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Validating Your Offer and Leaning Into Your Role as Founder

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If you are not familiar with Emylee and Abigail over at Boss Project, you need to get familiar. I met these ladies in 2018 and immediately connected with their content and mission to help founders become full time creators. 

I even taught a session for their Boss Project Summit called “Progress Over Perfection” – an EPIC 4 day virtual (and free) conference to help founders and creatives connect with great content and grow their businesses. Needless to say, I’m #girlcrushing hard and not mad about it.

I recently sat down with them to chat about the realness of being a female founder on their top-rated podcast, Strategy Hour, and we chatted all things marketing, feeling the need to do everything and be everywhere, and how to prioritize all the crazy things that are actually working in your business so you can move forward.

Have a listen and check out the show notes and blog post below.

 

Life as a successful female entrepreneur can be frazzling with all the different responsibilities you have to take on.

Sometimes it can be difficult to know which thing to tackle first! Today on the podcast we have Jessica Korthuis, founder of Sohuis, a marketing and branding educational company that provides on-demand trainings for early-stage female entrepreneurs. Jessica is a powerhouse brand strategist marketer, and she has worked with brands like Red Bull, TEDxWomen, Girls Who Code, Stanford University, Bloomingdale’s, and Florida Institute of Technology. 

In this episode, we are talking about all the differences between small business ownership and entrepreneurship. We cover marketing tips, feeling the need to do everything and be everywhere, and how to prioritize the stuff that is actually working in your business so you can move forward.

Joining this discussion, you’ll hear some top tips for validating your product, how to stop being a perfectionist and take action, and the value of being transparent to build audience trust.

There is a lot of mindset-related stuff we are tackling today! Jessica is really in tune with female founders, and the different way intuition works when running a business. So, if you’re feeling a little overwhelmed about what is on your plate and what you have to handle, perfect! This episode will definitely provide some clarity for you.

Prioritize: Don’t Take Action for Action’s Sake

As we move from being entrepreneurs to business owners things can and do change a lot. There are some very clear differences between the two roles and it helps to be ready for the new challenges that will arise. As a new product of yours gets ready for release, the walls can start to feel like they are caving in on you with all the new responsibilities. Many women just accept this and begin to believe they will never sleep again because this is just how running a business is. The truth is, some of these pressures are more important than others. We can sometimes get weighed down by ‘shiny ball syndrome’, or the concept that all these attractive pressures such as social media and so on can be extremely distracting.

As women growing up, Jess shows us that we were told from a young age to behave a certain way and that everything has to be ‘just so’. This indoctrination can take a counterproductive form as you transition from entrepreneur to business owner.

You want everything to be perfect and can sometimes struggle to delegate. Don’t let this happen to you. Jess recommends the ‘sinking Titanic’ strategy. If you were trying to keep the Titanic afloat, you wouldn’t be washing dishes as your contribution. It’s the same with a new company: you have to prioritize. At the end of the day, global brands are looking to startups as examples of how to run a business, because they are so lean and able to move so quickly. This is a blessing so use it and get that profit coming in by being able to act on your priorities!

Validating Your Product Through a Mixture of Intuition and Openness to Feedback

As you’re getting your startup going, you will have a product you’re getting ready to release to the world, and it is important to have some tools for navigating its conception as well as evolution once in the market. It’s good to have some strategies for validating your product. A great strategy Jess believes in is simply using your intuition and figuring out how to get more customers. It’s as simple as that, but this process of researching and interfacing with customers can actually become quite challenging. When things turn out differently to what you expected, remember not to take it too personally. It is easy to become precious about our concepts, but it is important to survey products as you navigate their release. Data is just data so use it, incorporate it, and then move forward. While making your product surveys it is also important to ask the right questions. Don’t ask leading questions, ones that try to influence your customer into giving you the answer you want.

We talk about The Mom Test, or founders bias, the tendency to let our subjectivities get in the way with market research. Try to avoid this, ask the right questions, move onto your next assumption, make a tweak, and then repeat! Don’t see a discontinuity between a product and the data as a failure. It’s rather an opportunity to make a tiny pivot because entrepreneurship is a marathon, not a race.

Your business is not going to succeed due to one thing but is rather a journey with twists and turns.

Most importantly, don’t get too caught up in the data either. A balance needs to be struck between intuition and openness to feedback. In the universe of entrepreneurship, you are the sun, and the planets and stars are your coaches and feedback: without your idea their input is useless.

Stop Procrastinating and Take Action

One thing that a lot of people tend to get caught up in is this idea that they are not ready to take action yet for whatever reason. It could be that you haven’t created your marketing campaign, created your website, or designed your logo. Some people might be worried about having their idea stolen. The truth is that if you’re not creating some hugely disruptive product then the chances that somebody will want to steal your idea, or that it’s even your idea in the first place are quite low.

It’s all about the secret sauce you put on it anyways. Newsflash: all these things we think we need to do first are just forms of procrastination! You don’t need them! Get out there and take action! Before you get hung up on the opinions of your dad or friend who says you need a pretty logo before starting, just get going. Those people might not understand business that well, and so will suggest these unimportant things to you, but there is a lot to do before the branding stage that will drive your business forward hugely.

Winning Trust by Showing Vulnerability

It is easy to get caught up in the lessons you might have learned from a different background and then apply them inappropriately to the context of your new business. For example, if you have been a designer before then you may think perfect branding is what you need to make your business succeed. This is becoming less true these days especially with the huge buying portion of the market which the millennial group has now claimed. These groups are using things like trust and amiability as benchmarks before supporting products, and the ability of an entrepreneur to show vulnerability plays a huge role in this process.

People trust brands that seem human, so remember you don’t have to have everything perfect before putting something out there. People want the behind the scenes take on a product they love, so forget the makeup or the filters, and share the raw truth of your process!

Top Strategic Tips for Validating a Product

This is for those of us who have just launched something. Maybe it succeeded and maybe it was a slight flop, but either way, we are not wondering what the next steps to take are to find that progress and take our business to the next level. How do we go about accessing some data to validate and tweak our product? Jessica recommends before any validation survey, one should spend some time finding out exactly what it is they want to discover. She likes to set up what she calls customer discovery interviews, phone calls she organizes with past customers whose details she has acquired over time. These can be done over Skype or Zoom and the point of them is to locate data points that can be used to drive decisions going forward. See yourself as a data forensic in this process. Do you have recurring customers? Ask them why they keep buying. If you know somebody who bought a product years ago and didn’t repurchase, that is a data point too. Why did they choose not to come back? Using a strategy like this will help you get much more clear on the landscape of your product and help you figure out how to keep that revenue flowing.

HIGHLIGHTS

  • Prioritize: Don’t Take Action For Action’s Sake. [0:03:03] 

  • Validating Your Product Through a Mixture of Intuition and Openness to Feedback. [0:15:00]

  • Stop Procrastinating and Take Action. [0:33:25]

  • Winning Trust by Showing Vulnerability. [0:43:46] 

  • Top Strategic Tips for Validating a Product. [0:46:40]

#TALKSTRATEGYTOME [0:44:51]

  1. Launch your product

  2. Determine what you need to know to make it grow

  3. Gather this data using surveys

  4. Contact old customers to conduct surveys

  5. Reasons for returning and non-returning customers are data points

 

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8 Surprising Traits of the World’s Most Successful Entrepreneurs

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Hey babes!

Sohuis team here with another one of our favorite posts from “The Balance Small Business” , an excellent resource for a variety of topics relating to entrepreneurship and growing your small business. This post dives into the nitty-gritty of what it takes to be an entrepreneur, and while it was written by a male author and uses a lot of male-related examples, we won’t hold that against him. 🙂 

 

 

We can all think of the names of some of the world’s most successful entrepreneurs. Richard Branson, Steve Jobs, Sara Blakely, (added by Sohuis team!), Larry Page, Warren Buffet and many more.

In my interviews and studies of these successful entrepreneurs, I’ve come to notice several key traits that most share in common with each other. What makes them successful? Why do these people succeed at business when so many do not?

Every successful entrepreneur has their own individual quirks and idiosyncrasies, developed over years of experience within their own unique environments.

Here are the 8 most surprising traits of the world’s most successful entrepreneurs.
1.Successful Entrepreneurs Listen More Than They Speak

This might surprise some people. A familiar image of some of the more outspoken, successful entrepreneurs of our generation, is that they do what they want, regardless of others’ opinions.

Those who have read anything about Steve Jobs have no doubt heard about how difficult he was to work for, and how hard a time he had letting go of control. What people miss, however, is that even Jobs usually had a team of advisors and extremely talented employees helping power all of his decisions behind the scenes. Jobs’ relationship with Apple’s Chief Design Officer Jony Ive was one of immense trust when it came to product design.

Richard Branson has also named listening as one of his three most important leadership principles. He says, “Listening enables us to learn from each other, from the marketplace, and from the mistake that must be made in order to get anywhere that is original and disruptive.”

2. They’re Ready to Embrace Failure

While you will never be a success if you are totally reckless, you do need to take risks along the way, and accept that there will be failures, as well as successes. Nearly every successful entrepreneur has some failures in their backlog of life.

Even though Steve Jobs is no longer with us, he certainly left behind a legacy at Apple. However, many people have forgotten that at one point the Apple board, who disagreed with his decisions, ousted him as CEO. It was only after he spent time developing NeXT and Pixar, that he made a triumphant return to Apple.

Steve Jobs did not lose heart when he was dumped from the successful company that he built. It merely gave him the impetus to embrace that failure and move further forward.

3.They’re Extremely Curious

Inc. columnist, Naveen Jain, founder and CEO of Inome, sums up the essence of this trait in his post, The Most Precious Resource on the Planet? Big Dreamers. He states, “You should always remind yourself that the day before something is a breakthrough, it’s just a crazy idea.”

