Class E Podcast

Join us as we invite forward-thinking minds to share their stories, expertise, and experiences, all in pursuit of cultivating a dynamic ecosystem of innovative and entrepreneurial thinking. Brought to you by the collaborative efforts of Furman Innovation and Entrepreneurship alongside the esteemed Communication Studies Department at Furman University, the Class E Podcast is your go-to resource for unlocking the secrets of success in the modern entrepreneurial landscape. Each episode is a masterclass in innovation, featuring insightful discussions with industry leaders, trailblazing entrepreneurs, and visionary educators. Whether you're a student eager to kickstart your entrepreneurial journey or an established professional seeking fresh perspectives, the Class E Podcast provides the inspiration, knowledge, and practical insights you need to thrive in today's competitive business environment.

How RIZE Prevention is Empowering the Youth 04/18/2024

Unleashing Inspiration: Standout Advice From Season 8 03/20/2024

Unleashing Inspiration: Standout Advice From Season 8 In this special episode of the Class E Podcast, we're revisiting the most impactful insights from our incredible guests this season. From the wisdom of Jennifer Jones on turning pain into power, to Chad Price's reminder that in entrepreneurship, you set the rules of the game, and Fred Cary's inspiring mantra to be comfortable with the discomfort of chasing your dreams. And don't miss Jason Richards' profound question: 'How do you want to spend your day?' Whether you're seeking motivation or guidance, join us as we uncover these remarkable nuggets of wisdom that have resonated deeply with us. Tune in and let these voices ignite your entrepreneurial spirit! Guests: Jennifer Jones, Chad Price, Fred Carey, and Jason Richards Host: Mary Sturgill Producer: Isabella Martinez Links to full episodes: Jennifer Jones – “Empowering Voices: From Pain to Power with Jennifer Jones of Beauty Marks for Girls” Chad Price – “Why Entrepreneurs in Any Industry Need to Prepare for Battle” https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/why-entrepreneurs-in-any-industry-need-to-prepare-for/id1499156754?i=1000634172515 Fred Cary – “Competition and Failure: Two Things Every Entrepreneur Shouldn’t Fear” https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/competition-and-failure-two-things-every-entrepreneur/id1499156754?i=1000627878496 Jason Richards – “One Question: How Do You Want To Spend Your Day?” TRANSCRIPT MARY: Hi there everyone and welcome to the Class E Podcast. I am your host Mary Sturgill. This podcast is brought to you through a partnership between the Hill Institute for Innovation and Entrepreneurship and the Communication Studies department at Furman University. Today we have a special episode where we are taking a look back at some of the best conversations we’ve had with our guests this season…and we’ve sure had some impressive motivational guests. If you’re in need of some advice or even some inspiration, take a listen to some of these amazing nuggets of wisdom that this season’s guests have shared with us. MARY: First, let’s look back at our episode titled, “Empowering Voices: Turning Pain to Power,” with guest Jennifer Jones, the founder of the nonprofit mentoring program, Beauty Marks for Girls. JENNIFER JONES: Every scar tells a story and we don't look at those scars as shame, but they're now badges of honor where I can tell my stories to the ladies and it was relatability, like wow, this young lady has taken time out of her day and she's going through something very similar as I am but we turn pain into power those young ladies. JENNIFER JONES: Discipline is freedom. You have to be disciplined as an entrepreneur. And I like to also say because I come from corporate America, the same type of motivation and hard work and discipline that you put within someone else's company, it needs to be to a second level for your own. MARY: Our own personal experiences inform how we move through the world… and how we work as entrepreneurs and innovative things… sometimes we need to look at entrepreneurship like we are going into battle.. we are fighting to make our ideas.. our ventures… a reality… in the episode titled, “Why Entrepreneurs in Any Industry Need to Prepare for Battle,” with guest Chad Price, an international business consultant and well experienced entrepreneur…He outlines exactly what he means. CHAD PRICE: And I think in business you have to, you have to create that for yourself. So that doesn't exist. There's no real game. And if you're, you know, when you're first starting, you get to kind of stall and say, well, we'll just play next week. We'll just play next week. And it's like, no, you have to be the one to say the game is on Friday. So we're starting on Friday and that type of mindset I think is what is most important in entrepreneurs so that you're the person that pushes things forward if no one is there to build your dream for you. Like no one is there to build a brand. It's a multimillion dollar or a billion dollar global brand for you. It's like you're going to be the driving force or at least the starting point where the energy comes from. CHAD PRICE: Understanding that you need to go into it with the mindset of this is going to be a battle. I need to learn on the fly. I need to be a lifelong learner, you know, the person that kind of leads my team as an expert in my industry and expert in whatever field that I'm trying to get in. I think that's more important than, you know, trying to gorge yourself on information before you get there CHAD PRICE: I think having that self-awareness not only about who you are as an individual, but who your team is, these types of things. For me, it comes easy because I've been on so many teams. I didn't, you know, I don't, I didn't like everybody I played with. I was the kid that I knew the coach would get on some people and baby other people because that's what it took to motivate them. There was a, you know, there was a method to the madness sometimes and I'm one of those people that can see and I like that kind of psychological strategy to things and so I really try to come in and say, you know, where are you? Where do you think you are? Let's see, you know, how close to my objective, a perception of things is your perception of things and then if we can agree on common points then I think you can kinda coach any team to the direction you want them to go. And that's just a matter of kind of putting the plan in place and executing on it. CHAD PRICE: I think having the correct mindset going in that you're gonna do whatever it takes to work is more important than, you know, trying to make sure that you've gotten the exact product line up right or you've gotten the exact advertising, the exact logo even. You know, I think there's situations in which action trumps, you know, kind of just sitting there being stale. So, if you have a way to create cash flow, to create revenue, to reach customers, I would say that's where you should start. You know, you should start with whatever can kind of create that initial cash flow. Even if it's not high profit margins, you can, you know, you can work on the margins, especially if you're not doing high volume and you're still able to create cash flow and bring in new customers and generate leads, bring in some type of let's say proof of concept that will allow you to do a lot of different things because as you're doing that you can work with individuals you can, you know, you can mentor or you find yourself. I'm sorry, not mentor. You could find yourself a mentor to help you in these situations. But if you don't really have any real world item to analyze.It's kind of hard for anyone to help. You kind of talk about a figment of everyone's imagination. MARY: Many of us have an innate fear of failure.. we don’t want to lose the battle as it were… but we don’t need to fear anything… as a matter of fact… if we can change that fear… or worry … into fearlessness… that mindset will propel us further… serial entrepreneur and thought leader… Fred Cary shares some excellent advice in the episode we titled, “Competition and Failure: Two Things Every Entrepreneur Shouldn’t Fear.” FRED CARY: For me, the kind of mantra for entrepreneurship is be comfortable with pain. Because you know that in the end, you can help a whole lot of people. Whatever it is that you're doing, if you're doing it for the right reason, with the right purpose, the right determination that you're a potentially a world changer, and you can't change the world without hurting yourself. FRED CARY: Don't chase the money, chase your dreams. Make it a reality and as long as you have your dream and be really strategic about how you take that dream and actualize it. When you can actualize your dream, the money will follow. It's as simple as that because doing it the right way, doing the research, understanding what the real need is, and being able to deliver on that need results in capital coming your way. MARY: Once we overcome that fear of failure.. There is one question we should ask ourselves…. how do you want to spend your day…. in our episode titled, “One Question: How do you want to spend your day?” with guest Jason Richards, the global business director and shareholder of the commercial real estate property management firm, NAI Earle Furman, he posed this question… it was so profound.. that we titled the whole show around it. JASON RICHARDS: You have to be open minded. But you also have to listen. And I think, you know, certainly, depending on what field you're in, you know, there can be a lot of alpha personalities that like to talk a lot. And, you know, that was something certainly when I was in my 20s I wanted to be noticed, you know, I always felt like I had to be in the meeting. I had to speak up so that people knew that I was there and that kind of thing. But I think, you know, one of the things that the founder of our company, Earle Furman, that I've always taken away from him… Earle does not talk a lot and has the superpower of being able to just sit there quietly, and he takes everything in and he doesn't miss a thing. And I think listening is a really underrated skill in this day and age, for any business, but certainly for entrepreneurialism, because if you're an entrepreneur, you have to learn from others. And not just asking people about their successes, but you have to listen for people's stumbling blocks and their mistakes. JASON RICHARDS: You know, I do a lot of the meetings with Furman students here through the mentioning office, and I'll meet often with people who were maybe a year or two out of college trying to find their way and the question that I have sort of really decided is maybe the ultimate question, you know, certainly when you're trying to start your career, but also something to reflect on along the way is how do you want to spend your day? You know, people think about what industry do I want to work in or what job do I want? But it's you know, how do I want to spend my day? You know, do I want to work in an office? If I want to work in an office, do I want to be with a big office or a small nonprofit type place where it's an intimate, more interpersonal environment? You know, people don't reflect on those questions and if you know the answer to how do I want to spend my day, it makes answering all the other questions a lot easier. And I think for entrepreneurs, especially, you know, you may have the best idea in the world, but ask yourself how you want to spend your day. MARY: Alright listeners…i hope you gained some inspiration from today’s special episode…i am a firm believer that sometimes we need to be reminded of things.. that help us grow… either as a way to push us to the next step.. or remind us of the motivation we put on the back burner when life got busy… in upcoming episodes… we talk with an expert in live video about how to make the most out of your digital space…. and we talk to a woman who… as robin roberts say.. has made her mess her message… she’s created a non profit… aimed at helping kids and parents in the upstate… make sure their family doesn’t fall prey to the addiction epidemic our country faces… those episodes are coming up next month. That does it for this episode of the Class E Podcast. I am your host Mary Sturgill. Remember this podcast is brought to you through a partnership between the Hill Institute of Innovation and Entrepreneurship and the Communication Studies department at Furman University. It is produced by student producer Isabella Martinez. Thank you for tuning in. Until next time everybody, dream big. /episode/index/show/class-epodcast/id/30464648

Turning Greetings Into Greatness: The Remarkable Rise of Sparks of Joy 03/06/2024

Turning Greetings Into Greatness: The Remarkable Rise of Sparks of Joy Join us in this episode of the Class E Podcast as we dive into the extraordinary journey of Callie Goodwin, the mastermind behind a thriving greeting card company born out of the challenges of the pandemic. From a humble start during quarantine to becoming a household name on TikTok, Callie shares her inspirational story of turning isolation into innovation. With her background in education and social work, Callie's path to entrepreneurship was unexpected but undeniably rewarding. Tune in to discover how she navigated obstacles like funding shortages and leveraged the power of social media to skyrocket her business. From viral TikTok campaigns to unexpected partnerships, Callie's journey is a testament to the resilience and creativity of small business owners everywhere. Join us as we explore the highs, the lows, and the invaluable lessons learned along the way. This episode is a must-listen for anyone seeking inspiration, practical tips, and a glimpse into the limitless possibilities of entrepreneurship in the digital age. Guest: Callie Goodwin. Founder Host: Mary Sturgill Producer: Isabella Martinez Transcript: MARY: Hi there, everyone. Welcome to this episode of the Class E Podcast. I am your host, Mary Sturgil. This podcast is brought to you in partnership between the Hill Institute for Innovation and Entrepreneurship and the Communication Studies Department here at Furman University. And today we have a very special guest…you may know her from Tik Tok and some Tik Tok ads. It's Callie Goodwin, who is the founder of the greeting card company, Sparks of Joy. Callie, welcome to our show. CALLIE: Hi! Thank you so much for having me. MARY: Callie, I want to start with… Do you remember the first time that we met in person? Because we’ve known each other for a while though. CALLIE: It's been quite a while. I was helping film in Columbia. I don't know what year it was. But it's been quite a while. MARY: It's been at least seven years probably. Yeah. Yeah. I was still in news. I was still a news anchor. And Callie had this drone and I was you know me, I'm a gadget girl. And so I went up to her and I was like, oh, show me what you're doing. Like we were just talking off air that we were flying drones and we didn't really know any of the rules back then. So we just flew them all over the place. CALLIE: I look back now and I'm like, Ooh, yeah, we were definitely breaking some rules then. But honestly before… it was still the wild wild west of drones. MARY: You were on the cutting edge then and now you're on the cutting edge again. That's your life. CALLIE: I like to live on the edge. MARY: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So tell us a little bit about Sparks of Joy for people who might not have seen your TikTok ad because your TikTok ad… I say TikTok ad guys but it is all over TV right now. CALLIE: Yeah, so Sparks of Joy started as a pre stamped greeting card company in the middle of the pandemic. I bought a house the summer 2020, moved in, was exposed to COVID had to quarantine and during that two weeks was going stir crazy. Neighbor dropped off a handwritten card and some brownies. And that handwritten card like really kind of sparked this idea of like, I want to send out cards out with my new address like I finally have an address on my own. But I realized that I didn't know what boxes my cards were in. And I didn't have any stamps. And so I used that two week quarantine period to start a business. I design all my own cards. And then we pre stamp the cards so that our customers don't have to or don't have to try to track down stamps at the post office so it has grown I started my TikTok right as I started my business and now it's grown into this massive account and this like really cool opportunity to partner with TikTok on these things. And I never would have dreamed that this loneliness of my brand new house would have turned into this three years later. MARY: Right and so the…let's back up a little bit and talk about your education because everything that you've done in your education so far is geared toward education. For kids right? CALLIE: So I thought I wanted to be a preschool teacher growing up. I worked in preschool for seven years. So I got my Associates in early childhood. And then I transferred to Columbia College and got my Bachelor's in social work, essentially social work, and decided that's not what I wanted to do. I began working at Columbia College doing social media and got my master's in higher ed administration. And now here I am, I work for a social media app for high schoolers going into college. So still kind of like higher ed adjacent, but also run a greeting card company. MARY: Right. So you're doing social media and you're a master at social media by the way. You're doing social media for them and you're running this company that has just literally blown up. How did it come to be that Tik Tok contacted you and said we want you to be in this for us. CALLIE: So I retold the story recently or was talking with the people that this all started with. It started in the spring of 2022. So we actually got a very kind of vague sketch email from TikTok that was like, Hey, we're working on a new upcoming project. If you think you might be interested in being part of this vague project that we can't tell you information about, like fill out this Google form. And I clicked it and like it really was just a basic Google form asking about my business and I'm like, well, nothing I'm sharing here is like proprietary information that they can’t like find on my website. So I filled it out. And three months later, they got the green light from legal to start this. It was called TikTok Impact and showing the impact of TikTok on small businesses. So they got the green light to start it and so it started as a website with about I think 10 to 20 of us, representing 10 states. And that rolled into the first campaign with TikTok, which was South Carolina based…a couple of billboards and newspaper ads and stuff that ran in October of 2022. And then thought that was it… thought the campaign was done. And then I was contacted in July of 2023 by a production company, they're like, Hey, we think you're a good fit for a project again, super vague. We can't tell you the client. Like are you interested? And I'm like, sure we've done this before and it's been great. So sure, let's try it again. Turns out the client was TikTok again. But it was a much bigger scale. So it involved filming this commercial, they came to my house. I think there was like 13 or 14 different production team members that came out and we filmed all day long. And then this is part of a national campaign so it's rolled out. I think the commercial is rolled out to South Carolina at this moment, but will continue to roll out nationwide. And then it also included billboards in places like… Vegas is covered. I think there's like 13 or 14 in Vegas. Times Square, the New York subway system… all around South Carolina and it's been really cool to watch that grow. MARY: Yeah I love on your Instagram when you put your…. you took a picture of yourself in front of your billboard in Times Square. CALLIE: Yeah, we went up for my birthday in December and I was like, told my parents we have to go to Times Square to see this. It's just surreal to see yourself in public on these advertisements. So I just flew to Washington DC. And I saw myself in the airport like on the screens and I was like, Oh wait, that's me like, and nobody else around me like notices in this moment that I'm standing here like in all of this ad and everyone else is just going about their busy day, but I'm like, right. Oh my gosh, I'm on this giant screen like that's crazy. MARY: Yeah,I know that feeling. The first time I saw we had a billboard for one of my stations that I worked at when I was broadcasting. And the first time I saw one of our billboards I had to like stop. I've literally pulled up on the side of the highway. Like oh my god, that's huge. CALLIE: The first night that somebody texted me that the billboards were live in Columbia, because I didn't know that that was part of this campaign. So somebody's like, I just saw a billboard of you and I'm like, What are you talking about? They're like, Oh, yeah, it’s over onForest drive and it actually was not on Forest drive. It was somewhere completely different. They got the location wrong. So I'm driving around Columbia, like just looking for myself. And yeah, it's probably crazy, but it’s a lot of fun. MARY: I love that. But I do want to point out to our listeners that this is a prime example… I do a workshop sometimes for women entrepreneurs who… how to get your story told. Right? And so let me ask this question… was anything… did you have to pay for any of this? CALLIE: Not a penny. MARY: Exactly. So saying yes to things will get you free advertisement. Right? Now, of course, there are a lot of scams out there. So do be careful about that kind of stuff and kind of use the techniques that Callie used to say, Okay, this is just business stuff that I'm giving them, right? CALLIE: Absolutely. MARY: And then you can always do your background checks, make, make the phone calls, send the emails, you know, do whatever you need to do to check the background of things like this. But let's talk about how this has blown up your business. CALLIE: Yes, so, through the first campaign, we ended up getting verified on Tik Tok and being able to reach a large amount of people and through that campaign, rolled into the opportunity to… so that started with the vague sketchy email to begin with, which then turned into the first South Carolina campaign, which then rolled into the opportunity to speak at South by Southwest last March on a panel with TikTok which led to go into DC with TikTok, which led to like this campaign, and so saying yes, at all these points, continues to just open doors. But yes, I think I missed the rest of your question there. MARY: I think you got it. Saying yes to one thing opened all those other doors. South by Southwest is huge, you know, being able to go to DC all off this one, you know, thing that you said yes to was really the catalyst for all of that, right. So, let's talk about the art just a little bit because you were an art major, right. And how does that play into part of your personality, part of who you are and into the whole thing? CALLIE: Yeah, it's been cool to be able to take some of these designs that you don't see represented in greeting cards every day. And I know again, like I always tell people like you, if I can succeed on Tik Tok, you can succeed on TikTok. I am selling greeting cards in a digital world. Like people don't send mail, people love to receive mail, but don't take the time to send mail. And so the fact that we've sold over 50,000 cards in the last three years is proof that like people want that connection, they want human connection. And I think a big thing is like people like to purchase from me because I show myself on my account a lot. I also share not just business stuff, but I I share a little bit of the personal side. We talk about mental health. We talked about behind the scenes of packing orders and so people connect on a personal level there and feel like they're supporting a person in a business. And that's something they could get behind. MARY: Yeah, I think you bring up another good point with that because part of marketing yourself on social media and you just gave us a tactic right there. Right. So it's not all about the business. It's not all about buy buy buy this right. It's about sharing and connecting on a personal level. CALLIE: Absolutely. So originally I had gone back and privated all at the beginning of my TikTok because they were so cringy I couldn't even like stand to see them on my account. They were… it was bad. I was just watching the waters…. and I had to go back and unhide them because the reality is like I didn't want to minimize, like how rough the start was, like sure we're at 113,000 followers now. But we weren't there at the beginning. And we started small. We started cringy it took a while to find our stride. And when I did, it really changed when I started getting on camera and being myself and realizing like, I am not going to be equal to the people that have millions of followers like I don't have the pretty perfect setup. This is me in my garage selling greeting cards and so once I found what was unique to me and just like the fact that like this is who I am and embracing that, like that's when we saw growth because I got comfortable with who I was instead of just trying to be everybody else. MARY: Yeah. Wow. What you just said is so powerful. Right there. I think that being comfortable with who you are and finding the power within yourself can transcend any area of our life. But at the same time holds us back from all areas as well. Right? If we don't have those feelings. Even in my own daily life I catch myself ... .that self talk, you know that we have that Oh, I shouldn't do this because I don't have this or I don't do this right. And, boy, I need to take your advice today. And I know somebody listening does too. Wow. CALLIE: I often have to remind myself that especially as my account grows larger, I find myself hesitating before I post up I'm like Ooh, is this worth the post? Like is this gonna fit things and I realize I'm like, that's not how we got here. And that's not how we're going to continue to grow if I'm if I stray away from where like what our tried and true like method is so yeah, everything doesn't have to be perfectly filmed. My hair always looks like a disaster. It's always a frizzy mess. Usually whatever t shirt I wear for the day, or I slept in and just showing whatever I'm working on really connects with people, MARY: Yeah whatever part of your life that it is for that moment. Yeah, yeah. You also brought up the fact that you started with… You know, I mean, everybody has to start somewhere. Right? And so with the followers on Tiktok, you started with small followers with a small number of followers and then that grew over time, the more that you became your authentic self and I think so many of us, me included, tend to not be as consistent as perhaps we should be to help really gain those followers and take advantage of what Tik Tok and other social media outlets have to offer for free advertising for us. CALLIE: Absolutely. Yeah. It's really cool for me to connect with the people that used to join my live streams like I remember when I hit 1000 followers and I got to finally live stream for TikTok specifically and there was two people that would join my live streams all the time. I think we ever we maxed out at like five people viewing for the first couple months and now whenever I go live, there's sometimes there can be a couple 100 people in there, but sometimes I see those, those original two or three and it's always such a special moment when I see it pop up, and I'm like, Oh my gosh, you're you're still here. Like you're still like, I don't care about the rest of them like you followed me through either there at the beginning. Like it's really it's really important for me to connect with my followers in general in the comments, but then also to like, remember people and remember that, like I wouldn't be here today without the support of the people along the way. MARY: Yeah, that's an excellent point too. And that connection, you know, when those live streams, you're creating community. CALLIE: Yeah. 100% we have whole like, like conversations in the comments, or I think at one point, I was taking a new medication that had to be taken at night and I'm a nighttime like live streamer. Like that's usually when I'm going live and I had one follower who is now a really good friend of mine we've never met but she would remind me every night and she's like remember to take your meds and I was like thanks because I forgot and they're ADHD meds so like it's seem funnier that like usually it was the thing… the thing you need to take to remember to do the things consistently. And so she was my consistent reminder during live streams and he's like, Did you take your medicine and like, Oh, thank you so much. Let me take one right now. And so yeah, we got through that entire, like, season of that specific medication because she reminded me every night because I wouldn't remember. MARY: I love that. So what inspires you? CALLIE: That's a great question. I am fueled by trying new things, and seeing what can happen. So I also love a good challenge. So recently, back in August or July…I had an opportunity to work with a laser company called… and they sent me a laser and I was to make content with it. And so I wanted to do a 90 day payoff challenge. Because I thought, You know what, that'd be a cool like source of content…have all these projects. I need to pay this laser off anyway, like let's, let's do it in 90 days. And so I made a list of all these projects that I wanted to do and started working my way through it. And on day 15, our Stanley topper file went viral and we sold $30,000 worth in nine days on TikTok shop. And so those videos collectively have over 10 million views. My house is a train wreck for weeks as I had about 14,15 people rotating in and out to help me fulfill these orders. But I'm constantly like inspired by trying new things, seeing what will take off and then watching the power of social media work. We've had multiple cards go viral, we've had multiple products and so it's always fun to kind of chase that like new level of success but also like what is going to connect most with our followers. MARY: Right. Do you sell the cards as singles or in groups? How does that work? CALLIE: So we have cards that are available as singles. We have postcards. We have flat cards that go with an envelope and a stamp. And then we have like little baby like mini cards. And you can buy them individually but you can also bundle them to get them at a cheaper price. MARY: Okay, excellent. So what has been the most rewarding about this process for you… this experience? CALLIE: I think the experiences and being able to meet people and connect with people. I think social media allows you to really connect with people that are outside of your circle. And so I have been able to make some really incredible friends through Tiktok through social media in general. I actually went to VidCon out in California last year with four creator friends that I had, or three creator friends that I'd never met in person. We all rented Airbnb and went out together and had an absolute blast. But we've just built all these relationships, friendships, partnerships with different people. And that is… it's just so fulfilling. MARY: Yeah, that's really cool. And I think you know for all of its faults, social media does that really well. CALLIE: Yes. MARY: Is there any obstacles that you had to overcome that you other than, you know, the self talk which we've talked about, you know, that you've had to overcome in the process? CALLIE: I think our biggest challenge is always like money, and funding. I started this with 20 bucks in the bank account and have used the profits from whatever I sell to reinvest back into my business and so every time we go viral or we have these like big influx, it's like okay, now how do we, how do we upgrade our stuff? Instead of outsourcing, we now print all of our stuff in house. We've purchased the equipment, you know, we've purchased the lasers, we've purchased the shelving like never, never knew shelving was so expensive. But to house all of the cards that we offer, we have about 150 designs. And to also to hire an assistant that helps with fulfilling card orders. That was important but... /episode/index/show/class-epodcast/id/30238018

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Sustainable Strides: Furman’s Eco-Innovation Unveiled with Andrew Predmore 01/24/2024

