At the end of the day you have these people in your life as business mentors, or guides as I often call them, and you're trying to figure out how to win, how to play this game, how to be better than the next, and if you're in tech, probably faster than the next, too.
I grew up in a single-parent household. My mother raised four of us on a salary of $29,000 a year. She was an assistant manager at Kmart, running their gardening department. My mother worked hard for whomever she was working for and everything she did, she did with excellence. She passed that down to my siblings and me.
My mother was my role model, although she herself had not graduated from college. My grandmother had not received a formal education past the sixth grade but would live to be 103 years old. She was also my role model.
Do you know where your story begins? My entrepreneurship story began where my mother's story left off.
When I started SGI and then when I entered tech I was ready to work hard, but I knew I was behind. I knew that there was a knowledge curve that I had to really overcome. I wasn't out in Silicon Valley. I wasn't in New York. I wasn't in a hotbed for tech, and so I had to get really resourceful.
2 The Difference
The biggest risk of all is not taking one.
—Mellody Hobson
My good friend Sherrell Dorsey, founder of TP Insights, referred to me as the “antithesis” in an article she published for her editorial and tech platform, The Plug.
I'm female, Black, from the South, and a nontechnical solo founder. In all respects (and perhaps statistics), I'm everything that they say a tech founder can't be.
Overall, I've now been an entrepreneur for over 12 years, and what a roller-coaster ride it has been, from bootstrapping my first company Solid Ground Innovations (SGI) to raising capital for my second company. It's been more than what I could have imagined, and really little of what I expected. But what could I have expected, being that I had no true blueprint starting out?
Yet, I feel that entrepreneurship was in my veins. Do you remember starting or selling anything, from Girl Scout cookies to lemonade stands? I never did either, but I did sell candy for my school's annual fundraiser. Looking back, that was a form of entrepreneurship mixed with hustle, too.
In this book, a lot of lessons are transferable to mostly all entrepreneurs regardless of sector, though I'll spend most of my time focused on walking you through the steps of launching and raising capital for Resilia, the tech company I launched in 2016. If you want a more detailed description of how I built Solid Ground Innovations, the professional services company I started in 2009, I have an entire self-published book on that. called Solid Ground. But let's start from the top of my entrepreneurship journey. When I was 19 years old, I rallied up my friends to help me start an online newspaper that I would name B-NOW (Black News Our Way). I remember talking to my college professor, Dr. Leonard Moore, about the idea. I told him that I wanted to bring together students from Southern University A&M College, a neighboring HBCU (historically Black college or university), and students from Louisiana State University A&M, a predominantly white institution, where I attended school. He was all onboard and asked me if I had filed an LLC. He might as well have been speaking a foreign language, because I had no worldly idea of what he was talking about other than it was something I perhaps needed to run a business. There in his office he wrote me a check for $150. Looking back, I guess I could say he was my very first investor. He was at least the very first person who believed in me and gave me money for an idea. He also understood that there would be costs associated with my idea.
It wasn't until a year or two ago that I acknowledged B-NOW as what in hindsight was my first business. My first hires were also students at LSU. Terry and Jonathan created my website. Another friend created my logo. I suspect it cost a few hundred bucks at the time: $50 for a logo, maybe $200 for the website with all pages included. I even enlisted my friends to write articles and to act as administrators, and hired my friend Scott to take our photos in the recreational room of the west campus apartments. I had an all-hands meeting on campus as well in Coates Hall, where I enlisted other friends to write stories for B-NOW.
Maybe I didn't know it then, but I had created something special. A few years later, at 22 years old, I would start Solid Ground Innovations.
But I was now in grad school. My mother had passed away. I was consulting while I worked at an organization called Louisiana CASA (Court Appointed Special Advocates) as an AmeriCorps VISTA member while going to grad school full-time. I know technically you weren't supposed to go to school during your AmeriCorps service, but it actually came very naturally to me.
At Louisiana CASA, I worked mostly on their advocacy programs and state capital projects. During this time an opportunity came about for me to start consulting for a new foundation, so I took it. This would eventually turn into an opportunity that led my work to receiving a Nobel Prize for public service, the Jefferson Award, and being recognized in the White House Report to the Senate on Volunteerism in America as the director of TTI, a nonprofit started by Tyrus Thomas, mostly running the organization, and an award-winning youth program we had created called C.A.T.C.H. (Caring and Actively Teaching Children Hope).
It was during these early days that I really learned how to operate an organization. So when I launched my first business to the public it felt right, even if I didn't feel 100% ready—though doing the actual work would prove we never ever really feel 100% ready. We just do it. We take the leap.
So, in 2009 I started SGI; we were a strategic communications and management agency with an arm called SGI Cares, which helped nonprofit organizations and grant makers such as the W.K. Kellogg Foundation provide capacity support via technical assistance to the organizations that they fund.
For nonprofits, we were acting as their back office in lieu of full-time employees. In my clients, I'd meet some of my biggest champions like Raymond Jetson the President and CEO of Metromorphosis, a nonprofit with a mission to transform urban communities from within.
When I first started SGI I didn't have employees. We were a true professional services agency and because of this we were able to stay very lean as a business. I began creating marketing materials (trust me, nothing fancy at all). One underutilized resource I leaned on was using our local state economic development office. There I was able to use state-funded programs to cover the cost of items I needed to start my business, such as marketing and collateral materials. I participated in programs that can be found within every state. In Louisiana it was called Economic Gardening. I'm pretty certain that at the time we went through this program, we were not as large as the other businesses. But we were able to take advantage of consultants to discuss opportunities related to sales, operations, and understanding our competitive landscape. Having experienced individuals to even just talk through my ideas with and get feedback from was a game changer. I always urge small businesses to take advantage of their local, state, and federal programs and the free resources they provide; if nothing else, at least find out what exists.
There are many ways to build a business. When I started SGI, there was so much I didn't know. I was so green, from state filing docs to understanding the operational and legal jargon to writing winning proposals that would ultimately land me my first clients.
There is truth to the saying “you don't know what you don't know.” This is the case for all of us when it comes to a subject matter that is unfamiliar to us. SGI was a strategic communications and management agency. Early on we heavily specialized in nonprofit management, hence where the idea for Resilia came from.
Some