Thomas Edison would never have come up with his inventions, including the phonograph, the motion picture camera, and the long-lasting, practical electric light bulb if he had not been curious.

Curiosity is a fundamental trait of any successful entrepreneur. Business leaders do not make it through life by being indifferent to the activities occurring around them. They are always looking for the next way to make something better.

4. They’re Determined to Follow Their Passions

Alas, too many people make their way through life without ever discovering what they’re truly passionate about.

Graham Young, in Passion 101: How to Discover Your Calling in Life says, “passion is something that will stem from your beliefs, be enhanced by your skills and sustained by the value that you are able to provide.”

Not only do successful entrepreneurs determine what their passion is, they make an all-out effort to ensure that they wholeheartedly follow that passion.

Most entrepreneurs spend long hours running their businesses. It is much easier to devote this time if you are doing something you love.

5. They Admit What They Don’t Know

A common misconception about successful entrepreneurs is that they’re often arrogant and believe they know everything.

You’re likely to find that most genuinely successful, self-made entrepreneurs are not anywhere near arrogant, however. It’s the vocal minority that gets all the attention. Most successful entrepreneurs are the first to admit that they do not know it all.

The more they learn, the more they discover what they don’t know.

To truly succeed, you have to learn from your experiences in life. You need to keep an open mind and be prepared to handle criticism the right way, as evidenced on CreativeLive.

To quote Richard Branson again, “Learning and leadership go together. Too much credit goes to me for what we have achieved at Virgin, but the successes happen from working and learning with some of the world’s most inspiring and inspired people.”

6. They Know When (and How) to Say No

Business managers and owners find that they have enormous demands on their time. There is a real danger that you can burn out if you attempt to micromanage your business.

Truly successful entrepreneurs can see a multitude of opportunities for their business to take. More importantly, they can also see that it would not be beneficial (or possible) for them to pursue every opportunity that comes their way. They need to be selective and concentrate their focus on only those ideas with the greatest potential.

Steve Jobs was the master of saying no. When he returned to Apple in 1997, the company had a range of 350 products. Jobs reduced this number to 10 products in a two-year period. He was able to give Apple a real focus, a process they continue to this day.

Feature overload within technology companies is another example of people not knowing when to say no. How many people actually use all of the components on a Swiss Army Knife? Most people use the knife to cut with, but unless they are stuck in a hairy situation, they are unlikely to use specialist tools in other scenarios.

7. They Know the Importance of Balance

Truly successful entrepreneurs know that there is much more to life than just running their business. They spend quality time with their family. They take breaks and vacations.

In some cases, this is an example of their learning from their past mistakes. You hear about entrepreneurs working horrendous hours, and many that do, end up experiencing eventual health problems.

Warren Buffett was asked in a meeting with MBA students for some of the reasons for his success. Two of the reasons he cites were picking the right spouse, and staying in Nebraska rather than moving to New York City (with a quieter, less stressful lifestyle).

Sheryl Sandberg, the COO of Facebook, has an innovative view on this. “There’s no such thing as work-life balance. There’s work, and there’s life, and there’s no balance,” she said in a Maker’s video interview. She recognizes the difficulties women, in particular, have juggling family responsibilities with a high power job.

8. They Know How to Build a Good Team

If you intend to be a successful entrepreneur, you will very quickly discover that you cannot do everything by yourself. It is a physical impossibility, and you would certainly burn out.

Also, any human being, no matter how intelligent, educated and experienced they are, is unlikely to have the full skill set needed to run a successful company by themselves. That’s also why I’m a huge advocate of validating your business ideas before diving too deeply into spending your precious resources on them.​

None of the entrepreneurs I’ve studied have become successful solely of their own accord. They’ve all built a team of loyal, creative, and skilled people. To be a successful entrepreneur, you need to know how to delegate. You need to be able to allow others to become involved, and make decisions in their areas of responsibility.

Richard Branson, Steve Jobs, Larry Page, Warren Buffett and many of world’s most successful entrepreneurs have learned the importance of spending their time doing only what they do best, and trusting talented people to help them do the rest. Combine all 8 of these traits, and you’re on a path to create something truly monumental.
 

The original post to this article can be found here.

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Sohuis Launches Membership Community to Continue Empowering Female Founders

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“If you would have asked me two years ago if I was going to quit consulting and focus exclusively on educational content and building a community, I would have thought we were living in an alternative universe.” 

This is what I said on a podcast recently when reminiscing on our journey towards building the Sohuis brand. Sohuis has always meant more to me than being an outlet for my own entrepreneurial journey and creativity. What started out as just an idea I had while my husband and I were on our way to breakfast and I was nursing my (then, 5 month old) daughter in the backseat of our car – has transformed into something much greater and more meaningful than its original intent. 

I created Sohuis because I hated pumping on the floor, under my desk, in my office at work. I created Sohuis because I quickly figured out that our society is not kind, and most of the time, unsupportive, of working mothers – much less mothers in executive-level positions. “Society expects us to work as if we don’t raise children, and raise children as if we don’t work,” and that saying hit home for me hard that Saturday morning on our way to breakfast. 

I created Sohuis to change the dynamic between my personal and professional life – to work on projects that I deeply cared about, and to have the freedom to merge my new identify with my former one. My journey to entrepreneurship has been a twisting, interesting endeavor, and I’m beyond grateful that its lead me on this path. 

Helping women amplify their stories with branding and marketing education

While a lot of my former work involved larger brands and global teams, I have always maintained deep, rooted love for supporting women. Being raised by a single mom and having grown up in that dynamic, I have been inspired by so many women in my youth, I feel like it’s a part of my DNA. 

I set out in the fall of 2018 to test the validity of a concept that was initially sparked in me from Danielle Leslie, a well-known course creator who’s made millions teaching others how to productize their knowledge and create life-altering online courses. Prior to this, I had never created a course in my life. I loved teaching, and I was constantly asked to host workshops and share my unique frameworks with others, so naturally, an online course was an expected (yet surprising) next step branching off of workshops I was already doing. The biggest difference though, was that I was going to unapologetically create educational content to exclusively help female founders tell their unique brand stories. 

With the knowledge acquired through all my years of implementing successful brand strategies, I knew that the magic of branding lied in a founder’s ability to speak her vision, deeply understand her customer, and uniquely serve the needs of that customer in her special way. Once I validated my flagship program, the Sohuis StartupBlueprint, I launched my first beta program that had over 100 registrants with 24% of them actually completing the beta. 

It wasn’t all unicorns and rainbows after that though. From there, it actually got a lot harder. 

After a successful beta, it came to fruition that the program was way too long and required too much commitment from my ideal customer. And then, after several successful mini-cohorts, I was commonly presented with the question of, “now what?” Our conversations went a lot like this…

“Thank you so much, I loved the program it was a game-changer for my business, what can/should I do next?!” 

And here I was….

With the exception of 1:1 consulting, which was not a model I wanted to rebuild after having consulted for the past 7 years, I quickly noticed that Sohuis was ill-equipped to continue to serve the diverse needs of our founders. The Sohuis StartupBlueprint Program gave them everything they needed to know about rethinking failure, iterative growth, brand vision, mission, values, and they left having a clear focus on their ideal customers. They received the fundamentals needed to get started, but now they wanted to put those concepts into action – they wanted to grow. 

Community, tools, strategy, accountability 

Luckily, we are not the first to build a digital community. Brands like Girlboss, Create & Cultivate, Yellow.Co, Hey Mama – and countless others – have paved the way for us and allowed us to follow in their footsteps. While some would say those communities are our ‘competitors,’ I would disagree.

These brands serve the needs of their female-driven communities by covering a broad spectrum of content related to working women. We, in a sense, do that too. However, Sohuis is special in that we are building a community to empower early-stage founders with marketing and branding-focused tools, resources, and education to help them grow their business. Marketing is reported as the #2 challenge all female founders face, with funding and access to capital being the #1 challenge. We want to break down the complicated nature of marketing and cut through the noise that makes it almost impossible for ‘non-marketers’ to keep up with. 

Marketing and Branding have become a complicated (dare I say, terrifying) experience for most entrepreneurs. The women who come through our programs are smart, resilient, brilliant entrepreneurs with incredible ideas – and yet, they’re caught in this endless fear cycle of not knowing how to brand their business in a way that’s meaningful and authentic to them, while also being relevant to their audience.

Our community is set out to change this. We are going to provide the tools, principles, best practices, resources, templates, and education female founders need to break through these barriers – and we’re going to do it at an affordable price. 

Our membership is $29/month and includes the following member benefits:

  • Weekly branding and marketing strategy hour: This serves to provide our founders with consistent access to marketing-focused topics, and gives them a platform to receive answers to their specific challenges
  • Exclusive access to the Sohuis Vault: This is our entire library of marketing and branding courses and on-demand trainings that cover a wide-array of marketing topics. We also plan to add new trainings and courses on a monthly basis so that our founders can dive deep in to particular subjects.
  • Access to mentors: If there’s one thing I’ve done right over the past 7 years, it was connecting with incredible women from all walks of life and entrepreneurial paths. I’m very proud of the network I’ve built, and they are ready to give back, mentor, and pass the ladder down to those who are climbing up.
  • Private community: Like other communties, we thought it was critical for our founders to have easy-access to each other. Slack provides us a way to authentically connect with one another, share resources, celebrate wins, and push each other forward.
  • Encouragement, accountability, celebrations: The way I see it is, we are their girl-squad – the Sunny to their Cher, the peanut butter to their jelly. We’re here to encourage them, hold them accountable to their goals and celebrate every win along the way.

With future partnerships and collaborations that are in the early stages at the moment, we have the capacity to offer more and bring that much more value to our founders’ membership experience. 

So, if you’re a female founder who’s looking to build this ship at sea with us and benefit from the education and accountability we can provide, then I encourage you to join as a founding member! If you’re a potential partner who would want to help us succeed with our noble cause, please contact me at [email protected].
 
