Career Change at 40, Why Not?
At 40, at the beginning of COVID, with nothing in savings and it's like you sink or freaking swim. -Erin Pierson-Mills
Circa 2000
Apprehensively she tiptoed around the hospital curtain outfitted in her leopard print pencil skirt and chunk heels at 5 months pregnant clutching a dainty bouquet of wildflowers. Erin Pierson-Mills is not one to admit when she’s wrong, but it was written all over her face. We both burst out laughing when our eyes met. Her “I wish at least your boobs hurt!” and “You didn’t feel sick at all again today?” all melted away. She had been secretly angry with me for months due to the fact that my life calling should have been surrogate. For whatever reason, pregnancies were fairly easy for me.
Several months before, after a less-than-a-year performance stint in Biloxi, Mississippi at the Beau Rivage hotel/casino, my husband (at the time) and I high tailed it back to Las Vegas, Nevada. Our good friends Erin and Craig Mills did not hesitate to invite us to live with them until we could get squared away with a place of our own. Of course her and I both ended up pregnant at the same time, with Erin about a month ahead of me. She endured several months of malicious morning sickness. While day in and day out she witnessed me bouncing on with my life as though nothing had changed. My pregnancy was going along like a charm. No pains, no sickness, no symptoms of any kind. So when that day came when it felt like someone was continually twisting a knife into the lower right side of my abdomen, she was thrilled! For obvious reasons I could not keep anything down. Not even water - what was this? At 4 months along, morning sickness was supposed to be over. But I never had any morning sickness, so I didn’t know the difference. I remember the last thing she said to me before going to bed was, “It’s just a little morning sickness, get over it.”
My husband came home from his show on the Las Vegas strip around midnight. He took one look at my ghostly white face and called the doctor. I was rushed in for an appendectomy surgery where my appendix was removed immediately. The hospital staff took all precautions of protecting my little bun in the oven through it all. When Erin came to visit me in the hospital, she and I had a good laugh and chatted about how fragile life is.
Erin and I gave birth to our girls 9 days apart that August, with my daughter coming a month early. To say we know each other…hell we’ve been through it - together. She nursed me through my divorce (3 children and 10 years after the appendectomy) and I’m fun for girls night out, so I’m guessing that’s what she gets from me! Now we are heading into our Second Half together, but with our own unique styles.
True Las Vegas Native
Erin: But let's really talk about it. Like how long have we known each other? It's actually tragic. We knew each other in the first half. So, I was a 19 year old bride when our husbands knew each other, and we met, and so, I would say that you were my first adult married friend. So many years ago, 26 years basically. So that's why I think this is kind of exciting, actually.
I was born and raised here in Las Vegas with really cool ties. I’d love to dive in and share that my parents were raised and working for the mafia and our family having a tennis club. I come from a family of entrepreneurs. So it's been very few and far between that I have actually worked for other people.
So I worked for the family business for over 22 years, which was formerly known as the Las Vegas Racquet Club until the 1980’s. It's now known as the Secret Garden. I was the wedding coordinator and office manager, and in the middle of all that, 11 years as the actual events DJ.
So, through COVID and not wanting to work with the family anymore, it's kind of like a midlife crisis. I don't know. I don't think I would call it that. It was just like Pinterest was born and Erin tapped out. And so my grandparents had a lot of properties to sell. They said, get your real estate license. You're smart. It'll be fun. Here I am.
Carami: Do you have any influences in your first half that you view as positive, helpful, supportive, or even on the other side, any negative or heavy?
Erin: Family and family, working for family and not working for family.
Carami: You have an amazing family by the way. Love them.
Erin: So my mom is like Mary Poppins. So no matter, I mean no matter what, no freaking matter what….everything is wonderful. And she is so nice. Like she's going boop - directly to heaven. Mrs. Mary Sunshine Hopkins. Yeah, so positive influences and certainly my mother-in-law too. They're just the nicest, happiest people on the planet. They did the law of attraction before they knew what it was.
Negative, I just think, are just toxic people that will never get out of our heads. So it's the law of attraction. If you're positive, you're just going to attract that your whole life. If you're negative, you're going to attract that your whole life. So being non specific, there's my answer.
Carami: And speaking of the law of attraction you are always, always positive. You don't want anything negative around you, I notice.
Erin: I know. I know. Everybody's disgusted. I was like, I could be an angry cheerleader, but I'm definitely like a cheerleader most of the time.
Because if you're just going to dwell on a law of attraction, you're just going to bring that into your life. So, my staff is trained, my family's trained, everybody's just trained. You have to start with gratitude. And we were just on a trip to Disneyland, and I'm over tipping the people that don't normally get tipped, like the shuttle driver. My kids were like, ‘What are you doing? That's my churro money.’ And I was like, ‘You know at the beginning of the day, you give it away.’ You have to give compliments, give a good attitude, give money, you know, depending on your situation. The more you give away, the more you're going to get.
At the beginning of the day, you give it away. You have to give compliments, give a good attitude, give money, you know, depending on your situation. The more you give away, the more you're going to get. -Erin Pierson Mills
Career Change at 40
Carami: So in my blog I reveal why I call this my Second Half. I realized that both of my grandmothers passed at age 94.
Erin: She did some math. Ha ha.
Carami: I looked at myself. I was 47. I was half of 94. And I thought, wow, I possibly have a whole other half of my life to live. And so, Second Half.
Erin: And so, Second Half. We're not crawling toward like the crypt keeper. Let's just dispel that. I think I'm prettier, smarter, and I have eyebrows. Thank you, microblading. I think we get better looking.
Carami: Side note: you just posted a picture on social media as a baby. And the caption was something like: See, I was born with no eyebrows. Ha ha.
