Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Keisha Montfleury. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Hi Keisha , thanks for joining us today. Can you share a story that illustrates an important or relevant lesson you learned in school

One of the most important lessons I learned is that you need to choose the people you allow in your life wisely!

Unfortunately or fortunately ( depending on how you look at it), I did not have the proper discernment to make quality friendships, which ultimately lead to being in a toxic relationship when I got older.
The reason this reminds me of school is because if I really sit down and reflect it all started from such a young age, being in elementary school. I had a friend who we would now refer to as a frenemy. She was nice when she wanted to be and not so nice most of the days a group of us hung out with her. The funny thing about it is that she had a group of us and everyone followed what she said because she was confident in her delivery.

The reason this is unfortunate is because it set the tone for me to not have boundaries and standards for people that I allowed in my life, which we should all know how dangerous that can be. If we do not have boundaries in our lives, others will create it for us.

The reason that I think this is fortunate is because if I did not go through this experience I would not have found my PURPOSE and developed programs that are exclusively for our school aged girls to learn the importance to protecting herself by caring for herself, having boundaries and creating standards. Every program that is developed through HandiWork LLC is meant for our girl to flourish and build HEALTHY CONFIDENCE!

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your background and context?

As I was sharing in the story beforehand, I am Keisha Montfleury , proud founder of HandiWork Mentoring Services! First let me explain what HandiWork means; it means, something that one has made or done; some of the synonyms include creation, design, achievement. We want our girls to know that she has a purpose, she was put on this earth with gifts, skills & talents that was meant to share with the world.

We believe that it’s our responsibility for our girls to be equipped with the skills, tools and knowledge to thrive as individuals. All of our programs allow our girls to practice skills such as problem solving, critical thinking , friendship building. We do this in a unique way by hosting classes and workshops such as our Confidence Chill & Chat class (which is designed for our girls ages 6-12 to be in a safe place where she can participate in fun, intentional enrichment activities with her peers) or our 5 Day Confidence Challenge classes where we facilitate conversations with our older girls that will allow her to really plan and communicate ways that she is able to care for her self, physically, mentally and spiritually.

Can you tell us about a time you’ve had to pivot?

HandiWork was started in 2018, but did not start to pick up till about a year later. Then in 2020 Covid happened and it was so scary! But it challenged my resilience and I ended up moving my classes from in person to on line. Even though it was scary and there was a lot to learn with technology, I was able to do classes with girls from all over the world! It was unbelievable! I went from just servicing local girls in my area to girls from places such as Illinois, Georgia and even out of the county in Belize!

We’d love to hear the story of how you built up your social media audience?

One thing that I can say is that I have been very consistent on social media. I think the key to building an audience is to be consistent in your messaging.
Also remembering that social media is just a tool and not be coveted or depended on , but taking the time to analyze, learn and even have fun creating content.
Another thing that I think is important is to do things outside of social media so that you are not depending on it and using other methods to engage with your audience, like attending networking events, participating in vendor events (in your local community) and taking advantage of sending people who are interested in your brand newsletters.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.keishashandiwork.com/
• Instagram: keishashandiwork
• Facebook: keishashandiwork

Image Credits

Priscila Garcia