Episode 048
Suzie Hall
How do you jump from a million-dollar business to a $15 million contract in just two weeks? Join Alice Tang as she speaks with Suzie Hall, founder of the Cornerstone Collective. Suzie reveals the “secret” behind her massive international growth: it wasn’t just about the hustle, it was about her internal state. Suzie shares how she navigated a major life “halftime” trauma to rebuild a life and business that operates in a flow state. Learn why Suzie believes that when you are in alignment, the “divine” brings you the projects you are ready to lead.
In this episode, you’ll learn:
"My journey has taught me that so much of that is in our mind, right? Everyone has the same 24 hours in a day. When we learn how to master our thoughts, our time and our energy and our focus not only simplifies, it integrates."
[00:00:01] Narrator: Welcome to Women’s Million Dollar Conversations with Alice Tang, where we share stories from successful business women who have saved, earned, or sold over a million dollars and discuss how they built their success and insights to help you achieve your goals. Now, let’s join the conversation.
[00:00:14] Alice Tang: Good morning everyone. I’m Alice Tang, the host of Women’s Million Dollar Conversations. I am here sitting down with my good friend in Idaho. Her name is Suzie Hall. She is the CEO of Cornerstone Collective. I’ll let Suzie tell us a little bit about her and then we’ll start the interview questions.
[00:00:40] Suzie Hall: Thank you, Alice. It’s so great to be back here. I really appreciate the time and the space. As you mentioned, I’m the founder of actually four companies. The Cornerstone Collective encompasses three that we mainly design and furnish hotels now around the world. Just last fall, I began to go international, which is super exciting.
[00:01:03] Suzie Hall: Today, our focus is going to be more on my upcoming memoir that’ll be launched on my 60th birthday, April 22nd. The title is Blessed Disruption, which is a very significant title because it describes my life. As a new author, writing and connecting to my personal story has been very powerful, and I encourage listeners and viewers to consider writing your story and narrating your story. That’s a whole other conversation.
[00:01:26] Alice Tang: Very good. Welcome one more time. So this is Women’s Million Dollar Conversations. We interview guests who have saved a million, sold a million, or earned a million. I’m sure that you hit all these three areas. We want to focus on one.
[00:01:43] Alice Tang: Can we pick on your business?
[00:01:47] Suzie Hall: Yes.
[00:01:49] Alice Tang: Okay. I’d like you to go back to your journey or your story and think and remind yourself of your first million dollars.
[00:01:57] Alice Tang: How long did it take for you to get there?
00:02:02] Alice Tang: And if there were any challenges or biases that were stopping you from getting there, what were they, and how did you overcome that?
[00:02:10] Suzie Hall: Oh, such a good question. So, I began my full-time entrepreneurial journey as a mom after the halftime of my life, which I write about in my book. That’s when I joined EO and I turned my attention full-time to my business.
[00:02:28] Suzie Hall: I just started doing naturally what came to me, utilizing my natural talents and skills in the design world, putting my business management degree to work. It took about three to four years to build up to the $1 million revenue mark in a single business. That’s the criteria to join EO. And so that was a very significant milestone for me.
[00:02:57] Suzie Hall: But it wasn’t something that I aspired to, and once I hit it, I’m like, “I’m here.” For me, it was a natural progression and outgrowth of my natural skills and talents and bringing those into the business world.
[00:03:17] Suzie Hall: So many obstacles and limiting beliefs and playing small, which I talk about in my memoir, along the way. And as women, as moms, we know all the challenges that come throughout a day. A lot of it’s around time and priorities and focus and feeling like we need to be in multiple places at one time.
[00:03:41] Suzie Hall: My journey has taught me that so much of that is in our mind, right? Everyone has the same 24 hours in a day. When we learn how to master our thoughts, our time, and our energy and our focus, it not only simplifies—it integrates. And that’s when we achieve a flow state, which is what helped me land my biggest contract to date ever last fall: a $15 million contract.
[00:03:58] Alice Tang: Let’s take a pause and celebrate.
