Today we’d like to introduce you to Elisa Estrera.
Elisa, we appreciate you taking the time to share your story with us today. Where does your story begin?
I always wanted to be a freestyle dancer. At three years old, I watched my older brother do head spins on a flattened cardboard box in our living room. His b-boying was my first introduction to the world of hip hop. Seeing him hear a song for the first time, but somehow able to react and manipulate his body to perfectly compliment the music…That’s a superpower! And it filled me with so much wonder and awe.
How did break dancers look light as a feather? How did they throw themselves into a one-handed pose in half a second? How does it look like the music is moving them like a puppet on strings? My 3-year-old brain didn’t have the vocabulary to know that I was so captivated by their joy in being so raw, so free, so in flow.
I dabbled in break dancing and other street dances in high school and college. I even joined a professional dance company while attending UC Berkeley. However, I didn’t have the confidence to pursue dance full-time. After graduating, I went the “safe” route of joining a tech startup in San Francisco that specialized in artificial intelligence.
It was such a young company and no one knew what AI was back in 2008 or knew the potential it harnessed (AKA how ChatGPT and SIRI are being used today). Our product was constantly changing as we learned what was and wasn’t working for our clients. It felt like the market kept changing the song on us. Miraculously, the startup was acquired and I was ready for something new. Working in SF tech was like listening to the same EDM beat over and over again for five years straight. Day in, day out of grinding and chugging energy drinks.
After the startup was acquired, I became an entrepreneur because I wanted to dance to the beat of my own drum. Different projects, teammates, clients and collaborators have come and gone over the years dancing in and out of my life. Some dance partners I liked more than others, but I always came away knowing more about myself, the people I want in my life, and the life I want to live. I had the space to find my style and evolved from a product manager to chief of operations, business consultant, and now a brand consultant and serial entrepreneur.
It took me until I was yesterday years old to realize that I was freestyling this whole time. I don’t regret leaving dance anymore. I love being an entrepreneur and all the experiences and people I’ve met along the way. I love that I discovered different talents and developed different skills that I may not have if I pursued dance earlier.
Spoiler alert: life is the ultimate freestyle dance. What I really craved was freedom and flow. Freestyle dancing is my doorway to that flow state where time, labels, and expectations don’t exist. It’s a feeling of oneness with your soul and how it wants to express itself. That’s my definition of freedom.
However, dreams don’t die. Deep down inside I still wanted to dance. Dancing in my room in the dark wasn’t really cutting it anymore. Fate has a funny sense of humor and I don’t believe in coincidences. Earlier this year, I made it a goal to take dance seriously and came upon an opportunity to enter a freestyle dance competition. Why now after 15 years of a dance hiatus? Well better now than after 20 or 30 years.
I entered the competition and didn’t get past the first round, but I felt like a champion. The insecurities about dance that built up over the years were vaporized (for the most part). I’ve designed a life where I now have the freedom to both dances and be an entrepreneur. The big AHA! was that my consulting work began to thrive the more I danced. Maybe because this lost part of me was re-integrated, and I was whole again. Plus, you can’t spell abundance without “dance”.
After I reluctantly shared on Instagram that I joined a freestyle competition, so many people reached out and opened up about their fears, hopes and dreams. Some were younger than me, and they felt like it was too late. They’re not even 30 years old! It’s never too late, and this is coming from someone who took 15 years off and is about to turn 38.
This firmed my resolve to keep following my dreams, to keep freestyling, to give myself permission to change and evolve, and to let myself be seen in the process. This kind of vulnerability is terrifying but so necessary so that the people I care about have the courage to do the same. And then they get to inspire others creating an amazing ripple of freedom and flow throughout society.
We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
I had so many opportunities to learn how to b-girl and other street styles, but I resisted so hard. Maybe it was because I was raised to believe that girls don’t do that. Or that Filipinas are to be “mahinhin” which is Tagalog for meek and mild. Or that it was wasteful to spend so much time on a hobby that didn’t vibe with my family’s immigrant mentality of “get good grades in school so you can get a stable job, preferably in the medical field”.
