903. Never Settle When Pursuing Your Dreams

Erica Duran

“The one thing that really lights a fire under me is that I’ve also experienced a lot of deaths in my family. A lot of deaths that make me think that I’m not going to wait until I retire to do this, and I’m not going to wait for anything really because I’ve had to experience all those unfinished dreams through seeing my family members pass away.”

Erica Duran is an international Business Coach and Lifestyle Mentor for entrepreneurs and influencers on the rise, who are meant to impact millions, earn millions, and never settle. She also launched a new business in early 2020 called Enchanted Tiki Travel where she wants people to “Collect Magical Moments, Not Things!”

The Most Impactful Turning Point?

“I was a hotel executive for a good 15 years. I absolutely loved the industry. I loved being at luxury resorts every day for work. I wanted to move up the management chain. I loved every minute of it, but I got very disenchanted with all of the politics. That was something that you don’t really learn in school and kind of slaps you in the face. When you get in the real world, it’s politics, backstabbing people setting you up to fail, and things like that. I got really disenchanted with not just hotels, but anything corporate-related, and I started exploring other options.”

The Most Powerful Lessons and Experiences?

1. “I wanted to go to a hotel-restaurant management program and I did at Cal Poly – Pomona. It was almost like getting two degrees because we took a ton of classes in the business school and then went to the hospitality campus. We had a fine dining restaurant that all the students ran and a little hotel that the students ran. We got hands-on learning through that and learning in the classroom for all the accounting and business things.”

2. “I went to a job fair that the school put on and really clicked with a team that was there from a particular hotel. So I see it as a kind of a networking play: I went to the fair and talked to everyone and just kind of naturally clicked with this one team.” They became her first employer.

3. “When I got disenchanted with the corporate world, I started seeking how to get out of it and how to start my own business. I tried all kinds of things–moonlighting and starting little side businesses and getting my real estate license, getting my securities and investment licenses and life insurance. I just licensed up on everything. I was pretty much earning money, too, with all of these things. I began to merge them all together so, when it came down to it, I was a financial planner because I would get them a better mortgage, and then take the excess and get them better life insurance, and then take that excess and get them in the right retirement plan. So I kind of made a one-stop-shop financial company out of it.”

4. “During the housing crisis, which started in America in 2008, I negotiated with the banks to keep families in their homes or I would also find investors to buy out the homeowner for cash and present that offer to the bank. I was kind of the middle man between the investor and the homeowner and the homeowner and the bank.”

5. “I really try to get down to the root of what people desire their lifestyle to look like if they could do anything and be anywhere. And what would it look like down to: What are you going to have for breakfast? What time do you get up? Who are you with? What do you do each day? How is a weekend different from a weekday? Why would you go on vacation? Like Just paint the picture of that ideal lifestyle that you want to have. And then a lot of times they see that it’s not that big a stretch from what they’re doing now. It’s just small little shifts sometime.”