Sustainable Strides: Furman’s Eco-Innovation Unveiled with Andrew Predmore Dive into the latest episode of the Class E Podcast with Andrew Predmore, the executive director of Furman University's Shi Institute, as he shares insights into their innovative initiatives. From on-campus climate action planning to a closed-loop food system, the episode delves into sustainability challenges and solutions. Join the conversation as they discuss composting, student engagement, and outward-facing programs, including the Sustainability Leadership Initiative. Andrew sheds light on working with businesses for sustainability and fostering leadership in South Carolina. Discover how Furman is making strides in sustainability, from reducing carbon emissions to unique partnerships. Don't miss the innovative steps they're taking in waste reduction at athletic events, creating a blueprint for sustainable practices. Gain valuable perspectives on sustainability and be inspired by Furman's commitment to a greener future! Guest: Andrew Predmore, Director of the Shi Institute at Furman University Host: Mary Sturgill Producer: Isabella Martinez '24 Transcript: Mary: Today, our guest is Andrew Predmore, who is the Executive Director of the Shi Institute for Sustainable Communities here at Furman University. Andrew, welcome to the show. Andrew: Oh, thank you. I'm excited to be here and excited to talk about innovation and entrepreneurship. Mary: Absolutely. Because you guys have some innovative programs, which we're going to talk about but you've only been here a year right? Andrew: Not even a year. Getting close. So I started October 5th or 6th of last year so getting close to a year, yeah. Mary: How are you finding it? Andrew: Oh, I love it. Mary: Not to put you on the spot. Andrew: Well yeah I can't exactly answer like, oh, no good at all. But no, I truly am enjoying the position. And you know, I tell people that I really have one of the most fun jobs there is out there because we do a lot of good. And really, you know, my biggest challenge is trying to figure out what in the world to say no to because all the sustainability work that comes our way is good work. And work that's needed in the world. So lots of opportunity and lots of good things to do. Mary: So let's talk about that because you have some innovative programs that you guys are working on. Can you kind of… I don't want to say just list them all but kind of talk about them, list them and then I want to jump in…there's some that I want to dive into Andrew: Well it would depend on how you define innovative right? But we have a lot of programming. I couldn't possibly list them all for you. Yeah, I would say like just in a broad sense, like the Shi Institute is working on and off campus on sustainability issues and we're looking to make a difference in both places. Andrew: And along the way, we engage students and faculty in that work. So you know, I'll mention just a couple of things going on on-campus and a couple of things off campus and then we can see where that takes us. But on campus our biggest push right now is climate action planning for the university. So Furman University has a carbon neutrality commitment for 2026. It's going to be really difficult to meet that commitment. And so we're really intentionally working on how we are going to pursue that commitment or we need to reset sort of when we're going to be carbon neutral and what is a pragmatic pathway to reduce carbon emissions because we're in here right now and the lights are on and we're using energy right now. And so that's, that's a real challenge for any university in any large organization. So you got to be innovative, you got to think outside the box. And we want to do it also in a way that supports the broader Greenville community. So that's a big thing that we do on campus and anything that we do on campus, we're always engaging students in that so we have a really vibrant student fellowship program. We also have a farm as you know, and that's an important thing on campus for students to get their hands dirty, and see what a closed loop food system looks like. So we'll probably get to that as an innovation but like, you know, we pick up the food waste that comes out of the back of the dining hall, we take it to a compost facility, we compost it, the compost comes back to the garden. The garden grows produce that is then sold to Bon Appetit. So we really have been working on that this summer, and over the next year to scale that up and see how much we can produce and have students learn along the way. So those are two things on campus. Mary: So quick question about that - Is the goal then to produce so much that then we can sell it to local farmers and stuff? Andrew: No, I mean, not yet. I mean, the goal right now is to produce as much as we can that will then be served in the dining hall. So I'm gonna go to the dining hall in a few minutes when we're done with this, and you're gonna and I'm gonna see like all those heirloom tomatoes that we grow, I mean, hundreds of pounds and tomatoes this summer. We're getting close to $15,000 over the produce that's gone to Bon Appetit over the summer. So that really is healthy local food going to our students, our faculty, our staff right now, in the future, we might do CSA or do some other things where we sell that in other places, but for now, it's just going to the dining hall. Mary: What about the compost? What's the goal for that? Andrew: The compost as you might imagine it… we've produced quite a bit of organic material, right and like so students out there and everybody listening, you know, be conscious of what you know, sometimes our stomachs are bigger than… what's the saying? Mary: Our eyes are bigger than our stomachs. Andrew: Yeah, that’s right. But then that translates into food waste. So be aware of that, but there's a lot of that and then there's a lot of leaf litter and organic material that comes on campus. So we blend that right? You have to get the carbon to nitrogen correct and compost that so we have quite a bit of it. We're going to start to sell that as a way to raise funds for the Shi Institute. Mary: Yeah, that's kind of what I meant when I said for the farmers like local farmers, who are we selling that to? Andrew: Right now… we're not, we haven't even until now this podcast. I'm not even marketing that we're selling. And we've sold you know, several $1,000, but we're looking to scale that up because we have a lot of organic material and a lot of finished compost. The one little bottleneck we have though is filtering the compost. So we can't have plastic and forks and things that sometimes end up… so we have students out there sometimes filtering that so… Mary: I’ve seen some of the pictures that students have posted about people accidentally throwing away their forks and stuff in the DH. Andrew: Yeah, the DH has a tough job right? Like anybody that's been there knows things are moving quick. And sometimes, you know, a fork or things just end up in the wrong place. But we'll solve that, we're going to filter it. Mary: So I want to turn now and talk about some of the outward facing programs. So you have the sustainability leadership initiative.Tell us about that. Andrew: Yeah, so um, you know, think about it this way, like, like, for the world for society for South Carolina to become a more sustainable place. We've got to work for large organizations, right? And so and large organizations have to change just like Furman has to adapt…other organizations, businesses across the state need to adapt and so Furman and the Shi Institute partners with a nonprofit called sustain SC and each year we do a training that lasts five different sessions throughout the year across the state of South Carolina with around 25 business, nonprofit and public sector professionals that sign up to be in that and we're teaching them about the core aspects of sustainability. We take them out into the field and show them some of the challenges. And what we want to do is create a network of sustainability leaders across the state that are going to move us forward. So that's that program. This will be its third year. We have a really great class of people involved with that, real leaders across the state, and it's been fun putting together that program like we're taking them out to Waitis Island, which is a big conservation win. It’s an under conservation easement. It's a barrier island off the coast near Myrtle Beach. So we will take them out there and show them like this is an amazing thing. This is amazing that it’s protected in perpetuity, but they will also have to grapple with the fact that, like you all might have heard on the news this week that Myrtle Beach is one of the fastest growing cities in the US. Right? So there's all that urban development and around that area. And so those students that are in this program, those professionals, we're going to grapple with that like and hopefully that's going to help create better leadership and sustainability. Yeah, Mary: Yeah, because those people are the people who will then go back to their companies and it has to come from the top down, right? So that's a great way to network. I like that. That's very innovative thinking there and I like that because a lot of people in the industrial side of things don't think like that, right? Unnecessarily. Andrew: Yeah, I mean I think that is changing. You're right and I think that the innovative thing about that is getting leaders embedded in organizations that then construct and flip systems to more sustainable ones. Mary: Exactly. Getting them to flip the systems. That's exactly what I was talking about. You have one with manufacturers, a program with manufacturers, talk about that one Andrew: Yeah, so this really was you know…I don't always love the word pilot but how about demonstration project? This summer where we worked with the South Carolina manufacturers extension program, and they know that there's like 7000 or so small to medium sized manufacturers across the state of South Carolina. And a lot of what they do is supply the really big manufacturing businesses in South Carolina. So think of the you know, the big name industries or companies that you all know like BMW or Michelin or Volvo or, or Milliken across the upstate, right? So they have many, many small suppliers. And then those small suppliers are under some pressure now to understand their carbon footprint. You know, because they supply these bigger businesses that have commitments to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions. So I'm like okay, knowing this I'm like, alright, there's a there's a niche here for the Shi Institute right to step in and roll our sleeves up and see if we can help some of these small to medium sized businesses understand their carbon footprint, and it helps their business because then they can say to their customer, their large customer, hey, we're working on it. It helps us because we got students who need to learn carbon accounting as a skill. So there's a really nice win-win. And so we did a couple of those this summer. They were fantastic. We work with a French company, which is located mostly in Anderson County, and they make advanced textiles. And then we work with a company that's really right down the road here called Mosaic Color and Additives. So we had two students do their greenhouse gas inventories, which is the first step like you cannot reduce your impact on climate without first understanding where your emissions come from, that are driving that impact. And so that's what the students do is, you know, we worked it was very much like a client consulting type experience for our students, which is super valuable for them. Mary: That’s the Furman advantage right there. Andrew: It is. We handed the company like a report. Here are your emissions, here's where they come from. And they can start thinking about okay, what can we do to lower emissions? How can we market ourselves as a more sustainable company as a result of taking this first step? So that was a great project and we're looking forward to potentially scaling that up next summer and I think yeah. Mary: I love the fact that you because when we think of people who need to really work on sustainability, we do think of the large companies right because they probably have the most greenhouse gas emissions, etc. But I love the reaching down to the smaller companies or supplying the bigger companies because that really, I think, will make their partnership stronger. Andrew: It should and it should create an advantage for those first movers in a small to medium sized manufacturing...because they can say to their larger customers, hey, we're serious about it. We're taking this first step. So we, we, you know, sometimes people think sustainability, shouldn't or can't work with the business sector and I think instead we need to be innovative and think about how we can support the change that needs to happen. And so that's what we've tried to do. Mary: Because we're part of that community. So why not? Right? Andrew: We're wearing clothes and we consume things and so we're all a part of this economic system and, and the challenge of sustainability is how are we going to meet human needs within the boundaries of what our ecosystems can provide? Mary: What kind of obstacles are you facing with some of these things that some of these initiatives that you're started? Andrew: My own ability to keep up with all this. Like I mentioned, sometimes there's more opportunity than then I can capitalize on it. I mean, we're also involved with some really substantial grant work, research work on climate and climate resilience in South Carolina. Luckily, I have staff they're helping with that. We're also involved with athletics and athletics at Furman and starting to think about, you know, how can we make those events… move them towards zero waste or zero landfill events and so we have to really, I don't know if you want to get into that. Mary: I actually do. Andrew: I have some, I think some really exciting things that we're just starting this year. So I'm not going to say we're going to finish the thing, but my biggest challenge is keeping up keeping all these things going. And luckily, I have a great group of people that I work with. Mary: Because if you think about all of the ways from the concession stands, and even when people are tailgating and all that kind of stuff. That is a huge area that could be fixed. Right? So how are you… what kinds of things are you talking about? Andrew: Yeah, I'm, like I said, we're gonna take incremental steps just because of our own bandwidth. But I think students, we have an eco-rep program, and those are students that work in the residence halls here at Furman to encourage sustainable behavior among their peers. They're going to help us with this athletic thing, because we need some, we need some person power behind this because there's some education but you know, you think about like, just think of yourself at a football game or a basketball game and what's served there, you know, and you start to go through sort of the inventory of what you could consume there, and then you start to understand the challenge, right? So you get a hot dog. What is the hot dog served to you in? Maybe some sort of cardboard type of thing? Well, could that become a compostable? I guess cardboard is compostable. Making sure that everything that the food is served is compostable. And then you got to figure out how to compost and collect it and you got to train people to not put what’s compostable into the landfill bin. So one of the cool things we're doing and it is with that company Mosaic Color and Additives…they have a compostable fork, that they're working on and it's sourced from US materials, so it's not made in China. And we're gonna pilot using that in men's basketball games this winter, and we'll collect it and compost at Furman compost. Mary: So that's the innovation right there. With the company. Andrew: You know, so we'll start with basketball. Our students are also going to be doing… our Greenbelt students that live in the cabins along the lake are going to do some waste audits. So they're going to help us this year understand the waste stream that I didn't describe perfectly there for each of the athletic events. So that next year, we really understand well, like what needs to happen to move towards nothing is going to landfills, either recyclable or compostable. That'll be… that's the ultimate goal with us. So cool, really cool stuff happening there and just thankful to have athletics just super supportive and excited about it and to have Mosaic Color and Additives also, like here use our product. Mary: Yeah, I heard their CEO talking about that fork. Andrew: Yeah, and test it in our compost like they're very open, transparent about working together on that. And that is probably, you know, I'm not in innovation and entrepreneurship, but that's a hallmark of good thinking. Right? Mary: Right. That is innovative thinking. Andrew: Think about systems, think about being open and transparent and creating partnerships. Mary: Exactly. One of the things that I find troubling is that we do have people in this country who don't believe that we need to do these things, right, that, that we don't necessarily need to be sustainable. How do you change the minds of people who aren't taking those actions that all of us can take? Or who don't have that same philosophy? Andrew: Well, I would say a couple of things to that. And you're right, you're right. That's a challenge. If you watch the Republican primary debate the other night, you saw someone say that climate change is a hoax. Well, you know, 99.99% of scientists do not agree with that. Right? It's established fact as much as science can be fact at this point that climate change is real and it's driven by humans. Okay. But to your question, which is like, how do we start to convince people? I think one thing to do is kind of what I mentioned earlier, which is…all people are embedded in an economic system that currently is not terribly sustainable, right? It's based on a take from the earth, make something wasted model, and we have to change that. That is a big systems change. So I don't think the way to do it is to place a lot of guilt on other people, because a lot of times we're embedded in a system where it can be very challenging to live sustainably. That's not to say you shouldn't do what you can do. I really think you shouldn't but don't put all the blame on individuals. Instead, you know, let's look at systems change. Let's look like I talked about let's look at training leaders to work in organizations that can flip larger systems so that it's easier for you and I to go to a football game which I think is a you know, I like sports, but I don't want to create a bunch of waste when I'm there. So create a system when I get there, so I'm not generating so much waste. Right. So there's systems work to do. The other thing I would say is, you know, you got to start talking to people about these issues in ways that matter to them. Yes, absolutely. So like, you know, we talked about climate change, you know, if you're a sports fan, I don't want to go to a football game at 12 o'clock in South Carolina, in September. And I think that is going to be a more and more difficult, unpleasant experience if you look at the climate models. So that's something that a lot of people care about. It's part of our culture in the South is to go to college football games. We need to do something. Youth sports are a big thing. Like is it safe to practice in some of the heat and humidity that we're going to encounter? So talk to people about things... /episode/index/show/class-epodcast/id/29568638

Performance Pathfinders: On Stage Collective's Artistic Odyssey 01/10/2024

Performance Pathfinders: On Stage Collective's Artistic Odyssey Embark on an enlightening conversation with Heather Mckenzie Patterson and Katherine Sandoval Taylor, co-founders of On Stage Collective, as they recount their journey from college vocal performance majors to pioneers in the immersive performance program landscape. From adapting to major changes during their studies to overcoming setbacks caused by COVID-19, their unwavering dedication and problem-solving spirit shine through. Through auditions and immersive learning, they've empowered aspiring performers, shaping the future of arts education. Join their exciting journey as they gear up for their upcoming New York show, continuing to offer aspiring artists a chance to shine and fulfill their dreams within a supportive and transformative community at On Stage Collective. Guests: Heather McKenzie Patterson and Katherine Sandoval Taylor Host: Mary Sturgill Producer: Isabella Martinez TRANSCRIPT MARY: Hi everyone. Welcome to this episode of the Class E Podcast. I am your host Mary Sturgill. This podcast is brought to you through a partnership between the Hill Institute for Innovation and Entrepreneurship, and the Communication Studies Department here at Furman University. This is also the podcast where we talk to entrepreneurs and innovative thinkers about their endeavors, and we share their stories with you in hopes of inspiring you. And today we welcome guests Katherine Sandoval Taylor and Heather Mckenzie Patterson, who are both Furman alumni and founders of the immersive production company On Stage Collective. Katherine and Heather, welcome to the show. Katherine: Thank you for having us. Heather: Thank you so much, Mary. Mary: Yeah, absolutely. I wanted to start because I was of course looking at your all's career paths and your accolades and stuff and you have been… both of you have been in some of my favorite operas and performances. Can you talk and Katherine, we'll start with you. Can you talk about some of your favorite shows that you've been in? Katherine: Yeah. So um, gosh, I've been so fortunate to really be able to check off a lot of bucket list roles in my career. Some of my favorites, I guess, have been Maria in West Side Story. That was a role that I was looking forward to playing my entire life. And I have played that role twice. Love. One of those was actually in South Carolina, with an opera company in South Carolina, and we rehearsed at Furman. So that was really cool. Another one of my favorite roles was from Light in the Piazza. I played Clara and that was a really beautiful production. Another favorite stage memory of mine was when I did two national tours, two national jazz tours. And that was a really great experience, kind of like living the tour bus life for a while. That was fun, and I really got to kind of explore a different side of my voice that I didn't… I haven't had the opportunity to perform that much with, but it was really… it was a really cool experience doing that tour. And I worked with some incredible musicians and singers that I learned a lot from. So yeah, those are some of my favorites. Mary: Yeah, I love that. Okay. Heather, what about you? Heather: Sure. Um, I would say that, gosh, it's been a minute since I've sung any opera, but I would say that…I did that with Arbor Opera Theater up in Michigan. After I finished my master's up there at Michigan State. And another role that was… I actually only completed scenes of this but it was Sophie from Deb Rosenkavalier..and that’s one my favorite operas of all time. So that was really fun. Got to revisit that a couple of times. And I would say one of my most like meaningful memories was singing at Carnegie Hall, which I had done a few times versus a chorister in high school. That was of course like, oh my gosh, I can't believe we're here on the stage. You know, really exciting. And then I went back as a singer with the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra and chorus. We went there a couple of times and we sang Peter Grimes, the full opera concert version of the opera there. And while we were in rehearsal for that, I was singing in the chorus it was a big chorus for that and I, the soprano walked down to the front and I was like, next time I'm on this stage, I'm going to be out front in a big poofy gown as a soloist and I even said it to a friend of mine and of course next year like that's, that's where I'm going to be next time and it was one of those like manifest moments where that's what happened. So the next time I got to perform there was as a soprano soloist with a big choral orchestral work, we were singing a Schubert mass, and I bought the big pink gown and sang at the front of the stage with one of my favorite conductors. And it was a blast and probably the best part was just that I had a lot of friends and family come to the performance from all over the country. We had a big party afterwards and so that was just really special to celebrate. Like I saw my parents, you know, in the 12th row like oh my gosh, freaking out. It was really nice to have that memory with people that I love. Mary: Yeah, I love that idea of manifesting that, you know, speaking that into existence right? I think that's what well, I think a ton of artists do that no matter what, you know, whether they're performing arts or the you know, different kind of art, but I think that that spirit that comes with just being an artistic person kind of drives that in you and you and you have to believe them, right? Katherine: Yeah, definitely. Heather: And it can be scary, I think even like I would call myself a recovering perfectionist. And so I would be like, if those perfectionists out there know you don't want to even do something unless you know you're going to be awesome at it like the best perfect at it, right? Mary: Yeah. Heather: And so manifesting something like that or saying something out loud that could easily never happen. Like that could easily never work out for you. I wouldn't, it's not in my nature to want to really, like put it out there unless I knew for sure I could just make it happen. Mary: Right. Right. I don't think you’re alone in that. Heather: It was a leap of faith, you know? Mary: Yeah, for sure. I don't think you're alone in that. I think all entrepreneurs and innovative thinkers have that. I mean, we talk to other entrepreneurs on this podcast and they want to get the best, most perfect product or iteration of whatever their venture is right out there. When in fact, we should just literally just do it, right? Katherine: Yeah, sometimes Heather and I joke about the phrase that we need to implement in our lives a bit more, which is better done than perfect. Because sometimes, as Heather said, being a perfectionist, I would also lope myself into that category of recovering perfectionist. I feel like being a perfectionist can sometimes hold you back from opportunities and, and at least taking that first step to try and that's important to kind of acknowledge that sometimes you do have to take that leap of faith just to maximize your potential. Mary: Yeah, absolutely. 100% I love that. Say that phrase again. I want to make sure our listeners get that. Katherine: Better done than perfect. Mary: Yeah, better done than perfect. That's my new motto. Heather: Always within reason. Mary: Of course. Yes. Absolutely. We always put our best foot forward anyway. So you guys have known each other for a long time. You were roommates here at Furman? Heather: Yes, we were. Longer ago than I care to say. Mary: So you're both vocal performance majors while you were here. And of course, you both went on to get higher degrees and stuff. But was there any competition between you for roles and stuff while you're here? Heather: Oh, that's so funny. Well, I want to clarify that I started out as a vocal performance major, but I did change my major to a BA in voice. And that was because I wanted to double major with psychology. Mary: Oh, that’s great. Heather: At least at the time, you couldn't get like a Bachelor of Music in one thing and a Bachelor of Arts in something else. You had to get a Bachelor of Music in two things and a Bachelor of Arts in two things. And I remember the conversation sitting down with Dr. Thomas, the department chair at the time, to like deliver this news that I wanted to change my major and how was that going to affect my scholarships and was I going to be allowed to do it, you know? And so I…he said, yes, of course, Heather, we will support you doing that and so I was able to shift. And as much as I could, I tried to take like the classes that the performance majors were taking. And so it was just a matter of like, oh, I guess I'll just overload every semester that I'm here to get in all of the credits for both majors. But there were things that I didn't get to take because I wasn't a performance major, just specific classes. One of them I think, Kat you'll know the…Was it a counterpoint class that you had to take a class…that I didn't have to take and by then we were roommates and so she was just like, I hate this. Katherine: She could have helped me. Heather: But to answer your question about competition… I mean, I don't think so. I never would… I'm very competitive with myself. But with the people that I love, like my my ride or die BFFs I don't want to compete with them at all, you know, like I want to celebrate them and to be honest, if there was ever a time where that might happen like, I mean Kat, you can say if this is not true, but I would just not want to audition like I would just want…if I knew it was something that best friend like Kat really wanted, like, I just wouldn't want to audition for that. I would be like, you know her hype girl for that role rather than like, out of my way let me try, you know. I don’t recall any competition. Katherine: No, I don’t…Heather and I aren't competitive with each other. And I feel like it's just kind of like a personality trait that we both share. We weren't competitive then with each other and we're not competitive now. I feel like you know, I feel very strongly about surrounding myself with strong, talented, passionate women. And being surrounded by strong, talented, passionate women encourages you to be better at what you do. It's not about competition. It's about lifting each other up and empowering each other and learning from each other. And that's something that Heather and I… I've always really respected and looked up to Heather and learned a lot from her and I feel like that hasn't changed. We did that in college. I felt the same way then that I do now… that we empower each other and motivate each other. So, no, there was never any competition between us. Mary: Yeah, I love what you say about empowering each other and uplifting each other. And I think both of you have been teachers for close to 20 years now. What has informed… how is that experience and your performance experience informed On Stage Collective and what you're doing now? Katherine: Oh, 100% Yeah. Such a large can of worms. Heather: Well, the reason that we began the company was out of our two studios. So just the background information is that yes, we both have been teaching in different iterations for years. Then we honed our own private studios. I taught at a few universities for over 10 years, 12,13 years, something like that, but we were both building our private studios of voice and piano. And we both think big and we want what we put out there to be excellent. And I think it's been important to both of us to provide great opportunities for our performers, our students to be able to do big things, big performances, big opportunities. And so before, before COVID, we were talking about like, where maybe if we partner up, we're in totally different cities, totally different states. But what if we brought our students together? And really this was… Kat brought this idea to me. What if we partnered together with the students in our studio? And could we do a performance somewhere excellent that they don't have access to and even we don't have access to on our own, but could we pool our resources, pool our students, our talent base, and make something really incredible? And that was like the first conversation. You know, how it started was just to do something with our own two studios that we couldn't do on our own. Kat, would you agree with how that started? Katherine: Right. And it just kind of took off from there. So we were thinking big, and we took that leap of faith like we just talked about. It was a little bit scary. And I mean, honestly, it felt impossible to think about performing. I mean, fast forward to where we ultimately decided we wanted to try to perform which was 54 Below at Broadway's living room. I mean, every famous Broadway star you can think of has stood on that stage and has… and behind that microphone. And so that was a little bit intimidating and seemed out of reach. And we just put…we're such big thinkers…it was something we wanted to try for at least and then we surprised ourselves and then we had a full, all of a sudden, we had a full cast of people from all over the country ready to perform with us and make this big event happen. And it kind of just like snowballed from there. Mary: So talk a little bit about that process. And how did you, you already had some of the students, but did all of your students participate in that and how did that kind of come to fruition? Heather: Yeah, we auditioned them because, you know, I know what my students sound like, but not Kat’s students and vice versa. So, we wanted to make it as fair as possible too, you know, and have an outside person judge and choose who would be performing. So we brought in a panel of people, not just the two of us, but other music directors to listen to all of the singers and they didn't know whose student was coming, you know which student was coming from which studio. And so the students submitted videos, I think two full songs, and we had the panel and ourselves rank the singers and came up with kind of like, okay, our max number of singers was such and such number. And so not everyone got to go from our studios and not everyone from our studios auditioned, but we selected people from that audition, and it was basically half and half. Half students from Kat’s studio and half from mine. Now, this was pre COVID. And I did want to back up because when Kat mentioned the leap of faith…I feel like the first leap of faith was… I remember where I was standing. We were on a call and it was like should we just call 54 below like is that a thing? Can we just call them? Let's call them. So we did, you know, go to the website, call the number. This was a better done than perfect situation because we didn't we didn't have anything formulated yet or planned or when or who, what. We just called and that got the ball rolling and I think that built the confidence because it was just a normal person on the other side of the phone who just walked us through their requirements and what it would take to be selected, to be able to perform there. And then it's just steps, you know, one foot in front of the other, do this thing, and this thing, then this thing. And so that first cast, I think it was like 24,26, 28 singers, something in that number, and it's foggy because that group did not end up performing at 54 below. And that is because our first cast was set to perform July 2020. So we all know what that means. So we had planned and this was just the two of us putting on lots of different hats and utilizing every skill we'd ever learned or gained to auditioning singers to craft the show to pick the music to assign the songs to the singers to arrange songs like over the phone. How does this chord sound for this because that cannot be a trio… Mary: Wow. And you did that over the phone? Heather: Yeah. Before zoom was a thing. We were just on the phone trying to arrange songs together. And we did and the singers learned the music. It was so exciting. And it was I think April 2020 that we had to go, all right, if we don't make a choice right now to postpone or cancel this production, like we'll be within the 90 days of owing all of the money that we owe to the hotel and all the things right so we have to call it at some point. And it's it felt still like oh so optimistic April 2020 us. You know, or maybe by July like this, this virus will just burn up in the summer heat and it'll go away. And that did not happen. And so we did. We postponed it at that point to say okay, cast, we're gonna we're gonna try to do this again, but we need to, you know, wait and we tried to do it the following summer, July 2021. But unfortunately, I think there was some kind of whatever strain had come out that previous winter by December 2020. It still wasn't looking good. Mary: Right. Heather: And people were still worried about going. It was almost worse then. And so we decided to, at that point, sadly cancel. So we had to just say… just end it. And that was heartbreaking. Really difficult to deliver that news to the cast. And then that is when that was like a big shift for us, which was okay, we're not… that's over but we just can't give up on this dream. We've worked so hard. We've put all these pieces together. We know we can do it. But when and how? And we were watching our own students in our studios every performance that they were in that year got canceled. Every graduation, every prom, you know all of our events after the other. Yes, our college students, just devastating. And talking to our singer friends, our teacher friends, directors just, it's just obliterated and it was so so sad. And so then we were like, Gosh, why can't we just open this up to anyone? We don't have to limit this to our own students. Everybody is just dying for a chance to perform again. Why don't we contact everyone we know? All of the choir teachers, theater directors, singers, voice teachers across the country, this network of people that we now know from our performing and teaching and grad schools and stuff and ask them Hey, do you have students who would want to audition for this? We're going to do this. It's going to happen and now we're opening it up to anyone and everyone. And you know, the first iteration was video auditions. So we could still do that, you know, no problem, of course. And so we did, and we were able to build two casts of singers and perform two performances in 2022, which was so satisfying. Many of the singers were still coming from our own studios, so that was especially satisfying to see them performing after all this time. Even some of them who were in that first 2021 cast that was supposed to perform…sorry 2020. But now with singers who…Maine, California, Florida, Michigan, like all… Katherine: Washington State. Mary: All over the country. Heather: Yeah. Singers from all over who were just craving performing again. And that was really, really nice to fulfill the dream that we had set out to accomplish and also be fulfilling the dreams of all of these young artists. That was just spectacular. Mary: You know, I think you know, 2020 threw a complete loop and especially for those of you who started companies quite right before and… but we do have a lot of entrepreneurs who really either started right before or during and it was a great time… I will say this, it was a great time for planning and for iterating right? Like figuring out okay, this didn't work because… obviously you guys ran into a brick wall, right? And, but so many people would stop at that point, right? That's.. We failed… you know, COVID took us out, you know, kind of thing. How did you and because I'm sure those thoughts entered your minds at some point. And... /episode/index/show/class-epodcast/id/29431018

Taylor Swift's Entrepreneurial Blueprint: Lessons in Leadership, Innovation, and Love 12/08/2023