[00:04:04] Alice Tang: From $1 million to $15 million, how long did it take from the $1 million to the $15 million? How many years?
[00:04:15] Suzie Hall: So that’s in my experience. I was ready to play big again as an outgrowth of my journey writing my memoir—knowing where I play best, where I function best, where I lead best and create best. And that’s on a big stage.
[00:04:33] Suzie Hall: I was raised as the daughter of a major college football coach. I thought I was going to be a newscaster in college until I talked myself out of that. So praying and putting it out to the universe: I’m ready. I am ready for big.
[00:04:51] Suzie Hall: The next morning after one of my prayers, I opened my email inbox to receive an email from someone who we had proposed to two and a half years prior, and we were runners-up on that project.
[00:05:06] Suzie Hall: Now, they basically handed us this $15 million project because of the relationship we had established over the course of three years. So one email—we got to contract within two weeks from the time of the email to the time of signing that contract.
[00:05:29] Suzie Hall: All the years leading up to that, it’s hard to quantify because of all the work. I can say, however, beyond a doubt that it’s due to my internal work—showing up how I wanted to show up, being the person I want to be and the leader I want to be—and then putting it out to the divine.
[00:05:56] Alice Tang: Oh, this is so inspiring. Congratulations—$15 million is a big number. The part that inspires me most is everything we need is inside us.
[00:06:10] Alice Tang: A lot of us are still—at times, right—every day we need to fight that thought that we look for external validation, external circumstances, conditions, maybe a person or a situation. But no. That’s why we hear it a lot: go inward, tune out the external. That’s why meditation and mindfulness is so key. I’m here to tell you that it works. I’d love to hear that it worked.
[00:06:37] Suzie Hall: Yeah. So it’s that personal being state no matter what situation we’re in. Take money for example. When money is tight, we don’t know where the next project is coming from, we lose a key client, a key team member quits—those things used to cause me to go into an anxiety spiral. And that would just kind of ruin my day.
[00:07:05] Suzie Hall: Now today, again because of the personal transformation work that I’ve done, my foundation of faith, my personal practice of that—those things don’t get me off track at all. Sure, I might take a few minutes and process it, but then I’m just believing that’s clearing space for bigger and better things ahead.
[00:07:25] Alice Tang: Oh my goodness. I have goosebumps over goosebumps as you speak. And I am like you. I have a standard time when I get up—before I do anything—is to have my stillness with my divine. And that really helps set the tone for the day so that I’m more resilient.
[00:07:53] Alice Tang: Chinese, it’s funny—we believe nine things, eight to nine things out of ten things in life are challenging, are bad, they’re going to come get you. So if that’s life, I like to borrow what you said: I accept me and accept my circumstances as is, knowing that it’s pacing for a bigger, better—because everything works to the greatest. It’s going to be okay in the end.
[00:08:19] Suzie Hall: It will be okay in the end. And again, I’m living proof. Yes, that’s right. So many setbacks and traumas in my life. And I write about that in my book.
[00:08:36] Suzie Hall: And as women, especially entrepreneurs, we feel like we need to do, do, do—have all the lists, the calendars, the this and the that. Going back to being still—that’s when our mind expands and we think about relationships and people and contacts and paths forward that it’s hard to see when we’re just doing and busy, right?
[00:09:05] Suzie Hall: I used to thrive on busyness and calendars. I was most likely to succeed in high school. I was the dean scholar of the business school in college for two years. I had it all going on. It wasn’t until I transformed myself due to the halftime of my life that my life began to transform.
[00:09:32] Suzie Hall: And it took a while, right? Doing the work day after day, learning, growing, clearing out. I work with a peak performance coach and she always reminds me: think about what you want. Don’t spend time thinking about what you don’t want. Learn the lessons, get the feedback if you fail, then get back and focus on what you want.
[00:09:56] Suzie Hall: When you take that question deeper, there are a lot of layers. You can say, “Oh, I want a million-dollar business by the end of the year. I want a $10 million business by the end of the year.” Why do you want that? Why? Is it because you want to be rich? Is it because you want to pay off debts? Pay off a mortgage? Create a legacy for your children?