Thank you for being here and watching our journey unfold – and cheers to more women building brands, businesses, and creating opportunity for themselves and others. 

 

 

AUTHOR, JESSICA KORTHUIS

Jessica is the founder of Sohuis, and educational platform and membership community that provides marketing and branding educational resources to help early-stage founders brand and market their businesses. She has a passion for writing and educating and an obsession with teaching others how to bring their brands to life.

Jessica has been featured by Thrive Global, Girlboss, the Lean Startup Company, is a 40 Under 40 Award recipient and has been listed as a “Woman to Watch in 2019 and Beyond” by the national publication, Biz Journals. She is a contributing writer to Girl CEO Inc., proud mompreneur, and to keep up with her super inspiring and fun content, follow her on Instagram @jessica_korthuis.

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Why Womenpreneurs Need to Reclaim Their Time

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Hey gals, Jessica here. 2019 was a year for the books, would you agree? I have been challenged in so many new ways this year, and have been rewarded (two-fold) in ways that I never could have imaged.

As we enter into this new decade, I wanted to reflect on something that I’ve been thinking a lot about this year – productivity. Now, I’d like to preface this piece by saying that I’m not going to give you 5 tips to be more productive, nor am I going to give you 3 tools to increase your productivity. Our incredible team of Sohuis contributors have loads of content dedicated towards everything relating to helping you become a productivity ninja.

In this post, I wanted to take a broader look at productivity and share some personal experiences with you that I’ve learned this year that could help you think differently about how you’re going to show up for yourself in 2020 and beyond. 

First and foremost, I wanted to share that I’ve learned that productivity is not the same as busy. And man – do we glorify being busy.

The other day I was cleaning out my bookshelf and I came across one of my old calendars/notebooks. This wasn’t any old calendar/notebook though, this was my calendar from the very first year Thomas and I launched our agency. That thing was so worn out, the pages were barely attached. It’s red, with one of those old school ties you wrap around it to close it, with a slot in the middle to insert a pencil. I kept that notebook for so many reasons, the primary being that it’s literally a time capsule from my first year as an entrepreneur (my naiveté leaps from the pages). It’s also the last year that I reluctantly gave up using a paper calendar, that’s a story for another day. Every single square is jam-packed with notes, meetings, calls, to-do’s, my entire life for a year lives in this historical text, and I will never throw that old notebook away. 

As I was reading through my days of 2013 (this way predates children), the only thing I could think about was time. I thought about how, during those days, I genuinely believed that I didn’t have enough of it, I could always use more of it, and I didn’t see it for what it truly is, currency. Truthfully, this was because I hadn’t developed a sense of how valuable my time was, which I would figure out as I evolved over the years.

I gave away my time like free balloons at a balloon festival and holy crap – was I tired. 

Tired in a different way that I am tired today (where my mamas at?), tired because I was so incredibly inefficient and unproductive. My days were so full, I literally had an event of some sort from sun up to sun down. Client calls, demos, networking events, parties, community events, pitch competitions – client work, you name it. I was so insanely busy, but I wasn’t necessarily productive, and I sure as shit wasn’t efficient.

Now, that’s not to say that we didn’t do great work – we did. But now that I’m on the other side of entrepreneurship having folded our agency and started a new company armed with my learnings and lessons, I now understand that time was, and is, my most valuable currency. 

This little story brings me to what I wanted to talk about now – productivity. It’s easy to understand the relationship between these two commodities, time and productivity. Without productivity, we waste time, and in theory, additional time gives us the ability to do more things. 

And in 2019, I feel like I finally learned the art of truly balancing productivity and time. Coincidentally, as my daughter gets older and becomes involved in more activities, it’s even more critical that I maintain this balance as much as possible. 

So as you embark on this next decade and season of change, whether you’re a small business owner or aspiring entrepreneur, here are a few things I figured out this year that I will continue to do in 2020 and beyond to increase my productivity and maximize my time:

I learned to unapologetically shut down and turn off my work when my mind and soul need it.

Also related, I hardly ever (ever) work more than 6 hours a day. For those of you slaving away working 15 hour days, I can feel your distain. Don’t worry, I did that for a loooong time too, (too long). Obviously this may not work for everybody with where they are in their careers, but it’s important to note that I have made a conscious choice to seek opportunities, clients and roles that allow me the flexibility to do this. I have turned down well-paying positions because it meant I wouldn’t have the flexibility of time, and I’ve learned over the years, since the days of my old red notebook, that I do not function well as a human being if I cannot take a break and reclaim my time. This has lead me down a unique and interesting professional path, but necessary for me, to maintain my mental health, happiness and relationship with my work. 

Think I’m crazy for working less hours and not slaving away at my business like I did before? Take a look at what Microsoft has done in Japan. Microsoft tested a 4-day work week during the month of August and gave all of their employees Fridays off (while paying them their full salary), and you know what they discovered – a productivity increase of 40%. 

Humans are not designed to be machines with focused outputs for extended periods of time. In fact, a recent study showed that the traditional 8-hour work day is a completely irrelevant and antiquated way of working. Our brains actually crave 1 hour of work time and 15-minutes of rest. When is the last time you could feel yourself getting tired at work, but you pushed through to make your quota, or you worked through your lunch break because it made you feel more productive? 

I explicitly seek professional opportunities that allow me to work from home majority of the time for this exact reason. I don’t work from home so I can answer emails in my pajamas (although that’s pretty awesome). I work from home so that I can take a quick 15-minute break and fold some laundry, or run an errand, to give my brain some time to recharge and relax. 

For almost 2 decades I worked 12-15+ hour days, so trust me when I say I’ve been there. And I’m aware that not everyone can make similar choices that I have. I’m also aware that I have missed opportunities or passed up certain things in exchange for this time – which is something I accepted long ago. 

So, if you are in the position to reclaim your time, or you’re working towards a place where you can work in a similar fashion, know that your productivity is not based on the amount of time you dedicate – it’s about how you structure the time that you do spend. 

The other thing I learned this year is that slaving away at your business is unhealthy. 

Yes, it’s true that entrepreneurs have a hard time disconnecting from their businesses. But when you become a slave to your business, your business ends up running you, where it should be the other way around. As entrepreneurs, the core of our identities gets associated with our company, and during that process, it’s so easy to absorb your entire self into your work. 

I learned during the time of our agency that we were walking a tricky tight rope of muddying the waters between personal and business, and Thomas and I made a distinct choice to physically shut the doors to our home office and turn off our computers around 3pm on Friday afternoon. Everyone thought we were crazy.

In fact, someone once told me that if I wasn’t working on my business 24/7, I wasn’t a “real” entrepreneur. 

To that I said, “ugh, yea…but I like sleep, and travel, and spending time with the ones I care about. And If I can’t be present and enjoy these simple pleasures of life, what does it matter how successful I am?” If success comes at the price of alienating yourself from everyone you know (your kids, your family, your friends, whoever is important to you) – then, was it really worth it? 

I share this with you because I want you to know that it’s okay to set your business down for a minute.

It’s okay, healthy and encouraged to take breaks and stop for 5-minutes to smell the roses and admire how far you’ve come. I recently partnered with The Boss Project and spoke at a virtual conference on how to maximize your marketing for the holidays, and my session was on how to realistically commit to your goals in 2020 and beyond. In that session, I stressed that everyone forgets that success is the culmination of a million little steps – it’s the tiny steps that add up to the large leaps. And while everyone else only sees the large leaps, you are living alongside your tiny steps. 

So as you think about entering into the New Year with your ambitious goals and aspirations, I implore you to make a personal agreement with yourself that you will focus on productivity over busyness, and you will work to reclaim your time, giving yourself, your soul, and your mind a few breaks along the way. Don’t worry, we’ll all get there in the end, it’s important to enjoy the scenery along the way. 🙂 

xoxo,

 

AUTHOR, JESSICA KORTHUIS

Jessica is the founder of Sohuis, and educational platform and membership community that provides marketing and branding educational resources to help early-stage founders brand and market their businesses. She has a passion for writing and educating and an obsession with teaching others how to bring their brands to life.

Jessica has been featured by Thrive Global, Girlboss, the Lean Startup Company, is a 40 Under 40 Award recipient and has been listed as a “Woman to Watch in 2019 and Beyond” by the national publication, Biz Journals. She is a contributing writer to Girl CEO Inc., proud mompreneur, and to keep up with her super inspiring and fun content, follow her on Instagram @jessica_korthuis.

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How To Create The Ultimate Brand Identity (Free Template Inside!)

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Let’s talk about something near and dear to my heart – branding. 

Side story: You probably don’t know that I bartended for many years to put myself through college. During my bartending days, I worked at several steakhouses, and do you know what else steak houses sell besides steak? Bourbon and Scotch. Lots of it. During my time in the restaurant business, I learned an old saying that “all scotches are bourbon, but not all bourbons are scotches” – and what that means is that all forms of scotch are, in general terms, made from the same ingredients that bourbon is made out of. However, in order to be called a ‘scotch’ it must be distilled and bottled in Scotland. It sounds like a minor difference simply based on geographic region, but in reality, it’s quite a major distinction. Scotland has a completely different climate, terroir (dirt), barrels – all of which contribute to the distinct flavor of scotches.

A similar concept applies to those of us who call ourselves “marketers” vs those of us who call ourselves “brand strategists.” Allow me to explain – like bourbon and scotch, all brand strategists are great marketers, but not all marketers are great brand strategists. What I mean by that is, being a great marketer is already a complex discipline. There are so many facets to marketing, and the practice of marketing continues to become deeper and more expansive. Oftentimes, marketers must align their efforts with other areas of the business, in particular, operations and sales in order to understand effectiveness and impact.