Erin: No hair. This is the only hair I have. I look like my dad without makeup on. I look like a dude. Like, when my husband married me my hair was back and I was literally a cone head. That is love. That is love.
Carami: She has the most gorgeous red hair, by the way. Oh my gosh. Okay. So for me, that was my Second Half description. And it's going to be different for everybody.
Erin: And you call it your freshman year.
Carami: Yeah.
Erin: So I kind of want to drill down on that. I literally at 40 changed my career. COVID did nudge me directly out of the wedding arena. But I was ready to go. I got my real estate license and then spent one year with the boutique brokerage really not learning anything. Still moving out of the wedding venue, but really like COVID, it was like well, sink or swim girl. Get the heck out there. So I was like a kindergartner, there's no freshman, nothing, definitely kindergartner. Brand new career at 40 years old. And so maybe six years later. Okay, maybe I'm in junior high now.
Carami: Right, right.
Erin: I don't know. I could be like Doogie Howser because I did really well. So maybe I'm in college. Do you know who Doogie Howser is?
Carami: I do. Ha ha. The 16-year-old doctor on TV?
Erin: Yeah. I’m one of those. Ha ha.
Carami: But okay, so I wanted to have this conversation because I feel like, especially women, kind of drop off the planet or drop off the cliff if they get done with their first career or wrap up raising kids or something like that. And so that's why I love this Second Half conversation because here you are being bold. You started this new career. As a real estate agent and boom.
Erin: At 40, at the beginning of COVID with nothing in savings and it's like you sink or freaking swim. Do you know what I'm saying? I loved that wedding venue for so many years, like 25 years.
I was already very conditioned with selling weddings. I didn't like to call it a salesperson because they're coming to me and we were creating something. So it's sort of the same thing with real estate. They're coming to me and we are finding, we're creating something major, major milestones in people's lives. So selling the biggest amount of one day of your life was an easy transition to the biggest purchase of your life.
So Ryan Serhant said it best. Love that man. That is the name of my emotionally supportive fish in my office, Mr. Ryan Serhant. You go through seven emotional states when you actually go through a major purchase in life. And I feel like going from weddings to real estate was more helpful because I can realize what you're going through and then try to help you before you get manic. So like buying a Rolex or like buying a car you will go through seven emotional states whether it's within an hour or like a 30 day escrow.
Carami: What are you currently focusing on now in your career or personal life?
Erin: Personally, we had our two kids almost nine years apart. So our second one was a blessing. We didn't know we could have another one. So I do have two kids. One's married and out of the house and I have one left at home. He's in high school.
I feel like I want to focus on him. Oh my gosh. I only have three and a half years with him. So I had my daughter forever and now I think the focus is also on me. I love social media. My wedding venue was the first one on Facebook after that Super Bowl when they advertised. I thought, what is this?! So I've been on social media since the birth of social media. I'm a good cheerleader. I'm a good trainer. And so we are growing, and I hate to use the word team, but we're growing our girth of real estate professionals.
So to me, it's podcasting, YouTube. That's my trajectory for the next few years. I never call it a goal. It is a plan, ma'am. Goals never get attained. Plans, you actually have to make a plan to get to the end. Your goal can't be, like, climbing Mount Everest. You gotta have a plan.
Carami: Where do you see yourself going in your Second Half?
Erin: Let's talk about how we have older parents and how we have to transition at our age to taking care of older parents or older grandparents. So mine and my husband's goal is to actually focus on the future and alleviate that stress for my kids. So we want to be independent like our parents are now.
Where are we going to retire? What are we going to do? So retirement is on my, on my docket, because at 40 going into a new career, I needed to have an exit plan. With a family job, I didn't have 401ks. I didn’t have retirement and stuff like that. So it’s been like balls to the wall, 15 years of let's build it up.
That's why I chose my current company because of stock options. You have to be smart when you're starting over. I just have the best of both worlds because my kids are older now. I don't have to deal with babies, it’s more like get on the bus, kid, see you later. He's like 6 '2 he'll be fine.
Carami: One thing you said, the reason why you chose your company, what company is that?
Erin: So I went with EXP Realty, I was a boutique brokerage and honestly, it was a boys club. It was very aggressive and they either love to hate me or hate to love me. And it was all those things. I wasn't getting any help from anybody because they felt I was direct competition. And so moving over to a company where literally the motto is community over competition, was a breath of fresh air. When you really think about it, if there's 14,000 agents in Las Vegas, but there's millions and millions and millions of homes, there's one for everybody.
So helping somebody, like I said, you start the day with giving it away, you help somebody, it's helping you tenfold. Anyway, I went to EXP Realty because of the stock options and then if you help people, my company actually pays me to help people. So, there you go.
Erin’s Adieu
🔹The world needs to realize that those in their Second Half are…funnier, richer, prettier, viable, we have the wisdom and more patience hopefully.
🔹I'd like to tell everyone in their first half to…don’t use Postmates, don’t order your food and have it delivered. If you want a Slurpee, get in your damn car and go get one. Save your money for something valuable like real estate.
🔹Hands down in my second half I will…surround myself with amazing people and try to better other people’s lives.
Thank you to my one of a kind girl, Erin Pierson Mills. My hope is that at least one person can resonate with her story today. I love this community. Thank you for all your support!!!
💙Carami and Erin
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Erin Pierson-Mills is a current Rockstar Realtor here in Las Vegas, coined as "Your Favorite Redhead Realtor LV". Her passion is not only in real estate, but community service conjoined with her family's rescue ranch animal foundation at McKee Ranch and reviewing local coffee shops and food venues around the valley. Born and raised here, she's using her platforms to promote the beauty and excitement that Las Vegas and the surrounding areas have to offer! Her business is building to elevate and educate realtors across the United States with a positive attitude centered around education and the Law of Attraction.
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