Taylor Swift's Entrepreneurial Blueprint: Lessons in Leadership, Innovation, and Love In this episode of the Class E Podcast, Dr. Kasie Whitener and Host, Mary Sturgill explore the fascinating intersection of Taylor Swift's career, entrepreneurship, and the power of love. From the impact of Taylor's re-recording on the music industry to her savvy business decisions in negotiating streaming rights, the conversation delves into the entrepreneurial lessons embedded in Taylor Swift's journey. Join the discussion as they uncover Taylor Swift's entrepreneurial blueprint, offering valuable insights for leaders, innovators, and dreamers. Guest: Dr. Kasie Whitener Host: Mary Sturgill Producer: Isabella Martinez TRANSCRIPT: MARY: Hi there, everyone. You may have noticed that that is not our regular music. And that's because today we are talking about Taylor Swift. Yeah, that's right. More specifically, we are having a discussion about her innovation, her entrepreneurial spirit, and the economic impact that she is having on our country and now that she’s started her world tour, probably other countries. So I want to welcome you to this episode of the Class E Podcast all about Taylor Swift. This is the podcast that is brought to you through the partnership with the Hill Institute for Innovation and Entrepreneurship and the Communication Studies Department here at Furman University. And of course, I'm your host, Mary Sturgill. And can I just tell you I've been so looking forward to this conversation that we're gonna have today, and I hope that you enjoy it as much as I've enjoyed researching it and chatting with my friend Kasie Whitener. Dr. Kasie Whitener is joining me today. Kasie is an author. She's an entrepreneur, she teaches entrepreneurship at the Darla Moore School of Business at the University of South Carolina. She and her daughter are Swifties. I do believe. Kasie, that you have some proof of that. Yeah, there we go. The friendship bracelets. She and her daughter are Swifties. And she's my friend of course. So when I thought about this podcast episode topic, of course, I thought about having Kasie on the show to talk with us about that. Kasie, welcome to the show. KASIE: Thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to be here and any excuse to talk about entrepreneurship, which I get paid for. And also Taylor Swift which I don't get paid for. This is like it's perfect. It's the perfect combination of both. MARY: Yeah, I love it. “It’s me, hi, I’m the problem, it's me…” MARY: And of course, she is not the problem. She's our topic today. That's Taylor Swift. She has been in our lives for 17 years, guys. I can't believe it's been that long. We've known her since she was a kid. And now of course as especially with people like Kasie who have children, she is in her children's lives as well, socially. And so today the conversation is going to be about her innovation, her entrepreneurship, her economic impact, as I said, because now her entrepreneurship is bolstering others, not just herself. And Kasie I want to start with…we talked about, you know, her fandom and, and all of that and how she's pulling more fans in every day and I want to start with talking about her marketing. Can you talk about some of the things that you've noticed that she's doing right? KASIE: Yeah, so you know, I'm hosting this digital marketing class in the honors college right now at the University of South Carolina. And one of the things we have been talking about is online communities, and the ability of online communities to amplify the message of a product, a company, a brand, right? So Taylor Swift very clearly a brand…has put together this Eras tour, which the idea of it is so beautiful, she's got 10 albums, she's walking people through 10 different versions of herself essentially. We're seeing her entire kind of career all onstage at the exact same time. Artists typically come forward… they do the one album that they're promoting right? And they'll play mostly from that album, but in her case, she's decided she's going to do them all and so depending on which show you get to see, you get to see two or three songs from each of the albums. The fandom has gone crazy online because a lot of people are going to a show… they're seeing three or four songs from Lover, they're seeing two songs from Folklore, they're seeing one song from you know…the version she put in the movie theater only had one song from our favorite album, which is the one that she released over the summer, Speak Now Taylor's version, and so when we you know you kind of get obsessed with it. You're like, oh, this is my album. I can't wait and then you get to the show, and you're like, oh, she only gave me one song for my era, you know? And so then people just keep coming back for more and more. So everything around the excitement of it. This online kind of cult following for her, the community that has grown up around it. She also drops a bunch of hints and creates these little kind of Easter egg nuggets that people started building up these conspiracy theories and well she said this at this time and she was wearing a blue dress on this day and I can't even pretend to keep up with all of that except that it all shows up in my Instagram. MARY: Mine too. And my Tik Tok and my Tik Tok.The other thing is with those little easter eggs…and there's a Tik Tok video going right now that came up on my feed last night about the Easter eggs. I think this is brilliant on her part because like you said: one, she's creating that community, that family. She talks directly to her fans that other artists…not in a way that any other artist does right now I don't think or has in the past I should say. But the Easter eggs… we all love a good mystery right? And we all love trying to figure things out so she has us intrigued and on the edge of our seats. KASIE: Well, the way that she's predicting what she's going to do next. So everybody kind of says, Well, are we going to see this next? Are we going to see that next? So of course, I know we're going to talk about this on the business side. But she's been rerecording some of her earlier albums because she didn't own the master recordings. But she did own the copyright of the music itself. And so she re-recorded them so that she could then profit off the albums being sold, right? So we have all these albums where they're Taylor's version albums. And the Taylor's version albums are the ones that she actually re-recorded, which there's a whole other sideline there about really that is because when you get to take a look at your own work and do it again, you're a different person. You're a different artist, and it's just been incredible to listen to how her voice has changed. And sorry..I went crazy fangirl, down the rabbit hole with that one. MARY: No, it’s true though. No, I totally agree. It's true. I was listening to something, maybe her it was her first version of 1989 or something. And, or maybe it was, I can't remember which one it was quite honestly. But I was listening to the first version of her first album. And then I was listening to the newer version. I believe it was the first album. I might be wrong about that. I was listening to a version of one of her albums. And then the other version and her voice of course has matured because she started when she was a kid, right? And we can see the same evolution and other people we've known who've grown up from kids. I see this in Kelly Clarkson who can sing anything right? But I'm also seeing it specifically in our girl Taylor, and just the re-releasing of those with her, with the maturity in her voice and the way that she sings certain lines I've noticed and the different clips that I've seen online and stuff is totally different too and people are here for it. KASIE: Yeah, well so the two…I think the two songs that we hear on that first album that are so… you hear “You Belong With Me,” which is the song about the girl in the bedroom, you know, and the boy that doesn't realize that she should be more than a friend right? There's that song and then the other song is the “Love Story” song which is about the guy getting on one knee and asking her to marry her right? These two songs… very wistful, very teenagery, teenage-y like this kind of first love ish kind of sound. And then when we hear it in Taylor's version, it's this kind of backward looking, nostalgic sort of feel to it, and I gotta tell you, I think Gen X is here for it. Like I think when we first heard those songs, we were too old for those songs, right? Like they were teenager songs and like the turn of the early 2000s, mid 2000s. Like we were past that right? And you get into now this age and she re records them and you hear that nostalgia to them and you’re like yes, that's the voice I'm looking for on those particular songs. So I definitely think she swept in an older generation with the Taylor’s version on some of these older versions. MARY: Yeah, I completely agree with that. We're both of Gen X right? And I have been swept up with all of this. I mean, I've always been a Taylor fan because I mean her poetry, her lyrics are just… No one writes a song like she does except maybe Dolly Parton, right? In my book. That's my personal opinion. Which is why she has a gazillion awards and that kind of thing because she's recognized by her peers as a good storyteller, as a good songwriter. And it's that storytelling, I think that is the key to her marketing, right? So it's the songs , the lyrics, it’s the storytelling with laying the Easter eggs for her fans and giving them hints about things when things are coming out and she and her PR team. You know, we know Tree Paine’s her publicist, they are brilliant. They make a brilliant team. I think of Tree Paine as the Olivia Pope of the music industry. KASIE: You're not wrong about that. So I think you're right about there being… the marketing piece here is knowing exactly who your audience is, and what they want, and giving them what they want. And it's interesting because I've been listening to these other podcasts lately that are talking about how the danger of pop culture is that it gives us exactly what we want. And so it's not necessarily stretching us or making us better people and this kind of thing. And it's almost like Taylor's like I get it, I get there are people for whom that's the thing they do, right there are philosophers, there's whoever else that's out there that wants to make us all better people. What I'm here to do is give you exactly what you want, which are the stories that you recognize, the lyrics that you like, the poetry that you're looking for, and she's delivering. I think right now she's firing on all cylinders. MARY: Yeah, I agree and when I talk to my students about the importance of storytelling because I teach storytelling and its place in marketing, these are the kinds of stories that I want my students to come up with, right? And if successful entrepreneurs come up with these kinds of stories, we just had a podcast recently with Chad Price of Kettlebell Kings, and they were making that online community before the athletic communities or the workout communities that we see that are online now. And they were doing that back in 2012. So I think that's… and of course, Taylor has been doing it since day one just about…. KASIE: Well, let’s talk about that online community growth over Taylor. Because I think it’s so organic. I think that people go to talk about what they're interested in and what they care about. And she's been quoted as saying things like anybody who makes you feel bad for the things that make you happy, that's like the worst kind of person, right? And so instead, she's encouraging this idea that people should come together and talk about things that make them happy and that's the feel, that's the vibe in the Taylor Swift fandom..is this sense of this makes me happy and and sharing it with other people makes me happy. And when other people are happy, I also feel happy. Like there's this tremendous joy in this community, which I think is something unique that we don't see in a lot of other fandoms and I'll be honest to say like, I'm not in a lot of other fandoms. I'm not in the Star Wars fandom. I'm not in, but my kid is in a lot of fandoms and her take on some of them is like there's some purity tests to it, right? Like are you really a Star Wars fan? Do you know this, that, or this, right? But you don't get that from Swifties. Swifties aren't out there being like how Swiftie are you? Do you know this about that? Do you know this about? Instead they're just like, welcome! What can I share with you that you don’t know? MARY: And have a friendship bracelet! KASIE: Have a bracelet! Yeah. MARY: I love that. Um, is there anything else from a marketing standpoint that you've noticed or that you've even talked about in your classes with that, that our audience should understand about maybe some takeaways that they could take away from Taylor to their own businesses? KASIE: Yeah, so marketing is all about channels, right? Figuring out how to reach your customer, how to get the right message in front of them at the right time. So understanding what their buying cycle looks like, giving them, you know, awareness, giving them a reason to make your choice that you want them to make, right. All of these kinds of things. And I think what Taylor does a good job of is using all the channels available to her. So she has her music, obviously, right she's got video appearances. Anytime she's on, you know, interviews or talk shows or anything like that promoting things. She's done her own video content. So if you haven't been to see any of these videos, the short films that she's made to get over these videos, like take yourself down the rabbit hole because it's totally worth it. But then on top of that all the social media channels too, where she's purposely using different social media channels to drop different information and trying to bring all those fans access to her no matter where they are, which I think is a huge marketing lesson for anybody that's doing marketing. Meet your customers where they are, and bring them the messages that they need to be able to choose you and choose your product. MARY: Right. And that movie, the Eras movie, that's doing exactly that. We're going to talk a little bit about the economic impact of that a little bit later, but that's doing exactly that. KASIE: To meet them where they are, yeah. MARY: She's meeting them where they are because not everyone can afford concert tickets or to go to the cities. I mean, we have a lot of rural people in America who love Taylor Swift, right? Not everybody lives in a city. And so she's giving everyone the opportunity to get, you know, the feeling of the tour to be able to experience that in some way in the theaters, which I absolutely love. KASIE: I gotta say my favorite reel about the Eras tour movie was the video of her actually watching it. Like, this is the first time Taylor Swift has seen Taylor Swift on tour. You see her in the movie theater, just like, yay! She's as excited as everybody else. And I can't even imagine what that must be like to watch what you've created there live for people to see and enjoy. Well, MARY: Well, and I want to point out too that that is not an act. You know, people see through when things like that or an act. The joy that she shares with people is truly her and who she is. I mean, I don't know her… like I haven't met her, but I feel like I have. And that is a great skill for anyone in the public eye to have or anyone who is the face of the company to have because that can transcend not just the music industry or the creative industry, right? KASIE: I think the critical word there is authenticity, and especially if you're trying to appeal to Gen Z. Gen Z is so cynical about what they see everywhere. I mean, online and politicians, in person, in the classroom, like Gen Z is so cynical, because they've been so overexposed, right? They've seen so much and authenticity really resonates with them, and they and they pick it out. And I think Taylor Swift just has a gift of being authentic all the time. She is…what you see is what you get. She is who she is right? And um, people will say that. Other celebrities will meet her and talk about or they'll just be like, it's just amazing how kind and gentle she is and how she's just genuinely interested. And whether or not you've enjoyed your experience either at the tour or wherever they are like, it's… people are blown away by her. MARY: I think one of the things that show that is the growth in her Instagram following. You know, when we first had this conversation about doing this podcast, I checked her Instagram following and it was at 265 million followers. Just in the past month, it's grown to 276 million followers. KASIE: Wow. MARY: Yeah, that's a lot of growth. KASIE: That's 10 million people jumping on board in the last month. MARY: Exactly, exactly. KASIE: That’s wild. MARY: So I would like to get a look at her Instagram stats because that's… just based on that number, it's gotta be crazy. “I promise that you’ll never find another like me…” KASIE: There's this great viral version of Taylor, while they're writing this song, and she's sitting on the couch and she sings it, she puts her hand up like that she gets really excited about it, and it's in the writing process. It's well before it's ever been recorded. It's like as she's putting down the lyrics for the first time ever. And I mean, you can't stage that, like it's, it's clearly not staged. It's obviously spontaneous, and her joy in the process and how excited she is when it clicks for her, and then we hear what it turns into right afterwards. But I think that that really resonates with people too. That creative process piece really resonates too. MARY: And that's part of the story too, because she's showing behind the scenes of how she does her work. Right. And that draws us in. I get that same feeling. I understand that feeling when she puts her hand up in the air and is like I'm onto something right here. KASIE: Yes. MARY: Any creative knows that feeling. One of my students the other day, or even this morning, one of my students figured out how to do this great thing for her video. And I did it for her basically I was like, woo hoo, you know, whatever. MARY: Yeah, so proud that they have that moment where everything just comes together like that. So I want to shift now to talk about her Eras tour because we've been talking about it a little bit but I want to dive into the economic impact of this thing. Right? Because we had three great tours I think going on this past summer, Beyonce, Pink, and of course Taylor Swift and the economic impact, specifically of Taylor Swift, since she's our topic today, has just been crazy. The overall impact of the tour should be around, and this is the United States part of it, North American part of it, $2.2 billion just in ticket sales, right? That doesn't include the hotels, the merch, the food, all that other stuff. KASIE: And don't forget the hospitality tax that everybody's paying, right? So all these cities that have posted or that have had this massive 11% or whatever it is hospitality tax, you know, yuck it up communities, but you're getting all of that too. MARY: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. So based on research that I found, I believe this was from Time Magazine, maybe… typically every $100 spent on a live performance generates an estimated $300 and ancillary local spending on things like hotels, food, transportation, I forgot transportation a minute ago. But for... /episode/index/show/class-epodcast/id/28994408

Empowering Voices: From Pain to Power with Jennifer Jones of Beauty Marks for Girls 11/22/2023

Empowering Voices: From Pain to Power with Jennifer Jones of Beauty Marks for Girls Join us in this inspiring episode of the Class E Podcast as we dive into the transformative journey of Jennifer Jones, the founder of Beauty Marks for Girls, a nonprofit mentoring program for girls whose mothers are incarcerated. Jennifer shares her personal story, the origins of Beauty Marks for Girls, and the profound impact it has on the lives of young girls facing similar challenges. From vulnerability and forgiveness to the power of empathy, Jennifer's insights and experiences offer valuable lessons for all. Tune in to discover how one woman turned her pain into power and is now empowering the next generation of resilient young women. Guest website: Host: Mary Sturgill Producer: Isabella Martinez '24 Transcript of the Show MARY: Hi, everyone, welcome to the Class E Podcast. I'm your host, Mary Sturgill. This is the podcast that's brought to you through a partnership between the Hill Institute for Innovation and Entrepreneurship, and the Communications Studies Department here at Furman University. This week I've been so excited all this week for this guest because you are going to be excited after you hear this conversation. You will want to.. don't walk, you will want to run to an event where she is listed as the speaker and after we have this conversation, you're gonna know exactly why I said that. Jennifer Jones, welcome to the show. JENNIFER: Thank you Mary for having me. I'm excited. MARY: Yeah. I'm excited for you to be here because Jennifer did a speech at one of the women's events that I went to. What was it last spring or something like that? Yeah. And I was just sitting in the audience and I was…I probably shouldn't admit this, but I was just crying. Because I was so touched and so inspired by her story. So I wanted to have her on to, you know, do the same for you guys. Right? So Jennifer, let's talk a little bit about your story. You've started a nonprofit, we're gonna get to that. But you had a lot, of course, leading up to that and were really motivated to start it in the first place. Can you tell us a little bit about your personal story? JENNIFER: So Beauty Marks for Girls…It did derive from a lived experience. We mentor girls whose mothers are incarcerated in South Carolina. And so I wanted to make sure that no young lady has to experience the pain of living with an incarcerated mother by herself. I am the daughter of a formerly incarcerated mother, who really has turned my pain into my power. MARY: Yeah. I love that. JENNIFER: And I plan to do the same for the young ladies throughout our program. So parental incarceration, I like to say that it hurts, but still in those broken areas, you can find that is where your power lies. Normally I’m asked about Beauty Marks, where do we get that name from? And that's what it means… Every scar tells a story. And those stories not only deserve, Mary, to be told, but they deserve to be heard. MARY: Oh absolutely. And telling and hearing are two different things. JENNIFER: Absolutely. MARY: So you overcame some of the hardships that you experienced and you graduated from Columbia with a Fine Arts degree. JENNIFER: That’s right. Columbia College. MARY: Yeah, yeah. So tell us how you kind of have parlayed that into Beauty Marks for Girls. JENNIFER: I think it's beautiful that it just, it matched perfectly for me because when I entered into college, arts was something that I wanted to focus on and what it did for me, the arts, was it allowed me to have this blank canvas, right? So Jennifer you can create whatever it is, no matter what you're going through, this is your canvas. So it was an outlet for me. I like to say that education saved my life, because it allowed me to use my pain as a way… as an outlet to grow not just personally but also from an impactful way throughout the state. So yeah. MARY: I love the idea of the blank canvas really being a symbol for what these girls are working with in your organization because their lives are blank canvases right now and they may not realize it, right? But you guys help them with that. JENNIFER: That’s it. That’s the beauty behind it is we're not telling them what to paint, but we're telling them here, here’s the tools. No matter what you're going through, you can create something beautiful. It’s the mastery for them using the paint brushes and the colors that they are given. And parental incarceration, like I said, is something we don't talk a lot about Mary. But what I have found is that when you create those spaces for these young ladies, they grow… they have the sense of belonging, their self esteem is built and they know that they are not defined or withdrawn from having a successful life. But we're here to help them along the course. MARY: Yeah, and a lot of times they don't see that they can have a successful life. Because what they see is the trouble that their parents have gotten into or their mother has gotten into, and especially for girls, especially at some of these, you know middle school ages and even elementary school even earlier than that, they are super impressionable, obviously, and they need that special connection between their mom and if they're not allowed to have it, that's a big piece of their development that's missing. JENNIFER: Absolutely. Perfect example - that first crush, right, in middle school. Or that first breakup, which I just experienced last week with a young lady and you know, typically we run and we tell our moms and our moms are there to embrace. What happens when that mom is not there? Girls tend to internalize, you know, what it is but I'm grateful that we have developed an ecosystem where they can pick up the phone and say, “hey, Miss Jen.” Well, they don't even have to say “hey, Miss Jen.” They may start off just crying. MARY: Right, right. And you're gonna know by the tone of their voice exactly that something's up. JENNIFER: That's it. And I say and I pause, “let me know when you're ready.” So they have that outlet. Yeah, that's important. MARY: I love that. So you're not only providing the outlet and the network and the space. How exactly does the program work, like you guys meet weekly, or how does that work? JENNIFER: Yes, so we are a year round mentorship program. So that is a part of our ecosystem. Every girl is partnered with a mentor and I like to say they're the trailblazers - our mentors are because they're creating this path that they may have never been exposed to if they didn't show up. So we meet with the girls on a monthly basis, but mentors do a “hey girl hey” check in and that's a call-in every month, twice a month, which is great. And that can be anything, Mary, from “hey, let's just go and grab some ice cream”, or I found this quote and I wanted to share it with you today. So that mentor really stands in the gap as the locomotive really to our organization. MARY: You are so creative. I love the hey girl, hey, well, that's why you were a fine arts major. Hey, girl, hey, and all the other things that you're creating for these girls. It just spurns out of your creativity and your heart and your soul I think. JENNIFER: It really does. And again, I look back to my connection with the arts. I have to be honest and share a little bit of my testimony…I knew when my mom was incarcerated, right, there were two options for me: it was either going to be quote on quote the streets or education. And I'm so grateful that I chose education. Now when I went to college… with the administrator like “hey, what are you gonna major in?” I was like “I have no idea” because I knew in college I was going to have a roof over my head, right? And I was gonna get meals a day. And it just goes to show that your pathway, you may not understand it in the very beginning, but keep walking. So not only that, I went to a women's college, one who would have ever known that I would be leading a women's, you know, organization. I started in prison, actually was called into the prison system and I taught two years there for rehabilitation for women - how to get to the root issue of what's going on. And then again, it just, it just transpired. So your pain is usually a dictation…it’s giving a little bit of a leeway of what you're built to do in the future. So don't dismiss it. MARY: Yeah. Oh, yeah. That's great advice. Don't dismiss it and that can be applied to entrepreneurs to innovative thinkers, to anybody, young girls, young boys, anybody. I do want to talk a little bit about your volunteering at the correctional facility. What kinds of things did you learn from that experience that kind of helped you now? JENNIFER: Wow, that's a powerful, powerful question. The last thing I wanted to do was to go back into a correctional facility. But someone very dear to my heart, one of my mentors, actually my pastor, Pastor Wendell Jones, he said, “you know that you're healed in an area when you can go back to that place and you're not broken in that area.” That's when you know that you've hit a healing place. So what was mine gonna be? I had to go back to the correctional facility and that session was only supposed to be maybe like, two weeks. It turned into two years. I fell in love with vulnerability and community and that I was having an impact that was greater than me. And so that was my way to healing…was to give back and to ask mothers. That was the common denominator for moms…serving anywhere from a year to life in prison and to hear their stories and for them to say “Miss Jen, if I could turn back the hands of time or Miss Jen, if you can show up for my daughter's graduation on my behalf..” It's bigger than me. And so I was able to encourage them and heal at the same time. How divine is that? MARY: Yeah, absolutely. As a matter of fact, you saw me do it and the camera saw maybe too I don't know, but those of you who are listening, go to YouTube and watch that part. I caught my breath when you said that… that you are healed if you can go back to the place where you were broken… JENNIFER: Absolutely. Yeah. And you do not have that animosity or your strength and that's Beauty Marks. Every scar tells a story and we don't look at those scars as shame, but they're now badges of honor where I can tell my stories to the ladies and it was relatability, like wow, this young lady has taken time out of her day and she's going through something very similar as I am but we turn pain into power those young ladies. Funny, funny stories and… real quick Mary to a birthday event. And my very first mentee at the prison at Lee’s Correctional was there at the birthday event. Very first mentee in 2016. MARY: Full circle. JENNIFER: Full circle and she hugged me. And it was one of those full circle moments for her and she just poured her heart out like “thank you. You showed up when no one else understood. You didn't pass judgment on me.” Now she is a business owner doing well. I mean, it's amazing. It's amazing. MARY: Yeah. That gave me goosebumps when you said that because I love full circle moments like that. And we never know. I truly believe this. We never know what impact we have on somebody. A lot of times we go through life and never know but you had the look, I would say, of being able to experience that and know the impact that you had on her and you know you're on the right path. JENNIFER: And sometimes you don’t recognize it…in that very moment, the seeds that, you know, that you're planting and that's how seeds work. You have to organically, right, you have to allow them to grow. And yeah, it was powerful. Yeah, that was a powerful moment. MARY: I love that. I love that. I want to talk about failure just a little bit because these girls have experienced failure, right? and they may… and failure comes with a lot of negative connotations. Right? And I know that entrepreneurs and innovators think of failure as a positive thing most of the time as this is something we're going to overcome. We're going to learn from it. How do you incorporate that and teach the girls that? JENNIFER: Yeah, great question. We have a saying that obstacles… We look at obstacles as opportunities. You know, this is an opportunity for you to grow. This is the opportunity for you to learn something or maybe just pause for a moment and say maybe how do I need to pivot this? So we look at obstacles because failure is going to come and so that encouragement I think… also surrounding yourself with people who understand and have pivoted their way out of failure. That's important as well. MARY: Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. And the girls can learn from that. And speaking of that, how do you find the mentors to pair up with the girls? JENNIFER: Yes, yes, great question. We typically try very hard to match our girls with whatever pursuit like career suit. Like we had a young lady who wants to be a nurse. So we made sure that we found someone in the nursing field. That can be just from networking, events, presentations, just doing a call to action, and the community's response..I can't describe it. It has blown me completely away. People see the need… people connect somewhere in the search, you know, in the story no matter if you had a parent incarcerated or not. We all… we’re not immune to pain. Somebody somewhere is going through something and so to see individuals you know, executive directors say, hey, I don't have that much time, but I want to give two or three hours to mentor throughout the month. So it's been amazing. MARY: Yeah, I love that. What has been kind of..I know the whole thing has been rewarding because when you hear Jennifer talk about this, it's just, but what has been the most rewarding thing for you in this journey? Because I know the journey hasn't been easy. JENNIFER: That's a great question. Come on Mary with all the great questions today. I love it. Wow. So I set… our huge initiative is to help send a minimum of 50 girls off to college within the next seven to ten years. As I spoke of earlier, my mom was incarcerated when I was in college, and so to drop a young lady off, and to help her get settled in… the first day of her day of college, I didn't have that, right? I was by myself. And I’m gracious you know, my brother, I had the bags on my back and it was pretty much good luck. Hope this works out. MARY: That’s kind of how I was. JENNIFER: Hey, that's my story. But, to have a group and people… we actually paid for the U haul. We drove her down there. We hugged her, we said our goodbyes. That was a pivotal moment for me and I wept. I held it together, right, that day but I got in my car and I was like wow and it made the saying come to mind, the goal is not to live forever, Jen, but it is to create something that will live past you.” And I knew that that was my purpose. That was why, in a sense, I was placed here on this earth… to mentor and to make sure that girls never have to experience what I had to do alone. MARY: And this… the lives that you are touching that is your legacy. JENNIFER: That is my legacy. That is my legacy. MARY: Speaking of legacies, you have children. Two children. Am I right in that? JENNIFER: I do. MARY: Yeah. So let's talk about them and how them watching you is affecting them and kind of importing to them the things that you feel are important in life. JENNIFER: That's so good. That's so good. That's my heart. Right? So when I live on the outside, I live on the inside and Harmony Rose is a part of Beauty Marks for Girls. To be honest, she actually plans events better than me, but don't tell her I said that. MARY: She’s going to know if she listens to the podcast. JENNIFER: But she is so excited. MARY: And how old is she? JENNIFER: So Harmony is eight. MARY: Eight. That’s what I thought. She’s still pretty young. JENNIFER: She's pretty young and she's excited. She has a heart for philanthropy. She picks out the girls’… because we provide care baskets every single month. So she goes to Walmart with me and she says, “Okay, remember mom, Jenesis didn't like that color last time or Eden, this is what she would love.” She does play dates because our girls are as young as eight years old in our program, who are missing a mom and she understands that and so she's a beacon of love, light… the girls in our program…they hug on her, she embraces them. It's a huge family. And so for her to see mom in action, that's a part of my legacy as well. MARY: Yeah. For sure. This has not been an easy road. It's not easy to start a nonprofit. And so what are some of the roadblocks that you encountered that you had to overcome? And…one, getting people to buy into your vision of what this is and how big it could be and how important it would be, but two, the funding, which nonprofits always have kind of an issue with sometimes. JENNIFER: Absolutely. So we launched Beauty Marks for Girls in 2019 as we know the pandemic hit the following year. So I'm like hmmm, I’m supposed to start a nonprofit with no profit, how exactly does that work? MARY: And everybody's on lockdown and can't see the girls. JENNIFER: Exactly, exactly. So the great thing about that…in 2018, I started with maybe around $17 so that’s my story. It was and I bootstrapped right? So I stood in front of Walmart, I started this from the ground up. I'm appreciative from starting from the ground up because now I can share with others, share with other entrepreneurs what to do, what not to do. That was my path that I had to take. The great thing is by 2023, I would say that we were a six figure nonprofit organization. MARY: Wow, that's huge. JENNIFER: Starting from $17 to that and it was just learning… MARY: That’s four years… JENNIFER: That was four years of growth and it was the community and telling the stories. For instance, our gala that we had, we didn't bring any keynote speakers very to our gala. Our girls told their stories, and they did in such an organic way. And that was the goal. I wanted the community to hear what these young ladies… what it feels like to truly walk in their shoes, having a mom incarcerated for the next 10 years, and you're only 11. What does that feel like? And so like I said, I would, I would say the financial part of it is always going to be a challenge. The funny thing, the funny challenge I like to always bring up is that a lot of the milestones that we had planned for maybe five or so years to do, we were doing it two years or three years. And while some like what's the problem with that? That's super exciting. It presents this challenge because your team now says “well, what's next?” And as the leader, you have to be vulnerable and say, “I don't know. I don't know.” And so that presented a challenge for me constantly being innovative. And just to bring up GVL Starts…that was one of my… I like to say I had kind of like writer's block or creative block because I was pushing out all of these programs. They weren't effective. And I came to that roadblock like what do we do next? And so I linked up with Brian Davis at GVL Starts and that really, I would say helped me to get my mojo back. Right and everybody was like, okay, team was like “Jen’s back.” We pushed out a mental health and wellness program out at that time that is exclusively for girls who have a mother incarcerated and it is right now voted the number one among our girls… the number one program Beauty Marks for Girls has offered. MARY: Yeah, that's good. Because that's a component, right, that we all need, especially in this day and age. I was gonna circle around to Greenville Starts, but you jumped right in there. And I went through Greenville Starts within the first... /episode/index/show/class-epodcast/id/28756718

