Episode 54: Celebrating 3 Years in Business and Lessons Learned

3 Essential Lessons from 3 Years in Business: Authenticity, Investment, and Friendship

Pop the champagne; I'm celebrating my three year bizversary!

Reflecting on my journey, I share three lessons that I've learned. I hope they will inspire and encourage you in your business journey.

Thanks for tuning in to another episode of Collab with Kiva.

See you next time!

Are you ready to take massive action in your business and harness the power of data in your decision-making? Let’s chat 👇🏽

Podcast Transcript:

Kiva Slade: [00:00:01]

Hello and welcome to Collab With Kiva. I'm your host, Kiva Slade. From the marbled halls of the US Congress to my racing-themed office chair I've learned that there is no perfect path to the life of your dreams. My journey over the past 20 years has included being a Legislative Director for a member of Congress, Policy Director for a nonprofit, stay-at-home mom, homeschooling mom, jewelry business owner, and now the owner of a service-based business. Whether your journey has been a straight line or full of zigs and zags, join me and my guest as we share insights, hope, and lessons learned from our email entrepreneurship journeys. May the collaborative sharing of our stories be the tide that lift your boat. Let's dive in.

[00:00:55]

Hello and welcome to another episode of Collab With Kiva. I am your host, Kiva Slade, and I am celebrating three years in business. As I look back on the last three years, I wanted to just come today and share three lessons that I've learned. I'm going to let you know right now they are not earth-shattering lessons. I think sometimes we're looking for something monumental when really it's small things that are key takeaways that when we put them into practice and we are consistent with that practice of these things that monumental shifts actually do take place. So, without further ado let's dive into my three lessons learned over the last three years.

[00:02:00]

The first one is be authentically you. Yes, be yourself. When being an entrepreneur, having to be the face of your business, you are the brand, personal brand, this kind of brand, all of these different monikers that are given to us, in the end, you have to be you. Because anything else that you decide to embrace, that you decide to cloak yourself in, you have to be comfortable in that. And if you're not it's going to show. And the uncomfortableness is not necessarily uncomfortable in the sense that something that stretches you, it's uncomfortable as in that sweater that you had as a child that was really itchy and you had to wear it, but you hated it because it was that level of uncomfortable. And that's what happens when we try to become or envelop ourselves in something that's not authentically who we are.

[00:03:23]

You might try ROH marketing tactics because a coach, a colleague, a friend, someone suggested these things to you and they said, "Hey, this really does work. All you have to do is these four things." And you just don't feel comfortable doing those four things. That's the unconformt I'm talking about. The discomfort, rather. That is the understanding that this thing that you're trying to do to move your business forward is not aligned with who you are as a person. So, taking that time as a business owner to really unpack, uncover, discover who you are at your core is so critically important, especially if you want to have any level of longevity when it comes to being a business owner. When I work with clients and I ask them about their mission, vision, and values, it's because of that. What is it that you believe? What is it that you are doing and why? And what is that impact you're hoping to make? What drives you? What fuels you?

[00:05:02]

 So, whether it's through assessments, whether it's through therapy, whether it's through whatever works for you, take the time to understand who you are at your core. So that the things that you do, the things that you say, the things that you promote, the people you promote, the people you associate with, all feel authentically aligned with who you are. And even as you travel from five-figure to six-figure to seven-figure entrepreneur, you at your core do not change. There are things about you that may grow. There are things about you that change, but who you are as an essence, just most central part of you does not change. So, being authentically yourself is really my first takeaway.

[00:06:20]

There are people I've met in this space three years ago who I still talk to, and they're like, you are still how you were. And that's important to me, and it should be important to all of us. Because again, we're talking about who you are at your core. Have I grown as an individual? Most definitely. Do you have boundaries now that I may not have had three years ago? Absolutely. Are there things about me that are different? Obviously. But how I show up and who I am is still the same because that's who I am and I can't be someone else. So, lesson number one or takeaway number one is be authentically you. And in order to do that you need to take time to figure out who you are.

[00:07:27]

So, now moving on to number two, and I shared this in a recent podcast. I think it is critically important that we continue to invest in ourselves. No matter what your business is, I can guarantee you that it probably does not look the same as it did when you started it. There are shifts that we have to make. There are adjustments, tweaks that we have to make in order to be viable in order for us to serve and make money in order to have an impact. There will be shifts, there will be changes. There might need to be additional things that you have to learn, know, be aware of. And those are all things that involve investing in yourself. Coaching, therapy, additional certifications, or anything else like that. Sometimes it's free stuff. Don't get me wrong. Those things do happen as well. The bottom line is you have to be willing to grow.

