Episode 6: Abe Lopez-Bowen
This episode was recorded in the fall of 2021.
Rachel Kobus 0:09
Hello Illinois State Welcome to another episode of Redbird Buzz. I'm Rachel Kobus, with alumni engagement. 2012 Redbird alum Abe Lopez Bowen brings joyful energy with him wherever he goes. This can be seen in his extensive involvement as a student at Illinois State where he served as a preview guide, a resident assistant, a co chair for students today leaders forever, and university program board president. His Spirit and good heart also led to a being crowned the 2011 homecoming king. After graduating, he wanted to do more and take risks of finding himself and his passions. After moving to California in 2015, Abe created Lightward Photography, a brand who's been published in a national wedding photography journal, and brought Abe invitations to work across the globe. Continuing to push the boundaries of his creative mind in 2020 Abe created Lightward Empowerment, an empowerment coaching business through which he helps his clients bring their dreams into a living, breathing tangible reality. And since 2016, he has served as a commitment mentor with the Clinton Global Initiative University mentoring an international student cohort as they bring practical innovation to some of the world's most pressing issues. We are Redbird proud of Abe. And without further ado, let's hear more from Abe on how he inspires others to live a life of meaning by living such a life himself. So Abe, what's the word Redbird? Can you tell us a little about yourself?
Abe Lopez Bowen 1:33
I am a person who is actively engaged with life, and building systems and building relationships. And I'm a creative who truly wants to kind of take in all that life has to offer. And I've seen that play out ever since graduating from ISU, in so many different ways. But we can kind of talk about that throughout our conversation. Absolutely, yeah, that's a little bit about me,
Rachel Kobus 2:02
okay. And I love that you use the word creative as a noun, like so talk about what's it mean to be a creative, how's that lead into your small business and not even small business anymore? Your growing business of Lightward.
Abe Lopez Bowen 2:18
You know, I think when I think about the identity of a creative for me, it means approaching every single thing in my life with a kind of a lens of creativity, whether it be from the home that we're making, or the relationships that we're building, or the team dynamics that we're creating, I think that creativity offers myself and my husband who runs Lightwarde're in kind of this open handed space and environment where we can create something beautiful, out of mundane things, and also really extravagant things. And I think that kind of the identity of of a creative to me means really just like seizing the opportunity to create create more beauty in the world, whether it be with humans or environments, or with thoughts or with words. Everything kind of that we touch, we kind of view as creative.
Rachel Kobus 3:13
I love it. And like you said, I know another part of Lightward. And the way you and your husband manage it is that you're just you're in the present, like you everything is and are and obviously I was reading up about Lightward and the amazing things you are doing. So can you talk a little bit more about what is Lightward? And how did you get to where you are right now?
Abe Lopez Bowen 3:36
It's actually funny that you ask what is Lightward? Because Isaac and I have that conversation a lot with our team. And we're actually working with a big branding agency out of Chicago and we're doing like kind of a rebrand and focus on our brand. And what what does it mean to be Lightward? I think the biggest this is kind of some things that we talk about being lightward is this kind of experiment to see if living in our truth can work not only just with health, but also with the health of our business, can we make money, doing the things that we love in a way that is aligned with the things that are highly important to us, like trust and openness and freedom and respect and love and creativity like we were talking about? We want to remind people of their own light and I think that's what you know, Lightward means like toward the light. The things that we are doing is building our building towards this kind of metaphoric sense of light and openness and health. Because I think for our generation specifically, we're just excited about changing things up a bit and not--so for me, yeah, like, what can what can our business look like? When we give one we pair people really well. Number two, we give them truly like the trust to trust themselves and build--have, of course, of course, the core responsibilities that they have--but entrust them to, to do more with themselves. And with the business, I think, you know, all those things kind of go into Lightward. And it's just an ongoing experiment what what we can do with this mentality of anything is possible, literally from like a podcast that we have to like, you know, a random app that Isaac built two years ago, his second app that he built on the Shopify platform that enables other creators to create on top of Shopify, and it's like doing really well already. All of that is just with the core kind of motivation to produce more and to produce more health for not only the systems at play, but also the people at play and environments.
Rachel Kobus 5:48
Great. So. And obviously, it takes a team. So you touched a little bit on your employees. So what's it like to build this sort of company? What's it like to look for those specific team members? I have to brag for you. You said you have a small but mighty team, but they've been with you for six plus years now. And I mean, that's strong retention, you don't see that a lot, especially small businesses, it's a lot of risks. What do you do?
