Читать книгу Resilient - Sevetri Wilson - Страница 9

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 of the projects we took on then, I'd never touch today. I'm just being honest.

I know there is a lot of talk about getting your value and what you are worth. But when you are just starting out, and you are trying to get clients and prove yourself, as well as figure out your pricing, it's very possible there will be times you undercut yourself. Sometimes it will be worth it and other times not so much.

As I began to establish my credibility and footing, everything around me began to increase, including my rates.

One thing in business you'll have to look out for is “upside-down contracts.” This is where your cost to do the work exceeds the price you are charging, and thus your business loses money in the execution of the work. These types of agreements are easier to recover from when it's just you working on a project, but when you layer employees or other hired consultants on top it can be difficult to recover from.

A few years into my business, I started resigning from contracts because of this. Not because the clients were horrible, but because they didn't make economic sense. One of my close advisors told me a long time ago that you get into business to make a profit. This may be your first reason, or it may be one of many reasons after the initial passion and your purpose drives you to start it. Either way, it's a business for a reason.

As SGI started to grow, we started to reevaluate SGI Cares, the arm that focused solely on nonprofits. SGI was growing—a very uncomfortable growth, but growing nevertheless. A few years in, we had landed our first seven-figure, multi-year contract with a healthcare provider seeking to provide Medicaid services via a government contract. They found us through a state website that listed Hudson initiative–approved companies. The program encourages state agencies to contract with certified small businesses, as well as encouraging contractors who receive contracts from the state to use good-faith efforts to utilize certified small businesses in the performance of the contract. If that contract taught us anything, it was the importance of cash flow and billing. When you are dealing with government contracts and large agencies, the billing cycles are much longer. Yet, because of the size of the contract, you have to hire employees and/or contractors to do the work. We also had to execute media buying and other vendor purchases as an agreement of the contract. It's very important to have someone, if not yourself, who knows the intricacies of buying media and appropriately running a tight ship with budgeting and billing. Otherwise, this can cause various headaches, from delayed payments from the client to your business struggling to meet important deadlines such as payroll because you're awaiting payment.

So, as SGI continued to grow I decided that we needed to go in a different direction with our SGI Cares arm. Via this arm, we were serving nonprofits in various ways. But not all nonprofits are created (or treated) equal, and many struggle to find additional room in their budgets to hire consultants. When they do, consultants can find themselves wanting to go above and beyond to help the nonprofit organization, because they can really get drawn into the work. As SGI began to grow we no longer had the capacity to service nonprofits in the way we had become accustomed to; when you're acting as a back office it's very natural that circumstances change and that the workload changes as well. So, I started thinking about ways we could continue to support these entities.

I really began to think about the future of our space as I saw it: software as a service.

We were providing a service and we began to think about how we could productize that service and deliver it through a software solution. We are seeing technology being evolved for various sectors by the experts in those sectors, thus what a technology founder once looked like is changing. Experts in their particular area of expertise are thinking about how they can create technology solutions for their antiquated sector in order to evolve it through the use of technology, and simplify a lot of the problems that they're having through solution-based products.

So, I began to think about how I could do this in the nonprofit and philanthropy sector, and ultimately how this technology could extend into other verticals such as government.

Yet, the first service that we took a stab at productizing was one that we offered under SGI Cares, called nonprofit creation services. We were helping nonprofits go through tedious paperwork to file for incorporation and exemption for their nonprofit, which today we call formation services.

We had created a system, and were receiving referrals from attorneys and accountants and other clients to provide this service. We were working with schools. We were working with health clinics. Many of them came to us because they wanted to create a nonprofit arm; the same for small businesses, restaurants—you name it.

And so we felt that there was perhaps an opportunity to create technology around this service, as we were doing it manually, which was very time-consuming. Then people were coming to us because they had tried their luck with products like LegalZoom which was heavily focused on just prepping the services, and customers still had no idea what to do next.

So as we continued to think about how we could release the manual touches that we were having with this service, productization seemed like the most likely solution. In November 2016, we launched what was then called Exempt Me Now to the public. We were doing something really simple and that was productizing or “TurboTaxing,” as we would say, the process of incorporation and exemption nonprofits. We launched the product in all 50 states, allowing our customers to now go online and “do it yourself, but not by yourself.”

I talk a bit about how we assembled the team to get this product launched later.

We were ultimately trying to solve for the bottleneck of communication that existed via emails and calls, standardizing the process, improving approval timelines, thus drastically reducing the time it took an average customer to go through the complete process from prep to filing to securing their exemption.

