This next girl boss came to me by nomination from her sister Alyssa. There is nothing I love more than unconditional support and acknowledgment for someone that you know is killing it in life. Alyssa Hines nominated her sister, Lacey Nevin, for several reasons including her drive, accomplishments, determination, and continuous need to help others. As Alyssa says, “She amazes me all the time with the things she can do in a day. Anything she puts her mind to she accomplishes.”
Lacey handles the sales and marketing department of their company Living10, is a motivational speaker to those looking to improve their business, homeschools her daughter full-time, built a school in Haiti and continues to help maintain it, teaches Sunday school at her local church, and is continuously looking for other ways she can help others and her community. Needless to say, Lacey accomplishes a lot in a day and I’m excited to feature her, her accomplishments, and how she got to where she is now.
Name: Lacey Nevin
Business Name: Living10
Established Year: 2019
Instagram: @WeAreLiving10 // @LaceyNevin
Website: www.living10.com
Tell me more about YOU, the dedicated and hardworking Girl Boss behind the business.
I grew up in Kinderhook, NY! I moved to Florida with my sister Alyssa Hines when I was 18 years old. Starting working for Red Bull when I was 19 years old while attending USF St Pete. Worked for Red Bull for 3 years in their Marketing Department.
I was living on my own at 20 years old in Downtown St Pete, FL and working 3 jobs in order to pay my bills. At 20 years old, I started my first business with 4 other friends. We called it the M.O.B. (Movement Out of the Box) This idea was to show young entrepreneurs (18-25 year olds) support. We provided private trainings, incentive trips, and culture events allowing young entrepreneurs to network in the Tampa Bay Region. At this time, I was an independent contractor for a Travel Club full time and began to find my first glimpse of what I believe to be success; not just financial success, but freedom/mastering my craft. In 2014-2015, I was 22-23 years old and able to travel and speak at events all over sharing the power of thinking big and putting action into your ideas. That year-two year window included over 60 trips to 16 different countries… it was a little crazy.
***The hardest part of moving forward with a lot of that was that in 2012-2013 my sister Alyssa Hines, who is also my best friend, was battling Lymes Disease in a terrible way. She was placed under extreme treatments, lost the ability to move her legs for 10 months, and was unable to physically go to a lot of the places with me that I wish she could! (Alyssa finally recovered from her treatments and therapies when we made the decision to move forward together with our current company.)
n 2015 I met my husband Jason while speaking at an event in Kansas City, MO. He is from Denver, CO and we spent our first year dating traveling around together from event to event. He also is an entrepreneur and was able to work remotely from wherever we landed.
I n 2016 we got engaged at the Kentucky Derby, and 6 weeks later found out we were going to have our daughter!We named her Ashtyn Derby and always say she is our little souvenir from that trip! Ashtyn was born February 13th, 2017 & Jason and I got married in the Rocky Mountains, CO in 2018. We currently live in Colorado. My sister and my parents live in Tampa, FL. We visit with them every 3 months and stay for 4-6 weeks at a time.
In 2017, Alyssa, myself, our husbands, and our parents fulfilled a dream of ours. We opened our first Christian Academy in Haiti. Alyssa Marie Christian Academy. In 2018, we launched our second Christian Academy in Haiti named Lacey Lee Christian Academy. There are currently around 700 students attending the schools, and reside in towns where there is no electricity, running water, or means of transportation other than by foot. Our goal is to provide education to children that wouldn’t typically be given that opportunity! The students receive school uniforms and meals every day when they attend school. We find that if we provide them with hot food, they are more likely to show up every day. We hope to open 2 more schools by 2022!