Abe Lopez Bowen 6:15
If we were actually recording a podcast episode with a product --Product Manager from Shopify, actually, who oversees kind of the App Store in Shopify? And he was like, it's actually really hard to create an environment where, especially in tech, where people stay for more than two years. So how do you do that? And, you know, we started Isaac, my husband, on the tech side, had two employees for the first couple years being in business. And he did that by just really an honest conversation about where the company was going, and not not any promises, but he promised to, to keep the experiment alive and well, and with what he was building. So, you know, we've had two employees, we started with two employees, and they actually, non-traditionally started with us. So they were in transition with their own careers and lives, like one of them was coming back from Spain. He was teaching abroad, and he was like, Well, I have coding background, like, what can I do? Another person had customer service background, but didn't have a lot of coding background, but he didn't want to, he wanted to get into more coding and code meets customer service. So we were like, hey, as this grows, we're going to actually pay you, we're not going to start you full time, we're actually going to start you off with like, a couple hours a week. And as the company grows, then your salary and then your time is going to grow, which is like actually really non traditional, because a lot of people are, you know, looking for a full time job, which then
Rachel Kobus 7:48
-- like, this is a true experiment, like, like you said, from the get go.
Abe Lopez Bowen 7:52
And then and then the pandemic hit. So that was like, for many years. So our oldest teammate, is, has been on for six plus years. And then the second one, five plus years, but then the pandemic hit, and it was actually us for we were at a team retreat in New Zealand. And because we again, we were like, why not take a little team retreat to New Zealand and enjoy nature and each other. And then, you know, because everything went online, the company really, really skyrocketed on the tech side. And now we have 10 people on payroll. So we went from four to 10 in like about a year, and some of them, you know, came on through through connections that we had actually all them except for one, there's one person who used the one of Isaac's product for his own business, he was CTO of a publicly traded company in Canada. And he used one of Isaac's app for their store for their online storefront. And he was like, Hey, I'm looking for some just kind of extra side work like just for, you know, his brain, his brain happiness, like you wanted to have some extra projects. And then he like slowly transitioned full time, he left his full time job as a CTO to come on the Lightward team. And that like, you know, so I'm saying all this because it's we don't really hire traditionally we are --we hire a lot of people we know and everyone's like, don't work with your friends, but we're actually really emotionally intelligent for our age, I believe. And also like, we set the groundwork, and we set the stage for high trust, high communication, high, just kind of vulnerability with each other, like one of our biggest core values and actually on every job, kind of application or kind of job. What's it called? Description The word description? Yes, job description, is like your health is number one. It's not about the business first. It's about like, if your health is not good, then what are you going to bring? So like your top priorities, your own health and Then comes the business. So I think I think that's really kind of says a lot about what we value here and what we're building. Because when you have healthy people, and of course not, everything's perfect. But honestly, in the last like, six or seven years, as you know, as ever since we started having people on our payroll, there hasn't everyone's like, yeah, you go through, up and down. But like, in our experience, like the lowest of lows was just like, hey, I think, actually, I'm gonna, I'm gonna pause myself here. Isaac, my husband started a thread in our Slack channel recently, and he said, What did you need to unlearn coming on to Lightward team? And starting on Lightward team, what did you need to unlearn about work? And a lot of people were like, Oh, that I don't need to dread Mondays, or that I can actually be trusted to take off time in the middle of the day to walk my dog and not feel like I'm on the clock. Or that actually, my my health is the number one importance and like, we figured out a way to make that work. And a lot of people had to undo these, like, kind of traumatic work experiences was where they were everyone says, like, oh, yeah, you are trusted. But like, No, you you really aren't. And I think it's really fascinating the environment that we're creating, because it's all an experiment, like, like we keep on talking about, but so far, it's working. And it's working really well.
Rachel Kobus 11:22
Well, that's how good results happen. You have to keep experimenting with them. So this sounds like a great experiment. And like I said, it's, I want to say this for everyone listening to is the foundation is you stick to your values you you set very unique values, like we hear the same values of trustworthiness and openness. But to have health as a number one value, you don't hear that very often. And a business that maybe isn't very like stereotypically health focused like a fitness center or something like that. So the fact that your company has this as its number one value is just very, I don't want to say maybe appealing, but experimental, eye-opening something that hopefully other businesses can pick up on as well, too, because, like you said, high retention means that you know, happy employees. So I think you're doing a great job with Lightward and the name itself just speaks wonders Lightward to me, in my mind, when I read about both you and Isaac is onward and upward, keep going, keep trying, keep doing new things. That's what you're doing.