Why Entrepreneurs in Any Industry Need to Prepare for Battle 11/08/2023

Why Entrepreneurs in Any Industry Need to Prepare for Battle Our well-being is important to maintain in our lives, and different companies can help us with that. In this episode of the Class E Podcast, we talked with Chad Price, an international business consultant and entrepreneur with several successful wellness ventures. Price shares the knowledge he’s acquired throughout his entrepreneurial journey from his exercise equipment company, Kettlebell Kings, to his most recent venture, Life Grows Green, a lifestyle brand focused on natural and hemp products. Price also discusses how entrepreneurs in any industry should always be equipped for battle because they never know what hurdles they may face. Guest: Chad Price Webistes: Host: Mary Sturgill Producer: Isabella Martinez '24 TRANSCRIPT MARY: Hi there, everyone. Welcome to this episode of the Class E Podcast. I am your host Mary Sturgill and this is the podcast that's brought to you through a partnership between the Hill Institute for Innovation and Entrepreneurship here at Furman University and the Communication Studies Department. Today we have a very special guest, Chad Price is with us. He is the founder of Kettlebell Kings and multiple ventures, which we're going to jump into and talk about. Chad, welcome to the show. CHAD: Hi, nice to meet you. Thank you for having me. MARY: Yeah, thank you. So I want to start by talking about… kind of going way back to your childhood, and I want to find out…where did your entrepreneurial spirit come from? CHAD: You know, I think it's interesting. I had to really kind of dig on to that question when I was writing my book recently. And trying to figure out, you know, when was the first time that I really kind of thought about being an entrepreneur and I don't know if it was ever, you know, a one kind of light bulb moment in my head.I think it was just, I've been kind of light bulb moment in my head. I think it was just, I've been on so many teams growing up playing sports that I always knew I wanted to be or create, you know, some type of business operation that I respected like the teams I participated in. So, you know, some type of successful operation, a group of individuals that got together and you know, achieve something bigger than themselves. That's kind of always been my dream. When I graduated college, I, you know, I think it was just like anybody else. I went into the corporate America and tried to find different jobs and different experiences that I thought would maybe fulfill that need and in that process, it kinda led me to realizing that, you know, this wasn't the exact experience I was looking for and if I really wanted that type of experience I'd have to create it myself MARY: Yeah, absolutely. So you mentioned you played football at Rice and you got a business degree while you were there. It was a few years after that though that you started Kettlebell Kings with I believe a couple of your teammates? CHAD: Yeah, so one of my teammates, one is a friend of a teammate. So kind of, you know, small circle. And when we started Kettlebell Kings, it was more for us. We knew we wanted to start a business in general. MARY: Yeah. CHAD: And we knew it's gonna be something e-commerce. We had kind of been doing our research and at the time I was working a corporate job. So, you know, in my free time, I was researching and trying to figure out if I was gonna start a company, what type of company would it be? And at the time there was really no cool brand around Kettlebells. And so, we wanted to kind of build like a network or community of people who use the kettlebell as a tool for health and wellness, but more of a fitness or enthusiast type of community, an overall health and wellness community just using that kind of as a centerpiece. MARY: Yeah, I love that idea. I'm gonna remind our listeners and viewers on YouTube that was back in 2012 right? So it was before Peloton and before the mirror and all of those things. CHAD: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, no, and it's interesting to see those things come along. Cause like, you know, you kinda feel like, oh, we missed that on these huge ideas, right? Cause we're sitting here selling kettlebells, but you know, I think that's kind of the benefit of starting your own business. You know, there's different kinds of levels to the journey. There's different scales to everything that you do.You know, I think the fitness community, building the online community and kind of aligning different kind of small and niche type of organizations is kind of an expertise of ours and expertise of mine now that I can carry with me and kind of apply that in any organization. MARY: Yeah, absolutely. And well, I think you guys, I mean, I don't know if anybody before you guys maybe unless it was like individual people or individual gyms that were creating this idea of community around the product, right? And before or some of the big ones that we can think of now. So I think that was brilliant that you did that at that time, right? You kind of rode the digital wave a little bit in that regard, I think. CHAD: Yeah, it makes me feel very old that I'm like original like social media, you know, like I had Facebook when it first came out, right? MARY: Right. CHAD: I thought those were the good old days and I think you're correct in the sense that there weren't any real kind of online communities back then because social media wasn't such a big presence. And we really… in the kind of creation of our business, we really wanted to focus on bringing as many people together as we could through a digital platform and we never really wanted to have like a physical location. We wanted to invest everything in the company that we could to have like the most successful aggregation of content and basically like a superstore for the enthusiasts online and anyone can experience from anywhere in the world. MARY: Now you also… for people who might not know, you also actually sold kettle bells and worked on the design of them and the manufacturing of them as well, didn't you? CHAD: Yeah, no, I mean that kind of stuff is awesome for me. You know I had many different jobs in college and after college so some of my previous experiences helped out there. Like for example, I was doing stadium seating when I was in construction and if you do stadium seating, you know, like the stanchions or the uprights that hold the seats together, they're made out of caste. And so I would get huge containers of those on the construction site. And you know, for me, it's like, oh, this is how, you know, metal is made. This is how bulk iron is shipped to America. So I kind of had a familiarity with the type of process that was needed. And once we started Kettlebell Kings, we really just found experts and organizations that, you know, we kind of took their advice and took the customer advice and tried to make the best product. So we would take samples from a manufacturer and then just really tweak and tweak those until we got those into the hands of the professionals and they told us it was perfect and then that's the one we'd go with. MARY: Yeah, nice. I love that process. You know, and it's trial and error, right? You just have to go with what's best right now until you find something better. CHAD: One hundred percent and you know, I tell people all the time we got kettlebells with literally, you know, we get them into the warehouse, we want to do quality control and so we literally throw them up in the air, bang on the ground like try to break them on purpose and during that process, some of them would crack open so you know we've got kettlebells literally like factory dust and dirt and cigarette butts inside before. So there's definitely a trial and error process that goes into making things right but you know I enjoy that process and I think that's what helps separate you from another company. So if everyone has to go through kind of those pitfalls and overcome those obstacles, you know, just puts you a little further away from the competition. MARY: Absolutely, absolutely. You know, COVID affected a lot of businesses that were… in a negative way when we all closed and all of that, but you guys actually thrived during that time. Talk a little bit about that and how that happened. CHAD: Well, I mean, we always knew when we started the company that online fitness and digital fitness at home was gonna be the future of health and wellness. So you know in our eyes, COVID just kind of accelerated that process and took this into that, you know, that new reality forever. So even if you went back to the gym, I think you still remember those days and you still kind of have a plan or backup plan for your online fitness or your home based fitness, let's say initiatives. And so for us, we were already set up perfectly for that. And all that really did was, you know, kind of prove our point and, you know, it proved the kind of the model if you will for Kettlebell Kings as a whole because we weren't even able to fulfill all of the needs at the time, you know? We went from, you know, normal, doing well as a business, growing, doubling every year type of success as a company, but during that time period, you know, we had over 50,000, 60,000 people on our waitlist. Just they couldn't get product so you know it's kind of a crazy time. MARY: Yeah, that is a crazy time. You mentioned your model. Can you talk about that a little bit more? Kind of outline that for our listeners. Your model for Kettlebell Kings. CHAD: Sure. I mean, I think it's multi faceted, right? MARY: Right. CHAD: So when you talk about having a business model or, for Kettlebell Kings, specifically our business model, you're gonna have basically your products for your hardware, which is gonna be fitness equipment. The main thing for us is going to be kettlebells. So, you know, we section that up into the different types of kettlebells.There's different, you know, you have kettlebell, sport, you have hard style kettlebell lifters. You have people who want kind of a hybrid. You know, you have kilograms versus pounds, different things like that. So we decide on, you know, which lines of series of kettlebells we carry. And then more importantly, we really try to be a content company. So we try to see ourselves as a kind of like the ESPN of the kettlebell world where we're aggregating all of the content, all of the user generated content that exists out there and trying to create or produce better content from that and work with those people who are creating those pieces of content to, you know, promote them as a, you know, whether they're a trainer or it's a gym or, you know, a facility for kettlebell sport, different things like that. So it's about really kind of having a production, if you will, where we're literally having, you know, 365 days a year. This is what we're going to be producing. This is what we're going to be, you know, when we're going to be filming it, this is when it should be coming out on our social content channels and things like that. So a lot of it was really growing that production side. I think that was the harder part than the equipment. The equipment is just, you know, I think that's kind of the basics of just getting manufacturers from wherever you're getting that manufacturing. MARY: Yeah, but you bring up a good point about having multiple revenue streams. Coming in with that. And correct me if I'm wrong in this, in 2019, you guys actually acquired another company… Battle Ropes. Am I saying that right? Tell us about that. CHAD: Correct. Yeah, so in 2019, you know, we really decided that kettlebells were really growing. As a fitness company, we had inquiries and we had, you know, the ability to sell other things besides kettlebells, But we didn't wanna have, let's say, dumbbells by Kettlebell Kings. And so we created a new brand called Living Fit. And that brand was basically going to encompass and it's still I say going to because I sold my shares in that when I sold my Kettlebell King shares, but my partner still runs that brand. That brand basically sells all types of fitness equipment and battle ropes was one of those things that we want to incorporate into that. So the purchasing of battle ropes, you know, a strategic decision for us to have those types of certifications and all of the training and workout videos that came with that company. That gave us a kind of a foundation to build other types of products from. So, you know, we'd use that as a structure to build the dumbbell, the barbell, the jump ropes, resistance bands, you know, diet programs. So at that point we really were into building digital programs and digital services that we could offer people and you know there was no actual physical product that we need to ship in that situation. MARY: Yeah, yeah. You mentioned the sale of Kettlebell Kings, a multimillion dollar sale.How did you come to the decision to say, okay, maybe it's time to do this kind of… be open to this? CHAD: Well, we knew, you know, we…It's a heavy inventory based company. So when you're trying to grow, you know, you can only grow as much as your margins will allow you if you're not taking on a significant amount of financing and when you have 3 partners… We had 3 partners, 2 companies, a bunch of kind of different initiatives so it becomes a challenge just to allocate resources and agree on where you're gonna allocate those resources most effectively to grow the company because when you're growing so fast that, you know, it's not much room to pay yourself personally. Because the company just needs more and more finance for whatever it is, whether it's inventory, marketing, expanding into new countries, different things like that. MARY: Right. CHAD: So on that journey when we're looking for inventory financing or looking for a financial partner, a lot of people were approaching us about owning some type of piece of the company and a lot of those people wanted to own a majority share of the company. So once those conversations started about a majority share, you know, there wasn't a real option for us to stay around as a kind of a side or a minority owner in the company. And so we really just started kind of taking conversations of if you want to purchase the company as a whole and that led us to some of these larger aggregators had already been reaching out to us. You know, I think a lot of people see the brand and has a lot of potential because it has such a great online following and it demands such a big presence in that niche. So, you know, if you're searching kettlebells, you're going to find Kettlebell Kings. You know, we've becomes synonymous with the term kettlebells in a way where you know we have our competitors to have the hashtag “Kettlebell Kings”, on their social channels and things like that. So I think that's one of the benefits to just owning that brand and the expansion that it’s capable of is, you know, it's outrageous. You're not even talking about… you're talking about…we've only really been in America. Kind of just dipped our toe into Europe and Australia a little bit. MARY: Right, right. You mentioned the brand becoming synonymous with the piece of equipment, the kettlebell, and I think that you guys worked hard to make that happen because that's what comes to everybody's forefront of their mind when they think kettlebell. You're absolutely right about that. I know initially…and this is, you know, well documented… as a minority business owner, it's difficult to get funding sometimes.Did you face any of those hurdles based on the fact that well, you had 3 partners, but 2 of you are minorities, right? So, did you face any of those hurdles that people normally face? CHAD: Yeah, definitely. And, you know, I, you know, I tell people all the time we would never get financing. So we tried to get financing from every, you know, bank that we ever worked with. We ended up leaving every big bank because they kind of, you know, what we felt were not taken as serious as entrepreneurs or as businessmen. We ended up working with smaller credit unions who you know told us that they would take us a little more serious but they never really had any type of financing that was substantial enough to really make a difference for us. So you know. $5,000 is not really gonna change your company when you need, you know, $30,000 worth of kettlebells. MARY: Right. CHAD: But in those situations, they also wanted, you know, personal guarantees and things like that. And when you're an entrepreneur, you don't have, you know, a salary, let's say, for example, to guarantee some of the things that they're gonna want to get these types of financing options. So for us, you know, we literally boot strapped it all the way into the point where we were using, you know, these kind of e-commerce type loans, whether that's, you know, PayPal capital or, you know, the different ones that you could just, you know, you basically can sign up online. They take a percentage of your revenue from your ecommerce store. So that's probably the biggest financing that we used. But up until the point in which we were looking for serious financing and eventually ended up selling, that's kind of what led us to that conversation. MARY: Is this your second or third year staying on and then you're moving on? Kind of talk about that process a little bit. CHAD: Yeah, so unfortunately I probably should have mentioned this to you earlier, but unfortunately with the company that acquired us, we were then acquired by another company and so we attempted to stay on and unfortunately that ended up leading us to no longer work with them and in the end actually ended up leading to litigation. MARY: Okay. CHAD: So we're in pending litigation with that second acquiring company right now because of the current contract. MARY: Right, because that was part of that original agreement. I'm assuming that you guys stayed on for a period of time to help in the transition and, you know, bringing the company forward in the way that you guys had intended. CHAD: Correct. Yeah, and it was the 3 year acquisition that had, you know, payouts associated with the 3 years and everything like that. MARY: Right. CHAD: And so, it'll get worked out through the course of some, you know, luckily we live in, in a world where there is a way to handle these situations and our lawyers have been involved the entire time. So from this, from the time we sold to the time they were reacquired, the lawyers were kind of never really finished with the first sale so it's something that the lawyers will work out and it's really just a matter of time before everything gets settled. MARY: Right, right. I think that's important too for our listeners to understand that sometimes these sales don't always go as planned, right? CHAD: For sure. MARY: But there are avenues that you can take to protect yourself. And I think that's important for them to know. What did you learn in that process that you wish you had known before you started that process? CHAD: Yeah, I mean, I was just gonna say that I think even in these situations you learn so much about what you can do, how you can help someone in the future, what, you know, what kind of safeguards you could have put in place. I think in these situations you really have to understand that you're working with a corporation, you know, when you come from being a small business owner, you take a lot of personal pride and, you know, you put a lot of personal integrity into your work, into the brand. And when you're working with corporations, especially international corporations, they don't necessarily look at business the same way or maybe have the same, let's say, personal attachments or personal integrity to what you're trying to do, as an individual brand.... /episode/index/show/class-epodcast/id/28444802

Picture Perfect Branding With Photographer Jatoya Rector 10/24/2023

Picture Perfect Branding With Photographer Jatoya Rector Capturing the perfect picture can be tricky, but it can also help companies brand and tell their stories. In this episode of the Class E Podcast, we sat down with photographer Jatoya Rector and discussed how she helps companies’ brand with her business, Jatoya Lanisha Photography. Additionally, she shares what she learned from the Greenville Starts program, and emphasizes the power of networking and branding. Guest: Jatoya Rector Website: Host: Mary Sturgill Producers: Kayla Patterson '23 and Isabella Martinez '24 SHOW TRANSCRIPT MARY: Hi there, everyone. Welcome to this episode of the Class E Podcast. I'm your host, Mary Sturgill. You know, this is the podcast that's brought to you through a partnership between the Hill Institute for Innovation and Entrepreneurship here at Furman University and the Communication Studies department here as well. This episode is part of our Everyday Entrepreneur series in which we talk to graduates of the Greenville Starts program about how that program helped them and where they are in their ventures in hopes of inspiring some of you. So we have a very special guest today. Jatoya Rector was in the very first Greenville Starts cohort with me and she joins us here today to talk about her business which is Jatoya Lanisha Photography. Jatoya, it's good to see you. JATOYA: It's good to see you Mary. I’m so happy to be here. We meet again. MARY: I know. I know. Our cohort… it was, I mean, I'm sure all of them are like this, but we’re the best. JATOYA: Yeah, exactly. MARY: But our cohort…we have such camaraderie amongst us and it's so good when we run into each other and see each other at events. JATOYA: So excited. We're so proud of each other. We made it through and we're all like dreamers you know, going after what we want in life. So that's really good. MARY: I love that and I mean, that's exactly how I always end my podcast is “Dream Big everybody.” You know? And that's a huge part of what we're doing as entrepreneurs. So let's talk about this. How did you…you have an MBA right? How did you parlay an MBA into photography? JATOYA: Well, see.. I think that really helped me with like all the admin stuff and everything behind behind the scenes, but it really was, you know, taking something I want to be passionate about like photography. It wasn't as… using the MBA, you know, you don't get to be as creative as you want to be. So photography gave me a creative outlet and it really helped me to showcase, you know, my passion and then being able to work with people is really really what I wanted to do. MARY: How long ago did you start like taking pictures and when did you discover that photography was your passion? JATOYA: You know what? I think I've always been taking pictures like in the group of friends, I'm always the picture taker and I just always want to make sure everything, everybody looks good and everything's right. So I think that was always my passion. And I take a lot of pictures myself. So I think that… it's just photography just came to me, especially like branding photography. When I saw like people starting businesses but didn't have those high quality images, and I was like, I can fix that so I picked up a camera and it's been all ever since. MARY: So that's exactly what you do in your company is you help people with their branding. So for people who might not understand how you do that through photography, how do you do that through photography? JATOYA: Well, it's pretty much taking the person and make… and showing their personality basically. You're gonna take like lifestyle pictures or pictures of you planning, doing things behind the scenes for your business. And I make sure that you have those images so that you can share that with your clients and the clients you want to attract so they can not only see your business, what you produce, but who you are as a person. So it's really about showing the person behind the business. MARY: And I think that's so important because so many people make decisions on companies to go with. Say they're, you know, searching for something, someone to do something for them or someone to hire. And I know a lot of people are like me, I look at those photographs, and I'm like, who do I connect with? JATOYA: Right. Exactly. You want to see a little bit of you in that person and you want to have something to connect with that's just beyond the product. You're like, what are they into? Are they a nice person? Do they have pets? You know, what are they doing for vacation? You just want to see them outside of actual work to make sure that you align together. MARY: Exactly because that’s so important. Let’s talk about your path to get to opening the company. What did you… what did you do once you, did you go straight through for your masters and work out in the field somewhere? JATOYA: Yeah, I definitely…So my career path is in IT. So I've worked in IT for over 18 years. I was a Project Manager. Well, that's still kind of what I do now during the day so I still have that day job. But with photography, I pretty much started shooting my friends, family, anyone just to get that practice. Just starting is pretty much what will get you going as you know, just, you know getting out there and getting it going. So once I started, I was like, I can turn this into a business, I was getting really, really good and I was getting a lot of clients. So I was like I need to, you know, formalize this and make this a real thing. MARY: So you run this on a subscription type of basis. Is that correct? JATOYA: Yes, I have clients. I have clients that do subscription where they do monthly, like maybe four or five months at a time they subscribe and they have a set price but then I do still do clients who you know pay as they go or whenever they need me. I still have that option as well. MARY: The photographs that you take are like headshots, lifestyle shots, anything that they might need for websites, potential videos and social media as well. JATOYA: Yeah. If you're going to an event, you're gonna get an award, you need someone there to take your picture, make sure you have that. Anything that's going on with you personally. And then anything… maybe you want some with your kids or family to show that side of you as well. So anything to do with your lifestyle and then anything to do with your business as well. Yeah. MARY: So I love that because as you said, you know you're getting an award or something. I'm just, I'm thinking about you know, when back when I was a journalist, all the awards I won. I’m like usually I'm the one taking the picture up here. I’m like hmm, should’ve had a picture of me getting that award. JATOYA: Right. You're the winner. You need your picture… MARY: Exactly. JATOYA: …up there receiving your award that you can show everybody. MARY: Right. Right. MARY: So… some people might think well, what does an MBA have to learn from Greenville Starts, right? So for people who might not know, Greenville Starts is a program that's hosted by the Hill Institute for Innovation and Entrepreneurship with our community partners, the City of Greenville, among others. It's an eight week program that people go into and they meet like twice a week. And it gives them training and connections and we meet with people who have access to capital who could help you get access to capital, anything to either launch or grow your business. So some people might say, well, what does an MBA need to do Greenville starts for? JATOYA: Because Greenville Starts was an awesome opportunity. It was about the networking like it was the people in the community who came in and like really poured into us and then you don't know what you don't know. MARY: Right. JATOYA: Like, exactly. It's about… they were telling us things and businesses and places to apply for things that we didn't know and then there's a legal side of things. So, you're not a lawyer, so they had someone come in and tell us, you know about IPs and things like that. So it was really about them pouring into the behind the scenes and how to actually run a successful business that you just really wouldn't know unless you had the opportunity to connect with folks. MARY: Yeah, for sure.Did you… what were some of the takeaways that you were like, okay, I have to apply this to my business in particular? JATOYA: I think the basic… the major takeaway was I needed to really formulate my pitch on where I'm reaching clients or reaching out to investors, really formulating what I need and kind of putting that in a very executive and clean place. I mean, clean order so that we can like understand what our needs are. I think the program really helped us to focus and streamline our needs and what our ask is, when we go out to the community and we present ourselves or we ask, we're in front of investors, we know how to you know, go down our executive summary and kind of formulate that ask. MARY: Right. So…and to be able to tell your story. JATOYA: And tell our story. Absolutely. MARY: So important, so important. What…you know, lots of us fail. I mean, you still of course are doing two things at one time…running the company And still working in IT. But what…has there been a time when you have failed, but you've learned something from it that you can share with our audience? JATOYA: I think it would be dealing with overworking yourself and burnout. So it's really like being able to stay on top of all the tasks you have to do. Once you put on the CEO hat, that's not your only hat. MARY: RIGHT. JATOYA: And you have to, you know, do customer relations and everything like that. So I think failing would be, you know, overbooking yourself or overworking yourself and not having that balance. And I really think that's really important with me right now is just finding, getting in the right tools and resources, even the right people to help you along the way so that you could actually scale so yeah, I think that would be it. MARY: So where are you now in… in the process, are you because you can't be everywhere. And most I would think that most of these photography sessions probably take place nights and weekends because of other people's schedules, not just yours. JATOYA: Right. MARY: And then that leaves you with no personal time. How are you balancing that? What kinds of things are you doing? JATOYA: Oh, really, it's all about my calendar. So I literally live off my calendar, blocking off those weekends and making those vacation plans and making sure I have that time blocked off and being available for my clients to be in… I'm flexible, and they're pretty much flexible too. So if I do run into a time where I need that break, they're always willing to kind of say we can move it to this day. And it just, yeah, just making sure you block your time out. Absolutely. MARY: What other advice do you have that you've… something that you've learned that you're like, oh, I wish I'd known that before I started? JATOYA: I think I wish I would have learned the power of networking. I think that we, we go through life and we're like, learning all these things and we're, you know, getting our degrees and we're working working really hard but it's really relationships that's gonna take your business to the next level. It's really people knowing people knowing people so it's really about getting out there and I wish I would have, you know, got out there earlier. So as you know, making your face known in the community so that you can meet the right people to kind of propel you into your dreams. MARY: Yeah. I want to talk a little bit more about the branding and how just good photography helps with branding. What are some of the things that you've noticed that you've been able to help your customers with, just by upgrading their photography on their websites and on their social media? JATOYA: Yeah, I think that… I think that branding is, I think people don't understand what branding is. It's not like modeling or high fashion. So being able to kind of tell your story and make them comfortable with themselves and not thinking they have to pose and do all this high fashion runway type of thing. People get that confused and branding is more about, you know, you relaxing into who you are. Your genuine smile, your genuine, you know, activities that you will be doing on your laptop, on your phone. I think having people just calm down and understand that it's not you, it's not all about you posing, it's about you just being your natural self in front of a camera. MARY: And, and you as a photographer being able to capture that, I think. JATOYA: Absolutely. And bringing that out of people because a lot of people are super nervous. And I, it's just like calming them down and saying this is this is not, you know, anything that's gonna be scary, I’m gonna work with you and I'm definitely gonna guide you so you don't have to worry. MARY: Yeah. So it's really a lot of, of human interaction and… JATOYA: Yeah. MARY: It really takes some people skills to be able to do that. JATOYA: Absolutely. Absolutely. I get that a lot that people like, oh, God, I was really nervous. But then you got here and I got here. I’m very comfortable with you. So it's a lot of calming them down, talking to them, letting them know it's gonna be okay. And yeah, just really having that personal time with them before we get started to say hey, this is what we're gonna do. And everything's gonna be okay. MARY: Yeah, it's always gonna be okay. Because you can always take another picture. JATOYA: Right. I show them like, look, this is how it's going. So they are always comfortable. Like okay, this is going okay, MARY: And they’re like okay, it’s better than I thought. JATOYA: Absolutely. MARY: Like I have a sister who wants no pictures whatsoever ever taken of her. And she would be, she would be one of those clients that you have to work with. JATOYA: You look good. You look great. Look at this. I'm always like, trying to let them see what I'm doing so they get comfortable. MARY: Yeah. What is your plan to grow that because like I said, there's only one of you right? And you can only do so much. JATOYA: Right. Jatoya’s going to need a team. So right now I'm thinking I'm gonna need the space so I'm… I want a creative space where there's like different setups, like different scenes, living room, bedroom, couch that I can have. And then I'm going to need a team that's definitely going to be able to help me with that and grow. Also, you know, having people who can go out and shoot the content for me and bring it back to me to edit or you know, watch…even train editors so it's gonna be really about building Jatoya’s team and finding the space that I need to create this studio that can translate to really good content for whoever needs it. MARY: Yeah. And that's huge to be able to have that space that people can come to you that you don't necessarily have to travel to them all the time. JATOYA: All the time. Right. And I'm definitely willing, but yeah, having that space they can come to. Because some people don't have, you know, offices. A lot of people work out of their homes… MARY: Right. JATOYA: …as entrepreneurs, so having that space they can come to looks really, really good and is what I want to have. MARY: Yeah. And that you can change. Because you don't want everybody to be looking exactly the same. JATOYA: Exactly. Change some things out Make it whatever they would need it to be. MARY: Exactly. So it reflects their own personality. JATOYA: Right. MARY: I love that. So how do people who want to get in touch with you… how do they do that? JATOYA: There are several ways. They can follow me on Instagram @theimagequeen. My website is Jatoya Lanisha Photography.com and they can find me on Facebook - Jatoya Lanisha. MARY: I love your Instagram handle. JATOYA: Thank you! I know. I was like, how is this available? MARY: I know. This is so good. JATOYA: It’s perfect. MARY: It is perfect. People who are watching this on YouTube will know what we mean when we say it is perfect. Because you are… she's a hot tamale. That’s what she is. So, she is the image queen. MARY: So Jatoya, before I let you go, do you have one more piece of advice for anybody who might be thinking it's just not the right time to start a business? JATOYA: For anyone thinking it's not the right time, now is the time because there's no other time than now. If you wait, you're, you're just delaying your progress. You have to start to get started. So it's just basically get out there, get it going and follow your dreams because if you believe in it, and you have that passion, people are gonna come to you and be attracted. So, now is the time. MARY: Yeah, I love that. Gotta start to get started. JATOYA: You gotta start to get started. MARY: That should be your motto. JATOYA: That’s right. MARY: That should be every entrepreneur’s motto. JATOYA: Absolutely. MARY: Jatoya, thank you so much for joining me today. JATOYA: Thank you for having me. I loved it. I loved seeing you. MARY: It was so much fun. Good seeing you too. MARY: All right, guys. Remember if you know of anyone who's an entrepreneur, or you're an entrepreneur yourself, Greenville Starts is a great place to get that jumpstart into your business, no matter what level your business is at if it's just an idea in your head or if maybe you've started and you have some clients, but you just got to figure out how to get to the next level so that maybe you can leave your job and really do this full time whatever the case may be, Greenville Starts is a great place to start. However, just Google Greenville starts at Furman and get yourself on the list for the very next cohort that's coming up. We are both advocates that will say you will not regret putting in the time to do that. That does it for this episode of the Class E Podcast. Remember guys this podcast is brought to you through a partnership between the Hill Institute for Innovation and Entrepreneurship, and the Communication Studies Department here at Furman University. It's produced by student producers Kayla Patterson and Eliza Polich, who are a prime example of the Furman Advantage here and they are just wonderful producers. They put in a lot of hard work. I want you to check out our YouTube channel if you like watching people talk instead of listening to them, go over to YouTube and check out our new YouTube channel there but of course you can find the podcast wherever you listen to your podcast. We'd love to hear from you as well. So if you have any comments or whatever, just pop them in there on the comments on our website or on our YouTube channel as well. Thanks for tuning in everybody. I'm Mary Sturgill. Dream big everybody. /episode/index/show/class-epodcast/id/28408208

