duty cases. I don't I didn't realize it, and I know my sister didn't, but there were times when we were being watched. Oh got kind of, you know, another government employee. Sure. Par across bus stop and things like that, and we didn't realize that. Wow. Well, yours truly didn't get on the bus one day. And somebody saw me, and he knew before my mother knew when the school called her, he called her.

Shawna 5:16

Oh my goodness. Wow.

SPEAKER_01 5:18

That was yeah, I never got away with you.

Brian 5:21

I never even thought of that side of it. So anybody that's listening that's parents are investigators, you might want to rethink your uh your your strategies here.

SPEAKER_01 5:29

Oh, my friend and I thought we had the best day planned. We went down to the beach that day. We and that back then, and I would never have admitted this to my mom and dad. I never did that we hitchhiked all the way to the beach. Oh my goodness.

Brian 5:43

And um maybe it was actual agents that were giving you rides every time. You don't even know.

SPEAKER_01 5:49

I have no clue. I don't know. I have a feeling they would have brought us home. They probably brought you home, yeah. Yeah. But oh yeah, I was grounded for three months for that. And that meant prom. That meant every school activity, the art club, the you know, anything that I was involved in.

Painting, School, And Writing

Shawna 6:08

So, with you bringing up your art club, that makes me wonder, because spoiler alert, now you do writing and painting. Right. But what I'm curious about is what did you start with first as a kid? Were you painting? Oh wow.

SPEAKER_01 6:21

Yeah, my dad was a painter in his what free time he had. Yeah. And he got me started. I was probably nine, ten. Oh, where what city were we living in? I have to tell you by what you were living in Virginia at the time. Okay. So I was probably in fourth grade.

Shawna 6:39

And did you start with watercolors, oils, acrylic?

SPEAKER_01 6:41

No, I started with oils. Okay. Acrylics went out then, not as popular anyway. Sure, right. Yeah, he was an oil painter and he was really very good. Wow. That's amazing. And his mastery was using a palette knife to paint.

Brian 6:58

That's really cool.

SPEAKER_01 6:59

And I have one of his pieces in my house now. It's in my second bedroom. My sister doesn't like it, but I really do. Yes. So I would love to see it. Okay, it's mine. Yeah, exactly. That's fine. That's mine. I'll take it.

Brian 7:13

Now, do you do oil painting or I'm a watercolorist?

SPEAKER_01 7:17

Okay, watercolor. Um when I went to high school and college, um, I studied watercolor. And uh also when I get went to college, I studied graphics and commercial design. So it wasn't just a fine arts degree. It was a visual arts. Oh, okay. Interesting.

Shawna 7:38

I didn't even know that was a thing. That's cool.

SPEAKER_01 7:39

Hopefully, get a job. Little did I know that my minor in English would turn out to be what I'm doing now, or was actually my very first job.

Shawna 7:50

No kidding.

SPEAKER_01 7:51

I was a proofreader for a newspaper, and we covered two deadlines every day.

Shawna 7:55

Wow.

Brian 7:56

So that's that's what so proofreading, uh, I guess that just I mean, that sounds like the perfect job for like a finisher, like you're talking about. Like you're you're a finisher.

SPEAKER_01 8:05

Oh, and I was picky. I I trained I went from the newspaper directly to a large Fortune 500, I guess. Wow. Into their design department after a year. Okay. And I worked there for a number of years. I still I followed through. I was the art director for a couple of places, and then I ended up into general management, and then that that's when the proofing came back into play, and the writing started to come forward. You know, and people I was at a printing company, they needed somebody to write. Well, I was it. So I started writing, and then that's pretty much ended up working for another Fortune 500 company as a writer. Wow. So it was kind of a an unusual segue. Yeah. Sounds like it.

Layoffs Lead To Starting A Business

Brian 8:56

What when did the idea come or how did the idea come for you to actually start your own business? How did that take shape?

