By the time she was in her early twenties, Ashley Fox had it all: She had graduated from Howard University, fulfilled her dream of working on Wall Street, and was making six-figures helping millionaires and billionaires sustain and build their wealth. 

But she wasn’t exactly happy. “I felt like I had hit a ceiling,” she says. “I did everything I could to work on Wall Street, but I wasn’t fulfilled.” 

In search of reigniting her passion, she eventually quit her job and became a financial advisor for people with low to moderate incomes. “But when you run a business, you don’t make money every two weeks,” she says. She entered a new lifestyle but hadn’t changed her financial habits. It was a matter of time, that as a new entrepreneur, Ashley lost everything. She moved back to Philadelphia and into her parent’s house. Once there, she came up with a new vision: To educate, empower and modify the mindsets of the 99% of people Wall Street would not talk to.  And Empify (EMPower + modIFY) was born.

Through Empify, Ashley has been able to create financial education programs and events that have impacted the lives of over 20,000 people around the world. The Empify programs have been implemented in over 50 different schools and organizations across the country, and it has financially educated children, adults, and those impacted by the prison system And last year, she branched out with another new initiative: The Wealth Builders Community. 

“I like to say that Empify is the parent, and The Wealth Builders Community is the child that Empify birthed,” Ashley says. 

Ahead, we chat with Ashley about her work with both Empify and The Wealth Builders Community. She explains why Mighty Pro and cultural software was so important for her ever-growing digital community.

Where did you get the idea to create Wealth Builders as its own thing?

With Empify, I had this desire to financially educate children. We’ve implemented programs in Philadelphia, Atlanta, and New York, we taught in the prison system. And at that time adults were like, ‘Hey, we see what you’re doing with kids, what are you doing for adults?’ So we created online classes. 

I remember with that first online class, I sold it for $10 because I was so scared to sell a class to adults. And 400 people purchased our class and I was just like, “Oh wow, people actually listen to what I say.” 

But then as we started to create online classes, I realized that there’s a lot of emotional support and consistency that you need in order to help people unlearn the thoughts and habits they’ve cultivated throughout their lives, especially adults.

Talk us through the journey of building your new community and finding Mighty Networks.

I always had this vision of having a community, but I didn’t want to be everybody’s financial advisor. And I didn’t want to leave people to fend for themselves either. I wanted to create an environment.

We were approached by this company called StockTwits, which is literally Twitter for stock investors. And we forged a partnership with them and launched a community on their platform. We had a hundred people in seconds, and every other month our revenue was doubling. However,  I didn’t own my data with StockTwits. I didn’t know anything about our members.

Then, another company approached us saying that they wanted to help us build a platform for our community where we would own our own data. That partnership ended up not working out—they just weren’t as effective or established as a company to do what we needed them to do. 

Eventually, someone on our team found Mighty, and we saw that Mighty Pro [provided solutions to] all of our pain points. And once we launched, we generated over $100,000 in the first two weeks. We have a 90% retention rate, 65% of our members are annual members, and from one course alone in our app, we’ve generated over six figures. We have over 1,060 people in there. So now, we’re building a strategy for the long-term. It’s just about utilizing all the features and all the resources that we have to be able to grow our message. 

So what does it look like within your Mighty Pro Network? What kind of resources are you offering?

We like to call ourselves the Netflix of finance because you have access to financial education in the palm of your hand. We do weekly classes. Pretty soon we’ll be doing in-person events. We do a lot of accelerators and challenges. And we just create a safe space for people to build wealth with one another, no matter how small or how big they start.

What do your members look like? Are they investment newbies? Working professionals?

Our target is beginner investors. They are all working professionals, entrepreneurs, and parents who didn’t grow up with wealth but want to break generational curses. These are people who have the resources and desire to change financially and grow emotionally, but they just don’t know where to go or how to start. We have people in our community who make over a quarter-million dollars, and then we have college kids who do not have a large income. But the commonality is we have a group of people who want to be financially educated in order to make financially educated decisions. 

Getting into the world of financial literacy and investing can be intimidating. How do you help your members shift their mindset?

People don’t realize that everyone feels the same way about investing. However, nobody talks about it. We created a safe space where it’s ok to talk and learn how to build wealth as a beginner. If you don’t believe in yourself, teaching you what a stock is won’t fix the problem—we have to fix you. So we want to make a great personal impact on our members by launching our Mentality and Money Book Club. This book club will create a private space where we can talk about our struggles, thoughts, and traumas around money and what’s holding us back from our truest selves. It’s the mindset and heart-centered part of Empify that will help strengthen the inner core of our members.

Our goal is to create a space where it’s okay to be a human and not a financial expert. And that’s the journey that I’m on too. I think I’ve outgrown finance—I can teach that like the back of my hand—but it’s the human aspect that makes you willing to learn. It’s the emotional part about wealth building that helps get you out of your own way. We want you to know that you deserve better, and help remove any thoughts or conditions that are causing you to think otherwise.  

I feel like you have to drink our Kool-Aid. The more of our Kool-Aid you drink, the more connected you are, and the more results you produce.

And how has moving to Mighty Pro impacted your overall business?

It’s turnkey software. It gives us the ability to have unlimited storage of all the content we produce. The ability to not have to deal with the hassles and nuances of managing technology. 

For me, it’s also the data. I like to know everything that can help us impact more people. And I think as Mighty continues to evolve its data platform it can truly help us. The first phase of it has been really helpful. Without it, I would have never known that every 30 days 70% of our members come into the platform, and over 90 days, more than 90% of our members are on the platform. So when it comes to us talking to investors and looking to raise capital, our churn rate matters and key data points like that matter for the company.  

What’s next for Wealth Builders? What are your goals for the next few months, the next year, and beyond?

I want to take this and turn our Wealth Builders Community into a seven-figure business. We’ve doubled our company revenue from 2019 to 2020, and we are on track to generate close to a million dollars this year. 

I’m coming from a space where I started Empify because it was in my heart. Now, I have to take something that was very heart-driven and turn it into a scalable billion-dollar business. In order to do this, I have to evolve into a person who is comfortable in that space. That takes personal work.

Old strategies will not take us to a seven-figure business, but I’m learning every day and getting stronger moment by moment. I know our shift will be big, and I am excited to grow this company into a place where over 250,000 people are building wealth in The Wealth Builders Community!