Tiffany Alley

"I never felt bold a single day in my life. I was always scared when I asked... but I’d pray, 'Lord, help me see my opportunities and step into them with humility and boldness.'"

In this episode of Westside Stories, Tiffany Alley shares her journey from growing up in a small-business family to founding and running a successful company that grew beyond her wildest dreams. From facing doubts and obstacles to leading with faith and courage, Tiffany reveals how taking risks led her to build a thriving business and coaching cohort.

Further Thinking

As you reflect on today’s episode, consider how Tiffany’s journey might resonate with your own life. Take a moment to think about how your faith shapes your experiences and decisions. Here are some questions to guide your reflection:

1. What dreams or aspirations have you set aside due to doubts or external expectations? How can you seek God’s guidance to rekindle or reexamine those desires?

2. In what areas of your life do you feel called to take a bold step, even if it feels daunting? How can you rely on God's strength to move forward in faith?

3. Who in your life can you reach out to for support, wisdom, or encouragement as you pursue your goals? How can you invite God into those conversations?

4. Reflect on a moment when you felt affirmed by someone you respect. How did that recognition impact your self-perception, and how can you remind yourself of God's affirmation in your life?

5. How can you cultivate a mindset of gratitude for the unexpected paths your life has taken, trusting that God has a purpose in every twist and turn?

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Transcript

Anne:

Hey, my name is Anne Henneger. I'm here with my husband Walter.

Walter:

Hi.

Anne:

And our friend Tiffany. Alley. Hello. Tiffany. Tell us a little bit about where you grew up and maybe what you wanted to be when you grew up.

Tiffany:

Well, like Walter, I grew up in Chattanooga, Tennessee. My parents had multiple small businesses as I was growing up, including a country western bar, also known as a honky tonk.

Walter:

What was it called?

Tiffany:

Dixieland. Dixieland. Did you go there, Walter? No,

Walter:

Probably not

Tiffany:

Walter. I feel pretty certain you were not the target demographic. That was the second business my parents actually had. The first one was a little motel with 10 rooms, and we lived in the motel and then my dad built duplexes and

Walter:

Sounds like the plot of a Wes Anderson movie.

Tiffany:

Well, yeah, there were definitely movie-like elements to my childhood. So what did you want to do growing up? I eventually discovered that I was a good arguer and so I wanted to be a lawyer and my parents were deeply opposed to this. My cousin was a lawyer and he suggested that I go to court reporting school and become a court reporter.

Walter:

Wait, and why did your parents oppose becoming a lawyer?

Tiffany:

I honor my parents as I say this, they didn't think much of girls doing something like that, and so that was sort of not in the cards in the way they saw the world,

Anne:

But court reporting they were okay with

Tiffany:

That was a little side type of job they thought it turned out to be. It's one of those things where you see the Lord do something so much bigger than you could have imagined from a very small beginning. So court reporters, you sit at the end of a conference room table and the lawyers go at it, right? That's in depositions, the examinations before trial. So that's what I started out doing, barely 21 when I started, because it took me a couple of years to get through court reporting school. I had a boss that was sort of like Meryl Streep on Devil Wear's Prada. She was something like, you can't imagine. And Matt, my husband, said, you've got to quit this job. This is insane. She would call our house at 11 o'clock at night and all kinds of things, and I was like, but I'm not a quitter. I'm not a quitter. And he's like, but you can quit this and not be a quitter. I did leave that position and through that I had one client and I asked him, do you mind just calling me at my house? I'll come and do your court reporting. And that was the seed of what eventually became the business that we had for 29 years.

Eventually, Matt came into the business, so he was working in his field and I had this little small business that started not being small and it became so overwhelming and in the meantime, Sierra was born, our daughter was born. It became so overwhelming that I've just got to quit. I can't keep doing this. And he woke me up in the middle of the night one night and he said, what if I left my job and instead of trying to push this business away, we go after it together. We can do this together. And I was like, oh no. Why did you wake me up and no, this is a terrible idea. Well, two weeks later we had done it and it was a great idea.

Walter:

Well, I'm curious, in the early days, even before Matt came on, you said it started to be not small. What did you perceive was driving the growth at the time?

Tiffany:

I started out thinking, I'm going to just be so good at what I do, that people are going to want to hire me. And I was kind of obnoxiously perfectionistic about it in the early days that didn't cause people to hire me. What caused people I came to realize was asking them, we here in James that you have not because you ask not you have not because you ask with wrong motives. And I don't know, I probably always have had mixed motives for everything I've ever done, but like I asked him, this lawyer, I had no business even being in the same room with. He was very important and I was 23 years old. He told me I was doing a really good job. He took the time to tell me that and I asked him if he would help me build my business, and he wrote a letter about the work that I did on his case, and he put it on the bulletin board where everybody ate their lunch in his law firm. And that law firm is Austin and by which is the second largest law firm in Atlanta, and it's through Mr. May. Earl May was his name through Earl May. I got a lot of business. He was one of the key people that put me on the map, I guess, put us on the map.

Anne:

Have you always had that kind of boldness?

Tiffany:

Oh no. I still don't ever feel bold. No day of my life have I ever felt bold. I was always scared when I asked. I never got the people say, oh, you have to have thick skin. I never got a thick skin.

Anne:

It makes me wonder about, you weren't just serving your clients, you were also helping your team grow. So tell us a little bit about how you grew your team, how you nurtured and coached them, et cetera.