Brand strategists – on the other hand – not only have to fully understand the complexities of marketing, but they also need to correlate their efforts across ALL aspects of the company from the user-experience, to design, to function, to implementation of the brand at every level of the company. It’s that minute, yet important, distinction that separate these two disciplines. And my reasoning for drawing this correlation is because branding is really hard to define – whereas marketing can be tracked, sliced and diced with data and other corrections. Branding relies heavily on the emotional experience someone has with your brand at a deeper level – and don’t get me wrong – some of the BEST marketing campaigns rely on emotions, too – but branding takes it a step further.

So for this post, I wanted to peel back some of the layers to what makes a brand so relatable, lovable, and therefore –  sellable (marketable). THEN, I’ve included a free template towards the end to help you start to formalize your brand identity – yea!

So let’s start with Brand Identity – WTF is it, exactly?

A brand identity is a collection of all experiences a potential customer has with your company. It’s how your brand looks and feels, what your values are, how you communicate yourself, and what you want people to feel when they interact you. Essentially, your brand identity is the personality of your business and a promise to your customers.

‘Your product leaves an impression on your customers long after you’ve made the sale. Brand identity is the process of shaping that impression.”

So, now you might be asking what the ingredients are to creating that lasting impression on your customers. To tackle that, I’ve summarized three of the most important components of a well-defined brand identity.

1. The leading lady — the face of your brand (i.e., your logo)

Okay, so don’t fret here – I want to start this off by addressing a myth that everything about your brand can be found in your logo – that is 100% not true. Your brand is more than your logo – remember, it’s the collective experience someone has with your company, and there’s no way to communicate a collective experience with one design element. However, your leading lady, your logo, is an important character in this story. She tells a lot about your company and acts as the person who opens the door to your brand experience. In fact, I like to lovingly refer to her as the welcome committee – the hostess with the mostess!

The reason everyone gets so hung up on the logo is because it’s typically the first interaction with the brand. Imagine going to someone’s gorgeous house for dinner and being welcomed by a rude ole’ prune who doesn’t pay attention to you, throws together a meal that sucks, and then proceeds to complain about everything in her life to you for the remainder of the meal – would you stay for desert?

Now imagine going to that same gorgeous house and being welcomed by a dear friend, or a stranger whom you might not know, but they’ve greeted you with open arms and they’re warm, generous, and are genuinely interested in getting you settled and making your experience comforting. Not only would you probably stay for dinner, but you’d come back a second time if invited.

That is the feeling your brand communicates – and your logo is the woman who opens the door.

2. Mission, Vision and Values

I have a large section dedicated on how to do this in my program, and it’s for good reason. We are living in a buyer’s market, so as a result, buyers have a strong say in how brands interact with them. So when you’re creating a brand identity, you are also telling a story about what your brand stands for – no matter what you are selling. As a result, your mission, vision and values are based on the framework of what your brand stands for. So, if your brand doesn’t stand for or represent anything, you’re going to have a really hard time with this.

The good news is that your brand can stand for whatever you want it to stand for – you don’t need to be saving the planet or addressing global issues with your company to do this well (although that would be really cool). Do you represent helping small businesses? Are you addressing a need within a marginalized market? Are you creating a new technology to help with problems x,y,z? Are you creating a food product that’s made from alternative ingredients? There’s an endless amount of ways to communicate your brand’s purpose and story, and your mission, vision and values help you to craft that story so that your customers can relate to it on a deep emotional level.

3. Brand Personas (i.e, personality traits)

This is probably one of my favorites. I’d like to ask you a question – if your brand where a person, who would you be, and why? What personality traits would you have? Are you shy, dynamic, sarcastic, gentle, professional, funny, rebellious – some combination of everything? Building a strong brand identity requires that you tap into human traits so that other humans can connect with you – seems pretty straightforward, right?

If you’re able to define a brand persona to help you channel these personality traits, it’s much easier to create that experience across all areas of your brand. I once worked with a marketing agency that said their brand personas were a combination of Louis CK and Robert Downey Jr.’s character in Sherlock Holmes (weirdly specific, and weirdly awesome). The reason this was important for them to define was because they could then figure how to actually talk and act like those personas. Their copywriting became a lot more witty and sarcastic, they started creating bolder design styles, and it trickled down into all aspects of how they showed up for their customers.

So now that I’ve shared with you ways to create your brand identity, so I’d like to share with you a free Brand Guideline template I created to help you formalize that brand identity.
What is a brand guide?

Simply put – a brand guide is a set of rules that a company follows when presenting their brand to the world. It details things like the story, mission, vision, values, voice and audience of the company to ensure consistency across all communication channels. It also typically includes logo usages, color codes and typography guidelines to ensure that all creative assets are designed with intention and stay “on-brand.” Everything I wrote above is collected into a “guide” so that anyone you show it to can understand how your brand needs to function. Think of a Brand Guideline as your lighthouse – when you’re lost or unsure of which direction to go, you always refer back to the Brand Guideline.

Why do you need a brand guide?

Every business needs a brand guideline because it keeps your creative and marketing in check. How many times have you thought this, “let me just whip up (or ask my designer) something quick in Canva and post it on social?” If there aren’t some sort of standards put in place for those use cases, overtime, your brand will look incredibly inconsistent and it’ll create confusion for your audience. Even if you’re a one-person show, if you have a logo and plan on creating content, having a *basic* brand guide will go a long way.

 

<<  Click here to download the free (and totally customizable) Brand Guideline Template  >>

 

I hope this was helpful for you, and enjoy this free template!

 

 

 Author, Jessica Korthuis

Jessica is the founder of Sohuis, and educational platform and membership community that provides marketing and branding educational resources to help early-stage founders brand and market their businesses. She has a passion for writing and educating and an obsession with teaching others how to bring their brands to life.

Jessica has been featured by Thrive Global, Girlboss, the Lean Startup Company, is a 40 Under 40 Award recipient and has been listed as a “Woman to Watch in 2019 and Beyond” by the national publication, Biz Journals. She is a contributing writer to Girl CEO Inc., proud mompreneur, and to keep up with her super inspiring and fun content, follow her on Instagram @jessica_korthuis.

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My latest feature on VoyageATL

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A few weeks ago, I sat down with the super vibrant and fun publication, VoyageATL for an interview on my story. They just released it and I wanted to share it with you here!

Today we’d like to introduce you to Jessica Korthuis, Founder and CEO, Sohuis.

Jessica, can you briefly walk us through your story – how you started and how you got to where you are today.

My journey is a bit of a crazy one! So, I suppose I’ll start with relatively recent events. About seven years ago, I was working for a corporate fashion brand in Public Relations – it was everything to me. I had always wanted to work in fashion and through a ton of hard work and grit, I landed this amazing role. In fact, my former boss and mentor were grooming me to take on her leadership role, as she was planning to exit and start her own company and follow her personal passion. About six months after working in this role, I found out that my job was going to be eliminated due to corporate downsizing across the United States.

Done. Finished, my dream job and career were inadvertently flushed down the proverbial toilet and I was absolutely devastated. My husband, who was my fiancé at the time, and I drowned my sorrows in several bottles of wine and did a lot of chatting about our futures and what we really wanted out of our personal and professional lives that evening. At the time, I didn’t realize it, but this was the moment my future was forever changed. After much discussion, my husband and I decided we wanted to launch our own branding and marketing agency. I had been working in communications for a while and had some significant relationships under my belt. My husband was, and still is, the tech and creative unicorn of the two of us, and just like that – poof! We created our own company, designed our first logo, developed a basic (and crappy) website all in that weekend.

4.5 years went by from that point and we built our branding agency from the ground up. We had no idea, no mentors, and no clue. We just followed our passion and ran the agency off of our own moral code and ethics, and after the first year, we were able to bring on two team members. By years 2-3, we built a team of six, including us, and we worked with brands like Red Bull, Girls Who Code, TedxWomen, Stanford University, and from there did work internationally with the European Union and the U.S. Department of State to support entrepreneurship across the globe.

It was insane! It was from these experiences and owning our agency that I discovered something very important about myself. I discovered that I was born to be an entrepreneur and a leader. You see, while I always got along great with my colleagues at other formal jobs, I never truly fit in – and I honestly could never pinpoint why. At some point, I always felt like I was able to grow within the company, but only at the pace of someone else’s success. I was encouraged to learn and to lead, but only so far until I needed to stay in my lane and respect my own box. I never realized until I became an entrepreneur that having the ability to look at a problem through multiple lenses was actually an asset, not a weakness. And I learned that having wild, innovative, creative and crazy ideas was a strength to a team and not a liability.

A critical moment of clarity for me, I knew entrepreneurship was where I belonged, and I knew the road would be full of challenges and uncertainty. But it was in those challenging moments that I brought my best and learned the most about myself and my business.

Since then, we decided to fold the agency for a number of reasons, all of which are good, and we still have great relationships with our former clients to this day.

Now, I’ve expanded my journey through entrepreneurship and have founded my second company, Sohuis.
Sohuis started out as a brand consultancy, allowing me to spend time with my new baby and manage motherhood in a way that made sense to me. Since last year, it has grown and transformed into a living and breathing educational platform that supports and empowers other female founders to create businesses they can be proud of and to live life by their own rules.

I create branding and marketing training materials, from guides to ebook, free courses, mini-courses, to a full-fledged program called the Sohuis StartupBlueprint; which is a step-by-step blueprint designed for entrepreneurs to take their brand and marketing strategy from idea to execution in as little as 30 days.

When I hear from my course members how much my content has changed their lives and the trajectory of their business, I just literally beam from all corners of my heart because this is my purpose – to lead and to teach. And if I can empower other female founders to live their lives by their own rules, then that is what I am here to do.

Great, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome? 

