Today's guest joining us on the Join Up Dots podcast is a lady who boldly states. "If you are a small business owner who is feeling overwhelmed by ALL the different pieces of technology you need to run your small business, you are about to loooove me!" And certainly I have heard her name mentioned by many of the on-line luminaries of the world, who don't just loooooove her, but really like her too. She is the founder of LKR Social Media, where she used her expertise to help small businesses with social media and on-line marketing. She is also the founder of Edgar, which is is a tool that helps with social media scheduling and marketing automation. But more than that she is big on building a business that supports the lifestyle that she loves. She believes that social media is part of a new way of running a business – a business that is internet-driven (even if you don’t sell online), flexible, scalable, and provides you with a life, not a grind, which means that she can travel frequently and recently spent 3 weeks in India and 2 weeks in South Africa totally unplugged. But how is she doing this? Well she earned a degree in Advertising at The University of Texas, while teaching herself about web and online communications on the side. However when she graduated at age 20 she moved to Chicago to start her professional career, but unusually didn't then set into a decade of working her way up a ladder, just to find out that it was the wrong ladder. Instead with limited business knowledge she took the leap started her own company and the rest is history? So what made her different from so many people who wait with fear and apprehension till their mid forties before going for it? And does she look back at the hustles, and struggles with fondness, or a "Thank god I don't have to go through that again?" Well let's find out as we start joining up dots, with the one and only serial entrepreneur herself Laura Roeder.