Abe Lopez Bowen 12:22
Absolutely. And I'm going to read a part of the job description of a recent role that we just hired. The title is being Lightward. The bits in the section apply to all lightweight employees, your responsibilities, these are the living things that I'm looking for you to hold to monitor to understand and to sustainably expand. Number one, your health as determined by you informed by all the ways you know yourself. Number two, your relationship to everyone on the team as determined by you informed by all the ways you're connected. Number three, our collective relationship to the world as determined by you informed by everything. And I think what we do, that I'm really proud of is we actually seek to understand what's actually really happening because we can't we can't assume that we know our employees what's going on in their minds unless we give them a space to communicate it. And then we do fun work from there, which I get really excited because we have a really awesome team that we're, you know, allows us you know, the tech side of the business actually funds the other parts. So we have a podcast that we produce. Every week, we just interviewed the CEO and co founder of Whole 30. Her episodes coming out next week, another New York Times bestselling author, Jedediah Jenkins, he's the week after that. Lawyers, artists, CEOs, it's really cool to explore what it means to be alive for different people so that that's what we're doing. I have a photography, arm of Lightward. And I have a coaching arm. So I coach clients, I'm an empowerment coach. And then also we have a membership community focused on empowered living, and we're having our kind of first in person retreat in the fall. Hopefully, everything goes well with COVID. But yeah, so there's so many things alive and in motion. And going back to health, you know, the 10th person who we hired on our team on our payroll was is a fitness and wellness expert. So like literally we spent we're spending money that we could hire a developer or someone else and we are focused on making the team healthy and being a resource for not only me and Isaac but our team for free, you know, coaching, fitness and nutrition and all this stuff too because why not do that if we have an opportunity to ground ourselves in health.
Rachel Kobus 14:43
I love it. So another part about you know, when you're doing experiments is is taking risks. So do you have any thoughts whether it's personally I know just from following you on social media and reading through Lightward's bios of yourself, but You've taken risks to get here to being an entrepreneur isn't just happens overnight and look at us being successful and healthy like this takes time and effort and whether that's personally or professionally. So can you talk about any risks that you've taken? Or how you how you get through those challenging moments? Maybe that's happened as a small business as an entrepreneur?
Abe Lopez Bowen 15:22
Yeah. You know, I think the things that keep on coming to my mind when you're asking this question is just like being value driven. And that's like a cliche answer, but like, what is driving, like my actions and what we're building? Again, it's trust. Again, it's like believing that this can work. And that's surrounding myself with people and experiences that are going to help us achieve more and not and not like, honestly, being really picky with the things that you do. I think I saw I saw a quote recently like, the, the more you heal, the more picky you get, because your kind of standard of what you could take on before is actually different when you're actually strong enough to say no, and there's a lot of no's that you need to say, and there's a lot of yeses that you can say. But I think being like really firm in your, in your no's, as well as your yeses are super important. And taking risks like I think, to be honest with you, I don't think that when I hear the word risk, none of this seems like a risk because I'm so grounded in like, what is possible and what like I moved to Denver right after Illinois State a year after I graduated Illinois State and I literally graduate, I graduated, did a job at Target for a year. And then I was like, I don't want to do this. I remember calling Larry Dietz, like, in my office at Target, like crying, I was crying. I'm like, Larry, I did. I did not graduate from ISU to hate my life, like what is going on. And he was like, he just helped get me through that moment.
Rachel Kobus 16:55
Of course, um, that's what he's there for.
Abe Lopez Bowen 16:56
Yeah, he's so amazing. Um, but I think like, I packed up my car and moved to Denver, for love for an ex, right. And I think like, I opened up that I literally packed up my car and moved and had a serving job, but then serving job lined up and then literally, like, two or three days before I was going to move to Denver, I actually got a call from a big nonprofit in Denver, and I was their first out of state hire, I got a job there. And I think like, I think when you follow what's right for you, I think that that kind of produces momentum that no one can stop. And I think that's really has inspired me along the way to continue saying yes to the things that feel good to me. And I mean, as that translate to what we're doing in Lightward, all the things that we're doing feels really, really good to us, which then gives us momentum. So that way, when we do have roadblocks, or situations that come up that need, you know, more more mind work to get through or whatever, then we have the momentum to do it. So I don't I don't really think if I'm being honest, I don't like I think it takes a lot of work and a lot of intention. And also like we haven't risked things that we weren't comfortable with, like, losing. Ifthat makes sense.
Rachel Kobus 17:00
It makes perfect sense. That is a great way to put it. You know what I mean? Different way to put it, I like it. Yeah, you for sharing that. So I always have to ask this question, too. And sharing because I know we do have something in common from Illinois State is that we both were on homecoming court during our respective years. I know I saw. I know I saw I was so happy when you said yes to doing this because I remember being on court in 2010 This is dating us too. So but then being able to sit on the judging side of it and see Abe come through. And let's just say after rocking his interview, and being one of the most respected students, I feel like in the student body when you were here, got to be Homecoming King too. So that's a great memory for me for homecoming court. I know you share that. Being involved in that capacity, but for all of maybe our future Redbirds listing today too, how else I would assume and hope ISU has helped drive you and your entrepreneurship. I know your school of communication background obviously just speaking with you and that has helped you with your empowerment your life coaching, but what else has ISU done for you do you believe?