[00:08:58]

Carol Dweck's book Mindset going into this journey you have to have a growth mindset. If you don't it is going to be so exceedingly hard and unnecessarily hard. If you were little and your parents were like, "you can make your bed of feathers or you can make your bed of rocks. Okay growth mindset, you're making your bed of feathers. I'm not saying it will be easy. It's not always going to be fluffy and soft but you're prepared for the journey. The fixed mindset you are making your bed out of rocks. It's just going to be hard, hard, hard. And it doesn't need to be. It doesn't have to be. But you have to make that choice for you. So, continuing to invest in yourself, whether that is through coaching, whether that is through therapy, whether that is through learning a new skill, whether that is through wanting to, or realizing that you need to tweak your offers or that you need to position yourself differently.

[00:10:15]

All of those things are part of that investment in yourself. New tools, new applications to use in your business, new ways of doing business. I know I am not alone with an inbox full of things that I've purchased because such and such says this or such and such, and I'm investing in myself by doing this. No, I'm not. I'm adding to my inbox clutter and depleting my bank account for things that I'm likely not going to use. But there does come a point in your journey where you do. You start to stop listening to these other people and other things, and you're not as sucked in with the [unintelligible 00:11:06] and you realize those things aren't really the investments that you need to make yourself and that there's a way to do business. That again goes back to number one in which you are being authentic to who you are.

[00:11:25]

If you're not a techie person why create a very elaborate tech system? Yes, you can hire someone to help you manage it. But again, like Oprah, you still got to be the one signing the checks. Do you really want to sign that check every single week, every single month when you don't have to? So, a part of investing in yourself is related to being authentically you and finding what that investment looks like for you. Maybe it's a mastermind because you enjoy group learning. Maybe it's one-on-one coaching because you loathe group learning. Whatever it is, find the thing with the person and or people that work for you. Not that work for your friend Sally. Not that work for your friend Bob, but work for you.

[00:12:37]

And my last takeaway as I reflect is make friends. It's really deeper than business, or at least it should be, in my opinion. Make friends. Take the time to take your relationships, your LinkedIn connection, your Facebook friends, your Instagram followers, your whatevers offline. It still may be on Zoom so technically Kiva still online, but actually getting to know people. Meet up with them. Talk to them. Text with them. Voxer with them. It is so much more than business. And we can sometimes lose sight of that in our pursuit of business. Connecting with people. We are made to do that. We are made to connect with one another. We are made not to be on an island by ourselves like Tom Hanks making a friend out of a soccer ball or was it a volleyball?

[00:14:04]

Make friends. These friends will nourish you. Nourish your soul when parts of this journey get hard. Not necessarily because of something you did just because that's where your journey is at this point. And you want those friends to nourish you. You want those friends who are also on a journey who might be ahead of you, who might be somewhat behind you, who might be lockstep with you to be able to pour into you and you to pour into them. And that connection that so many of us have made, especially in the online space is so much richer. When we get to know each other beyond what we do and who we serve, and how we do what we do.

[00:15:22]

One touching example for me. I was in a group. At that point, it was a networking community but I do think they now call themselves the mastermind. But at any rate, the group of women in my pod, we've just formed some really amazing relationships. And seeing each other twice a month on calls and things of that sort and connecting with each other beyond that. Over the summer my son traveled to Texas. And just some things happened in his living arrangements, his staying arrangements while he was there shifted unexpectedly and quickly. And for those that...your heart just is like, what? Wait a minute. Everything stops in the world and pauses, and you're just like, what do I do? How do I solve this? Or at least that's how I act. And I couldn't solve it at first. I was multiple states away. And I was sitting and my husband and I were speaking about who we knew in the area. And when Patricia popped in my mind, I was like, call Patricia.

[00:16:50]

And I reached out to her and told her what was going on. And she was like, "No worries." I connected her and my son. Patricia took care of him. She put him up in a hotel. She made sure he ate. She took him to the airport two days later. There was just so much that she did. And I'm not saying make friends so that when your kids get stranded someplace they have someone to reach out to. But make friends because life is about connection. Life is about helping each other out. Life is about being there for other people. And when, if I have the opportunity to do the same for Patricia or someone else, I'm readily jumping in there and doing that.