SPEAKER_01 9:02

Actually, it it took shape for me. I was at the at uh the large, this the last large Fortune 500. They merged with another company that was out of state. They brought a bunch of their employees down, they laid off 30% in one day. Oh my. They got rid of all the senior people, all the permanent employees, and hired contractors. So they didn't have to pay for benefits. So I was in that round. And I'm like, I was really upset because I put a lot of time there. And there was no opportunity to go back to your desk. Somebody else cleared out your desk, got your purse, got your personal items. So anyway, I got out of there and I moped for a couple of days, and then I said, Well, what am I doing? I mean, I was in the middle of getting taking my getting my master's degree. Oh, wow. And my dad was just my biggest fan. He's like, Usue severance pay, live off of that, I'll help you out. So he helped me with my mortgage and he helped me with my electrics, stuff like that. Of course, I paid what I could every month. I finished my degree, and when I graduated, I started going for interviews, and I could see the ageism popping up, and it was pretty obvious. I just decided one day, I said, you know what? I think I'm gonna consider starting my own gig. Yeah. Because I was already looking for jobs and that kind of thing. And um I joined a couple of networking groups, and before you knew it, I was doing proofing and editing for a couple of things. One was a huge real estate company. I started writing blogs for them. The other one was a health and wellness company. Uh, he wrote books, and I was proofing and editing his books. I mean, and when I decided to come home here, everybody with all my clients were like, of course we can work remotely. I worked remotely with them down there. Yeah. They would be in Coral Springs, I would be in Pembroke Pines. Right. I would be in Coconut Creek, they were in Boca. Made sense. So they all promised to stay. And within a year, they all dropped off. Oh. Because they wanted to meet once every few months, I said, I can drive down. Yeah. Not an issue. But no, I kind of started over up here. Yeah. Wow.

Brian 11:39

And it took it took a lot of work. See, I think that's so inspiring. When you when you started your business, running your own business, what was would you say was your biggest challenge?

SPEAKER_01 11:51

Capital. Because even though I'm a writer, you still have to add the software. Yeah. You still have to there. I use um after I fell recently, I was not able to type for at all. In fact, I'm still relearning with my left hand again because it's not like I don't know where the keys are. It's just I have to reprogram it to go to the right ones in the right order. You know, it's just like relearning it. And you would think it's like riding a bicycle, but I can't ride a bike anymore

AI Writing Pitfalls And Best Uses

SPEAKER_01 12:30

either.

Brian 12:30

So okay, so now we're we're gonna get into the AI talk because this is a good conversation here to have too, because one of the questions I like to ask entrepreneurs is like, what's a common misconception about what you do? And I think that this might play into the AI time season that we're in now. Because I know I use AI, but even as a business owner, I've I've met very successful business people that are using AI and they take everything as if it's like 100% truth, 100% correct. Yes. I'm like, what in the world? Like, if I would have like if I stepped in that role and you paid me and I gave you that kind of results, you would pick through it with a fine-toothed comb. But if it comes from AI, it's like no, it doesn't even they just send it. So so let's talk about AI. And I know she's gonna be able to get a lot of people. Okay, she's gonna get me started. How did this conversation happen at the network? So you said you guys met at the networking event, she was talking about AI.

Shawna 13:36

She um you spoke to the group of women about how important it is to use AI responsibly and to have a real writer in the process, to not just take it from Chat GPT and send it out into the world, but have a real writer look at it, which I was positives and negatives of AI. And I was like, amen, sister, because I now, of course, you see AI writing everywhere. And it makes me feel sick because you see the pattern.

SPEAKER_01 14:07

Yeah, yeah.

Shawna 14:08

And it's just like I I won't even read it anymore if I can, if I have a choice to not read it, because it's so annoying that you don't even know what the person is even actually trying to tell you because all you can see is the AI. Right. Which yeah, is is very frustrating to me. But that's how it came up. So that's what she was speaking about. And so I went and talked to her and it it was it was wonderful what you were saying because it was um I've never heard another actual writer talk about AI. So I really just resonated with what you were talking about.