It’s All About the Secret Sauce With Guest Chris Sexton 10/11/2023

It’s All About the Secret Sauce With Guest Chris Sexton Finding that secret sauce can lead to success, but it’s not always easy to find. In this episode of the Class E Podcast, we talked with Chris Sexton, founder of the barbecue catering company, Sexton’s Smoke-N-Grill. From learning countless lessons in the Greenville Starts program to dealing with personal health concerns, Sexton discusses the future of his company, how he has become more appreciative of his skills, and the importance of keeping priorities straight as an entrepreneur. Guest: Chris Sexton Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/sextonsmokingrill Host: Mary Sturgill Producer: Isabella Martinez '24 TRANSCRIPT: MARY: Hi there, everyone. Welcome to this episode of the Class E Podcast. You know, this is the podcast that is brought to you through a partnership between the Hill Institute for Innovation and Entrepreneurship and the Communication Studies Department here at Furman University. Today's episode is part of the everyday entrepreneur series in which we talk to entrepreneurs who have graduated from our GVL Starts program. And the reason that we're doing that is we want you to hear their stories and be inspired by them wherever they are in the process of their venture. So today we have a very special guest, Chris Sexton, who is the owner of Sexton Smoke-N-Grill, and a new venture that he's calling Mr. Sauce It Up. Chris, welcome to the show. CHRIS: Thank you for having me. Thank you for having me. MARY: Chris, I'm so happy that you were able to join us today because one - I'm gonna look right into the camera for the YouTube people - Chris’ food is amazing. Now when I was in, you know, I was a broadcaster for 20 years, and when I was in Texas, the broadcasters and you know different people in the community, they call us celebrities or whatever, but we had to judge barbecue competitions. So I've judged many a barbecue competition in my life. And Chris' is by far the best of any that I have done and it all boils down to the sauce, which I imagine is where the Mr. Sauce It Up came from. CHRIS: That is exactly where Mr. Sauce came from. I've created a new sauce using fruit, alcohol, and just a wide imagination to come up with different sauces. We've got about 10 to 15 sauces that we do. MARY: Yeah. CHRIS: All incorporating fruits and alcohol like I said. Like you can take Hennessy bourbon… MARY: Don’t give your whole secret away. CHRIS: No, everything’s not coming, but we’ve got great stuff coming. MARY: We don't want people to copy it. And you will want to once you taste this, you'll want to try to redo this at home. Tell us about how you got started with this. Because you’re in finance. CHRIS: I’m in finance. So to be honest with you, from working in finance, I've always had a passion for cooking. I started cooking when I was like 14 years old working at a little restaurant in Greer with legendary Peggy Davis. She owns Peggy’s Diner in Greer. Started working with her, handing out trays… and I kind of fell in love with that whole environment of cooking, creating. Did that all the way through high school… worked at McDonald's. But the sauce and the cooking came from truly talking on the phone with a guy from Mississippi on the phone about a car deal. MARY: Oh, wow. CHRIS: And he asked me what I was doing for Thanksgiving. I told him I was going to try fried turkey. He said you need to smoke it. MARY: Yeah. CHRIS: And that day, I smoked a duck, a turkey and a…a duck, a turkey, and a Boston butt. MARY: Wow. CHRIS: And they all came out great. MARY: Yeah. On your first time. CHRIS: On my first time, it came out great. Not perfect, but great. MARY: Right. CHRIS: But it was addictive. It was like it was something that…it’s what I needed at that point in time to slow me down and give me some perspective. MARY: Yeah. CHRIS: And from there it's just kind of bloomed and grown from there. MARY: Yeah. What inspired you? Was it just the conversation with him or have you always… I mean, you've kind of always been a little a foodie. CHRIS: A foodie. MARY: I mean, I consider you a foodie. CHRIS: So what really inspired me is the process. MARY: Yeah. CHRIS: I fell in love with it. And I'm a person that loves serving people. So getting to feed people, seeing smiles on their face, people honestly patting your back saying this is the best barbecue I’ve ever had. MARY: And there are some smiles when they eat your stuff. CHRIS: And it’s encouraging. So the sauce idea actually came… I made a dish, not gonna say what dish it is, and my mom tried it and when she got done, she says “man, this would be good on some chicken wings.” MARY: Yeah. CHRIS: And so me being who I am, it took me like three years… I sat there and thought about it and one day while I was at work, all my great ideas come on the clock… So I was sitting there one day and I'm like bingo. I figured out how to do it, I tried it, and I kind of took it off from there. MARY: Yeah. CHRIS: And that's… the biggest thing about my barbecue is it's different. MARY: Yeah. It totally is. CHRIS: And I refuse to do what everybody else does. And my goal with my business is to create a new space in a traditional market. MARY: Yeah. CHRIS: When you go to restaurants and you go places… that's the other thing that inspired me…I’m tired of eating vinegar based, tomato based, mustard based barbecue sauces. You know, I want something different and so that's what we've done. MARY: So you have…how many sauces did you say now? CHRIS: Got around 10 or 15 sauces. MARY: Yeah. CHRIS: The newest…the newest sauce that I'm working on would be a Carolina white sauce. Carolina is known for that fruit flavor for peaches and things of that nature. MARY: Right. CHRIS: So imagine taking your traditional yum yum sauce mixed in with a little bit of fruit. MARY: Oh yeah. CHRIS: And we're working on that and actually combining the smoked brisket and pulled pork with fried rice with that yum yum sauce. MARY: Oh my gosh. My mouth is watering. CHRIS: So, yeah. Look for us on Tik Tok soon. MARY: Yeah, there you go. When we were in the… we were in Greenville Starts cohort together, and the first time I tasted Chris's sauce, I was like, “Chris, you need to call this the best damn sauce ever.” CHRIS: That is actually the slogan. “The best damn sauce you’ve ever had.” MARY: Yeah. Yeah. I love it. CHRIS: I tell people… I'm trying to be humble, but when you have something that's different, you have to let people know. MARY: Exactly. CHRIS: And this is when you taste it, it just… it kind of shocks you because you're not… you’re thinking barbecue sauce. MARY: Totally. CHRIS: But it kind of just catches you… you're like what is this? MARY: Yeah. CHRIS: And it just kind of sucks you in. MARY: Well, and I think you just said it correct. You're taking a space that is so kind of entrenched in kind of the flavors that are there. And you're creating something new with the idea of barbecue. And I love that. Can you talk us through the process of creating this business because I guess you started with the smoking first and then the sauces and then where are you… how, you know…do you have a website? Do you have a restaurant? How are you coming together? CHRIS: What we're doing now is… So this is how I initially started out. I was at my desk at Ford one day having a conversation with someone that asked me about catering. MARY:Yeah. CHRIS: So I hopped online, in between calls, looking at what I had to do to get started so I went online, I got my EIN…and kind of got in touch with state and got everything going. MARY: Yeah. CHRIS: That was in 2016. So for the last three years off and on, I've done a lot of catering. A lot of on site. My biggest thing is on site grilling. MARY: Yeah. CHRIS: I put on quite a show when I grill. MARY: I mean you can tell with his personality. You're the entertainment and the food. CHRIS: So yeah, if you’re looking for an entertainer and a grill master, I’m your guy. So we… that's my big thing is I travel, I take my grill, I like to set up shop. MARY: Yeah. CHRIS: And I also work with… I've been working… I had been working before I took my current job with the church during the Wednesday night Bible studies. I'm big on… like I said my dad is a Baptist preacher. MARY: Right. CHRIS: So we grew up in the country and all I know is fellowship and eating. I've probably eaten in every county in the state. MARY: Yeah. CHRIS: Every, every type of food you can have, but those experiences is what inspired me. But long story short, the business idea and the model came from just three years of having to stop and go because working back and forth, and now learning how to balance time, family, and everything. The Mr. Sauce It Up will give me the opportunity to kind of work and service people and enjoy it and also make my first big shine through Mr. Sauce It Up. MARY: Yeah. So I want to talk a little bit about… because entrepreneurial, you know, ventures are, it's a journey, right? And I know we all have setbacks, and I know that you've had some setbacks, including a health setback for a while that kind of made everything go on pause. So how are you doing now? And let's talk about the setbacks and how you overcame them. CHRIS: Oh, wow. So it’s crazy the night that we had our finale. Our, you know, our big pitch. MARY: Yeah. CHRIS: I found out I had a nodule on my thyroid that they had to go in and remove. They thought it was small, but it ended up being like the size of a baseball. MARY: Wow. CHRIS: So it sat on my chest and it kind of impacted me. Dealing with things like that… it impacts…your thyroid is your gas and keeps you going. MARY: Yeah, yeah. CHRIS: So for like the last three years, I've ran on nothing but adrenaline and you didn't know it. So it's taken me a little… little bit of time to adjust to being normal and not having that excess energy and just you know being actually knowing what it feels like to be tired and having to take a nap. MARY: Right. CHRIS: So for the last six, you know, part of that I ran on you know pretty much adrenaline because the thyroid and I were back balanced. Kind of and it… but it gave me an opportunity to really sit back and refocus and re- kind of gave me a bigger hunger for what I want to do. I've looked at food trucks, and things like that, but a crazy and a funny fact about me is I've had 22 wrecks in my lifetime. MARY: 22 wrecks? CHRIS: 22 automobile accidents. MARY: Oh my goodness, Chris. CHRIS: So me driving a food truck probably nobody around here wants. MARY: They don’t mix. CHRIS: That’s not a good mix so I'm in the process of trying to find a building either…. I would prefer Greenville, but the Spartanburg area is also something I'm open to… to certainly barbecue out of. But until then, I'm gonna let myself and also cakes and sweet potato pies… MARY: Yeah. Oh my god. Sweet potato pies. CHRIS: …kind of feed my business and my picture while I kind of work my nine to five and do your day in and day out thing. MARY: Yeah. CHRIS: The struggle. You know, being an entrepreneur… it takes a… you got to have a little bit of crazy in you to be an entrepreneur. But the biggest thing you have to have to be an entrepreneur is being resilient. MARY: Yes. CHRIS: You never know what obstacles are gonna come your way. I never expected and never thought I was sick MARY: Right. You had no idea. CHRIS: I had no idea. You know, and even through it, you got to, you know, one of the mottos I live off of is fake it till you make it. MARY: Right. CHRIS: You got to go into every day, no matter what's going on, with a smile on your face, press through. And you kind of put it behind you and live in that moment because you never know life can be taken from you at any given moment. So you got to enjoy it no matter what's going on. And that's what's kind of helped me evolve and get to the point that I'm at now. And for me, I've learned you know, when things are going… when things are going at their best is when things…your biggest hurdles are going to come. MARY: Yeah. CHRIS: For me, I spent all last year partnering with people and creating a lot of partnerships I kind of had to give up. So to kind of reinvent myself and roll back out and rebrand as Mr. Sauce It Up, it’s going to be really exciting and I think it's the right way and path to go. The biggest thing I can tell other entrepreneurs is don't be stubborn. MARY: Yeah. CHRIS: For a whole course, through Greenville Starts, everybody told me, “it’s the sauce, it’s the sauce, it’s the sauce.” MARY: Yeah. CHRIS: And I love cooking. I love grilling. MARY: Yeah. CHRIS: And a couple of weeks ago… I'd say a couple of months ago, it finally dawned on me “Hey, you've got a product that nobody else can do.” MARY: Right. CHRIS: This is your…this is your headline and this is your angle. I'll still grill and barbecue and do barbecue and whatnot. But…I have a gift that I gotta give the world. MARY: Right. That's your foot in the door - think the barbecue, but the sauce is so scalable. I mean it gives me goosebumps just thinking about where you could go and seeing this on grocery store shelves. I mean it really does. CHRIS: That’s my ultimate goal. My ultimate goal is to… MARY: I mean I literally just got goosebumps. CHRIS: We've got here in Greenville…we've got we've got the Duke’s manufacturing. I want to have something similar to that here just pumping out sauce so hopefully when you’re getting you know your Chick fil A… go to McDonald's get a sauce packet, and you’ll see my pretty face on it. MARY: I love it. I love it. And you said some really good things about there in that comment about being resilient and not being stubborn. And I think being willing to go with the flow because I know you were in talks about a space right when you got sick. And so every… I mean literally everything went on hold. CHRIS: So with the space…this is another thing that when in the restaurant business, it's a risky business… MARY: It is. CHRIS: For me, the biggest thing is finding people that want to invest and that will roll the dice on a restaurant. MARY: And that's true for all restaurant owners. CHRIS: That’s been the biggest challenge, but the buildings I looked at have been highly competitive. MARY: Yeah. CHRIS: I looked at a property in Duncan… was looking at property in Duncan and somebody came in at the last minute and outbid me by like 30 grand. MARY: Right. Wow. CHRIS: And being in finance and being the underwriter you… the risk… I'm very careful if that’s the risk I take and I evaluate it making sure I’m making solid decisions. MARY: And you understand that risk. CHRIS: Yeah, because being in business for yourself, is a risk alone. MARY: Absolutely. CHRIS: You don’t want your business upside down and trying to make back money that you may not be able to get back. That’s not a wise move so we kind of backed off a bit. And it's been a blessing because like I said had I got into it then, gotten sick, we would have been in a worse situation. So thankfully, we got into a position where we're able to press pause and my true belief is that when my opportunity and my time is there, it's gonna happen but until then we're just gonna keep doing what we have to do. MARY: One hundred percent. One hundred percent. So what's been the most rewarding thing about starting this venture for you? CHRIS: Networking and meeting new people. MARY: Yeah. CHRIS: And to be honest with you, the other thing people don't know about me is I’m kind of shy. MARY: I don’t believe that for a minute. Because the first night we were in Greenville Starts together, I mean, we clicked, obviously but…but yeah, no. But you, probably like me, I have to overcome it when I'm with people. Once I get there, I'm fine. CHRIS: So I guess you can say my shyness comes out different. When I get nervous and get shy, it's like lights on, like camera on, game on, let's go. So you never really know it. So I embrace it. And being able to… this has taught me how to fight through that and how it really… I guess having a good time meeting new people and the biggest thing I think I'd say is just learn. Being an entrepreneur has taught me so much and it has stretched my limits. And so when I was younger, I was a hothead. MARY: I believe that. CHRIS: Something happened… something happened and I'm, you know, fired up. MARY: Right. CHRIS: So for instance, a couple of weeks ago, my first time back out and I go to leave and my grill catches a flat tire. MARY: Oh, no. Yeah. CHRIS: And the old me would have been saying Sunday School words and throwing stuff and all upset. We just pressed pause and regrouped and it has made me grow and develop patience. And understand that some things you cannot control. If you can't control it, you just move on. MARY: I would think that this entrepreneurial process that you're on, and that health scare, that major health scare, probably both had something to do with that kind of, okay, it does no good to get upset about this stuff, just deal with it one thing at a time. CHRIS: Well there's another factor in there also. I’ve got a grandson now. MARY: Oh yes, that's true. Happy Grandfather. CHRIS: So, being a grand dad, it kind of…I would say the moment I took my daughter to the hospital. MARY: Yeah. CHRIS: Got the call. I had to take her to the hospital. That's when life changed. MARY: Yeah. CHRIS: We just kind of… I don't know it’s something about having a grandchild that you can give back to them. MARY: Right. CHRIS: It kind of changes you. At the same time, it just shows your new appreciation for life. So all of that within the three month period, it really has slowed me down… made me appreciate life even more. But at the same time, it's made me a fighter. It's really made me a fighter and made me... MARY: Yeah, because you want to be around for him. CHRIS: Yeah, to be honest with you, this whole get up, I've thought about for the last four years. MARY: Yeah, this is what it's gonna look like. CHRIS: Yeah. And going through that experience gave me the courage to kind of step out of the shell and put it out there and move forward because what's the worst thing that can happen? Somebody will laugh at you? MARY: Right. Exactly. CHRIS: You know at the end of the day, this is who I am. MARY: And who cares? If they’re laughing at you, they’re looking at you? CHRIS: They’re looking at you. They’re going to remember. MARY: Right. CHRIS: This is who I am. A little country guy from South Carolina just trying to sell some good barbecue and sauce. MARY: Yeah, I love it. Chris, I love it. So we were, like I said we were in the Greenville cohort, Greenville starts cohort together, and for those of you may not know that's like an eight week program where the participants could expose everything from, you know, fundraising, capital to legal issues and things that of course, you're not an expert in everything, right? And so we learned so much to marketing. I mean, you name it, we touched on it in that class. What were some of the takeaways from that that you are... /episode/index/show/class-epodcast/id/28047570

SWEET TREATS FIND THE SWEET SPOT TO HELP COMPANIES BRAND 09/27/2023

SWEET TREATS FIND THE SWEET SPOT TO HELP COMPANIES BRAND With dessert comes happiness, and happiness can breed employee morale get your company noticed. In this episode of the Class E Podcast, we sat down with Stufona Latta, founder and CEO of the desert consulting company, Bake Your Mark. In our conversation, Stufona discusses the need for companies to maintain employee morale and innovative ways to share the company brand. We discuss how her company, Bake Your Mark fulfills both those needs. Stufona also shares how valuable the Greenville Starts program was for her and urges entrepreneurs to immerse themselves into communities of like-minded individuals. Guest: Stufona Latta Host: Mary Sturgill Producer: Isabella Martinez '24 TRANSCRIPT: MARY: Hi, everyone, welcome to the Class E Podcast. I'm your host Mary Sturgill. This is the podcast that's brought to you through a partnership between the Hill Institute for Innovation and Entrepreneurship and the Communication Studies Department here at Furman University. And this particular episode is part of our Everyday Entrepreneur series in which we talk with graduates of the Greenville Starts program in hopes that us sharing their stories with you will help inspire you to take whatever idea you have and make it into a venture. So today we have a very special sweet guest, Stufona Latta, who is the CEO and sugar maven… STUFONA: That’s me. MARY: …at Bake Your Mark. Welcome to the show, Stufona. STUFONA: Thank you for having me. MARY: I love this… the sugar maven. STUFONA: That's me. MARY: That's what you call yourself? STUFONA: It is because I feel like, you know, all things dessert, it's sweet. I'm very knowledgeable. So I'm a maven in it. So, there you go. MARY: There you go. So how did you come up with Bake Your Mark and exactly for our viewers and listeners who don't really know what that is, what is your company? STUFONA: So Bake Your Mark is a dessert consulting company, primarily business to business. And basically what I'm doing is that I am helping companies bake their mark, increase their branding through desserts. MARY: Yeah, I love this. So the types of…give us some indications of the types of folks who come to you and say okay, I want to, I want to bake my mark. And you're really putting their logos on edibles. STUFONA: Correct. MARY:I should say… clarify edibles…sweets. STUFONA: So I had… one company reached out to me. It was a fairly new HR department and they didn't know their employees. And so they said, hey, you know, we just want to have something to go with our chat. We're going to have them come in the break rooms. I was like, okay, what about cookies? They were like okay. So they got their flavors together. And it was called, like, chat with Chris and Shawn. MARY: Yeah. STUFONA: Get the cookies. They didn't know I was gonna put their logo on it. So I did and they were like, we don't care how this tastes, we're going to use them. I’m like okay. And they had employees that they had the cookies. They had some employees that didn't make the chat, but they would come and say hey, do you have any of those cookies left? We heard about them. And so they were able to engage with employees they otherwise wouldn’t have met just on the fact that we heard that the new HR team had some really good cookies. MARY: Right. STUFONA: You know, let's kind of check them out. So I think that's how it helps because as far as human resources, fairly new, you are able to engage with employees that you may have missed just because you work a different shift or whatnot. MARY: Yeah, so here I am limiting my thinking. I was thinking, oh, this is a great way to reach customers. But it's like you said it's a great way to reach your employees as well. And I would think build loyalty and employee morale. STUFONA: Correct. MARY: Yeah. STUFONA: And that was kind of my thinking behind it… MARY: Yeah. STUFONA: …is that it's about connection. MARY: Yeah. STUFONA: Whether you're connecting with your employees on a personal level or clients on a personal level, because I do love a branded item. I have all my pens and notebooks that if you really give a dessert, which let's just say you know, they really like brownies, so you give them a brownie with MARY: Your logo right there. STUFONA: Class E Podcast on there. MARY: Yeah. STUFONA: And then they're like, oh my gosh, this is so good. I remember when my grandma made these and then it's kind of… they’re tying that food memory in with the podcast and it's just like, oh, that's kind of cool. MARY: Yeah, that's so smart. STUFONA: Yeah. MARY: So I… this is, this can fill another niche in branding, as you say with a company. I mean, they have their pens and their T-shirts and their whatevers… their swag that they give people but we have such strong food memories. I think you're right about that. That if you connect through a food memory, then that kind of solidifies that, that branding even more than a t-shirt or a pen would. STUFONA: Exactly. MARY: I would think. STUFONA: And that was kind of my rationale behind it. MARY: Yeah. STUFONA: It’s just like if you can tie your brand to a positive memory, that's an instant connection. And then it's kind of like, you know, let's say we want to see which podcast...okay, which university I want to attend. MARY: Right, right. STUFONA: Well, Furman did this for me. MARY: Yeah.I remember that chocolate chip cookie from the DH. STUFONA: And I wasn't even a student there. So what would they do for me as, you know, once I'm enrolled? MARY: Right. STUFONA: And so that's kind of my thinking behind it. MARY: Yeah. STUFONA: …is that, you know, if they just do this, just because, what will they actually do once I'm a part of the Furman family? MARY: Right. STUFONA: And so… MARY: I love that. So how long ago did you start baking and how did you discover that you had that passion? STUFONA: So, I grew up around baking. Both my mother and father…they always kept something sweet in the house, but I was one that… I had to stay out the kitchen. I couldn’t. I could only lick the beaters afterwards. That was it. That was the extent. And so my mom passed when I was 20. I was a sophomore in college. And I didn't know it, but I think I use it as a way to kind of continue that continuation. MARY: Right, that connection to her. STUFONA: That connection. Correct. And then my father just passed in December. And I found… he was… had this famous apple cake and I found the recipe for it and so… MARY: Was that the one you brought to us at Greenville Starts? STUFONA: It’s not. I did bring an apple cake, but it isn’t. Yeah. Nope. That’s not it, it’s a different one. So, it’s just that. It’s like alright, two different apple cakes, but this one reminds me of my father. MARY: But that’s that memory that we're talking about too. I mean, that connection. Yeah. So you have the connection to both your parents. And so that kind of… I love that because that's kind of carrying on the traditions of the family, you know? STUFONA: Yeah, and it was just their pastime. MARY: Right. STUFONA: I don’t know if they ever wanted to do it as a career. MARY: Right. STUFONA: But I was like, hey, you know, I'm good at it and I would bring things to work all the time, like anytime I’d see a recipe, I’d bake it, take it to work and everybody would be like, oh, we would buy that from you. You know, you need to go bake and so that's what I did. MARY: So when did you start Bake Your Mark? STUFONA: I started Bake Your Mark April of 2020. MARY: Oh, wow. STUFONA: Right in the midst of the pandemic. Right when no one could go do anything or celebrate with loved ones. MARY: Right. STUFONA: And so that's kind of how I came up with the individual packaging just to kind of… even know we’re hopefully, you know, out of it… new normal, whatever you want to call it. Still, just as that precaution, I do like to do individual servings and… MARY: Individually packaged. STUFONA: Right. So, it’s like, okay, who’s hands been on this? MARY: That's a good idea. And it makes them, if somebody's at an event or at a workshop or conference or whatever their company is hosting, they can take that and put it in their purse and, you know, have a little snack later. STUFONA: Right. MARY: So, it continues to kind of put that brand out there. So, Stufona, you used a human resource as an example. You work in human resources so you see the connections with that. STUFONA: I do. MARY: What other aspects of that particular part of your background have you been able to incorporate into the business? STUFONA: That… being in human resources I really was able to see how some employees could feel like they're just a cog in the wheel. You know, you really don't get anything personalized. You have someone that works for your company, let's say 25 years. MARY: Yeah. STUFONA: They've gotten married, had children, children have grown up, all within that same company. How do you recognize that? MARY: Right. STUFONA: Like we recognize, you know, years of service and work anniversaries or birthdays, but what do you do for someone whose child has just graduated high school going off to college, and now they're an empty nester all within a timeframe of them working for you. MARY: Right. They've lived their whole lives there, their whole adult lives there. Yeah, yeah. STUFONA: You know, what company actually says… MARY: We appreciate you. STUFONA: Yeah, we appreciate you and you know, eat all these brownies on your way to take your child to college. MARY: Yes. STUFONA: Because we know you're gonna need them. MARY: Yeah, exactly. Even little things like that make such a huge difference in making your employees feel like they are valued and they are appreciated. STUFONA: And it's not a grand statement. MARY: No. STUFONA: Because we all know it's just the little things. MARY: Exactly. STUFONA: You know, thinking of you, again, like my sister passed away while I worked at my previous company, and, you know, of course I only had, you know, condolences, but there really wasn't anything else. And so, for companies that really value or want to show that they value their employees, this is a way for them to do so. MARY: In a personal way I think. STUFONA: Very personal. MARY: Yeah. I love this. I love this. So you were in the first Greenville Starts cohort with me, and we loved being your guinea pigs with all of the recipes that you brought in and stuff. It was so much fun. STUFONA: Oh yeah. MARY: What were some of the takeaways that you got from that experience that you have now put forth into your business? STUFONA: For me, again, it's all about meeting new people. MARY: Yeah. STUFONA: And so we were all you know, different stages of our entrepreneurial journey. We could all keep in touch and I found ways that oh, they can help me, you know, I can use this in the future or really be able to bounce off ideas. And what I realized is kind of forging I guess, the City of Greenville and Furman University. So you have like the educational component, which is what Greenville Starts was doing plus you had the city backing it which means…says to me, you know… MARY: They believe in you. STUFONA: Yeah, so, I really enjoy that. I really enjoy teams that we had and the people, the speakers that we had. I actually met with... MARY: Oh, yeah. STUFONA: …recently about a month or so ago. MARY: Yeah. STUFONA: Just to kind of talk about it. And again, I wouldn't have been introduced to that particular company had I not participated in Greenville Starts. MARY: Right. STUFONA: So, just kind of learning and getting the knowledge of… these are some things that we need to consider while we're doing business. MARY: Right. I completely agree with that. The… such good connections for you because as you're sitting here, I'm always brainstorming, you know, entrepreneurs, we all are and I'm brainstorming, oh, what a great connection for you because of this and this and this, right? And so you never know what… I mean, so obviously, we had the connection number there, you know, with the 26 or 29 people that were in our cohort, but all of the, the professionals in their areas because that's one of the great things that Greenville Starts does is that it brings professionals in, you know, the area of law or the area of marketing or PR and branding and that kind of thing. And because we can't be experts in every single thing. So we got all of those touch points with all of those great speakers and all those great people and connections that we can now take with us and use or say hey, I connect with other people because I look at myself as a connector as well. And I'm like, oh, well, I met this person that would really help you with your mentor. STUFONA: Exactly. MARY: And the wider we cast those nets with our connections and our network, the better we all are. STUFONA: Exactly. And then for me, I know there's always a lot of talk, especially with tech companies about scaling up, scale up, scale up, sell it off. But what happens is that once the business has been sold… yes, it's good for the owner, but there's no longer an economic impact potentially if they leave Greenville. MARY: Right. STUFONA: Whereas for me… MARY: Which many of them do. When they scale up like that, they do leave Greenville. Yeah. STUFONA: For me, I want to be kind of rooted so I always say scale deep. Kind of want to be entrenched… MARY: Oh, I like that. Scale deep. STUFONA: …in the community. MARY: I just got goosebumps. STUFONA: So, you know, I want to be entrenched in my community. I am a native of this area so and I've seen the changes and I see the good things. MARY: Right. STUFONA: And so, again, like I said, company that follows an employee, I want a company to use me for that same thing. I remember when they started up and now they are celebrating their 5 million mark of revenue. MARY: Yeah, yeah. STUFONA: And we're still here and we're all in this together. And I would love for my product to be a part of that from the start, hey, new employee here you go to, you know, this employee is now the CFO. MARY: Right. STUFONA: But they started out as an analyst. Anything. So that growth and development within your company, I want to be able to do that and keep it here in Greenville. MARY: I love that because most of the time you're right as entrepreneurs, especially in the tech field. It's like let's grow the business, scale it up and then somebody's going to purchase this and we're gonna make a lot of money off of this. And that's their sole goal, which is fine. And that's great. That's amazing for them. And amazing for the, you know, sometimes amazing for the people who work there, if they're well taken care of in that transition. But you're right, oftentimes those companies do then leave and take because they're part of a larger company now, they're headquartered now in Nebraska, or wherever, or Silicon Valley or whatever. And so I think what you said about scaling deep is so important as well, and I think that many of us need to take another look at that, right? So it's not just about scaling up, it's about keeping our roots here. STUFONA: Exactly. MARY: But, but growing as much as we can. And then of course, I mean, you could be nationwide because you can ship and you can do whatever so it's, it’s you can scale… STUFONA: But I’m still paying these South Carolina taxes. MARY: Exactly. Exactly. But… and that's something that you learn about in Greenville Starts is when you have to do these things. STUFONA: Yes. MARY: But the potential for that is, is still there as well. Right? And you could franchise and there are multiple ways that you could scale up it while still staying deep, but I think that's what, as entrepreneurs, we look at and we recognize, right? STUFONA: That’s it. MARY: What is a piece of advice that you have for someone who thinks they have a good idea but they haven't taken that step yet, or maybe they've started and they… now they're stuck and they just don't know where to go from here? STUFONA: My first piece of advice would be for them to get out of their own way. Because really, that's what stops us… MARY: That’s so true. STUFONA: Our fear, our just whatever, like we feel like inadequacy or anything, but there is someone to buy everything. MARY: Right. STUFONA: And you can say man, why didn't I think of that banana slicer? MARY: Yeah. STUFONA: Even if it’s just a gag gift, MARY: Right and I mean, so many people love gadgets, especially so I would buy a banana slicer. STUFONA: And then the second piece would be, again to find a program such as Greenville Starts to participate in to see that you're not alone. Like yes, you may have this particular endeavor that's different from everyone else, but you're pretty much gonna find people that are in the same starting places. MARY: Yeah. STUFONA: And so even though you may be out in left field, you're all playing baseball. MARY: Exactly. STUFONA: It’s a team. MARY: And it takes, it takes everybody to create that ecosystem and create that team. Because I mean, I learned so much from everybody in that class, and just about different…even our businesses were totally different. There are certain things that you can take obviously and apply to your own business, even if it's totally like we had a bunch of really cool tech guys in our, in our cohort that I sat and talked with, and I learned a lot and I was like, okay, I can, I can take that idea and apply it to mine. STUFONA: We all need to protect our brand. MARY: Yep. STUFONA: So, you know, we all have to make sure we're following the right rules and regulations and filing our taxes or whatnot. MARY: Right. STUFONA: Making sure we have the proper registration. So, you know, there are basic tenets that we all have to follow regardless of what we're actually pursuing. MARY: Right. 100% 100% So Stufona, what's next for you and Bake Your Mark? STUFONA: So, I'm out at Travelers Rest Farmers Market through October and I really love going out there because first of all, it’s… but I really enjoy meeting the individual people and each week I kind of design a different menu. And so that helps me see what sells, what doesn’t… MARY: Oh yeah. You’re doing market research. STUFONA: Right. MARY: Love it. Yeah. STUFONA: Right. And then as far as company wide, it's just helping companies get that loyalty and that recognition for their brand and then also doing the same for myself. So kind of trying to do a little market strategies to see, you know, what will be the best avenue for me to do that. MARY: Yeah. So if someone wants to hire you to brand some things, some items, some really delicious dessert items for their company, how do they get in touch with you? STUFONA: They can submit a request via my website www.bakeyourmark.com and then I'm also on Instagram @bake.your.mark. So, those would be the two best ways… to shoot me a DM. MARY: Or go talk to her at the... /episode/index/show/class-epodcast/id/28046589