We wanted to go beyond just being a prep service, instead taking those customers from A through Z from prep to filing, and educating them throughout the process, so they understood what would be next as founders of nonprofits. Now that product was in market those customers began asking for other services. They were asking, What happens next? How do I run effective board meetings? How do I raise money?

How do I create brand and awareness for my cause in my community? And so we continued to think about how we could further productize the services that we were offering as consultants and continue to deliver these services through a software solution. And so the next product that we were thinking about was the nonprofit platform (NPX). The NPX platform was a natural second product because we could now begin delivering the capacity support that we were offering as consultants through a subscription-based platform, whether that was fundraising, curriculum design, or providing resources such as conflict interest statements to development materials, and finance tools to help manage budgets and funding, and how to stay on track and align to reporting milestones that are required for certain grants.

Yet, there was still something missing. As consultants, we knew that there were major silos that existed between organizations and the funders that granted to them. Additionally, there was usually a number of us hired to do various projects related to one program whether that was evaluation, technical assistance, or some other task.

The enterprise platform would be the next product we would launch in the market. This product would compliment the NPX platform to allow funders to provide the capacity support and technical assistance that we were providing to organizations on a touch-and-go basis year-round. Additionally, funders would have access to their own dashboard, which would allow them to capture insights and evaluations, report information in real time regarding their projects, and easily manage stakeholders such as board members. So, whether you were a public charity, foundation, government entity, or corporation, you could benefit from this product. This one-app solution would be geared toward solving a few hurdles: scaling impact, measuring impact over time, and allowing grant recipients to deliver reports directly to their funders without the heavy load of reporting and in the manner funders want to see it.

I was asked by Keely Anson, an investor at Incite Partners, why I wanted to democratize philanthropy. She admitted that her question was almost rhetorical in a sense because she knew why. Incite, though a venture fund, also had a nonprofit that supported organizations that aligned to their company mission of launching and backing the most important and innovative ideas in the country. Sometimes this doesn't look like a startup. Sometimes these ideas are within nonprofits. Because of this, Keely had worked with several of Incite's nonprofit partners and regardless of size she found the same challenges to be prevalent.

So, we began to build out our enterprise product to do a number of things but certainly to create a more harmonious flow between funders and their grant recipients.

Exempt Me Now would go through a rebrand to recognize our suite of products, and what would come out of that is Resilia, a SaaS technology platform that enables organizations to increase capacity, and enterprises (think cities, private foundations, and corporations) to scale impact.

I share this part of my journey to emphasize that you have to start somewhere. As you'll recall me mentioning, I'm not a technical founder, but if you have an idea and you're willing to execute against it, anything is possible. Today entrepreneurship has been glamorized in so many ways. I'm here to tell you that it's hard, and that success is achievable, but there's very little glamour in it at all. I'm excited to see all the aspiring entrepreneurs, and those who have broken through to attain success.

As a Black female entrepreneur, I'm among the fastest-growing demographic of new business owners. What we often don't talk much about is that the average Black female–led business generates less than $30,000 a year. Digitalundivided, a nonprofit studied the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on Black female founders, finding that 82% reported a loss of revenue because of the crisis.

I do not say that we should start businesses to make money because I believe money is everything. But security is something, the security to take care of your family and/or yourself. What I know for sure is that not having financial security will make your days much longer, and will likely cause you an unhealthy amount of stress, but it's something that business owners often face on their climb. Coupling that with running a business and one that doesn't provide you the financial security you need in order to pay your bills will make it difficult to focus on growing your business because you're too focused on just trying to keep your head afloat and survive, literally.

The life of an entrepreneur can feel like you are on a roller coaster: there are a lot of ups and downs, you can't always see what turns are ahead of you, and the roller coaster can seem never ending. At one point you'll be having a high, perhaps a new product launch or amazing press that captures the essence of what you are doing and building; at another point there can be what feels like endless things going wrong. Customers complain, key team members move on, or you just feel burned out. Something that my mother shared with me that I now apply to entrepreneurship, not just my personal life, is: “Don't let your lows get so low you can't see the heavens, or your highs so high you can't touch the ground.”

2020 was a year of extreme highs and lows for me: just days before closing on my Series A round, COVID-19 began to rear its ugly little head, and I could feel my anxiety doing the same. I remember emailing my attorney, “We need to get our round closed!” I could feel the ground shifting—and just like that, it did.

Later, I'll get to how I raised a Series A during the onset of COVID-19, but first, let's take a step back and discuss what's needed for this journey.