SPEAKER_01 14:41

Oh, that's great. I I you would not believe the emails that I got about that. Really? Yes, good.

Brian 14:47

And to make it feel like we're talking about a person, let's call him Al. Al. Okay, so talk to us about Al. Doesn't seem like you guys have a great relationship, no.

SPEAKER_01 15:00

No, he's my third husband. Uh no. No, I don't have time for one of those right now. No, I just I don't think it's appropriate because there are a lot of reasons, but the first is that it's not always right. It's because it pulls information from so many places on the web that you don't know if it came from the original original writer or subject. And if you take it verbatim for what it says, you could easily get sued. Use it, use it to spoof up something, maybe make it a little more creative, check punctuation, but even then it's not always right because the rules in England are nowhere near what the rules are here. They use commas instead of periods for like miss, actually, they don't use anything for like Mr. Ms.

Shawna 15:57

Oh, I didn't even realize that.

SPEAKER_01 16:00

And Canadian English is the same way. They don't follow the same rules we do, and can Canada has differentiations between them and England, even though they follow UK English. Interesting. Yeah. A good use is to maybe have it say check an article that you've already written, uh, because I say article because that's what I do. Sure. Check it for A P style style guide, the MLS style guide or Chicago style guide, because they're all really different. Oh, yeah, that's smart. You could use it to um give you a more creative headline.

Brian 16:42

I think that's so important. Like we've talked about that um because I use I've been using AI for a long time, but one of the things is you know, use it as a tool, not as a replacement.

SPEAKER_01 16:53

As a replacement, and people are so afraid that AI is gonna replace them, and it's not. If it does, we're all screwed up. I mean, every single one of us.

Brian 17:04

Yes, yes. All right, so okay, so this has been an amazing, you know, story to learn about your journey. And now I want to learn more about it's a little bit of a crooked journey.

Shawna 17:14

It's a crooked journey, but it's a aren't the best ones always yeah, curvy.

Brian 17:19

That's what makes great art, right? Not just a straight line. It's curves, curves, crooked lines.

Shawna 17:23

Don't tell a cubist that's we don't know any cubists, don't worry.

SPEAKER_01 17:29

Okay.

Brian 17:29

Oh, that's great. So, all right, so let's talk about community.

Cats, Community, And How Helen Unwinds

Brian 17:32

Like, I know like you're really well established here in Vero. You've got a you've already mentioned some of the networks, so we're gonna talk about that as well. But I think we need to start with the community of the cats that you mentioned earlier. Shauna already knows a little bit about the cats. So you have some insight already.

Shawna 17:47

So what is I'm not really insight, but just I know how important they are to you. And I thought you might just want to introduce our audience to your kitties.

SPEAKER_01 17:54

Oh boy. Okay, let's go back a few years. I've always had cats, always have cats. I except for when I had a dog. And I had a couple of dogs. One was an Italian greyhound, and then I used to dog sit for people when they were out of town. I'd bring them over to my house when my second husband and I were married. But anyway, I grew up with cats because I lived when we moved to West Virginia, we adopted a stray. And the stray we named Susie because my sister and I didn't know any better, and we thought it was a girl. Well, Susie was a boy, and then we got another one that somebody dumped off in front of our house, and we named her Tim. So Tim was a girl, Susie was a boy.

Shawna 18:45

Have you ever heard had you ever heard of that song, a boy The Boy Named Sue? Yo, yes, I love it.