Freestyle dancing didn’t put food on their table so why would it be any different for me? Instead, I became the b-boy’s girlfriend. It was close enough to the action but not too close to raise suspicion from my family or elicit guilt from wanting to do something so “trivial”.
I finally joined a dance company while in college because it was part-time and easy to hide from my family since I was living far away. There would be paid gigs and opportunities to teach dance classes and get into an agency. Hallelujah, I was chosen to be in the Black Eyed Peas’ “Bebot” music videos. My first professional gig and one of the first groups that had a Filipino artist. I made it! But, no…
I thought being in the music video would be proof that dancing was viable, but the demons of doubt had grown too strong over the years. They said, “This gig is a fluke, and something like this won’t ever happen again”. I quit the dance company soon after the music video came out. The demons won.
I buried my desire to dance with working. Sound familiar, anyone? I busied myself working 60+ hours each week in the startup, my first job out of college, hoping we’d get acquired. Then I could retire and do whatever I want. We were acquired, but the payout wasn’t enough to retire. I was burnt out and fat from not getting the exercise I was used to.
This pattern continued into my early years of being an entrepreneur. The same thoughts on repeat since I was 25 years old: I’m too old, I’m an adult, I’m a businesswoman who was more important things to do, I don’t have time for this. Instead, I went to yoga and qigong to help manage stress. It felt good to move like I was flowing and dancing. Then I learned aerial silks and how to surf because it also felt like a dance. No matter how hard I tried to bury the desire to dance, it kept popping up. I was stubborn and in so much denial. Sorry to all the people that have been encouraging me over the years to dance who I most likely snapped at.
Slowly, over the past three years, I let myself dance more. It started at home, then moved to a dance class, and then an all-female freestyle dance competition. I tried talking myself out of entering the competition for a whole month leading up to it, but the pain of not doing it would’ve been far greater than any humiliation.
The humiliation of being too old? The girls competing were half my age. I could’ve been their mom! The humiliation of failing? I didn’t pass the first round. Being publicly humiliated? Didn’t happen. It was the safest and most supportive environment I could’ve imagined. And I wasn’t the oldest woman to enter!
Turns out all these fears were just in my head. Plus, I finally shut down the biggest lie that I’ve been telling myself: I don’t have the time to dance and get better. I just had to make it a priority. It also helps that I have amazing friends who prove that there is time to dance, to get better and also be other parts of themselves whether a parent, employee, or entrepreneur.
We’ve been impressed with Gratefruit, Inc., but for folks who might not be as familiar, what can you share with them about what you do and what sets you apart from others?
I founded Gratefruit – a brand and business strategy consultancy – back in 2018 to collaborate with as many businesses as possible. I launched my first business, a microfinance startup, and 2-years later, a premium dairy brand, both in the Philippines. That’s when my addiction to launching new ventures, products and services started. It was the creative freedom I craved ever since leaving a tech job where there was so much bureaucracy that nothing new was launched in a year. At this point, I’ve helped launch over 30 digital products, services and brands.
I get to work with the most amazing small businesses and solopreneurs. They come to me overwhelmed. They know that something has to change in their business to grow, but they don’t know which is the next best step. They have millions of ideas for how to make their business more profitable. They research many experts who tell them conflicting things about how to scale. Strategic thinking and empathy are my superpower according to the Gallup Strengths Finder, and I use them every day to identify what’s really blocking my clients from thriving. I unearth the real problem underneath their problem.
My clients come saying they want to redo their website because it’s old and needs new content. In between the lines, they’re telling me: We’ve changed so much since we started and we kind of lost our way in who we are and who we want to be. In that case, we create a new brand strategy to articulate a new identity that’s more aligned with their values and how they do business. Another client says they need more organization and want to implement a better system to handle more clients. In reality, this client was too attached to an audience that they could no longer serve and needed to let go so they could focus. Solopreneurs launching a new venture are more straightforward. Most need help because they have a fear of uncertainty, rejection, etc…and need step-by-step guidance as they come to believe that their service is worth paying for.