Hell no!
I’ve hit so many obstacles I don’t even know where to start. Of all, some of my biggest struggles were actually more emotional than anything else. As an entrepreneur, no-one really understands your world except you. Even your closest friends and loved ones cannot see everything exactly from your point of view. As such, entrepreneurship can be incredibly isolating – as you’re always stirring around in your own head.

When I started to notice this was affecting me, I reached out to other female founders that I met online or through other avenues and essentially created an unofficial committee of advisors. I reach out to them when I feel overwhelmed or need to advisement, and they reciprocate by providing guidance and their point of view, as I provide guidance to them when they need it.

I also started joining a bunch of online communities of other female founders and I find a lot of solace in knowing that we are all effectively dealing with the same things – whether you run a $50K business or a $50 Million business, everyone needs support and advisement.

Do you have any advice for young entrepreneurs?

I actually have two big pieces of advice for other women, particularly young women who are just starting their journey:
1. You just need to START. It’s not going to be perfect. You’re not going to get it right at the beginning. You’re going to receive push back and it will be challenging. The goal of ANY business is not to be perfect. The goal is to understand your customers and know how you bring them the MOST value. If you exist to serve your customers and serve them well, your business will flourish.
2. The other piece of advice I would give is this: Overnight success is absolute bullshit. If you’re seeing other women miraculously succeed overnight, it’s most likely because they’ve spent years chipping away at it. Slow and steady wins the race, and you cannot succeed without learning. And the only way you learn is to make mistakes along the way, growing and improving with every little step you take.

Please tell us more about your work, what you are currently focused on and most proud of.

My work is exclusively geared for female business owners and entrepreneurs, who are either at the idea stage or early revenue stage, that needs crystal clear plan of actions to brand and market their businesses. I’ve worked with large corporate entities all the way to 1-person founding teams, and the #1 thing I see is that everyone knows marketing and branding is important, critical even, for success. They know they need to build a brand, communicate what they do, understand their customers, deliver products and services that are needed and valued. The problem is, the marketing landscape continues to expand and it is overloaded with information – it’s just simply too much. Everyone knows the ingredients of the marketing salad, but nobody knows how to put the salad together.

That is what Sohuis helps female founders do – I help them understand all of the ingredients and put them together in a way that makes sense, is digestible and sustainable to implement.

I am proud of so many things about my company. I’m proud that we are unapologetic in who we serve. I’m proud that we show up authentically as ourselves and have attracted female founders who align with our values. I am proud that I’ve created a product line that will support a sustainable marketing engine so that I can create wealth for myself and for others. Probably most importantly, I am proud that other women trust my knowledge and my experience to invest their time, energy and resources into my education.

What sets me apart from others is that while I deliver value through marketing and branding education, I’m here to do more – to change lives. I’m here so that the mom of four who’s barely managing to keep her head above water can actually build a business that brings her joy and freedom. She can do this simply because I provide no fluff, and no-nonsense education that she can actually act on. In my experience, when women are able to show up as their full and authentic selves, communities thrive and the world just simply works better.

Looking back on your childhood, what experiences do you feel played an important role in shaping the person you grew up to be? 

Oh, yes.

First and foremost, I was raised by a single mother. This has undoubtedly played an outsized role in my journey. I saw my mom work 3-4 jobs in and out of my childhood, I saw her open up her own hair salon and close the doors because she didn’t have the resources to carry it all the way through. I was raised in a small little town in Florida that I desperately wanted to get away from. As a result, my mom sat me down when I was 14 and told me that the best way to expand outside of what I knew was to go to college. And on that note, we didn’t have money to send me to college so I either needed to get a soccer scholarship (I was playing premier at the time), or an academic scholarship – which I set out to do when I got into high school.

I started working at 14, (I bagged groceries at a grocery store and I thought it was the coolest!), I played competitive soccer my entire youth, which definitely influenced my ability to work hard, practice, get back up, it honed my leadership skills, and so much more.

In case you’re interested… I did end up getting that scholarship and I went to the University of Central Florida on a full scholarship where I studied Communications and Art & Design.

The original link to this article can be found here.

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6 Reasons Why Moms Make the Best Entrepreneurs

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Today is May 9th. May 9th is an incredibly special day for me because it’s also my daughter’s birthday. And today, my baby girl Aèden, turns 3 years old.

Three, I can’t even believe it. She’s no longer a tiny little infant that needs to be taken care of in every way imaginable. She’s my little rocket ship of energy and charisma with thoughts and feelings all her own – who has wants and desires and a clear point of view. And while I think about celebrating her on her 3rd birthday, I’m also thinking about how much I’ve learned from her, and from my own personal development journey, over the past 3 years.

“There’s no manual when it comes to raising children.” This was one of the many pieces of advice my mom gave to me when I told her I was pregnant; and I have since harnessed everything about this motto as I’ve embarked on this journey over the past 3 years.

If you know my story, then you know that I was an entrepreneur long before I became a mom. And as I sit here in my pool of nostalgia, reminiscing on our collective experiences from the past 3 years in celebration of today, I can’t help but make the strong connection between the similarities I’ve experienced from motherhood to entrepreneurship. I mean, I always knew that women were incredible multitaskers and that we, obviously, were the more superior gender. 🙂 But it’s only been fairly recently that I’ve noticed the many correlations in how the daily life of motherhood can prepare you to be a super-successful entrepreneur. So in celebration of Aèden’s birthday, I wanted to share a few funny stories about my journey and write a piece about how my experiences have lead me to the concrete conclusion that moms make for the absolute BEST entrepreneurs.

Here are the 6 reasons why moms make the best entrepreneurs

1. We’re all making it up as we go

If there is one fundamental truth I’ve learned over the past 3 years, it’s that we’re all just making this shit up.

Let’s call it what it is. My mom was right. There is no manual, and we’re all just doing the best we can. This is fundamentally true of entrepreneurship as well. While there are endless mommy blogs and tons of incredible resources for new moms, the same way that there are mountains of resources for entrepreneurs, at the end of the day – we’re making it up as we go and learning from our daily experiences.

We’re relying on our instincts and natural wherewithal to navigate the tricky waters of entrepreneurship and motherhood, and while at some point you do get the hang of it. At first, and for the most part, this fundamental truth stands.

Here’s a cool fact: there are 8.1 Million women-owned businesses in the US that generate $1.3 Trillion in revenue and employ roughly 7.6 Million people. And guess what, all of these women once were making it up as they went along, too.

2. Moms are multi-tasking ninjas

True story: before launching Sohuis I worked for a nonprofit organization that supported entrepreneurship all over the globe. I was their director of marketing and the CEO enthusiastically invited many of the moms to bring their kids to work when needed and during this particular time in my life, Aèden would come to work with me about 2-3 days a week. She was less than a year old at the time.

So here I am…in my office (door closed), Aèden is sleeping in my left arm, I’m managing to handle my pump with my right arm, I’ve got my headphones plugged in because I’m on an important call with the U.S. Department of State, as we were rolling out a global marketing plan to bring entrepreneurs from Latin America into the United States. Meanwhile, I’ve got leaders from all over the U.S. government asking my thoughts on how to roll out the program, what strategies we should try first…I’m trying desperately to give short, concise, serious answers so that nobody puts the pieces together that my pump is what’s making the sound of a city bus starting and stopping. I’m praying that Aèden just continues to sleep for 5 more minutes, and my marketing coordinator is taking notes for me because she knows that I literally cannot do another task at that moment.

What’s incredible about this is that I know this is one of MANY similar stories and experiences that other working moms can relate to. And while my story is unique to me, the concept of ninja-like multi-tasking most certainly is not. As an entrepreneur, you multi-task in similar capacities because oftentimes you’re the only one who can do those specific tasks in that specific moment. You’re constantly managing multiple things at the same time and after a while, you get deviously good at switching from various tasks quickly and efficiently.

In fact, a recent study showed that, on average, “moms manage at least 26 tasks in the morning while completing at least 12 major jobs per day.” And that’s all before 10am!

Now, it’s been my experience that long-term multitasking in this way isn’t the most sustainable option for your well-being. But the fact of the matter remains that we become pretty damn good at it, and it translates to being nimble, efficient, resourceful entrepreneurs.

3. Speaking of resourceful, moms are resourceful AF

I feel like there are endless examples of mom-resourcefulness. Like that one time I totally forgot to pack extra diapers in my bag and I had to make-shift one out of toilet paper. And I’m not talking about good, luxurious toilet paper – I’m talking about the crappy public bathroom toilet paper that practically disintegrates upon touch. Did I mention that the restaurant I was at also didn’t have a family restroom or changing table? Yea..so I managed to craft her Tarzan diaper on the counter and POOF! Nobody knew the wiser.

Entrepreneurship is defined by resourcefulness, especially in the beginning. Like motherhood, everyday poses a unique adventure with unforeseen challenges and obstacles that require you to channel your inner Macgyver and curate out-of-the-box solutions.

4. A mother’s intuition is never wrong

This recent study illustrates a fascinating scientific discovery about a mother’s intuition. Everyone knows that the mother passes DNA on to the child through the placenta, but apparently, fetal DNA also passes back to the mother and can find a home inside of the mother’s organs – particularly, the brain. And in this study, they concluded that the DNA that was passed from the fetus in utero stays with the mother for life – hence, the science behind a mother’s intuition because they carry the DNA of their children inside of their own bodies. CRAZY!

Many famous entrepreneurs have credited their intuition as the main vehicle for their success. And while I haven’t built a multi-million dollar business (yet), I can get behind this notion all day long. One of the first things I do with a new business opportunity or partnership is listen to what my intuition is telling me. It took me years to figure out how to do this, and I can honestly say that becoming a mom has sharpened this tool ten-fold.