SPEAKER_01 18:51

I it Johnny Cash was just, yeah. Anyway, uh Tim used to go in and out periodically, but basically they were indoor cats. Well, Tim got pregnant. Tim had kittens, which she hid for like three months. We had a cat do that once too. Yeah, and well, my dad found them eventually, and we knew that she'd had the kittens because she disappeared, and um turns out they were in inside a standalone garage that the owner had. When I got older, after um Willie, my Italian greyhound, had to be put down, I moved into I adopted like outdoor animals, you know, that were close, squirrels and you know, anything that came and wanted to eat. I took care of a colony of cats in Pompano Beach. There were 13, I think. And one of the kittens I took found homes for two of them, and the other one, the runt, latched onto my socks one day. I couldn't get her off my leg. She's about yay big, five months old, and very tame. And I went in the house. I said, you know what? You're stuck on my leg.

Brian 20:12

That's I didn't want to say anything, but I was wondering what that was on your leg when you walked in the street.

Shawna 20:18

She became a permanent fixture.

SPEAKER_01 20:20

A permanent fixture, yes. And um, so she hopped down. I said, you know what? I think I'm gonna keep you. But she continued to nip at my ankle, so her name became Nipper.

Brian 20:34

Nipper.

SPEAKER_03 20:35

Oh Nipper.

Brian 20:37

So okay, so that's cool. That's cool. There's some cool stories about your cats when you're not a writer, when you're not painting, when you're not so when you're not doing those things, uh, what do you like? What do you like to do in in Vero to kind of unplug to unwind?

SPEAKER_01 20:52

Unwind?

Brian 20:53

Yes.

SPEAKER_01 20:54

I'm I'm pretty much a homebody, really. I really am. I like to read. Okay. I love politics, especially satirical cartoons.

Shawna 21:04

I just do you write any yourself? No, I used to. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 21:09

I used to. When I was at the newspaper uh many years ago um in Hollywood, I used to do cartoons for them. Yeah, that's homemade. Yeah. Um, no, um I guess Shauna will tell you, I'm a bit of a news junkie. So I read a lot. I read a lot of news and I read. I prefer not to read fiction when I'm reading a book. I like something that's more on a mystery level. That's real.

SPEAKER_03 21:42

Like, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 21:43

Don't ask me what well, probably what my dad did got me into this. He specialized in fraud. His before they came out with the line follow the money, he used to say that all the time. I'm like, Dad, how do you get these guys? How do you catch them? He'd say, Yeah, follow the money. And this is when I was, you know, high school before the movie, All the President's Men. Follow the money. And so I'm really kind of into that kind of thing. I volunteer at my church for um, I'm part of the tech booth, believe it or not. Oh, that's awesome.

Brian 22:16

All the AI stuff. You're not doing AI.

SPEAKER_01 22:20

No AI. No, but yeah, that's that's kind of fun.

Brian 22:26

Helen, we've been we've loved having you on the podcast. This has been such a blast getting to know you more, what you do, what you do, your story, getting to know your cats.

SPEAKER_01 22:34

Uh they take up a lot of time, believe me. They really do.

Brian 22:40

Well, this has been great. We again we appreciate having you on. Thank you for having me. I appreciate it. I would love to know if for any of our listeners that might be listening, what would be one piece of advice that you'd want to share with them? Maybe it's an encouragement, inspiration.

SPEAKER_01 22:56

Um I'm not gonna say something profound like be true to yourself or any of that mess. Make sure you're honest, you treat other people the way you want to be treated, and never give up if you have a dream, unless it's illegal.

unknown 23:13

Okay?

Brian 23:14

Well, that's like the perfect hello quote right there. Thank you again so much for being on the podcast. We appreciate having it. I enjoyed

Advice For Dreamers And Closing

Brian 23:23

it. You guys, if you guys have enjoyed this episode, make sure you leave that review. We would love to hear your thoughts on it. And if you guys have a message, make sure you use that link in the show notes where you can just send a message to Brian and Shauna.

Shawna 23:35

And with that, catch you next time, neighbor.

SPEAKER_01 23:40

And my dad was growing up teenage years during my first marriage, during my second marriage. He was just my biggest fan. He was the best dad ever, I have to say that.