We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Jennifer Paulino. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Jennifer below.

Alright, Jennifer thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. We’d love to go back in time and hear the story of how you came up with the name of your brand?

The Leverage Index was born from the importance of the word Leverage in both the business space and world in general. It also has a tie in to the baseball world and seeing as our company was founded with athletes founded nonprofits in mind, I saw it fitting.

Our company focuses on helping athletes and entrepreneurs build stronger and more sustainable strategies around their nonprofit work with a focus on how they are driving revenue. We focus on leveraging the vision of the founder and strategic partnerships to drive change while also working towards effective revenue goals that allow for scalability and growth of the organization and it’s mission.

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 back background and context?

I am a Dominican born Afro-Latina that grew up in the suburbs of Maryland and Pennsylvania with a short international living experience in Germany. I always like to say that I was born to live in two worlds simultaneously. I grew up having a middle class living experience during the weekdays and an inner city living experience on the weekends due to my mother’s occupation in the beauty industry and her place of employment as well as my father’s close familial ties being in the Bronx,NY. Outside of my everyday living experiences being so complex and diverse, I also had to grapple with my summer vacations being in Dominican Republic in a home that had no indoor plumbing. Needless to say I grew up knowing the finer and less sexy aspects of life all at the same time.

At an early age I was exposed to the inequities of the world through everyday experiences and learned to love all the intricacies of this world. This led me to have a burning passion to help others understand the world at large and how they could help bridge the gap in various communities. I started my career in for-profit marketing and quickly realized I needed to incorporate my passion for community service into my work to keep me motivated.

After some time of working in the for-profit space and incorporating my nonprofit work, I decided to make the shift into nonprofit to help bring more visibility to the opportunities that I saw on the for-profit space. As I dove deeper into the nonprofit space, I became passionate about exposing as many people as I could to the beauty of the marriage between both entities. Then I was presented with the statistics and challenges that athletes and entrepreneurs face when it comes to nonprofit work. I knew immediately this was my calling! I could leverage all of my knowledge to impact two industries that could exponentially drive the change we needed to see in the world. Thus the birth of The Leverage Index.

A company founded on helping build stronger communities through encouraging strategic partnerships. We focus our services on strategy building and helping nonprofit entities build operational processes, foster relationships, and train their employees adequately to drive impact internally and externally to the organization. We are able to support organizations with their programmatic ideation and structure as well as develop strategic plans to increase the organization’s revenue. We want to be known for Clutching the Leverage found in building communities, to Change the game in Business. Our core values are integrity, authenticity, and respect. They govern all of the work we do and ensure we are always showing up as our best selves individually and collectively.

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

When I started my business I knew it would be a difficult road filled with many lessons. However, I drastically underestimated how difficult staying on track would be on the days I lost motivation. There are so many times when I lost focus and as the days went on, I started to see how drastic the effects were. I ended up missing a lot of opportunities to close deals and also depleted my start-up capital quicker than I thought I would. This led me down a path to revisit my timeline for building out my business and find ways to explore how I was going to keep it going. I decided I was going to need to pivot back into a full-time role to get my financial footing back and slow down the external momentum of my business. This decision was difficult to make and extremely humbling. It caused me to revisit my values and perspective on business. I quickly realized that as much as I wanted to see my business grow, my quality of life was more important to me. I had to trust that God would provide the role I needed that would allow for my to gain the financial footing I needed with the flexibility to continue growing my business.

Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?

I think I unlearn things everyday! Each day I find myself unlearning so many different things but most recently, I found that the most impactful unlearned lesson was the one about having high standards. I always felt guilty and ashamed for having high standards and also found myself consistently disappointed by things and people because they could never meet them. It took me down a path of negotiating with my standards and at one point even drastically lowering my standards. This didn’t solve my problem. It actually caused a bigger one for me. Until I finally learned that my problem wasn’t how high my standards were but rather my lack of appropriate language to proactively communicate my expectations of the world around me.

I learned that instead of changing my standards, I had to learn to proactively communicate my standards. It’s perfectly acceptable and encouraged to have high standards because it helps you strive to operate at your most optimal levels. However it’s vital that you learn to explain what you expect from others and extend them grace when they don’t meet those standards. It’s also important to note that there’s a difference between standards and expectations. Expectations are based on assumptions you make about how something should go versus standards require you to be an active participant and support in ensuring the outcome you are seeking is achieved.

Contact Info:

• Website: theleverageindex.com
• Instagram: theleverageindex
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jenniferalexapaulino/