Tiffany:

Well, our longest employee was with us for 20 years. Christine. One of the things I learned from working with Christine is you don't want to hire people that are like, you want to hire people who are different, and Christine resisted every great idea I ever had. She was just, when I would come in and say, I have an idea, she would be like, run, everybody, run. Because I was always an idea factory, and it took me a while to recognize that Christine's resistance is actually what made the idea able to come to fruition because she was so different than me that she thought of all the things that I didn't think of. One thing everybody wants to bash on millennials, but I think millennials helped our business, our team a lot because they wanted things to be purposeful and seeing how they wanted things to be softer. That really enhanced our team. So we had lunch together every Friday, and eventually I came to recognize and it took me longer than it should have, how important our company culture really was.

Walter:

I'm curious, the culture piece, did you have any mentors that kind of helped you to see that, or did you just sort of stumble your way into it and think maybe it matters how we relate to each other in the office?

Tiffany:

Yes, and yes. There was a man from Kansas City, Jay. If Jay chose you, you were so lucky, so blessed because Jay would just pour out his wisdom and his knowledge and his love on you. He hosted these amazing dinners. Through that connection, some of us formed a group and we were people in the same industry from cities all around the US and we would come together and you had to have something that you were great at, that you had figured out in your business, like own the thing you're great at, bring it to the table and also what you stink at. I really stink at this. I need to learn how to do this. Our company needs to learn how to do this, and we would share those things and then we would pair up and teach each other. So that's where the mentorship really came in.

Anne:

How did the culture from the mentoring program affect your culture? We wanted to

Tiffany:

Be the best knowing that we were going to be meeting with this mentoring group, it just made so much sense to add to our excellence every year, the Fulton Daily Report, which is the newspaper that serves the legal industry in Atlanta, really all the lawyers in Georgia read it. They had a best of, so they had best litigation support services company as one of their categories. The second year, they put us on the list and we won, and we won every year after that. Well, that pride that our team started to feel of we are the best and we're part of the best. Really, it was amazing for our culture to see people take ownership because it certainly wasn't me. It was everybody working together.

Anne:

So how did you go from being the best to then wanting to sell?

Tiffany:

Oh gosh, I didn't want to sell. What happened is private equity got interested in our business. PE companies started buying court reporting firms, and I was just like, oh, I'll never sell. I don't want to do that. The three big private equity players all contacted us within a period of a few weeks of each other really wanting to make our business their southeastern hub. They bid against each other for us while we weren't in the market to sell. When market forces start aligning like that, it seemed like that was very much the time to do an exit, and once it became clear, oh wow, we could sell, I realized how tired I was.

Anne:

What are you doing now?

Tiffany:

So once we sold the business, we had a contract with the buyers and we stayed in for 16 months. We did various things to help with the transition, and I hired a coach, Fran Laina, shout out to Fran to help me finish strong. She helped me so much that I got inspired to want to be a coach myself, and I really started right away into getting my coaching training, and through that, I had been a part of a women in business group. It's called Women Presidents Organization, WPO.

Anne:

With the amount of women that you've coached, what would you say is something that you find yourself often sharing as advice? Put your armor on every

Tiffany:

Day from Ephesians six because there's a lot of hard things. Developing your tough skin or your heart out or shell is not the way, that's not the way of the cross doesn't need to be armoring up against the world or against flesh and blood as we're told that our struggle's not against flesh and blood. I even teach women who are not believers about the armor. Everybody wants to hear about the armor, and I've had people come to faith, women I've coached, come to faith through learning about the armor.

Walter:

What do you think it is that resonates with them so much about it?

Tiffany:

I think we feel so much in our bodies. We feel so scared. We feel stress and pressure in our bodies, and when you think about the armor, there's a piece for your feet. There's a piece for your gut. There's the belt of truth for your gut. There's the breastplate for your heart. There's the helmet, or I call it the crown for your head, and there's a sword and there's a shield. It's helping to embody and to take some deep breaths, to calm down, to feel empowered and protected. Men and women resonate with that, but for some reason I find women more so, and you asked about what do I share with women? I coach, and it's to be bold, to take your opportunities to be looking for your opportunities, and one of the prayers I teach is, and that I used myself is, Lord, help me see my opportunities and step into them with humility and boldness.

Walter:

So when you look back now and you think about those days when you wanted to be a lawyer and your parents didn't approve of that, how has that changed the way you see yourself now, even through their eyes, given all that you've

Tiffany:

Accomplished? I was walking on the beach with Daddy probably about 10 years ago, and it was just the two of us, and he said, babe, I just want to say to you I was wrong about you, and that meant a lot. He's a man. A few words, but that meant a lot. I didn't expect it of me either, and I think a lot of it is just who God brought along for this ride, most specifically Matt, Alley. So as he's got so many amazing gifts and talents and he put them to great use in our company and in our lives, then we did have an amazing team of people. Almost all of them are still with the company, what is this, nine years later, and our director of operations is now a senior vice president of a billion dollar company. It's a happy story, I think for our team and for me and for Matt. No, it's all unexpected. I did not have a grand vision for this coming about. I can definitely give my parents a pass for not expecting it either. It's all a big unexpected mystery to this day, but I'm grateful for the ride.

Walter:

It's a happy story for us too. We're delighted to hear it.

Tiffany:

We're glad you're a part of our body. Thank you, Anne. We're so glad to be here. I'm so glad to be here.

Speaker 3:

A very special thank you to you for tuning into today's episode of West Side Stories and our sincerest thanks to Tiffany, Alley for joining us as well. This episode was produced and directed by me, gory Fleeman. It was Co-produced by Sarah Smith and hosted by Anne and Walter Henneger. Our editor was Tim Lane. Original music was composed and performed by the talented Mr. Tim Lane. If you enjoyed today's episode, we hope you'll share it with friends and family. A positive review on your streaming service of choice would also be appreciated. Thanks again for listening and we'll see you next time.