Nicole Lux-Ritchie
Technology Guide
As a technology guide, productivity consultant, and speaker I’ve enjoyed over two decades of working with small businesses, solopreneurs, and tech-shy individuals to start where they are, use what they have, and do what they can to build sustainable businesses and implement technology best practices.
Leveraging my business experience from owning and operating several businesses (brick and mortar, and online), I help my clients across multiple industries build a foundation of digital office tools (email, files, contacts, and calendars) that supports their creativity and productivity. In small groups and VIP coaching, we co-create a balance of structure and flow that liberates my clients to focus on what they do best and not be buried by inefficient activities or systems anymore.
It is my joy to guide my clients as they gain the technical skills to grow their businesses and realize their vision. Clients often experience operational and emotional shifts that start by feeling overwhelmed and bullied by their technology to a feeling of freedom and confidence about how to use their technology. My goal is to help clients become proficient and confident in harnessing technology’s power to do what they do best!
For those of you who need more ease in how you deal with your Digital Office, I would love to chat with you.
Don’t let your Technology Bully You!
The Luxcentric Why
In 2005 my grandmother asked me to teach her how to use the computer. Together we developed a computer training curriculum for beginning computer users and she told me to “go do this for other people”.
My grandmother was 80 when we began our work together. She was brave, curious, and always engaged in learning. It is because of her (in a variety of ways) that I am doing what I can to help anyone, no matter their technological skill, get control of their technology situation. She encouraged me to share my ability to take complex topics and break them down into simple steps using normal language.
She gained Heaven in June of 2016 at age 92 and even at the end of her life, she was able to stay connected to her people, follow her interests and passions online, and do the everyday things that are much easier with access to the online world. I am extremely grateful that she allowed me to help her achieve that ability, and to solidify my knowledge and confidence that you are never too old to learn a new skill.
About the Luxcentric Business
They say your business is your baby. From pregnancy (the early planning stages) to graduation (when it must stand on its own), and beyond, you will be wildly surprised where the journey takes you.
In the beginning, Luxcentric started with a variety of sputterings and miscarriages and a desperate desire to create something that would help support my family as I cared for my very human babies.
I am not from the “corporate” world, I didn’t leave a high-paying job to start a brave new venture. I tinkered and failed, and got up and tried again. Before even starting Luxcentric I began several “bootstrap businesses” (AKA started a business without investing dollars). These all came with varying degrees of invaluable education. It has taken a long time, but Luxcentric grows stronger and more viable every year.
“She wasn’t where she had been,
She wasn’t where she was going,
but she was on her way”
If you are willing and interested, let us travel back in time and see what that journey has looked like so far. In sharing this I hope to inspire you to get up and try and fail and get up and try again to see your vision grow.
Silly Yoda, there is always TRY! but there is no DEFEAT!
The Nicole and Luxcentric Time Machine
TODAY
Luxcentric is designed to offer a tech support system for professionals to gain the technical and computer skills they need to move forward with their vision. My clients come to me for VIP training on email, files, calendars, and contacts.
Please, join in and check back often and see how we grow and shift and change.
2022 Luxcentric in Canada
In life and business nothing is static. One of my visions has always been to design a life that is neither time nor location specific. When I married Gary I shared this vision and he loved the idea. Gary, is Canadian and one of his dreams had always been to return to Canada.
Our children were set to graduate from highschool in 2021. Several years earlier Gary joined a company that had employees all over the world including Canada and virtual. The Pandemic pushed Luxcentric to 100% virtual. There would soon be nothing preventing us from embarking on whatever adventure we chose.
We talked with the kids, those moved out and on their own, and those still living with us and we decided to take the leap. After careful planning and identifying the type of community and home we wanted for our new Canadian life. We determined that we should do “recon” missions to assess various locations and what conditions we were likely to find.
During our first mission we found the perfect home in the perfect neighborhood in the beautiful city of Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. There is something to be said about clearly identifying what you want so you can recognize it. when it appears.