Sure business can make you money, but its real value is that it invites you to overcome your fears and unlock your greater potential as a human being. While the goal is to help my clients make more money, the real work is in helping them overcome their mental and emotional resistances so they continue to enjoy their business, enjoy their lives AND make money. I’m not willing to compromise the quality of my life for success in business, so I can’t expect my clients to do the same.
It’s such an honor to work with my clients because of how willing they are to do the inner work that most people run screaming away from. They trust that I’m a safe space, and that is really the highest honor. I’m not a business coach though. I’m more like a trainer. A coach will help you find your blind spots and suggest what you need to work on like time management. As the trainer, I help you apply what you take away from your coach. If time management is your issue, I help identify the high-priority areas in your business where you might need to outsource and help you process the mental blocks that keep you from letting go of that control.
At the end of the day, we’re all people doing business with other people so it would be a big mistake if I only looked at the business and ignored what’s going on with the person behind it. I call myself a brand and business strategist because I’m all about building from a strong foundation. The brand speaks to your business’ identity and identity is the foundation that dictates how you run your business and who you want to do business with.
I’m in the business of making sure that your business identity is in alignment with your personal identity so I draw from a lot of modalities – coaching, psychology, Eastern philosophy, personality tests, dance – to make that happen. I don’t think my process for creating a brand is complicated or entirely original. However, what I’m most proud of is that my clients always feel truly seen, heard, safe, and accepted for who they are.
The best way to start working with me is through a brand audit. We don’t know what we don’t know, and usually, the problem is too close for us to see. For example: I do branding, but I’ll go to someone else to help with my brand because I need a fresh perspective and support. A brand audit can be confronting because it shines a light on where we can be doing better and why we’re not. However, I make sure to help you see that whatever we find in the brand audit is the doorway to a greater potential for you and your business. And I’ll gladly be there to help you step through that doorway.
We’d love to hear about any fond memories you have from when you were growing up?
One of my favorite childhood memories was a group project for English class in my senior year of high school. English was my least favorite subject, and I also hated group projects until I made it to Mr. Varieur’s class. He was the cool teacher that could motivate kids with senioritis to enjoy writing essays by coming up with fun topics.
Each group had to come up with their own philosophy and then present it to the class. I forgot how we were assigned groups, but it was fate. We started talking about conspiracies, then odd coincidences and unlikely probabilities. I felt so seen that other people had occultist thoughts like me.
At some point, we all agreed that our philosophy would be called “Parallelism”. It described how we are all connected and that we can see proof of these connections in patterns that repeat across unrelated things. Our favorite example was the golden ratio: this value appears in the Vitruvian Man by Leonardo Da Vinci, as well as the spiral of a Romanesco cauliflower. How mind-blowing is it that the proportions of man could parallel a vegetable. That’s just the tip of the iceberg; we went really deep in our discussions.
20 years after high school, it blows my mind to see that this way of thinking had always been in me. Personality tests helped me find the words to describe my thinking style and aptitude, but I thought this was something I picked up from working and my environment. I realize now that this is my natural programming and how we’re each so unique and special coming into this world with specific gifts.
This memory was one of many breadcrumbs that led me to a career where I get to use this gift of seeing the connections and parallels within people, their businesses and beyond.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.gratefruit.com
- Instagram: @litz_bitz
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/estrera/
Image Credits
Bright Beginnings Pediatric Services Stowell Learning Centers, Take the Stone Out of the Shoe book launch Dancing Portrait by Alana Bernstein @thatsbubby Entrepinayship Retreat by Lyka Gozon @lykscreatives My Dang Agent realtor Latinas in Hollywood at Google Brand audit workshop at WeWork Working the Calaboo Dairyard booth