Competition and Failure: Two Things Every Entrepreneur Shouldn’t Fear 09/13/2023

Competition and Failure: Two Things Every Entrepreneur Shouldn’t Fear It’s natural to not like competition, but having it is key for successful entrepreneurs. In this episode of the Class E Podcast, we talked with Fred Cary, a serial entrepreneur and thought leader who has over thirty years of experience. Cary discusses the various successful companies he has taken to the next level and shares how his current company, Idea Pros, provides anyone a path into the entrepreneurial world. He also encourages entrepreneurs to view failure and competition as good things in their ventures. Guest: Fred Cary Host: Mary Sturgill Producer: Isabella Martinez '24 TRANSCRIPT MARY: Hi, everyone. Welcome to the Class E Podcast. I am your host Mary Sturgill. As you all know, this is the podcast that's brought to you through a partnership between the Hill Institute for Innovation and Entrepreneurship, and the Communication Studies Department here at Furman University. Our hope with these podcasts is to share the story of innovative and entrepreneurial thinkers in hopes of inspiring you. And today we welcome, serial entrepreneur and thought leader with over thirty years of experience in that space, Fred Cary, has created transformational strategies that have resulted in billions of dollars in corporate value, and these stories cross boundaries. He's built high-growth businesses in finance and software, mobile technologies, data, retail, consumer products and E-commerce and probably a lot more. Through all of that, he's acquired of course thousands of lessons along the way that he is now going to share with us and he's sharing in his latest venture Idea Pros, which is an entrepreneurial startup services company. Fred, welcome to the show. FRED: Well, thank you so much. I'm not sure I'm gonna I'm going to share thousands of lessons but we'll hit some of the big ones. MARY: We'll share what we can with the time we have. So you have a… just to give everybody a little bit of background on you, you have a background in law with the Thomas Jefferson School of Law and Harvard and you have an MBA in business from the University of Liverpool. But I suspect that your history with entrepreneurship started kind of way before long, way before you did any of that stuff. What sparked innovation and entrepreneurship for you? FRED: The fact that I didn't fit the mold. I always felt kind of like an outsider from the way that my childhood and teenage friends approached what they thought was going to be their adult life. And the way that I did it, I was always all over the place. And I was always thinking about how to do things the different way, in a more unusual way, than my friends were. So that's really… by 21 I knew I could never work for anybody else. MARY: So you knew at that point that you were just going to create whatever you needed to create at that point in time to work for yourself? FRED: Absolutely. MARY: Yeah. You've… we've listed briefly some of the ventures that you've had. What I'd like you to do, just to give everybody a little bit of background, can you go… take us through some of those, just briefly, maybe your favorites and briefly talk about what they are and where you took them. FRED: My favorite companies? MARY: Yes, yeah. FRED: Historically? MARY: Yeah. FRED: Ok. So I think one of my favorites was Boxlot. And the reason for that is it was a company that was going to be a disaster. We started in 1998. And we were chasing eBay. eBay was literally a year ahead of us with their app and well, their website mostly at that point, and we just couldn't catch up. We had an auction website, we did better auctions than they did, much finer quality things than they did. And we ended up being just a distant second that we couldn't change. We had a lot of money that had already been invested in us. And it was time to either shut the doors down or figure something else out. And we had to make a really, really big pivot. I don't like quitting, and so, our pivot became let's be a technology company. The reason was a lot of the underlying technology needed for options, reverse bidding, bitter buy, accepting multiple bids, automated bidding increments, and a lot of that technology didn't exist. And so we turned ourselves into a technology company and re-sparked everything and all the biggest companies in the world started using our technology. And we ended up getting an agreement 18 months later for $125 million acquisition of our company which it was something that should have been in the assets. So I think that's a good one for me. MARY: Yeah, that's huge. FRED: Yeah. Another one's Imagine Communications. When HD first started penetrating American households, the cable industry was in really bad shape because the cable that would go to the home would only support one megabit of data and they needed back then 1.5 megabits to deliver an HD signal. And so it was going to be disaster for the cable industry. We came up with a technology that we approached the cable companies with our proposed technology and they said if you can make it we'll buy it and my engineers said, “You're crazy. We can't make it.” But we did. And nine months later, we came up with a technology that could in different residential communities that actually took their infrastructure and we quadrupled their throughput. So instead of only being able to handle one standard definition signal, they were able to deliver to HD and one standard using all the same infrastructure they had in place. So that company now, Imagine Communications, does probably $750 million a year in revenue and you know, it started from an idea that couldn't happen. MARY: Right, that people thought just wasn't possible at the time. Yeah, that's amazing. And then what would be your third one? FRED: Well, my third one is IdeaPros, the company I’m in right now. It's the hardest even though I brought a couple of companies public, it’s the hardest I've ever worked really. And it's because we become co-founders with entrepreneurs and it's expensive to work with us. It's not cheap at all, but the entrepreneurs that we're about ready to go out and spend 100, 200, 300, $500,000 to build an app, build a company, do all the engineering for physical products, we approach them or they approach us most likely to be the co founder and they will pay us an upfront fee, a fixed fee of around, it's around $100,000 and they give us 30% of the company we're going to form together and then we do everything. We do all the heavy lifting from research and competitive analysis, customer profiling, branding, naming, positioning, development of the website, development of the app, development of the physical product, engineering, and all the way through marketing and then launching while we're training the entrepreneur how to really, really be experienced in a year period of time. So that's been very, very fruitful. I've had 100,000 applications in the last two years. We’ve taken 400 companies and we have about 24 of them that we think are going to be worth around $100 million dollars each. So $2.4 billion worth of value right there. So that's been very rewarding and very stressful at the same time. MARY: Yeah, I bet so because I mean, I know, and you probably experienced this in your own journey that, you know, you have this great idea, but sometimes, a lot of times, you don't necessarily have the skills that it takes to make that idea into a company or a viable company, right? And you guys seem like you're providing that for some of the idea people. FRED: You know, when I was a kid, the rich people were the doctors and lawyers and the businesses down the street and the movie stars, the athletes…now when people think about wealth, it’s about entrepreneurs. When you have social media, it makes it look easy, but if you look at the underlying data, literally 94% of the multimillionaires and billionaires are entrepreneurs, went to really great schools, over 60% of them got advanced degrees from those schools. They know how to be an insider, they know how to play that insider game. And the rest of us the 95% of us, including me, we were all outsiders. We don't know the rules. We don't have the connections. We don't know what we're supposed to build and that's why the biggest cause of failure for new companies in America is that entrepreneurs build something there's no demand for. How crazy is that? You think the number one thing would be not enough money. The number one thing is that you built something that nobody wants. Your mother won't even buy it and that's really devastating to think all those dreams crushed. And so we started Idea Pros to really turn those outsiders into insights. MARY: Yeah, so that's what I was gonna say is you're taking those outsiders and giving them the path to get on the inside. FRED: Exactly. MARY: Yeah. Yeah. I love that. So can you talk about a couple of the companies that you're working with? FRED: Yeah. And I have to be careful because I'm just launching in semi secret mode. But we have one company that is, it's an app company. It's basically if you think of it as Uber for the construction industry, and it's called Grunt. You can find them at trygrunt.com. And basically, what it is is this, this founder came from the construction industry, always breaking tools, running out of supplies, and they need to go off the job site and you waste the day, waste a couple days and a couple of people that are going out there for hours. And with Grunt, you can place orders for whatever you want. Grunt drivers pick it up, deliver it to your site within an hour and in some cases two depending on how many places they need to go to. And so it really sells a major problem for the industry. On top of that, we're trying to make Grunt drivers sexy, you know? I can't tell you the number of guys in their 20s and 30s that probably hate delivering groceries to grandma at 8 o'clock at night. You know, it's not a very compelling side hustle. Be able to tell your girlfriend you're gonna go out and pick up some lumber and that's part of what you do in the first place. We want to make it like UPS when UPS first started coming out their drivers with the sexy shorts and everything was a big spin on things. And so we're doing the same thing with Grunt to try to make it a side hustle that you can be proud of doing if you fit that profile. MARY: Yeah, and that's actually… I agree that's so much needed. I volunteered for Habitat for Humanity, and it was my job to get that project… get them all the materials we needed for whatever project on site and it does take a lot of time away if you're not prepared for that. FRED: Yeah, yeah, anything can happen. You get there and then it's the wrong, the wrong thing. MARY: Absolutely. FRED: So, we're gonna do really, really well with that. There's another one that talking about kind of, Habitat for Humanity and things like that, there's another one called Exhale. Exhale is a web based solution. Our partner has been in health care for many years, and she's dealt with people with lung issues. And insurance companies only cover you when you get to stage four lung disease, which is insane to me. It's like okay, we're gonna help you die. Stages one, two, and three is where people really really need the help and it’s not covered. So we built this company called Exhale. It's all… hundreds of videos, advice on how to eat, how to sleep, the types of exercises you do, you have groups. You put it all together and she's launched. She's doing really, really well. There's a lot of doctor groups that are signing up with her. She actually got picked to be on the board of the National Board of Directors for the American Lung Association, because of this work. So that's been a really noble work that’s's really really taken off so that I think that's another good example. MARY: Yeah, absolutely. What are some of the criteria that you look for? Because I'm sure some people have come to you, they've had the money. But you've looked at… you've done your due diligence and you look at them and you just don't think this is viable. What are some of the things that you're looking for? FRED: You know, I was the first person doing this and so I've made a ton of mistakes, speaking of thousands of lessons. When we first started, we were really mostly interested in the idea and of course, the capital you had contributed or my model didn’t work. If you don't have skin in the game, you're not as motivated as if you do. That's one lesson that I learned historically. So now, the entrepreneurs are actually even more important than the idea, because we can take an idea as long as it's a decent idea, we can take it and we can massage it and we can turn it into a great idea but you can't turn somebody into a great entrepreneur, if they don't have the heart if they don't have the grit and determination, not able to accept failure as a step towards success. If you don't have those things, you're not going to make it no matter how great of an idea we turn this into. So ultimately, obviously, got to be able to fit the financial profile. But then the very next step is are you somebody who's not going to quit? And if you got those two things going, now let's take a look at your idea. And let's see what that real market need is and whether or not this thing can go in and become a dominant player in that space. Those are the things that we look for in that order. MARY: What's one of the problems that you wish that you discovered in any of your processes in any of your companies that you wish someone had told you beforehand? FRED: Um, well, I think the most obvious one is things never work out the way you intend. And everything's gonna take twice as long and cost twice as much. And that's just the way it is, you know, and we have, we as entrepreneurs, we look at things and we see that there's a real need, and we believe that the world is going to come running towards us with this new great solution. And it's really, really a long process. I mean, if you look, everybody talks about Elon Musk and, and Tesla and everything. Number one, he wasn't the founder of Tesla, it's two other guys that did it. But number two, the first electric car 1890. MARY: Right. FRED: 1890. MARY: I literally just read that the other day. FRED: Oh you did? MARY: Yeah. FRED: I got my facts. So, the reality is that things take a long time and just because you're first doesn't mean you're ever gonna make it. And sometimes, I think the second lesson I learned is sometimes it's good not to be first. If you're second, third, fourth, you're making something but you're making it better because you've had the first ones go in there and crash and burn and try to do things but not do it well. And now you have a market demand, you have people who have penetrated the market, you have customers that are screaming about that one star component of the solution, and you can make that one-star thing, your five-star thing. So I would say don't be afraid of competition and understand that things take a really long time. So don't be afraid of failure either. MARY: I think a lot of times and correct me if I'm wrong, because you probably know more about this world than I do, but I think venture capitalists sometimes look at the competition aspect of it. Is there competition in the marketplace already? And that kind of almost contradicts what you just said about it's okay to be the second or third company. FRED: Yeah, well, you know, if they were worried about that, they would have never taken HelloFresh after Blue Apron or Lyft after Uber. There's always room for more than one. And if you look at, for example, the food delivery apps, there are at least a half dozen… ones that are doing really, really well. MARY: Oh, yeah. FRED: So venture capital, there's no venture capital firm that would give a dime to Quicken. When Quicken first started, he literally went door to door to every venture capitalist in Silicon Valley. Now over 240 of them, not one would give him a penny. They thought it was a stupid idea. Of course, after he really started kicking butt everybody wanted to give money at that. MARY: Of course. FRED: One thing you have to understand or the audience needs to understand about venture capital or any other type of investor, they don't know everything. A lot of times they haven't even ever started their own company. Some of them are just finance people, and bankers, and they are theoretically inclined, as opposed to being able to really find that target market and understand that there's an opportunity so don't be discouraged. If you can't find money in one place, go find it somewhere else. Because eventually you'll get it. Yeah, venture capital…To me, somebody comes in right away and says, “Hey, I have no competition. It's awesome.” If you have no competition, there's no demand, right? Because competition fills a demand that is generated by consumers or whoever the ultimate customer is. And if there's no demand and you're doing something so revolutionary that you have to actually build a demand where none existed before, then that's billions of dollars probably to get there. I mean, people..I use the example of the first car you know, somebody could argue that there was no competition when the first car came out, but the competition was horses. You know, that the issue was transportation. And so the demand was there for to be transported. You just had a different way of transporting people. And you're going to compete against that horse in the beginning. Cars were actually slower in some cases than horses and buggies. So, there's always competition and if there isn't, you know, you're gonna be one of those that fail because you created something that there is no demand for. MARY: Yeah, I think that's a very good point. Let's see, do you have and I kind of feel like you do, just from our conversation, do you have kind of an entrepreneurial philosophy of entrepreneurism? FRED: Well, my first philosophy is, don't. MARY: That’s what everybody says. FRED: Look, if you want to be an entrepreneur, you need to understand it's a lifelong struggle,no matter how far along you get. I mean, Elon Musk with SpaceX, he was one rocket failure away from losing everything that he had after he'd already had a couple of successes. A big payday for PayPal. And yet, still having those issues, problems with testing, problems with Twitter. There are always fires. And if you're not comfortable wearing a fire suit, you shouldn't be an entrepreneur. But if you are, then I think for me, the kind of mantra for entrepreneurship is be comfortable with pain. Because you know that in the end, you can help a whole lot of people. Whatever it is that you're doing, if you're doing it for the right reason, with the right purpose, the right determination that you're a potentially a world changer, and you can't change the world without hurting yourself. And as long as you're willing to do that, and do things for the greater good, you're going to be able to make it no matter what you're trying to do. MARY: I think that's a great mindset to be in because I think you're going to be more prosperous if you're in the mindset that I'm doing a greater good, rather than I'm going to make money. The money is going to come. FRED: Yeah, yeah. And I say that all the time too. Don't chase the money, chase your dreams. Make it a reality and as long as you have your dream and be really strategic about how you take that dream and actualize it. When you can actualize your dream, the money will follow. It's as simple as that because doing it the right way, doing the research,... /episode/index/show/class-epodcast/id/28014081