In 2018, I started training for my first fitness competition in Colorado. True success to me is not only financial. It also means feeling fulfilled and satisfied with the direction your life is going; actively pursuing something that completely challenges you. Having Ashtyn in 2017 set me back further than I had ever been athletically. I wanted that to change, so I decided to throw myself in a competition. ***Our Dad Jim Powers is a nutritional formulator and manufacturer and has been for 24 years. He formulated and manufactured every supplement for me, including our Living10 products! (This is how we created the products for our Living10 company: Dad designed them for us to perform better mentally as moms and as athletes.)***
16 weeks later, I placed first at my local MuscleMania show which qualified me for the national event in Las Vegas 2 weeks later. Competing in the national show as a rookie with 300 competitors, I ended up shocking everyone (including myself) and winning 1st place! As a rookie, I won Fitness America and became a Fitness America Bikini PRO.
Shortly after that, Alyssa and I decided to make these brainfood products that Dad designed for us open to the public. We gave them names, put labels on them, and created a company. We now have customers in 40 different states all over the country. We plan to open in other countries in 2021!
Now, as a homeschooling mom to a 4 year old, I am 5 months pregnant, running Living10 with Alyssa, planning to open another school in Haiti, a middle school girls basketball and soccer coach, and currently training for my PRO Debut which will be 5 short months after I have our 2nd Daughter. November 2021!
Tell us more about your business and how you became a Girl Boss.
In 2016 & 2017, Alyssa and I had our first kiddos; our daughters Amelia and Ashtyn. Our Dad, Jim Powers, has been a formulator and Manufacturer of Nutritional products for professional athletes and doctors for the past 25+ years. He has formulated and created over 2500 different performance based products in his career and has owned his own lab and manufacturing facility for over 20 years. He has even been recognized for his formulations by the Harvard Medical School! After we had our daughters, Dad produced brainfood products for Alyssa and I to help with brain fog, mental clarity, and our ability to focus. They are super clean products with the intention to work powerfully. I used these products while I trained for Fitness America.
We were giving baggies of the brainfood to our other Mom friends and as the word began to spread we decided to make them available to the public! The instant results people were feeling helped us to grow quickly! We created the labels and product names so people could see exactly what was in it instead of just baggies haha! We initially marketed only to Moms because we know how terrible exhaustion and brain fog can be with moms, especially new moms. The thing about marketing to moms is that they will start sharing the products with their husbands! We became a company marketed for everyone pretty much overnight. We decided to allow our products to grow from word of mouth and created an affiliates program so other people can get kickbacks from their own referrals. Affiliates can share our info and products from our Living10 App on their phones and then directly transfer over the extra cash they earn with us to their Living10 Debit cards instantly. We now have over 850 customers in over 40 different states!
What does it mean to you to be a #GIRLBOSS?
To be a girl boss is to be unafraid to dream big and unaffected by the opinions of those around you. Alyssa and I both are the type of people that do not know how to stop pursuing more. We are dreamers and find a lot of purpose in hard work. We also have full belief that we are the type of people that are capable of great things, because we just don’t quit. (And we don’t quit on each other.) We make the perfect team. Alyssa is organized and an expert at logistics and software, where I am very comfortable in front of a crowd and feel like marketing and sales training are my strong suits!
What do you love most about running your own business and being a Girl Boss?
This is going to sound so cliche, but every single day we receive 2-10 testimonies from people we have never met telling us how our brainfood has made a major impact on their life. If we can help people feel their best and function at their best, then we can help them live their best life, their 10 life. *Where the name Living10 came from.* We also get to do this as a family. Our husbands are now fully involved, our Dad is still and will always be our master formulator and manufacturer, and our daughters even play a role on all of our conference calls.
We will be hosting live conferences in 2021 where we plan to provide personal development for children as well as our affiliates so that entire families can grow together!
What are some of the challenges you’ve faced in being a business owner?
