Natalie Hayes Schmook Takes Ownership of Both Business and Life
Natalie Hayes Schmook is the founder and owner of Hayes Wealth Advisors, LLC, a financial planning and investment management service for optometrists, optometry practice owners, and their families. In this interview with J.B. Adams of Crummer Connections, she discusses her early entrepreneurial influences, the difference between working in corporate America and owning her own business, and what she has learned from facing the challenges of business ownership.
Part 1: Natalie Hayes Schmook as Founder of Hayes Wealth Advisors, LLC
J.B. Adams: Hayes Wealth Advisors is a company that you founded just two years ago, and you work with optometrists. Tell us how you serve them.
Natalie Hayes Schmook: Very simply, I do financial planning and investment management, mostly for optometric practice owners — optometrists who own their own business. I work with them on retirement planning, risk management, and helping them meet their long-term goals for themselves and their families. I have clients from Hawaii all the way to Virginia Beach.
J.B. Adams: I have to acknowledge that this session is being taped in June of 2020 and every businessperson is having to adapt to the pandemic. Tell us how the pandemic has affected your business.
Natalie Hayes Schmook: For my business, it hasn’t had much of an impact. I conduct all my meetings with clients over Zoom. Whereas a lot of advisors are struggling to find ways to communicate or stay in touch with their clients, I’m able to do what I’ve always been doing, which has been fortunate. There’s a little less of a learning curve. On the flip side, not a lot of people want to do retirement planning in the middle of COVID-19. It’s been a little slower than normal, but not a complete standstill.
J.B. Adams: What do you love about doing wealth management with optometric practices?
Natalie Hayes Schmook: I really love helping people. Every job I’ve had that I’ve loved, that’s been a common thread. There’s nothing like telling people who are nervous about their futures that they have a plan in place to help them sleep at night and get where they want to go. I also like being analytical, and working with business owners allows me to dig in deep and create interesting spreadsheets. It keeps me intellectually satisfied.
Part 2: Natalie Hayes Schmook’s Backstory and Early Career
Natalie Hayes Schmook was born in Jackson, Mississippi, and raised in Jacksonville, Florida. Her earliest business influences came from her father, who is a serial entrepreneur.
Natalie Hayes Schmook: My dad was originally an optometrist with his own practice in Vicksburg, Mississippi, and he started a company that did postcards for optometrists and dental practices. Ever since I was old enough to stuff an envelope or a folder packet, I worked for his businesses — labeling addresses, anything I could do to help out, and make money. It was impactful to see him design and build businesses that were ultimately quite successful.
J.B. Adams: Did your dad have a business education, or did he work to figure this out on his own?
Natalie Hayes Schmook: Nope. My dad is from a small town in Shuqualak, Mississippi, a kid from a single-parent household. He went to LSU [Louisiana State University] for a couple of years and didn’t graduate, and then went to optometry school and started his own practice. What he was really good at was finding a need and filling it. That’s the voice in my head: “Find a need and fill it.” He wasn’t afraid to take risks, so that worked out well for him.
Even though he worked quite hard [when I was] growing up and he was in his office till late at night, a lot of times he was my basketball coach. He shot Horse with us outside. He came to all my running meets and he was really, in my opinion, there for me as a parent. I think that’s hard to do as an entrepreneur, but probably easier in the sense that he got to make the rules. If he wanted to go somewhere, he could. That’s something that, in corporate America, you don’t necessarily have the opportunity to do.
J.B. Adams: When you decided to become an entrepreneur, how did the values from your dad influence you?
Natalie Hayes Schmook: I didn’t start my first business thinking that it would be easy. I work really hard. There’s no time that’s off-limits for getting things done. But it also means that I get to carve out time for my family, which is sometimes hard to do. It means during COVID-19, I can adjust my workload and my work schedule, or not market so hard so I can take care of my kids because they’re home. It gives you flexibility. I can go to work in the mountains if I want to.
J.B. Adams: Being an entrepreneur is sometimes a risky business. Tell us about one of the challenges that your dad faced.
Natalie Hayes Schmook: When my dad turned an age landmark, there was a cake with a flag for every business he had ever started. There were probably only six or seven flags on there that were successes out of 30 or 40 flags. Not everything he did turned to gold; there were a lot of failures along the way. One of the biggest was when he started an optometric dot-com back in the late nineties. I had the pleasure of working there. That was a real learning experience. It got millions of dollars in venture capital funding and ultimately busted because the market fell apart. Nobody wanted to put more money into it. It’s still around today. It got sold off to somebody for next to nothing.
The thing about failure is that you learn so much from it about your values and how to approach things next time — what worked, what didn’t work. I know it’s a cliché, but failure really is the best learning experience because it is the one that stings the most and has the most emotion caught up in it.
Part 3: Natalie Hayes Schmook’s Crummer Experience
Natalie Hayes Schmook participated in the 3/2 Accelerated Management Program at Rollins College. The 3/2 program combines a four-year Bachelor of Arts (BA) and a two-year Master of Business Administration (MBA) into a five-year program. Here she describes her Crummer experience and how she worked throughout both undergraduate and graduate school.