[00:17:54]

 And that's what those friendships provide you with. Not only nourishment but also it's just such a safe confidence that you have being able to trust some else that you have literally done life with with some area of your life that's not your business. And it is such a warm feeling. It is a refreshing feeling. I have friends who we have our own not written rules of bartering. They have a skill that I don't have. I do things they don't do. We trade off. Not because we are trying to not make money, but because we know we can help someone else in that area. And it's a gift that we have.

[00:18:56]

So, friendships are so important and it really is deeper than business. I don't mean make friendships just so you have referral partners. Hey, if my friends refer me, they refer me. If they don't, they don't. I am one of those people who strongly believe and very firmly believe that there are more than enough people out there for all of us to serve, even if we were all doing the same thing. And so, I don't count on my friends to refer me. I don't look to my friends to refer me. But do I know that if they come across someone who they think I would be ideally aligned with that they would most definitely and the same for them.

[00:19:45]

So, the friendships, again, are so much more than business. They're deeper than that. And they're just a beautiful part of this journey. A beautiful part of the experience that we all are having as business owners. Connecting with colleagues, connecting with their children. I love meeting up with people in real life. My brand designer, Lindsay, she lives one state away, but we have a place we can meet up. Meeting up with her in person and her daughter, who seriously, within 10 minutes of meeting me, sidled up to me on my side of the table and was trying to take my drink, which was non-alcoholic. Just so you guys don't think we were trying to get the little kiddies drinking, but it was the funniest thing. And then when I was leaving, she was like, "You're not coming with us. We're going here." And she's an absolute gem. And I'm excited to have not obviously just met Lindsay, but also her daughter, who I tease is my spirit animal because she is that amazing and I wish I had some of her spunk at three.

[00:21:17]

So again, friendships, they're so much more than business. They're so worth it to develop them, to nurture them so that they can provide nourishment for you when you need it. So, those are my three takeaways from my three years in business. Be authentically you, continue to invest in yourself, and make friends because it really is deeper than business. There are a ton of statistics out there that three years is a pretty doggone good thing for those of us as entrepreneurs, especially women, and especially myself as a woman of color. I won't bore you with the stats, but please know that your efforts to support other women in business in particular and any efforts that you do to support women of color in business have monumental impacts because those shifts are literally changing our world. They truly are.

[00:22:41]

Women have left the workforce in droves after COVID. And women of color have been deeply impacted by COVID and its aftermath. And when thinking of referrals, when thinking of business partners, when thinking of someone who might be a good fit for something, I do want to challenge you. Think of women business owners. Think of those that you have seen show up authentically, who you know have invested in themselves, who you have taken the time to make friends with. And if your friend circle looks exactly like you do with no real variety I challenge you to have some new friends, add some people, widen your circle. There are things that we can do that are amazing and life-altering, but they only happen when we stop swimming in the sea of same.

[00:24:07]

So, as you reflect on where you are in your business and what you are doing to make an impact I want you to make sure you've done the work you need to do to know who you authentically are and that you take inventory. If you show up to an event and everyone looks like you, it's 2022 people. That has got to end. That is not a true reflection of the world. Nor is it a true reflection of entrepreneurs in general, or more specifically, women entrepreneurs. So, challenge yourself, challenge your friends. Let's challenge each other. Widen our circles. You might be surprised who you connect with. And what amazing things you can do together that will have an impact that goes beyond you. So, thanks for tuning in to this episode of Collab with Kiva. I look forward to our upcoming episodes because this podcast is also about to celebrate a birthday, one year. So, stay tuned we'll have more celebrations to come. Bye.

[00:25:39]

Thanks for tuning in to this episode of Collab With Kiva. Each of us has a different path and I hope that this episode gave you some takeaway that has left you inspired and motivated to keep pressing forward on your unique path. Make sure you subscribe so you don't miss out on any future episodes. And of course, your reviews on Apple are greatly appreciated. If you're a small business owner ready to start making data-driven decisions in your business, and you know that without the data, you're really just guessing. Make sure to visit my website the516collaborative.com and let's schedule a time to talk to make sure that you can harness the power of data in your business. I'll see you next time. Bye.

Meet Kiva Slade - the Founder and CEO of The 516 Collaborative. With a unique background in high-power politics on Capitol Hill and sixteen years as a homeschooling mama, Kiva found her calling in the online business world as a trusted guide for entrepreneurs looking to build the business of their dreams.

Kiva's work began behind the scenes, orchestrating the back end of businesses and managing teams. But her inner data diva couldn't help but notice that small businesses needed help harnessing the power of data for growth. So she and her team set out to uncover and tidy up the data required to enable clients to grow their businesses confidently and easily.