The opinions of other people and mom guilt. The everyday difficulties are stressful sometimes, but are in no way as big of a challenge like the personal ones you hold within yourself. Not so much with Living10, but when I started my first business, there was a stigma that we were too young, not qualified enough, lacked experience, etc. I was laughed at by a lot of people I grew up with and began hearing stories about myself that were just untrue. I learned that rumors can take over your mind and emotions if you let them. I also learned that people are going to believe things about you without even truly knowing who you are or what you are trying to accomplish. Most importantly, it is not always your responsibility to change their minds. If you allow people’s distorted image of who you are to dictate how you live your life, you will spend your entire life trying to prove them wrong. Why waste your time and energy on something so unimportant? Just keep moving forward and keep chasing after your dreams!
With Living10, the “mom guilt” was real. Running Living10 includes a lot of webinars, conference calls, long meetings, and last minute flights. I have learned how to involve Ashtyn more and how to accomplish what I need to without just placing her in front of a screen. In the beginning there was definitely a learning curve with that though. Ashtyn is now our official “notetaker” in our meetings and our accounts and affiliates now know Ashtyn will be present every time. The help of an INCREDIBLE husband helps a very large amount with this. Alyssa and I have the most incredible husbands who allow us to dream and help us more than we could have ever hoped for! Without them, none of this would have been possible. As I thought about it, I would much rather Ashtyn witness her Mom actively chasing and pursuing big outrageous goals than just sitting back and allowing life to happen to her.
Is there a moment during your career that stands out to you and validates your decision to become a Girl Boss?
There are a few! Deciding to be an entrepreneur has given my husband and I the ability to both be full time parents to Ashtyn and her soon to be little sister. We still receive income from past investments and businesses we have created. We are firm believers in multiple streams of income and residual income. Our daughter gets to see both of her parents every single day and will know us both equally.
Even before Covid, Ashtyn would wake up and spend every day exploring with Mom and Dad. hat is priceless. Because we can work from anywhere we can bring a computer, Ashtyn has now been on over 60 flights and has been able to travel all over the country in the last 4 years. *I also want to let everyone know that Jason and I have experienced our financial highs and financial lows together! It was not always rainbows and butterflies. We were able to make it work with odd side jobs and things like that along the way, but we have always stayed full time entrepreneurs. Owning a business can have great return, but also HUGE sacrifice! *I grew up in a household of hard workers, but had a much closer relationship with our Mom than we did with our Dad.
This also gives my husband and I the ability to spend our days every day together. We are best friends! We both take our health and fitness very seriously, so can take time throughout every day to go to the gym and meal prep all of our meals. We love to be out and about and explore the outdoors.
Covid helped us to realize how grateful we were also. Not the actual virus of course, but when everyone’s lives were completely turned upside down because of the restrictions placed on them and their families, we were already set up to still be able to work and not much had to change for us. We already work from home and honestly, because we had a way through our affiliate program for people to make money from home, our program’s system increased tremendously!
Helping people learn how our app works and being able to pay them instantly was what a lot of people were looking for during the uncertain times. Our Living10 debit cards helped a lot as well. Also, the results our products are giving people helped a lot of people with their struggles of working from home, virtual learning with their kids, and going through the stresses of losing their jobs!
What advice would you give to aspiring Girl Bosses?
Just go for it! Whatever it is you want to do, go for it without fear or hesitation. There will ALWAYS be a reason not to or a reason you can talk yourself out of it, but if you don’t try it will never happen! Whatever hiccups pop up in front of you, never give yourself a way out. Because if you do, you will take it. Instead, figure it out and adapt to the situation. Sometimes you need to just walk away from it all for an hour and spend time with your family, and that is okay!
Also, never be afraid to admit that you do not know something and to ask for help. Sometimes we can feel too proud or too afraid to ask for help, but people are way more willing to help you than you think! Don’t know how to start a website? ASK someone who has a website! Don’t know if you are being overcharged for certain things, ASK someone who has paid for it before! Don’t know where to start? ASK someone who has started before! The best way for you to learn how to do anything is by doing it and learning from others WHO HAVE DONE IT BEFORE!
Michella Hand 