communities of color and otherwise, supporting our families rises to the top of our reasons of why we do what we do.
I never was able to realize buying my mother the home of her dreams, or retiring her so she didn't have to work until she couldn't physically do so anymore. Now I'd pour my days and time into building—building a company that seeks to enrich communities so that those with less have more.
Because of this new vision, my first company was heavily geared toward helping community figures, nonprofits, and those aligned with social good, to get their programs and ideas off the ground. We wanted to ensure that they were effectively operating and able to serve the communities that needed them the most.
It took some time, but you have to think of yourself as an entrepreneur, a business owner, a builder; otherwise you'll spend a lot of time downplaying what you do and what you are seeking to accomplish. Yes, you could fail and the odds are you'll fail at a lot of things along the way, perhaps even that thing you created and wanted most. I know I did and still do. Yet, I've learned my strengths and my weaknesses and seek out the strengths in others to create balance. I don't desire to be a jack of all trades. I desire to do what I do, best.
A lot of times we are waiting for the perfect moment or the perfect feeling. Lisa Nichols, an author and motivational speaker who often talks about overcoming doubt and fear, said it best: “do it afraid.” You really have to sit in that for a second, because you can wait for years or never get started at all waiting to feel something different. Something that doesn't feel like anxiety or fear or doesn't give off nervous energy.
I am often asked if I get nervous. Sometimes I can speak on a large stage and feel no anxiety, and other times I can speak in front of a group of teenagers and feel the pressure of wanting to leave an impression that could potentially alter their future, the way that some speakers have done for me.
Either way, you have to find what motivates you—what's going to push you after a long day when you don't want to go anymore, or you are feeling the weight of success or failure.
I talk about my upbringing because it's important for people to understand my journey, especially those who come from a similar background as I do. I want everyone to know that if I did it with so few resources, then you can do it too, and most likely even better.
People often ask me what my favorite part is about the work that I do. For me, it's about building a company that is mission-driven, one that I feel, as my mentor told me, I can make money and do good too with. But most importantly, I want the people who work with me to feel empowered to utilize their own capabilities and their own skill sets.
I want them, as well as digging deep to make great products, to sell great products, and to be a part of a team that markets great products, to know that they're part of something that's really helping the world and helping the community we are fostering do their work better.
I want them to make a lasting impact and really create something that is beyond what they had imagined. Building SGI and now Resilia is something that I feel really embodies our mission of powering the people changing the world.
When I think about my favorite part of the work that I do, it would be building a company and employing people to be able to do this work. It's not about necessarily building this huge hundred-million-dollar annual recurring revenue company, it's about whether we can build products that move the needle and raise the bar.
You'll have to remind yourself often of the reason that got you started.
I often have to remind myself of why I started because I think that's important, too. As much as they try to tell you otherwise, business is personal. I think about how I spend my time, where my mind goes to, and where my thoughts lead me to so I can recenter when I need to, reinforcing what really matters.
As an entrepreneur you have to keep positivity in your life. If you wake up in the morning and you're like, oh, you know, this is going to be a dreadful day, or if it's Wednesday, and you're telling yourself it's the middle of the week and I just have to keep pushing to Friday until it's over, that mindset takes over your entire aura and embodies who you become.
Instead, you want to wake up and realize you have another day to get it right. Another day to get what is in front of you done. If you need to rest for a day or a week, then do it. What matters is that you're doing things that align with your whole self, right? You're doing things that make you feel good and you have to reaffirm yourself. That's so important because not everyone will. I had to learn over time how to live in a healthy state of mind. I'm a sponge when it comes to learning. I want to learn as much as possible, and in business you are constantly learning, but what are you absorbing? I listen to what people are dishing out and I soak up what I need and I release the rest. I have to, because we're in the age of over information.
Yet, in order for me to become a really good entrepreneur and business owner, I had to learn what I didn't know. When I first started out, I began to reach out to people who were in business who had ascended to greater heights, to where I wanted to go.
I think it's important to seek people out because they have insights that they're able to recall from their journey in a way that was exciting for me to listen to. It was exciting to understand what mistakes they had made so I could try to avoid some of them, although I'd make enough of my own. But I listened because the more you learn the more you can minimize the mistakes, and when you're building a business that's critical.
At the end of the day you have these people in your life as business mentors, or guides as I often call them, and you're trying to figure out how to win, how to play this game, how to be better than the next, and if you're in tech, probably faster than the next, too.
I grew up in a single-parent household. My mother raised four of us on a salary of $29,000 a year. She was an assistant manager at Kmart, running their gardening department. My mother worked hard for whomever she was working for and everything she did, she did with excellence. She passed that down to my siblings and me.
My mother was my role model, although she herself had not graduated from college. My grandmother had not received a formal education past the sixth grade but would live to be 103 years old. She was also my role model.
Do you know where your story begins? My entrepreneurship story began where my mother's story left off.
When I started SGI and then when I entered tech I was ready to work hard, but I knew I was behind. I knew that there was a knowledge curve that I had to really overcome. I wasn't out in Silicon Valley. I wasn't in New York. I wasn't in a hotbed for tech, and so I had to get really resourceful.
2 The Difference
The biggest risk of all is not taking one.
—Mellody Hobson
My good friend Sherrell Dorsey, founder of TP Insights, referred to me as the “antithesis” in an article she published for her editorial and tech platform, The Plug.
I'm female, Black, from the South, and a nontechnical solo founder. In all respects (and perhaps statistics), I'm everything that they say a tech founder can't be.
Overall, I've now been an entrepreneur for over 12 years, and what a roller-coaster ride it has been, from bootstrapping my first company Solid Ground Innovations (SGI) to raising capital for my second company. It's been more than what I could have imagined, and really little of what I expected. But what could I have expected, being that I had no true blueprint starting out?
Yet,