Abe Lopez Bowen 19:27
Yeah, I I'm gonna kind of piggyback off of the homecoming real quick. I think what was really cool about it is you know, getting to college wasn't like easy peasy for me. It was like I was I needed to always fight to like be in the honors classes. I literally when I was 14 convinced my guidance counselor that I belonged in honors classes because my tests, my standardized tests didn't align with that. And I've always been this person that like if I want if I saw something that I want to chase after it, even if I didn't have a lot of people around me to kind of benchmark myself out off of I'm a Latino, I'm you know, first generation grads, I mean first generation college student. And I think the homecoming to me that time I remember calling my old Professor Jennifer McDade. And it was the Sunday before homecoming weekend, I was on homecoming court. And I said, I have a job interview for the sales position in Chicago on Friday, the night of the hoops contest or whatever, where they would, where they would announce king and queen. And she was like a like, think about if that job was not in downtown Chicago, because at the time I was like, this is in downtown Chicago. It's super cool. And I was like, this is all I've been wanting my whole life. She's like, take the job, take Chicago out of the job, like, Would you like this job? And I'm like, no, like, none of it seems exciting to me. She's like Abe you literally have spent three years investing in Illinois State. And this has been your life like this is your week. Enjoy it, there are going to be a lot of job offers that come to you. So I think you should do it. And I did and I stayed for the week and I won but it was it was really cool. Because it was just like this. I think to answer your question, I think it prepared me to one Illinois State prepared me for a life that was committed to one just like excellence like we can do anything I was a student leader at. I was bringing LMFAO or like part of bringing the LF LMFAO when I was 20 to campus or like hosting Herman Boone when I was 18. The coach from Remember The Titans Yeah, through my involvement with university program board. I was like who like this little 18 year old me with my advisor Kaitlyn friends, like we were hosting this like Mega superstar basically, I think I think Illinois State just really taught me that things are possible. And I think that's what, that's why the kind of jarring experience post-college of like being in an environment that was not for me, coming from an environment that really was for me, I was like, no, like, I can actually build a life where, where the environment is actually cultivating the sense of like, one safety for me to actually be who I am. And then two like, you know, kind of sharpened me as a leader and a person. And now like, now, I honestly, if I were to be talking to my 2012 self when I graduated, like, I wouldn't even I wouldn't believe what I've done and what I've experienced, which is really cool. And we're only just I feel like we're only just beginning I was--we were literally having lunch a bit ago. And I was like, you know, I've aged really well since you know, college in terms of like, not just my luck, I've lost weight, and I've become a lot healthier, but also just how much of the world I've seen and how many people I've been able to connect with and products I've been able to do. It's all just, I'm so grateful. And I'm so just like excited about what's what's to come.
Rachel Kobus 22:46
I'm excited for you about what's to come because I think a lot of great things are going to come for you are going to come for your company, we are excited to have you as a Redbird alum a of everything, your excitement, your passion, your dedication back to Illinois State, it's amazing, you're very much, you know, as we looked at your hashtag robber proud, you could put a face to it Abe Lopez Bowen definitely one of those people's. So thank you. So with that. I guess if there's anything else you want to add to our time together, I again, I appreciate speaking with you your your journey so far. And like you said, it's a journey that's going to continue for many, many years. But anything else you'd like to add talk about?
Abe Lopez Bowen 23:27
No, I think I think just, you know, as an encouragement to anyone listening, whether you're a student or even in even in the business world, I I've been able to meet with, you know, heart forward entrepreneurs and heart-forward CEOs and artists and lawyers through you know, not just our, you know, professional endeavors, but also just, you know, through the communities we run run in, and I think that there, there are things like being shaken up in the world, which is like really exciting to be a part of, and I think that if, if you are curious about that kind of direction of, of building businesses and projects and teams in a heart forward way, like there's so much there's so many resources out there and so many people who are actually pursuing this not just studying this, but actually making millions of dollars doing this. And I think that there it's not just like I saw something online the other day, like soft skills were quote, unquote, soft skills were actually like, viewed as not strong back in the day. But I think like, in the in the future of business and entrepreneurship, we're gonna need to be really human, human, human focused, and not just like cookie cutter human focus, like, actually, what does it mean to produce environments where people can feel safe and encouraged and empowered to be their best selves, so that way the product or whatever we're building can be its best self. So, you know, I'm really excited about that. And please feel free to reach out if you want to connect with that Lightward.com We're doing a lot of cool things and we'd love to connect
Rachel Kobus 25:07
That was 2012 alum Abe Lopez Bowen and we thank him for sharing his story with us today. Tune in next time to Redbird Buzz for more stories from beyond the quad.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai