-The question is, how do you know
when you're ready to be an entrepreneur?
And the answer is you're never ready to be an entrepreneur.
You're never ready. Nothing's ever going to be 100%.
You really just have to dive in and get going.
Hi, guys. I'm Jaclyn Johnson,
the founder of Create & Cultivate.
And today I'm going to teach you
about what it takes to be an entrepreneur,
tell you about how I got my dream job,
and show you what a day in my work life looks like.
So come on in.
So you want to be an entrepreneur?
Well take a seat.
I'm going to tell you what it takes.
The definition of an entrepreneur is having an idea
and then taking that idea through fruition,
whether that's starting a company,
building a company, launching a company,
or even having a company fail.
I never thought I would be an entrepreneur.
I grew up in a family of small business owners,
so I was always around entrepreneurship.
But for me personally, I thought I was going to be working
in corporate corner office life.
But things took a different course for me.
As a young female entrepreneur,
I wanted to create offline and online experiences
for entrepreneurs to give them the tools, tips
and tricks they needed to go out and create
and cultivate the business of their dreams.
So step one of being an entrepreneur
is finding what you're passionate about,
but also finding what the market is missing.
I like to say start by starting,
find that passion and then go from there.
It can be as simple as just talking about your idea
in public and getting feedback around it.
Starting to talk about it is the best way to get
that momentum and movement towards your business idea.
I think sometimes people overthink
what it takes to launch a business
and they want every single thing to be perfect
before they hit go.
But my advice is just get it up 80% it
and get it out into the world and get all that feedback back
and see what worked, what didn't,
what sold, what isn't selling and go from there
and iterate your business along the way.
Create & Cultivate is a great example of that.
I started as a side project, never thought it was a business
until someone literally sat me down and said,
"I think you need to take this seriously.
And I think this is a company."
And all the light bulbs clicked and I said,
"Oh my goodness, it is.
I should be investing in myself and my own ideas
and taking this way more seriously than I was.
Taking your creativity seriously,
taking your what you might think is a small B,
the idea seriously is going to change
the energy around your company
and therefore will propel you into a space
that you didn't even know existed.
A large part of being an entrepreneur
is spending time with your team.
Today and meeting with our director of content,
Andrea Sobieski, So, Drea, what's the latest?
-Well, I wanted to give you an update
of what we went over in our marketing meeting this morning.
-Building a team is so important when growing a business.
There's that saying, "You can go far alone,
but you can go further together,"
and I think that's so, so, so true.
When building a team, it's really important to think
about what
and what's missing from the company
and who is going to come in and fill those holes.
So I always like to say staff against your weakness.
One of the questions I always ask during job interviews is,
"Tell me about a time there was a crazy fire at your old job
and how did you fix it?"
And I think that question is really important
because it shows how people operate under pressure
and it shows how they get creative in solutions.
It's really about presenting yourself
in a unique and different light. You really have to be willing
to take risks to get yourself in for that job interview.
It is crucial as an entrepreneur or small business owner
to know about your financials.
My mom, who is an accountant, always told me,
fall in love with the numbers. And I think that's so true.
And while you might not be running the finances
for your company forever,
it's important to know when the cash is coming in
and when the cash is going out.
The number-one question we get asked at Create & Cultivate is,
"Where do I get capital for my business?"
It feels really intimidating,
but
The first of which is investing in your own company.
That's what I did with Create & Cultivate.
I put my own money into the business to retain
as much equity as possible in the company.
And then there's opportunities like friends and family.
You can go out to your network
and get cash into your business that way.
There's also angel investing,
and the major difference between an angel investor
and a venture capitalists is angel investors
are investing out of the goodness of their heart
while they expect a return, they don't necessarily need one,
whereas venture capitalists expect a return
on their investment. So there are a ton of ways
to bring capital into your business.
It just depends on the stage you're at,
how much money you need and what you plan on
using that money for.
A lot of my day is spent meeting with small business owners,
usually over Zoom to hear more about their businesses
to see if I want to invest.
Okay, Alexa, tell me about your business.
As an entrepreneur, you are pitching nonstop,
so you have to get really good at your pitch,
which means being an expert in your field,
knowing everything there is to know about your own business,
but also your competitors, the landscape
and what's five miles down the road.
Why are you the right person to start this company?
When I was first starting as an entrepreneur,
pitching was like a muscle.
I had to build up and get better at over time.
The five things you need to know on a pitch
are everything about your company --
who you are, what you do, what you stand for.
Everything about your product --
why it's amazing, why it stands out,
and why they should want to buy it.
And thirdly, your competition -- What are they doing?
Why are they relevant? And where you see you can make
even better strides than they can.
And fourthly, who are you talking to,
who are you pitching -- Who are you giving this pitch to you,
and what do you want to get out of it?
And fifthly is, closing the deal --
So ending the pitch with what you want to get out of it,
whether it's money, whether it's winning a client over,
always end with a next step
of what you want to see from that pitch.
Here's what I would advise you. As a next step,
I would put together a deck with all this information.
I would secure at least 2 to 3 different clients,
then come back to me and ask how much money you need
and we can kind of devise a plan together. Does that sound good?
So since the pandemic,
we've all been working from home.
Our company has actually gone completely remote.
So I'm going to show you guys my home office. Come with me.
Especially these days, it's so important to have
a home office space that lets you set boundaries
from your personal and work life,
whether that's a physical space or just time you spend
in certain areas of your home. So I'm going to show you guys
what a typical day in my work life
looks like, come on.
My day-to-day responsibilities
change all the time, but for the most part,
I'm working with Create & Cultivate on
building out our next event,
securing our next keynote talent,
working on
interviewing amazing women,
seeing pitches from small business owners on new ventures,
securing pitches, funding deals,
and thinking about the next big business
that we maybe want to create as a fund.
For me personally, you have to have
a lot of energy to be an entrepreneur.
You could be spending your day taking meetings
and then that night going to one of our big networking events
at Create & Cultivate.
Time management is crucial
when you have a lot of different jobs and hustles
or whatever it is that you're working on.
I think for me personally, I am a calendar ninja.
I have everything slotted up to 15 minutes.
I even slot my personal time,
whether that's to have lunch or walk the dog.
The one trait entrepreneurs need to have is resiliency.
The reality is, is business is hard.
Being resilient is so crucial because every day ebbs
and flows with things going really amazing
and then really bad at the same time.
So for me, the moment I learned I was resilient,
I had moved to Los Angeles for a high-powered job
and was promptly let go,
which was devastating both personally and professionally.
But I really took that setback as a set up for my future life
and used that really difficult time
to build up my own resilience to then launch my first company.
So I like to think of my journey
as an entrepreneur as accidental.
I started Create & Cultivate
because I wanted to give women entrepreneurs
and small business owners the tools, tips and tricks
they needed to create the business of their dreams.
I thought maybe there would be 20 or something women
that would care about this, turns out
there was a lot of women and now cut to Create & Cultivate
hosts around a million women
a year through our different events, sites, and social.
I think the biggest challenge that a lot
of female entrepreneurs or small business owners
can relate to is being told, "No."
You're going to be told no
a thousand times throughout your career.
People are not going to believe
in what you're building or your vision.
Until you actually go out and do it.
So I think building that resiliency
as you keep hearing those No's is so crucial
and just know you're not alone in the No's.
Everyone is getting them.
You get better over time at recognizing the No's
as just feedback points to your next "Yes."
I think it's so important to be able to accept failure
and then bounce back immediately from it.
♪♪