[00:10:20] Suzie Hall: Once you get in touch with that why and you know what you want, it makes a lot more sense—and it aligns everything within you.
[00:10:28] Alice Tang: That brings to the question about the value of money for you. What is the value of money for you?
[00:10:37] Suzie Hall: Again, being a business major in the 80s in college, I believed at the time that money led to success, and the more money I had, the more outward external value I would receive from others.
[00:10:54] Suzie Hall: Through my journey of founding my company from nothing—I didn’t start with a loan or anything, I just started from scratch—building all of that, I’ve seen a lot of money come and go over the years.
[00:11:10] Suzie Hall: Today, money means freedom. Money means I’m able to create. I’m able to give to my community. And I believe that money is a divine energy. So money derives from the source. And I love money. I love to share money.
[00:11:29] Suzie Hall: I put little hearts on my checks when I write people big checks because money is energy, love is energy, and that’s right—it’s all ours. So I don’t check my bank account that often because I know from experience that the money will flow if I am in alignment and I am putting it out to the divine to lead me and guide me.
[00:11:59] Alice Tang: Beautiful.
[00:12:02] Alice Tang: Now, in building your business, I’m taking you way back—as today I’m talking to the author of Blessed Disruption. You have a good team or management team managing your company that is handling the $15 million contract and many others.
[00:12:17] Alice Tang: But when you were still in charge—when you were building—I’m sure there were times you said, “Gee, I can’t do this anymore. I want to quit.”
[00:12:25] Alice Tang: What kept you going?
[00:12:31] Suzie Hall: Yes, there were many times I wanted to just throw my hands up in the air, walk out and say, “I just am going to go get a job and just do that.”
[00:12:42] Suzie Hall: For me, I am very legacy-driven. When I set a goal or set out to do something, I go all in. To me, all in means that you don’t give up. You don’t quit.
[00:12:58] Suzie Hall: And again, I learned that in my growing up years with my dad’s profession. You get bruised and you get battered. You get injured, but you get back up and you keep going.
[00:13:12] Suzie Hall: During the halftime of my life, when I went through that trauma, the quote by Martin Luther King Jr. appeared in my mind: “You don’t have to see the whole staircase. Just take that next step in faith.” And so that’s how I approached every time I went through those setbacks in business and in life—take the next right step, the next best step in faith.
[00:13:36] Alice Tang: Very good. Our audience might be curious about how you make your decisions, especially big decisions that have a huge impact to the livelihood of the company, the employees, the client, and you.
[00:13:46] Alice Tang: How do you make those decisions?
[00:13:52] Suzie Hall: Yes. I’ve learned—again over trial and error and making lots of mistakes—that for me, the best way to make decisions is to write down what it is that I want. Again, going back to that question: how can I serve what I want through my business with my teams?
[00:14:12] Suzie Hall: And then journaling about that. So those are my prompts, and then I journal. Over the course of it—could be a day, could be a week, could be a month—then I pray about it. I meditate on it. I think about it.
[00:14:30] Suzie Hall: So I spend time thinking about my thinking, which again, as busy entrepreneurs, we don’t give ourselves enough time to do. I’ve learned. And then I feel in my body and in my mind if it’s aligned, and then I simply know what to do and how to respond.
[00:14:51] Alice Tang: Very good. So write down what you want and how you can serve. Second, journal. Spend time with yourself. In meditation, the universe is going to show you.
[00:15:04] Suzie Hall: Yes. And part of that will be other people. It might be consultants. It might be a coach. It might be team members. It might be clients. It might be vendors—depending on the business and the industry.
[00:15:20] Suzie Hall: And I’ve learned to be open to input and feedback from valued, trusted people—not from people who don’t know my business or don’t really understand me. They might have their own goals and their own agendas, which is fine. But I’ve learned it’s important to listen to wise and trusted voices, and let the others fall by the wayside.
