Hi, everyone, im jj ramberg and welcome to your business. This show dedicated to helping you grow your business. Today we tell you the story of one entrepreneur who is making it her mission not only to have a successful company, but to help women be independent and have a voice at the same time. How . One job at a time. We had a he had to boynton beach, florida, to find out how her commitment to employing women in crisis situations is helping them get back on their feet and also helping her grow her business. Thanks to this company i got my own place, i found my boys, i went through a lot of things like Sexual Harassment, Domestic Abuse and now im by myself. Im like i can do it. Being around great coworkers it helped me, i dont know, to see that everyone out there isnt a villain. These two women have both beaten incredible odds and both work at ur batting and body in boynton beach, florida. Thats no coincidence. In fact, about 50 of ur bodys workforce is made up of women coming out of crisis situations. Being a single mother whenever i started this business, there were multiple times that that could have been me. Tracy gun is the founder of the company. When she was laid off from a corporate job she started making and selling soap out of her home to help pay the bills, but a chance visit to new york city changed everything. I visited a homeless shelter in the bronx, the director of the homeless shelter as the ladies would leave to go about their day she would stop them, hug them and say, you are amazing, you are beautiful, you are going to do awesome today, youre going to get your life back. Suddenly tracy saw an opportunity. She could do more than just sell soap. She could help change peoples lives. So she got in touch with local shelters and nonprofits to ask if they knew of anyone who would want to work for her. One of her first calls was to faithbased childrens organization place of hope. If were going to do a better job in this nation of taking care of people who have walked through tremendous trauma in their lives, sex trafficking victims, foster care that are aging out, you cant make it in life without a job, without skills that allow you to be employable. They connected her to jasmine west, a young woman who had grown up with an unstable home life that left her jaded and a bit weary of the world. Between at home, work and school, i felt like it was always a give and take. There was always something. Theres always a trick to it. And here it wasnt. Two years later, jasmine now mansions the business shipping department. I dont know what i would do without jasmine. When jasmine first came to work for us she was to herself, very withdrawn, almost rebellious. She had to fight for her life. When you spend the time with someone you get to know their situation and their history, and you can turn those traits, those learned behaviors through her years of really surviving, when you take that and you embrace it rather than say thats bad, then you get a much Better Success rate by trying to understand the person rather than trying to correct the person. This woman left cuba in 2012 looking for a better life for herself, completely selftaught and a victim of Domestic Abuse and Sexual Harassment it meant everything when tracy took a chance on her and hired her as the companys web developer. She believed in me and some people they dont. I have an accent so when you get to an interview or something they just, you know they dont get you. I want to continue my life as an independent woman and show other people that they can do it, too. And its not impossible. That doesnt mean every hire has always ended with this type of happily ever after. I learned the hard way that its not always easy employing the people that we want to employ. Keep very healthy boundaries. You are their employer, not their family. Not their friend. True trial and error tracy learned how to best balance running and growing a profitable business without losing sight of her mission. She says you need to vet what organizations you work with. All organizations are not created equally. So the ones that we truly love are the ones that dont just send employees and say good luck. We want the ones that will come in if we have an issue or if the employee is having an issue. Also every person that comes on starts with a trial period. We do a couple weeks and make sure that its comfortable for them. We dont want to put somebody in a situation that they simply cant function well. And she doesnt put her core business at risk. She has a group of employees always in place that guarantee the bottom line is met. We know every day that we have a certain number of production so to have the Core Foundation we can guarantee that, but we also have people that should they be slo err in their learning or slower just because theyre having a really bad day or they have a sick kid at home, we know that our business is solid. She has also built a certain type of culture. With so many of the employees having experienced firsthand just how far a little help can go, everyone here pays it forward. I know before i got here there were times in my life where that help wasnt provided. It wasnt there for me. So i had to go out and look for it or i had to be without it and i know what its like to be without it and i dont want them to experience that any longer than what they have already. Its not all about giving back. Providing an opportunity to women who need a little boost has helped tracy build up a loyal workforce thats been the backbone of her business growth. No matter who you hire, theyre going to come or theyre going to go. They may or may not work out. So to take a chance on someone who life has really beaten down on, the ones that truly work out and embrace what were offering here, make the best employees. And in the end we have people that are solid. Believe in our mission and believe in our company and thats what makes us so successful. And organizations hope more businesses will follow tracys example. If you just think youre coming in to save the world you really dont know what youre about to enter into sometimes. We have to give them the opportunities. We have to teach them, guide them, mentor them, but more businesses need to be able to