We jumped on that perfect house and moved up our plans by about 6 months. Living in Canada and estalblishing Luxcentric here has been a fun an wild ride. I am excited to see where things take us from here.
Luxcentric and the Pandemic
The pandemic was an interesting time for Luxcentric.
One of the challenges in learning computer skills is finding the resources that are both affordable and targeted. The quickest way to learn something new is to work closely with someone who understands your goals, your learning style and what you actually need to know. This focused training has, in the past, been very expensive to deliver. When I began teaching in retirement communities I would physically go to them and sit with them in person. This worked well for learning, but unfortunately the costs involved with travel and the limitations of time, there was no way I could continue to deliver that level of service at a cost my students could afford.
My decision to shift my focus from retirees to small business owners was primarily because small business owners were more willing to shift toward online and virtual instruction. In 2012 the ability to remote into a computer and train people virtually allowed me to cut out drive time and take on more clients. I no longer needed to juggle my schedule with my people’s schedules based on where they lived. It made the work I do viable as a business.
For the first 3 months of the pandemic I spent most of my time offering free Zoom lessons to people who had, in the past, had been reluctant to work virtually with a computer coach. I taught people how to present information over Zoom for classes they had previously taught online. I taught people how to meet with their friends and families, or go to virtual bible studies and book clubs.
The pandemic required people to learn the computer skills they needed to open their world in so many other ways that they had previously reisited. Online doctor appointments, chats with friends and family in far away places became not only doable, but easy because they now knew how. This hurdle has opened whole new avenues for people to engage in the wider world and interact in ways previously unavailable.
For Luxcentric, it made it possible to work with even more people.
Building the Luxcentric Brand
With the encouraging support of my spouse and children, I took the leap to build a solid foundation to take Luxcentric to its full potential. With the guidance of Caffeinated Communications, we began work on the Luxcentric website and brand based on my vague vision of what Luxcentric could be and how services should be presented.
Luxcentric.com went live to not much fanfare. I still had plenty of things to learn to properly launch a business.
Once the first professional website is launched for a company the real work of an online presence begins. It is ok to build slowly. It is ok to adjust and change. Keep in mind that your first website is not likely to be your final website. Life and the internet are dynamic and changing things. I needed to learn about running a business, marketing, and presenting Luxcentric to the world.
To share Luxcentric with the world I found professional women’s groups that focused on supporting women as they built their businesses. The relationships I formed and the skills I learned and continue to learn from these groups is truly where the secret to success lies.
Over the next several years I spoke at conferences and group meetings for women in business. Sharing my knowledge about how email works, how files are arranged in a computer, and why it is so important to understand these things. I introduced Luxcentric’s first program, Operation: Inbox Zero. Operation: Inbox Zero was a foundational block in how Luxcentric opperates to this day and taught me so much about how to impliment a vision.
Building a Foundation for Family
In 2014 – 2015 I met and married Gary and we merged our families and became 3/4 of a Brady Bunch. We spent our first year dedicated to building a foundation for the success of our new family.
While it was a crazy idea to merge 4 teenagers, and add in cats, a ferret, and furniture, we somehow managed it with very little drama. I am grateful every day for this family blessing.
The Dark Times of a Life Being Reborn (cue dramatic music)
During 2012 – 2013 My personal world was falling apart and professionally I was getting my legs.
Due to money troubles, communication troubles, and a variety of other distressing things, my marriage of almost 20 years completed its cycle and I moved north to the east side of Seattle and began to build a new life. I needed a secure and predictable income and was able to find contract work for a financial planner as a tech admin.
What was a very difficult time in my life became the catalyst I needed to really narrow in on what kind of life I wanted for myself and my children.
The Value I Learned Back Then
Between 2009 – 2011 My children were in school full time I took on a few clients to do small business admin work. This naturally led to helping them with their tech. I had no idea that this work would save me in the future when my world fell apart.
