Gaby's family business, Jules Flower Truck, combines her family's love of vintage Volkswagens and her daughter's love of flowers to create a small business that brings joy and happiness to her community.
Transcript:
AMY: [00:00:00] Welcome back to this month's Enterprise Coworking Community Spotlight. This month, we're talking to Gaby Ansel with Colonial Life Sales. Gaby, thank you so much for sitting down with me today.
GABY: [00:00:14] Absolutely. Thanks for inviting me, Amy. Of course.
AMY: [00:00:17] Okay, let's go ahead and get started. Tell us a little bit about Colonial Life Sales and what you do for them.
GABY: [00:00:25] Absolutely. So Colonial life is a Fortune 250 company that's been around and established since 1939 in South Carolina. One of our very first clients was the North Carolina State Troopers, and they're still our client today, which I think speaks volumes for how we develop a relationship and what we do. The simplest, I guess, way to explain it is we help small businesses, large businesses, all of these types of businesses offer benefits at either no cost to the business, but that can help retain and attract quality employees along with combating the rising cost. I like to say of everything right now, but truly health care. And for me personally, my position is a manager in the quarry district and I help facilitate and mentor my teammates as well as, you know, establishing my own business within Colonial because at the end of the day, it's my agency that I operate my team with.
AMY: [00:01:30] Awesome. Awesome. How long have you been working with Colonial?
GABY: [00:01:34] Yeah, So I'm slowly or I guess quickly approaching my one year mark with them. Um, I had a 15 year career with In-N-Out Burger, and that was how I met my husband and we bought our first home and had this amazing opportunity to come to Colorado. Um, as a mom of two kids, like, I truly wanted to have a better work life balance. And so that's where it came in with Colonial. I love what I get to do and working in my own community and excited for what this next year will bring.
AMY: [00:02:09] Awesome. Sounds like you stay pretty busy.
GABY: [00:02:14] Oh yes, definitely with a seve year old and a two and a half year old. Absolutely.
AMY: [00:02:21] Tell me a little bit more about Colonial. I mean, you kind of touched on it, like what separates them? What makes them different from other, similar businesses in the field?
GABY: [00:02:34] Absolutely. I think, I guess that the simplest form of what makes us different is there's kind of two things. One, we want to develop a long term relationship with business owners. Like the North Carolina state troopers, for example. You know, we want to understand a business and what makes sense in their world and what kind of their needs are and how we can be a strategic partner with them. That being said, we as a company hire people to be in a specific niche. We don't expect everybody to understand every single part of the business and to do it all themself. We like to have, like I said, individuals who are in a certain niche, you know, doing the back end work, doing the benefits counseling specifically for each individual and so on and so forth. And so in the Cory district, we have an amazing team that we help each other. We support each other and lean on each other to help our clients, so to speak, you know, be the best that we possibly can. And that's how we can develop those long standing relationships.
AMY: [00:03:44] That's amazing. I mean, knowing you and knowing your other people on your team, you guys are just so friendly and so nice. And I'm sure your clients love you guys to death.
GABY: [00:03:58] It changes, you know, like, we go in trying to help our clients at the end of the day. And I appreciate the compliment as well. We truly just care about our people and want to help them. So.
AMY: [00:04:11] And that makes all the difference, you know?
GABY: [00:04:14] Oh, absolutely.
AMY: [00:04:15] Um, so why or, you know, how is it for you guys as a company working out of Enterprise Coworking?
GABY: [00:04:26] Yeah, absolutely. So we as a district, which Dan Cory is our district manager, so to speak, he wanted us to be with like minded individuals, entrepreneurs who you know, are facing the same kind of obstacles that we are on the phone talking to different businesses, so to speak. I mean, this is the perfect environment for that because there are entrepreneurs at every level of their career here, and it's a great environment. I think that you would do a fantastic job, too, of like helping greet people when they come in. If we have appointments with them and we just we just love it here. So it's exciting.