One Question: How Do You Want to Spend Your Day? 08/30/2023

One Question: How Do You Want to Spend Your Day? There are important questions we must all ask ourselves. One major question is, “How do I want to spend my day?” In this episode of the Class E Podcast, we talked to Jason Richards '01, the Global Business Director and shareholder of the commercial real estate property management firm, NAI Earle Furman. Richards discusses how his involvement with non-profits led to him to where he is today. He shares why it's key for entrepreneurs to listen and reflect, and the importance of passion in a career or venture. Guest: Jason Richards Host: Mary Sturgill Producer: Isabella Martinez Transcript: MARY: Hi there, everyone. Welcome to this episode of the Class E Podcast. I'm your host, Mary Sturgill. This is the podcast that is brought to you through a partnership between the Hill Institute for Innovation and Entrepreneurship, and the Communication Studies Department here at Furman University. And we're so happy to have you with us today. We have a very special guest, Jason Richards is not only a Furman alumni, you… I believe serve on the Board of Trustees. He's on the board of trustees, and he is the Global Business Director and shareholder of the commercial real estate property management firm NAI Earle Furman. That's a mouthful Jason. JASON: It is. It doesn't roll off the tongue very easily. MARY: No, it doesn’t. I was like alliteration there. No, not at all. Well, welcome to the show. JASON: Thank you. It's an honor. MARY: So I wanted to have you on because I love your background and you were a political science major here at Furman back in the day when you graduated. JASON: Back in the day. MARY: Back in the day. And then you went to Duke and got a certificate. Tell us about that certificate. JASON: So yes. When I finished Furman, I moved up in Durham and I was working with Habitat for Humanity. I was not building houses. I'm not remotely handy, but I was on the administrative side of the office and Duke, I think they still do have a certificate program in nonprofit management, and I took that. It was probably about a six-month course. It was great, it's a great background, even for small businesses frankly. MARY: Yeah, that's what I was going to talk… so talk a little bit about because I believe, just looking at your background, I would think that that would lead you into the small business part. But before we jump into that, though, I want to talk about the nonprofit sector because I think it's so important. I worked for Habitat for Humanity too for a while. You guys are not gonna believe this. I was the construction project coordinator for Habitat for Humanity in Hickory, North Carolina… JASON: Okay. MARY: …for about a year. I did all of their PR stuff. And then I did all the ordering for the projects and all that stuff. It was a lot of fun. JASON: I visited a job site once to work and was not invited. MARY: They didn’t give you the build and a hammer? JASON: They did not. I think they spent more time fixing my mistakes that I spent trying to help. MARY: There were a few volunteers like that I would say. JASON: Know your limitations. MARY: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And accept them. So let's talk about your role in the nonprofit world. JASON: Sure. MARY: What kinds of things did you do and did you learn that help you now? JASON: Well, you know, so when I finished that program, I moved back to Greenville in 2003. And so my wife and I met at Furman. We’re one of those couples, and she finished graduate school. We got married and moved to Greenville and I started working in nonprofits here. And so I worked for two different nonprofits, and a nonprofit’s a small business… MARY: Absolutely. JASON: And really, I'm so thankful from that point early in my career, because working in the nonprofit…that you have to be hands on in every aspect of the operation. And so I learned, I think a lot more than many of our counterparts that went more traditional corporate routes right out of the gate. MARY: Right. That's a very good point. Because when you do work for a nonprofit, you have to wear multiple hats. Because, you know, money's thin most of the time. JASON: Oh, yeah. MARY: And you have to put your talents where you can put your talents and make it, make it happen. You know? I love that. The fact that you compared it to a small business because that's really in fact the way that most nonprofits should be run. And the successful ones are. JASON: Oh, absolutely. MARY: Yeah. So you still have to be pretty innovative though in that and I'm gonna circle back around to the idea of innovation. JASON: Sure. MARY: So then after the nonprofit sector, did you go directly to NAI Earle Furman? JASON: Sure. So as I said, I worked with two different nonprofits here in town, but on the side, I have always been interested in passive income and alternative investing. I started dabbling with stocks when I was in high school. And at that point in my, I guess, mid 20s, I was very interested in real estate. And so while I was working with nonprofits, I was actually investing on a very small scale in some commercial properties and was a client of NAI Earle Furman. MARY: Ok. Yeah. JASON: And so working in that second nonprofit, I was in operations management and an operations position was coming open at NAI and they asked me then. So I started there in 07. MARY: Yeah, that's a great stepping stone too. I did the exact, not the exact same thing, but a similar thing - working in nonprofit that led me to my corporate jobs in two instances. JASON: It's a great foundation for business. MARY: Yes. Yeah, for sure. So let's talk about what you do now in the commercial real estate world. You're in charge of kind of growing the business. JASON: Right. So it's been fun. When I started with the firm in 07, we had, I think, 12 commercial brokers, a couple of property managers, and the company as a whole was, you know, one floor of one office here in Greenville with about 30 people. Now, we're about 160 people. We have five offices in North and South Carolina. And in addition to you know, the brokerage and property management, both of which have grown quite a bit, we started the private equity fund seven years ago. We bought about, I think, six or $700 million worth of real estate with that. MARY: And that's kind of your… you're the one who kind of looks for acquisitions. Is that right? JASON: Well, so, I mean, everything we do is a team effort. Very collaborative, very entrepreneurial, is the word we like to use for our firm. But yeah, so I was the COO and actually pivoted to a different position a couple of years ago. But at the end of the day, yes, we're all always looking for opportunities. You know, one of my roles as COO was looking for acquisitions, not of real estate, but other brokerages and like firms that we could roll in, and I'm still, still doing that as well. MARY: So to grow the firm. So in your, and you just alluded to it, in your description on the website, it talks about how you guys are innovative thinkers and talked about that entrepreneurial mindset. JASON: Right. MARY: I want to talk about that a little bit. How do you carry that out as a company and then individually too? JASON: Well, I think, you know, our business especially, you know, as I said, we have three business lines, but commercial brokerage is our core business and, you know, nationally and really internationally that's becoming much more corporate. There are a lot of really large firms that do a lot of work with Fortune 100 companies, and they're very process oriented if this than that. MARY: Right. JASON: We actually like to joke, all of our upper management is liberal arts majors. So I mean, and truly, you know, we're very much… we're very thoughtful in how we approach things for, for clients and investors and for our own business. And I guess the word that I always like to use is then we're just very, we're very open minded. And we don't say no to an idea just out of hand. You know, we really think through, is this something we should try? Yeah, and we're open to trying and failing. MARY: Yeah, I think that's a great trait that entrepreneurs should have. JASON: Absolutely. MARY: You have to be, and most entrepreneurs do, I will say this… and this may be the main difference between people who are entrepreneurs or innovative thinkers and people who are not is that entrepreneurs and innovators say yes. JASON: Right. Well, and I think, you know, too often, and certainly when I was in the COO role, and especially as, you know, with regards to, you know, employees come to you and they have an idea, I think people just too often say no, because that's the way you know, well, that's not the way we've done it. MARY: Exactly. We've always done it this way. JASON: Right. So, you know, training yourself to say, well, no, you know, is there a reason that we haven't done it or we just don't do it? And sort of re-centering that thought, and I think we're really good at that. MARY: Yeah, and I think that's important. I think if COVID taught us anything, maybe that's one of the things that it taught us. JASON: Right. MARY: There are other ways to do things. JASON: Absolutely. MARY: Yeah. Yeah. If you would give advice to new entrepreneurs because you're, you know, you are an entrepreneur, even though you may work for a company, what would your advice be in addition to saying yes to those things? JASON: You know, I think and…entrepreneurs or people, you know, just getting started in a corporate career, my advice is always kind of the same. And this is reflective of my personality so your knowledge may vary. But, you know, I've built all of my success on relationships, and I do feel you know, that things, especially, you know, with COVID, and you know, people getting very comfortable with remote things, which is great. You have to work extra hard to build relationships. MARY: Absolutely. Yeah. JASON: Because, you know, the people who focus on the transactional aspects of business, do very well on the short term. But as you're growing a company, if you're an entrepreneur or trying to bring a product to market, it's the relationships you've built along the way before you actually needed them that are going to help you get across the goal line. So for me, it's, it's time invested, you know, that may not have a clear objective at that moment, but it's taking time to build and maintain those relationships. MARY: And planting those seeds. JASON: Exactly. MARY: Yeah. I don't think a lot of people or enough people maybe kind of have that mentality that if it's not, if it doesn't have a quick return on my investment, so to speak… JASON: Right. MARY: … right? Then I'm not going to put the time in. JASON: Well, and I think too, you know, I love the energy and I use this term loosely, young people, right? So I'm 44. So I don't think of myself as old but I'm certainly not young either. But, you know, I think it's hard to, you know, when you're 23, 24 and you're starting something you're excited about you want those quick returns. MARY: Right. JASON: But with a little bit of hindsight, you know, I've now realized how quickly 10 years passes. And I've started to see and have seen that the seeds that I planted, many of which were inadvertent, frankly 10 or 15 years ago, have really paid off with great relationships now. MARY: Yeah. And that's true when it comes to, you know, banking, and I mean, all aspects of business. JASON: Right. MARY: I was just a ghost writer for a book for a local businessman and part of what he talks about in his book is that very thing about planting those seeds, keeping those relationships, the reason he attributes his success, a big part of it is the relationships that he had, from the time that he was in high school playing sports. JASON: Right. MARY: Right? JASON: And you never know and that’s, you know, that's one thing I, you know, I'm…my personality by nature is that I'm a helper. MARY: Yeah. JASON: All the assessments I've taken have indicated that, but, you know, a lot of the relationships that I now have are people that I helped in some way, you know, 10 or 15 years ago with no notion of a return at the time, but they've worked their way up and now they're in a position to pay that back and you just, you just never know. MARY: That's amazing. JASON: Yeah. MARY: Yeah. So how did the 2008…Let's talk about kind of the real estate business. JASON: Sure. MARY: 2008 huge crash… JASON: Right, right. MARY: …that affected everybody, especially companies, I'm sure like yours. And then… how have we grown and where are we now? That's a loaded question. JASON: How long do we have for this podcast? You know, I think, you know, obviously, it is funny, when I tell people a little bit about my journey which I alluded to earlier, you know, that I was investing in real estate… MARY: Yeah. JASON: …at a young age, people say, well, how were you able to do that? And I said, well, that's part of the reason that we ended up in the crash because it was a little too easy to borrow money and leverage was a little out of whack… MARY: Yeah. JASON: …in terms of the ratios and things like that. So you know, obviously we're in a complicated place right now. MARY: We are. Yeah. JASON: Interest rates are up and deals are slowing a little bit. But I do think it's very different in terms of, you know, the fundamentals never went back to the pre 2008 issues. It became the, you know, borrowing money was not as easy right as it was then nor should it have been. MARY: Exactly. JASON: So I think, you know, the fundamentals are better, you know, things… COVID changed everything. And so the economy is in a weird place right now. But you know, at the end of the day, real estate and this is where I think we go sideways, you know, people have these pontifications at a macro level. Real estate is not a national business. MARY: Right. JASON: It is hyper, hyper local, and very regional. And you know, my lens, although we don't, we do deals all over the country, my lens is focused on the southeast and this region is booming. You know, there are certainly some speed bumps and some hiccups in the real estate world at this time, but at the end of the day, this area is growing. People want to be between Raleigh and Atlanta, and we're smack in the middle of it here. MARY: Right. JASON: And so, you know, we're very bullish on, on real estate now. And in the immediate future. MARY: Yeah. So what advice… that's good to know, for those of us who live here. JASON: Right. Certainly. Certainly. MARY: What, what is your advice to someone say like yourself who might be young who might want to start their investing career in real estate, what would be your advice to them, how to get in right now? JASON: Well, right now, it's a tough time to break in. MARY: I know. JASON: And, you know, one of the things that I always get and actually, I was talking to a Furman student who had this question, he said, you know, I've got X amount of money and I'm interested in getting into real estate. And one of the things that I tell people is if you have X amount of money, and that's all you have, don't buy real estate with it because, you know, banks when they're lending for real estate, you need to have some liquidity somewhere else. MARY: Absolutely. Yeah. JASON: So that's gonna make your life a lot easier. MARY: Yeah. JASON: So that's, that's number one. But for right now, you know, again, I go back to relationships. You know, like it or not, the reality is that real estate, like so many things is kind of an insider's game. And you know, the best opportunities are ones that you never hear about. MARY: Right. JASON: And so it's getting out there. It's networking, and not with the notion of I'm going to find a deal right now, but I'm going to get to know these people and let them get to know me so that when they have an opportunity to be involved and to invest, they're going to reach out. MARY: I like something you kind of alluded to right there, and you've alluded to it before, but I want to make sure our listeners get this is that if you're going for the sale… JASON: Right. MARY: If you're going for the immediate satisfaction, that may have an immediate, you know, kind of boom to your pocketbook, but in the long term, it's not going to sustain you like relationships will do. JASON: Right. Because you're going to have to recreate that transaction time and time again, but if you have the relationships, eventually you get to the point where they're coming to you. MARY: Yes, yeah, that's, that's a good point. They're coming to you. And I think, I think that's a mistake a lot of people make is they go after the dollar… JASON: Right. MARY: …rather than a relationship. JASON: Right. Exactly. MARY: Yeah. So how do you find your clients when you, when you bring clients on? JASON: Well, you know, actually, I'll sort of pivot back to the nonprofit. MARY: Yeah. JASON: Right? So I was very fortunate with both of the organizations that I worked with, that the positions that I held interacted very closely with the boards of directors, and some of the top fundraising volunteers and I cultivated some amazing friendships out of those groups, people who are much further, you know, 20 and 30 years into their career, CEOs of local companies, banks, etc. And those relationships served me really well, but also sort of modeled for me… I watched how they interacted and how meaningful… they had found these organizations that they were passionate about, and they were giving their time, but that also helped them with their work. MARY: Yeah. JASON: And so I have, you know, sort of followed that path. You know, I've served as you mentioned, I serve on the Furman board, I chaired the local United Way board, I've been on several others… MARY: The list of your boards is… you need to go to an NAI Earle Furman website and look at his bio because there's like 15 boards on there. And I believe in that too. JASON: Well, it's important. MARY: It is important. JASON: And when I pivoted, you know, my wife and I both were working professionally in the nonprofit world. And when I made that decision to go into the business world, one of the things that was very important to me, was that I worked with a company that valued community involvement. MARY: Yes. JASON: And not, you know, obviously it's good for business. MARY: Right. JASON: But for the right reasons. MARY: Exactly. JASON: And our company is very, very tied into the community. And so there was a while there where I was on way too many at one time… MARY: It's time-consuming. JASON: It is. And so I've had to step that back. So now I think I'm only on three right now. And that's probably the max. MARY: Well and that would be a piece of advice that I would give to young entrepreneurs too is to find… and I would, I've always served on boards personally that I'm passionate about… JASON: Right. MARY: Right? Like helping children, helping SA victims or survivors, or the Humane Society. I've lived in several cities around the country, and I think I've been... /episode/index/show/class-epodcast/id/27885789

Making Data Analysis Usable: A Conversation with Guest Spencer Tate 08/16/2023

Making Data Analysis Usable: A Conversation with Guest Spencer Tate Analyzing data can be a daunting task, but what if there was a more usable program to do so? In this episode of the Class E Podcast, we sat down with Spencer Tate ‘24 to discuss his and co-founder, Nemath Ahmed’s, data analytics platform, dotflo. Reminiscing on his win at the 2023 Paladin Pitch Competition, Tate shares what he’s learned on his entrepreneurial journey and the reality of having opportunity costs in life. Guest: Spencer Tate '24 Host: Mary Sturgill Producer: Isabella Martinez Transcript: MARY: Hi there, everyone. Welcome to this episode of the Class E Podcast. I am your host, Mary Sturgill. This is the podcast that's brought to you through a partnership between the Hill Institute for Innovation and Entrepreneurship, and the Communication Studies Department here at Furman University. And we are right in the middle of our special series in which we talk to Furman students and recent alumni about their entrepreneurial endeavors. And so I have Spencer Tate with me here today. Spencer, welcome to the show. SPENCER: Thank you. No, it's great to be on a podcast. This is the first time so… MARY: Alright! SPENCER: I'll try my best but I'm excited for the opportunity. MARY: Cool. We're glad to have you. I know you at your young age are a serial entrepreneur right now. You just won the Paladin Pitch competition. Let's talk about your current company dotflo. Tell us about that. SPENCER: Yeah, so right now we're…so Nemath and I…so Nemath Ahmed…he's my co-founder. He's actually in San Jose, California. That's why I have the festive San Francisco bridge behind me so he's out in San Jose right now working at Cisco. And I'm out actually in Chicago working at Ernst and Young. He's doing more AI machine learning and I'm more on the finance side. So yeah, over the past, since the Paladin Pitch… Well first I went out to San Jose for three weeks to work in person with Nemath. During that time, we were able to continue to develop the vision we were, we were able to continue to talk with initial beta users and start those initial relationships with people who are actually going to be able to use our product. And yeah, it's been an exciting time. We're actually about to launch our initial real MVP that is going to go into the hands of four universities who we're talking to right now who are using our product or will be using our product and we're going to go through kind of an iteration mode where we just work with those kind of initial first users and see how we can provide the most value. But going back to the dotflo and what it is and why we started it is so I'm a data analyst and Nemath’s a data scientist. And frankly, a lot of companies can't afford to hire a full-time data analyst or a full-time data science team within their organization. That's kind of where the ideas spurred of… kind of leveraging new technology and building out our own novel way to streamline that data science process and make it accessible for teams who otherwise wouldn't be able to afford it. So that's really what we've been pushing on over the past few months. And we're getting it to a good stage where we can actually then put it into the hands of those initial universities and I think we're at an exciting time right now. MARY: Yeah, so I imagine your customer would be maybe universities, small or medium sized businesses. Am I correct in that thinking? SPENCER: Yeah, so, so actually, when we first, when we did the Paladin Pitch we were pretty open to a lot of different verticals. So we were open to retail, manufacturing, food, universities, you name it, but what we found really quickly when we were developing, kind of the technology behind what drives that streamline process, is that it's better 1) to focus on an initial vertical and essentially train the brain within understanding data within that specific industry and even problem statement. So what we're focused on right now is helping advancement and development teams at universities help understand how they can use machine learning, which is basically statistical methods that help with understanding, how to assess the right, the right people who I should look, who I should reach out to, who who might potentially donate to my university. So a lot of… so Furman was the first people who approached us, and they essentially said, “hey, we have a data analyst on our team. However, we're lacking in the data science expertise. This is something that can be really beneficial for us because we're kind of, not that we're guessing but there's a lot of, there's a lot of guessing to be frank…That includes the process of “Who do I reach out to, do I reach out to all 1000 people on my list?” And when we bring in that flow, you can find out the 100, the top 100 people who are going to be most likely to donate or that have the characteristics that will donate a specific amount. So yeah, so we're actually just focused on fundraising teams right now. And building out that validation that we can streamline it within this just initial vertical. Work with different datasets from different universities. Basically train our, our AI essentially to learn the space of advancement, and provide that in house for teams. MARY: This is amazing, because I could see how you would save money, time and some of the effort that goes into development, right? And chasing leads that aren't necessarily going to be the best leads for a university to get funding. Right? And so I would think that what you guys are doing would help universities streamline that and just be… work more efficiently and that's the goal, I assume. SPENCER: Yeah, definitely. And what we found is that universities will pay 20, 30, $40,000 to send their data out to companies who will then do the machine learning on their own end. And then they'll send the results back to those companies like Furman, for example, and then they'll have the list of the top 100 people to do it. So not only do we want to put this in the hands of a university, like Furman, but we also want this to be a tool where people who are, don't necessarily have those, that analytical background can grow within their role and can leverage this technology and feel empowered and feel like they can really make an impact and feel like they can collaborate with, with their teammates at a whole new level that they just, it was just too big of a barrier to get into before. MARY: Right, right. That's amazing. How are you balancing all this? Because I know you're a full-time student as well. And you're at an internship this summer, which is why we're zooming and, and you know, getting this thing off the ground. That's a lot. SPENCER: Yeah, I mean, I think the first thing that comes to my mind is that I mean, Nemath and I love just innovating and thinking of ideas and it's really about the journey. It's not necessarily something that is easy. It's time consuming. There's sacrifices that I have to make. Am I going to go out and go to the bars on Friday, Saturday night, or am I going to work on my startup? I'm going to work on my startup, and it's just kind of the opportunity costs at a younger age that, that I have to weigh, but we love it and I think we have to take the small wins into consideration along the way that help continue to build the momentum. Because we're at such an early stage right now where we have great opportunities in front of us. He's at a great tech company. I'm at a great financial institution where we both can learn a lot. And what we're just trying to do right now is just take advantage of those opportunities to learn as much as we can. And if the opportunity comes where we really see a clear, foreseeable path to like let's say raise money to then go full time into dotflo, then, hey, that's gonna be an opportunity we're going to weigh. But at the point we're at right now is, we're just continuing to iterate and ideate on the idea, get that initial feedback, and I think at this time, we can balance both things and do a great job of doing both. Once school comes around, it'll kind of be like Ernst and Young will kind of be my new school because we'll go away for, for that for that year. But yeah, you know, one of the big things that I can think about a lot is opportunity costs, and there's a lot of opportunity costs, especially at a young age. When it comes to, you know, what am I going to focus on? So, to answer your question, we love it. MARY: Yeah. So this is not your first entrepreneurial adventure…you, gosh, were you a freshman when you did the first Paladin Pitch that you did? SPENCER: Yes. Yeah. MARY: So as a freshman, you created a company. Tell us about the Trash and Dash company. SPENCER: Yeah, so it all started with… I was really bad at taking my trash out, out of my dorm room. So it was like a 5,10 minute walk just to take the trash out. And I thought you know this probably is a need. There's other people who probably are really busy like me who…trash is piling up in the room. And wouldn't it be nice if someone just came by their dorm room and came and picked it up on a scheduled basis? So that's kind of where the company University Trash and Dash came to light. I started that freshman year. Second semester I got two 64 gallon trash bins at a local Lowe's. And yeah, I started. I started growing that. MARY: So where does that entrepreneurial spirit and just the innovative thinking come from do you think? SPENCER: Oh, man. Well, I think I have a lot to give credit to my parents. They're both really hard workers. So, my mom… she's bounced multiple jobs throughout her life. My dad works long hours. They're just both very driven people. I come from a modest background. So I've really seen them work hard for what we have. And I think that drives me a lot. And then also my grandparents. I would say that I have great grandparents that always told me to just follow my dreams and to never give up. So I think that… It sounds cheesy and cliche, but I mean, it's driven me a lot over the years. MARY: No, that's awesome because you know, a lot of entrepreneurs, especially young entrepreneurs come from an entrepreneurial family. And sometimes for those of us who don't, it might be a little bit harder to get into that mindset, right? And I think that mindset is so important. So it's such a great thing that you talk about your family giving you that mindset that they've created you to be, you know, an innovative thinker, obviously, since you're doing what you're doing and I mean, who would have thought of, you know, dotflo and helping universities really hone in on development, you know? SPENCER: Sure. MARY: So when you think about this process that you've gone through with first Trash and Dash and now dotflo, what are some of the things that you've learned that… kind of along the way that might help other young entrepreneurs? SPENCER: Yeah, well, it's actually funny because so yes, University Trash and Dash and dotflo, but there was a few things actually in between that. MARY: Yeah. SPENCER: We're not gonna go to the full extent of it, but to be short, there was… I'd tried to start a company that would connect collegiate athletes to mentor elementary and middle school and high schoolers. MARY: Oh, yeah. I remember you talking about that at one point. Yeah. SPENCER: Yeah. So, so that essentially… I ended up not continuing that one because I was really having a hard time with the business model, but then too, if you're, if you're going to start a technical company, it's really hard to outsource the tech. You really need a co-founder who's, who's technical, who's going to be in it with you, and I didn't really have that. So… and then also, I was, I was younger, and I didn't have as much as experience. I still don't have a lot of experience right now. But yeah, so I ended up stopping that and then I started a group with my friend Tyler. And we basically brought together just driven people who wanted to ideate once a week. So we brought in people from all different universities…started doing that ultimately. We stopped it because it was really interesting what I've learned. You can bring a lot of really smart people together. However, if there's not like a really big meaning or connection with that group of people, it’s really hard to motivate them and it's really hard to get something going especially if they can't really see the finish line. I'm someone who like, I can have a more long term outlook on things. It’s a little bit easier for me not to see the finish line, but for a lot of people, they want to see the finish line, they want to see, you know, what's incentivizing them to carve out an hour and then to actually do more on their free time to like to dig into the group. So, yeah, to those points, just starting things, I think and I'm just curious. I think one of the biggest, the biggest blessings in my life was when I started that first company. I didn't know what was gonna happen. I literally went to the school library. I made a little flyer. I printed like 100 of them out and then I started talking to people and getting people to sign up. I think like when you're, at least for me, I would say trying to be an entrepreneur, especially if you don't like come from a super entrepreneurial background, you’re naive to a lot of things. MARY: You're not alone though. A lot of entrepreneurs aren't business majors, right? They don't know necessarily how the business side of things work. So you're not alone in that. SPENCER: Yeah, so you're naive to a lot of things. And you kind of, at least for me, it's kind of a trial and error. It's how am I going to step into this opportunity and how am I going to learn from it? How am I going to take that to then, to then be successful when I take that next step forward? So yeah, if I learned anything, it's just take that initial step forward and be willing to step into the unknown. And it's not an easy journey. I mean, there was a lot of times where I did feel kind of lonely like I kind of sacrificed, not spending as much time with my friends and then I didn't have as close relationships when I was a freshman and sophomore. Once I like stopped those businesses, I was able to dig into relationships more but I mean, there was an opportunity cost to that. But you know, if you really want something, you can go get it and I believe that with all my heart and that's kind of like why Nemath and I fully believe in the vision behind why we started dotflo and the purpose of it and everything like that. But yeah, I probably can say a lot more lessons, but I'll keep it at that. MARY: Yeah, I think that's a great lesson and what, you know, there's no better time to take those chances, like you were talking about, then when you're young, right? And so that's why whenever I'm in class, and my student has an idea, I'm like, why aren't you doing that? You know? SPENCER: Yeah. No, I think it's, I think it's important to just…to just take a step forward when it's, especially if you haven't started anything before. You have that creativity to have ideas. You're gonna probably fail. The first few ideas are probably not going to work out. And if they do, then that's awesome. MARY: Right. SPENCER: But out of all the successful entrepreneurs I've talked to, a lot of them failed first, and a lot of them had… it wasn't easy at all. So I think really quickly I found out that the glamor of, you know, maybe putting on my LinkedIn that I was CEO of Trash and Dash, it goes away really quick because at the end of the day, no one really cares. I'll be completely honest, no one cares. And you kind of find yourself in this place of like, oh, do I really want to do this? And I think that's how you find out whether or not, you know, this is something that you might want to continue to pursue as you continue to grow. MARY: Right. So what's next for dotflo? SPENCER: Yeah, so basically, right now, as I said, we're continuing to iterate on our initial product. It's really exciting because we, at the beginning of last month, we got together. We actually had a call with Furman and the call didn't go great. Our product was buggy. It was kind of rushed. Nemath…so he's more on the tech side. He was traveling to India, because that's where he's from. He is an international student. He's in his master's program. And I admire him a lot, honestly. I mean, he's, he's a very hard worker. And through meeting other, I'm kind of going on a tangent right now, but from meeting people from different cultures, I think it's super important to work with them. Because he brings a completely different perspective from what I bring to the table. But yeah, all that to say, where was I going with that? MARY: I think you just hit on something super important. So when you're starting a company, you need to bring in people who have the talents that you don't have, who have different perspectives than you so that you can look at things in a more full way. Right? SPENCER: Yeah, yeah. No, I couldn't agree more. So with that, we…where I was going with that, is we kind of were rushed into that initial kind of meeting with Furman. It didn't go great. However, what we did learn is that we needed to focus more on that industry. And that's where we just said, hey, we're not going to be reaching out to 100 other people from retail, manufacturing, maybe food. We're just going to focus on college universities. So we have been talking to different universities. We have demos set up. We're getting data from these universities. And basically, over the next month and a half, we're just really going to work with these universities, continue to build out our product, make it functional for their needs, and by mid September, you know, our goal is to have paying customers, paying enterprises on the platform as a software, as a service. So it's something where it's in the cloud, you log on to your browser, you don't have to download anything to your computer, and then they can get that seamless value of 1) really understanding their data, but being able to do so in a way where they can grow within their role and to collaborate with each other on the insights they're finding and really put this as a platform where, where they can go to the next level of how they can ultimately find people who are going to donate to the university and do it in a much more effective way than just kind of guessing and sending the 10,000 emails that are going to cost $10,000 compared to the 1000 emails that have much more higher probability that those people are going to respond. So really we're just trying to build that environment right now. It's a journey, like we kind of thought that we were gonna have things a little bit quicker than we did. But it's completely fine. And we're actually staying on track with what we wanted to accomplish over the summer. We wanted to get beta users on the platform. We want to iterate and by the time the semester comes around, we wanted to have paying customers and we're on track for that right now. MARY: Yeah. Excellent. Excellent. So are you one of the entrepreneurs that, or serial entrepreneurs I should say, that keep a notebook? SPENCER: Yeah, so I, I do. I actually do. I love journaling so I do this thing before I go to bed where I'll write the most important thing I did, the summary, how I can be excellent tomorrow, and then what I'm grateful for, and when I… MARY: I love that. SPENCER: It helps me kind of, helps me reflect on the day, but I can spit out some ideas through there. But yeah, I have ideas all the time. And a lot of them are kind of crazy and something that I love about working with Nemath is that we can just… we feel open and we can shoot down ideas really easily if it's not a good idea. I think like, when you look for someone to work... /episode/index/show/class-epodcast/id/27681936