5. Fall down 9 times, get up 10

Moms. are. resilient! It’s been said that motherhood is the wildest rollercoaster on earth – and I believe it. Some days I wake up feeling like I’m totally owning this #momboss life, and other days I just want to watch Project Runway reruns all day and take a nap; bonus for me if I get around to washing my hair. In another post I wrote, I talk about the realistic version of entrepreneurship that nobody sees, and it looks a lot like this:

Both moms and entrepreneurs, even during the toughest of times, have days where we go to bed exhausted and wake up ready to do it all over again. Moreover, we wake up wanting to be better – to keep going, keep chipping away at it, and to keep believing in our vision.

6.  Moms are expert negotiators

“Use a sticker chart to potty train,” they said. “Give them a reward every time they pee in the potty,” they said. “Girls are way easier to potty train than boys,” they also said. Potty training Aèden was one of the most ambitious obstacles to date. Not because she was difficult or had a hard time with it – I’m actually thankful for our experience after learning what other moms have gone through – however! How do you use a sticker chart with a child who hates stickers? When we first started potty training, Aèden was totally not interested in any incentive I would offer. She would just sit on the potty and sing songs, get down, then immediately pee on the floor. It wasn’t clicking. Something about my proposal was not enticing for her – that is, until she discovered popsicles.

We had been “attempting” for a couple of weeks when I decided to pull out the big guns. Everything I read stressed that I shouldn’t lose my cool, no matter how frustrated I got. And let me you tell you, I was getting frustrated. Our negotiations went back and forth for some time until one morning, I cleared my entire schedule and self-proclaimed that today was the day. With the most amount of zen energy I could muster, I sat on the bathroom floor with a day’s worth of reinforcements (books, crayons, toys, etc). She wanted a snack, I would point to the potty – not saying a word. She wanted to go outside, I’d look at the potty. She wanted to watch her favorite show – potty. I was never upset at her, and occasionally she would sit on my lap and we would read and color and play. I just made the following very clear – “I am going to sit right here until you pee on this potty, and nothing will happen until you do so. I can play this game all day, and you will not break me, little toddler.” This went on for 2.5 hours.

Then, when I knew she was seriously considering my proposal, I brought out the big guns – popsicles. (We didn’t even have any popsicles, but that wasn’t important) I told her that she would get a popsicle if she peed on the potty and sure enough – success! We celebrated, high-fived and hugged, and off we went for her to pick out her favorite popsicle. She’s been potty trained every since, and I’m happy to report that she now has a new love and appreciation for stickers. 🙂

In my entrepreneurial experience, negotiations are never about winning or losing, they’re about co-creating a solution that works best for both parties. It requires patience, strategy, and anticipation of the other person’s wants/needs/desires so that you can propose something that works best for you, and for them. Moms can do this in their sleep

Bonus! Moms don’t take no shit

Let’s take note from one of my favorite mombosses, Daenerys Targaryen, mother of dragons.

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Want a visionary to execute a powerful idea? Take a few notes from a mom you might know. Need some perspective on how to manage that client from hell, call a mom you know. Working on a huge deal that could make or break your business – you know what to do.

To all of my fellow mombosses out there, I see you. And to all of the mamas who are thinking about launching their own business, remember that you already have every skill needed to be a successful entrepreneur – you already do it every single day.

xoxo,

Jessica

 

 

 

 Author, Jessica Korthuis

Jessica is the founder of Sohuis and creator of the Sohuis StartupBluprint, a online accelerator designed to help female founders and entrepreneurs build authentic and meaningful brand strategies. She has a passion for writing and educating and an obsession with teaching others how to bring their brands to life.

Jessica has been featured by the Lean Startup Company, is a 40 Under 40 Award recipient and has been listed as a “Woman to Watch in 2019 and Beyond” by the national publication, Biz Journals. She is a contributing writer to Girl CEO Inc., proud mompreneur, and to keep up with her super inspiring and fun content, follow her on Instagram @jessica_korthuis.

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My Chat with The Everyday Series: A Movement of Female Change Makers

I recently had a fun chat with Stina Welty, Founder of The Everyday Series. Stina and 11 of her other founding members created The Everyday Series as a movement of women seeking change through collaborations and partnerships as entrepreneurs to make the world a better place. They seek to empower women entrepreneurs who are building a healthier, safer, and equitable world, and when I had the opportunity to share with her my story, I jumped right on it!

Below is a breakdown of our convo, and stay tuned for other collaborations we have in the works with Stina and her team!

MEET JESSICA: MOMPRENEUR + STARTUP GURU

When Jessica and I crossed paths on Instagram, the stars truly aligned! She shares a passion for empowering women that is so unashamedly genuine – her brand glows because she glows by being 100% herself. She wants all women to experience success in their entrepreneurial endeavors and is a true source of wisdom for all of us. Take her advice and run with it!

CAN YOU SHARE A LITTLE BIT OF YOUR JOURNEY & WHO YOU ARE?

My journey into entrepreneurship really just kind of happened to me by accident, really. I was working at Bloomingdale’s. I had dreams to go to New York. That was my plan, you can read more about it here! I was on my way, and then a girlfriend of mine who worked at corporate called me one day told me she had really shitty news. She told me they would be cutting jobs corporate wide and that my whole job would be eliminated.

That’s how corporate America goes. This is how the agency that my husband and I started came about – he had the technology background, and I had the PR/ Marketing background- we we went all in to launch our own company and do our own thing! Within a weekend, we built our first website (it was total crap), and then we started the agency that Monday morning. It really grew organically over four years with my clients to the point where we were being sought out within the community, and all of our business was word of mouth.

In traditional working environments, I would usually come to a point where I hit a ceiling and I never could figure out why. It wasn’t until I put focus into entrepreneurship that I realized: “oh – this is my tribe! These are my people!” I never really understood what it meant to own a business or be a founder, as it wasn’t something that I grew up understanding or knowing anything about.

Bringing us to present day, when I became a mom, my perspective changed once more and prior to starting Sohuis, I was working at a nonprofit organization as their director of marketing. It was an incredible organization that supported entrepreneurship all over the world and I really got to see how entrepreneurial ecosystems start and grow in incredible diverse communities. We were fortunate to work with the European Union and with the US Department of State – bringing entrepreneurs from other counties into the United States, and we ran several programs that brought entrepreneurs from Europe and Central America into the US to  teach them how to expand into the US market.

I was there for about a year or so, and I ended up leaving because it just wasn’t a good environment for me anymore, just personally and professionally. Sohuis, at the time, was just a passion project that started out as a brand consultancy. But as my daughter started growing, I realized very quickly that time is the most valuable asset you can have and that consulting just was not scalable. And quite frankly, it’s not very rewarding either.

I really wanted to set out and create a digital product that could be scaled and turned it into something really interesting. I took time to reflect on all the work I had done over the past 10 years – looking at a lot of the workshops and things that I do for my clients – and I started to notice that in a lot of the conversations I was having, many of them were asking me the same types of questions. Questions like: How do you build a brand? How do I know who my customer is? How do I communicate to my customer? Which platform should I be on? Among others.

I never thought that creating an online course would be something I would be doing. But I just started thinking outside the box and asking myself: what can I do to scale content? What’s really working? What’s not working? The Lean Startup methodology is a big part of what I do, and “Lean” refers to maximizing resources and output as much as possible in order to achieve quick growth and eliminate waste. A lot of the problems founders have is that they don’t know their priorities or what to focus on first. So one of the principles of The Lean Startup is to prioritize what’s going to give you the most output as quickly as possible. For example, don’t spend a year building an app that you’re not sure anybody wants! Get out there and validate those ideas and test for buy-in and fail and learn as quickly as possible so that you can make sure that you’re maximizing resources.

Following the principles I teach my clients, my theory was that if I developed a comprehensive course that touched on all these various marketing and branding subjects – I thought that founders would really enjoy it. Particularly, I love serving female founders. It’s just a passion of mine and is part of my DNA. Using some Lean Startup concepts, I sent out to test and if my idea was viable (because…just because you, the founder, thinks it’s a good idea, doesn’t mean others will think the same). I told myself that if 25 people ended up signing up for this free beta program for the course, then I would go ahead and create it. Low and behold I had over 100 people sign up for the beta!

As a result, Sohuis has moved away from consulting and is now turned into a framework and platform for teaching female founders how to brand and market their businesses through a core curriculum called the Sohuis StartupBlueprint.

TELL US ABOUT THE MISSION OF YOUR BRAND. HOW DOES IT EMPOWER WOMEN?

My mission is really simple. The marketing and communications landscape is super confusing and it just keeps getting more cumbersome as technologies and marketing practices evolve. My purpose is to declutter and streamline this landscape to completely cut away all of the bullshit that’s related to marketing – particularly for females!

As women, we get caught up with trying to be perfect – our website needs to be perfect, or our logo needs to be exactly right, etc. Oftentimes, that fear does more harm than good so the first half of the course is actually all about Lean methodologies. I teach the course participants how to rethink their how they market their business- and I teach them to re-evaluate what failure actually means. The goal is just to empower them to be able to build a brand that they have an idea for without knowing how to get there. And then of course, the rest of the course has exercises and key takeaway assignments so that they can concisely speak the value of their brand and align their brand platform with what they envision.

WHAT IS THE BIGGEST CHALLENGE YOU’VE HAD TO PASS PRESS THROUGH AS A FEMALE ENTREPRENEUR, AND WHAT ARE THE STEPS YOU HAD TO TAKE TO OVERCOME IT?

So, not only my a female entrepreneur, I’m a solo founder- I don’t have a co founder, or a team, and I’m always in my own head as a result. So I would say the isolation of being an entrepreneur has been something that I’ve struggled a lot with. When you’re a solopreneur, everything is from your own point of view, and you just can’t do that. You have to have diverse points of view and be able to step outside of your business from time to time.

To overcome this, I reached out to a few good friends and acquaintances. In fact, I started cultivating a community on Instagram with two or three women that I’ve never even met in person! But we have like minded interests and we follow each other’s journeys, plus it’s genuine when we share each other’s posts and support our missions. They are basically my unspoken advisory board for myself!