AMY: [00:05:08] Hey, I love to hear that. Thank you so much for informing us a little bit about what you do with Colonial. I understand you have another business going on as well. Tell me a little bit about that and how that started and what you got going on with that.
GABY: [00:05:30] Yeah, absolutely. So entrepreneur right through and through. Um, I developed a basic, uh, mobile flower business, okay? And I did it as an investment into my daughter. My daughter is seven years old, so I really didn't want to depend on the educators or just other people to upbring my daughter, and my husband and I are very passionate about that. We both have mobile businesses, but this one specifically is a mobile flower business operated out of a 1963 single cab Volkswagen.
AMY: [00:06:07] Um, I love it so much.
GABY: [00:06:10] Right? Like they're just fun and my husband and I, we both grew up with Volkswagens, so it's kind of like a marriage of both of the things that we both love. Of course, our daughter. But flowers and cars, they just speak bounds. And what I mean by we do mobile is I typically operate out of Parker, Colorado, on Main Street, and you come up to my truck and not only am I there, but my daughter is because she needs to learn what that looks like, how to run a business, customer service, you know, ordering, preparing, all of the planning and the elements that go into it. And I think that those are such important life skills that when she's 25, it will be her business, but she will have earned it, not been handed it. And so the concept is, you know, like I said, when you come to my truck, it's all filled with these beautiful flowers. And we put a bouquet together together because I want you to have a say in what actually goes in your bouquet. I always hated going to the supermarket or going, you know, wherever. And they put, I'm sorry, but I'm a flower shop. I can't stand incarnation. So any time they put a carnation in my bouquet, I instantly have like, this negative feeling. And so I wanted people to have that joy and do it together as well as meeting people. So that's what we do.
AMY: [00:07:34] That is so amazing. And you know, myself, my mother was always an entrepreneur and owned her own bookstore. And I remember growing up, you know, watching her run her own business and helping out and yeah, I mean, the life lessons that you're teaching your daughter, that's amazing. And what a fun way to do it with beautiful flowers and the way that you guys are doing it with the truck. It's so, so cool. And now you guys will bring that to people's events or weddings or things like that also.
GABY: [00:08:11] Yeah so I have a online shop and basically you can either do a personal bouquet that you order from, you know, from us and I can bring it to you or we do weddings. We, I've done baby showers. Um, I've done so many different things.
AMY: [00:08:28] Just the cutest idea to bring a really special element to anybody's event.
GABY: [00:08:39] Yeah, I think we just need more kindness and we need more joy in our life. And so another part of basically this business is kind of a grassroots movement that I'm trying to emulate because I got my degree in history. I'm very passionate about history. And so I think as business owners, we do a good job of supporting and hashtagging supporting. But what does that actually look like? How do we model that? And so I incorporate so many different small businesses into my own business because I, I want to model what that looks like to my daughter and other generations. Because if we don't start now, it won't change. It'll be this and more, but nothing will have progressed, so to speak.
AMY: [00:09:30] So I mean, I love that. That's so great. And the collaboration with other businesses and other, you know, family owned businesses and things like that, you know, that's really important. And it does, you know, help lift each other up and cheer each other on. And, you know, that's the co-working is all about that, too. And just being around other people and supporting each other and caring and all of that. So, um, it's amazing. I love what you're doing. It's great. I want everybody out there to, you know, go take a look. And Gabby, thank you so much for sitting down. With me today on the community spotlight. Definitely. If for more information about Colonial Life sales, you can email Gaby at gabyansel@coloniallifesales.com. And be sure to check out their flower truck on Instagram. It's Jules Flower Truck, like and follow. It's super, super cute. I will probably put a picture of it with this interview because I think it's really special and everyone will like to see that.
GABY: [00:10:50] Awesome. Thank you, Amy.
AMY: [00:10:52] Yeah. Thank you. That's it for this month's Enterprise Coworking Community Spotlight. Thanks for watching. Thanks, Gaby.
GABY: [00:11:00] All right. Bye, Amy.
