9 Entrepreneurs Share What You Need to Know About Building Successful Businesses

One of the things that has been most inspiring to me during the past few months is to see how people are still fearlessly launching new ventures or finding new ways to pivot and grow their existing companies, despite everything going on in the world. Perhaps the pandemic has opened our eyes to the fact that life can be short and unpredictable, so we should just go for what we want to do—or perhaps it’s just further proof that nothing can stop a driven entrepreneur.

Either way, I want to be here to support those who are embarking on this journey during COVID. So, this month, I’ve pulled some of the best back-to-the-basics advice from my podcast guests on starting and growing companies. Even if you’ve heard some of these tips before, they bear repeating because they are really foundational in finding success. Read on for the highlights, and then listen to the full episodes for more insights. 

1. Make your biggest frustrations your next opportunity. 

Sara Rodell is the founder and CEO of Loop & Tie, which is a digital gift giving service that completely turned the $90 billion corporate gift giving industry on its head by giving the receiver a choice of what they want. In other words? No more rotting fruit basket gifts that nobody actually wants to eat. 

The idea is ingenious, but it came out of a boring chore that Sarah offered to do during her first job—ording the client holiday gifts. “[It was] something everybody was complaining about, and I was like, ‘Oh, how hard can this be? ...So I volunteered to do it, and I couldn’t believe how inefficient it was.” Instead of just rushing through the frustrating task to get it done ASAP (like most people would), she put on her systems thinking cap and looked for ways to make it better. “There’s so much opportunity when people think things are boring,” she says. 

Listen to the full episode.

2. Learn from your customers. 

If you regularly dye your hair, you’ve almost certainly heard of Amy Errett’s company, Madison Reed. They have completely disrupted the $15 billion hair coloring industry, offering salon-quality hair color, without the nasty ingredients you usually find in drugstore boxed dye, delivered to your door, and with the option to subscribe so you always have fresh color right when you need it. 

In the episode, she shares that one of the most important things she’s done from the start is to talk to her customers and learn from their experiences. One of the most pivotal moments while developing and testing the product was when a friend wasn’t happy with her hair color. “I often tell that story because what matters most in our business is getting her hair to be perfect, it's personal. And so, I learned in that moment about the risk of screwing that up, the fact that we needed to have great technology to color match, and we needed a call center with colorists.” During COVID, they’ve been holding focus groups to gauge how needs have changed as salons shut down. “Understanding who your customer is and what it is that this change has done in their eyes is really critical,” she shares. 

Listen to the full episode.

3. Assume people will want to help. 

Sehreen Noor Ali is the co-founder of Sleuth (formerly Visible Health), a platform dedicated to helping parents find care options for their children with ongoing or uncommon health issues by giving them information on what worked for other children with similar conditions. 

Sehreen discovered a need for a product like this after her daughter was diagnosed with a medical condition and she found herself with so many questions that weren’t being answered by the medical system. Given that she was new to the medical field, she knew she’d need help along the way—and wasn’t afraid to work her network to get the support she needed. “I've gotten a lot of amazing advice from people just by reaching out to them and telling them what I'm doing,” she says. “I think the assumption that people will be generous is a much better assumption to walk in with than to be afraid of asking people for help.”

Listen to the full episode.

4. Welcome advice, but ultimately do what’s right for you.  

Tessa Horovitz is one of the amazing co-founders behind Ametti, a luxury travel brand geared towards supporting women with fashion-forward travel gear and a community of women who understand the unique joys and challenges of being on the road. 

It’s certainly a tough industry to be in right now, but Horovitz has persevered by trusting her intuition about the rights steps for her company at this given moment. While it can be tempting to ask everyone around you for advice when you’re in a tough spot, you have to remember that you ultimately know what’s best for your situation. “What's right for you at this moment should be what you do, basically, regardless,” she shares. “You have to take on advice and other people's opinion and be able to re-question yourself constantly when you're building a company. But you also have to trust your gut feeling. It's not for nothing that you are an entrepreneur right now. It's because you trust what you envision.”

Listen to the full episode.

5. Find small ways to test your idea before going all in.

Joanna Parker is a co-founder of Yumble, a meal-delivery service specifically focused on healthy meals that kids will actually want to eat (and parents don’t have to cook). 