WHAT SETS YOUR BRAND APART FROM OTHERS?

As cheesy as it might seem, I genuinely think that what sets the brand apart is that the brand is just 100% me. It is authentic to its mission and its purpose, and it isn’t trying to be anything else other than what it is. Ultimately, my brand exists to serve female founders who are typically at an idea stage, or they have a really small business. My brand doesn’t really serve giant institutions or CEOs of large companies. Could they? Could they take the course? Sure, but my brand doesn’t exist to do that.

You definitely don’t have to be a mom to I take my course either. However, I am a mother of a young child who’s trying to run a business and has a million other things to do so I do want to empower other moms to be able to run their business in a successful, strategic way.

HOW DO YOU COLLABORATE WITH OTHERS WORKING TOWARDS A BETTER WORLD?

Collaboration is probably the #1 thing that I always have my sights set on. I’m collaborating with a bunch of different people who have similar interests in order to create courses together, even webinars, E-books, and blog series! There’s all kinds of ways to make sure that you’re creating super valuable content and really serving your audience.

I believe we’re all working towards a better world because when women are empowered and educated, they build incredible things and everyone benefits. So the more women I can teach and empower through my courses and other materials, the better the world will be!

WHAT ADVICE WOULD YOU GIVE FOR FEMALE ENTREPRENEURS IN THE BEGINNING STAGES OF LAUNCHING THEIR BRAND OR BUSINESS THIS QUESTION?

There’s so much I could say, but the #1 thing I would say is that it doesn’t need to be perfect. You have to start with the vision you have, and you cannot let your fear of failure, or the concern about failure stop you from starting. The biggest thing I would say is you just have to start! If you never start, you’re never going to get there. Part of the Lean methodology that I really like to follow is you have to learn as you go- you’re not going to get it right the first time so you should just remove the idea that you’re going to launch this perfect business, because it’s literally not going to happen.

The faster you launch, the faster you can actually learn from and listen to your customers and the feedback that you’re receiving. You have be open to customer feedback as well!

Check out her free guide to finding your target audience here!

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How I Became an Entrepreneur: A Behind-the-Scenes Story

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Part One:

It’s 2011 (which now feels like an eternity ago…), I’ve just gotten my new black blazer dry cleaned, I’m prepping for an in-store fashion event that’s about to take place at the corporate retailer I was working for. It’s crazy. There are models everywhere, the DJ is late, the caterer dropped like 25 cupcakes, everyone is buzzing around trying to figure out where they left their phones or their bags — this is the life of working in public relations and event management.

You see, before landing at Bloomingdale’s, I sold advertising for a local fashion magazine in Orlando, FL. I quickly noticed that all of the magazine’s “features” were men, which of course was something I needed to remedy immediately. This was not okay. I decided, through my starry eyes and naivety, to host a fashion event for the magazine that would feature Orlando business women during the month of October. I honorably declared it would take place at a swanky club, include a fashion show and a silent auction so that all proceeds would be dedicated to breast cancer, since October is, of course, breast cancer awareness month. I partnered with a friend of mine who owned a PR & Events company at the time and through her networks, we were able to convince Bloomingdale’s to be a part of the event and allow us to pull their garments for the show. This is how I ended up working with Bloomingdale’s.

Over 300 people attended this event and it didn’t cost the magazine a dime. We gathered sponsors, partners, volunteers, models, the whole nine yards, and everyone believed in our vision. Hell, we even convinced the venue to let us host our event for free and create specialty cocktails all the while donating 2 drink tickets per attendee. Which, now that I look back on it,  I’m sure costed them hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars that night.

When we stood up on stage at the end of the night and proclaimed that we had raised over $1,000 for breast cancer and featured 50+ women in the magazine, I knew that my vision had come to life. Not only that, I knew that the magazine had benefited greatly from this and most importantly, this was the first major initiative that I had devised, created and executed – and it felt fucking great.

A week or so afterwards, I gallantly walked into Bloomingdale’s to return the garments they let us borrow and to give the Public Relations Director a gift as a thank you for her generosity. We talked about dreams and visions and future plans, and in that moment, I had landed an opportunity to interview for a role that didn’t actually exist yet – the assistant director on the public relations team. Through this event experience, my dedication to the cause and hard work, she saw something in me and allowed me the opportunity to join her team as an intern so that she could prep me for the role when it became available. I was literally bursting at the seams and overjoyed with enthusiasm. This was my dream. I loved fashion, I loved fashion events, and I was on a one-way ticket to NYC to work for Bloomingdale’s corporate. At least, that’s how I thought this was all going to turn out.

Fast forward to the beginning of the story where I’m prepping for the in-store fashion event. I had been with Bloomingdale’s for a while at this point and my (now husband, Thomas) and I were dating at the time – he was the one who brought me my newly dry-cleaned jacket and a cup of Starbucks, as he usually did, to get me through the crazy night. I was soaking up every bit of knowledge and experience that I could while also bartending at a steakhouse to keep myself afloat as I supported this dream.

Then, I was told that the position was no longer available and that all of the assistant director positions, corporate wide, were being eliminated. And just like that – it was gone. My huge dreams, my plan that I had so strategically and purposefully managed to create – gone. I even put in a request at the restaurant I was working for to transfer to a new location they were opening in Times Square. I figured that if I could transfer with the restaurant, I would then lay the ground work to find another opportunity once I lived in NYC. My direct manager, who was a complete dirtbag that was intimidated by strong, capable, beautiful women – denied my request. Honestly, for no other reason than because he could. Overall, I was crushed.

That night I came home to several LARGE bottles of wine Thomas bought for me, feeling super sorry for myself. We ate homemade pasta and had a long conversation about our futures and what we wanted from our lives. Feeling all relaxed and chill from our wine and food comas, we came up with an idea. Thomas has been an entrepreneur all his life. His background is in IT related work, information architecture and programming, and he was looking to expand his creative talents and wanted to pursue opportunities with design and video to break away from the mundaneness of programming. I, of course, had marketing, communications and sales experience, so we decided that weekend that we would launch our own company.

We honestly felt that between our combined skill sets, we could easily and, at minimum, get people to consider letting us work with them. Thomas already had a fairly robust portfolio, as did I, we just simply needed to package our services and nail down our audience, and off we went. Easy, right? 🙂

We designed our first website that weekend and used the existing name of his company, Creativity InMotion (to the left is a photo of our very first business card, which we also designed that weekend). Within the first 6 months of our agency, we did marketing activations for a local fashion week, worked with a few small businesses, found love in the Orlando startup scene, and we were generating enough revenue to keep the lights on. A big win for us at the time since we had no clue what we were doing or how to scale an agency model. By the second year, we rebranded to Move2Create, as Creativity InMotion was a mouthful and overall hard to say and to sell. We grew our team by creating a rich internship program through a partnership with the University of Central Florida (where I went to college), and by year’s 3 and 4, brought on paid designers further expanding our team, joined a coworking space and had an office downtown, and we were asked to work on projects for Red Bull, Girls Who Code, TedxWomen, Florida Institute of Technology, Stanford University, among others.

It was amazing. It was hard, super challenging, all consuming – but still amazing. Looking back, not moving to NY and inadvertently being thrown into entrepreneurship purely from a survival perspective was the best thing that ever happened to me. Move2Create was exactly what I needed at that time, and it revealed a unique path to entrepreneurship that I never would have seen otherwise. All of the things that were “weird” or “out there” about me, which typically got me in to trouble, now had its place and its purpose. You see, I didn’t grow up ever wanting to be an entrepreneur, it wasn’t even really in my vocabulary until after I graduated college, and even then, I was seeking opportunities elsewhere. My mom was actually the first entrepreneur I encountered, she owned her own hair salon for a number of years when I was in high school. But, as most high schoolers, I was so consumed by my dramatic high school life, boyfriends and soccer tournaments, that I didn’t really pay attention to her entrepreneurial journey. It just simply wasn’t anything I was interested in.

However, with all that said, I always knew that while I got along (interpersonally) with my colleagues at my various jobs, I never truly fit in. At some point, I always felt like I was able to grow within the company, but only at the pace of someone else’s success. I was encouraged to learn and to lead, but only so far until I needed to stay in my lane and respect my own box. I never realized until I became an entrepreneur that having the ability to look at a problem through multiple lenses was actually an asset, not a weakness. And I learned that having wild, innovative, creative and crazy ideas was a strength to a team, and not a liability. Move2Create, and by large extent, my experience with Bloomingdale’s, taught me this.

I also learned that entrepreneurship isn’t something that you do, it’s something that you are. 

So, whatever happened with NYC? Well, don’t you worry – while I never did move, which I am now eternally grateful for, I have since visited dozens of times, attended New York Fashion Week (a bucket list item for me), got to walk the halls of the epic Fashion Institute of Technology and had a meeting with the legendary Valerie Steele; American fashion historian, curator and director of the museum. This is all thanks to one of my dear friends and incredible clients. Then last year, I was invited to host a panel discussion for SheLeads Media NYC (who I met on Twitter, of all places) and have continued to grow that friendship and opportunity to support my heart’s mission, to help and encourage female founders to build the businesses of their dreams.

Along the way, Thomas and I decided to fold the agency due to a ton of reasons, with the primary one being that we wanted to start a family and simply didn’t feel we were in the right place to manage both. I’ve taken several amazing jobs since then and have come to embrace that my path through entrepreneurship is ever-changing, maturing, and non-linear. It’s true what they say, you know, that everyone thinks entrepreneurship is all about that #workfromanywhere lifestyle, full of glamour and flexibility. And while parts of that may be true, the realistic picture looks a lot like this:

And then, it also looks a lot like this:

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had this exact same conversation with myself. And as Sohuis grows and continues to serve its mission, I seem to be having this conversation even more. The truth of the matter is that entrepreneurship is incredibly risky and really. fucking. hard. Even for someone such as myself with an iron will – I question if I should just turn it all in for a steady paycheck and a 9 to 5.