Natalie Hayes Schmook: I took any job I could at Rollins [College]. I catered and filed for an attorney’s office, and I worked for the international business department. The most meaningful thing I did was when a Crummer alum, Thomas Powell, had me come help. He was in executive recruiting in the mortgage banking industry in the mid-2000s, so… going gangbusters. He needed help reading resumes, filing, and looking at atlases to figure out if people lived close enough to the job that was being offered. I had the opportunity to move up from filing to reviewing resumes, to listening in on calls with candidates, to being an executive recruiter myself. It was an incredible experience to have that much responsibility when I was in college and graduate school. I worked really hard, though — the same as I do now. I get home, be done with classes, pull up my computer, start emailing people, answer emails. I tried to live up to his expectations.
J.B. Adams: What kind of advice would you give to a current student who’s looking for an opportunity?
Natalie Hayes Schmook: Anytime you have an opportunity, always ask to do more, and always look around to see what you can be doing that nobody’s asking you to. That’s how you move up in life. It’s not the people who just do their jobs; it’s the people who go beyond their jobs.
Part 4: Natalie Hayes Schmook Applies her Crummer Education
In her first position after graduate school, Natalie Hayes Schmook moved to Atlanta, Georgia, to work for SunTrust Bank in their private wealth management division. There, she worked her way up from analyst to an adviser.
J.B. Adams: What was one of your biggest takeaways from that experience working at SunTrust?
Natalie Hayes Schmook: I never moved past an adviser. I think one of the reasons I left was because I didn’t know what was next. One thing that I could’ve done better was to learn how to be more nimble within the organization — network better, learn about different roles. I would have been happier if I had made a better effort to figure out what else was out there in the world of SunTrust.
Natalie Hayes Schmook met her now-husband Eric Schmook when they were both students at Crummer. They shared a common interest in business and entrepreneurship, which led to a new chapter in her career.
Natalie Hayes Schmook: I think back to the summer that Eric Schmook and I started dating. We would sit at his parents’ house and try to think of business plans to make a big company that would make lots of money. We thought of one called Grant Right Now, a grant writing service; there was no scale, but it was an interesting idea. From early on in our relationship, we both had a passion for entrepreneurship and business and building something. It just so happened that we enjoyed building things together.
J.B. Adams: This was brought about as a result of the Great Recession.
Natalie Hayes Schmook: That’s right. Eric also works for a bank, Regions, in their corporate banking division. Back in 2008, we would sit on our couch every Sunday and watch the news to see if we had a job to go to the next day. It was a scary time for two kids that had just bought their first house and were two years into their careers. We decided early on that we were over-concentrated in banking and that we wanted to find a way to diversify. We couldn’t think of any good business ideas at the time, so we started looking at franchises. Eric was spearheading most of that work and he found a women-only gym that had been around since the 1960s, and they were looking to expand their model to franchising. We bought the rights to multiple locations. It took us two and a half years just to find the first one. In 2013, I left my great job at SunTrust Bank as a financial advisor to open a women-only gym.
It limped along for a couple of years. I was working 60 to 80 hours a week. I was pregnant with our second child. I wasn’t home at night because that’s when people go to the gym. Finally, we decided that we were going to divest of what was left and move on.
J.B. Adams: What was your takeaway from that experience?
Natalie Hayes Schmook: The two things I learned were to always be forward-looking with your business model, not backward-looking, and to trust your gut. I think that my gut was not into the model or the business from the beginning, but we [Eric Schmook and I] made the decision together.
J.B. Adams: You divested from the franchise business and you had to figure out what was going to be next. How did you find your way?
Natalie Hayes Schmook: I wanted very badly to buy something that was up and running that I could learn, but nothing seemed like it was a good fit for what I was passionate about and my skillset and expertise. My dad had been asking me to do wealth management for optometrists since I was working at SunTrust. He said, “Find a need and fill it. And these guys really need it.” I finally decided this is something I can start slow. I still have young children. I can work from home, which you can see I’m doing. I love doing it. I just like doing it on my own terms where I get to spend as much time with clients as I want to and prioritize based on what people’s needs are, rather than bank revenues. So, I landed right back where I started.
J.B. Adams: Tell us what’s hard about running the business.
Natalie Hayes Schmook: Everything. I am the Chief Compliance Officer and I’m the marketing person and I’m the person who has to make the photocopies and I do my own books. I have to do everything, and that is quite hard.
J.B. Adams: What makes it all worth it?
Natalie Hayes Schmook: What makes it all worth it is I’m not just building a business — I’m building a life.
J.B. Adams: How do you think Crummer made you a different person?
Natalie Hayes Schmook: Crummer made me better prepared for the real world than undergraduate did. It’s also nice to know that I have a very interesting network of alumni. I follow most of my class on Facebook, and while I’m not active friends with too many of them, I know I can pick up the phone any day and call any number of interesting, connected people and have a good conversation.
J.B. Adams: If there were any prospective students listening today, what advice would you give to them about considering an MBA?
Natalie Hayes Schmook: Getting your MBA introduces you to a much bigger world than having a marketing degree or a business degree would. It helps you see all the different pieces and how they work together. I don’t know where else you could get that except through an MBA.
The Crummer Graduate School of Business at Rollins College in Winter Park, Florida is consistently ranked as the number one MBA in the state of Florida. Crummer offers a variety of educational programs to prepare students to become global, innovative, responsible, business leaders.