look at these kids and think, wow, we could really Work Together to make something great happen here. I think looking at tracys example is a great way of starting. By this point most of us know about millennials. Now its time to move to generation z, these are the people who are born 1996 and after. How are they different . How do we market to them . How do we hire them . We have all these questions. Here at south by southwest we name to ask tiffany zong who is the founder and question of zebra intelligence. So good to see you. You, too. You are jen z. You drop out of college, started your own company and your company talks to people about how to reach people just like you, generation z. What are some of the big things you tell brands who want to get to sell to someone like you . The biggest thing is gen z grew up on their smart phones and social media so they can see through the bs very quickly. They will immediately skip through ads, they are just in tune with identifying whats an ad and whats not. Thats why people have to or brands have to have more native ads and ugc. What about influencers who get paid, does the bs button go up for that or not . Gen z can identify if its a Product Placement or sponsorship and ftc is cracking down on making sure that the influencers are showing that its a sponsored post. Kids can see through that. Some influencers who dont have the right partnerships and try to make as money as possible will build a poor brand over the years because their fans will see that they are just selling out. But you feel like if a Brand Partners with the right influencer even if they are paying them that that might get through . Yes. Okay. 100 . Okay. But a lot of brands dont know how to find the right influencers, like what pepsi did with Kendall Jenner and how that had a lot of controversy because it was out of the pepsi mission as well as kendalls so it just didnt work. You have to really be careful that whatever youre doing is sort of true, is authentic, i hate to use that word, but is authentic. Exactly. Thats one thing you tell brands. Whats another thing you tell them . Another thing is that every single kid is a content creator and baby boomers werent like this, but since we grew up on instagram and snapchat every single thing we take a photo of or tweet so its a piece of content. Utilizing that for your branding and marketing instead of trying to create your, for example, create your own ads or manufacture stuff, you can just use what your fans are already talking about and is that also, then, about always having something that is worth a photo . If theyre going to come to something you better make sure you have something fun because they will put that out to the world for you . Exactly. So another thing i tell brands is that gen z optimizes for going to things that are ass et tick first, its all optimized how this is going to look on my instagram or snapchat, is it going to be amazing. They think in terms of optimizing for photos that their fans and followers will like versus experiences. Gen z cares more about experiences than products and cars and stuff like that. Thats a huge shift in these Luxury Brands and how theyre going to market to the Younger Generation when they care more about experiences and renting stuff instead of owning stuff. Are there any particular brands that gen z loves right now . Who is doing it really well . Well, vans and adidas and converse are still relevant. Supreme is obviously one of the hottest brands still, but majority of brands are just really struggling to adapt with how fickle gen z is and how fast things are moving, adapting with teen interest ends. You said gen z is fickle. How do you as a brand deal with someone who is so fickle . Well, my suggestion would be to constantly talk to your users and your target audience and constantly interviewing them and just understanding whats trending, whats not. What things you can jump on and what you cant. Because you cant follow whatever is trending, you cant follow every single relevant meme and try to hop on to it joe ert wise it becomes unauthentic and brand never want to cross that line. But you do have to keep changing, you do have to keep evolving or they are going to say go there, go there, go there. Every week, every month you have to keep iterating and a big problem with a lot of the brands is that they think that they want to understand millennials have purchasing power and they want to target millennials right now and they care less about gen z. But gen z is growing really fast and its tail end of college, kids are about to graduate from college, they have their own purchasing power because they have side hustles and learn how to make money quickly on the internet as well as the fact that they have influence over their family and parents purchasing power. Thats also a fallacy where brands think that gen z doesnt have money. All right. Tiffany, thank you for stopping by. I know you did great on your panels. I really appreciate you giving us some insight here. Thank you, jj. The official note takers at south by this year were the team at ever note. They summarized more than 50 talks outlining the big ideas coming out of the austin so that you didnt have to. Its hard to believe its been ten years since ever note launched, the note taking revolution. Long before it was cool to be in the cloud ever note was there on almost every platform making your work accessible to you wherever you were. We spoke to the ceo chris oneal about making mistakes, setting expectations and the importance of community in this learning from the pros. Ive learned much of what i have in life by playing team sports and in team sports the best team wins. Its not the best collection of individuals but the best team and i think thats true in business as well. So being really intentional about your hiring is essential. Play for the front of the jersey not the back. So when im hiring i listen very intently to the number of times someone says the word i versus the number of times they say we. Thats important. And then also hiring by committee and that sounds bureaucratic and a bunch of red tape but i think you can arrive at better decisions if you have different people interviewing people and probing