But then I remember that feeling from when my future changed at Bloomingdale’s. I remember so many times from our Move2Create days that the things that used to block me in traditional work environments, flourished in an entrepreneurial setting. I remember that while difficult, I am lucky to have the opportunity to embark on this journey not only once, but twice. Most importantly, I also remember that by intentionally curating this journey, I am the author of my own story.

I’ve always been pretty hesitant to share this story because it is indeed personal, and it’s mine. But as I continue to serve the incredible women I’m hoping to inspire, I realize that my story has power, too. And my hope in sharing this is that you’ll find your voice along your entrepreneurial path to pull inspiration from your experiences to craft your story as well.

I’ll leave you with this for now, and know that you are worthy and capable and deserving of greatness, no matter what path you choose.

Xoxo,

AUTHOR, JESSICA KORTHUIS

Jessica is the founder of Sohuis and creator of the Sohuis StartupBluprint, a online accelerator designed to help female founders define, distinguish and differentiate their brand in 30 days or less. She has a passion for writing and educating and an obsession with teaching others how to bring their brands to life.

Jessica has been featured by Girlboss, the Lean Startup Company, is a 40 Under 40 Award recipient and has been listed as a “Woman to Watch in 2019 and Beyond” by the national publication, Biz Journals. She is a contributing writer to Girl CEO Inc., proud mompreneur, and to keep up with her super inspiring and fun content, follow her on Instagram @jessica_korthuis.

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My Conversation with Lean Startup Co.: Applying Lean Startup to Marketing and Brand Strategy

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How to Apply Lean Startup Principles to Marketing & Brand Strategy

If anybody knows me, they know that I run my marketing teams and brand strategies like a lean, mean, marketing machine! I have been a HUGE fan of the Lean Startup for many years, as I love applying various lean principles to large, enterprise-level clients all the way down to the one-person founders I work with. In fact, the Lean Startup is the foundation to the Sohuis Framework, and a really critical piece of my course, the Sohuis StartupBlueprint. I stumbled across Lean Startup about 6 years ago, and while Lean isn’t always the perfect strategy for every situation, I find that my most successful projects pull in Lean elements in areas of the most uncertainty. For the past 6 years, I’ve run several Lean Startup Meetups, taught a ton of workshops, and used lean principles during the two years that I helped organize Startup Weekend Orlando.

So, imagine my surprise when Lean Startup Co. sent me an email asking me to chat with them on their webcast – I about fell off my chair. The webcast just aired yesterday, and I would love to share our fun conversation with you! Check out the video below.

Here is the full writeup provided by Lean Startup Co. This post was originally posted here, and on Medium.

Just Start Somewhere

Jessica Korthuis started her first company with her husband after her corporate dream job was eliminated. She didn’t have a ton of experience helping entrepreneurs brand themselves but she had a lot of experience in marketing communications and a can-do spirit. “We built this super-crappy website and then poof, we just started our first agency,” Jessica said.

The agency grew organically to include such clients as TED Women, Red Bull and Stanford University, but was completely bootstrapped. “It was this absolutely scrappy thing,” Jessica said.

Through the local business ecosystem in Orlando, Florida she learned about Lean Startup, which is where she got involved in helping entrepreneurs brand themselves using Lean Startup tools.

Jessica admitted that she was naive at that early stage of her business, but that was both a strength and a weakness. On the one hand, she said, it helped not to know how much work was in front of them, but it was also scary. Her biggest takeaway from starting with so little knowledge is that sometimes the best thing to do is to, “Just start.”

Once she was deeper into the process, Jessica saw the value in Lean Startup methods and began to use it, suggesting founders should learn who your early adopters are going to be and determine your minimum viable product (MVP) as early as possible, but “Don’t try to slay the dragon all at once,” she said.

When she closed that first agency to start a family she wasn’t expecting the next iteration of her business to happen so quickly. However, while on maternity leave with her daughter, a former client from a large global organization she’d worked with, called her in a panic with a desperate need for help rebranding a nonprofit. Jessica leaped at the chance, so long as she could work from home to be with her daughter.

“I wanted to have the complete freedom to be my own boss again,” Jessica said. And SOHUIS was born.

Jessica took all the learning from her first agency and developed a marketing framework she could use with larger clients, which became the foundation for SOHUIS.

“Oftentimes people don’t actually know why they’re rebranding.”

Rebranding is Not a Quick Fix

One thing Jessica has found is that rebranding can appeal to lot of companies for the wrong reasons. “Oftentimes people don’t actually know why they’re rebranding,” Jessica said. “They think that sales are stagnant…or it’s not progressing or growing the way that they should.”  They leap at rebranding as a fix but, she cautioned, “It’s not always the solution.”

What companies need to do before rebranding, Jessica said, is really understand what part of the company is not growing and what kind of experiments they can run to validate or invalidate the hypothesis.

She engages her companies in a brand persona building exercise that involves asking them five questions that break down, “If your brand were a person today, who would you be and why?”

One of her clients discovered that their existing personas were like Hillary Clinton pre-election, and Walter Matthau from Grumpy Old Men, which might have been popular with an older segment of customers but were not attracting new ones. Instead, they determined they wanted to rebrand to become a combination of Ellen Degeneres and Jimmy Fallon.

While this exercise might sound abstract, Jessica explained, “It’s actually quite helpful because what it does is give you a roadmap of where you are today as a brand versus where you want to be.”

Once the company knows who they want to be, she helps them be “relentless in that vision” and asking what steps they need to take to shift the brand in that new direction.

Rebranding does sometimes mean losing older customers, but Jessica said, if you’re doing it right, you’ll gain new ones. Her client saw a 200 percent increase in brand new members after one year of the rebrand.

Validate the Brand

This brought Elliot to the question, how do you validate a rebrand?

First Jessica pointed out that companies should not look to the customer to tell you if you need to rebrand. “Your job is to ask the customer the right questions in order for you to get the feedback that you need to decide whether or not a rebrand is useful.”

To find the metric that says the rebrand itself is responsible for any change is harder to determine, but Jessica engaged in “a ton of surveys and interviewing members” about what sort of content they would like and what would be helpful to them.

“And then…we actually created solutions to things that they wanted,” Jessica said.

One of those things was to invite members to participate in webinars and webcasts “to make them feel loved and appreciated” and to ensure that they didn’t contact members only when trying to get them to renew their membership.

So for Jessica’s client, the goal of the rebrand was to increase membership, and they did that, and with a new market segment that they hadn’t had before.

Jessica said she takes her clients through a “pretty regimented, hard core process” of validating and understanding customers. “What are their problems? Before you go into the solutions phase…let’s really understand what the problems are that customers are having. And then solve those problems.”

“Your job is to ask the customer the right questions in order for you to get the feedback that you need to decide whether or not a rebrand is useful.”

Set up the Right Hypotheses

Of course, before validation you need to have a solid hypothesis. The big hypothesis Jessica set up for her business was that building a brand should follow the same steps no matter whether you are a startup, a nonprofit or a giant corporation. She set out to validate that hypothesis in creating the SOHUIS framework.

Jessica said she pulled all the “core common denominators” that she’s learned over the years about brand building and combined that with Lean Startup concepts like validated learning, the build-measure-learn feedback loop, and  innovation accounting as well as some other tools such as the Business Model Canvas and the Value Proposition Design Canvas and a few others.

To test her hypothesis with users she built a beta framework and offered it free to several clients: a nonprofit, a global organization and a small startup founder. “I tested it in different market segments and different verticals and the results were awesome,” she said.

She has found that a lot of people are aware of Lean Startup concepts but don’t know what order to use them in, or when. Her framework advises on that.

Focus On a Customer Segment

Once Jessica had the evidence that her framework worked, she narrowed down her customer base to startup founders, particularly female business owners, which is her passion. She noted that all of her clients were asking the same questions, so she came up with a second hypothesis: Could she take all of these questions and pain points and pare down her in-person workshops into an online course?

Jessica turned to her instagram platform where she invests the most time and energy in terms of social media because her main customers, female startup owners, spend a lot of time there. Jessica engaged in “hashtag research” which allowed her to see what people were searching for and interested in. Then, using Canva, she developed a landing page with a ton of information about her course and what people would learn, all of which she gleaned from her in-person workshops.

She did a limited six-week promotion run offering a free beta program and spent just $98. Her goal was to get 25 people to sign up. 100 people signed up instead. She knew the course was going to be a hit. As part of the beta program, she asked users to answer questions along the way about where they get confused or fall behind to help her with the next iteration.

The beta version finished in January and she’s launching the paid version in February.

“If you do not fully understand the pain point that you are solving with your product or service, the brand that you create is just going to be noise.”

Lean Startup for Branding

For people who want to use Lean Startup to help build a better brand or rebrand, Jessica said the most important part is understanding your customers. “If you do not fully understand the pain point that you are solving with your product or service, your brand that you create is going to be noise.”

Jessica urged founders to enter a scientific mindset and “remove your emotions.”

Additionally, Jessica reminded people that “failure is required” and that startups should “fail fast” by doing experiments and testing and validating. Elliot interjected that failing fast “means learning fast.”

Jessica and Elliot agreed that the most important thing when using Lean Startup is to know the real problem you’re solving, and a brand is no exception.

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Get Around

Hey there!

I’m Jessica Korthuis, a branding and marketing expert with a passion for teaching female founders and aspiring entrepreneurs how to market and brand their businesses.

I’m here to teach you everything I know. Check out our All-Access Sohuis Membership for marketing workshops, strategy sessions, courses, tools, inspiration, and a consistent kick in the pants!

Let’s connect. 

@jessica_korthuis

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