A woman after my own heart, Joanna tested the idea for the company in her kitchen without having a clear sense of where it would go. She posted on a mommy group on Facebook that she was going to be offering a week’s worth of dinners delivered, and immediately had tons of takers. “So I quickly put together a menu, I sent it over to the first 20 people who wrote back to me and I cooked them up, I tied bows on everything to make it all look nice, loaded up my car and I hand delivered everything for the first couple of weeks just to kind of understand exactly what people wanted.” Now they ship all over the U.S., but Joanna is glad she started small so she could verify and refine her idea, and tackle the challenges of scaling step by step. 

Listen to the full episode.

6. Don’t be afraid to just dive in and do it your way.

Hopefully I don’t have to tell you who Cynthia Rowley is, but if you don’t already know about this incredible fashion designer and entrepreneur, you’re in for a real treat. 

Cynthia’s entrepreneurial energy is contagious, and one of the most inspiring things about her is that she’s never been afraid of the hustle, never been afraid to dive in, get her hands dirty, and just go after an idea. Arriving in New York with dreams of being a fashion designer, she started scrappily throwing her own fashion shows, sewing everything herself and inviting any fashion magazine she could think of. "I'll figure this out. I'll just do it my own way," she thought to herself at the time. “Sometimes naivety is important and can take the fear out of things,” she shares on the podcast. “I always think what's the worst that could happen? You fail. So if you fail, you're learning something. You fail fast, you move on. I think the most important thing is to just try it. Just go for it.”

Listen to the full episode.

7. Push yourself beyond the average way of doing things. 

Michael Bernoff is the founder of the Human Communications Institute, a leader in personal and professional development, and the author of the new book Average Sucks: Why You Don’t Get What You Want (And What to Do About It). 

In our conversation, we talk a lot about how “average” holds a lot of people back. “Every human being has an average,” he explains. “Everyone has what they do regularly, and if you're not getting what you want in life from the way that you live your life, then your current average sucks.” People who successfully create the lives (and businesses) they want are those who are able to learn from adversity, invest time in improving themselves, and not get stuck in their average way of doing things. 

Listen to the full episode.

8. Listen to your gut. 

Julie Smolyansky is all about gut health, a cause she helps support every day as CEO of Lifeway Foods, one of the top producers of probiotic dairy products. They’re most well known for their kefir, a tart and tangy cultured milk smoothie traditional in Eastern Europe that Julie’s parents introduced to the U.S. market when they founded Lifeway. 

Julie is also all about trusting your gut—especially as an entrepreneur. Although she grew up working for her father’s company, she actually originally intended to become a psychologist. But before her second year of grad school, she felt she needed to return to the family business. “Suddenly, just out of the blue, just like that, it hit me: I am going to leave school and I'm going to come work for my dad. And it just was a gut feeling,” she shares. It’s lucky she did, because five years later her father suddenly passed, and she was able to step up as CEO since she had been learning by his side. “In general, my leadership philosophy is always trust your gut. I guess my personal philosophy is that the universe has your back and to trust the process.”

Listen to the full episode.

9. Never stop evolving.

Jessica Mah is the CEO and co-founder of inDinero, a company with the goal of making accounting fun, easy, and affordable for entrepreneurs and businesses who can’t afford people in house. Over the past 10 years she’s scaled her company from zero to over 250 employees, and one of the biggest things she’s learned along the way is that you can never stop changing, learning, and growing as a business. 

Many people call this the pivot, but Jessica thinks that sounds a little dramatic. Instead, she likes to think of it as a thoughtful evolution since these shifts should be happening consistently based on the needs of your business. “As an entrepreneur, you're pivoting every six months,” she explains. “And so, now I don't see it as a huge deal. I just see it as part of being an entrepreneur. And that's what makes it exciting.”

Listen to the full episode.

You might also like:

• Why It’s Important to Celebrate Wins (Especially During These Stressful Times)
• My Work-From-Home Diary: The Schedule That’s Kept Me Sane & Productive the Past Several Months
• How to Inspire Your Team From Afar During a Pandemic

Kara Goldin is the founder and CEO of San Francisco–based Hint, a healthy lifestyle company known for its delicious unsweetened flavored water. Since launching in 2005, Hint has introduced an oxybenzone- and paraben-free sunscreen collection using its signature fruit essences, and most recently, a plant-based, aluminum-free eucalyptus + lemon deodorant. Kara produces and hosts her own podcast, Unstoppable with Kara Goldin, where she interviews founders, entrepreneurs, and disruptors across various industries. Keep up with her on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. And, of course if you aren’t already, follow her on Linkedin here and subscribe to her podcast here. She is an active speaker and writer. Her first book, Undaunted., will be launching this fall and is available for pre-order now.