How One Musician’s Company Is in Tune with Sustainability 08/02/2023

How One Musician’s Company Is in Tune with Sustainability Our environment is important, which is why being more sustainable is key. In this episode of the Class E Podcast, we talked to Alexa Valdovinos ‘25 about her sustainable instrument reed company, Monte Valle LLC. From winning the 2022 Paladin Pitch competition to now, Valdovinos shares her entrepreneurial journey and plans for her company and discusses how she balances her life as both a student and entrepreneur. Guest: Alexa Valdavinos '25 Host: Mary Sturgill Producer: Isabella Martinez '24 TRANSCRIPT: MARY: Hi there, everyone. Welcome to this episode of the Class E Podcast. I am your host Mary Sturgill. This is the podcast that is brought to you through a partnership between the Hill Institute for Innovation and Entrepreneurship and Communication Studies Department here at Furman University. And we're right in the middle of our summer series this summer where we talk to current Furman students and recent alumni about their entrepreneurial ventures. And today my special guest is Alexa Valdovinos, who was the winner of the Paladin Pitch Competition not this past year but the year before that and she is the founder of her company Monte Valle LLC. Did I say that correctly? ALEXA: Yes. MARY: Okay. Welcome to the show. ALEXA: Thank you. MARY: So, Alexa, tell us about Monte Valle and how you came up with the concept for that. ALEXA: Yeah! So, it all started in high school. So, I have been a musician for eight years. I started off playing the flute and then I expanded into playing saxophone in high school. And so it all started off in my little band room during COVID… 2021, peak COVID. There were probably five kids in my class, so we didn't really do a whole lot. MARY: Right. ALEXA: And so I kind of sat there one day and I was like, you know, Mr. Stewart, who was my band director at the time, I wonder if we can make reeds out of something else like they have so much waste. I mean, you use them for like a couple of weeks, and then you just throw them away but there's so much waste with them. MARY: Right. ALEXA: And so we got to thinking and he was like, you know, I think you're onto something Alexa, but maybe you should wait until college to really like fully grasp and have more, you know, access to resources. I'm like, okay, I'm gonna do it and so I had joined FUSEA (Furman University Student Entrepreneurship Association) my freshman year because I just knew that I wanted to be an entrepreneur. And I remember Matt Reed at the time, who was working with the Hill Institute, he told me, okay, Alexa do you remember that idea that you had with the reeds? Because I pitched it in the fall semester at their little like Big Ideas Competition. MARY: Right. ALEXA: And that's when I really like kind of developed it a little bit more. And I was like, I looked at him funny, I was like, yes. And he's like, well, do you want to, you know, pursue it? I'm like, oh, 100% and so that's when, you know, I started working with the Hill Institute and I actually went to Charleston to compete in the SOCON entrepreneurial challenge. And that's when, you know, I had like three days to build the whole pitch deck and develop this whole product idea. MARY: Wow. ALEXA: Yeah. So that's when it fully I would say took off. MARY: Yeah. So, you went down to Charleston before you won our pitch competition here, right? So they were just like here, let's, let's run with this and you're like, “absolutely.” ALEXA: Yeah. So, what had happened is that they were taking Brooke Dominiak, who was the winner the year before me with To-Go Bros and she was in the profit portion. And they were like, well, we don't have anybody for the nonprofit portion. So, would you want to do it? And so I was like, I mean, a free trip to Charleston, sure. It'll be a good opportunity. So that's when I, you know, it was like, you know, Matt had told me at this event, you know, you only have three days and I was like, oh, okay, so that took long hours of making a pitch deck and, you know, working on everything. I think it was working up until like, one o'clock in the morning the night before. MARY: Yeah. ALEXA: So, it was a process for sure. MARY: Yeah, yeah. So that was…was that the fall and then spring you won the Paladin Pitch Competition? ALEXA: Yeah, Charleston… I went to Charleston, probably I think the February. That February in the spring and then I competed in Paladin Pitch that March. MARY: Yeah. Excellent. So what… you've been working on the company for a little over a year now, diligently. And so, what kinds of things have you learned from this process? ALEXA: I've learned quite a bit. I've learned that you know, there's a lot of different little nitty gritty details in order to start a business. You know, it's not easy to just say I want to start a business and do it. MARY: I have a business. ALEXA: Yeah, exactly. You know, like it takes you know, making it LLC approved, going through all the proper permissions, making sure that everything is legal… MARY: The licenses and all that yeah. ALEXA: …the licensing, the buying, you know, for my product, in particular, prototyping and researching, and a really important thing that I've learned is that not everything's gonna go how I originally thought it was going to go. I remember, you know, I had this huge vision. Like I wanted everything to be compostable, biodegradable, but Olivia Esquivel, who is the co-founder of Southern Pressed. She was one of the judges when I won and she told me, you know, like, going in the industry of the sustainability organic industry is hard. MARY: Yeah. ALEXA: And so not everything is gonna go how you want it to and that was hard for me. MARY: Right. ALEXA: And so realizing that you know, it's okay if things don't go the way that your blueprint ideas say it’s going to go. MARY: Yeah. And just because they don't go that way right now, doesn't mean they won't in the future. ALEXA: Of course, of course. MARY: So what prompted you to create the sustainable portion of this? Like you could create reeds out of other things, right? But how does the sustainability play into that? ALEXA: I've always, you know, so both my parents are from Mexico. I've grown up going there since I was really little, but I also grew up in the mountains here. I grew up in North Carolina, about 30 minutes from here. MARY: Yeah. ALEXA: So I've just always grown up around, you know, forest and mountains and my parents always taught me, you know, take care of what you have, you know, let's be sustainable, and let’s recycle and all that stuff. But it was really during COVID when I had a lot of thinking time and was like, you know, reeds… they produce a lot of waste. And it adds up because I'm just one musician out of millions on this planet who use like boxes of reeds over weeks of time, and each of those produce single use plastic, single use, you know, waste, and that's what really got me was like there needs to be change because I want to have a future. I want my kids one day to have a future and growing up in the mountains and if you know, we don't do something about it… MARY: You're gonna lose them. ALEXA: Yeah, we’re going to lose them. So that was my biggest I would say motivation. MARY: So, you've been prototyping. How's that going? And what’s going on with it? ALEXA: Yeah, so right now we are… I'm working with my old high school. And right now they have a reed machine, which is what helps create the reeds itself. MARY: Yeah. ALEXA: So right now they're gonna prototype those, prototypes for the material, use the machine, see how that's working… I'm also working with the middle school over there as well, to kind of do some researching with some 3D printing as well. So it's, it's going, you know, it was definitely a long process to figure out, you know, what we need, what we don't need, sourcing the material because that was something that was really important to me… MARY: Yeah. ALEXA: …was making sure that I source well. MARY: So what are you… what is the material? What are you making them out of? Because I know originally in your pitch, and this is maybe how something might have changed is that bamboo grows really quickly. Let's do bamboo. It's a renewable source. ALEXA: Yes, that's what we're hoping to use right now. We're also kind of just for the prototyping just to make sure that all the machines work and stuff, we're using cane but I'm also using mostly bamboo, which is what I originally had wanted to and what I told in my pitch. MARY: Yeah, yeah. Oh, excellent. Excellent. So you're just setting all that up to be able to do the bamboo and then are you working with bamboo farmers? I mean, are there bamboo farmers? ALEXA: Well, I'm working with…I worked with a small business right now to kind of start sourcing. I'm hoping that maybe in the future, I can work with bamboo farmers. I can work with the Veterans Healing Farm up in Hendersonville, North Carolina. MARY: Oh, yeah. Yeah. ALEXA: They grow bamboo on their farm and it's, you know, it's a nonprofit organization. MARY: Love that, that partnership with the nonprofit and yeah, they're doing great things up there. That's awesome. Because I don't know of any bamboo farmers. ALEXA: I don’t either. I just know people who always tell me to like Alexa like can you come, you know, like I have bamboo all in my backyard. MARY: Can you come get it? ALEXA: Yeah. MARY: You'll be having everybody come, come ask you to do that. Here I have some bamboo for you. What do you think you've learned through this process that you were just like, wow, I'm so glad I learned that early on? ALEXA: I would say it's what Olivia Esquivel told me is that it's okay if you compromise. You have to pick and choose your battles, especially with sustainability and businesses because you know, it's not cheap to start a business either. And especially, you know, if you want to get it off the ground you can't, you know, and you…specifically buying organically, it's hard. It's expensive. MARY: Let's talk about this…packaging is one of the most not sustainable issues with the reeds, right? And so how are you meeting that problem? ALEXA: Yeah, I'm also sourcing more sustainably. I'm hoping to use in the future some sort of like beeswax that will hopefully control the humidity and moisture because that's a really big thing… MARY: Yeah. ALEXA: …in reeds that, you know, in transit, they're very fragile. I'm hoping to also work with Bubble Paper. It’s a company that makes basically bubble wrap but it makes it out of cardboard and paper so I'm just trying to source and make it more sustainable more…not as like wasteful and reusable. Perhaps. Yeah. MARY: And that makes sense because…and then you have to do some testing I would imagine to make sure that that moisture doesn't get in in transit. ALEXA: Yeah, that's what we're hoping to do through this whole process with my high school throughout the summer. It's just once we test the reeds, test all the other material as well. MARY: So, what advice would you have for other students who have an idea… because you very well could have sat back and said, oh, that's a great idea, but never done anything about it, right? And I love the fact that you're reaching back to your high school and they're helping you with it to get those high school students involved in this because I think that will probably influence the future entrepreneurs even more than you know, right? What advice would you give to other potential entrepreneurs who might have an idea but haven't acted on it yet? ALEXA: I would say the biggest piece of advice I would give is take baby steps. You know, I have to do that a lot as a college student. MARY: I started to say, yeah. ALEXA: Yeah. As a college student, I don't have all the time in the world and you know, I'm involved in a lot and so knowing that it's okay, like it's okay to think…like it's gonna take time. It's gonna take time, but don't lose sight of your goal. Yeah, I know that there were definitely times… oh sorry. MARY: No, keep going. ALEXA: There were definitely times where I just got so caught up in college life that I was just like, oh my gosh, am I really gonna be able to do this? I've never done this before. You know, I'm a first gen college student like I don't… I can't even tackle that. Like, am I gonna be able to do this? But just remembering that, you know, you have an idea, and sticking to those goals and knowing that baby steps are okay, is the biggest piece of advice. MARY: Yeah, that was gonna be my next question. How in the world are you balancing this because aren't you president of FUSEA as well? ALEXA: Not this year. MARY: You were last year. ALEXA: I was the VP of marketing. MARY: That's a lot, right? So how are you balancing all that? ALEXA: Well, yeah, taking baby steps. Just like taking the time that I can. Like last year, last semester, I would focus on my school, but then take the time that I did, to just work on pitch decks, work on emails, doing that… just taking a little bit, increments of time. MARY: Yeah. ALEXA: And just working on it little by little. And in the end, it’ll add up. MARY: Yeah, that’s true. ALEXA: Also focusing like my mental health, making sure that I'm doing that and finding a good balance. MARY: The… you know what I do? I work in Pomodoro’s, which I think I've talked about this before on the podcast. Because you do have to compartmentalize things like that when you're having all these balls in the air, right? And so, I work for 25 minutes on this project, and then 25 minutes on this project and 25 minutes on this project, and I get up between those projects, or whatever it is that I'm working on. And you know, go get some water, go have a quick chat with somebody or something like that. And then it refreshes my brain a little bit to sit right back down and get right back into it. So, those 25 minutes that I'm spending on that particular thing are really intentional and really focused on that thing, right? And so, I'm not thinking about anything else while I'm in that 25-minute time period. That's helpful and I love the fact that you're pretty much doing that at this young age. It took me a long time to figure that out. ALEXA: It took me a long time too. MARY: So, what's next? ALEXA: So, after this… after I prototype all of my materials, do the proper research, I'm hoping that I can start selling, you know, get my online business going and hoping to distribute to high schools. That's what I'm hoping to do as well… sell directly to high schools and middle schools in the area and up in North Carolina. That’s where I’m hoping to get my start because you know, that's where I grew up. MARY: Right. ALEXA: And so that would be the next step to just getting the prototyping done, making sure that it's good to go and then selling. MARY: This is… so this is gonna be totally online, right? And people from all over the world could find you, right? You just have to… ALEXA: Yeah. MARY: …help them find you a little bit. ALEXA: Yeah. MARY: Yeah. So, I love that because, I mean, I'm thinking of so many marketing ideas, which I'm sure you have a plan or are coming up with a plan for how to go about doing that. I love that. So, you did Greenville Starts. Tell me about that experience as a college student too because like you needed one more thing on your plate. Greenville Starts is a great program that helps entrepreneurs kind of launch their business no matter where they are in their business, right? And take it to the next level, but it is time-consuming. You are meeting you know, every week, right? So tell us how Greenville Starts kind of help you. ALEXA: Oh my gosh, it was an amazing opportunity. They teach you just so many amazing things from that program. I learned leaps and bounds. You know, so many so much information that I wouldn't have learned on my own. You know, it definitely was like, you know, time… time…I had to learn time management a lot with that because every week I had to come down here, make sure I take an hour of my day, then come back, make sure I get everything done. But it was… all it was worth it. MARY: Yeah. ALEXA: I could say that. You know, I get to learn from so many other people as well. MARY: Experts in their field. ALEXA: Yes. And see so many different markets, see so many different levels. There's so many people there who you know, have a business already or are wanting to start one and it was all wonderful just to see all the different walks of life and all the different speakers that they would have come in helped so so much. MARY: Yeah. What is the one big takeaway that you took away from them? ALEXA: Oh, that's hard. MARY: Because there's so many, I know. ALEXA: There's so many. The biggest takeaway I got is planning…planning, planning, planning. You have to plan out everything beforehand. You have to plan out what your budget is going to be. You have to plan out where you want to distribute. You have to plan out what your pitch is, what your market is, and what your point of sales is going to be. Planning, planning, planning is what I learned the most. MARY: So, when you… are you… how are you raising money? I mean, we know you won the pitch competition and so that's helped some. ALEXA: Yeah, that's kind of where I'm starting right now. And I'm just hoping to kind of base everything off of my winnings from Paladin Pitch and then hopefully in the future if I do get it off the ground, that's where I'm hoping to.. MARY: When you get off the ground. ALEXA: Well, yes. When I get it off. Not if…when. MARY: Yeah. So, the sales then will hopefully maintain you. ALEXA: Yes, that’s what I'm hoping. MARY: Yeah, for sure, for sure. And I think you have found a really important niche too, because we don't really think about sustainability in the music industry at all. And I think you can come and broaden even beyond the reeds. Have you thought about that at all? ALEXA: Oh, definitely. I have also started prototyping guitar picks. They're made by a business named Steve Clayton. They've made guitar picks for the Beach Boys…for all these big names. And they have a line of guitar picks that are compostable… MARY: Oh, I love that. ALEXA: You just throw them in the ground, they're good to go. So I've been prototyping that. I'm hoping to make drumsticks in the future. I'm definitely hoping to expand because the music industry is, I mean, probably one of the most well established, if not the most established industry. MARY: Yeah. ALEXA: I mean it's been around for centuries, centuries. And there hasn't really been a huge change. You know, people find something that they like and they stick with it. MARY: Right. ALEXA: And they like consistency. So… MARY: Yeah. And that may be your biggest barrier…is getting people to try the new thing. ALEXA: Yeah. MARY: The new reed because they’re so used to what they're used to. ALEXA: Yeah, that's why I'm hoping to start in the school system because I know that… MARY: Start them young. ALEXA: Start them young. Show them that they… that they're good. MARY: Yeah. ALEXA: And they’re gonna keep sticking with them throughout their whole career.... /episode/index/show/class-epodcast/id/27446859

How One Company Evolves to Help Others Tell Their Stories 07/19/2023

How One Company Evolves to Help Others Tell Their Stories Change can be scary, but it can also be good. In this episode of the Class E Podcast, we talked to Nathaniel Desantis ‘19 about how his entrepreneurial path has evolved from the multimedia company, Amalfi Media, to now Podcast Studio X. Desantis shares how the growth of his personal podcast company is now helping others tell their stories. We discuss how failure can be rewarding, and how it’s important to always be willing to learn. Guest: Nathaniel DeSantis '19 - Owner Host: Mary Sturgill Producer: Isabella Martinez '24 Transcript: MARY: Hi, everyone. Welcome to this episode of the Class E Podcast. I am your host, Mary Sturgill. This is the podcast that is created through a partnership between the Hill Institute for Innovation and Entrepreneurship and the Communication Studies Department here at Furman University and we are right in the middle of a very special kind of summer season if you will, of the Class E Podcast where we're having current students and not so recent graduates. Well, some recent graduates… four years ago, is that right? Yeah, four years ago, so recent graduates who are entrepreneurs in their own right, and so our special guest today is Nathaniel DeSantis. Nathaniel, welcome back. NATHANIEL: Thank you for having me back on again. MARY: Yeah. NATHANIEL: For those of you who don’t know, this is my second time on the podcast. MARY: Yeah, so I had Nathaniel on… what, two years ago? Right when you started. NATHANIEL: It was like a year and a half, two years ago. MARY: Yeah, so at that time you were running Amalfi Media… NATHANIEL: Correct. MARY: And Amalfi Media has gone through several iterations since our conversation and so I'm excited to kind of catch up with you and learn about the growth of what's happened since then. So, tell everyone… go watch… one go watch or listen actually, it's listen to at that point because we didn't have our YouTube channel yet. So, go listen to that podcast with Nathaniel about Amalfi Media because I want you to see how much his company’s grown from then to now. It's crazy. NATHANIEL: It's changed a lot. MARY: And in a pandemic. NATHANIEL: Yeah, well that was probably part of it. MARY: Yeah. NATHANIEL: It truly has changed. MARY: So give everyone a brief description of what the first iteration was. NATHANIEL: Like Amalfi Media? Okay so Amalfi Media was just a digital media company. The whole point was we would make our own podcasts and it was primarily podcasts. I think we had one YouTube channel. MARY: Yeah, your mom had a YouTube channel. NATHANIEL: Exactly. We would make our own content and put it out there and the goal was to monetize this podcast. So that was like the one of the company. And it was going pretty well. But as I think I discussed on the previous episode I was on, I quit my manufacturing job to do that. MARY: Right. NATHANIEL: And it got to a point where I was like, okay, I need to make money. MARY: Right. NATHANIEL: I need to survive. MARY: Like everybody thought you were crazy when you said I'm leaving this job after a year and I'm starting this company. NATHANIEL: Yeah. MARY: Right? NATHANIEL: And like the shows that we were producing were growing very well. But the writing was on the wall that it would take maybe two, three years for it to get to a point where I could sustain myself and all the hosts that were doing the shows, which kind of led to V2 of the company which is it fine to go into that now? MARY: Yeah, absolutely. NATHANIEL: So V2 was the Greenville Podcast Company because what happened was at the end of Amalfi Media I shut it… I closed Amalfi Media LLC so legally it's no longer an entity anymore. I asked what did I do well, and what did I not do well, and we would always get compliments on our production work. People would always say like that sounds really professional. MARY: You guys have great productions. And listen to his voice everybody. Oh my goodness okay. NATHANIEL: Good genetics, I guess. So the production value is really good and people would always compliment us on that. So I said, well, we'll work on just being a production company specifically focused on podcasts. And again, like I said, I focused on what I did wrong as well. And a lot of it was I think, when new entrepreneurs, especially young ones, because I was like 21, 22 when I started. No 22, 23 when I started, young entrepreneurs, I think they have this idea like oh, like it's just gonna like be huge, and it's gonna blow up and it's gonna be… MARY: Immediately. NATHANIEL: Yeah, exactly. It's gonna be this huge thing. So I took a step back and I didn't focus on like names or anything. I said, we'll just call it the Greenville Podcast Company to start with and we'll produce and let's just see, let's see if we get any clients. Eventually, we did get clients so that turned into us producing content, specifically podcasts for nonprofits, like Greater Good Greenville is one really good example. They have a podcast called Simple Civics Greenville County, but then we do things for larger corporations like Johnson and Johnson. So we're really hitting kind of like the companies and using it as PR and marketing for them. And it got to a point where a month ago… so this is like fresh…we decided to change it to Podcast Studio X because… MARY: Yeah. And how did that change come about? NATHANIEL: So we kind of again, I started through Greenville Podcast Company right after Amalfi Media shut down and I said I'm not gonna go in thinking this is going to be huge. MARY: Right. NATHANIEL: I'm just gonna keep it local to start with and it has grown really well. And the problem we're running into is that people outside of Greenville are like, why would I use the Greenville Podcast Company? MARY: Oh, right. NATHANIEL: And a big emphasis of ours is on remote production. So we only have two clients that we actually go to in their office. The rest are remote, still make it sound really good, still really good quality. So, you know, we took a look. And we said, what do we want to name the company so that people can look at it in California. MARY: From anywhere. Yeah. NATHANIEL: Exactly. They can look in Europe and be like, wow, well, they just do podcasts. And this is actually the reason is Podcast Studio X is very specific because we… Google has a really cool ad tool where you can do like this keyword search, and you can see what keywords are people Googling and so my sister and I, we made a list of like 500 keywords related to podcast production be it remote podcast production or podcast studio or this that the other, right? Anything with podcasts and production work, we put them into Google and we saw what performed the best with search and podcast studio was the highest ranking one so it got something like 20,000 monthly searches for just podcast studio, whereas podcast production only got like 100 a month. MARY: Yeah. NATHANIEL: So we're like okay, well, let's do it based on search. MARY: That’s smart. Does that come from your sister? She’s this marketing guru. NATHANIEL: I wish. This is a lesson learned from the Amalfi Media days and some advice from some really good mentors that I met along the way. That's actually what we do for our clients when it comes to their show titles. And so we looked through we're like well, let's just do it with this as well…the company name like if it works for the podcast, it will work for the company name. And so my sister and I, this is where my sister comes in, her and I are brainstorming names and we're like, okay, it has to have podcast studio in it, right? And she's like, she texts me Podcast Studio X and she meant that as like a placeholder, but as in like, fill in the blank. Again, like what are we gonna put it in for the X and I just saw and I was like, I love it. It’s sick. Great idea. You got it. You got the company name. MARY: Well and that fits because you create podcasts for all these different companies. NATHANIEL: Exactly. Yeah. It just happened to work really well. And it's one of those things. So you know, we looked for the domain and it was there and it’s like, great, this is perfect. Now we don't have to worry about it for a long time. So that's the long story of how we went from Amalfi Media… MARY: The evolution. NATHANIEL: …to Greenville to Podcast Studio X. MARY: Well, and the reason I wanted you to talk about that was so many entrepreneurs… what their initial idea is not how it ends, right? NATHANIEL: Yeah. MARY: And so you had this initial idea with Amalfi Media and then you saw the potential and the need for a podcast production company because so many people are wanting to get into podcasts, but they don't have the skills, right? NATHANIEL: Exactly. MARY: They don't know what equipment they need or you know all of this stuff or where they should host or anything like that. So you're filling that niche for them. And I think that's great. So how do you get your clients? NATHANIEL: So a few ways. First of all, we actually just hired our first salesman, salesperson I should say. So he does a lot of cold calling and cold email outreach. We have a target audience that is businesses and nonprofits because we found that podcasts are great PR marketing tools. We thought personally and it’s a little biased… I think it should be around 70% of what you do for marketing. The other… you know the rest of the percentage, you do whatever you want with that. But I think 70% of your marketing and PR should be podcasts. MARY: Because if you look at the number of podcast listeners in the United States, but also around the world, it's not going… it's seen a seven-year… huge growth in the past seven years and each year keeps growing and growing. NATHANIEL: Yeah. And also the way that we look at podcasts and it's our job to try to explain this to potential clients is that you can repurpose it in so many ways. So you're doing a video podcast. We’re on video. Your YouTube's covered, you don't have to worry about YouTube anymore. Using that video, you can now chop that into clips and now your Instagram, your Tik Tok, your Twitter, your YouTube shorts, your Facebook, it's all covered. Turn these episodes into transcripts. Now your blog strategy’s covered and then you have them on the audio platforms as well. So that's something we really have to hammer home to potential clients. This is used for a lot of different things. It's… a lot of people think of a podcast as just talking, it's not. You can repurpose that. So it's our job to help potential clients understand that. MARY: And that's efficiency, right? Because you're sitting down for maybe 30, maybe 45 minute podcast and you have that much content that.. yes, you're gonna produce it as a podcast in its entirety, but you also have that content that you could chop out and use for other things depending on what their marketing that week, right? NATHANIEL: Exactly. Yeah. So to go back to your question, how do we find clients? Part of its referrals. So obviously we have a new salesperson but part of it is… we work with people and they have guests come on and then their guests say my company wants a podcast too. We really enjoyed working with Podcast Studio X, you guys were super professional. We want you. Part of it is connections, honestly. So I think Furman is a great example of like good connections. You just happen… you meet people in your life at Furman who may or may not become lifelong friends, but they’re still connections that you'll have and when their company or their boss wants a podcast, they're more likely to think of you, right? That's helped with a few clients that we've gotten as well. Other times before we had a salesperson, I would just pick up the phone, I would call people. I'd say hey, does your company want a podcast? Just hope and pray that they would say yes. Then we also do this thing for all of our clients where if they say at the end of an episode, this was produced by Podcast Studio X and have that on their shows, they get a discount. And they also…we have a referral system that's new where they'll get a whole month of production for free if they do refer us to someone else. MARY: Oh nice. NATHANIEL: So lots of avenues. Also with sales, we started doing more inbound marketing so we're pushing out five blogs a week. MARY: Yeah, wow. NATHANIEL: That's just good quality content that we're putting on our website, hoping that it draws people in and best case scenario we get a client, worst case they learned something valuable about podcasting. MARY: Yeah, for sure. So, you are… this is almost a subscription-type service, is it not? NATHANIEL: Yeah, it absolutely is for our clients. Yeah. We have yearly contracts with them. They do one episode every week or an episode every other week that we will produce for them. And it starts with a kickoff and training period where we kind of go into the logistics stuff like cover art. No one really thinks about that. MARY: So do you help… Do you help them not only with the actual podcast and the mechanics of the podcast itself, but with some of the marketing of it as well? NATHANIEL: Yeah, so they'll get clips with every episode. MARY: So it’s full service. NATHANIEL: Our motto and our slogan is, “You talk, we do the rest,” because that's really what it is. MARY: Nice. NATHANIEL: And when we do those sales calls, that's what we try to explain to those potential clients. We have two focuses…you have a professional brand, your podcast needs to reflect that. MARY: Right. NATHANIEL: Because you know… have you ever heard those podcasts where it's like, wow, this is a big company, why does it sound so bad? MARY: Right. Yeah. NATHANIEL: Right. You worked hard building your brand like your podcast should sound as good as your brand does. MARY: Absolutely. NATHANIEL: Yeah, so that's one thing. And then the second emphasis we always tell them is simplicity. So we want to make it super easy. And the example I always use with potential clients is we have some travel agents who are clients and they'll record on a cruise. We make it that easy for them that they can take their equipment… it's very mobile, very light, very easy to do. And they'll record on a cruise or when they're flying to Dublin like we've so many opportunities to make it easy, but still professional for them to do. MARY: Yeah, I love that. NATHANIEL: And yeah, so it really is full service. We have different packages so it kind of depends. And then we have add ons as well that they can subscribe to like they might only want a transcript with the basic package as well or they might want social media management for two channels so kind of depends. Everyone's a little bit different. But yeah, it's really full service for them. MARY: That's amazing. I think that's… I think you're filling a niche that not a lot of people even knew existed, maybe because everybody thinks everybody just grabs a microphone and starts talking. NATHANIEL: It sounds easy to do. MARY: It does. NATHANIEL: Everyone thinks how hard can it be to start a podcast until you actually look into it and you're like, oh, actually a lot of steps involved to it. There are two of you doing this one right now. MARY: And we’re really shorthanded. We really… I mean we have if you're in the studio, then you would see that we have three cameras right now. And we have the… basically the audio board that Isabella, our producer, is recording everything into so she's running all of that for us right now to make sure that we have the best quality possible. NATHANIEL: Exactly. Yeah. And so there are a lot of steps that go into it. And they’re a lot of things that I… you just don't think of unless you do podcasts daily. So like one thing that I'll share with the world here, one of our secrets, so we call it maximizing milliseconds or the millisecond framework just depending on who we're talking to. So everything for us, like cover art, people need to be able to look at it and immediately understand this is what your podcast is about. And the second thing is they need to understand that it’s a very professionally done podcast based on the cover art because they have milliseconds to decide based on that… am I gonna listen to the episode? So it goes… the flow is the cover art, if they liked that, in that millisecond, they'll go on to look at the episode title. If they like that, they'll look at the episode description. If they like that, they'll hit play, and that's what we're trying to maximize for is hitting play and things like that, that if you don't do it daily, you don't think about how do I maximize that millisecond with a title and description for a podcast or with the cover art. So there's a lot that goes into it. MARY: And it's super interesting. I mean, we're in the podcast business so of course, it's interesting to us, but I think that any business I think could take a podcast and that's kind of like a microcosm look at how they market themselves, right? Do you get what I'm saying? Because if you could look at this podcast, this artwork, this title, right? This kind of promo paragraph that we put with all of our podcasts, and did that lead this many people to actually listen to the podcast? How long did they listen to the podcast? And that lets you know whether you're being effective or not? NATHANIEL: Exactly. MARY: Right? I mean, the numbers are right there, right? Yeah. Yeah. So how many… I mean, this is time…it's time consuming to produce a podcast and do all the marketing. I know you have your sister working with the marketing. She's an expert in that area. You're the expert podcaster. And then you just hired a salesperson, is it still just the three of you or are you…? NATHANIEL: We also have an intern from Furman. MARY: Oh yeah. NATHANIEL: And then we have another intern as well. So the Furman intern, she does marketing, so she's helping out with that. And then the other intern just graduated from high school I was…I mentored him during a senior project he had to do. And at the end of his year after he graduated, I was like, well, do you want an internship? And so he's doing the production side of things. Besides that, yeah, that's kind of the whole team is like the five… five or six of us. MARY: You guys are busy. NATHANIEL: Yeah. MARY: Yeah. So what is your vision for the company now that you’re at this point of it? NATHANIEL: Right. That's a really good question. So I know sales wise, our vision is to get at least six more clients within the next four months. We'd really like to bring that up. MARY: Yeah. NATHANIEL: …which we think is very doable. I know our sales guy already has like five calls booked for next week. So, will those five calls all turn into sales? I don't think so. I think maybe one. Exactly. MARY: If we look at the normal percentages. NATHANIEL: It's a numbers game. MARY: It is. Yeah. NATHANIEL: So we would like sales wise to get six more. And at that point, we would bring on… I don't know, I don't know if it's a full-time producer, but in some capacity and other producers to help with that workload. MARY: Right. NATHANIEL: We really are working on kind of standardizing business, because this is something that you don't really learn unless you get into the weeds of... /episode/index/show/class-epodcast/id/27432969