[00:15:44] Alice Tang: Yeah. We call them noises actually, right?
[00:15:47] Suzie Hall: Yeah. Exactly. Yeah.
[00:15:50] Alice Tang: Reading away from the distractions. Very good.
[00:15:56] Alice Tang: This brings up a point where you just addressed: some people say, “Well, I don’t have time to be in stillness,” and “When I’m in stillness, I didn’t hear the voice.” But the thing is—if you pay attention, your calm can come from your coach, from the people you’re interacting with, like you said—the consultants—or a billboard that you look at. You have to be open.
[00:16:22] Alice Tang: So the goal is not to dig in and say, “Well, I’m not hearing anything yet. I’ve done it for a month.” It can show up in different forms.
[00:16:34] Alice Tang: One of the things I share with my wonderful husband is: I say, “You are the reflection of my divine when you do this for me,” because a human being would not be able to—
[00:16:49] Alice Tang: What are you grateful for?
[00:16:52] Suzie Hall: Oh, I am always grateful, and I verbalize my gratitude. If I have a wonderful business meeting, if I have wonderful time with my family, when I win big contracts, when I get to go to Hawaii for work, when I get to go to Paris for work, when I wake up in the morning, when I finish a hard workout.
[00:17:16] Suzie Hall: So the way I view gratitude is: first thing in the morning during meditation, I fill my heart with gratitude, and I use HeartMath. It’s a wonderful app for connecting.
[00:17:29] Suzie Hall: And then throughout the day, I give gratitude. I’m also learning to verbalize the gratitude like you just shared. That is so powerful, and people light up when we share our gratitude. My goal is always to be grateful for everything—even in the midst of the hard stuff.
[00:17:55] Alice Tang: Very good. So gratitude and gratefulness.
[00:18:00] Alice Tang: I’m sure through your HeartMath study and learning—I’m going to share this to the audience—gratitude has the highest vibration among all emotions. In order to be calm and still and make good decisions, we need to vibrate in the highest emotion so we can attract good to us.
[00:18:21] Suzie Hall: Yes. That’s beautifully said. So true. Yes.
[00:18:26] Alice Tang: Thank you so much. We are grateful for you. Thank you for sharing your story. And our audience would like to know more about your book. I’ll put it in the notes of this podcast.
[00:18:39] Suzie Hall: Wonderful. Yes. So the title is Blessed Disruption—two juxtaposed words put together intentionally. That’s the theme of my life. I think a lot of women especially will read it and see themselves in my book, in my story, in my journey.
[00:18:59] Suzie Hall: We were just talking about: I went through a trauma when I was in my late 40s, mid-40s, and it caused me to really look at myself and look at my life. I call that the halftime of my life. Again, I’m a coach’s daughter. I had the choice to give up or to transform myself and my life. And I write all that in my memoir.
[00:19:21] Suzie Hall: I share unedited journal entries in the throes of depression and anxiety and all these things that I worked through because of trauma. Again, ten years later, today I’m living the life that I intended all those years ago. So we all have the power within us.
[00:19:40] Alice Tang: We are so grateful for you.
Suzie Hall, ASID, LEED AP ID+C, WELL AP, is a proven expert across multiple industries and disciplines, including leadership, sustainability, interior design, procurement, modular development, writing, speaking, and philanthropy. As the Founder and CEO of The Cornerstone Collective, she represents, synchronizes and optimizes teams around the globe in the realm of hospitality. A seasoned strategist and collaborative specialist, Ms. Hall has led teams to award-winning results throughout her 33-year career.
With more than 20 LEED and sustainable projects to her credit, Suzie combines a rare depth of technical expertise with holistic design elegance to elevate the essence and brilliance of every project. A seasoned LEED project administrator and award-winning interior designer who holds a BA with honors in business management, Suzie facilitates an integrated project design and delivery model that increases purpose and profit for everyone.
Raised as the daughter of an American major college football coach, Suzie learned early on the power of dedicated teams who, when aligned and synergized, create magnificent results for all stakeholders.