Tinkering with the computer and programs like Outlook and Gmail and such has always been an obsession of mine. Figuring these things out is like working on a puzzle (one of my favorite things). To my surprise, I found that the professionals I was helping didn’t really like that sort of thing. A bit of a lightbulb went on in my head back then, I had a skill that was of value!
The Path that Led me Here
It really was not that long ago that my grandmother asked me to help her with her computer. This truly was the trigger that started Luxcentric. Back in 2005, my baby was about 2, not quite in preschool, and she and I would go to my grandmother’s house and have lunch and do computer lessons. Together, My Grandmother and I created guide sheets she could follow when we were not together and I learned how to show her how to do things in a way that she could relate to.
After about a year she looked at me and said: “Honey, you should go do this for other people.”
From that Luxcentric was born. I got a business license and secured the luxcentric name. My little one started preschool and I had time here and there for this new adventure.
During the next couple of years I offered computer tutoring for seniors, my average client age was 85 and one of my most popular classes was “How to use the Mouse”. It was an extremely fun and rewarding adventure, I would teach computer classes at retirement communities and sit with seniors during private computer sessions where they learned everything from, how to play Solitaire, to how to grab pictures from social media and upload them to a service to order prints. We would chat and have tea while complaining about where the country was headed with all this computer stuff.
It was during this time that I really understood how frustrating it can be to watch how easy it is for “other people” to do a computer thing and not be able to do it yourself. With just a few sessions my people were able to maneuver around the internet, send emails to their friends and interact with the world through social media.
The joy and confidence these computer skills gave them were supremely gratifying to me, and it continues to be as I now focus my training with solopreneurs and professionals. (I do still sneak in the occasional beginner from time to time).
How My Past Shaped My Future
Before starting a family I worked at a low-income apartment complex for seniors as the assistant manager. Working in that building brought me a good deal of joy as I made friends with the seniors who lived there. That foundation allowed me to understand how to work with the retirement communities that eventually hired me to teach computer skills to their residents.
I became a mother for the first time in 1996 and my world changed forever in an amazing way. In my family, being a stay-at-home mom was the most blessed thing possible for a mother. My mom, (a now retired kindergarten teacher), was a perfect stay-at-home mom. Kind, fun, dedicated, and available. She has always been the kind of mom I wanted to be. So naturally, I wanted to give the same kind of focus to my children.
I have since realized that there are many beautiful and varied ways to be an amazing mom. At the time, however, I was filled with disappointment and guilt when I needed to get a part-time job.
In 1998 I was hired on by a bank when online banking was just starting to be a thing. It was in that job, the one that took me from my baby, where I learned how to guide people through technical challenges over the phone. Despite my desire to stay home with my children I really enjoyed that job.
We learn skills in our past that prepare us for our future. Answering questions, troubleshooting technology weirdness, and talking people off digital ledges became a thing I excelled and thrived at. That skill lead me to be available and useful to my grandmother and the other seniors in the retirement communities where I taught. Now I use those skills with my clients every day.
In 2000 I was laid off from the call center bank job. Still wanting to stay home with my children I tried a number of work-from-home mom things that gave me a fantastic amount of experience and education, but not so much in the income department.
I studied graphic and web design but had no idea how to market my skills (and wasn’t particularly good at the design part either)
Did a brief stint cleaning houses (very brief)
Tried my hand at writing fiction. I have 2 very bad novels hiding in storage and will never see the light of day.
My neighbor invited me to open a used bookstore with her. She provided the funding and my children and I worked 2 days a week in the store and learned what it was like to run a location-based business. This is when it really became clear to me that I didn’t want a location-specific business even if I could bring my children with me. I left the bookstore in 2005 as Luxcentric Computer Tutoring started to take more of my time and my children were both in school.
Our history shapes who we are and who we can become. Everything I have enjoyed and endured in my life has helped me become who I am today and how I can contribute in a positive way to this world. I hope you will be able to see in my story how important your story is in your life.