and asking questions about different areas and Different Things and then comparing notes afterwards. So that you avoid biases in your hiring decisions. Yes, it might require a little bit more up front but ultimately you are going to make better decisions. Whoops the monkey is a cute little stuffed animal as it sounds like and its awarded to the person who has the courage to stand up in front of their peers and admit theyve made a mistake. They also have to share what theyve learned, but in return theyre granted immediate forgiveness for that mistake. You think about that, allowing people to be okay making mistakes is absolutely essential. Like taking the right types of risks is essential for doing things differently. Innovation. It requires you being okay with making mistakes along the way. One of the things you do as a leader, you have to set expectations. You have to say whats expected of me and how am i doing against that and how can i improve . If you cant answer those three questions, you are not doing your job as a errleader. If you are answering those three questions it makes those decisions a little less mysterious. If you have to part ways and fire somebody and theyre surprised it means you havent done your job. Community is everything. These are people we rely upon for everything. When were developing a product how do we develop it . We test it with our community and get feedback from our community. They are our sales force. We dont have a traditional sales force. With he rely upon the community fob evangelists. We operate in 28 different languages. In every country in the world. We cant be everywhere to everyone so we rely on our community in that regard. One of the things that i think is has been a great lesson in my time here at evernote is the degree to which it is an emotional connection to the product and content and what people capture. With en we think about the value we deliver and how we ask people to pay us, with he made changes last year to that, and i was nervous about that because its pretty important, that relationship when you ask people to pay for something, its emotional. With when we did that we were nervous but ultimately it was a leap of faith. When we did that we were very pleasantly surprised that not only did people respond a little bit positively, they responded incredibly positively. They said, oh, i get it. You do something in my life that is greatly valuable to me and youre asking me to compensate you in part for that. Time for todays elevator pitch and we have leigh goodwin. Tell me the name of why you are company. It is called we do and we do dorm decor and bedding. I have two nephews going off to edge cl. This is who youre after, right . This is. The freshmen going there and need beautiful bedding for their extra long beds. Absolutely. Do you have any investors yet. We have no investors other than friends and family. How comfortable are you with pitching . Im pretty comfortable. Im ready to go. We will be talking to two people today, both entrepreneurs, very successful so they know what its like to be you, the first one is jess can johnson cope, the cant of Johnson Security bureau and the second is Jason Albanese the ceo of centric digital. Lets hear how you do. Thank you. Hi, im leigh goodwin, the founder of a bedding and dorm decor company. After my daughter went off to school she had difficulty sourcing quality bedding in the extra long twin size. Everybody wanted them. We designed a pillow shaped like a head board and that became the pillow head board our best selling product. Today we target girls going off to college and boarding school and we reach them primarily using social media. The goal was luxury bedding at a great price and we do dorm decor differently than anyone else in the space. With he design our own textiles, manufacture our collection all made in america. Today im seeking Strategic Direction to open up new Sales Channels and drive revenue and im actually open to offering equity in exchange for funding to help accelerate the business. All right. Nice job. Thank you. Good job. All right. Im going to give you i will trade you the pillow for your scoreboard. So i need two numbers, one to ten, the first one how do you feel about the product, the second how do you feel about the pitch. Its so funny when you talk about the extra long twin bed, i remember going to bed, bath and beyond when i went to college with that list. I clearly do not need an extra long bed but it was so hard to find the sheets shoo that was part of the problem. Really the impetus for starting the us company. We like to say its not your mamas 80s dorm room. I was trying to think 80s dorm. What year was i there. Jessica, lets start with you. Turn it around. All right. I give you a nine and a nine. I think its an innovative idea and i think its very timely when you think about young people and how they want to express themselves, its nice to have something thats American Made that they can get by in and make their dorm space their own. I also give you a nine for your pitch. I think that you were poised, you were were confident. You were convincing, and i think youre going to do extremely well as you reach out to potential investors and as you reach out for a thought leadership. Thank you, jessica. Jason, ton it around. I gave you an eight and a seven. I think that the product from the example im looking at here really feels like super high quality. It is very impressive that the coloring, the texture, which is something you cant tell if youre watching on television. It is really soft. The softness of it. You could see it is just super high quality product. I think thats very important in this competitive Consumer Product marketplace we live in today. What was she missing in the pitch . In the pitch i think overall you did a great job. I would say talking a little bit more about how you would utilize your proceeds if you were raising capital is important to express. That way you can attract investors with a specific focus on wanting to put their money to work in a way they think is going to drive immediate results. Sure. Thank you. Thanks, both of you. Good luck to you and your company. Were twins coincidentally today. Thank you for having me. Good l